So caught up in the whirlwind (and literally wind) of emotions, Matty had neglected to realize who it was that had grabbed onto her hand. Yet with some air in her lungs and some welcomed clarity, Mateo’s eyes shifted into focus, matching the face to the voice, one that seemed continuously at ease in belittling her. On any other day, Mateo would have bit back a response, pointing out that 10pm wasn’t that late at all, and also she had been heading home in the first place. But this was not any other day, and Briar wasn’t just anyone. Since their meeting in the forest, the only sight of the other girl had been in her dream, the voice that called out for her to stop, to control herself while her body lost itself to the flame. The very thought made her burn and Mateo pushed herself off her knees. She blinked and found herself back in her dreams, or were they more visions now? Briar called out to her, fear in her eyes, Sigrid, you have to stop. Please, you’ll kill yourself, STOP. Another blink and she was back in the windy Seattle streets, Briar’s face morphed from one of fear to one of frustration. The person in her dreams had never been Matty.
She had questions swimming in her head, and she felt it pull at her stomach nauseously. For days the dreams had been intensified, Briar a reoccurring presence, and Matty’s need to find Briar had been difficult given that vampyres were particularly hard to locate in the first place. But here she was in front of her, and Mateo couldn’t help the way the question stumbled out of her. She wanted so badly for the answer to make the nightmares stop. “Sigrid, who is she?”
Despite the “independent” and “never distressed” damsel definitions Mateo had proclaimed herself to be aligned with once upon an evening, nothing about her current rendition endowed Briar with any reassurance. Apparently more disabled by a spell of shock than had originally met the eye, Briar lacked the patience and sympathy to coddle her back into a state of homeostasis. Sighting a couple of oversized feral dogs was an unreasonable cause to induce intermittent catatonia, even in the unlikely chance Mateo possessed a nasty allergy to fleas. At the back of Briar’s mind, encouraged by time constraints to regress the elaborate rigmarole of her professional practice with cruder methods, she recalled a prompt slap to the face usually did the trick of grounding a malfunctioning soul back into reality. Such an option only became more appealing when Mateo finally met her eyes, clouded by poignancy and panic before abruptly clearing, harnessing Briar with a focus so precise it was borderline stifling. Beneath the artificial gleam of a streetlight, the vampire distantly noted disturbance still plagued her expression to a startlingly unnatural degree — which might have perplexed her more if Mateo’s coinciding name-drop had not served to plummet her concentration elsewhere.
It had been a traditional peasant’s cabin comprised of logs and stone, with a roof covered in moss. Two small glass paned windows had been carved into one side of the structure, opposite the wooden door leading to a half-domesticated garden. The dirt floor was kept insulated beneath layers of handwoven rugs, imported textiles, and a makeshift mattress. Braided bundles of drying fireweed, hypericum, and meadowsweet dangled over the fireplace where an enchanted cauldron perpetually maintained its contents at just below a rolling boil. Upon one of the sole pieces of furniture, a round table, would sit two mugs filled with the golden liquor of long-steeped lingonberry and sea buckthorn tea. Standing in the doorway, Briar could account for every detail of the intertwined lives which occupied the home — an unimpressive collection of simple objects, yet signifiant enough to mean something to her. To them. On another occasion it became a place to bear witness and seek refuge, unable to move, after each earthenware vessel — the proverbial canaries in the coal mine; accustomed to being fired at temperatures into the thousands during the crafting process — was pulverised into dust by the detonation which engulfed every inch of the space. Sigrid had needed only the kindling of her emotions to have success at ignition. Without a doubt, the indefinite meltdown of a fire witch on a rampage rivalled the volatility of a compromised nuclear reactor.
Before her irreversible turning point, each heatwave had done something different. One made the windows shatter and swallowed their cauldron in a scalding eruption of steam. Two darkened the cabin’s foundations until charcoal scarred the walls like thick veins, expanding and groaning in protest against unbearable pressure. Three sucked all the air from the room, destroying Briar’s ability to yell cautions any longer; each sense sentenced to smoulder without repair. Accelerated healing had been rendered useless alongside Briar’s stubborn insistence she stand too close to the inconsolable pyre which had been Sigrid, repetitively subjecting herself to sear before the blaze’s source until her complexion ranged from raw and shiny reds to purple and blistering. The severity of her burns would take days to heal. Wave five was the most ferocious and irrevocable, exuding a surge of heat so nauseatingly intense it propelled Briar off her feet until she landed outside in the meadow, sizzling in the damp dewdrops of dawn. Pale ashes swirled in the swan song’s air like snowflakes, coating every surface in powder, inundated with evidence of Sigrid’s physical form. At least, when the witch’s body was consumed by an inferno decuple her size, the horrific scent of spoiled flesh stopped with her.
Accordingly, the force of the unseen blow had a knee-jerk effect which echoed beyond the boundaries of the memory’s devastation, sending Briar ( literally ) stumbling back on Seattle’s ground — but instead of the softness of grass, it was hard brick which greeted her back, digging in with enough force to unceremoniously extract her from the paralyzing hold of the past. Or was it a dream? Already rapidly fading to the point of obscurity, Briar’s body sluggishly calibrated to the present, entrapped by a thick fog of disorientation. She knew this place, this girl, this life — yet her head spun and her mouth felt unusably dry. Muscle memory alone guided her back on track, uttering the missing clues beneath her breath on its own volition: “Seattle. Mateo…” Without further ado, bitter recognition seeped back into her bones. Any lingering blankness inhabiting her form was eclipsed by her previous building simmer of frustration; all traces of that vivid mirage burying itself on the fringes of Briar’s awareness as her conscious mind took charge of tidily rehoming its lock of neglect, as if what had happened was no more than a baseless hiccup that perhaps hadn’t happened at all. The last relevant task of concern was all she remembered — and for no valid reason not yet performed. All she knew was that she felt, with every undead fibre of her being, inflamed with an enlivening anger. Without a target to blame for it, she both clung to and unloaded upon the next best avenue.
Roughly pushing herself back into an upright position, asserting her regained power over the invisible resistance which had cast her there, it was without hesitance that she stepped up to invade Mateo’s personal space, “The hell is your problem?” Both of Briar’s hands shot up to cuff the woman’s upper arms in a vice grip, “Did you not hear me? Go the fuck home.” A vehement squeeze of her hands emphasised the expletive, forewarning the spike of energy which unfurled along the lengths of her arms — charged from her shoulders to her fingertips — as Briar at last punctuated the command with a vicious shove.
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