So I just found out about @birbfest.challenge ... a challenge to draw a bird a day and I am late to the party???
So I am speedily trying to catch up! This is the Golden Headed Manakin from day 4.
A wonderful friend of mine got me gouache paints for my Christmas... so this is the perfect opportunity to start learning them!
Uh-oh! Crackle had unknowingly entered the forest of the wicked witch, and now he is cursed to become a part of her personal collection of garden statues.
"Is there a difference between a maze and a labyrinth?"
"Mazes have a separate entrance and exit. Labyrinths don't," I said. The old landscape garden matched the old manor house it belonged to for levels if shabbiness and neglect, and the fact that the manor was settled in the midst of wild moors made it look all the smaller and more haunted.
And it was even more haunted than it looked.
"Is this a maze or a labyrinth?" Julie asked, peering into the passage between two massive rosemary hedges.
"Maze, probably. They're more common in England, I think." Julie raised an eyebrow at me.
"You say that like they just grow of their own accord."
"Are we sure they don't?"
Julie frowned at me. "I'm going in."
"Have fun."
"Coward."
"Oh absolutely," I agreed. She stuck her tongue out at me and went into the maze.
And I waited outside. Alone. While rain threatened the moorlands around me.
"Julie?" I called after a moment. I peered into the maze. Nothing but shadows and silence and the overwhelming perfume of rosemary.
"Shit," I said, and followed after her. I'd never hear the end of it if I lost her in a hedge maze. I was still hearing about losing her at a horse race, and that was ten years ago.
It took me a while to realize anything was off about the maze. I'm half in the Gray at the best of times, right? And it came on slow. Just a whisper, a feeling, a color that wasn't right. There was a breeze that didn't rustle the hedges so cold it bit into my bones. The sky overhead slipped from slate clouds to an inky black night studded with stars.
"This is...weird," the Grim murmured, following me with a solidness he rarely had out of the Gray.
"What the fuck happened here to make a place like this?"
He shrugged.
"Julie!" I called, and my voice felt thin and wispy, like a cloud torn apart by the wind. I swallowed and called again, imagining my voice carrying through the rosemary. "Julie! Julianna Knockwood!"
"Devin?" she called back.
I found her frowning at the ground, hands on her hips. She shimmered, sometimes a girl in black overalls and big boots, sometimes shrouded in a mantle of crow feathers and a crow skull mask. I wondered if I did the same when she looked at me, and what form Nettle took. Rabbit skull? Betta fins? Jay feathers?
"Thought you were a coward," she said.
"I am," I said. "What the entire fuck is this place?"
"I don't know."
"It was a rhetorical question."
"You know I'm bad at those."
"I know, you goddamned encyclopedia." I joined her and looked down too.
"What are we—ah. I see."
The earth was full of bones.
Some were human. Some were only mostly human. The teeth gave them away.
"We should go," I said.
"They aren't doing anything."
"Yet."
I didn't have to tell her that the dead didn't always stay quiet. She knew as well as I did.
Julie looked at me, dark eyes bright behind her skull mask. "What's the point of being a shadowcatcher if you run away from a pile of bones?"
"I'm not worried about the bones. I'm worried about the things they turned into."
Cowards live longer, and I'm still working on my self-preservation skills.
"Devin," the Grim whispered anxiously.
There were so many goddamned teeth.
A skull with an elongated mouth like a wolf near my foot rattled.
“Of course,” I said.
Julie drew her sword.
“Oh, come on.”
It wasn’t the bones that came for us, but the things they turned into. I hate being right sometimes. It was a massive thing, a mess of darkness and gaping mouths and glinting teeth.
“You had to go in the fucking maze,” I said, and pulled my bow from my back.
“Shut up,” Julie said, and dove right in.
“Doesn’t she know it’s a bad idea to get in front of you?” the Grim asked.
“Yes. Does she care? No.” I aimed over her and shot, catching one of the wide mouths. The thing whined and shook, and lashed out at us with its many many mouths.
“Get it off the bones!” I called. I couldn’t tell if Julie heard me or not, but she pressed into the creature anyway, and I kept firing arrows that vanished into the murk of the thing. Julie drove her sword up and into it, where its heart could have been, and it screamed, stumbling back.
My big old officer’s coat had many, many pockets, and I reached into one and pulled out a bottle of salt. It smelled like the lagoon when I unstoppered it, like the kitchen had when Armand had made it for me, wide and dark and deep. I spread it over the bones and then replaced it and reached into another pocket.
How do you kill a spirit? With salt and fire and spirits of your own.
The thing turned several mouths on me to hiss and squeal when I dumped vodka over the bones over the salt.
“I know,” I said, lighting a match. “I’m a big ol’ bastard.”
Its voice was very, very human when it screamed, going up in flames. Julie stood next to me by the bones as they turned into a pyre.
“Maybe we should get out of the maze before we burn it down?” Julie suggested after a moment of silence.
I solemnly swear I am up to no good... I'm going to draw all the things... all of them!! #drawlloween #drawlloween2019 #drawing #drawallthethings #draweveryday (at Chattanooga, Tennessee) https://www.instagram.com/p/B25UkcPHCsb/?igshid=ob64ymhpzh46
"You probably should have found someone from Moscow for this," Kostya said, peering down the manhole cover into the darkness dubiously. No one else in the little Moscow park looked at us as they walked past, which was as much part of being in a capital city as it was my illusions. I had never seen Kostya in anything less casual than good jeans and button up shirts before, so seeing him in a t-shirt and big rubber boots felt as unsettling as seeing him in a parakeet onesie would have, even though we were dressed more or less identically.
"I don't want a guide, I want someone who won't lose their shit when I inevitably start doing something spooky," I said, and Kostya grinned.
"I can do that," he said. "After you. Spookiest first."
"Thanks," I said, and looked down. "Well. Here we go."
The ladder was slick with water, and it smelled like a basement after a flood. I stepped off into water up to my chest and scooted aside so Kostya could get off the ladder too.
"Where are we going?" he asked, flicking on his flashlight and sweeping it up and down the tunnel.
"Give me a minute," I said, and stepped into the Gray.
There was something under Moscow, and in the Gray I could feel it creeping like a cancer.
“This way,” I said, and waded through the water. Kostya made a soft noise and followed me with the flashlight.
“Maybe we’ll see the giant cockroaches,” he said.
“Is that really your tunnel cryptid? Cockroaches? I expected more from Russia.”
“They’re big and white, supposedly.”
“God. Not even a single sewer gator? Step up your game.”
“Excuse me?”
“American cities have sewer gators. Allegedly.”
“Oh, I hate that,” Kostya said. I laughed.
At first there was evidence of other explorers, though we didn’t see anyone. The brick walls were tagged, some of the graffiti incredible works of art, others simple slogans drippily sprayed.
And then we went down deeper, and the graffiti petered out, until we were in narrow tunnels so low that even I had to stoop. It had the mildewy stale smell of a flooded basement. And there were cockroaches, but they were normally sized, and normally colored.
“So is this a job, or an adventure?” Kostya asked over the slow drip of water from a pipe above into the stream we padded through.
“Job. Quill didn’t want to go spelunking and sent me instead.”
“Sounds right. I can’t see them down here.”
“Oh, I can. I have. We just got back from Mongolia though, and they’re much more interested in staying home and flirting with Marina for a while. So here I am.”
“Devin?” the Grim said. I turned and saw him crouched in a side tunnel set about half a foot up in the main tunnel, his tail hanging out.
“Grim? What is it?” I asked, and went to him.
“Something bad,” he said softly. He looked back at me, silver eyes shinning like moons in the light.
“What is it?” Kostya asked.
“The Grim says something’s coming.” I offered my hand. He looked down at it.
“Is this where the spooky shit starts?”
“Abso-fuckin’-lutely.”
He sighed and took my hand.
In the Gray the water running beneath our feet was mixed with ichor, the lifeblood of an ancient city flowing around us. And something snuffled in the darkness.
“Oh,” Kostya said, and sounded very small. I turned back to him. In the Gray he looked so young—ten? twelve?—wearing a torn coat too big for him, the scruffy shape of his pigeon daemon huddled on his shoulders. He had a smudge of dirt on his face, and matted hair, and tired eyes. He still held the flashlight steady, even as he stared at me. “You look…different.”
“So do you,” I said. He looked like he wanted to say something, but something scratched in the dark, like nails on chalkboard, and he started.
It was not a cockroach. It was a sludgy form like a man covered in oil, leaking shadow into the ichor-infused water. It had claws on its hands bigger than my head. It dragged them across the brick, making a noise that scrapped against my skull. I squeezed Kostya’s hand and drew my sword. This was about the worst place I could imagine fighting a wraith. In a fucking tunnel. Where I had to duck. Where my boyfriend was reminding me in very visual terms that I had to protect him, that I’d dragged him underground and out of his depth.
Things could have been better, alright?
“Stay behind me,” I said, and let go of his hand. I didn’t think he’d stay in the Gray that way, and I wasn’t sure what he’d see without being there. He was a powerful witch in his own way, but he wasn’t a Graywalker like I was.
I moved forward, hoping to use the closeness of the side tunnel against the thing, to keep it out of the larger tunnel Kostya and I were in, but it moved bonelessly and slipped past me and my sword, and I felt cumbersome and heavy against it. It just wanted to eat me. I wanted to make sure it didn’t eat me, or Kostya, or escape. I had a lot more to keep track of. In out, strike, doge—
It caught me, claws sinking into my chest. Don’t drop the sword, I thought as it clattered to the ground. I grabbed one claw like that was going to do anything. I stared at its teeth and chocked on blood and ichor.
Getting eaten was so fucking embarrassing.
My hands pawed at its claws as it pulled me in to its long teeth. And then it stopped, jerking, and hissed. So very, very slowly, it toppled to the ground, still keening softly.
Kostya stood behind it with a knife, shadows dripping down his hands.
“Thanks,” I croaked. He swore at me expressively in Russian, pulling me free of the claws.
“We have to get you to a hospital—”
“I’m fine,” I said, knowing I did not look fine even a little. “We have to burn it.”
“Devin, you’re—”
“I’m going to be fine. Here, can you…” I trailed off until I pulled the bottle of vodka and box of matches from my jacket. The shadow and blood and ichor stains on it were never going to come out.
It was easier to think about the ruins of my coat than the ruins of my chest, and how badly it hurt to breathe. I could feel the Grim curled deep, and I wonder if the wraith had gotten his heart. I didn’t think I’d be conscious if it had gotten mine.
“Devin, you’re bleeding out of your mouth. That’s bad,” Kostya said gently, squatting next to me in the water. I grinned at him.
“Takes more than that to kill a witch,” I said. He sighed and took the vodka and matches. I watched him light what was left of the wraith aflame.
“And this is why we don’t feed our daemons,” I said in cheery sing-song as Kostya returned to me. “Did you know you’re great?”
“Devin. Stop talking,” he said. I grinned up at him, feeling woozy and useless. He bent down beside me again, tucking my things in my pocket and lifting me to my feet. I leaned heavily on him while he slipped my sword back into its scabbard.
“You’re a fucking danger to yourself, you know that?” Kostya grumbled, leading me back out of the tunnel. I turned to watch the flames smolder out on the damp bricks.
“I’m harder to kill than I look.” I looked back up at him and added, “You know how it is.”
Kostya looked back at me, his scowl twisting into some expression that was both amused and annoyed about it. “One day we’ll run into something bigger and meaner than we are.”
“Not today.”
“Not today,” he agreed. “Here’s to living when we should’ve died.”
“Here’s to living,” I repeated, squeezing him with the arm wrapped around his neck.
The library had always made Armand a little nervous, when he was small. He didn't think it was the curiosities. Or not just the curiosities, because being five and having a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling overhead was definitely a worrying experience. But something about the hush and the smell of old book binding glue said that there were secrets living there, and Armand thought somethings were best left secret. So he left the library be, and his preferred haunts in Magpie House were the solarium with its big windows, and the studio on the roof, and the kitchen, his kitchen, that smelled like bread and basil and salt, and was always safe.
But Devin loved the library.
Armand found him curled in one of the worn velvet chairs by the window, frowning thoughtfully into one of the old grimmoires. The windows in the library were all colored glass, showing fantastic scenes from some long lost story. It was to protect the books from sun damage, but mostly it just helped the room seem spookier. The table next to Devin was piled with notebooks and pens, and he had a stack of books on the floor by his feet.
"It's too nice to be inside," Armand said. "Come onto the lagoon with me." He tried very hard not to look at the stuffed pangolin in the cabinet next to Devin's spot. It was probably older than his mother, but it still made him feel guilty, like he had personally killed and stuffed it.
"Quill gave me homework," Devin said vaguely, still focused on the old book in his lap.
"So? Be naughty. You're good at that."
Devin looked up at that, one brow raised. "Are you--Armand Scordato, known doer of good--encouraging me to play hookey?"
"Listen. All Scordatos are a little naughty."
"I know," Devin said, giving him a stupid, soppy look that Armand knew he'd be embarrassed about if he could see it. "If I get in trouble with Quill I'm blaming you."
Armand smiled brightly and helped him out of his chair. "They'll never believe you," he said sweetly.
"You monster," Devin said, and followed him out of the library.
