Her mouth hung open, unable to decide what shape fear should make. High Priestess didn't wait for it. Her thumb and forefinger took Aspen by the face, pressing into the soft hollows beneath her cheekbones until her lips pushed apart. "Enough winging. Do not make me catch you twice."
Aspen's hands flew up between them. Not to strike. They folded together so fast her sticky fingers clicked, palms pressed flat, trembling under her chin. "Okay," she mumbled around High Priestess's grip. "Okay, okay. You got it." Muscles seemed to slush inside her thighs. She kept them under her by mistake more than strength.
She held herself very still in the woman's grip. Her eyes found the sharp line of High Priestess's jaw, then dropped before they could look like a challenge. If I act like a threat, she'll treat me like one. I'm not much of a threat to her anyways. "Okay," she said, using her daughter voice, soft at the ends and already sorry. Her words came out squeezed, warped by the fingers in her cheeks. "I'm listening. I'm done. I just—back then, I was startled. That's all. I woke up, and you were touching me, and I panicked. We're cool. Yeah?"
High Priestess did not blink. Aspen pressed her clasped hands tighter beneath her chin. I'm begging! The paste between her palms made a wet little sound.
"Can we reset?" she asked. "Please. I won't do anything, I'm a pacifist!"
High Priestess watched her for another breath. Then the hand left Aspen's face. Gravity yanked her down. Her knees folded first, then her butt hit the wood hard enough to knock the air out of her nose. She caught herself with both sticky hands and stared up.
The moth-woman stood over her, cutting the mushroom light into a dark shape.
"Then tell me what you remember, if there is anything."
Aspen swallowed hard. "Yeah, um, so my name is Asp—"
High Priestess's hand snapped over her mouth. "I see. You remember little." She lifted her other hand between them. Her thumb touched the indent beneath Aspen's lower lip. Her forefinger and middle finger spread to either corner of Aspen's mouth, making an upside-down triangle over the place where her name almost escaped. "Do not speak of your Ainm here. Your Ammunta is Hermit, and you will go by that. Mabla?"
"That's not—" Aspen cut herself off. She glanced at the thumb under her lip, the two fingers at the corners of her mouth, the neat little point they made of her face.
Is this a cult?
Her name crowded hot behind her tongue. She kept it there. What is an Ammunta? A title? Her hands still hovered under her chin, clasped wrong, slick with paste. A glob of it stretched from one knuckle to the other when she tightened them.
High Priestess waited. Aspen nodded once. Too small. She did it again, harder. "Mabla." The word came out bent around the thumb beneath her lip. It left a bitter wetness on her teeth. Don't think insults. She might hear them.
High Priestess's thumb lifted only after the word finished. When the hand left, the shape stayed on Aspen's face: two sore corners, one warm point under the lip. "Is there anything else?"
Aspen swallowed before speaking. "I-I don't know. I was just at home, sleeping, and uh, it was completely different. I think there's a really big cultural gap here. Where even are we?"
"Where do you think you could be?"
How should I know? "Georgia?"
"...Georgia?" High Priestess repeated. A tremor ran from the roots of her wings to their outer eyespots, making the pale dust jump once from the veins. Her face stayed still, but the wings had already asked the question for her.
Aspen's own wings answered before she did. Some part of her back had manners.
The lower edges lifted first, peeling from her back the same handspan High Priestess's had. One side rose higher than the other. Am I not in Georg—ah. Right. Wings.
Her eyes moved from the pale dust on High Priestess's veins to the blue mushrooms sunk in the wall. Then to the wood they grew out of. Not boards or planks but heartwood that curved around them in gray rings.
Are we in a tree? There's glowing mushrooms. Words I don't know. Not my face. Her mouth opened and shut once. Not Georgia. A cold tingle threaded through the meat beside her shoulder blades. Her wings stiffened behind her, and the blue lines inside them brightened vein by vein, sap-light climbing outward in rows.
High Priestess's eyes cut to the light in her wings. Aspen followed them.
The blue had climbed all the way to the very edges. It sat there too bright, thick in the veins—her veins. The lines did not look drawn on. They ran from her, coming from inside her spine and feeding into the wings in branching pipes. Aqua sap moving where blood should have known better.
"Ah… no. No, no." Her hands slipped against the floor. "Where actually am I? Whose body is this?" Her jaw opened around a breath that would not finish. The room seemed to tilt toward the glow on her back.
"Enough winging." High Priestess was already down. One moment she stood over Aspen; the next her knees touched the wood on both sides of Aspen's legs, skirts settling after her like they were late to arrive. Aspen's wings locked. The light in them stuttered, brightened once in protest, then held.
The woman's hands moved to her collarbone. They worked in opposition. The left hand pinned two fingers beneath the throat, steadying the skin without choking it. The right hand hooked the air beside Aspen's neck and drew it across, as if catching a thread too thin to see. When the strand resisted, High Priestess did not pull harder. She waited. Let it give. Drew it another inch.
"Rooci Carthanna, watch me, for I am High Priestess." The mushrooms nearby pulsed brighter.
Her thumb turned under the invisible line and laid it flat against Aspen's pulse.
"Let this hold her Cridh."
The right hand passed the strand to the left. The left held it there, exact and unmoving, while the right reached over Aspen's shoulder and drew another line from empty air.
"The sign will not blind her."
Over. Under. Drawn close. Not tied tight but never, never loose.
"Remind her of my promise."
Aspen felt nothing touch her. Then the nothing crossed itself at the base of her neck. High Priestess made one final motion: two fingers pinching the unseen ends together, thumb pressing them down until the air seemed to accept the join.
Warmth closed around Aspen's neck. Not metal. Not silk. A narrow pressure against her skin, fitted so exactly it knew her pulse. The blue in her wings dimmed vein by vein.
A necklace she could not see rested on her throat. It pulsed once.
She inhaled, and the breath was arranged before panic could use it. Her ribs opened in the right order. The muscles loosened one by one, as if invisible fingers were unlacing them from the inside. Her jaw settled. Her tongue settled flat behind her teeth. Even the frantic little thoughts at the front of her skull began to separate, each one moved a careful distance from the next. She could count them now.
Where am I?
Whose body?
What did she put on me..?
The questions remained. They just stopped cutting her.
Her wings lowered behind her with a slow, obedient sweep. The organs in her back stopped buzzing. The blue in her veins faded until only a dull sap-glow remained, tucked under the orange membrane.
She felt at her throat. Her fingers met skin. Only skin. The pressure stayed beneath them anyway, narrow and warm, sitting exactly over her heartbeat.
"Oh, that helps. I kinda hate it," she whispered.
High Priestess brought her hand toward Aspen's shoulder. Aspen braced for a pat. Instead, two fingers found the base of Aspen's wing. Not the membrane but the tender place beside her shoulder blade where the wind entered her body. The woman pressed there once, firm and brief, the way someone might settle a squirming child by the nape.
"Be still and wait here. I'll have Raine and Ina Quinn come find you. Hierophant will wring sense from you where I cannot."
Aspen's wing folded halfway on reflex. Why're you touching it like you own it? "Can you tell me who those people are, at least?"
The woman turned to the curtain to their right. Her wings narrowed behind her as she walked, folding into a clean, vertical line that made the rest of her look even thinner.
At the threshold, she stopped. Not fully. Only her head turned, just enough for one green eye to find Aspen over the slope of her shoulder. "Whole girl's in gillebrist." The words were not meant for Aspen, and that made them cut deeper.
Then High Priestess stepped through the curtain, and the hanging fibers followed after her with a dry whisper. Her footsteps moved away down the hollow beyond, never hurried, never checking whether Aspen had stayed where she was put.
You're not her. Don't act like her.
The anger arrived late. Muffled. Like it had to pass through warm cloth before it could reach her.
The wing-root stayed warm after, a thumbprint under the skin.
✦
Aspen sat on the floor until her body stopped expecting her to move.
The necklace pulsed against her throat. Not steady enough to be a clock. Too intimate for that. It beat where her pulse should have been, warm pressure answering warm pressure, and each answer slipped something soft into her blood.
Everything will be okay.
The thought arrived with no proof attached. She touched her throat. Skin. Only skin. Am I missing it? The invisible band pressed back with the exact patience of a thumb keeping a page flat.
"Disgusting." The disgust started toward her face, then turned around like it had remembered the rules.
She stood. Her knees took her weight too politely. No shaking. No collapse. The body simply arranged itself upright, as if someone else had taught it. Why is this so easy now?
The paste clung to her forearms when she moved. Gray-brown smears had dried into strings along her wrists and in the webbing between her fingers. She rubbed at it with her thumb. It peeled up in gummy rolls, then stuck under her nail. "Just go away." She rubbed harder. "Come on, come on—"
The tingles in her gut died. She could ignore it now. Hm. "That's useful." She crossed to the desk because a desk meant human. Human meant habits. Habits meant information.
The desk looked grown out of the wall, not placed there. Its legs disappeared into the floor in knuckled roots. A shallow bowl sat near the edge, crusted with the same paste. They don't eat this stuff, right? Looks like shit. Beside it lay a flat bone spatula, three red-thin pins, and a strip of cloth folded so precisely it looked accused. The cloth had a darker corner where fingers had always grabbed it first.
She picked up the cloth. It smelled like bitter roots and alcohol. She gagged once, quietly, then wiped at her cheek. The paste smeared instead of lifting, dragging a cool line from the corner of her mouth to her jaw. Jesus. Now I look like I eat shit.
The necklace pulsed. It's fine. Someone will come to explain.
"Stop helping." The words came out calm. Did I say that? That made her look down at her own mouth.
Across the room, the curtain stirred. Aspen froze with the cloth near her face. No breeze touched her arms. The mushrooms along the wall glowed in their little sockets, blue caps sunk into the heartwood, each one trembling at the rim like it had heard something under the floor. The curtain moved again, bowing outward by an inch.
The room breathed. Not like lungs, like blood circulating. Like little beads of oxygen were swirling through the blue in the wood and being exhaled through the mushrooms.
Her fingers tightened on the cloth. Paste squeeze cold between her knuckles. Okay, that's... uh, data. Information. Do something with it.
She turned away from the curtain in pieces: eyes first, chin, then shoulders. The desk had no drawers. The surface dipped into shallow basins instead, each depression holding something different: blue dust, black seeds, a curl of dried membrane thin as onion skin. One basin held a dark, tacky resin. Another held a line of tiny amber beads, each with a hair sealed inside.
Weird choices in seasoning.
"Reality test," she said to herself. Her voice sounded reasonable. Too reasonable. Two options. This is real, or it's not. Let's settle this here. She wiped at her wrist harder. The paste came off in flakes now, collecting on the desk in dead little crescents.
I'll wake up.
She shut her eyes. Hard. The darkness was not dark. Blue veins stayed behind her eyelids, mapped across the inside of her sight. Not imagination. Not afterimage. They pulsed with the sap in her. She kept her eyes closed for six seconds anyway.
I'm going to wake up now.
The necklace pulsed and her breath stayed even. It treated the attempt like a symptom. The room kept breathing around her.
She opened her eyes. The paste was still under her nails. The desk edge still pressed against her hip. The curtain still waited in the corner of her vision, too still now, with a properly oriented triangle on its inside. A part of her figured the other end was different.
Okay, this room has rules. Logic. It makes sense... from their perspective. That was almost the same as safety if she squinted hard enough.
She nodded after the thought. Then she said it out loud. "Yeah. I'm good." She nodded one more time. Good. No point in panic.
She walked back to the cocoon-thing and put her hands in the silk. The fibers accepted her too easily. Soft strands curled around her fingers and settled in the gaps between them, not gripping, only remembering the shape of her hand. The silk-filled hollow still held the dent of her body. Two wing-prints pressed into it, broad and powder-smudged, the veins copied there.
Aspen stared at the wing-print.
Her bed at home would not know how to make that shape. The mattress was not built for it.
The thought did not hurt at first. It had arrived clean. Manageable. Almost polite.
Jamie wouldn't have to ask to sleep in her bed anymore. Wouldn't have to ask her to turn off the room heater. But he probably wouldn't anyway, now that she was gone.
Her fingers sank deeper into the silk. She closed her eyes and tried to put her room back where it belonged. The messy desk with eight water bottles crowded near the lamp would sit to her right. The protractor she kept on it for no reason would sit at the top right, orange plastic scratched white at the numbers. Right where it was barely visible, but in her peripheral. She needed it in her peripheral. And the Mili poster she had begged Mom to buy, one corner smudged because Jamie was a dumbass sometimes, would sit right next to the curtainway. Her door would stand where the curtain did.
And her bed sheets wouldn't have curled so easily around her fingers.
A wet little click moved somewhere inside the wall. Not beyond it. Inside the wood. Then footsteps came fast from outside the curtain. The triangle etched into it pulled crooked as the fabric fluttered inward.
She looked back. It wasn't High Priestess.
The girl in the threshold was breathing too hard to hide it. Sweat darkened in the wisps at her temples, and a few blonde strands stuck to her cheeks, faint blue-green threads glowing through them like veins under thin skin. Her wings were flared wide behind her, green and trembling at the lower edges, too open for the narrow doorway.
The girl took one breath toward Aspen and stopped like the air had come back wrong. Her eyes shot to the wing-print in the silk, and then to Aspen's hands, still braced in the silk instead of loosening at the sight of her.
"Y-You never looked at wings before faces." Her eyes dropped to the print again. "Not even broken ones." The last word came softer. Raine's fingers went to the base of her own wing, then stopped a breath short.
She looked back at Aspen. "Since when did my wings make you step back?"
Aspen caught her foot halfway through the answer. Her heel had dragged back through the orange powder shed from Lyra's wings, drawing a bright little line between them.