Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who isn't a dragon. Or a kraken. Or a wolf. Or a snake. Or a tentacled horror. Or some kind of undead. What are they?
"I'm SIX now," Emory says stridently.
"Six or six centuries," Rhuvan says easily, "your shoes are all covered in mud. Off with them before you come indoors."
"I'm not COMING indoors," Emory says crossly, in the exasperated way of someone who's explained all this. "I just need my Opus Bestiarius, because there's a monster next to the water and it's not a dragon or a kraken or a wolf or a snake or a tentacled horror or an undead or—"
"Mayhap a badger, young lord?" Rhuvan says indulgently. Three winters ago, the lad wouldn't have been allowed to stray alone like so; Rhuvan watched constantly for assassins. But none came, and neither did word of new orders for Rhuvan, and so take the boy away and see him grow has become less a charge and simply — life. A new, slow, softened life.
Rhuvan worries, sometimes, how much she likes that. That she's too soft, that one day there will be assassins, and she will no longer be half the guardian the boy needs. But for now, the boy grows, and wanders the flower-fields diligently cataloguing and interrogating imagined beasts, and Rhuvan tends the bees and learns rudiments of house-keeping from the farmer's widow they live with, these soft years.
"I think it's a dracula," the young lord says importantly.
"I was under the impression," Rhuvan says gravely, "that the dracula was a kind of a vampire, and so an undead."
"No," Emory informs her. "You'll have to read my bestiary."
"Of course, young lord. Wait there and I'll fetch it for you, that you may interview your dracula without muddying the widow's floors."
She fetches the small bound journal, expecting him to skip off into the grass. Instead, the boy hesitates, then fumbles for her hand.
"You'd better come too," he says, tugging her off the porch. "I don't know all the words the monster uses."
That's a bolt of cold up the spine; he's never said that about any of his fantasised creatures before. If he's been talking to some stranger, crept up on them....
"I suppose I better had," she agrees, mildly as she can. "I do know some words."
He leads her through the flowers, down to the tiny tinkling stream that parts this field from the next. Lounging on the bank on it, sure enough, is a long figure, barefoot, dressed in winding green fabric, edged in tatters of pale lace, like a queasy-coloured foam-ridged sea. Her eyes are poison-green; her hair runs with water, unnaturally much and undrying despite the warmth of the day, and the spreading wet stain on the bank of the stream around her says that it's done so ceaselessly while she awaited the boy's return.
"Ah," Rhuvan says, mouth tight. "Not, I think, a dracula after all, young lord."
What it is, Rhuvan has never known; perhaps none living do. It has served the young lord's house for time out of mind, bound by some long-ago wizard. Bound, she thinks, and not simply created; no artifice she's ever seen or heard of has such sly personality. It is watery, and can go wherever running water does; it is loyal — help them all, if it ever discovers how not to be — and it is, Rhuvan thinks, a curse.
The family history is threaded with obsession and deaths by drowning. The monster is an object of fascination; again and again, people fall into a madness, desiring to possess it; never mind that they already command it, as more property than person; never mind that it is no person; never mind that they have ample evidence what happens, when they so bend their will against it.
And they perish: wet and frenzied deaths.
"Not a dracula," the monster agrees, grinning up at Rhuvan.
"You LOOK like a dracula," Emory informs it. "I think you are!"
"You should listen to Rhuvan," it says, still looking up at her.
Its long, wet hair, Rhuvan thinks, would be as soft and warm as a sud-frothed bath to sink one's hand in.
"Well what are you, then!"
It purses ripe lips, taps considering fingertips upon them. "A mermaid," it suggests eventually, voice solemn and eyes laughing.
"No," Emory says, outraged. "You're not a fish."
"Oh, well—" and it catches its bottom lip and Rhuvan's breath both with neat and gleaming teeth. "An elephant, perhaps?"
"Nooooooo!" Emory hoots in delighted contempt.
"No," it agrees, "something wickeder."
"A ghost dracula!" Emory pronounces at the top of his voice.
"That's extremely wicked," it agrees, and stretches.
There were many reasons Rhuvan took the boy into hiding; duty chief, of course. But fleeing the prospect of her own terrifying, burgeoning fall to its madness was a dear-held benefit. Whatever business it has here, it spells the end of the time of warmth and softness; and somehow, just the fact of its presence is even worse.
No; Rhuvan lies. Not the fact of it: her own terrible reaction. It's been long enough not to miss it.
(And even quieter, in the back of her mind: long enough not to miss it? Rhuvan lies.)