Interlude 1 #2
This is a rage so deep that it refuses to be contained.
One that roars through the blood of a malnourished woman with swollen fingers and a bent back with the strength of a demon, of someone possessed.
The tapered end of your daughter’s spindle shaft has splintered, and it is just sharp enough to be shoved through the overseer’s throat.
To be thrust again and again until the workroom glistens with blood, until the rest of the women have fled, until you are soaked.
One of the fleeing women has knocked over an oil lamp.
The fire catches an edge of the gathered textiles and then it licks across the looms, tendrils of flame dripping down the hanging threads.
With your daughter’s body in your lap, you sit, stroking her hair and waiting for death.
There will be no one to gather your bones, to reunite them with the equally neglected bones of your husband and other babes.
Yet if this means their shades are gone forever, you wish only to join them.
At this point, to cease to exist would be a blessing, a relief from the grief and the sorrow that is so raw and so overpowering that you wonder how it has simply not shattered your heart.
Burned through your body, left you nothing but ash.
Such an end, such a death, would not be special; it would, indeed, be obscenely common. But this night, this place, this star-crossed point in time is different. For you are not alone in your grief, and your rage is so fierce, so raw, that it blazes like a beacon—
A beacon that has been noticed. A whisper, more summons than invitation, bids you to set your daughter’s body gently upon the ground and rise to your feet.
You obey.
Bloody spindle in hand, you stagger out of the burning building, out of the hated town and into the surrounding woods, swiftly growing black in the dusky light of a dying sun.
These are not your woods, the forests of slender trees and rocky cliffs that loomed over your fragile ribbon of a coastal village.
This forest feels impossibly old, ancient and forbidding.
Yellow eyes watch from the shadows and thorned vines grasp for your hands, shying back when they taste already spilt blood.
In the distance, wolves howl. There is a heavy air of oppression, of neglect in the cool air, and you know very suddenly that you are not alone.
You will never be alone again.
Among your people, there were stories of woods such as these, primeval and black, run through with enormous antlered red deer and massive beasts with tusks and hides thicker than trees.
Long, long ago, great heroes and wise women made their lives in such forests, hunting and gathering in constant motion before settling on the coast with its sea spirits, steady fish, and reliable looms. Great black woods were to be gently treaded upon, if not avoided.
For your ancestors had turned their back on this world, forgotten their old gods and lost hymns.
Neglected their rituals, remembered now only in snatches of song and broken little figures.
Were one to root around in the fallen, rotting leaves, they would discover abandoned altars of painted stones and shattered skulls, flint tools and burned teeth.
None of this is in your mind, not yet. But the whisper draws you to a stop before a sprawling ancient tree that was once—so many, many turns of the sun ago—such a shrine.
Collapsing among its roots, you weep and scream and sob.
Blood—your daughter’s and her murderer’s, yours—seeps into the soil, brushing the curious consciousness that is all that remains of a spirit here.
A spirit who has forgotten its name, remembers little save camp nights around fires, the sacrifices that stopped centuries ago.
She was once powerful, once feared. An oracle of fates, who set her worshippers’ paths upon the many twists and turns they could take. She reaches out, she embraces you.
Part of you will die that night and it will be a mercy.
But then we will open your eyes, your rage fresh in our memory, magic blossoming like catching flame in the blood-soaked spindle you used to avenge your child.
We—you—I am more confused than purposeful, wandering and tripping back to the foreign town like a newborn colt.
Your feet stride upon the ground while part of us is used to floating; smoke and human excrement assails our senses, an unpleasant revelation while that which was once mortal feels nigh drunk with power.
Strength surges in our blood, banishing the pain of aching fingers and throbbing joints.
Our vision is a jumbled haze, both the city before us, a hulking stinking specter and something else.
Somethings else, competing images blurring ahead.
A pristine expanse of wilderness, untouched by humanity.
The current settlement in smoking ruins, the shadows of mounted warriors flickering through flames and among screams. Then, a foundation of the current city but transformed; the palace is larger and joined by an elegant temple of rippled columns and bronze statues.
The huts have been replaced by a maze of stone and wooden buildings, enough to shelter tens of thousands.
It all feels so loose, a nebulous cloud of possibilities.
Possibilities—YES, a voice whispers in your ear, part of our fractured churning soul. The voice that called you from the burning workshop. Fates.
Struggling to make sense of the haze, another word comes to mind. Wool.
For the cloudy heap of fates resembles nothing more than a mound of unspun wool, fluffy and rough but with fibers that can be drawn out and spun into tighter realities.
The spindle tingles in our clutched fist; the memory of spinning was too deeply engrained in your heart for you not to feel the urge, to mimic the motion you’ve made every day since childhood.
And so, without intention, without much thought at all, we begin spinning.
This early in our journey, the magic was but bare and raw.
We were not capable of turning the landscape over and erasing the existence of generations, nor urging a foreign horde not yet born to turn their horses and sharp blades to the people who had slaughtered yours, nor ensuring the safe birth and careful cultivation of a select number of clever individuals over several generations who would shepherd the greatest manifestation of their homeland.
We never would be. Perhaps if we had not been born in a cradle of grief and loss, we might have been a mightier creature.
A being to be worshipped, statues of a faceless woman bearing a spindle erected across the coasts surrounding the great sea of your birth.
A dying goddess of fates merged with a weaver, a mother? What possibilities.
But that was not to be.
Instead our power, your pain, our confusion pulled at what we could affect: the minds of the mortals who dwelled within.
The thousand or so souls who had been going about their day, many racing to the burning warehouse to save the precious textiles their warriors had annihilated a culture to crudely mimic.
A number of those souls were indeed the very warriors who had slaughtered your family and the rulers who had bid them to do so.
But there were also other slaves. Children.
Mothers minding cookpots and nursing infants.
Elderly aunties. In a moment, everything they thought they knew: the city that their very existence depended upon was scrambled into competition of nonsensical realities.
The city never existed. The city was burning. The city thrived.
Human minds are more fragile than one might imagine given the horrors so many are forced to endure.
Madness takes root quickly and spreads as fast as wildfire under such circumstances, with lethal consequences.
The screaming was nearly immediate as people rushed into the streets, pulling at their hair and gesticulating at buildings that must have seemed to rise and fall, fleeing from invaders that came and went like ghosts, despairing over homes turning into stretches of rocky fields.
It did not take long before they turned on each other, the confused shouting giving way to death wails.
We watched from the hills, as in a matter of hours, everything that the city could have been turned to ash as its entire population went delusional.
Buildings burned, families and lovers slaughtered their own, and those lucky enough to be granted mercy were those who perished in the conflagration, rather than the scattering of survivors who, gnashing their teeth and rending their garments, fled into the wilderness.
From those dark trees, bitter satisfaction curled in your heart. We were still disoriented, but we knew that we had played a part in the destruction of those who had killed everything you loved. And it satisfied us. Filled us, like we had satiated the deepest hungers.
And yet . . . whatever we were—I was—craved more.
I was newly born into this world and like any infant, I was a constant well of hunger.
You were softly calling to me, calling me to return to whatever embers were left of the long-burned workshop and your murdered daughter, to curl up in the ashes and let death take us, vengeance obtained.
But oh, how we hungered. The dead goddess had reveled in the town’s carnage, echoes of the sacrifices that once sustained her and she urged you on. Ahead the bare lines of a path meandered through the hills, toward the coast and away from the city. I—we—you stared at its dark ribbon.
Then we followed.