#me trying not to just write the plot of rusty lake roots down: ah yes...... creepy shadows

[monabela]

yoo @tikola-nesla it’s your @aphsecretsanta gift! the prompts used are horror and family, with MonaBela and EstUkr, and Russia is also there. I don’t know what kind of horror you actually would want, but I hope you like this sort of... weird creepy stuff. it’s the only kind of horror I like!

the story of one

pairings/characters: Belarus (Nadzeya)/Monaco (Olympe), Estonia (Eduard)/Ukraine (Iryna), Russia (Ivan)

word count: 6012 summary: Olympe follows her wife back to her childhood home, a place she never speaks about. She’s about to find out the reason for that.

warning for character death (not super explicit but people definitely die)

Olympe wakes when Nadzeya bolts upright with a gasp.

In the dark, all she can make out is a tangle of light hair. She turns over, blinking sleep away and reaching out until her hand finds her wife’s back. It’s clammy under her fingers. Nadzeya is trying to catch her breath, and swallows audibly.

“Again,” she whispers, her voice hoarse. Olympe bites her lip and doesn’t do anything but just press her hand against her back, trying to ground her. It never quite works, but Nadzeya lies back down anyway.

Olympe stares at the profile of her pace face in the dark. The sharp nose, the part of her lips. This close, she can see her clearly without glasses. Or could, if it weren’t dark.

“The same dream again?” she whispers. Nadzeya sighs.

“Yes. Always the same.” A long pause, and then she turns, propping herself up on an elbow to look down at Olympe. “I think… I have to go home.”

Olympe feels her heart skip a beat. “Home? As in, where you grew up? You’ve never… Why do you think that?”

“I think I knew I’d have to, at some point.” Nadzeya reaches for her, her hand—cold as always, despite the lingering warmth of the late summer—landing on her stomach, where Olympe grasps it quietly. “You know I keep having that dream about it.”

“You hate it there, Nadzeya,” Olympe whispers. “Do you think you’re ready for all of that?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready, but I think it’s time.”

She lies back down. Olympe is silent.

Nadzeya never talks about her home—or, more accurately, the place she once called home. Her home, like Olympe’s, is here now. Wherever either of them goes.

And so she doesn’t protest when Olympe tells her, the next day when it becomes clear she still intends on going into the mountains, that she will coming as well. Both of them are stubborn, and they know that about each other very well. They work around it now.

It’s a little exciting, Olympe thinks, when they leave at the end of the week, Nadzeya taking the wheel and driving them north. After it became clear that Nadzeya didn’t like to talk about her childhood, Olympe never asked much about it. She knows her wife has siblings. There were two open seats in the front row at their wedding, symbolically or in case they showed up, she never found out. No one filled them. She also knows Nadzeya’s parents passed before she met her, but that’s just about all the concrete information she has.

So, it’s a little exciting, but mostly, it’s disquieting to see Nadzeya this way. There is a restless, nervous energy to her. Usually so stoic, she drums her fingers on the steering wheel when she takes a sudden turn off the main road somewhere in the mountains and flicks on the headlights to navigate the narrow cobblestone path ahead through the shadows of the dense trees and the drizzle that has started to rain down.

“We’re getting close,” she whispers, and her knuckles are whitening, so Olympe touches her upper arm.

“I’m here.”

Swallowing, Nadzeya nods.

A few minutes down the path, they reach a gate, and they stop. Nadzeya takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. The gate is nothing special, but it must be the entrance to her family’s old property, so Olympe lets her be for a moment.

“Don’t feel like you have to do anything,” she does say. She watches her chew on her lower lip in response to that.

“But I do. Like I said, I’ve always known.”

“That you had to go back?”

“That I had to go back. I know it doesn’t make sense, but my family doesn’t tend to.”

“Do they live here?”

Nadzeya turns an intensely focused look on her, blue eyes even darker than usual.

“No one lives here.” She opens her car door, and Olympe tells herself she shivers because of the chilly mountain air and nothing else, before following her example and heading out to help her push the gate open, the wrought iron creaking in protest. She can’t see anything of what lies beyond, even before the little droplets of rain render her glasses practically useless.

Nadzeya drives the car through the gate, and waits for Olympe on the other side while she closes it again. Wiping her glasses with her flowy scarf is mostly ineffective, but she does notice one thing before she gets back into the car.

“Nadzeya, did you see that there—and thank you,” she says drily when her wife tosses a box of tissues on her lap. “I’ll definitely use those to scratch up my glasses.”

“I’m sorry I forgot the silk napkins, your highness.” The teasing jab sounds a little flatter than usual, but Olympe will take it. She cleans her glasses and blinks through them at the winding path ahead before continuing.

“There were tire tracks by the gate.”

“What?” Nadzeya asks sharply. “On this side?”

“Yes. Just through, in the mud.”

There is no response to that. Nadzeya’s expression is difficult to read, even for Olympe, so she just listens to the tires, the intermittent woosh of the windshield wipers. The main road is already impossible to hear.

Finally, a house appears between the trees. Its weathered façade looms, somehow unexpectedly, over an overgrown yard, or maybe even a courtyard. In the drizzle, everything is grey, with one jarring exception.

A car is parked in front of the steps leading to the front door of the house, a tiny turquoise thing that stands out like a sore thumb.

“What the hell?” Nadzeya mutters, pulling up behind it. The license plate is from further east, and there are some bags in the trunk that Olympe can see, neatly arranged.

When Nadzeya kills the engine, it’s suddenly very quiet. Olympe looks up at the door. Well, doors. They’re high, and framed by an arch topped with a symbol that looks like a tree.

“Is this where you grew up?”

“Too much, yeah.” With that cryptic reply, Nadzeya opens her door and gets out of the car. Olympe follows, shielding her glasses as best she can while they ascend the stone steps.

“How old is this place?” she asks Nadzeya.

“My family built it in 1805. Most of it, anyway.” She takes a deep breath, straightens her back as if preparing to launch into a gymnastics routine, and pushes against the doors. They open, and Olympe hurries after her wife before she disappears into the house’s shadows, already digging through her bag for the flashlight she brought.

In the cavernous hall, Nadzeya grabs her arm, long nails digging into her skin, and makes a sharp gesture for her to be silent. In the gloom, not much can be seen, but Olympe can hear someone talking. Trying to breathe steadily, she looks up at Nadzeya, who shakes her head. It’s not anyone she knows.

The voice—probably a man’s voice—is getting closer, and is soon accompanied by the faint glow of a flashlight coming from a corridor to the left, in front of the grand staircase Olympe can just make out. Nadzeya lets go of her to take a step in that direction. She’s waiting.

A man appears, and almost walks straight into her.

“Woah!” he exclaims. When Nadzeya turns one of her ever-piercing glares on him, he takes a stumbling step back.

“Who the hell are you?” she hisses. The man glances nervously at Olympe, who just quirks her eyebrows at him. She isn’t about to stop Nadzeya, even if she didn’t find the intensity of the sparse emotions she shows incredibly attractive.

“My name is Eduard!” he stutters, holding his hands up.

“What are you doing here?” Nadzeya pokes a thin finger against his chest. He’s very tall, and has strikingly light eyes behind his glasses.

“I don’t know, my partner wanted to come here.”

“Your partner?”

“Yes! She—” He is interrupted by a new voice from behind him.

“Eduard, what’s— Nadzeya?”

Immediately, Nadzeya loses all interest in the man, turning instead to the woman who emerges into the hall, who drops her flashlight on the ground, where it stutters out. Nadzeya doesn’t even flinch.

“Iryna?” she breathes. And then, by some miracle, she lets the woman step into her space, wrap her arms around her, and pull her close. The man—Eduard—looks confused, which is just about how Olympe feels about it.

After what feels like a very long time, Iryna pushes Nadzeya back a little to look at her the way a mother might look at a long-lost child. They’re practically the same height.

“Iryna, we can’t both be here,” Nadzeya whispers. Olympe takes a step in her direction, reaching her hand out as if she can soothe away the terrified tone of her voice from the other side of the hall.

“I know.”

Now, Olympe exchanges a look with Eduard, who mirrors her baffled expression, and then she takes another step forward, deciding to take the approach to this she does to anything; face it directly.

“Excuse me,” she says. Iryna frowns at her, but Nadzeya smiles, ever so slightly.

“Olympe, this is Iryna…” She takes a deep breath. “My big sister.”

Eduard inhales sharply, so that must be a surprise for him as well. Olympe just holds Nadzeya’s gaze, questioning but not really expecting any answers, at least not yet. That’s how they work. Nadzeya speaks when she wants to, but Olympe knows she will always get the answers she wants eventually. About most things, at least, and it seems that might become almost everything now.

“And Olympe is your… Girlfriend?” Iryna guesses.

“Wife.” She smiles again. It’s still a novelty two years into their marriage.

“Congratulations.” Iryna grasps Nadzeya’s hand. “We have to leave. If we stay…”

“Can someone please explain to me what’s happening?” Eduard interrupts. He only recoils slightly when Nadzeya glares at him, which is impressive. She once made a man cry just by looking at him. It was incredibly attractive.

“Not here,” Iryna tells him.

“You’ve been dreaming about this place for weeks now, honey.”

“Fuck, no,” Nadzeya breathes. Iryna widens her eyes, and she nods, gravely.

They do look alike, even if Iryna’s face is fuller and seems more disposed to soft expressions than the angles and sharpness Olympe knows so well from Nadzeya. Her eyes are even lighter than Eduard’s, but probably blue like her sister’s. It’s hard to tell in the shadowy hall.

“We’ll tell you later, Eduard,” Iryna is saying now, already rushing to the entrance.

One of the doors opens before she can reach them. Another incredibly tall man enters, looking around curiously.

“Iryna?” he says, and he lets go of the door in shock.

“No!” she exclaims.

The man jumps around to make a grab for the door handle, but it’s too late. The doors slam shut.

“It’s fine,” he says, turning back. His voice is surprisingly soft for the imposing figure that he cuts in the shadows. “This is fine. As long as Nadzeya isn’t—"

“I’m here, Ivan,” she says loudly.

A long, heavy silence follows, blanketing the hall in discomfort. Olympe can hear Nadzeya breathing shallowly as if nervous, and feels her own heartbeat ratchet up in response. Nadzeya doesn’t get nervous, or at least doesn’t show it, same as Olympe. She reaches back and grasps her clammy, cold hand.

“Oh no,” Ivan says. His shoulders sag. He tries the door, listlessly. It doesn’t budge.

“I’m sure there’s another door somewhere,” Eduard says.

“There’s not.” Iryna’s voice is hard, and she pushes her hands through her short blond hair.

“That… That seems like a fire hazard.”

“There’s a lot more to be worried about than fire here, Eduard,” Nadzeya snaps, her nails digging into Olympe’s hand. And, “Fuck, Ivan, we can’t be here.”

“I had dreams,” he says. He tries the door again, to no avail. “There has to be some way to get out.”

“You know there isn’t. It was always going to be this way.” There is an untold sadness in Iryna’s voice that unsettles Olympe deeply. Eduard takes a few steps in her direction, but seems to hesitate before he reaches for her. Olympe wonders how long they’ve been together.

“Iryna, what’s going on?” he whispers.

“I shouldn’t have taken you here.” She closes her eyes and clenches her jaw. Olympe looks up at Nadzeya, who nods, slowly, before turning to her siblings—or, at least Olympe assumes that Ivan is their brother. She can’t tell if he’s older or younger than Nadzeya.

“We’re here now,” she says. “Let’s do something about it.”

Despite herself, Olympe smiles.

Everyone follows them when Nadzeya starts leading her further into the house.

“What a way to meet my in-laws.”

“I never wanted you to meet them.”

“I know.” Olympe flicks her flashlight on when Nadzeya reaches a door at the end of the corridor they’ve entered and starts fiddling with the lock. “Is it because of… Whatever this is?”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “I hope it doesn’t… My family is beyond fucked up, Olympe. Not Ivan and Iryna, but everyone else. We hoped we could end it.”

Shaking her head, she pushes the door open, allowing Olympe to shine her flashlight into the room beyond it. At first, she isn’t sure what she’s seeing. The space is larger than she was expecting, but maybe that’s just because it appears to be practically empty.

“Nadzeya,” Ivan is saying, sidling into the room past Olympe, “do you think this is where we should be?”

“This looks like a place I’d want to avoid,” Eduard puts in. He shines his own flashlight over Olympe’s head. Everyone here is twice her height, and she didn’t wear heels, so it’s even worse than usual. Great.

“This man has a point.” Ivan pauses, turning to the two of them. “Who are you?”

“Your in-laws,” Olympe replies, drily. “Olympe Castil, Nadzeya’s wife.”

“I’m Eduard,” says Eduard, “Iryna’s wife. I don’t know why I said that. I’m her partner.”

Olympe glances up at him over her shoulder, and he shrugs nervously, adjusting his glasses.

“You sure know how to pick them, Ryna,” Nadzeya puts in. And, before her sister can react to that, “We’ll end up here anyway, what’s the point in dragging all of this out? We can stop it. Now.”

Iryna closes the door behind them. It clicks, and Ivan’s eyes widen as he recoils.

“We can end it to begin again.” Iryna’s voice is low, and Nadzeya snarls.

“Iryna!”

Turning, Olympe can see her standing perfectly still by the door. Her shadow is intense in the beam of two flashlights, swaying against the wood.

Why is it swaying?

“Iryna,” Eduard says, reaching for her and not hesitating this time. She blinks at him, bright blue eyes unfocused for a long moment.

“Eduard.”

“Yes.” He touches her face with his free hand, and she turns into it. “Please, explain what’s happening. I want to help. I’m sure we both do.”

“You can’t,” she breathes.

“Maybe he can,” Nadzeya interjects. She has walked over to the other end of the gloomy room, using just the tiny screen of her mobile phone to guide her way.

Olympe illuminates her, and behind her, a carving of a massive tree that spans the entire back wall. The stone branches appear to move every time the light shifts.

“We are the story of one,” Nadzeya says, as if reciting something. “Ivan.”

When Olympe looks at Ivan, the man shakes his head, floppy blond hair falling into his dark eyes.

“Not me. The Ivan who built this place.” He joins Nadzeya by the stone tree, towering over her despite her own considerable height. That must run in the family. “This Ivan.”

He reaches for a low branch of the tree—is it some kind of literal family tree?—but is stopped by Nadzeya before he can touch it.

“That Ivan, yes.”

Ivan steps back, looking bashful. Iryna makes her way over as well, guided by the beam of Eduard’s flashlight, and the three of them stand in front of the tree, Nadzeya and Iryna flanking their brother. Next to Olympe, Eduard is biting his nails. Olympe herself tugs at the end of her braid. Honestly, she has made up quite some of ridiculous reasons her wife wouldn’t want to talk about her family over the years, but she doesn’t think whatever is going on here was one of the options. She turns to Eduard to whisper at him.

“Has Iryna ever told you anything about her family?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve always just assumed they were estranged. This is…”

Ivan turns around. His shadow makes the branches move. Olympe shivers, and Nadzeya grabs his shoulder, sharing a look with Iryna, who nods. They turn as well.

“We should show you something,” Iryna says, addressing Olympe and Eduard. “It’s… Our history. Our family’s history. Nadzeya is right, maybe you can help us, but not if you don’t know.”

What if we don’t want to? Olympe doesn’t ask, because she has the feeling it would be futile, and because she does want to. She’d never abandon Nadzeya.

“Okay?” Eduard does say, putting a hand on her shoulder. Nadzeya raises her eyebrows at her sister, who bites her lip.

“Show us, then.” Olympe takes a step forward, meeting Nadzeya when she does as well. She reaches up and pulls her in to kiss her, to whisper against her lips. “Show me.”

She swipes her thumbs over her wife’s sharp cheekbones when she closes her eyes, her eyeshadow even darker now. After a silent, suspended moment, Nadzeya straightens, adjusting her long skirt and turning to everyone else again, although she keeps touching Olympe, her fingertips resting cool against her neck.

“It started with the other Ivan.” She leads them to the other end of the room again, where Ivan and Iryna pull open a door Olympe hadn’t seen before—no, it’s a piece of the wall, revealing an alcove containing a portrait of a stern, pale man with the same light hair and dark eyes as Nadzeya and Ivan.

“Is that him?” Eduard asks. Nadzeya’s grip tightens on Olympe’s neck, almost painfully, and she swallows half a sentence.

“The child will—” She gasps for air. “Will be born—”

Olympe whirls around and grasps her face. Her gaze is terrifyingly unfocused for far too long, and she’s still choking on words she’s trying not to say. When she eventually regains control, her skin is clammy under Olympe’s hands.

“I’m here.”

Nadzeya closes her eyes. “You are.”

“Guess that’s him,” Eduard says, obviously trying to lighten the mood. Olympe flattens her lips into a thin line. “No?”

“It is.” Iryna reaches into the alcove and unearths a jar. “Ivan was obsessed with cyclical events. He… He believed he should be born again, when the cycle was complete.”

“That’s…” Eduard trails off when he shines his flashlight at the jar Iryna is holding. In it, obscured by a murky liquid, sits a human brain. “Uh.”

Iryna regards the brain with seeming curiosity. In the alcove, the portrait of the Ivan the First is shrouded in ever-changing shadows, and Olympe doesn’t want to look at it. As long as she’s known her, Nadzeya has had a fascination with the occult, but she never thought it was serious. She thought it was a hobby, like how Olympe likes to play the piano and do ballet and talk to the neighbor’s cat. Now, she fears her wife may have been looking for a way to stop whatever this is, all this time.

And maybe she still can’t.

“Why is there a whole human brain just sitting in your house?” Eduard asks—practically shrieks.

“It’s…” Iryna puts it down on the wall they pulled out, as if displaying it. “Ivan called them relics.”

“Them?”

With a helpless gesture, Iryna turns to the Ivan of the here and now, who is dragging a next piece of wall out of the way, opening another alcove, another portrait.

“You can’t be fucking serious!” Eduard takes his glasses off, frantically wipes them with his polo shirt, and puts them back on. “I didn’t know I would be joining the Addams family!”

“They’re far better,” Nadzeya says darkly. And, “Ivan, no!”

Because he has picked up another jar—Olympe is just going to assume there’s a body part in it—and is carrying it to the stone tree, already holding it up to put it somewhere among the branches when Iryna and Nadzeya practically barrel into him and wrench his arm down.

“Oh my god,” Eduard is muttering. “Olympe, how are you so calm about this?”

“I used to play poker,” she tells him. Her hands are shaking, but he doesn’t know how big of a tell that is for her. Doesn’t know how confused and scared she is.

The sisters have wrenched Ivan away from the tree, but there is something in his eyes—something of a darkness. Unwillingly, Olympe looks back at the first portrait. She swallows the scream that wants to escape, but the noise she makes still has Eduard looking.

“Oh, god,” he whispers.

All of the portrait is bathed in swirling shadows that won’t be chased away by their flashlights, except Ivan the First’s eyes. Like distant stars, they’re lit up from within with white light that burns through everything.

“What is wrong with this place?” Eduard says. Frantic all of a sudden, he pulls a mobile phone out of his jeans pocket, flips it open, and jams at the tiny buttons until the screen lights up. By the tree, Nadzeya and Iryna have taken the jar away from Ivan, but he is still struggling, and Olympe feels very small and useless.

“Is there reception?” she asks Eduard, who puts his phone away.

“Of course not.”

Of course not.

“Fuck it!” Nadzeya suddenly shouts, and there is a crash. Olympe looks up just in time to see Ivan crumple to the ground.

“Nadzeya!” Iryna exclaims.

“What! Did you have any ideas?”

The points of light in Ivan’s portrait shine brighter. The shadows swirl. Eduard curses under his breath. Olympe presses her nails into her palms.

“Stop it!” she shouts. “We can’t do anything like this!”

“Ivan—” Nadzeya starts, but she stops when Olympe throws her a stern look.

“Ivan is unconscious, Nadzeya.” She takes a deep breath and walks over to them, putting a hand on her wife’s arm. “What was he trying to do? What happens when he puts that…”

She looks down at the jar now on the ground by Iryna’s feet.

“Those… Human teeth…”

“Seriously?” she hears Eduard blurt, and Nadzeya shakes her head sadly.

“What happens when they’re put on the tree, you mean?” she asks. When Olympe nods, she takes a deep breath and walks over to the portrait—the portrait that looks perfectly normal now. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, she tries to tell herself, pretending not to shiver as she looks at Ivan the First’s angular face. “The relics of a life long lived will bring Ivan back. All of this, ever since he came here, has been building up to that. All our family has been for two hundred years, is Ivan’s legacy.”

By the tree, her brother groans, and Iryna takes a step away from him.

“Ivan?” she asks. He looks up at her, his head snapping up so fast it cracks.

“I am the journey,” he rasps, “I am the destination. I am you.”

Eduard knocks him over the head with the jar full of teeth.

“You know, I’d be inclined to say you’re all insane,” he says, breathing high in his throat, “but, I mean…”

“Maybe we are,” Nadzeya tells him. Iryna just closes her eyes and swallows, eyelids quivering.

“Maybe, but I love your sister. What do we do to stop this Ivan?”

Olympe appreciates that the man seems to be a practical thinker in the end. If Iryna is anything like Nadzeya, that’s something that she probably needs in her life. Even though Nadzeya doesn’t show them, she does let her emotions lead her most of the time. It doesn’t always work out great. That’s what Olympe is for.

“We break the cycle. As long as we don’t… Give in, to him, we have a chance of doing that. But everyone has, these past two hundred years. Even our parents…” Nadzeya looks at Iryna, and then at the wall behind her. “Even our parents.”

“Should we… Smash the jars?”

“The relics?”

Olympe thinks he might have a point, but Nadzeya and Iryna are both shaking their heads.

“The whole house was built around this room, and the room was built around the relics. They’re connected.”

The shadows of the branches move, although Olympe doesn’t move her flashlight and Eduard is aiming his at Ivan. She pretends not to have noticed it, but Iryna frowns and walks over to the wall behind her, which she begins dragging out with haste.

“We can’t idle,” she says. “All three of us being here has already started the process.”

Eduard helps her reveal the hidden alcove, and Nadzeya and Olympe do the same with two other ones on their side before helping them open the last one, keeping an eye on Ivan as they work. There are eight in total, evenly spaced across the room. Six have portraits or photographs of similarly straight-backed, pale-faced people hung in them. The same six contain jars.

At the photograph of a middle-aged woman in, of all things, a bomber jacket and high-waisted jeans, both Iryna and Nadzeya pause. She has Iryna’s eyes and Nadzeya’s slightly wavy hair. There is an ear in the jar.

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Eduard starts, “but why the empty ones?”

“Ryna, are you sure you couldn’t have picked a smarter guy?” Nadzeya asks.

“I have a PhD!”

“Olympe has two. You know why the empty ones.”

The empty alcoves are right next to the tree, one on either side of where Ivan is lying still, the rise and fall of his chest the only thing moving about him. They’re like places of honor. Like the right and left hand of a monarch. And Ivan…

“So is Ivan a family name, or is he called that for a reason?” Olympe asks.

“There is always a reason, with us.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Eduard has caught on, evidently, because he takes a step back, away from the carving of the tree. The shadows flicker, and Ivan groans, stirring ever so slightly. While she bites her lip, Iryna turns to him and crouches to put a tentative hand on her shoulder. All of them watch with bated breath as he blinks up at her.

“Did… He get me?” he asks, the softness back in his voice. It’s so different from the rasp from earlier.

“Almost,” Iryna whispers. Ivan feels his head and winces. That will most definitely bruise, but neither Nadzeya nor Eduard seems apologetic when Olympe looks up at them both in turn.

Ivan is looking around the room now, taking in the eight revealed alcoves—his gaze lingers on the same woman’s photograph before it shifts to Ivan the First’s portrait.

“He’s watching.”

In response to that, the shadows in the room stir.

They coil like snakes, like living beings, in the back of the room. Olympe clenches her jaw and looks down to where they creep around her feet. She doesn’t move her flashlight from the front of the room.

Eduard does.

The light is swallowed by the shadows. Ivan the First’s eyes glow.

“We have to hurry.” Ivan struggles to his feet, leaning on Iryna. “He… I think I heard him. He said he’s waiting. Even if we take the long road, he’ll be waiting.”

“Then we take the short road,” Nadzeya says. “And we fucking surprise him.”

She walks away from the shadows, but there is a stumble in her step that unsettles Olympe. Nadzeya was a professional gymnast for years. She doesn’t stumble.

Now, again, she and Iryna stand next to Ivan and face the tree, their backs to the terrifying shadows that Olympe can feel creeping around her. Nadzeya is motionless, the angles of her face shadowed and her hair snowy against the black of her blouse. She looks up at the branches, at the three splitting apart at the top like a crown. The end of all things.

“Fear,” Iryna whispers, “is a choice you embrace.”

Nadzeya glances over her shoulder at Olympe. Her eyes widen, and she stumbles back. Olympe can’t look behind her, she can’t. She doesn’t want to see it.

She looks.

The shadows have coalesced into the shape of a person, a dark form that’s blurred around the edges and has no features but for the eyes, still piercing like a branding iron.

“No,” Nadzeya says, and when Olympe turns to her, she has grabbed one of the upper branches of the tree. Her knuckles are white with the force she puts on it, and although the whole tree groans and cracks under it, the branch doesn’t shatter. It doesn’t come off.

BRING ME HOME

The voice—is it a voice?—rumbles through the walls, through the shadows and the stale air. The jars rattle in their places. Ivan turns to Nadzeya, and pulls her away. Around him, the light dims and gets brighter, as if it’s the beat of a heart.

“Ivan!” Iryna shouts, at the same moment that Olympe leaps forward to try and stop him.

He disappears in a shroud of darkness, there one moment and gone the next.

“No!” Nadzeya stumbles, but Olympe and Iryna catch her. “Eduard, get away from there.”

He is already hurrying over.

YOU ARE MY PATH

Is it Ivan’s voice?

“Ivan!” Nadzeya yells.

It’s Ivan’s voice.

“He can’t be—he needs the relics!” Iryna sounds out of breath, as if she’s just run a marathon. The shadows soar ever higher, and the eyes are ever closer. The four of them are losing light.

I AM YOU

Iryna gasps for air. Eduard reaches for her.

She lands a blow on his face so that he stumbles away.

“He is me,” she echoes, hollow. “We are the story of one.”

“Don’t,” Eduard says, again trying to reach for. His glasses are crooked and there is blood under his nose. “Iryna, don’t.”

THE CYCLE WILL BE COMPLETED

“No!” he yells into the darkness, and crumples when Iryna hits him again.

“Eduard!” Olympe exclaims, but Nadzeya tugs her back when she tries to check on him. Iryna is completely disaffected and walks at an agonizingly slow pace to the alcove to the right. It has no portrait, no photograph. It just has a space the perfect height for her to stand in, which she does, silent.

Olympe digs her nails into Nadzeya’s arm.

“Please, what can I do?” Because she sees now how this ends. One brand new life can’t simply be exchanged for some body parts and a family tradition of worshipping shadows. Never before has she wished that she could have taken some more interest in Nadzeya’s exploration of the occult. What is Ivan’s new life worth? What makes it worth more than Nadzeya’s?

“I need you…” Nadzeya tries to take a step back, to the other alcove, but catches herself. “You’re my home, Olympe. I’d give… I’d give everything just to love you more, but I don’t think I can.”

“It has to be enough, then.”

Nadzeya’s dark eyes brim with tears, shining in the last light in the room surrounding them.

“It can’t.” She closes her eyes and lets Olympe fold her hands around her face. “I see it now, Olympe. We were weak for hoping.”

“No,” she breathes, but the tears are gone from Nadzeya’s eyes when they open. The spark, the eternal sharpness of her gaze. “No, you can’t.”

Nadzeya takes a step back, into the shadows, and Olympe tries to reach for her. It’s like hitting a wall.

“How I wish… To dream again.”

It’s Nadzeya’s voice, but they are not Nadzeya’s words.

“No!” Olympe yells, throwing herself against the shadows that she can’t get through. “Let me through, she can’t—”

Arms close around her waist, and she kicks back, hitting skin and hearing something crunch as Eduard swears.

“Let me go! Nadzeya—”

The shadows drop.

Nadzeya and Iryna are motionless in the alcoves, and all the jars are on their branches. There are three at the top, the liquid in them not yet murky.

“Oh god,” Eduard says, his voice breaking. “Oh god, Iryna.”

THE CHILD WILL BE BORN AGAIN

“We have to go!” he yells, but Olympe won’t move. She can only stare at her wife, who stands like a statue of porcelain perfection, a vision in black and blue among the light, with blood dripping down her face. There is a single, dark blue eye in the jar on the left top branch.

“I can’t…” She tries to look up at Eduard, but can’t seem to will her eyes to move. “I won’t leave her.”

“It’s—Olympe, it’s too late.”

It can’t be. She looks up at the branches. Eye, heart, tongue.

GO

It’s Nadzeya’s voice. She doesn’t move, but it’s her voice. Olympe takes a step back.

The shadows return. The shadows shaped like a man, like a perverted mockery of a soul. The shape stands in front of the tree, and seems to look at them. Olympe takes another step back. The eyes of light follow.

WE ARE THE STORY OF ONE

This time, she listens to Eduard. They run to the door, now open as if it never locked so finally behind them, and pretend not to notice the shadows running along the walls with them, all through the house, the long corridor to the hall, where the front door is open too.

They practically fall down the steps, Olympe trying to see through tears and Eduard probably not much better. It’s got dark outside. There is no moon. Olympe can’t tell which shadows are normal shadows anymore. Maybe none of them are.

“Can you drive?” Eduard pants. He sounds muffled. His nose might be broken, but that is the least of their problems.

“Yes!” She sprints to Nadzeya’s car, digging up the keys out of her bag as she goes to open the doors. Eduard stumbles as he tries to get in, fully breaking his glasses in two and smearing blood on the leather seat. Olympe pushes the seat forward but doesn’t put on her seatbelt or let him get settled even slightly before she starts the engine and reverses as fast as possible, back onto the winding path.

The whole house is dark behind them, but she sees two spots of light in the rearview mirror, even with her vision blurred with tears.

Neither of them speaks. Olympe doesn’t know what she would say. Eduard is trying to regulate his breathing, until it suddenly hitches.

“Olympe?” he whispers, his voice shaking. “Can you see…”

She glances at him. He isn’t wearing his glasses anymore, but is staring down at his chest.

A hand is pressed against it, poised over his heart, over the blood that has dripped from his nose. Olympe feels herself turn cold, and slowly looks into the rearview mirror, meeting pale blue eyes framed by short blond hair. It’s dark. It’s dark everywhere.

She feels a gust of cold air on her neck. Eduard whimpers.

“Don’t worry, Olympe.” The voice is accompanied by another wave of cold, sending shivers down her spine. She clenches the steering wheel and stares straight ahead, ignoring the hoarseness she knows so well, the lilt Nadzeya always gives her name pressed right into her ear. “You are forever.”

An arm shoots out between the seats. Pale skin, dark blouse, black nails.

It yanks at the wheel, and the car plunges into the darkness.