By Kaya Skovdatter
Rani loves Vixi like the ocean loves the shore; like the root loves the soil. Has loved her since the day they met in that stupid fucking pop-up coffee shop in Vancouver that always burned the beans and couldn’t get anyone’s name right if their lives depended on it. Has loved her through the manic depressive outbursts, the wild fights at all hours of the night, the makeup sex that follows like a hurricane, through Vixi’s disastrous three weeks of culinary school (most people don’t set the building on fire), shifting between eight apartments across three provinces in six years, travelling into their thirties together and wasn’t that a trip—Vixi chasing dream after dream after dream, always more time to keep trying whatever struck her as the next great adventure. Rani just doing her best to keep up with her brilliant, impossible, whirlwind of a wife; Vixi a gods-damned force of nature, and Rani has loved every moment of being caught up in that storm.
Even as it settled them back in Toronto after Vixi’s mom died and they inherited the house in Queen West. The first time either of them had been back in a decade.
And then through the chaos of Vixi getting sick. And the doctor’s visits. And the stream of words echoing into senseless buzzing as diagnoses built up one atop another in unwieldy towers, from second opinions to thirds and on: Early on-set. Aggressive. Inoperable. And then it was hands clutched tight together in waiting rooms between confirmations. Between options. Between treatments.
On to quiet conversations in bedrooms, and in cafes, and on long walks taken in the city’s green spaces, down into beloved ravines and round rivers’ edges and through its endless parks, because they weren’t sure how much longer they’d be able to do that.
Rani’s always been the grounding rod. Vixi the storm that dances around her. She’s never going to stop loving her wild, ridiculous wife, no matter what shape she’s in. Even as she has to watch her waste away from the chemo that’s consumed the last five months of their lives.
Of course, that was before… Well. Before everything went to absolute shit.
Which is why she’s sitting on the bloodied floor of their garage, trying to figure out how to unfuck her wife’s bones. And the rest of what that thing did to her.
* * *
Apparently, it’s a bad idea to make a one-sided deal with an omnipotent forest spirit who speaks in dreams and whispers. Which Rani would have fucking told Vixi if she ever listened.
Oh wait, she did. A hundred times, while her fucking green witch flower child of a wife prayed to the earth and the trees and all the good and growing things and whatever else was listening—“casting the net wide” she’d called it—and raved ecstatically from her hospital bed about the titan-tall elk spirit that had answered in her dreams; that had offered to make her whole. All while the doctors kept sedating her, and it was all Rani could do to hold her spasming hand as the nurses strapped her down while the drugs coursed through her; bad reaction after bad reaction after worse to everything they tried.
“Whole” apparently having a decidedly different definition to something that isn’t human. Something that definitely doesn’t belong in the waking world if this is what it thinks helping looks like.
Rani doesn’t even try not to cry anymore as she cradles parts of her wife that aren’t supposed to be on the outside, flesh merging into fur in haphazard pattern; one eye all black and set different in a skull that can’t agree what shape it’s supposed to be, random bits of her trying to exist as a herbivore, antler-crowned, the whole of her still seeping so much blood…
Rani’s stopped trying to wipe away the tracks of tears down her cheeks, long rivulets running through the grime and the dried blood from when she kept wiping her hands across her eyes or knuckling at them to stay awake.
She’s lost track of how long it’s been, duct tape and glue and stolen surgical scissors bent toward fixing the mess of the woman she loves that that dreaming god or whatever the fuck it is made of her.
Piece by piece she’s putting her back together. Trying to at least seal the wounds and the breakage as her wife struggles to breathe through mismatched lungs and a throat caught between shapes. She’s been drowning out the wheezing, numbing her ears to it. Though she’s not sure how much longer she can bear to hear it.
“We’ll fix you, baby,” she whispers, eyes stinging salty and red-rimmed. “We’ll fix you,” she whispers to the chimera before her, ignoring the eyes that keep begging to be allowed to die.
* * *
She could have left her at Sunnybrook. Let the hospital’s doctors deal with the aftermath of the change Vixi knew was coming and had whispered to her about deep in the night, tears of joy running free when she talked about the promises the thing had made. When she talked about how beautiful it was in her dreams. That towering antlered god, awesome and austere, a beatific beauty the apotheosis of vernal perfection.
Rani had wept with her, so long since she’d seen that bliss in Vixi’s face.
She’d kept weeping, head buried against her sleeping wife’s side, as Vixi communed in dreams with the god who’d pledged to fix her.
* * *
The police have been looking for the pair of them since she spirited Vixi out of the hospital. But they don’t understand. She can’t stop hearing the doctors in her head; recalling how they talked of vivisecting whatever the hell Vixi’d become; how terrified they were of the mutilated thing that struggled to breathe as its blood soaked through the sheets in a flood that spilled over the edges of the hospital bed to splash down to the floor in waterfalls Rani couldn’t help but find captivating; light making a crimson prism of that magnificent fall. Something to latch onto as she disassociated; as she struggled to bring herself to look at her wife; at what she’d become while both of them slept, Rani’s face caked in gristle and dried blood from where she’d been resting it against Vixi.
She’d screamed like a banshee as they tried to drag her out of the room. There’d been so much more blood as she’d stabbed and stabbed and stabbed with anything in reach at the people trying to keep her from her wife. From the only thing that mattered.
Then more shouting before she’d drifted out of time and sense, bleary eyes looking down at the needle in her bare arm, spitting slurred words as she went under.
* * *
She’s pretty sure she didn’t kill the hospital security staff guarding her wife when she went back for her; her own restraints too easy to break. Nothing strong enough to keep her from Vixi.
Rani wishes she cared more about the people she’d left bloody on the floor of that hallway. But the only thing she truly cares about is dying slowly in front of her, no matter how much she does to fix her. No matter how much she cuts and sews and binds and begs. No matter how much she kisses her wife, who can barely talk except to burble in bloody bubbles. Whose own tears run free, who can do little more than hiss her name and whisper Please … stop. She can see how much pain Vixi’s in. She stole painkillers on the way out, too. But they’re running out now. And she needs to fix this.
She considers a moment, looking at the pills in her hand, and downs the benzos dry. She stares at Vixi’s coarse-breathing body, lying wrapped under the blankets on the mattress in the garage, as Rani waits for the drugs to kick in. She needs to keep her wife warm while she goes to find the fucking thing that did this.
Either to fix Vixi, or just to make the god-thing hurt. She hasn’t thought that far ahead. Maybe both. Who can know? she thinks sluggishly while her head nods and feathers down toward her chest in time with her breathing as she sits cross-legged in that garage, praying just like Vixi did, to the earth and the trees and all the green and growing things and whatever else is still hopefully listening.
And drifts out of the waking world.
Down into the dark…
* * *
She inhales sharp as she snaps awake. Ready to curse the world and the benzos and fate and whatever the fuck else is in range for coming back to waking. Until she looks up. And says “Oh,” in a voice so small it could fit between a mouse’s paws.
The sky shifts in a swirl of colours, the horizon stretching out forever across a plain of waving sun-burned grass, brown-tipped against painfully vivid myrtle, acid, and neon greens. The colours bleeding in a muddied spectrum under a sky burning through vermilion and ochre hues by uneven turns, before washing dark with sweeping patches of putrid cloud that swallow whatever unseen sun shines here. Her eyes aching as they try to keep up with the assault. Like being in a painting constantly thinned and running before new brush strokes gash across the canvas.
And then she sees It, and her hands clench into fists.
“Fuck you, you vile piece of mythic dogshit!” she screams up at the massive figure towering in the vast distance like a living mountain against a blood-red sky. “Yeah, you, you fucking cunt!” she shouts as the many-antlered god turns in glacial ages to regard her. The light of its eyes casting a burning glow across the sky, colossal searchlights blinking in stentorian measure as it angles down.
And then it is before her, time split like a cut film reel, its eyes burning into her soul, lifting her from the ground through sheer will as it kneels down to get a better look at her, sniffing through nostrils wide as craters to taste her scent. Time broken and out of joint, moving forward and in reverse as the living mountain turns her around to regard her, and pulls her apart at the seams to regard what lives in her, to explore every nook and cranny.
Rani screams as it puts her lungs and her larynx vaguely back in the right places. Everything feeling off, hard to breathe the too-thick air of wherever the fuck she is now that she’s not quite who she was before.
“Wife,” the impossible thing above her echoes, antlers scraping bloody streaks that rain like tears from a now-magenta sky. “Raging,” it adds, rearing back as if confused.
“Damn right!” Rani yells in broken voice, trying not to care how much it hurts to talk with her throat remade wrong. “You said you’d help her,” she spits, flecks of it coating her lips to run down her chin. Like how Vixi used to drool after they’d bring her out of her induced stupors so they could run their checklist; see what progress they’d made trying to kill the thing eating her alive. “You gave her hope!” Rani shouts, sobs hitching their way out of her chest. Her head falls slowly, whole body deflating. “You fucking lied,” she spits barely above a whisper, more for herself than the god still considering her.
“Helped,” the god-thing says, and Rani looks up. She could swear it’s trying to smile, its face splitting into cracks and fissures instead, teeth everywhere, stretching back up to its eyes and beyond. No sense of scale or scope as she tries to follow its impossible lines, its joy a living, liquid thing beyond mortal understanding. “Remade,” it echoes proudly, looking up to the sky, its form shuddering before time blinks and it’s back looking at her again, crouched closer; a mountain regarding an errant pebble. “Unhappy?” it asks, a child confused over an unloved gift.
“You fucking broke her!”
“Fixed,” the towering thing above her says to itself, the rumble of its confusion breaking the land apart at the seams, the ground howling in agony as the plain tears at itself, splitting like breaking waves only to crash down and swallow the fields whole. Jagged mountains rising in the wake of that motion, green-treed and shining like newborn emeralds. Before the god-thing above her nods once, a decision made, and breathes in the sky, drinking it down like water before turning in slow measure back to Rani, the terrible thing towering over her smiling again. “Make. Right,” the god-thing says, distorting and folding in on itself, until when Rani looks at it again its hands are stretched up to the sky, as if this thing too prays to some unseen higher power.
Rani can see it in her mind as that sunders, as something rips through her, rewriting everything she ever was and might be: an endless chain of obeisances spiraling out across realities, one god-entity praying to another to another to another, hoping someone, somewhere, has some sense of the grand tapestry underlying everything. That something has answers.
The thing Rani is becoming shudders at the emptiness, the need, at the heart of the universe; at the horror of understanding how alone, how afraid, how disconnected everything feels; that at that beating heart is a desire for connection. For unity. For love.
She understands in that moment how terrible, how beautiful, how broken, that ardor can be, given without understanding, without care; in reckless, beneficent abandon.
She understands how much, in that moment, this god-thing loves Vixi. How much it loves her. How much it loves everything.
She understands how oppressive, how crushing, is the burden of that passion—that worship.
She can feel it in her breaking bones as they’re retrofit into other shapes, face elongating, body cracking and breaking as it adjusts to new shape, as flesh sprouts downy fur, as keratin shifts from cuticle to hoof, as antlers burrow their way out from remolding skull, as her ribcage adjusts and her lungs move up and back, heart shuddering as it follows suit. Her screaming comes out different now as her eyes see in new ways.
It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, she thinks in endless loop as wave after wave of change sweeps through her. Her mind the only thing not grown cervid as she fights to wake herself from the nightmare.
* * *
Daylight cracks through eyes thick with rheum. Rani blinks at the pain of waking. At the sudden flood of something vomiting from waterlogged lungs; as she throws up past teeth that ache in a jaw that doesn’t feel right. The liquid she brings up sloshes too thick and too odd to be water or blood, viscous on the floor like sludge. She can’t properly tell its colour, something wrong with her eyes. Hues in the garage she knows should be distinct all blurred together. Fall greens and oranges and reds all dancing in her vision.
She tumbles when she tries to stand, head bending wrong when she tries to lift it; heavier than its ever been and her bones feeling so light. Her normally muscular limbs trying to hold her wrong.
Vixi’s still there, huddled breathing harshly under the cover of that blanket. Wheezing in aching measure, body dying around her in slow stages.
Rani tries to call to her, but only bleats, voice a high, strange cry. She shudders to hear it and stretches one arm out to Vixi. That limb, in her altered vision, too long and narrow, lean meat on bone under fur, ending in cloven, hard hoof.
She feels like she should be screaming. But her body’s sensory input is overwhelmed. Everything too much, too sudden, too raw.
And she can already feel her body shutting down. A better approximation from the god-thing this time, but still an imperfect transformation from a being who only dreams of flesh, of embodied existence, understanding none of it caught in a world without borders or finite limits. Its concept of “fixed” a world away from corporeal, transient understanding.
Having felt the touch of that terrible, transubstantiate love, she can’t blame the god-thing for trying to save them as best it knew. At trying to remake them into its own version of perfect.
How many months now has she spent trying to save Vixi? How many hours after has she spent trying to “fix” her. Trying anything and everything. And yet it was Vixi who’d somehow reached across realities to find something that only wanted to help; to gift its otherworldly, nightmarish love.
Just got the raw end of that deal, Rani thinks as she drags herself one limb at a time across the mess of the garage floor, leaving a streak of blood and gore in a thickening trail in her wake. Before she hoists her broken body up to nudge aside the blanket with her nose and lays her bloodied face against her wife’s moebian-twisted ribcage, listening to Vixi’s shuddering breaths and her gradually slowing heartbeat.
It doesn’t matter what shape they take. How broken they are. Or how little time is left. She’s done fighting.
Rani closes her eyes. Home. The only place she’s ever wanted to be.
She can hear the sirens wailing, getting closer. It looks like they won’t be alone long.
But they’ll find them together.
As they’ve always been.
Until the end.
* * *
Kaya Skovdatter (She/They) is a trans, disabled graduate of Clarion West (2014) with work published in Augur, Shimmer, Stone Telling, and Strange Horizons, among other venues. Kaya is the co-founder, and was for seven years co-editor, of the Ignyte- and British Fantasy Award-nominated Anathema: Spec from the Margins. She’s currently publisher of Huldra House (www.huldrahouse.com). Find her at kayaskovdatter.wordpress.com and on Bluesky @gothgreenwitch.bsky.social.
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