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The monster stopped as I swooped in with my tendrils and reached into its bleak existence. For a second, I saw its eyes dropping slightly and its raised claw stopping mid-motion. Then, I was gone from my body as well.
It was all wrong.
Emptiness welcomed me, the urge to kill having tainted all the monster had been when it was fae. I moved quickly as the monster growled again, searching within to find the conscious being inside it. I did not know what I was hoping to find, but when I found the thing that made it what it was, my insides twitched with fear.
A memory that wasn’t mine jumped at me with all its darkness and guilt. It was dug in deep, the memory of a girl who had buried herself underneath the facade of the monster that was killing Qai.
I could not let her stay there.
As soon as I saw her, the mind-world took shape. She looked up from the gravestone she was next to, behind her, many other fresh graves formed as my eyes darted off her. The air was smoky and dark and although there was no one with us, I could hear screams of agony reaching us from the distance.
It was her fault, she believed.
I could not stop and convince her otherwise.
I made myself in her mind. Now, I wasn’t a shapeless thing trying to travel in her memories but a concrete force of nature that could do as it wished. I grabbed her arm and shook her. She looked up.
Her eyes were empty, and stars shone beneath the surface.
I pulled her up and erased the graveyard. She was shaken, and disbelief was all over her expression as the dirt she was on became a dark nothing.
“What?” She said, her lips fumbling through the words as her voice croaked.
“Get up!” I screamed at her. “You cannot kill Qai.”
“Who is Qai?” She mumbled. “It was my mom. I told them what she was. She had the taint, and she gave it to me.”
“Stop it!” I shouted as the wind blew past us. We were nowhere, and yet there was wind here. “You can’t kill Qai.”
“You can’t live with light when there is darkness in you,” she shouted back. Her eyes were wide and full of cold shock. “No. I can’t. You can’t. You are one of them, aren’t you? One of the tainted ones?”
I could cry now, and she would get buried in the flood that was my tears. She would end here, and Qai would be safe.
She had said so herself.
She was guilty.
She had done bad things.
Like all of us...
I touched her face.
“I forgive you,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”
A single tear slid down her cheek, making a trail amid the soot coating her skin. She looked up. For the first time since I’d seen her, there was hope in her dark blue eyes.
My body was back on the grass, outside of her mind. There was the healing touch that I’d nurtured ever since Cari told me of its existence. I could take it now and she would be whole again.
I reached back to my body without thinking of what was actually there. The girl who was the monster was moving its claws against Qai’s vulnerable neck, too slowly for it to matter. Time moved differently now that I was traveling across minds.
I returned to my body to take what I needed to save her.
But another monster was waiting for me there.
The monster that was me...
I found the darkness within as soon as I returned to my body. The monstrosity that Cari had created in me rose to the surface quickly, taking over everything and spreading the thing that was a part of me. It used the moment of emptiness I had let inside of me when I left my body to be in the girl’s mind.
