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𝔦. Unknown / 𝔦𝔦. Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping / 𝔦𝔦𝔦. The Mountain Goats, Soft Targets / 𝔦𝔳. Unknown / 𝔳. Unknown / 𝔳𝔦. Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil
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What an age! Every one is dying, everything is dying, and the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun and the wind. I don't know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end. / George Sandin a letter to Gustave Flaubert, June 27th, 1870.
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I. The serpent eating itself, tail-first.
The first time Kore Byrne tastes blood, she is nine years old. The blood is hers and she wishes it wasn't.
She can feel herself slowly slipping away into the same veil of inexistence as her mother before her. Her small, bruised body feels too heavy for her to even attempt to get up, while the agonising pain keeps her down and silent, apart from the occasional whimpers that escape her when she does the slightest of movements. She has heard what the men that brought them there were whispering amongst themselves, she knows of the only two possible outcomes for her. She will either survive the night and end up getting sold like cattle in the darkest depths of the Underground or she will succumb to her injuries and leave her last breath right there, on the wooden floor of this dreadful cabin in the middle of nowhere.
She is cowardly enough to hope for the second. In spite of herself, she wishes her body would just give in a bit faster. She misses her mother, quite terribly. She would like to see her again.
Even after she is saved-
(It is a sight that doesn't leave her mind for years. The figure of that boy plunging his knife into that man again. Again. Again. The drops of blood on his face paired with his guttural screams making him look like a devil, far more than those men ever did. The girl stabbing the last man right into his head, making his immediately lifeless body drop to the ground. The memory follows her like a shadow, whenever she goes, becoming part of her even though she was nothing but a witness.)
-she can't stop thinking about her own cowardice, about the way her body shut down in fear, leaving her to rely on the good will of others to survive. She is weak, frail and vulnerable. She is on the bottom of the chain, she is an afterthought, she is alive on borrowed time.
