this won't do | Glowfic Constellation

white-as-snow

They spin out together like a spider's drifting thread, through distant spaces so alien and terrifying that groping blindly through lightless lifeless nothingness for the souls of the dead seems downright cozy in retrospect. The crown sometimes forges ahead with strength and purpose, and other times flails in total confusion through a place so warped that even its alien and terrifying senses have nothing familiar to grasp. Everything in its capacious pockets burns away, every coin, every bone, every last fragment of every blade of grass, all consumed to fuel their headlong flight.

It might perhaps have been safe to stop there, but the crown understands the depth of its bearer's terrified urgency. There must be no remaining possibility that the Chained One could find them. There must be no remaining possibility that they could have gone just a little farther, could have obscured their trail just a little better. So it pushes and keeps pushing, until they're both exhausted, until it feels like exhaustion is all they've ever known. It steers them into a howling emptiness that claws relentlessly at their conjoined souls, and presses blindly onward in the shelter of the Lamb's fiercely stubborn will to live, rekindled at last by the slim hope that there might be a life out there worth living.

By the time they land once more in a physical realm, with dirt below and sky above, neither of them has the faintest idea how long they might have been traveling for. All they know is that they can go no farther.

It's not a dramatic arrival; you could be forgiven for missing it entirely, if you didn't happen to be looking. One moment there's nothing in particular happening on this unassuming patch of dirt, and then a wavering black rift opens just wide enough for just long enough that a small fluffy body can slip sideways into reality.

She makes some sort of hoarse quiet sound with her voice, and tries to sit up, and can't remember how. Her crown darts anxiously from her head to her hands and back, flowing through the air like a weightless splash of ink, as she slowly refamiliarizes herself with the business of living. Right, those are her lungs, already breathing on their own, good job lungs, and these many miscellaneous aches all add up to the shape of the four limbs and a head that she distantly remembers having, and which bit is the eyes again? Right, those. She opens them.

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This is apparently a very suspicious assertion. "And you have wings! And you look like a sheep!"

white-as-snow

"And you look like a fucked-up monkey, but I'm not making any trouble for you over it."

"A what?"

"We're people! What are you??"

white-as-snow

"Also a person! Where I come from everybody looks like me!"

This is on some levels a lie but on some levels actually more of a truth than taking the time to explain the whole situation. These three alarmingly enormous monkeyfolk seem to be surprised, not that the Lamb is a sheepfolk, but that she's any kind of folk at all that isn't theirs; the important thing to tell them, here, is that they're wrong about how being a person works, not her entire life story.

"Are winged sheep monsters even allowed to live here," Mushrooms mutters to Herbs.

"Is anyone? It's the lord's woods," Herbs mutters back.

"Where do sheep with wings live?" asks Kindling, eyes narrowed.

white-as-snow

"A different woods. Very far away. I couldn't tell you how to get there from here and you wouldn't like it much if you did."

"What is the place where sheep with wings live called?" says Kindling.

white-as-snow

"What do you care? Anyway, it's not all one place. The Deep Woods and the Darkwood and, what's it called, Anura are all full of folk like me, and if I'd travelled around more before I left I'm sure there would've been plenty more to find."

"Anura. Never heard of it," snorts Kindling. "Are you an exile from the other sheep?"

white-as-snow

"No, I just left because I hated it there."

"Why?"

white-as-snow

"It wasn't a nice place. Lots of people trying to kill each other. I wanted to get out of all that and retire somewhere quiet, as far away as possible."

"And you picked here?"

"Washed up, she said."

"Doesn't look half drowned."

white-as-snow

"It was yesterday! I've built a house since then! Why are you still here? Go do whatever it is you're doing and leave me alone."

"It's only," says Herbs, "there was a monster as killed Uncle's horse and chewed the dogs half to death before they killed it, see."

white-as-snow

...

She sighs long-sufferingly.

"What'd it look like," she says, in the tone of someone who can see a monster-hunting job looming on the horizon and is grudgingly resigning herself to it in advance.

"Black."

"Lot of legs."

"Except when it looked more like a - a slug, or -"

"I didn't see it but it left such strange bites on the horse."

white-as-snow

"I saw something like that yesterday, after I got here," she says, grumpily. "And a blob of little bitty ones this morning that I squished to death. Ugh, I don't want to hunt gross slug monsters, I want to live in the woods and grow vegetables."

"And you always have - two legs -"

"Four, a sheep -"

"Two or four, anyways?"

white-as-snow

"...yes, I have two legs. They're right here, you can see them. Two is the normal number of legs to have and that's what I've got. I'm getting really tired of this conversation. You all look mighty funny to me and I'm not telling you that you might be slug monsters."

"We're just normal people! You showed up from Sheepland same week a monster killed Uncle's horse!"

white-as-snow

"That doesn't sound like it ought to be my problem! Look, I don't like the slug monsters any more than you do, and if you want me to go fight one, you can point me at it. If you don't, you can get out of my garden and leave me alone."

"We're not sure you're not a slug monster!" snaps Herbs.

white-as-snow

"If I was a slug monster, I'd eat you or something, that being how slug monsters seem to like doing things. Since I am not a slug monster, I'm more inclined to go get a big stick and hit you with it until you go away."