Interlude 4
You are a princess, a priestess; a blessing from the storm god, and the jewel of your cunning father’s eye. You are Harapsili of mighty Wilasa, descended from celestial seed.
But not to the woman who just struck your cheek with the wooden spindle given to you as insult, shouting at you to make yourself useful.
There is a cruel goad in the words she assumes you barely understand, for the mistress knows well who you are—the last surviving royal from a hated foreign city that now lies in ruins.
You have never spun wool, never scrubbed a floor, never bathed and oiled another’s skin.
Those were tasks for slaves, for your inferiors.
In your homeland, status was paramount and divine blood runs in your veins.
To sully yourself with common tasks would have been worse than an insult; it would have been blasphemous.
And that is why they choose to punish you so.
It could be worse—the rest of your family was slaughtered, as was the entire male population of your city, the women and children sold into a slavery that makes yours look quaint.
You, however, were deemed valuable; too young and too female to be a threat.
Instead, you’d be humiliated: held as an example of your family’s failure and your false gods’ weaknesses, bid to serve the princesses of a foreign court .
. . but not entirely damaged in case you are needed later.
A royal young womb is not a resource to be discarded so easily.
But the spindle that’s been thrust upon you is a strange, alien device.
Not just because the task associated with it is an affront, but because the spindle is evil.
You know this as surely as you know—knew—the color of your mother’s eyes.
The spindle is as cold and smooth as polished marble in the deepest shadows of a temple and smells faintly of blood.
It did not burn when you cast it into a cook fire, in your first wild days of grief and rage—earning a beating for the rash act.
More, it seems to find you, to seek you out.
It is in the filthy hay of the stables that slaves are forced to bed in at night.
It is in the bush when you go to relieve yourself, in the bowl of wine you are commanded to pour.
And on a particularly bad night, when the groping hands and hissed slurs are too much, when the loneliness and anguish and wrath burn into a conflagration, you notice that the cracked end of the spindle shaft has a sharp splinter.
If pressed with enough force in just the right place, it might sweep someone out of this world on a river of blood.
But it will not be you. So finally, you grip the spindle, close your eyes, and ask directly in a hush no one can overhear, “What are you?”
And oh, we are so happy to answer.
But Harapsili is different from the very beginning.
It is impossible to lull her into possession; a royal priestess trained in magic, she identifies the spindle as the source of our fractured being and warily treats us as such: as something different, something other.
She holds herself apart, interrogates us.
And so we try an alternative tactic—we show her ourself, fragments of memory and blood-soaked vengeance.
She clutches us tight as we unspool gruesome possibilities for all those who have harmed her, purr of the sea of death that awaits if only she shall let us feast.
She is cautiously intrigued but not impressed.
Harapsili burns with fury, yes; but she was raised in a cutthroat court that made clear power was a game, one which took cunning and strategy and persistence—things which make us impatient.
When Harapsili is commanded to dress a newly arrived consort for her first bedding with the king, we encourage her to urge the girl to see a snake among the silk sheets; to stab it, to stab him, the tyrant who slaughtered her family.
It was not only him, she counters. Through her eyes, she shows us the entire court.
The queen, whose family wields military strength; the ministers and bankers who selected her city for destruction, who hold the king’s debt.
To kill the king would be but a single supper of vengeance.
Instead, Harapsili suggests a different narrative, an alternative thread to spin.
Make him fall in love with her, she urges.
Put a baby in her belly; a son, a second prince to compete with the firstborn heir of the increasingly jealous and now overly protective queen, whose brothers are soon training additional warriors.
Let the king go into deeper debt buying a new estate for his now-favorite consort.
Let it fall between the contested lands of two political rivals who need little additional incentive to conspire against each other.
It takes terribly long. You starve as she bows her head and obeys, quietly learning all she can about her enemies. You are tempted to push her. But Harapsili is no fool and has warned that she shall pitch your spindle into the sea if you try and force her hand.
Be patient, she chides. It will all be worth it in the end.
And she is right, astonishingly so, for when the royal family that annihilated hers eventually turns on each other, they do so with shocking brutality.
The worried bankers throw in with the queen’s relatives; the political ministers scramble, divide, and their games of betrayal end up making everything worse.
The civil war that follows is vicious and personal and, in the end, the only person left to take the throne is a distant cousin, a child surrounded by grasping courtiers.
Nearly every person responsible for the destruction of Harapsili’s city is now dead. Their wealth is gone, their children are slain, and their temple has been burned; her people’s gods given a shrine by frightened, superstitious locals.
Suddenly your whole world expands in new understanding.
Vengeance does not always need to result in death—at least not right away.
Revenge could be a slow torture, a meal to savor.
These will be small points of victories, sustenance for years, as Harapsili is wise, one of the cleverest mortals in whom we will ever roost. We would be partners, each teaching the other as slowly we merge.
We would be . . . challengers. She will never think of us as a collective.
She—you—are Harapsili, and we are the entity.
And for the first time, we fall just a bit in love.
If it means keeping this rare spark in millennia of dreary hosts alive, we will master politics and the manipulation of this intricate world.
We spend long, sweltering nights debating political strategy, learning how to study the pawns and players in the game of power.
Harapsili advances in the city of her enemies even as it crumbles around her, married off to a not-unkind but avaricious banker eager to pay for the privilege of once-royal blood in his sons.
She argues against the marriage, pointing out that it will remove her from the center of power. We beg, still at heart a mother, a wife who remembers those years as the best of her life. We are sated and now merely wish for you to be safe.
But in this, we should have listened to her as well.
And when barely a year into her marriage, she lies strangled in bed at the hands of that husband, her belly swollen with the child she’ll never hold, the grief that rips through your fractured being is enough to send you splintering into madness.
The ghost of Harapsili slips away, one of the few that will evade you.
In return, in her memory, you orchestrate the obliteration of the entire civilization around you.
When it is over, two centuries have passed and hundreds of new hosts have been killed in the effort, their souls captured and spun into your own.
However, you’ve recovered from your grief and believe Harapsili would be proud.
But the experience teaches you another lesson: you will not fall for your hosts again. They are your sustenance, but you will treat them as such, not try to save them.
For in the eternity that beckons, a heart can only be broken so many times.