#origific

The clouds were thick overhead, and the moisture in the air felt unfamiliar out here in the desert. A storm was coming, Danny could feel it. Electric potential trickled down her spine, and she could feel it nestled there in the small of her back.

She looked sidelong over at Ruby sitting on the horse next to her. Ruby’s eyes were fixed on the horizon, past the brewing storm and into the future.

Their future. Whichever one they chose.

“You don’t have to do this, Ruby,” Danny said, low.

“Don’t I?” Ruby asked, and her eyes flicked over to Danny’s. “Don’t we?”

Ruby’s voice was soft and husky in her throat, and it made something in Danny’s stomach tighten, like it always did. But this time it wasn’t just a wondering hunger, the simple joy of finding one lone soul out in these arid lands who understood the heart that beat beneath your breast; this time there was just a little bit of fear. “I—“

“Danny,” Ruby said. “Do you really wanna be a ranch hand all your life? Don’t you wanna get out there and see the whole wide world?”

Danny swallowed. Of course she did, and Ruby knew it. They’d lain there together amongst the prairie-fire and the desert lilies, a riot of color that painted the landscape for too damn short a time, and they’d talked about lands far away. Flowers that bloomed all year round.

Ruby knew exactly what Danny wanted. That’s why, back then, she’d curled in close and trailed her fingers down her knee. It’s why she’d whispered soft promises and halcyon dreams into her ear as she’d made her gasp there in the afternoon sun.

It’s why the two of them were sitting here, right here, and staring down at old Wilkes Pass.

“There will be people in that coach,” Danny said softly. And that was a gun there at Ruby’s hip.

“There will be money, too. A lot of money.”

Danny swallowed. Then, almost without thinking, she reached out and linked her fingers with Ruby’s there between their horses. “Let’s go back, Ruby. I know he’s not the best boss in the world, but—“

“I’m tired of bosses, Danny. I’m tired of all this. The only thing I’m not tired of is…”

Ruby didn’t say it, but her fingertips tightened in Danny’s all the same. Their clasped hands looked dark there together against the baked earth until the first few drops began to fall.

“Rain’s here,” Ruby said softly, and it was. It was like the sky itself was weeping at what the two of them were about to do, and the ground beneath their feet went dark. Black.

Danny could hear a faint rumble in the distance, and Ruby’s eyes snapped up toward the road, her hand dropping Danny’s as she took her horse’s reins in hand.

It wasn’t time yet, was it? The stagecoach wasn’t due round these parts for another hour at least. It came early sometimes, sure, when it was coming to drop off the miners’ paychecks, but…

No. There was nothing there on the road, nothing but the patter of rain and the faraway caw of crows who were none too happy about getting wet.

Danny looked up, then, wondering which way they’d fly, and what she saw… No. That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be real.

Her lips parted around a silent gasp, and it was one beat of her heart, two, before she managed to hiss, “Ruby,” and point up at the sky.

Obediently, without question, Ruby looked up. And her eyes widened. “What on earth…”

So she could see it, too.

The clouds were spilling out across the sky above them like floodwaters in a canyon, and amidst them, between and betwixt, Danny could make out shadows. They flickered in the storm clouds, a flame painting stories on the rocks at night, and slowly, slowly those shadows coalesced into shapes. Into figures.

Danny could see them now, riding across the sky. They shimmered there on their beasts, ghostly riders made of sun showers and lightning, and she could see the way the eyes of their pale horses gleamed red.

Ahead of them, too, hooves pounded, the sound of it lost to distant thunder coming closer all the time, and Danny could see the quarry they chased. Cattle, from the looks of it, young, strong ones that made their charges back home look downright pitiful.

They were beautiful creatures, captivating in a way, and it was only the way their eyes, too, glowed red, that kept Danny very firmly in her seat. Below her, she could feel the fine tremble of Sally’s shoulders as her horse muttered her discomfort.

Ruby, though… Danny glanced over at her again and saw it. The rapture there in her eyes. The way that the cattle’s devil-gleam was reflected in her dark eyes.

Danny had looked into those eyes for hours before this. Had whispered devotion to them. But the look in them now was one that she didn’t recognize, and that she didn’t like.

“Ruby?” she whispered, fearful somehow of being heard above the thunder.

“They’re beautiful,” Ruby said softly. “Danny, they’re—“

There was a longing there in Ruby’s voice that Danny didn’t like, not one bit. There was something faraway about it. Something fey. Something so desperate that Danny didn’t even know how to describe it.

It was like that longing called to the clouds, though, and their ghostly inhabitants, because there was a peculiar curl to them now, like they were beckoning the two of them up. And one shadow, darker than all the rest, seemed to still there amongst all that flickering carnage.

A long, low whistle sounded out across the plains, echoing against their little ridge, and Danny shuddered. There was lightning and thunder in that whistle, cowbell and the shriek of a train shedding its tracks.

And Ruby, oh Ruby. Ruby threw her head back, fingers to her lips, and she whistled back.

The ghostly riders rode ever on and on, but their leader, or perhaps their driver, peeled away from the pack. The clouds parted for her, and her pale steed left no tracks as it galloped down through the sky.

The woman, if words like that could be used for such things, stared down at them with a tangle of red hair about her shoulders and eyes that gleamed.

That, Danny thought faintly, is a witch.

The witch’s mouth moved, lips red as blood curling around words that Danny couldn’t hear but could feel all the same.

She could feel the witch’s words stream through her like a knife to the gut, like a spider’s web drawn tight between the dawn and the horizon and herself suspended upon it. Those blood-red lips whispered about love and freedom, joy and madness. They whispered about all those things that seemed just barely out of reach, those dreams that run from the best of us on hooves tinged with thunder.

They whispered about the hunt.

Danny recoiled from the sensation, but she knew without even looking over that Ruby did not. Hell. She knew without looking over that Ruby could do more than feel those words; she could hear them.

“Ruby,” Danny whispered again, and she reached out to take her lover’s hand in hers once more. But Ruby’s hand was so cold now, and she could feel the way it shook.

Danny chanced a glance over at Ruby, and her heart sank at what she saw there. Ruby’s eyes were wide and sightless, the sweet, pretty darkness that she’d fallen in love with taking on a scarlet tinge that scared her. She was mouthing words and Danny couldn’t hear, either, and she wished she knew what fey conversation the two of them shared.

Maybe then she’d know what to argue back.

“Ruby, please,” Danny said, her voice stronger in her throat this time. “Don’t listen to her.”

But Ruby couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hear her. Danny could see it in those strange, deep eyes now. The lust and the greed and the desire for — for a quarry that could never, never be caught.

It wouldn’t be enough, would it? It would never be enough. If they knocked over that coach today, the money would only whet Ruby’s terrible thirst. It would be opening a gate that neither of them would be able to close again, a flood that could not be dammed, and Danny knew right then and there that it would drown them both.

“Ruby.”

But Ruby wasn’t listening at all anymore. Maybe all she could hear was the poison dripping from the lips of that woman who was smiling now, wild red hair barely restrained by the dark hat she wore, and maybe all she could see was the way that witch was raising a hand in invitation.

Ruby’s fingers felt numb, cold, dead in Danny’s hand, and they slipped unfeelingly from hers as Ruby dismounted her horse.

Danny just watched her go for a moment, frozen in a rictus of terror, and then—

She heard it.

It was a laugh, wild and awful, echoing around the mountains and the canyons and the plains all around them, and though she could see the witch’s mouth open, the sound didn’t seem to be coming from her. It came from everywhere and nowhere, all around them, thunder in a torrential downpour and lightning in the hills ahead, and every bone in Danny’s body went cold.

She was out of her own saddle before she had another moment to think of it, and if Ruby was desperate to gain some nebulous treasure that would never, ever be enough, Danny was desperate to protect the only one she already had.

And Ruby, now, was walking towards a cliff edge. That sounded like the sort of pretty thing you might hear in a song, but women like them, they weren’t pretty and they weren’t songbirds. Danny meant it entirely literally when she said that Ruby was sauntering directly toward a cliff.

It was the cliff that they’d chosen as a lookout point, the cliff that would let them see when a stagecoach rounded the bend, bound for the little town that had served as their cage all their lives.

To Ruby, that stagecoach had seemed like freedom. This cliff seemed like escape. But Danny was sure now that this was just another cage, a snare set out by a hunter much, much scarier than they’d ever known before, and the only thing waiting beyond that cliff was a tombstone that neither one of them could afford.

The witch on her pale steed beckoned and Ruby stepped forward and maybe it was just as foolish a decision, but Danny didn’t know what this situation called for if not foolishness.

If not a little bit of bravery for the first time in her miserable life.

“No,” she said, and her voice wobbled in her throat. She swallowed hard. Tried again. “No. You can’t have her.”

That old witch, her eyes narrowed beneath the brim of her hat, and that smile of hers faltered. Twisted into a scowl.

Our choices are our own, little girl, and we must pay for them.

The witch’s voice was like spiderwebs and shivers in the back of her head. Like the faraway scream of a cougar in the night. It made Danny’s stomach go hot and cold and terrified, but instead of loosening her resolve, it only firmed it.

How dare this woman speak to her this way? How dare this woman make her feel like this? How dare she try and take what was hers?

“She hasn’t done anything yet,” Danny said, and she could feel a stubborn, angry, wild sort of desperation filling her, too. “She’s not yours.”

Yet.

“She’s still alive, ain’t she? She’s still got dreams. Not—“ Danny swallowed hard as she realized just how true her words were about to be. “Not night mares like you.”

She dreams of riches. Of power. She dreams of the hunt.

“She dreams of me, you old bitch. And she wants to be free.”

The woman sat back in her saddle, and for the first time Danny saw that it was all pale leather embroidered with scarlet thread. And all those designs, meticulous in their sewing, were made up of little blood-red names.

And Ruby’s would not be one of them.

We are free here in the skies, the woman said, gesturing to the riders, gaunt and skeletal, that rode behind her. We are not bound by human laws or desires.

“You’re nothin’ but desire, are you?” Danny scowled. “I know what you are.”

She was hunger and she was thirst. Jealousy and lust and covetous greed. She was the pit at the bottom of their stomachs when they hadn’t made quite enough to earn dinner and she was the dark underbelly of every dream they’d ever had.

This woman, this witch, was human want. But the booze this one served would only make you thirstier, until that thirst ate you up inside. Until it ate you alive.

She was a hole in the human heart where all the happiness leaked out, and she wouldn’t be happy until she’d clawed that hole in Ruby.

But if there was one thing Danny had learned about loneliness and hurt, it was that it could be patched if you just found the right thing to nurse you. Or the right person, as the case might be. And she’d been patching up the holes in Ruby’s heart for so many years that she knew it better than anybody in this world or the next.

She knew all about Ruby’s hunger. She knew all about her need.

And she knew how to sate it. No goddamn witch required.

You know nothing, small one.

Well. Maybe not much. But “nothing” was pushing it. “I know what’s mine.”

The woman scoffed, and the sound was like rolling thunder in the distance.

Danny ignored her, turning to Ruby instead and ignoring the way her back shuddered to be turned toward such perilous danger. She stood in front of her now and placed her hands on unfeeling cheeks. Leaned up so she could press a kiss to cold, cold lips.

“I know you’re in there, baby,” she whispered, fierce. “And I know you don’t want this. Because if you go down this hill, I go right down with you.”

She thought about all the time they’d spent together. All the times that Ruby had looked at her like she wanted to give her every good thing. All the good things in the world. She thought about every time that Ruby had held her, protected her, had guarded her against danger.

She felt Hell itself at her back, and she almost laughed at the way things had turned.

“I want to make a life with you,” she murmured against still lips. “But down there? That’s just death.”

She could hear the rolling of an old stagecoach’s wheels, and she did not turn. She’d heard those wheels before, and whether full of money or trouble, opportunity or danger, she knew the sound of a goddamn Black Mariah.

“Let’s go, Ruby,” she said. “We don’t have to go home, but we sure can’t stay here.”

Ruby’s lips moved beneath hers, and though she couldn’t hear the words, Danny could recognize her own name. She could hear a hiss of anger behind her, the wind kicking up fierce all around them, but she didn’t back down, not now.

“Come on now,” she crooned. “Don’t tell me you think that old witch is prettier than I am.”

Ruby blinked once, stared into the distance behind Danny’s back, and Danny could feel a shudder roll through the body beneath her hands. “No. She sure ain’t.”

Danny didn’t know what that witch looked like now, all fury and hunger, but the wind was furious, the rain needles against her skin, so she had a feeling the old bitch wasn’t happy. Her laugh came out more like a sob, and she felt Ruby’s hands come up automatically to steady her, just like they always did. “Always knew you had good taste.”

Ruby’s eyes flicked down to the road below them, and Danny could see her swallow hard. “The coach is here,” she said softly.

“I know, Ruby,” Danny said. “Let it go.”

“But we—“

“Let it go.”

For a moment, all seemed still. The wind, the rain, the wretched thunder of hooves on sky plains. It all seemed to wait for just one breath as Ruby looked down at the road. As she looked up and locked eyes with a witch, a devil, a goddess that Danny could no longer see.

And then Ruby closed her eyes and all the tension seemed to leak right out of her. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s — let’s go, Danny. Let’s go home.”

Wherever the hell that is, Danny thought to herself. Still, though, she thought as she dragged Ruby in close and kissed her soundly, she had a pretty good idea that they could make one anywhere as long as they stayed together.

There was a scream of pure fury, pure lightning and thunder and awful, awful power, and Danny could feel the ground shake beneath them. But Ruby was no longer looking at the witch, was no longer captivated by promises that she had no intention of keeping. And the bridle that the witch had been slipping around her neck had faded away into nothing but the wind whipping at their faces.

When Danny pulled away a minute later, the stagecoach was gone, and so was the witch. The rain had eased all around them, the torrent easing into a gentle patter, and Ruby’s skin was warm beneath her fingers.

Danny turned finally, squinting into the clouds on the horizon and was relieved to find them empty. And down there, not too far away from where they’d intended to lie in wait for the coach once it’d come into view, Danny could see the wrecked remains of a tree smoldering in the rain.

“Lightning,” Ruby said softly, and Danny could see that she knew it, too. That the two of them would’ve been goners down there if they’d chosen that path.

They would’ve been riding in that witch queen’s wild hunt a lot sooner than even Danny had thought.

Ruby’s throat was working, and Danny could see the beginning of tears in those pretty brown eyes. “Back home again,” she said. “To an asshole boss and sleep for dinner.”

“Or,” Danny said, “we could go.”

“Go?” Ruby’s eyes slid to hers. “Go where? We don’t have money, Danny.”

“I don’t know,” Danny said, and once again, she slid her hand into Ruby’s. “But I know we’re alive. And that means we can go anywhere we want.”

They weren’t tethered down yet, not to this land and not to the ghost riders in the sky.

Ruby’s smile was rueful, like she still didn’t quite believe Danny’s words but she liked the sound of them nevertheless. “Yeah. Maybe.”

They kissed there in the rain, just the two of them and no one else, and Danny didn’t know where their choices would take them in the future. She didn’t know what their tombstones would eventually say when they were laid to rest.

Merry had a headache.

The evening before had been a stressful one. They’d needed her down at the university research center for a strong spell, and she’d played protection for them for hours. It had been a fine piano with a bright, clear tone and keys that gave pleasantly beneath her fingers, but spells of that length and magnitude were never easy. Her fingers had cramped and her temples had ached by the time she was finally dismissed for the night.

After a night like that, all she’d wanted to do today was drowse in bed and listen to birdsong instead of a piano’s dulcet tones. Unfortunately, she needed a little thing called money if she wanted to eat food.

And Lys wasn’t a terrible student, all told. Merry had worried a bit the first time she’d walked up the manor’s rambling path to find a set of marble stairs that went higher than her entire cottage did, but Lys wasn’t one of the silly, spoiled children that Merry had come to know all too well through her piano lessons.

Lys was a proper lady, polite to a fault and almost irritatingly standoffish at times, but she was anything but spoiled. She applied herself to her lessons with zeal, and Merry could tell without even asking that she always did the practice work that she assigned to her. It showed in every scrawled equation, every sweet note, every spell that quivered to life from the vibrations of hammered wire.

Her eyes lit up with joyful understanding every time Merry introduced some new bit of theory, and those long fingers of hers were delicate on the manor piano’s aging keys. She loved the puzzle of it all, Lys did, and while she wasn’t one of the wunderkinds Merry assisted at the university, she could more than hold her own against tough spells.

No. Lys wasn’t a bad student at all. On a good day, Merry quite looked forward to their lessons. To the careful, quiet scales. The barely restrained excitement as Lys led her through the ideas she’d had throughout the week. The table piled high with notes and questions and the hesitant beginnings of what might become a composition.

This, however, was not a particularly good day, and Merry did her best to hide the way each tremulous note was a dagger against the back of her eyes.

She glanced over at Lys to make sure she was still utterly consumed by the piece she was practicing before taking the opportunity to massage at her temple. The researchers at the university were bright, too, exceptionally gifted, but they pushed too hard. They were willing to go all night, writing and weaving and breathing life into magic that Merry wouldn’t be able to comprehend if she tried, and they expected their pianists to do so as well. She’d managed to contain the effects of their spells within the protection charm she’d played, but only just. Explosions wanted to be seen, to be heard, and she’d had to play loud and discordant to coax them back within the spell circle.

She could hear echoes of those jangling notes even now in the song Lys played, sweet as it was. Ugh. She should have prepared a tincture before she’d left. She couldn’t focus at all.

Then the tenor of the notes changed, just a bit, and Merry found herself relaxing a bit into her chair. It was softer now. Quieter. Waiting, but with purpose.

It was easier to bear like this.

This wasn’t the song that Merry had assigned to her, not anymore, and she frowned as she tried to place it. It wasn’t one of the ones in the beginner’s songbook, or even the intermediate one that the two of them had started together at the beginning of this year. It was, she realized with a pleasant sort of shiver, something entirely unique.

She could see neat little dots in her mind’s eye, notes and ties and accidentals all jumbled together, and she finally recognized the tune. It had been written down in Lys’s notes on the table.

“Did you write this?” she asked, quiet, her voice only just audible over the sound of the song.

A slight hesitation, a tremble of the keys. Then, “Yes.”

Merry frowned. “This isn’t protection magic,” she said. “Is it?”

She opened her eyes just in time to see Lys shake her head. “No.”

It was sweet and light, this tune. It didn’t have the gravity needed for a spell of protection nor the fervor needed for an attack. There was nowhere to weave strong, fierce magic. Only a sort of lightness that soothed the ache behind Merry’s eyes.

“What is it?” she asked curiously. She’d be able to puzzle it out herself if she listened long enough, but maybe if she were lucky, she’d get Lys talking. It was a rare treat to coax the woman out of her shell long enough for a real conversation, but sometimes if Merry got her going about her music…

Lys didn’t say anything, though, just let her fingers glide over keys she’d come to know like an old friend met only recently, and Merry allowed herself to watch.

It was her job, after all.

Merry let herself observe the slope of Lys’s shoulders, the tiny crease between her brows as she concentrated. The way she bobbed her head to a silent count, mouthed the words of a spell that she was too inexperienced to play silently.

She was lovely when she played, really.

It was some sort of coaxing spell, Merry thought. Healing, perhaps, or maybe growth?

Even as she thought it, she realized what was happening around her. She’d been so focused on Lys at the piano that she hadn’t even noticed the flowers, pale and graceful in their pots, beginning to grow. They’d been pruned so carefully, so delicately, but now they wound up and out of their enclosures, unfettered and alive, and they started to trace patterns against the aging stone of the pillars around them.

It was a little like joy and a little like love, the shy blossoming of a tiny bud into something beautiful and raucous and lovely, and Merry felt her eyes widen as her headache receded bit by bit by bit.

She was up on her feet now, wandering closer to the plants that Lys had coaxed into freedom, and she ran her fingers gently along one pale bloom.

Next to her, she could see Lys shiver.

“A growth spell,” she murmured. “This is complicated magic, Lys.”

If they were smart, the eggheads down at the university would jump at the chance to study a spell like this. But they weren’t, were they? They were always after important advances. Life-changing ones. Not flower arranging.

But Merry felt changed. Just a little. But changed nonetheless.

“I know,” Lys said, and Merry could hear that melancholy in her. That longing that had always hidden beneath polite words and tight smiles. Merry had always heard it there, had sensed it, but had never sought to pry. It wasn’t her place, as Lys’s music teacher. “I felt complicated when I wrote it.”

Perhaps it had been, though, as her friend. As the person responsible for guiding the art, the magical light inside her.

“It’s lovely,” Merry said, and she stepped closer so she could peer over Lys’s shoulder at the music that she’d perched on the piano. She pointed, her finger hovering just over the parchment. “There. This part in particular.”

It was a lovely little crescendo, and Merry could see how it was quietly encouraging life, growth, experimentation. Freedom. This part here was what the flowers were responding to, and it had really been very cleverly done.

Merry remembered feeling that little spark of inspiration before, that little thrill inside when she wrote something bright and new and clever. She hadn’t felt that in a long time, though. It had been stamped out long ago. 

These days, Merry didn’t write spells like that very often. Those weren’t the charms that got a woman hired, after all. They were for play. Fun.

Happiness.

Merry smiled. “Very good, Lys. I love it.”

Lys’s fingers stumbled, and Merry could see the way that she stopped mouthing her spell as she bit down on her lip. It was a very pretty pink that spilled out across those cheeks, framed by soft curls and dark lashes. “Thank you,” she said softly, then looked up over her shoulder so their eyes could meet. “I wrote it for you, you know.”

Oh. Oh...

Merry realized all at once that she was framed with flowers, both of them were, and petals were just beginning to fall from their soft blooms. It was… hell, it was dead romantic, was what it was, and she felt her own cheeks beginning to heat. “I see,” she said softly.

And she’d had another message in her mailbox that morning, another summons to the university and another summons to some rich old windbag and another summons to a mage who was going to make her life absolutely fucking miserable tomorrow.

But today… For now…

Merry gathered her skirts around her as she sat down at the bench by Lys’s side, and allowed herself to smile, pleased, as Lys looked at her with wide, wide eyes. “May I?” she asked.

Lys nodded, her hands stilling against the keys, and Merry took care to let her fingers brush hers as she took her own position.

Accompaniment. It had been a long time since she’d played accompaniment. “From the top, then,” she murmured.