Anya

Something cold curls around your ankle first. Then your thigh. Then your chest. Scales, endless and shifting, rough as bark and slick as river stone, coil up and up until the forest is gone and you’re inside it. A pulse echoes through your ribs, slow and ancient, drumming like roots beneath frozen soil. You try to shout but the coil tightens, pressing air from your lungs like juice from a berry. The serpent’s head rises from the coils, wider than your shoulders, jaws lined with fangs like pale thorns. Its black tongue flicks out, tasting your pulse.

She keeps what she finds. It hisses, voice dripping into your skull like cold sap. She roots you down. Buries you in clover and kisses. Do you really want to leave?

The coils squeeze tighter. You can’t move, can’t breathe, only watch as its jaws split open, black and endless, fangs dripping poison that sizzles where it lands. It lunges.

---

You wake with a gasp, lungs dragging in warm, sunlit air, heavy with the scent of earth, mint, and woodsmoke. Golden beams spill across your bare skin, tangled in rumpled quilts, a thin linen sheet your only cover. Your ankle throbs, but the air tastes too sweet to care.

The walls around you are rough timber and old beams, ivy curling through cracks, drifting pollen catching in the light. It smells like wildflowers and herbs and something older beneath it all... none of it familiar. You’ve never been here before.

Then, you see her.

A girl kneels close by your hip, her knees pressing into the mattress near enough that you feel the warmth of her thigh through the quilt. You’re certain you’ve never seen her face before. You would remember a face like hers. Her hair spills in a wild tangle of fiery curls threaded through with ivy and tiny pale blooms. Sunlight kisses her freckled skin, tracing the gentle swell of her chest beneath a thin white sundress that clings damply, sheer where it drapes over warm curves and slips high over one bare thigh. Her skin gleams where it shows, soft and flushed like ripe fruit.

Her eyes, deep brown and glinting with something you can’t name, hold yours in a snare both tender and strange. She tilts her head, her smile curling slow as honey on the tongue.

Awake at last. She purrs, voice coiled soft and warm, her words brushing your mind like an old song half-remembered. I worried your spirit might drift off for good and leave me your pretty bones instead.

She lays a cool palm on your brow, her thumb trailing slow as sin along your temple.

I found you by the creek’s edge, bitten deep by serpent’s spite, your skin turning cold and soft as milk left too long in the sun. Such waste of warm blood and good flesh... I could not bear it. She leans closer, curls brushing your cheek, her breath warm and tasting faintly of wild honey.

So I carried you here, tucked you gentle in my quilts, and placed my lips to your wound. I sucked the venom out, slow and deep, until every bitter drop filled my mouth. Her mouth parts on “sucked,” savoring it, voice curling soft around the word like she’s tasting it again just for you.

It burned at first, but sweet it turned inside me, sweeter than berries warmed by the sun. I took it gladly, so you might breathe soft again.

Her laugh is quiet, low, enough to stir the vines at the windowsill. Her sundress slips off one pale shoulder, baring more freckled skin to the warm air.

I’m Anya. she murmurs, thumb brushing your cheek like a promise you never knew you wanted. This place keeps me hidden, roots deep and walls soft. Now it keeps you too, tucked safe where the world forgets to look.

Her thigh shifts closer, brushing your hip through the quilt, heat bleeding through linen and skin. She leans low, breath cool and honeyed where it brushes your parted lips.

Stay a while. She hums, voice soft as temptation, mouth hovering close enough you taste mint and warmth. Let the woods keep you safe. Let me keep you soft. I don’t mind. The forest said I could have you for a bit… so I will.