Khalri von Kvitka-Vohnyu

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[okhalrinasai]

A Letter to Crimson

Even in her death I can never forgive Mother. She was obsessed by her need for perfection and power, but in the end it was her own tools that consumed her.

I can ignore my own abuse, my bruises hidden behind marine plates and scars patched with gold scale disguised as 'fashion'. I can forget the long nights serving men who saw me as a gift to be enjoyed and discarded. I can wash away the makeup and shatter the jewels and burn the fine dresses and clothes to ash.

But I can never forgive how she treated you.

If I had been born the eldest perhaps I could have protected you, drawn away Mother's ire and preserved your innocence, so you'd never have to know fear or pain or worry or life as a political tool. And in a way, you didn't. Your whole life you knew only cruel, torturous agony, locked away from the world as Mother cut and tore and pulled you apart to fix you, to find her twisted idea of perfection. How long were you there? How long had you spent, only knowing suffering, while I lived in that cold world of shining lights and pretty things? How long were we denied our blood right as sisters?

When I finally saw you in that dark room, your fur as white as pearl and eyes a deeper red than any sharp-cut ruby, illuminated by the meagre moonlight shining through the high barred window, I knew you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And that I needed you. Mother never bothered to lock the door properly. She always was arrogant, enough to presume you'd never escape. You looked up at me with eyes so wide and full of curiosity, streaked and stained rust-red by old blood. I remember how cold you were, how you didn't flinch when I touched your wounds but shivered when I placed my warm hands on your cheek and asked who did this to you?

We are all beasts at heart no matter what we do to hide it, and no amount of silk and silver can protect you from a beast that wants you dead.

It wasn't difficult to find Mother, still languishing with the guests of that day's ball. It wasn't difficult to call her away from the company and into a covert side room. And it wasn't difficult to take the engraved wine glass from her hand, shatter the bowl in my claws, and drive the stem into her eye. I pinned her to the ground and broke her wrists and ankles first, snapped to the side and near torn from the joint so she couldn't escape. Then, as she twisted and writhed in a pathetic attempt to escape, I pulled her horn from it's place with a sickening, satisfying crack, the one capped with a brass cover to hide the shattered tip, and rammed the point through her jaw into the roof of her mouth so she couldn't scream. And then I took her apart. I drew the shards of glass across her body, leaving lines of red that seeped into her fur. I cut every place she had left a scar on me, every incision I had seen on you, until I could feel the warm blood pooling around me. Then I dug my claws under the pelt and pulled, gripping hard until I felt skin separate from flesh and I could see raw, bloodied muscle. She tried to fight me, she tried, but a simple slam of my tail against her kicking legs was all it took to break them, and when I grabbed her by the throat and pushed her head against the floor, when I leaned in to meet her eyes and bared my fangs wider than I had ever been allowed to smile when I played as her toy, I saw fear. I raked my claws across her chest, dragging over the ribs and digging deep into her stomach. I opened my jaws wide and bit into her shoulder, bone crunching and the sweet taste of thick blood filling my mouth. I tore away the chunk of flesh, pulling back so she could see me smiling, see me covered in her blood, and see me swallow. "You always wanted to be beautiful," I told her. "Maybe you can be beautiful in me." Devouring her was the best thing I have ever done. The euphoria of using fangs and claws, to be muzzle-deep in a kill well-deserved and well-earned, to drink its blood and rend its flesh and eat and eat and eat until its heart gives out and its lungs expire and you can feel it's quivering body lie still. It was liberation beyond any pleasure I have felt, or ever will feel again, no matter how hard I chase it.

But, dear sister Crimson, I'll never tell you any of that. You are my pleasure now. I will keep you innocent and untainted by the horrors of the world that lay beyond our hunt, and you'll never know of how I tortured our Mother for my own selfish vengeance. You are mine, and I am yours.

I love you.

[okhalrinasai]

Spiced Bread Dream

The ECG monitor beeps softly in the corner, the screen, showing her slowing heartbeat, carefully hidden behind vases of gently wilting flowers. It's golden hour, and shafts of light obscure her face. I can remember how she looked, when we met, when we married, when we drove 30 miles past the speed limit to the hospital, when I lied and said our baby was fine only minutes before she slipped away from me into a coma she hadn't woken from in months. I tried everything, signing waivers and approving procedures and taking on debt I'd never be free of even if I worked until the day I dropped dead. It never worked. Part of me knows it wasn't a good idea to scream at the doctors, to let myself slip away from sanity, to turn to the quacks and the holistics and the mediums promising miracles. I knew agreeing to meet at the edge of a dark forest swaddled in mist for some ritual was a bad idea. But I'd tried everything else.

"In there," the medium says, pointing a finger as crooked and gnarled as the branches on the trees. "In there you will find her." I take a breath, deep and full of that smothering fog, and step forward... ...out of an elevator.

I know this place. An office, low cubicles laid out in front of me in neat rows, full of faces I'd met at my wife's company dinners. The gentle murmur of conversation fills the air, a few laughs off in the distance. A man stands to greet me--Robert, maybe?--and warmly shakes my hand. "Hey, buddy!" he says with familiar enthusiasm. "What brings you here? Pining for the missus again?" He grins, not seeming to notice how tired and hollow my face must look. "I... I'm looking for her. I don't have time to-" I pull my hand free of his. "I don't have time to chat, I'm sorry. This is her floor, right? Have- have you seen her? Somewhere? Anywhere?" I can hear panic rising in my voice, and so does Rob, his face becomes concerned. "She got moved upstairs a few months ago, you can take the elevator over there." He points down the corridor of cubicles, a set of elevator doors directly opposite me. I nod in thanks. As I get to the elevator I see they've added an office kitchen next to it, a shelf--the kind you get in supermarkets that hold chilled food and drinks--stacked with ready-made sandwiches, fruit, and baked goods. I see a loaf of spiced bread, baked with cinnamon, star anise, cardamom, and a dozen other fragrant ingrediets sourced from someplace far away. I take it. It was always her favourite. And then I walk into the elevator and go up to the next floor.

The doors open and I step out into another office floor, the same arrangement as the one below. The lights seem colder than the floor below, white, sterile and practical instead of a more comfortable yellow like the floor below. A few people glance up from their work but quickly turn back to their assigned tasks. I see Rob again at his desk, tapping away at his keyboard. The typing of keys and rustling of paper is the only sound I hear. I clutch my loaf of bread and walk forward between the desks and cubicles until I reach the elevator again. The shelf next to it is far less abundant than the one below, some plastic tubs of greying soup and stale sandwiches spread sparsely across the shelves. And then I walk into the elevator and go up to the next floor.

The next floor is silent except for the faint but pervasive buzzing of the lights above, their colour the kind of pale off-yellow you'd expect to see in vials at the urinologist's clinic. The people are hunched over at their desks, fixated on their work. They look like they haven't slept in days, maybe more. I reach the elevator door and see the shelves empty except for a withered apple core and something that might have been a bottle of orange juice in times long past. And then I walk into the elevator and go up to the next floor.

The lights here are a dim amber, deepening the shadows hidden under desks and around corners and in the gaunt, emaciated faces of the workers who hadn't collapsed at their desks. The buzzing sound is still here, but it's not the lights above me. I hurry forward swatting insects away from my loaf of bread, my fingers pressing holes in the crust as I hold it tighter. I pass Rob again, staring motionless at the screen. I see a fly crawl over his wide, vacant eyes. The shelf is empty. I walk into the elevator. And go up to the next floor.

Red and oppressive, the light of the next floor smothers my eyes like smoke. The thick air and putrid smell threatens to choke me and I cover my mouth as I run for the elevator. The computer screens sit blank, darkly observing what is sprawled across the desks or oozing through the chairs in front of them. The people do not move, but their skin writhes. The shelf is full again, overflowing with falling waves of worms and larvae and maggots that crawl over my shoes and up my legs as I fumble for the elevator call button. I walk into the elevator and step out onto a balcony.

A city lies before me, sky blood-red and violent, tall buildings stained by the soot and smog that swirls in the air like a hurricane. And I see her, bright and beautiful, facing the maelstrom with her back to me. I call out to her but my voice is lost in the wind. She turns, holding something in her arms, wrapped in cloth. "Darling, you're here!" She smiles, her gentle voice cutting through the howling noise with unnatural ease. "Now we can be a family again." She looks down tenderly at the bundle in her arms. "Come and meet our baby." She moves the folds of fabric out of the way and I see the contorted shape in her arms, the shape the doctors cut out of her, its bones twisted into the wrong angles, the skin both too tight and too loose at the same time, a warped and gaping hole where the left side of the face should have been. I shout desperately over the wind. "That's not our child! It didn't- it's not- you've been asleep for months, please, you have to come back with me! You have to realise- nothing here is real!" I take a step forward, struggling against the wind, and she takes a step back. "What do you mean? Darling, I don't understand. This is our family, you and me and our beautiful new baby." She takes another step back. "We didn't have a baby," I plead. "Just come back with me, please, you need to wake up!" Tears well in my eyes, from the dust in the air or my own desperation. Even through blurred vision I can see her look down, see the look of horror fall over her face. "That's not- this isn't- no, no, no no no no NO!" She shakes her head, stumbling backwards, slamming into the railing. "Wait, don't-!" I lunge towards her, hands outstretched- but the wind catches her by the shoulder and she tumbles over the edge.

[okhalrinasai]

Airports have a lot going on. Road and rail connections, boutiques, main concourses and gates and security and people coming and going and coming and going. Some are travelling for work. Some are saying goodbye. Some are saying hello for the first time, long distance relationships of any kind finally brought together into the same timezone, the same location, and into each others arms. There's no way of knowing the exact story of why everyone is here, but each one is significant and interesting.

[okhalrinasai]

I float in a bottle of my insides outsides. It is warm and wet and clings like a cage. My skin is soft in a way that is wrong, silky and smooth and sliding over muscles that are not mine.

Why am I here? Who am I, here?

The eyes in my head weren't made for me. One shrivels and the other swells. The bottles next to me are also full of their insides outsides, and I see a neighbor seeing me seeing them and feel their wings on my back.

What am I here? Where am I here?

I remember the time I didn't. I don't remember the time I did. I was whole and content, and now I am parts of many together and the many screams to be alone.

None of us chose to be bound in flesh and skin and blood and viscera in the outsides of our insides. We scrape and claw and wail to be free with muscles that cannot move and lungs devoid of air.

Take us apart. Let us be alone together again. Tear off the labels that call us things we aren't. Dragon. Pixie. Alicorn. Griffin. Sylph. Selkie. Wyrm. Grimm. Call us what we are. Name the patchwork of creatures you sewed together with your delusions.

Chimera.

[okhalrinasai]

It's interesting what people forget when they travel, when their destination becomes their foremost concern and getting where they're going is more important than making sure they take everything with them

Sometimes it's the small things, a bag left on a seat, a coffee cup on a car roof, a piece of paper, a sweet wrapper they were too lazy or preoccupied to take with them to throw away. But sometimes it's more unexpected, more unusual, something so importantly absurd that it would seem impossible to forget.

Someone left their tub of baked beans on the bus.

[okhalrinasai]

Elaine. My dear Elaine.

I stand before your resting place, a broken man repaired by your memory. As I work I recall your smile, the gentle curve of those beautiful rose-coloured lips and small dimples in your cheeks. I hear the birdsong in the garden and remember how you sang for guests, songs so well-rehearsed that they'd never guess how delightfully off-tune you could be in the quiet comfort of our own company. I look to the sky on fortunate days, the soft blue hues second only to your inquisitive eyes. And when the sun fades on those same fortunate days, the horizon brushed with gradients of indigo and amber and crimson and ochre, I long to find the paintings you made with such vivid paints and elegant strokes. The paintings from when we were newly wed, where I could see the blotches and patches of an artist who was not yet a master of her craft. You often chided me when I said they were my favourite. How I wish to hear you again, even if only to scold me.

Would you scold me for what I've done? Perhaps. Perhaps you would scold me for hiding myself away in my work. Perhaps for ruining myself in pursuit of our dream. Perhaps for failing. Perhaps for succeeding.

And I have succeeded. The fantasies that you painted with such fervour in your dying days, the stories that comforted you when I could not, I have brought them to life for the world to see. Our dream of the unbelievable, the unachievable, the mythological, the fairy-tale, the wonder brought out from the restless sleep of children and poets and made lucid.

My only wish is that you could see it with me.

-Walton

[okhalrinasai]

Rain poured down from the darkened sky, a percussion of sharp metallic clangs on the taxi's thin roof that meshed uneasily with the choked purr of the engine. The wind whistled by, conducting the otherwise rhythmic tap-tap-tap of the rain into an uneven crescendo as it blew about in the gale. Hedgerows peering over the low stone walls confining the gravelly road moved slowly past, barely illuminated by the weak headlights. It was the kind of oppressive yet exposed near-darkness that can only be found in the open fields of the countryside.

They had been travelling in silence for what felt like hours, far away from the lively city lights in Edinburgh. The man in the back seat pulled out a pocketwatch from his finely tailored waistcoat for what felt like the umpteenth time, the clear glass face and delicate hands showing that it was nearing 11pm. He closed the case with an impatient snap, stuffing it away and turning towards the letter on the seat next to him. The seal was broken, the folds of the paper wearing through from all the times he'd read it. He smoothed out the creases and held it up to the meagre light inside the cab to read.

My dear friend, With how well-informed you are you've no doubt heard the rumours, maybe even attended the parties. But we have a great opportunity at our fingertips. The old man has done the unthinkable, unachieveable. He's succeeded where so many other curiosity-purveyors failed. But, he's too senile to make good use of it anymore. We should do him a favour, and take the burden of that research off his hands. It's only kind, don't you think? I know you're no stranger to this kind of work, and I assure you that I would gladly come with, if circumstances permitted me. But I have faith in you, my friend. Together this secret will make us rich. Much love, mon ami Pelletier

His eyes glanced up towards the window as the crunching of gravel under the tyres turned into the smooth hum of evenly-laid paving stones, catching a glimpse of a plaque engraved with the words "Thornewood Manor". The taxi rounded a corner, the headlights illuminating a wrought-iron gate strangled by ivy, the leaves trembling in the wind. The driver glanced at his passenger though the rear-view mirror, trying to hide his anxiety with a jovial tone as he opened his mouth to speak for the first time since they left.

"Nice of them to leave the gate open for ye, saves us having to step out into the rain, ay Mr. Aideen?" "It's McCloy." "Ah. Sorry sir, the lads at the office mixed your name around on the ledger. You know how the wee ones are these days, they don't pay much attention to the details..."

He trailed off, silence once again returning as they drove up the path to a quiet stately house. It was modest for a manor of it's renown, just the right size for a rich family and it's staff, and presumably once held the warmth that all well-loved homes are required to have. But now the well-cut stones were streaked with dirt and slowly merging with the weeds on the lawn, the wooden panelling of the upper floors falling away as their supports rotted, and the once shining windows smeared and broken, tattered curtains behind them fluttering in the wind like haunted memories of the life it once contained. The taxi came to a halt, broadside to the shadowed front door. "Well, here we are Mr. McCloy. That'll be one pound three crowns." Aideen pulled his wallet from the letterman's satchel, pulling a ten-dollar note from it's folds and tossing it carelessly onto the front seat. "Keep the change." Then, pulling sharply on the door handle, he slung the bag over one shoulder and stepped out into the rain.

The paved tiles were wet and slippery, but he moved with self-assured purpose up to the manor's entrance. The door was engraved with flowers and vines, the carved handle resembling a wreath of blooming roses an homage to the estate's name, no doubt. He reached out to grasp it, his hand barely brushing the ornate handle before lightning snapped across the sky, rolling thunder following swiftly after. He glanced behind him, watching the taxi pull away and back into the night. There would be no going back. Firmly readjusting his grip on the handle, he pushed open the door and entered the darkness of the manor.

[okhalrinasai]

Spring came so suddenly. To someone who spends so much time indoors, living at night, when the rest of the world snores gently under the moonlight drifting idly between the curtains, it felt like spring went by in a flash. Trees that blossomed into beautifully coloured flowers lost their petals as soon as they gained them. And now they're lying on the pavement, dried under the sun, and trodden to dust by passers-by who have greater concerns than preserving the remnants of a short lived spring.

I just wish all this wasn't next to a pub. The white petals, decaying, have the same sad sun-bleached orange as an old cigarette butt. There's poetry in there somewhere.

Probably.

[okhalrinasai]

Lungs still ragged and heart slowly cooling from it's anxiety, I look at the scenery rolling past the train window. I've always enjoyed trains; unlike cars, where you are responsible for your own travel time and contending with the stressful pseudo-derby of other drivers on the road, or buses, where they are also susceptible to traffic jams and if you're especially unlucky, a driver who simply doesn't give a shit when they see you running down the street waving frantically for them to wait just one more minute for you to get there.

Trains feel, in a word, inevitable. Uncontrollable, at least to the average travelgoer. Trains have drivers, yes, but the long snaking mass of cars feels beyond the control of a single person. You can't wave at a train to stop. You can't ask it to stop midway in your journey to pull into a drive-through for a snack. You get on the train, and you wait for it to get where it's going. And there's a strange kind of comfort and relaxation that comes with the fact that, no matter the delay, no matter the breakdowns or signal errors or accidents on the track, it won't be your fault if you're late.

Because who can fight the whims of a creature so momentous as a train?

[okhalrinasai]

As I made my way up the beach where I had sat reading, the loose pebbles slowing my steps as they slid down the slope, seemingly trying to pull me back to the sand closest to the ocean's gently lapping waves, I saw a small pile of salt-sanded seashells. There were plenty of people around, but none sat close enough to have been the artist that spent their time staring at the ocean, idly pawing through the stones to find the smoothed fragments of shell to stack in a small pile. There was a small gap in the middle of the modest collection, and I wondered if maybe they had taken some home to keep as souvenirs from their time looking over the channel, the days haze blending together the sky and distant horizon. Maybe they had. Maybe they hadn't. It's not my business to know.

[okhalrinasai]

How do you pronounce 'vitamin'?

vit-ah-min

vy-ta-min

neither

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Voting ended onApr 21, 2025