She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.
⸻⸻Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
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HERAKLES Have you seen a man more ruined?
THESEUS Your misfortunes could touch the sky.
HERAKLES That's why it is time for me to end things.
THESEUS Threats are no use, the gods don't care.
HERAKLES Gods are stubborn. So am I.
THESEUS Quiet, lest you get more suffering.
HERAKLES I am stuffed with evils; nowhere to put more.
THESEUS What will you do? Where will your passion take you?
HERAKLES To death, whence I came, under the ground.
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ANYA Ivanov was made of marble and the Red Room wanted her dead. Two fundamental facts before we begin.
Even now, years later, Anya remembered it all. She always would. The psychiatrist had a few diagnoses, of course. Anya was frankly just surprised they didn't perform a lobotomy on her, sever the anterior part of her frontal lobe and take the madness out as if it were a chunk of matter, a tumour growing attached to her now ugly and rotten brain. It would've had a same outcome to the Red Room's teachings ── leaving Anya in a vegetative state of apathy and passivity. She could still recite the subliminal messages from the video projections. Instill. Fear. Pain. A slow drip-feed. Their objective was plain and simple ── break the girls until they're unbreakable. Which, at its primitive, seems counterproductive, but they knew what they were doing. With their barbarism and the ballet recitals until toes were breaking and bleeding and bruising. All their tests culminates to the Graduation Ceremony ── the last thing to shatter their delicacy, to see who's glass and who's marble. Sterilisation. And they said it was one less thing to worry about.
