Chioniphobia

Jewelry

Grim has no mother. She has a brother, but they share no blood. They have no blood to share in the first place.

Her brother was woven like the dreams he creates, out of quiet nighttime slumbers and sweet imaginings. Or so she supposes- she wasn't there to see, but she can't picture him being born as she was, from last gasps and the fading shine of eyes. He certainly couldn't have been born in chains.

For Grim was born in chains, an endless web of them, entangling her, strangling her, choking out her breath until the darkness overtook her. But she had no life to lose, not as humans did, and so she would wake again and again until her struggling tightened the chains around her neck.

She doesn't know how long she hung there, ensnared like a fly awaiting a spider to suck it dry. She doesn't know when she first saw moonlight, though she knows she must have spent many years there alone in the dark. Surely, it must have taken years for the rocky womb around her to crumble away in order for the moon could peer through.

The moon peeked through, and she heard him speak.

"Don't struggle. Wait."

Grim still doesn't quite understand what made her listen to him. Perhaps it was because his was the first voice she'd ever heard. Whatever the reason, she did listen, and quit struggling, and waited.

The chains were not thick- they were slim as they were strong, and although they were dull they pressed against her skin so tightly that they cut through. They left no marks, and she lost no blood. There was no blood to lose.

The chains loosened the longer she remained still, until the day they loosened enough for her to slip from them. That was the day she learned that the things on her back, strange, unwieldy masses of bone and feathers, were good for something other than getting caught in the endless chains. She spread her wings, pushed with them, and suddenly she was in the air.

She fell, spreading her wings again, and somehow managed to land without breaking her neck.

Grim looked up at the moon through a net of obsidian chains. She would have expressed gratitude, but her mouth had not yet known speech, and so she remained silent.

She lingered in the cavern for weeks afterward, learning how to flap her wings and stay in the air unsupported by chains. She tugged at the chains that had kept her, pulled at them until they fell away from the earthen walls around them, looped them around her hand, relishing in the fact that she could free herself from them whenever she so wished.

She kept them with her, tucked under her robes, when she left the cavern.

Flying, crawling, eating, drinking: these were all things Grim had to learn, mostly by way of imitation. What she did not need to learn was reaping. It was automatic, an instinct driving her to hunt down souls on the verge of escaping their shells, to usher them though to whatever awaited them. She didn't know what happened to them after they left the earth: she never caught so much as a glimpse though the veil that separated her realm, the living realm, and the next.

It struck her as ironic, now, that the realm of the dead should be one she was destined never to see.

Sometimes the souls would struggle, try to flee. In later years, Grim would occasionally find cause to let them go, but back in the beginning, she would snare them with the chains that had once ensnared her, drag them through to the next world kicking and screaming or resigned and silent. The chains were endless, therefore her reach was also.

Grim remembers first seeing an hourglass. Two glass bulbs, one on top of the other, connected in the middle. She remembers watching sand trickle though from the top to the bottom, then flipping it over and studying the cycle as it repeated.