Gallant

And dreams can never hurt you. That’s what her mother said. Of course, she knows now it isn’t true. Dreams can make you hurt yourself, dreams can make you do so many things, if you’re not careful.

It will grow back, she tells herself. If death is a part of the cycle, then so is life. All things fade, and all things flourish.

“The thing about old houses is the upkeep. How quickly they fall into disrepair.” He speaks as if to the gate itself. “Everything decays. Iron rusts. Bodies rot. Leaves dry and break. And all of it turns to dust and ash. No wonder it’s hard to keep any surface clean.”

“A body needs sleep. Without it, the heart gets weak. The
mind gets tired. And tired minds are pliable things.”

“I know what they have told you. That this is a prison, and I am the prisoner. But they are wrong. I am not a monster to be caged.”

He catches Olivia’s bandaged hand.

“I am simply nature. I am the cycle. The balance. And I am inevitable. The way night is inevitable. The way death is inevitable.”

“It is one thing to give death form,” he says, and the ashes coalesce into a chalice. “Another to breathe life back into it.”

“Everything casts a shadow,” he begins. “Even the world we live in. And as with every shadow, there is a place where it must touch. A seam, where the shadow meets its source.”

A mother made of flesh and blood. A father made of ash and bone.

What does that make her?

Real, she is learning, is a slippery thing, not a solid black line but a shape with soft edges, a great deal of gray

Olivia Prior has never been a quiet girl. She has always made a point of making noise, everywhere she goes, in part to remind people that just because she cannot speak, does not mean that she is silent, and in part because she simply likes the weight of sound, likes the way it takes up space.