#i'm on the mainland for a week and it's raining daily every day until we leave

[inexplicably-spookified]

this week's FUCKING BNUUY FRIDAY got CAUGHT IN THE RAIN

[strawberrystarcake]

where monsters lurk

my story for the dec 1-15 a million possible outcomes prompt! i took many creative liberties with this one and i'm not sorry at all! @chaotic-queer-disaster

I was born and raised in a town that has no name.

No one knows exactly why. Some people say that the mainland doesn’t know we exist. Others say that we were a people of mistakes, and the sooner we’re eradicated from the earth the better. Still others say that we don’t exist.

(No, only one madman said that. He died ten years ago, by drowning himself in the lake. I was nine, and the last one he spoke to. He told me that I should run. I didn’t. Perhaps that was my biggest mistake.)

Personally, I think it��s because no one wants to curse an innocent word by association with us.

I grew up hungry. Most of the people in my town with no name did. My mother grew up hungry, and my father, and their parents before them. The town’s foundation is more ice than land. We can’t grow anything, and squirrels dying of hypothermia and pinecones aren’t proper sustenance. Everyone in town is pale as death.

There’s not much else to say about the town. The ground is white, perpetually, or else a pale sickly brown after a rare rain shower, when the snow becomes a muddy slush. It never stays that way, though, because it always freezes over before a day can pass. The sunlight here is silver and the sky is never really empty of clouds.

Each house is made of pine wood, mostly because there’s nothing else. There are stone pathways that no one ever uses because they’re always buried under snowdrifts. There’s a bonfire in the middle of town that lends no heat but is kept running anyway. I think it’s to create the illusion of hope.

And then there’s the lake.

It’s not a very large one, resting about half a mile from the village border. It never freezes over. The water is drinkable, but drinking it isn’t allowed. There are shadows in the very bottom of the lake that move and dance and swim.

No one talks about the lake.

I mean it. Not even to scare children away from it- the children are scared of it anyway. The lake is a bit of a taboo, and it only ever comes up when a poor desperate soul tries to drink from it. They’re locked in a pinewood dungeon for a week and they never come out quite the same.

The madman was in the dungeon the most, perhaps because he was mad. Or maybe he was mad because he was in the dungeon the most.

I’ve only been in the dungeon once- when I was five years old. I don’t remember it very well- only how I was thirsty and the lake was right there and how apparently, that rule applies to kids too. My parents don’t like to talk about it and neither do my neighbors. My older brother occasionally brings it up to tell me how unfair it was. He’s been in the dungeon eleven times, although I’ve never seen him try. I guess he would know.

My earliest and clearest memory was the madman, and he would go on to feature in countless memories after. I liked him, although I don’t remember his name and all he ever really did was rave.

I was eight years old, and he brought me to the lake and pointed to the swimming shadows, telling me in a low whisper that monsters live underneath the surface of the water. He told me that he drank so much of the lake because when he died, he wanted to join them. I didn’t understand- why would you ever want to be a monster?

I remember asking my mother about it, after, and she’d clutched me close and told me that the madman was different, and that I should never listen to anything he said. For my own good, of course.

I remember talking to the madman anyway, almost every day until he died. He was always at the lake, or in the dungeon, and I found myself wandering to the lake every day just in case he was there. He never had anything interesting to say to me after the first few times. I went anyway.

I believe my parents only realized that I was disobeying them after he died, when I stopped going out for a while and they pieced together that my daily trips out were to speak to him- of course they were. Who would go out for no reason, in a village such as mine?

They never said anything. I wonder why, sometimes, then I shake the thought away lest I tempt fate.

You must have grown tired of my ramblings by now- don’t worry. I have only one more story left, and like each one of them, it starts and ends at the lake.

I hadn’t been there since the day the madman died. It was the first time in my life I’ve actively tried to avoid it.

I had missed it.

I really shouldn’t have. It’s dangerous, and it’s not beautiful in any way. Bitterly cold, still water and long-dead fossils of reeds jutting out around the uneven shoreline. The water is empty except for the ever-moving shadows and I was sure if I could see their faces, they would be nightmarish, with multiple eyes and teeth sharper than icicles, mouth curled into a sneer.

But gods, I had missed it.

My feet were moving before I could stop them, stepping around the reeds and onto the shore strewn all over with deathly sharp pebbles. They pierced and prodded my boots and the only warmth I had felt all day comes from the blood pulsing under my skin, everywhere- my head throbbed and my vision swirled.

It wasn’t painful yet. If I went back and did it again, I have no doubt that it would hurt me like a dagger through the heart. But it didn’t hurt me then, only made me curious. I went closer, deeper, faster.

I managed to make it to the middle of the lake before the pain began.

It was all so very quick. The process was cold and sudden and nauseating as a blizzard, and I could only remember taking in a breath that stung like a hundred little needles on the way down- one breath, and my skin had turned blue and my muscles taut and aching.

And then I sunk.

Like a stone, I sunk deeper and deeper, farther than I thought the lake went. At some point the water became as silver as the sun and hotter than blood, or maybe it was just so cold it burned.

On the way down, I saw many things. Things of myth, divine animals that my words would never do justice no matter how hard I might try.

I saw a decomposing body; not of any creature I know of, or any creature that exists. The corpse of a woman with no legs and no arms, but wings and a fish-like tail. She sunk with me, for a while, then she opened her pearlescent eyes and swam swiftly away.

I saw an orchard. The trees were completely black and the fruit were golden, shaped like human hearts. A man was tending to them; an old, old man with a bent back and a face that looked entirely carved-on.

I saw a hundred icebergs the exact colour of blood, melting in the heat-cold and dyeing the water a morbid red.

And I saw a god. They were larger than life and the most disgusting creature I have ever seen. Their eyes were vibrant white and completely empty, and a halo of light floated above their head. They looked at me once and smiled.

I fell for what seemed like hours. Maybe it was only a few seconds. Maybe it was far longer. Years, maybe. But I couldn’t fall forever, and eventually I landed with a ripple on a floor of white, fine sand.

I looked up, and there he was.

The madman.

He looked happier than he ever had in our village with no name. His clothes were made of something that shimmered when he moved, and that looked impossibly soft. His beard had been combed and his long hear was woven with pearls.

He was surrounded by the shadows.

I was dumbfounded, to say the least. The shadows that I always imagined were creatures of mistake were really just…

Plain old humans, just like my friend. Humans all decked out in ethereal finery, but just humans.

Hundreds of questions hung on the tip of my tongue, but when I spoke first I did not voice a single one.

“You’re dead,” I told the madman instead.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve joined the shadows, as I always told you I would.”

“These aren’t the monsters you told me to watch out for. These are people.”

That was wrong. He never told me what the monsters looked like. He never liked people, either.

He thought for a moment. “Well,” he finally replied. “I never did understand the difference. People, monsters- we’re just the same, don’t you know?”

“Do you mean to say people are evil?” I asked.

“No, not exactly,” he frowned. “The monsters are not evil, and neither are people. We are creatures of mistake, but not of evil. I’m sure you understand. You were always a smart kid.”

I sat in silence for a little while. The madman is not the person I remembered him to be- is he a madman at all? He was right, after all. Perhaps the people back home are mad, perhaps I am mad, but not he. I can no longer call him a madman, but I do not know his name. Unlike our town, I know he must have had one.

He looks at me and smiles softly. “It’s time for you to go. Remember this and remember me, child.”

I didn’t want to leave.

As it turns out, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Water surged into my lungs and I gasped desperately. The shadows, monsters, people- they cackled at me, all except the madman.

He just looked at me. He was smiling, but there was a horrible sad look in his eyes.

I was beginning to float up. I tried to reach for the madman, but my arms were like lead. I cried out for him- “Let me stay here! Please!”- to no avail, of course. The current snatched the words from my throat.

I was finally drowning.

The madman’s sad eyes did not leave me.

I wish I could have told him I was sorry. I wish I could have told him that I missed him. I wish I could have told him I understand. I wished a million things in a single moment, but wishing would do nothing.

“No one is born a monster,” he said. It was a goodbye and a warning all at once, and it was the last thing I heard before I fell from my world of distant saints and human monsters.