When Moder Foula found me with my long teeth deep inside her oldest familiar and called me ‘monster’, I felt a strange relief. The familiar was a great orange cat with grey at his feet and mouth. His name was Bear and he led most of the other cat familiars in a great clutter around the village. When I was a girl, I used to feed them scraps of fish, carefully pulling it apart from the bone so they wouldn’t choke. Bear’s fur was strewn like fish skin around the fireplace when they found me. His killing was the final nail, condemning me as the threat within our village. Before then, they believed I had killed Sotsker Ronas too. All I could think, as I pulled my bloodied teeth from Bear’s still-warm corpse, was thank god. The beast has been caught. 

I was asleep the night we found her, when the bell at Foremoder’s House began pealing out across the silence. My Sotskers and I pushed our way out of our sleep and our beds. Gathered around the central fire, our faces streaked with smoke and terror, we watched as Moder Foula slowly turned her great wimpled head to meet each of our eyes. She spoke while standing over a shape covered by a white sheet, stained with red. Something inside me stirred under my nightdress, and I tried my best to silence it. I know now what that stirring meant, and what it hath wrought.

‘My dotters… We have created a haven from the terrors around us. It has taken us many years and countless sacrifices to ensure your safety. This is what happens when one of us decides she is too good for safety, for community… when one girl decides she deserves more… we must suffer the cost.’ Then, whipping the sheet off to a collective gasp, she let us see our Sotsker. My Ronas. Her face was mangled beyond recognition, lips torn to show her scratched teeth, hair carelessly tossed from its tight bun, the remainder still clinging onto the other side of her cavernous head. She was missing her eyes, her nose, her lips. Pieces of skull showed through the gore. Her red hair tangled with blood. 

A Moder asked Moder Foula to cover her up, to protect her dignity. Two of the other Moders gathered up the bloody sheet but Foula stopped them with an outstretched hand. ‘Leave her. They must see their actions have consequences. Listen to me now. What happened to this Sotsker was not the work of a wolf. Wolves would not have left her corpse out in the grass for us to find. They have always honoured our agreement, and would not sever it,’

Moder Foula’s cold gaze appraised us once more, letting its frost settle into our bones.

‘This is the work of the beast’

We all nodded in solemn agreement. The beast killed Ronas because Ronas had strayed too far from the village. Too far from the Moder’s teachings. Back then I was afraid to show my grief, lest I be accused of sympathising with her. Even less did I want my Sotskers knowing about me and Ronas, nestled together like baby birds in the storehouse attic. My Moder had caught us then, seeking out the chores we had left undone. She kept telling us not to worry, that everything would be alright. I didn’t think then that we had any cause to worry. The next day she gave us two necklaces. A spherical charm on a silver chain. One for each of us. There was no clasp on it; she fastened it closed with a hot touch from the end of a twig in the fireplace. I was never to take it off, she’d say. No matter what.

Ronas’ necklace was still there, wound doubly around her throat.

Before I killed Ronas, before I killed small animals and beloved familiars, ingesting my own menses sated me. But their fleeting nature meant before long I was forced to seek out other sources. Those of us who bled fell under the same lunar cycle, and so their menses came with my own. I hoarded as much of it as I could, wringing it from rags, or using knives to scrape it from ruined underwear. It was not work I was ever proud of doing. For some time, this kept me fed well enough, until one of my Sotskers caught me with her petticoat spread wide and red across my bed. I had to pretend I was saving the scraps for a blanket. After that I was too afraid to return to their rooms. Menstruous blood didn’t bring me the same satisfaction that a fresh kill did, as I soon learned.

As the thirst showed no signs of leaving me, I began to hone my killing skills. I worked hard to be sure I caused the rat or the runt no pain when I took its life. I tearfully apologized during the act, thanked it after I had taken my fill. Refusing to look in the mirror, I began to forget what my face looked like. Then I killed Ronas, without knowing. Her killing came at a time I had become used to waking with the blood of a hen or a goat kid staining my lips. Maybe I had washed her away in the night. In any case, it mattered not. It was done.

 The murder of a familiar was even more serious than the murder of a Sotsker or Moder. I had witnessed trials before. They only let me watch, safe within the fold of women staring out from the wooden pews. It had felt so easy to condemn the silent, separate woman standing in the box to her fate. Death was scarcely the answer in most trials. Exile, public humiliation, imprisonment. These were more common. Easier to execute and in most cases, much more effective.

Moder Foula stared straight ahead as it was announced. Exile. Some of the Sotskers shook their heads. I knew that many of them, some of them close friends of mine, had voted for me to be put to death. Now they knew what it was like to have a bloodthirst, and even worse, the gnawing feeling as it went on unfulfilled. Perhaps I was being put to death out there, among the trees.  

Before I left, my Moder took me aside to tell me about a cabin in the forest. Normally it would be occupied by the last poor wretch to be thrown out, but she told me the last woman who lived there had passed just a few weeks ago, kindly choosing a clearing to expire in, rather than her temporary home. She gave me some books and drew a map to the cabin before she kissed me hard and lovelessly on the cheek. ‘It must be done, child,’ she whispered into my hair. I left feeling cold, the gates closing in silence behind me.

As I moved through the forest, an ominous, droning sound seeped through the trees towards me. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. The snoring of some giant creature? The slow sawing of wood? I broke into a clearing and saw the hut. Next to it was the source of the sound; a great black cloud, pressed and pulsing over something in the grass. It was too long before I realized they were giant black flies, teeming and plentiful, gorging themselves on something dead and rotting in the grass. The previous occupant. I let out a loud scream and it dented the cloud, a few breaking off just to circle back around to join the feast. My chest heaved as I ran to the hut, slamming the door behind me and letting my sobs fall out between the gasping breaths.

The first few days I wept quietly on the bed, resisting the urge to press my face fully into the dusty bed sheets, as if crying on the shoulder of a stranger. Then, after a few more days, I became more at home. I caught hares and ate their flesh straight from the pelt. I ran my fingers down the spines of the books, cracked the door open to peek outside, split the curtains to let light in. I took one book down from the shelf, and then another. As I read I noticed all of the books were on corpse medicine. Instructions on powdering skulls, flaying skin. How to soak and season to change the nature of people and things. We had never been allowed to practice this in the village. The flies carried on their buzzing, and I became immune to the sound over time.

Until one day when I woke up and the cloud had lifted. The dead Sotsker had left a spiteful singe of black around her, with a trim of yellow, dead-grass veins reaching outwards. I could try and use the remains to create something. The dried supplies left in the hut were running low, and I needed much more if I was to continue out there. So, I gathered my tools and my cauldron to carry things in, tied a piece of fabric around my mouth and nose, and went out to see what I could take from it.

I stood and stared at the dead Sotsker for quite some time before beginning. It seemed disrespectful. But I was beginning to think her survival had depended on doing the same to the Sotsker before her. It was a necessary evil. A lineage I felt I must take my place in. One I didn’t realize I was about to break.

I began, working as best I could from the instructions I had. I broke through her papery skin with my wooden tools, spooning dark reds blacks from her centre, the spoon scraping against her spine as if she were an empty bowl. The fabric I’d tied around my head did almost nothing to protect me from her stench; deep sighs of death’s breath flowed hotly over its surface, seeping through in tendrils and wisps.

Her hands were skinless to the bone, and not from rotting. Her teeth had been carved to sharp points, and her chest and stomach were choked with tiny bones, pieces of hair. Silver glittered inside her. I set about picking it out, digging through viscera, my fingernails snapping elastic gristle, separating tendon from bone. Finally, my fingers closed around the delicate chain. I lifted it to eye level as it twirled and danced on its chain. An ornate orb, the gaps in its cage matted with gore. A cold feeling settled in my chest, sickness rising in my throat. It was identical to the one around my own neck.

I found another wrapped unbroken around the dead Sotsker’s throat.

Later, I laid the necklaces across my white bed sheets, leaving little stains of red. They’re still there now, small brown whispers of old blood. Sometimes they look like dirt; other times they look like flowers. I scraped at the dried pieces of skin and muscle stuck to the orb until impatience got the better of me and I smashed it with a small hammer meant for crushing bones.

Out bloomed a dusty green moss, its curls wrapped protectively around a thin shard of bone, tiny and pointed as a fingernail. The bone had murky red stains around the edge. The smell when I opened it was overwhelming. It let itself into my sinus sweetly and in spores, igniting in me a kind of unpleasant surrender. I felt my limbs go limp as if I were floating in a lake. Along with the unbearable terror of losing control.

When at last I pulled myself from its warm embrace, I wrapped it in thick cotton to stifle it. I pulled a book on moss and lichens from the shelf, to find out what it was. It did not take me long. My Sotsker had drawn great looping circles all throughout its chapter. Illustrations, descriptions, recipes, she had even adorned the margins with inky, tumbling waves of it. Her pitch-black chanting reeked of obsession, and I could see her, high under its influence, writing its name over and over again like a lover’s.

Usnea.

It grows on trees and skulls and has many uses. Mainly it is used as a kind of influence charm, a spell not to control, but to steer the victim into a kind of helpless agreeability. Not turning the victim into a golem, existing only to do the spellcaster’s bidding, but to make her agreeable, to not question any scenario that might present itself as reality. So, if a girl already thought herself a beast, she would make herself one. I could see Moder Foula filling the orbs with the dusty coils, whispering her own fears into it, to give to the Moder that next came to her terrified because her daughter’s lips had met another’s. To make sure they’d leave and never come back. One way or the other.

The tall wooden gates of the village opened for me as if I’d never been gone, as if they never heard what happened. I cast my eyes over the worn homes, patch-worked with new wood and glass. The babies had become girls, and the girls had become Sotskers. The Moders stayed the same. Sotskers gasped and hid their frightened girls behind long and dirtied skirts; babies stared in disbelief from their baskets, then burst into frantic tears. I was being watched for the first time in a long while. I didn’t like it. I tried my best to keep out of sight as I moved through the village. It had made itself unknown to me. I would suddenly find myself facing the back of a new house, or trapped in the courtyard of two who had merged. It made me feel strangely ill. 

I sought Moder Foula. She did not live in her old house anymore, though the red curtains remained at the windows. The young Sotsker who answered the door peeking from behind the wood told me she had moved. To Foremoder House. Before I turned to leave she yelped for me to wait and disappeared back inside. When she returned, she pushed a small beetroot under the door. I heard the bolts draw behind the wood.

Foremoder House was the largest building in our settlement, and where the unofficial leader of the colony lived. It was unofficial in the way that she didn’t wear a title or a crown, but still decided everything that might happen or not happen. I walked in without asking, which I had never done. I decided to make this as quick as possible, with the fleeting thought that I could retire back to my old home in the village. As though that were something that could happen now.

The Moder’s room was empty, save for a great oak table, with the bountiful products of the Harvst upon it. Great flagons of deep red wine, bulbous loaves with egg-shined tops. Fruits with waxen skins. For a moment, I felt a strange sense of awe at the place. I realized this might be the last moment I would live my life according to the will of that room.  The great wooden doors opened and I was soon standing in a room full of women, some rotten down to the skeleton, others plump and whole, all pressing my face to their bosom, their hands upon my shoulders, to comfort or silence me I couldn’t yet tell. My nose was bleeding, but I only noticed long afterwards.

Their breath tickled my hair as they whispered, some to each other, some directly to me, staring at me with eyes wide, and wild as mares’. I felt myself suffocating beneath them, beneath their sickly-sweet smell, their light and feathery hair. Some of the hair was bound into braids, and these found their way into my ears, my mouth. The ends pricked my eyes, needle-like in their precision. I saw visions of them at my bedside, winding the chain of my necklace around their fingers, passing on messages of violence and blood. Telling me of my own hunger, willing it into existence inside of me. The whispering was a shout now, drowning out anything else, until I strained to understand the words. Then, as though awaking from a dream, a set of words echoed into clarity.

‘Fira honga, fira gonga,

fira staad upo skø,

twa veestra vaig a bee,

and ane comes atta driljandi.’ 

A rhyme I had learned at school many years ago. Laughingly, the words remembered me. It was a riddle. A cow, that was the answer. Two eyes show the way to the field… For a split second, I saw Moder Foula suspended in the centre of the room, weaving a great basket. She looked down, smiled at me. Then all was black.

When I woke up the women were gone, but the basket remained. Ceremonially it lay, like a great felled beast on Moder Foula’s table, surrounded by its offerings. The whole scene now seemed grotesque in its abundance. I approached, and lifted the lid off to reveal dozens of human skulls, all with varying coatings of usnea. Some of them completely overgrown, others with only an accent of moss at the temple, or inside the eye socket.

 Each one was tangled with identical silver chains, weaving in and out of mouths, their orbs nestled in eye sockets, balanced between teeth. I looked down at the sotsker chain still fastened around my own neck. Would I die here, and add my skull to the pile? I felt suddenly, violently, that I wanted to break it off, so I did, leaving red welts in my skin. I left it broken on the offering table, along-side my Sotsker’s; the blood dried brown and sharp. What could I be but a Beast? But a Beast alone, with control, with her own will, is better than a cow, being led to the field, towards its inevitable death.

I knew my way back and took it willingly. The streets were swept clear of Sotskers and Moders; preferring safety they peered out from the windows above me. Like portraits of long-lost ancestors. I took my time, walking slowly. The youngest girls were the only ones not cowering inside, and I was able to hear their tiny voices, the crowded buildings echoing them tenfold. Songs of creatures that live in the woods, that drink human blood. I took the tune with me as I passed, humming quietly, finding my own way back into the woods.