The Maw and The Misaligned

The world opened its ugly maw and out flew the dark of night. Fast as a wolf on a desperate hunt, it rounded the pale blue corners of the sky with startling speed and hunger. Swallowing the day, it gulped down every trace of warmth the sun had generously donated. It stole away the warm oranges of sunset with one exhale, blanketed the evergreens in grey with a look, and wiped the clearly lit path away to leave the wanderer lost.

And lost Enny was.

She tugged the jacket around her shoulders more tightly. The cold was seeping in from the outside of the layered leather and fur, infecting her bones with a sense of unease that a fire wouldn’t take away. A shiver worked its way down her back and she quietly wished for a bed. Something piled high with blankets and warm coals to keep the tips of her toes hot enough for her heart to find a place of easy rest. Currently, it thudded furiously in her chest. Reprimanding her for finding herself in this position. Again.

Fool, fool, fool, it beat.

Enny was a fool. Tonight, she couldn’t ignore that.

The sun had been eaten alive and would not be reborn until her birthday, a day without a precise number that fell sometime in January. Her mother had never felt the need to drive a stake into the moment and cage it like an animal. Enny had never been particularly inclined either. She rose anew with the infant sun. Next year. Next sunrise. And she had burned another bridge three days prior just as she had every year before this. It was as though some deep compulsion drove her to it.

To discard the name she wore. Abandon the safety of living and seek out the recklessness of dying.

The bitter taste of a drop in temperatures skated across her tongue as she sucked in a deep breath. It was useless to think about the village she had left now. She had scared them off with talk of spirits and skies and dying wildflowers. A light smile touched her lips. But she had made off with their best healing salves in the process. Given the sudden severity of the darkness and the unforgivable snap of temperatures announcing the arrival of the long night, Enny would need every ounce of luck and help she could gather. Even if it was stolen.

“Stolen luck is the best sort of luck a woman can have, Enny.”

“But äiti, it isn’t ours.”

Enny’s mother laughed, her pale eyes squinting with tears in the blue moonlight.

“Enny! It is all ours.” She tossed a handful of snow into the air. It glittered in the moonlight as it descended, but before it could land on Enny’s face, the wind snatched it from her and carried it into the forest. “It is all ours. The moon has told me.”

“Stolen luck,” she whispered.

A heavy sigh puffed into the night as Enny remained still. The pressure of unforgiving darkness pushed at her back with the wind. Soon she would move but for the moment her pale eyes scavenged the horizon, peeking through the trunks of the trees, as she searched for something familiar while she adjusted to the darkness. It had settled on her too suddenly and a distinct feeling of blindness gripped her stomach tight with apprehension.

This was when fools perished.

The snow had yet to truly fall and without it, the world was plunged in a vague, black nothingness that was so all-consuming Enny often found herself looking into the shard of glass she kept stowed in her pack to test the validity of her existence. Yes, there they were, her two blue eyes as faded as the arctic summer sky but lacking the same flashing intensity. And there was her long, crooked nose scarred from a fight with a nasty little boy many villages back. Red lips eternally pursed into a discontent pout. Her mother’s high cheekbones, narrow chin, and long blonde hair that fell in straight, wispy lines across her face.

She kept the image tucked close to her chest like a roll of fresh bread so it could heat her through the uncertain darkness. Even now, as the maw of the night swallowed the world whole, Enny clasped tightly to the image of herself.

Other women she had encountered were not so vain. Beside Enny and her mother, a woman whose name she never learned, she wondered if there were any who took as much comfort in their reflection. In themselves. Certainly, she had never come across one though there had been a little girl once who sat by the river all summer long watching. Enny had crouched low beside her once and asked what was so very fascinating that it drew her away from the warm porridge of breakfast.

“Breath.”

A wide smile had cracked the dry skin of her lips and the girl had said no more.

Enny had returned to the village that night wholly unsettled as though the green of the lights above had slipped into her throat and infected her lungs. Her mother had already passed and there was little to cling to so her mind latched onto the fantastical, mystical rhythm of air inflating and deflating her chest. Enny never again ignored the space in her chest.

Rising and falling.

Living boldly and dying quietly.

Enny rolled her lips together and craned her head toward the spattering of stars as her bosom rose with arctic air. The stars gave off plenty of light but without the brilliance of the moon, she was uncertain. Unprotected. Placing a hand against her sternum, she grimaced. Her breath was fluttering without its normal smoothness. Beneath it, her heart banged like a caged bird suddenly filled with fright.

She was caught in the In-Between, the most dangerous place, her mother once said. A place where life and death could both spread their wings and leave the lost wanderer as a ghost. An image to be caught amongst the traveling snow of a ferocious winter storm or the ripples of a summer lake disturbed by the wind.

The In-Between was a living, breathing place.

It did not hunger the way the polar night did nor did it burn itself out in the way of the midnight sun. Simply, it lingered on the horizon. A steady presence in the cavity of Enny’s body, it hung heavy between the last of the exhale and the first of the inhale. It wrapped fingers around her throat as the sun died, moments before the stars had yet to explode in their twinkling fury. In the dark emptiness between today and tomorrow it lived.

Enny feared she would be caught in it the way her mother had been.

An old fear, it had long ago taken up residence in her ribcage between the clenching-relaxing rhythm of her heart where the next cycle was never guaranteed. A night with no moon was a night stuck in the In-Between and morning was not a surety to Enny. She cursed to herself loudly, immediately spinning on her heel to see if there was another soul to reprimand her. There, of course, was no one besides the moaning of the wind creaking through the trees. The voice of a soul trapped in the In-Between.

Enny wet her lips.

So she had begun dying, then.

Caught until the next sunrise.

The lack of moonlight at the start of this long winter unnerved Enny. Slanted and misaligned with the world, she was off-kilter. A ghost.

“We do not travel, Enny, when the moon is asleep.” Her mother was rarely stern but as a frown furrowed her brow, Enny had a distinct feeling that she ought to pay close attention. “It is a dangerous trap.”

“Why?” Enny asked, twiddling the drawstring of her coat between her fingers.

“Because it is the In-Between.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Souls stick there.” She turned her head to the sky and scowled. “Come. Let’s rest tonight, Enny. The reindeer won’t mind if we miss them another night.”

“But I’m not-”

“Do you see that tree over there?” She snarled.

Enny looked. Gathered at the edge of a forest was a gnarled-looking tree bent at the waist with several long branches reaching forward, giving the appearance of a person trying to catch themselves before they fell. There was even a thick woody protrusion from which no other branches stemmed where a nest sat. Long tendrils of soft, decaying matter draped over the wooden head and Enny realized with sudden clarity what she was looking at.

“That is what happens when you travel once the In-Between has risen.”

Enny’s eyes had blown wide. Her pupils had eaten up nearly all the blue as they spread with hot terror. The tree swayed in the wind, leaning toward her with such suddenness that Enny tumbled into the snow on her back. A hollow, moonless sky sneered down at her.

The memory rustled in her mind, sending chills down her spine and raising the hairs on the back of her neck. When her mother had still been alive, before she succumbed to the illness of a hot summer, they would move beneath the moonlight and track reindeer. Not to hunt, of course, but to witness.

The herds led them to water. Granted them safe passage as they steered them clear of lurking predators. She missed those days. They burned in her mind like the midnight sun of summer, never letting her forget what she had lost and how very far away it was now. Two pairs of shoes had become one and the world had gone colder. Enny had suffered from frostbite of the heart. Three separate healers had declared her doomed.

A pained smile drew long shadows on her cheeks. Doomed to roam, they had said, until her soul finally shattered. Was a soul such a fragile thing?

Enny dropped her head. Between her two boots, pressed into the partially frozen dirt sat the split heart of a reindeer hoof print. Crouching low, she placed a mitten to the track. The temperatures had frozen the paltry layer of snow to ice and her hand did not disturb the imprint. Tugging the covering from her hand, she ran a short, stout finger along the outside of the shape remembering the way her mother had done so with easy reverence and a smile to her face. When she closed her eyes, Enny could still see the way the moonlight turned her mother’s hair white and glittered in the expanse of blue in her eyes as though she had become winter herself.

Her mother never smiled when the sun was out. Never laughed outside of the night. Her mother was magic. Belonging to the polar night.

Enny tapped a finger against the frozen snow. The cracking shot through the stillness of the night. For luck, she thought. Steal luck from villages and ask with a knock from the animals. She frowned. Tonight she would need luck.

Tonight she was going to break her mother’s only rule.

Enny was going to travel during the In-Between.

Tugging off the other mitten, Enny dropped to her knees. The cold earth pressed against her but she did not pull away from it. She let it crawl through her skin and parade through her bones until it clacked her teeth together, never tearing her eyes away from the hoof print.

“T-t-too l-l-long,” she chattered.

Too long she had spent vacillating between living and dying, exhaling and inhaling. Movement and stillness. She was tired of this game of freeze. Exhausted by the frostbite of her heart. It had been thirteen winters since her mother’s passing and she still loomed over Enny like a vengeful spirit. Her words clustered in the forefront of her mind poisoning every experience with the ruthless emptiness of the In-Between.

It was hardly the agony of grief that kept Enny burning bridges, though she did miss her äiti dearly. Villages kept disappearing from the horizon behind her because of the relentless curiosity occupying her lungs between each inhale and each exhale. A tangible entity cuddled in her chest. When her heart stumbled through the night, she could feel its breath coast across her skin and raise goosebumps in its wake.

Still on the ground, Enny tipped her head back to trace the long line of the Milky Way. She had been born in the moments after the night had begun to creep away before the sun had raised its face.

Was she not In-Between?

The question, asked only once, had driven her mother to a fit of tears and the final proclamation that if she could not abandon the seduction of that horrid thing, Enny would be left to search out her father.

Doomed to wander the winter forests as a ghost.

Enny despised the pursuit of living and how it copulated with the fear of dying to create an ugly little spawn, the ignorance of the In-Between. In truth, Enny had always craved the In-Between. She yearned to slip into that silken place that both was and was not where the world was ending and beginning. Where her breath was finished but did not have the courage to yet begin again. The hunger was so deep she once nearly drowned trying to hold her breath in the river only to be dragged out by the calloused hands of her mother. The fight that had ensued lasted for days, long enough for Enny to realize her pursuit was dangerously foolish.

But Enny was a fool.

The beating rhythm of her heart said as much.

“Do you want to die, Enny? Is that what you want?” Her mother screamed.

They were in the middle of a forest as dark as sin. The delicate winter snow was tumbling around them, catching on Enny’s eyelashes like her tears. Moments prior, she had been off following the curious sound of some animal and picking up feathers as she went like breadcrumbs. Now, she stood at her mother’s feet, shaking her head furiously. She did not want to die. She wanted to live.

“You are going to die, you foolish, foolish little girl.”

Enny’s lip quivered as she tried to swallow the tears.

“I told you…I told you to stay still. Do you remember the tree?” She nodded, sending a spattering of tears into the snow. They bored little holes to the earth from their warmth. Her mother grabbed her shoulders. “Then why must you go wandering? Should I kill you myself and save the world the trouble?”

“No!”

Her mother’s cold eyes darted down to her hands. “What is that?”

Enny hid the handful of feathers behind her back, sneaking one into the back of her boots to keep safe. “N-nothing.”

“You lie now? You wander. You lie. What else have you been doing, you little witch?”

Enny’s mother dropped her hands from her shoulders in favor of snatching her hands. Enny clutched to the little feathers, feeling as though they were intimately important to her soul. They were her treasures. Pieces of the world she had gathered herself.

But she was no match for an adult and her mother quickly wrenched all the feathers from her hand.

They shone in the moonlight. Bands of dark alternated with white down the long feathers. Enny, despite her fear of her mother, smiled until her dimples appeared as she drank in the sight of them. They were gorgeous. In her hands, they had been soft and she could feel the energy of the one shoved into her boot.

Her mother was not so enamoured.

“You…” Enny looked up to her mother whose face had turned an unbecoming shade of red. “You are a witch. Just like she said.”

A great hand clapped across Enny’s face. The stinging shock so severe, she never forgot the words that followed.

“If you ever go out in the In-Between again, I will kill you myself. No daughter of mine will be so…misaligned that she chases the Maw of Night.”

Enny wrapped her arms around her middle and wailed. She had been a good daughter to her mother, sacrificing the wilderness and awe strengthening her bones in favor of osteoporosis but now her mother was gone and she was full of holes. Surely, there was something in the world that could teach her how to live in the In-Between. Wasn’t there? Couldn’t it be a possibility that something thrived on the moonless nights?

It was not the reindeer or the elk. Often when the moon rose again Enny found their corpses, bloody and picked over, scattered across the dense forest. Nor was it the mice and rodents whose only impression on the world was their discarded tails. The rabbits screamed through the dark abyss as the night swallowed the last of their life.

But there was something out there, Enny knew, that was living. Eating. Dreaming.

Something with feathers.

Something her mother called the Maw of Night.

Something her mother was so afraid of she could not even witness the evidence of its existence. There was something out there breathing in the In-Between.

The tears freezing on Enny’s face glittered in the pale starlight but she had stopped crying. The sorrow left as suddenly as it arrived. A stillness as surefooted as the night’s captured her lips, pulling them closed as she blinked up at the rapidly greening sky. Streaks of emerald waved above the evergreens, growing taller and bolder until they reached their long arms across the breadth of the sky.

They beckoned her forward. Towards the In-Between.

Enny’s mother hated the northern lights but Enny found she did not care. Not this time.

She looked back to the split heart of the track now resting between her knees. The reindeer had always kept her safe, that much her mother had been right about, but they had chained her to the habits of prey. Imprisoned her in the ever-tangible fear souring the taste of summer berries. But she was not afraid.

Not beneath the warm, flickering green celestial fire above her.

Swallowing thickly against the old uncertainty in her throat, Enny rose to her feet.

And Enny ran.

The frigid air whipped past her, filling her ears with a deafening roar as her cheeks burned and then went numb. Tears welled in her eyes and the smack of her boots against the hardpacked earth raced through the forest like a gunshot ahead of her, behind her. A warning sign. Her lungs were alight as though she had inhaled the stars themselves but when she looked up they were still there. Watching. Eager to gobble up the story she was writing with her footprints.

They were a friend.

Enny chased the twitching tail of the aurora, veering left and right as the forest parted for her. The ground churned beneath her as she ran, abandoning the hoofprints in favor of the long, swirling lines of green above. The branches swayed. The oldest trees creaked in appreciation. Off in the distance, an old elk bugled. Enny smiled, wide and feral. Even the elks were wishing her well.

One elk became two and two morphed into too many for a number as the forest came alive with the In-Between. A low roar began all around her and soon she was cocooned in the screaming magic of the elks. It vibrated against her eardrums until Enny laughed as high and wild as the beasts.

Not even the wolves would dare hunt her tonight.

As she went, the living and the dying became separate entities, falling from her shoulders like ancient dust as the dark of night swallowed them too. Enny neither lived nor died. She moved. Held her breath. Floated between steps. Hung in the air like some ethereal being before slamming back against the ground and beginning anew.

The long stretch of green above her blanketed the stars. Every tree seemed to be bathed in the fresh light of summer as the light dusting of snow turned to moss beneath the emerald aurora overhead. Enny looked down at her hands and tore the gloves from them. Glowing. The undulating, mystical lights had slipped onto her skin and used her as a canvas.

The elks bugled again as another round of laughter exploded from her throat.

There, beneath the blocked stars and hidden moon, she had become something else.

A spirit. A witch. A new growth within an old forest. A stellar nursery for new dreams.

Blossoming in the In-Between.

Lifting her eyes from the northern lights spilling from her fingertips and dancing across the backs of her hands, Enny looked ahead only to skid to a sudden stop.

A wall of dark feathers fell like snow several feet in front of her, gathering at the base of a tree crooked with wisdom. In the middle of the strange tree sat a dark mass from which the feathers seemed to be originating. The center of the storm.

Enny's mouth parted in a shocked "o". This could not be any normal creature. It would have lost every last of its feathers by now. Placing a celestial hand against her sternum, Enny felt an absence of breath and an erratically pounding heart.

“You,” she breathed, releasing the air in her chest.

The ball of feathers pivoted to face her.

Even from this distance, Enny knew. It was her owl. The bird she had chased as a child.

It was a tall thing, occupying as much space as her torso would on the tree, and its face had long, white feathers giving it an aged appearance. They gathered in a long point as though the owl had a beard. Feathers, dark and light, snowed from the owl as it sat but it was the eyes that enraptured Enny.

Dark blue with spots of white, one eye held the shifting constellations while the other was filled to bursting with colorful galaxies and shooting stars. Enny approached slowly, sucking in sharp breaths and exhaling harshly. Losing her rhythm of life completely.

“The…Maw of Night,” shock colored her voice.

The owl regarded her out of celestial eyes a moment before opening its beak and grating out, “Maw. Of. Night.” One eye full of shooting stars and nebulas blinked closed. It tilted its head down to the emerald and violet storm dancing on the back of her hands before looking back up at her eyes. “The…In-Between.”

Enny’s mouth hung open in shock. “Me?” she whispered.

It clacked its beak in her direction. "Misaligned. Living and dead." For a moment, the worlds in its eyes stuttered and the ground beneath her feet gave a fearful tremble. "Not...in-between."

"Me?"

A rolling, high-pitched hoot echoed through the night as the bird clawed into the tree and flapped its wings.

Enny's long blonde hair flew back as the coat, mittens, and winter scarf disintegrated into glittering ash. She was breathless and cold. Confused but the furthest from scared she had ever been. Pressing even colder into her hand was the glass from her back which had also seemingly disintegrated.

"Look," the owl commanded, its left eye shifting to a blue gathering of stardust.

Holding the shard up to her face, Enny gasped.

Gone were the features of her mother. Her cheekbones remained high but nebulas colored them pink and orange. The interstellar clouds shifted like a summer storm across the soft skin of her face. Her chin had lengthened slightly and from it dripped a waterfall of moonlight down her throat and across her collarbones.

Enny's mouth flapped open and closed in shock as she fixated on the moonlight she carried.

"Look," the owl urged.

Lifting her eyes, Enny lost her breath completely.

The delicate, arctic blue eyes of her mother had morphed into something spectacular.

Like her hands, her eyes had turned into two open expanses of black covered by the playing green and violet of the northern lights. The witch's soul, her mother had said.

The colors rolled over one another, breathing like the river had the day she nearly drowned. The current of emerald was interrupted here and there by a spot of pink, an explosion of blue, and the beautiful streak of a shooting star. Lowering the mirror, Enny gazed at the sky above her.

It was the same. She was the sky.

"Maw of Night," she said.

The owl blinked at her.

"In-Between," it responded.

Tentatively, Enny reached out and buried her hand into the warm coat of feathers atop the owl's head. It gave a low trill of appreciation as the swaying lights raced across its feathers. A low, white glow began to emanate from them and Enny pulled her hand away.

It flapped its wings again, ruffling its feathers and looking years younger than it had moments ago.

Enny wet her lips, no longer feeling the cold.

"And now?" she asked, feeling the answer tingling in her toes.

The owl gave her a strange look, its eyes widening into two large reflections of the non-existent moon.

"We move."

Silently, the owl lofted.

Enny watched as the creature lifted higher and higher until its eyes had risen completely into the sky. The Maw of Night's great wings reached wide through the green lights but it was so high that its movements were minuscule and it took a great many moments before Enny identified it was indeed flying.

Looking at the forest ahead of her, Enny closed her northern light eyes and breathed in a deep breath. Opening them slowly, she left the thoughts and fears of her mother and the In-Between behind her with a trail of meteors and colorful skies.

And Enny ran.