The Final Messenger

24. Proserpine's Garden

Eyelids flutter to greet a blank canvas. A disarray of red, flesh and bone flashes across the ceiling over the events of yesterday. Was it a mistake? What if Adria actually didn't want to be kissed? Oh god, what have I done?

But also:

Why couldn't our kiss have lasted longer? What if I can't tear myself away when we do it again? Or if Adria can't? What if...?

Here's another hardball — how pathetic could she get? The bar couldn't go much lower, she bets. She could list an infinite amount of reasons, a kiss on every finger in the world, as to why she fell for Adria, but what did she see in Niryn?

Maybe... Maybe there's a reason why she's forcing all her thoughts to be filled with Adria and those lips of hers, instead of confronting what happened the night of the harvest moon. There's a word for this repressed horror — trauma. That's what happened, isn't it? Objectively? But Niryn has never been one to pit herself as a victim. It just didn't seem right.

That word — trauma — that's something reserved for war veterans or rape victims. People actually scarred by certain events, had horrors imprinted onto their bodies. What she went through is something she can get over with in due time. That's right. She wasn't a victim. She was no one. A spectre that's not meant to be perceived or acknowledged. And if she was nobody, what did that make the girl who fell for that nobody?

In some sense, Adria has got to be a little fucked in the head. That makes two of them.

But if she was repressing the trauma of what happened for the sake of the only thing that doesn't conjure any anxiety and aversion, then why does she return to the kiss even when she does try to ignore it? It just doesn't make sense.

Heat pools in the bottom of her stomach and snatches hollowness from the back of her throat. For the first time in years, she feels some semblance of being full. Or just the absence of absence itself. When was the last time she felt this? How did it happen? It must have been so gradual that she didn't notice it at first.

Ever since Adria arrived, she started feeling like a real, actual person. No, she doesn't quite feel any less broken or "complete." But who needs that in another person?

Too much thinking for one day. It's a sign she needs to sleep.

•••

Her mother's voice sings gently, wind blowing hard against the hollow shell of her ear. She never aches for her mum as blatantly as she does now. She also misses her dad of course — so much — but he was never around as much as mum due to his busy job, which only made the two women closer.

It's been years, but the loss of her mum is like having a page missing out of hundreds in a book. Something is clearly off, absent, misplaced, and you can't tell immediately, but you know something is seriously wrong. Or like sunlight being slashed by glass. You can see the light trickling through the window, but all the warmth is gone.

She never thought about the fact both of them would be gone some day. Even so, they were taken too soon. What once was a happy family full of life and laughter was now whittled down to two lost, grieving, angry children forced to grow up too quickly in an unforgiving world.

Some day, Lydia and Victor will have to pay the price for their deaths. Even with the knowledge that the Edevanes were planning to withdraw from the insurrection doesn't make a wick's smoke in the other direction. She's not sure how, but they will pay.

•••

As soon as Niryn wakes up, she knows something is wrong.

In the middle of her wooden desk laid a spot of blood. No, wait. Upon closer look, a pomegranate seed. How did it get here? It couldn't be any of the maids, nor the Edevane mistress and her boy toy.

There was only one possible explanation — Theridion.

It's a very suggestive piece of fruit to be placed on someone's desk.

If I were to ingest the fruit and swallow it, would that mean I'd be stuck in his world forever?

The thought gives her a distant shiver. She observes it with the intensity of someone unwilling to lose a staring contest. Toss the fruit away and show you're unaffected. Don't let him get to you. Still, the ruby-red sin stares back at her, the outline of it gleaming like a siren's call.

In the end, it resides unflinchingly with the many discarded papers and tissues at the bottom of the bin. A diamond in the rough. A fruit amongst dead, bleached tree matter. A drop of blood on rejected snow.