Lorne was a wretched creature, she had known this her whole life. Other girls scorned her in the play yards, and boys threw clumps of grave moss at her hair. If you insist, they all said, on being so morbid, you ought to look the part.
She had confided in Janice, all of once, during solstice, that she found the graveyards comforting, and, well. Once was all it took.
Yet Lorne couldn’t help being odd once more. And then just once again. The once more’s gathered like beads of dew on a thorny thicket, and now she was the strange girl. The one with no friends at all.
Except for her little toad, a creature small and wretched, just like Lorne. The other girls crowded, faces twisted with disgust. Sister Loschen! they all cried. Take it away!
And so, under the watchful disdain of her entire class and their tutor, Lorne set her toad onto the grass and watched her hop away, disappearing into the misty woods at the edge of the schoolhouse grounds. Lorne hid her tears the best she could.
That evening, misery gnawed at Lorne’s stomach. And not even the pleasant sort of misery that comes with rain and cold midnights. No, this was the hollow sort of ache that stung in places too deep to soothe.
Lorne crept from her dormitory, a creaking room of weathered wood, arthritic with the squalls of autumn. She stomped across the hard, chilled earth of the unfenced gardens and marched into the woods.
Until moonset she searched, but could not find her toad. She found plenty others, but they were strangers. As dawn rose to challenge the churlish haze rising from the swamps, Lorne spied a small and curious thicket. A copse of stunted trees, barren but for flaming tides of fireflies erupting from their boughs.
Lorne crunched forward, for she remembered her grandmother’s tales. A firefly captured from the Darkwood’s own shadows would grant the favour of a wish.
Oh, how Lorne wished. She kept her firefly in a small jar beneath her bed, shielding its light behind a wall of books. She wished to be more agreeable, so that she might find a friend. Just one would do.
Night after night, she crept away and then back to bed, her jar alight with winged fiends.
On the glow of her second stolen firefly, she wished her thoughts to be a little more simple, more easily unteased, that she might make prettier conversation. On another, she wished she might blink more often, that her earnest gaze might not put others so ill at ease. On yet another, she wished her laughter might not be so brash, so abrupt, as to catch all off guard, herself included, during solemn moments where laughter was not welcome.
These and more she wished and wished and wished. To no avail. Her laughter brayed all the louder as her heart grew larger with hope. Her eyes rounded all the wider in her eagerness to share her family’s most thrilling folk tales. The others called her new and ugly names as their cruelty matured with adolescence.
At last, the glow of jars beneath her bed became too bright, and her secret was found.
Sister Loschen! the girls of her dormitory wailed. Take these ghastly bugs away!
And so, with tears brimming in her colt-black eyes, Lorne handed over every last jar. The Sister tsked and humphed, bleating her disgust as she emptied them all to the winds beyond their wide, arched window.
Lorne was alone once again.
She dreamed of fireflies and their fabled light, only to wake to the darkness of a new and dreary day. Lorne dragged her feet through the brittle halls of the schoolhouse, her shoulders sagging all through candle craft, mouth morose and frowning as she etched her sigils. Her hands trembled as she stitched her pocket dolls and bound her poultices, and had to work them all again after supper.
The woods watched as Lorne faded like the dark after daybreak. She wilted, curling around the ache of her loneliness like a spiralling vine. One evening, when dreams of gliding lights could no longer illuminate the girl’s shadowed heart, the Darkwood crooked her thorns and beckoned.
Lorne woke to the rustle of dry leaves and the scent of moulding earth. She followed the breath of groaning winds and the whisper whisper whisper of scraping bark into the deep woods.
She stood before her secret thicket once again. Why, she despaired, why did you not grant my wishes? Why did your magic forsake mine?
An answer was borne on the screech of an owl, the growl of a hidden fox.
They were the wrong wishes.
Lorne sank to the earth, her knees wet and muddied, wringing at her ash-brown braid.
We shall answer instead the wish unasked…
Lorne looked up to the sound of paws scratching over knotted roots. A creature the size and shape of a cat ambled towards her. It’s bones tumbled beneath its skin, as though it could not remember its own shape. Its whiskers twitched with the ungainly swivel of its head, turning upon disjointed axis. Its eyes were wide and glistened with lights that should not be seen walking the earth.
Altogether, the creature and its matted fur were unseemly.
“Thank you,” Lorne breathed, reaching out her arms. “I love her.”
One condition… Just one unbroken condition and she is yours to keep… Do not forsake her, or you too will be forsaken. Do not banish her, or you too will be banished.
Lorne shuddered with the shame of her failures. I promise…
Lorne carried the ghoul, open-mawed and yowling with content, all the way back to her bed.
This time, screams of Sister Loschen! Make it go away! were not met with timid acquiescence. This time, the Sister’s exclamation of Fate so help me, get rid of that monster at once! was not met with sullen compliance.
No.
Lorne squared her shoulders and bared her teeth, eyes dark and round with defiance. This time, as her laughter rang out, harsh as a moonless winter, it was accompanied by the staccato chatter and rippling hackles of her new familiar.
As she fed her ghoul bones and beaks and gruel discarded from the kitchens, she smiled, for once, at all the vacant space around her as the others shunned her presence.
It was no matter to her.
Her ghoul kept her pillow cool at night and shrouded her in tepid mist. Hateful hands that made to strike at wretched creatures such as them were met with needled claws.
Lorne’s dreams were filled with luminosity: eyes stalking in the dark to keep her company where the dead slept; icy moonlight glinting from the spines of secret trees, barren but for swarming clouds of wishes; fireflies dancing in the darkest places, bringing to life all that which was wonderful and strange and left forgotten beneath the earth.
Lorne and her ghoul were wretched indeed, and she would not wish it any different.
