#30 Mia

Had she drowned?  She did not think so.  She had been told that if she was good enough, and pure enough and kind enough of spirit that she would not drown, that she would instead be taken by the little gods who watched over the pond, and she would become their princess.

Mia did not feel dead.  And she was sitting, muddy, on the edge of the water.  One would not be muddy in the afterlife, not even if one was to pay for their misdeeds.  So she must not have drowned.  But she was so very cold, and it was not a sort of cold that she had ever felt before.  It went deep, curled up inside her like a knot, and it felt like hunger.

She was so very hungry.  But she was not hungry for any food she could think of.  She somehow knew that she was hungry for something else entirely, only what that thing was she could not say.  She could not say until a foolish boy came wandering to the water’s edge, close to the reeds, not far from where she had hidden when she had heard someone approach.

Mia knew the boy was foolish.  Only a very foolish child would approach these waters alone, without a priest, without some sort of sacrifice.  Some sort of living sacrifice.  The gods of these waters were powerful, but they were greedy, and they took what came near.  And as the boy came close and Mia could feel his heat, she suddenly knew a few more things.  And once the boy was cold dead by the edge of the bank, she knew all that she needed to know.

She was no princess.  There were no gods.  There was only the water, and the cold, and the heat that living things could bring to her, wether they had been meant as a sacrifice or not.  The cold knot uncoiled from within her.  She wore it as a cloak, and waited for the men to come and take away the body of the foolish boy who died instead of her.

Category: 2011, Fantasy, Horror