Interlude 3
The spindle lies fallow for a very long time.
By all rights it should be buried. Should be returned to the dirt, decayed and unrecognizable.
By the accumulation of snow, of soil, of fallen leaves, of the bright green growth that comes every spring.
But just as nothing mars it, nothing inters it in a well-deserved tomb—a fate you also avoid.
Detached from your mortal body, you linger and drift over the spindle and the scene of your death like a fog that never dissipates.
Oblivion does murmur, an oblivion the mother in you yearns for but the dead goddess fights, leaving you in a paralyzed state.
Then one day, a man comes upon the spindle.
He is young, a potter pushing a cart toward a nearby creek bed who happens to tread upon the spindle’s shaft.
Another man might kick it away, thinking it a troublesome stick, but the potter is a craftsman who recognizes the tool of a fellow artist the moment his gaze falls upon the rich walnut shaft with its carved stone whorl.
You try to urge him to retrieve it, but you have no magic in this formless state.
The potter’s future is in his own hands.
Until he reaches down and plucks the spindle from the earth.
His hesitant fingers trace the slender shaft and you shiver as though he strokes your spine. His mind, his very heart seem porous.
However, it’s not just possibilities you sense.
Oh, his countless fates spiral out in the usual way, but this is something deeper.
An invitation to a more direct possession.
The sensation is new and remembering your ghastly death, you are apprehensive.
The first stirrings of self-control warn you to be cautious, to not fall upon this newest feast. But by the time the potter slips the spindle into his pocket, you have nestled in his heart.
And by the time he reaches the creek and begins cutting raw clay from its bank, you see your reflection through his eyes in the tumbling water.
His name—your name—is Ozmer. For those who have possessed and been by possessed by the spindle, whose souls merge with yours: these names you will remember. The names of cities, of empires, of gods, of children, and of enemies . . . they will fade.
But all that is in the future, your own; the one entity’s fate whom you’ll never be able to see.
It doesn’t matter right now. Instead you quietly creep and steal through the potter’s soul as he returns to his town.
The world has marched on while the spindle rested in the forest and you marvel at new sights: at the proliferation of wheeled carts, at the existence of braying donkeys, and the smells of foreign spices.
It is a simple town for its time, but to you, it is a new world.
Ozmer returns to his home, a small workshop whose plain appearance makes him flinch with embarrassment, but you are astonished, urging him to linger at the potter’s wheel and his mother’s hanging loom.
It is all so wondrous that it briefly distracts you from the hunger gnawing in your soul.
But not for long.
A young woman passes by, her belly swollen, and the spike of bitterness that courses through Ozmer is so familiar and tantalizing, it is all you can do to not instantly drive this town mad with a cacophony of conflicted vengeful fates.
Your appetite soars and you dive into his mind, his memories uncovering broken childhood promises, a dead father, and the heavy weight of new responsibilities.
The girl—his beloved—married a richer man, one who did not have a half-dozen mouths to feed.
As far as vengeance goes, this is petty.
Ozmer’s fate could be far worse and you try to stave off the inevitable, to find contentment in watching his mother weave and his sisters spin.
Their wool is not as soft, nor their textiles as magnificent, but they are pretty and honest and commendable.
There is joy to be found sitting at the potter’s wheel with the warm sun on your bent neck, your hands shaping vessels like blossoming flowers.
But it does not sate your growing hunger, a starvation that is starting to take its toll on Ozmer.
His body grows gaunt despite his mother’s cooking, his mind scattered.
One day, you sit to work and it is as though all knowledge of throwing clay flees your mind.
Would you let his family, all these children, starve because their brother happened to pick up your spindle?
And when you think of it like that, the decision is easier.
Though the mother in you is appalled, next time the girl passes the workshop of the young man she once loved, you unspool her web of fates like an oracle roots through intestines and you spin the thread that will hurt the most.
She miscarries the next day.
The satisfaction Ozmer savors when he sees her once again, her belly slack, your mother whispering sympathetically with your sisters, is as though a feast after a too-long fast. You savor the sensation; Ozmer wakes with a new brightness in his eyes, his flesh plump and his mind clear as a running stream.
Is it so wrong to ruin a life if it causes others to thrive?
Do seeds not require rot, fecund soil in which to take root?
The girl will lose a second baby. A third.
A fifth and the last, for this is when her husband finally rebukes her, declares her a witch and a murderer.
Her family takes her back, but they become outcasts.
She is forbidden to look upon other women, banished to the forest during weddings, cursed and spat upon.
Ozmer thrives. He works hard, creating such astonishing pieces that his work is prized by the wealthy.
He marries once, twice, enjoying a brood of children.
No one ever suspects him, and if in the dark of his soul, he sometimes wonders why it gives him such a vile pleasure to witness the continuing humiliation of the woman who once spurned him, he tries to set it aside. She likely deserves it.
But nothing keeps forever. Eventually the cursed woman succumbs to despair and ends the blighted life she has been doomed to with one sharp dagger thrust to the heart.
Ozmer doesn’t last much longer; with the source of your nourishment extinguished, hunger slowly drives you mad.
Starving and desperate, you attempt to force Ozmer’s hand, trying to provoke him into a feud.
But the awakening of a foreign consciousness in his fraying mind is the final straw.
It breaks him, you break him. And like the woman you destroyed together, he takes his own life.
But in the cradle of growing civilizations, there will always be someone else to pick up the spindle.
You find another host. Then another. It requires care to hunt in this fashion, experience slowly transforming you from starving beast to savvy predator.
You learn not to bluntly steal another’s agency like you attempted with Ozmer at the end; instead it evolves into a process of invitation and submission, more like falling in love.
No one wants to be possessed by an immortal spindle.
They want a connection, a sympathetic ear, a clear way forward when they’re most lost. Such intimacy also makes clearer the possibilities for vengeance everywhere.
You know those you hunt among; the hatred your mother bears for a certain uncle, the vicious betrayal between estranged friends.
Inventing patently unlikely futures isn’t necessary, not when you can take root in old grievances.
But this is a superstitious world. You have no law courts, no learned physicians; humanity is gathering and building and dividing itself into brutal hierarchies of power in a violent struggle with little precedent and few principles.
The vast majority of your hosts will die violent, unnatural deaths, but each passing teaches you more.
How to avoid detection and spin a narrative.
The limits of your powers and how best to stoke an injured heart.
Do you mourn your hosts? It is difficult to answer such a question because they are both your prey and your home.
And they do not leave, not entirely, each ghost laid over your soul like a varnish.
Their children are yours, their hurts and victories and loves.
It is a kind of immortality you offer, the opportunity to be part of something greater, one of the many faces of a being who will visit desert and jungle, the humblest of huts and the grandest of palaces.
But such an existence does eventually become wearisome, the human players and their ever-predictable selfish urges hardening whatever existed of your heart and leaving you increasingly less satisfied, like a gourmand who upon dining only on delicacies begins to find them dull.
No other emotion satisfied like vengeance; not love, not justice, not even murder done coldly and without reason.
Whatever you are, for you will never encounter a similar entity, was forged in a crucible of revenge, and no matter the glorious multitude of fates you gaze upon, the chance to stoke a better, harmonious world .
. . it is violence to which you’re drawn, the more justified and bloodier, the better.
However, you’re also tied to a spindle, a common object whose ordinariness means it rarely lands in the hands of someone different. Someone powerful.
Until it does.