Where the Dark Stands Still

by A.B. Poranek

Look toward the light, she reminds herself. Then you will not see the shadow behind you.

“That you must never leave the estate grounds without me, nor the manor after dark. Obey these, and you will be free in a year… assuming you survive that long.”

He grimaces. “I preferred you when you were quiet.” “And I preferred you when you were a deer.”

His is a treacherous beauty, a rusałka’s beauty—enthralling and deceitful, good for nothing but tragedy.

“If I look like a monster,” he says roughly, “then no one will be surprised when I do monstrous things.”

“I don’t think you’re a monster.”

He is a seven-hundred-year-old czarownik. With antlers.

He cannot leave her, not like this. She needs to know where they stand—that she didn’t imagine the softness of his voice or the longing in his eyes.

“He does not deserve you, Liska Radost.”

“Nor I him,” she replies. “But nothing is ever equal with humans, really—we give and we take, the scales ever tipping. That’s just the way of it. I am what he has, and he is what I have—there’s no point keeping score.”

if the world has not prepared a place for you, you must take up a hammer and chisel and carve one out for yourself.”

“You are not a monster, Liska Radost. You are sunlight, and you breathe life into everything you touch.”

“She asked it politely.” The demon makes a sound that is half laugh, half wheeze. “I resent you, you absolute madwoman.”

the Leszy muttering something about “mutinous peasant girls with no common sense.”

“I must tell you, my dear fox,” says the Leszy, “that you deserve someone far better than me. And yet—” His fingers brush the tip of her ear, linger there. “And yet, and yet and yet, I am a selfish creature, and I do not want to let you go.”

“Do not go back to that village, Liska.” He holds her gaze, steadfast. “Stay here with me. Stay, and you can have all the power and magic you desire. Stay, and you can be anyone you want.”

She wonders if kissing a demon is an appropriate thing to admit at confession.

For that brief splinter of time, the Driada feels like a different world entirely—a transient place where the dark stands still, waiting for the light to arrive.

“We kissed, you incorrigible antlered tragedy!

“My dear, terrible demon,” she whispers into the silence. “You open and close like a door caught in a draft. One moment you put flowers in my hair, and the next you hide yourself from me. I don’t want to live like that—forever afraid, forever restrained. You may have stopped fighting, but I’ve only begun. And perhaps you’re right—perhaps I can’t solve this. But I have to at least try.”

Because you are in love with the Leszy.

What can she do? Demons do not choose to become demons, do not decide to linger, tied to Orlica’s magic. It is merely a cruel stroke of fate. This is how it may be, monsters and monstrosities, but who among them hasn’t done monstrous things?

And then, oh then. Liska, Liseczka, the worst thing of all happened.” His voice cracks, and he looks away. “I fell in love.”

(He does not find her beautiful, he does not. What an absurd idea!)

They are insufferable and nosy and agents of rampant chaos. Yet when he is around them, he feels as if he is full of firelight: warm and bright and… and dreadfully poetic, apparently.)

She is beautiful, and he is going to die for her. For all of them. Liska and Maksio and Jaga and the House Under the Rowan Tree. (A pity his heroic sacrifice will go unappreciated. It should have been worthy of one tragic ballad, at least.)

(Of women, he’s heard it said: “She will be the end of me,” or “She will be my undoing.” None of that is true for Liska Radost. She is not the end of anything, but the beginning of everything. He has been dead a long time, and she is his resurrection.)

“Liska, Liseczka. Oj, lisku.” He raises her hand to his lips, kisses her knuckles in a final act of worship. His smile is that of a man complete. “I am already saved.”

This is the last time they will ever grow in the Driada.

But Liska is not proper. She is a czarownik with butterflies in her chest and a forest in her veins, and she has carved out a place for herself that is fully her own.

Until one night, one rainy spring night, it does not.