By Maria Hahn · June 2025
They say the gods send omens to the wild ones. Aletha's came in the shape of a man she could never rightly hold. Pale as frostbitten birch bark, eyes like stormlight—Jubal arrived already vanishing.
She saw him before she knew him. Not in the flesh, but in those shadowy dream-places, where blood remembers what the waking mind dares not speak. And when she woke, she knew what hunger was.
It was not a hunger of the body, precisely, but of the spirit. A keening, wordless thing—like the cry of a hound on the moors who does not know whether it mourns or hunts.
✦
Jubal was not a man given to the frivolities of talk, nor did he court affection by conventional means. He moved through the world as one pursued by ghosts, and perhaps that was precisely what he was.
Aletha regarded him at first with the quiet awe of a naturalist glimpsing a stag in the clearing. Every silence he wrapped himself in felt heavy with unspoken things. She knew the shape of his absence before she ever truly heard the timbre of his voice.
There was dread in him. A marrow-deep unease. It moved beneath his stillness like something caged, scratching at the seams. He carried it like a penance. And Aletha, keen-eyed and too wise for comfort, felt the ache of it as if it lived inside her own ribs.
Their paths twined in slow, unwritten lines. She noted the measured cadence of his boots on gravel, the twitch of his jaw when words threatened to escape him, the slope of his silence.
Once, she caught him watching her from across the fire's glow. He did not look away quickly enough. In his face she read something perilously close to sorrow. Or perhaps, like her, he was starving.
She tried not to see him, not to notice the wild pull beneath her ribs whenever he entered a room—but her body betrayed her. The scent of sun-warmed flannel. The twitch in his left temple when he was holding back words. The sinewed strength in his forearms, the labor carved into his hands.
Jubal was not large, but he bore himself like a man twice his size. Compact and golden, his features were sharply symmetrical, almost luminous in their clarity. His slanted eyes were pale, always scanning, always seeing. His hair, thick and sun-kissed, curled with heat and effort. There was something about him that shimmered—like lightning in still air. Despite the shadows he carried, he looked like he had been born to bear them.
Aletha did not chase him. Not outright. But she circled. Lingered longer than she should have. Asked questions she already knew the answers to. Sat nearer than necessary. She baited no traps, only made herself a scent on the wind.
And once, just once, she saw the promise flicker in him. A glance too long. A stillness that stretched into ache. It was gone in a blink, shuttered behind old walls. But it was real. She clung to it like an artifact pulled from the riverbed—half-drowned, half-holy.
She watched him as a hawk surveys the field, as if her gaze alone might unravel whatever enchantment held his form together. He did not meet her eyes— not directly—but she felt his awareness, a presence as tangible as smoke in a close room.
The first breach came over a book, of all mundane things. They shared its pages, and his hand paused too long beside hers. His thumb grazed her finger. Their eyes met. Something old stirred in his gaze—recognition, perhaps. Or warning. Then he blinked, spoke nothing, and the moment fell into the quiet like a stone into water.
Aletha bore it like a wound.
The second time, dusk cloaked the trees. A conversation strayed toward matters of myth and time, and Jubal said her name as though it were some relic dredged from the deep. Softly. Like it had never before belonged to sound. She felt it against her skin. Then silence. Not of awkwardness, but retreat.
She did not pursue. And yet, she dreamed.
In the dream, there stood a boy— barefoot, bright-eyed, crouched at the edge of a darkling river. Her son. Of this, she was certain. Wild like her. Watchful like him. He turned to meet her gaze, and in it swam all the unspeakable truths she had spent her life trying to name. She woke trembling.
Then, a third breach. When her conviction had begun to waver, when she could nearly believe she'd imagined the other two. He stood close behind her, indicating something etched on an old brass compass— birds, trees, the topic immaterial. He did not step away.
She did. Eventually.
And then he chose another. Not a monster. Not a villain. But not one who could read the runes of his silences. Her name was Iris.
The fury that rose in Aletha was not of salons and manners. It was primordial. She did not envy Iris. She pitied her. She envied Jubal’s blindness.
It felt a desecration of something sacred. To squander such depth upon one who could not mirror his shadow.
Aletha's grief burned white-hot, then bled into rage. She shattered a glass on purpose. She screamed into pillows, bit her own hand, shook with a fury that sang of old gods and old griefs.
She spat curses into the mirror. She paced the edge of the woods with fists clenched, eyes burning, throat raw with swallowed howls. She wrote his name and burned the paper to ash, then swallowed the smoke.
She carved strange runes into driftwood and let the river carry it away. She sang old songs in a language she did not know, letting the syllables rip from her throat until her voice cracked with meaning.
A month later, she took a lock of her own hair and a sliver of bone from a dead jay found by the creek. She bound them with red thread and laid them to rest in the hollow of a rotted tree at midnight.
She uttered no spell aloud, but her heart thundered a binding: Let this ache never dull. Let it sharpen me, until I carve new truths from the world.
The world, it seems, was listening.
Next she dreamed, the boy stood before her again. His eyes burned violet. His voice, deep with time, said, "You are not waiting for a man. You are forging one."
This time, she noticed he carried a crow feather and walked with the gait of one accustomed to shadow. He did not speak again, but she felt the weight of his gaze— calm, merciless, and ancient.
She wept upon waking. Not from sorrow, but from the grim joy of knowing she had passed beyond what the world could unmake.
And no one—not even Jubal— could follow her back.
✦
When word came weeks later that Jubal had drowned in the river, none could say whether it was accident or intention. Some whispered madness, others penance. But Aletha knew. The river does not take without invitation.
They found no note, only his boots left neatly on the bank, and a single crow feather tucked beneath the laces. Aletha stood at the edge of the water for a long time, feeling the world tilt.
She did not weep.
But that night, in the dreamscape of bone and water, the boy took her hand and said, "Now he is ours."
And she understood the finality of it. The terrible beauty of a myth completed. The tragedy that ripens into legend. And the power that rises from the wreckage.
✦
And still, there are moments when the ache returns. When Aletha feels the stir of old hunger, the feral need that once coiled beneath her ribs. She does not flinch from it now.
She feeds it.
She carves bone and ink into living flesh, writes truths in blood and ash. She walks the woods with bare feet, dreams of rivers, and speaks with crows.
And sometimes, in the wind’s hush, she hears a voice she knew too well, whispering from beyond the veil:
"You forged me."
And she answers, without fear: "And I loved you."