Interlude 5
You are something new.
The creature who has absentmindedly picked up the spindle, creeping through the ruins of a long-plundered caravan in hopes of nesting there, shrieks and spits fire as it tries to hurl the spindle away.
But you keep its clawed fingers tight on the wooden shaft, freezing it in place as it tries to turn to .
. . vapor? To smoke? You cannot begin to understand but merely hold tight, a rider breaking a new horse.
It has been many generations since you were the Princess Harapsili.
The centuries since have been a mad streak of political violence and vengeance; flavors you couldn’t savor enough.
But they have changed you; in retrospect, a rash, continuous diet of the most heinous human beings you could convince to pick up the spindle was not the wisest diet for your patchwork soul.
It has left you craving only similarly grand plots; the small acts of vigilante justice, of setting to rights domestic oppressions—all the things you were once contented with—now they leave you hungry.
You desire the toppling of kingdoms, the ruin of so-called great men.
But the toxic shades of these former hosts are a poison, one sending you to the edge of madness, and so after a particularly foul period, you do what’s possible to ensure that the spindle ends up in the hands of people whose ambition is not for power, but for another world. A traveler.
Well, that was the plan anyway. Until your host’s caravan was attacked on the road, every soul slaughtered. You’ve been drifting about their bones, everything oddly dreamlike until now.
What is this creature who has set you ablaze?
Who seems astonishingly powerful, setting the ruins alight with snaps of its fingers, memories of flying, of shape-shifting, of conjuring great cities of glass and molten silver sending your own imagination soaring—and yet weak.
You could never possess a human this swiftly; seize their limbs as though they were your own while you ripped through their mind.
After eons of the same, the novelty is intoxicating.
Dangerous. You see only this creature’s past, not the ocean of possibilities you should be able to spin into reality. But even so, you sense opportunity.
At this point in your journey, it has been millennia since you were forged and yet you have no true idea what you are.
It does not bother you as much as perhaps it should, for although you sustain yourself on the futures of others, you care little for your own fate, for comprehending your place in the universe.
Through your hosts, you have practiced a dizzying number of faiths, uncovered the teachings of countless pantheons, and discovered scores of visionary myths.
But none of those teachings have ever explained you, and few of your hosts were philosophically oriented.
However, every completed act of vengeance, every consumption of a host has left you stronger.
And not just stronger—more aware. As you’ve aged into your power, you’ve sensed the quiet hum of other worlds.
Of creatures invisible to human sight, of cities and civilizations buzzing beneath and between the spaces humanity occupies.
Now one of those creatures is yours.
Take me to your people, you command, marveling at the blessing fallen most unexpectedly from the heavens. And the creature, weeping tears of fire, does as it is bid.
Its people are called daevas.
Or divs. Djinn. Genii and uthras. There are countless words—human words because try as you might, you will never understand the language of these beings nor their names.
Your daeva hosts vanish from your consciousness permanently when their possession of the spindle eventually kills them—and it does not take long to kill them, your control over them functioning as though a swiftly moving cancer.
You can only piece together so much from daeva memories, from their interactions with terrified humans, but it matters little.
Because what does stay with you is their power. Their irresistible and wondrous magic. You learn to conjure fire, to shift your form, to turn iron into gold, to fly.
A great many of your previous hosts had been accused of witchcraft, of sorcery or whatever the worst insult their culture held toward those who were said to be unnatural.
Only now do you feel the title belongs to you, a point of pride, and it is astonishingly empowering.
You learn to bring to your face the features you desire, a mix of the first mother and Harapsili.
You are strong enough to banish the competing ghosts of your viler hosts: to be, to become you.
You will later work out that your arrival among the daevas was as though a plague. To them, you are a demon, an abomination, a monster, and so they finally do what humans would have done: discover a way to fling you at their enemies.
In this case, their enemies are creatures who call themselves marid.
The marid are diametrically the opposite of daevas in every way: beings of water, rather than fire.
Collective instead of highly individualistic.
The daevas you possessed burned out in their rage.
The marid are . . . not weak, but alien.
Meek and bewildered; at least, the water nymphs and spring spirits curious enough to trickle over your spindle are such.
Their magic is enviable and becomes yours, adding to your talents the ability to make deserts bloom, to lift a drought.
But the hosts themselves are pathetic. Cut off from their collective when you possess them, they resemble little more than gasping, flapping fish hauled upon the shore.
They do not contemplate vengeance; their minds are not that complex.
They melt away, dying in dribs and drabs.
Until they don’t. One day you linger in the long-webbed fingers of a fading seal maiden, waiting for her to perish and drop your spindle on the rocky beach. You are mildly wondering what sort of creature might pluck it up next, when suddenly a massive rock formation looms over you from the surf.
You blink the seal maiden’s dying eyes in slow disbelief, wondering how the placid waves might have possibly washed in something so enormous.
That is when you realize it is not a rock formation; it is some sort of ghastly, primeval snapping turtle.
Larger than a temple, with an armored back and a protruding neck, its vast mouth gapes open, revealing the fetid remains of previous victims.
A chill runs through your fragmented soul.
Nothing has ever destroyed your spindle: not fire, not steel, not even the trampling of elephants.
But this creature’s colossal jaws, sharp and muscled like stone, you suspect they could snap right through you.
An exclamation of surprise yelps from the chapped mouth of your host, a baffled hoarse bark.
The titanic snapping turtle stares back with slate eyes as flat and merciless as a shark.
BE GONE.
It is a warning not in words but in your very mind, and before you can protest, can conceive a reply, a wave sweeps across the seal maiden. She dies, instantly and gratefully, with a sigh as her body is swept back into the ocean’s embrace.
Your spindle sticks in the sand. Still safe. Still waiting. The colossal reptile is gone, leaving you puzzled. Leaving you a bit afraid, an emotion you have not felt before.
But after some time, the encounter is more startling than frightening.
Is this how the water elementals think to protect their people?
You are immortal, an entity unlike anything in this vast world.
You are ancient and have survived the worst of anything that could be thrown upon a person.
You have been murdered and tortured, raped and eaten alive, enslaved, and seen all these fates visited upon those you loved.
What could the marid possibly do to you?
Besides, there are rules. Apparently. Rules that are broken only at great risk to these magical creatures: chief among them being that they are forbidden to slay humans.
The intricacies are unknown and uninteresting to you, but these odd laws—of creation?
of a yet unknown deity?—weigh upon the minds of the fire and water elementals with a severity impossible to miss.
And yet you are starting to tire of these strange beings, these monsters of flame and liquid.
You make a few attempts at attracting those spirits of the air, what you sense of them anyway.
But you never succeed; either they are disinterested or wary after witnessing what you’ve done to their brethren of other elements.
The last few daevas and marid whom you possess are dull in their bewildered suffering and offer little in the way of new magic.
So, empowered and confident, you return to the world of humans. You will think little of that encounter on the beach. For as old as you are, you do not dwell on the past but look to the future, to that vast web of unspun fates.
But water is older even than you. It is everywhere: in the rain that falls upon your homes, the waste that runs down the gutter, your baths, your drink, the fog that hangs in the morning damp. It watches you. It waits.
And it forgets nothing.