When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death.
- Emily Dickinson
Leather
It takes a month to fashion the bridle.
She stalks and slaughters the animals for the leather herself; scrapes the flesh away from inside the lifedamp skins and works the hides until they are cured and stiff and stained a dark, deep reddish brown. Rich like mahogany, the color of bloodstained earth.
Cut down, the strips are salty and bitter in her mouth as she chews each long ribbon – breaking it down between her gnashing molars, making it soft and pliant and ready. She chews until her jaw aches and her tongue itches and the leather is willing and able.
Her fingers work expertly in the new moon darkness, the braids thickening in her hands as she reinforces the fastenings, adding strands and knots where previously there were none. She saves embellishment for her body and for her blade, leaving only necessity and function for the harness.
The first time she puts it on, the flesh underneath the leather bruises. Her body rebels with angry welts. To bind, to bite, and to reclaim, she tells herself.
Silently and without complaint, Keira shortens the girth and tightens the straps and hopes it will be enough to rein the beast within her.
Paint
Many hunters display their trophies. Fishermen and their shells, gamesmen and their horns. Keira carries hers in a small leather pouch she wears at her hip. Inside it is a growing collection of canines and incisors and molars with ugly, swollen roots. Some of the teeth are so old the enamel has hardened – bleached a pale, milky white by desiccation and the passage of time. Others are still fresh, and the small weight of them in her palm makes Keira's nerves sing with the sense memory of the kill. The process of extraction, still vivid in her fingertips.
She weaves a few of these tokens – these spoils of war – into her plaits like beads, the ivorysharp tips hidden like thorns in the dark ticket of her hair. She uses others to make paint: a primitive mixture of bone and water, grease and pigment. The process is painstakingly meticulous, but Keira feels a certain reverence for its exactness, for its ritual. She spends an entire night breaking the teeth into splinters, the splinters into chips, grinding the chips into powder, and refining it down to an even talc.
It takes days to collect enough beetles to give it the proper tincture. Last time, the designs were vivid enough, but rain and sweat made them fade too quickly and too completely. She crushes the glittering, iridescent bodies between her callused palms, staining her fingers a potent blue. Small flecks of shell imbed themselves in the thickened stretches of her skin, but there is no pain – only the acknowledgment of a sensation that is faintly familiar.
When she applies the color, she does so without the benefit of her own reflection. The designs emerge of their own accord from beneath her whitened skin, the lines rising to the surface to hold pigment, forming the patterns that mar the passage of her body like a declaration of war.
You are a warrior, she whispers in the shadows. This is your armor.
She stands erect amongst the spilt, knuckled roots of an ageless oak tree and drags an anointed finger down the flat incline of her stomach. The damp autumn air reaches out to caress her naked form – decorated and adorned and sheathed in claypaint. Corded muscles move against one another beneath skin and coloring.
The Hunger glowers at her from within, but Keira refuses to shiver, to flinch, or to relent.
Blade
She stands at the edge of the village, her eyes penetrating the darkness – peeling away the shadows to reveal the figures scuttling like insects between the cottages. They keep their heads bent low in profile, cloaks and hoods pulled over their cheeks, but Keira does not need to read their faces to know who and what they are. The true nature of man and beast lies just beneath the skin, and Keira can smell it – bright as day.
A carpenter wipes his hands upon his apron as he goes, the soft smell of shaved wood still fresh under his nails. A midwife disappears into a doorway, the life and the death clinging to the folds of her skirt, and Keira understands – she knows – that the new mother, whomever she was, is now gone.
The clouds streaking across the sky are pulled apart by the chasing wind and when the moonlight breaks upon her lithe and bound and painted body, Keira raises her hand into the crisp night air. She brandishes her weapon like an offering to the sky – a vicious curve of carved bone fashioned with a handle gripped with cowhide. Her fingers tighten and she feels the blade become an extension of her body, her entire being. Beneath the cold pigment on her skin, she can feel the color rising – flushing her arms and her breasts and her belly. As she gathers breath, the leather digs into her skin, reminding her of the physicality of her human form – her ribcage flush beneath the thick bands, her nipples toughened and hard but still sensitive to the chafe.
The heat gathers in her chest, crawls along her vocal chords and waits behind her sharpened teeth. When she opens her mouth, a shriek pierces the thick silence of the night. Faces lift upwards at the sound, momentarily illuminated by the pale grey night. There is a moment of dread stillness before the villagers scatter, splintering off from one another to shutter themselves in their homes. The birds rush from the spires of the trees in silent, shivering wingfall.
When Keira speaks, the world listens.
I am ready now, her cry says, and it is for humans and vampires alike – a comfort to some and a warning to others.
As she starts into the forest, something jars inside of her, but Keira is not easily swayed by arguments of the blood. She takes stock and reminds herself of the grace she once had, of an existence that did not require leather and paint and blade. There once was a time when death still held its sway, before the Hunger crouched in her veins.
You hunt the hunters, she tells herself, as her silhouette moves eel-slick between the shadows. The smell of ancient death invades her senses, guiding her through the darkness.
They gave you this life.
Keira knows where they hibernate, when they feed and how they breed. She knows because she is one of them, and that simple fact has sealed their fate.
They made you this weapon, she thinks, and the harvest moon flickers through the branches overhead in agreement.
