the lion shifter and her justice.

Deep in the bowels of the cosmos, in a place found by the blood of every star's organs and universe's bones, there is a world bloated with magic. It is a world of dragons and behemoth seashells that float above the sea like islands. Blizzards are alive with the roar of hurricanes and tornadoes. Lightning streaks across fields of daisies who turn their faces towards all that white-light as if the only sun they recognize is a storm's wrath.

In that world there are mortals with the souls of animals. Every night the moon rises, enthralled and strung along on the melodies of their howls, and roars, and birdsong. The morning sun warms their fur and glitters over their mortal gardens planted with the hands of creatures that prefer fur and feather to skin.

But there is a strangeness - a sickness - to the magic of that world deep in the black bottom of the cosmos. What magic might be salvation in another world is poison here. All their spells turn to death, their flowers to rot, and their moon does not glitter as brightly as she should. There is a shroud on this world, one thicker than any funeral veil. That rot does not relent as poison does for there is no cure, no death, no respite.

All that rot only grows, and grows, and grows.

And slowly, so minutely that the shape-shifters do not realize it, that rot spreads into their souls. Like a stain it darkens, and darkens, and darkens until all their souls are full of blackness and nothing else.

That world turns frothing and feral, its creatures waking with pupils grown red and rabid. The seashell islands are soon overrun with a grotesque mockery of dragons, and unicorns, and gryphons. The gardens so thoughtfully planted and tended are razed and salted with the blood of slaughtered livestock. It's when all hope seems lost, the few sane trapped among the rabid with failing hope for the future, that a new tower rises from the skeleton of a birch tree.

Clouds curl around the top of the tower and there is no mortal, no creature, that could lift their heads to the heavens that had forsaken them and see the spire of it. Many went to see what the belly of that tower held and almost all of those turned away, for the tower held in it only an endless spine of stairs.

All but two turned around and went back to their rotten gardens and their cursed lives.

The first was a marked woman with the deep eyes of a bear and a body that promised she had too the might and fury of one. For her those stairs were not a thing to conquer but a salvation for the howling hounds of death braying outside the tower walls. Even those monsters outside, wild with the taste and smell of her blood, would not brave the endless stairs to feast on the remains of their almost-meal.

The marked woman carried onward and upward, her thoughts full of both desperation and the dashed hopes her night had held.

There had been a whisper in the wind, a bitter winter echo of a prophecy. She had heard it sighing through her window as she awoke to the twilight. That whisper had held in it both the thought and the feeling that there was in her broken world the end of the rot and ruin of magic. She had always thought so—for did her garden not hold in it a cure for every nightshade and opium petal?

But the wind, confirming her thoughts, was a spark to her determined soul that had long since grown as dusty and worn as a clock left out for a season. And so she shrugged off the melancholy of her world, grabbed her bow and her nightshade arrows, and set out through the forest.

The forest had welcomed her at first. The silver moon outlined each tree she passed and dragon wings soaring overhead like a map. She followed it, deeper and deeper into the forest, and it seemed to her that soon even her bear-nose could smell salvation on the wind the same way a reaper scents a meal on a battlefield.

Magic was following that moonlit map as well, slipping after her as unseen as the silent owls hunting vermin on the forest floor. And like those owls magic too was starved and so it hunted, and hunted, and hunted, while it followed the bear.

Until they both stumbled upon a pack of half shifted wolves and then one of them feasted and one of them was the thing which would be feasted on.

The wolves had left their mark on her. She could feel her entire spirit leaking out with her blood from the wounds. Her entire body had become a masterpiece of claw gouges and bite marks - both from the men with the faces of wolves and the wolves with the mouth of men. Each spiral of stairs had her soul growing frailer, and frailer, until it was nothing more than a thin incandescent strand of spider silk— so frail that she had never noticed that the path had started to go down, and down, and down.

And when she opened her eyes, and saw for the first time not the throats of wolves and men, it was to see a gallery of black and gold silk and a room of paintings whose subjects did not seem to know any other expression than joy.

Had she not been dying she might have realized that this, this room felt not like rot but like a cure. Even the air tasted sweet as she licked the blood from her lips and turned to those many-faces watching her.

“Mercy”, she cried, “Mercy.”

It was the second of them that refused to turn away from the monstrous skeleton of stairs that answered her.

Twilight had carried the wind to one soul inside a house and to the one curled up in the garden behind it. The lioness, with her coat as pitch black as any ore buried in the belly of this world, had heard both the wind and the marked woman as if they were a dream. For her own mind was caught in an endless loop of gods and golems, and snakes curling endlessly upon their own tails.

A pale unicorn ran upon the back of that snake and when the lioness went to chase it the sound of its hooves started to sound not like war-drums and freedom but like a the brassy screams of a massacre. Her heart, fierce and full with the passion of a hunt denied, shattered upon that sound of death.

Sleep had shed itself quickly from her muscles and she leapt as a lion from the nightshade to follow the trail of her bear-sister. She had no map of moonlight to follow and no shadow of rotten magic to hound her trail (for even magic strayed far from the lion-woman with her heart that had no inch of it free from a fury so hot that no infection could make a home in it). All she had to follow was the iron smell of blood in her predator's nose and the fear making her run so fast and so low that her belly brushed the roots of the forest through which she ran.

Even the stairs, as she leapt them so quickly that they seemed to her no more challenging than the wreckage of a tornado-torn forest, did not soothe her heartbreak and fear. Onward and upward she ran, following the same path as her bear-sister. She ran so quickly that she did not notice when the skeleton of stairs turned downward.

And so like her sister before her she went down, and down, and down, until she too found herself in that room that tasted of prophecy and joy. She too saw the many faces of the paintings, but to her their smiles looked not like hope but like sneers— all she saw was the teeth between their lips and the shadows of their gaunt cheeks that swirled like flies upon the paint. She saw the golden and black silks and the quartz stones of the floor.

She saw the blood and the wounds left behind by men and wolves. The lioness even saw the spider frail threads of her sister's spirit wavering in the still room as if all that fierce bear spirit was turning to dust.

“Mercy,” her sister cried, “mercy.”

The lioness shifted then and she brushed the tears from her sisters eyes with mother's touch. It was a human's tears that fell upon the marked-woman's lips and a sword's heart that started to break in her chest as she pressed her lips to that bloody brow.

She did not see how the many-faces watching her started to flake and fade in their frames. Nor did she see how every golden banner of silk shifted to the color of rust and blood. All she saw was her sister dying. All she felt was the flame in her chest sparking, and smoldering, and turning to something so hot that it felt as she if had swallowed up an entire universe.

The bear-woman's pulse grew fainter as she pulled away, so faint that the lioness could barely hear it below the raging hurricane of her own pulse.

“Everything will die to avenge you, my sister.” That spider-web spirit of her sister seemed to brighten as she said the word. It grew brighter, and brighter, until it became that winter wind they has both heard.

“Everything.” A woman's lips made the promise, but it was a lion's roar that carried the sound of it up, and up, and down, and down, that skeleton of stairs.

It was a lion's mouth that ripped out the throat of her sister in the last act of mercy that world deep in the bowels of the cosmos would ever know.

And it was a winter wind that laughed, and laughed, and laughed, as it watched the rotten magic quiver beneath the echo of that lion's roar.

Story written with @griffin_13

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