VELVETEEN vs. Balance #3
“You will persist in thinking that you’re the only one ever to be courted by a season, won’t you?
” Persephone shook her head. “We tried to woo Supermodel when she was still Heather York of Beaverton, Oregon. She was a beautiful little girl, and when she raised her hands, flowers danced. I would have made her a demigoddess, if she’d allowed me to do it.
Lady Moon would have taken her dancing every night.
But she wanted more than we could give her.
She wanted the world. I told her that if she took it, she would be no friend of ours, and she laughed at me.
She asked why she should settle for a season when she could have the entire calendar, and she walked away from us. ”
“That’s…seriously? She just walked away?”
“She woke up the next morning thinking this had all been a dream, and we never spoke to her again,” said Persephone.
“But we had touched her, and what’s been touched can’t help being changed, in some small way.
I like to think that your survival was her trying to answer to the balance she’d broken.
This place,” she indicated the thorns again, more sharply this time, like she was tired of explaining herself, “used to belong to all your kin and kind, because Spring is our country, as Summer is the country of the physical, and Winter the country of the elemental. She took it from you. She took it from all of you. I’m offering you the chance to feed yourself and take it back at the same time. ”
“What would I have to do?” Velveteen’s voice was small.
Persephone smiled. “Just feed yourself. The rest will come naturally.”
Velveteen looked down at her hands and sighed. “Some days I really miss beating the crap out of petty thugs,” she said. Kneeling, she pressed her palms to the ground, between the thorns, and breathed in deep.
Nothing happened.
“You have to actually let it happen,” said Persephone. “Trust yourself not to go too far. You’re allowed to exist. You’re allowed to eat. Let that permission sink in.”
“Lady, you sure do talk a lot for somebody who wants me to find inner peace or whatever,” said Velveteen. She took a deep breath, and pulled—
For most people, eating is a physical thing. It involves the mouth, the teeth, the tongue; the acts of swallowing and digestion. For most people, nutrition comes from the food they ingest, calories entering their bodies and being transformed into potential.
For an animus who can’t access her own life force to sustain herself, things are slightly different.
Velveteen’s hands sunk into the soil and her mind sunk into the thorns, instincts she was barely aware of having seeking out and ripping away the things that sustained their roots and fed their questing tendrils.
She was an animus: she was the perfect predator, needing nothing but the barest of contacts to allow her to feed.
Her mind raced, moving independent of her intellect, which was slow and steady and burdened with unnecessary morality.
The body was hungry. The soul was starving.
The power she was host to had the ability to fix both these things, and so fix them it would, regardless of what the mind wanted.
Persephone watched, a strange, sad smile on her face, as the thorn briars withered and withdrew.
They dried up from the inside out, collapsing in on themselves, before turning to dust and crumbling where they twined.
It was a swift, unnatural process, a denuding of everything, and when it was done—when not a single briar rose from the blackened, blasted ground—they had revealed a wasteland.
Tombstones and stone angels dotted the earth.
Cobweb-encrusted tombs loomed in the distance.
Velveteen opened her eyes and blanched, the new color running from her face as she beheld what she had unveiled. “Holy crap I conjured a graveyard.”
“It was always here,” said Persephone. “Look.” She raised her hands, and the waste exploded into growth.
Green grass blanketed the graves, and wildflowers ran riot.
Roses bloomed in glorious abandon, climbing the stone angels and softening the tombs.
Trees shot up out of nothing, breaking first into flower, and then into full fruit as they reached their maturity in a matter of seconds.
When Persephone lowered her hand again, the field of briars had become a pastoral graveyard.
Still a place of mourning, yes, but one where the beloved dead could rest easily, and where those who missed and mourned them could walk without fear of the thorns.
Natural paths had formed amidst the green grass and the riotous wildflowers.
Persephone started down the nearest of them.
Velveteen, lacking any better idea of what to do, followed her.
“How do you feel?” asked the goddess.
“Good.” It was an understatement, but that didn’t make it any less true.
She felt like someone who had recovered in one miraculous moment from a long and debilitating illness, surging back to health and then to some glorious point beyond simple recovery.
The small aches and pains that had begun to haunt her were gone, replaced by a feeling of absolute, unquestionable wellness.
She could run a marathon. She could lift a mountain.
She had never felt so completely, utterly whole in her life, and it terrified her.
If she could feel this good by drinking the life of the world around her, what was to stop her from taking it all?
This is how Supermodel felt, she thought, and the idea sickened her, both with its reality and with its accuracy.
Supermodel had been obsessed with her own beauty, and with the life she gained from the adoration of those around her.
She had wanted to become a goddess. All she had succeeded in doing was destroying herself.
She was an icon now, an idol to be worshipped and feared, not a person.
“No one ever calls her Heather,” she said softly. “I didn’t even know that was her name.”
“She was a beautiful child,” said Persephone, following the change of topics without missing a beat.
“So sweet. So kind. She was always a little self-centered. I blame her parents. They made their love dependent on her accomplishments. ‘Shine bright and we’ll adore you, glow quietly and we’ll ignore you.
’ They taught her that the only way to be valued for anything was to be the best at everything, and she did her best to please them, until the day she realized that there were easier hearts to win. ”
The path wound gently between the graves, now circling a group of them, now bending away from a copse of trees. Persephone stepped off it, looking down at a headstone. Velveteen moved to stand next to her.
HEATHER YORK, it read. STILL BELOVED.
“She’s buried here?” The words escaped before Velveteen could stop them. She decided that she hadn’t wanted to. Some questions needed to be asked. “How can she be buried here, after what she did?”
“She’s buried here because of what she did, and what she was,” said Persephone. “Don’t you understand yet? Balance.”
“I understand that I am not Anakin Skywalker, and I am not going to bring Balance to the Force.”
Persephone looked at her blankly. Velveteen sighed.
“You know, there is popular culture more recent than that whole thing with the Argonauts,” she said. “Maybe you should check it out sometime.”
“If you say so,” said Persephone politely.
A goose waddled past, honking about whatever it was that kept geese occupied when they weren’t biting ankles and stealing bread from small children.
“Balance isn’t about bringing something.
It’s about taking what you already have and making it self-sustaining.
Making it last. Heather threw the balance off when she started killing the people she believed would be her rivals.
She was so hungry. She wanted the world to be her banquet.
All the strength that should have belonged to them went to you, and they came here. To rest.”
Velveteen stared at her, eyes going wide with horror as she realized what Persephone was saying. “So when you said this place belonged to people like me…”
“I meant that this was where their spirits were laid to rest. All of them. Come with me.” Persephone struck out across the grass, leaving Velveteen no choice but to follow as the living goddess of Spring stalked between the graves, pointing.
“Michael Wittenberg. He brought clay figures to life. There was a gas leak when he was three years old, less than a month after he started tapping into his powers. Fawn Clarkson. She was a resurrectionist. Given time to learn her own strength, she could have called anyone back from the verge of death. She brought back her pet goldfish. Her apartment building burned down the next day.”
The litany of names went on and on, each accompanied by a snapshot of their powers: what they had been, what they might have become.
It made Velveteen want to cover her ears and scream.
She had never asked to be the one to carry the gifts and burdens of an entire generation; she had just wanted to be a good member of her team, to take care of the people she loved, and maybe to be left alone to be happy for a little while.
That was all. When had it become so unreasonably much?
They reached the last grave, at the edge of the meadow.
The land continued from there, but it seemed somehow hazy, unreal, like it didn’t really count as part of the scene.
Velveteen knew without being told that it was because Spring didn’t care enough, as a season, to bring that place into focus.
If she kept walking, it would be forced to decide what lay beyond the thin veil of disregard.
It might resent her for that. She stayed where she was, joining Persephone in looking at the blank tombstone.