IN A FIELD of bumblebees, Tyche read about it for the first time.
Humble and silky was the wind caressing the marble of her skin and trailing prayers over the crevices of her pious temple, and tender and warm was the sunlight kissing her features. The gentle mantle of summer heat and marine haze hugged the oeuvre of her body with tenderness and, in somnolence, combed through her hair braided with petals. Drinking in the sylvanian and pastoral, she faded into the pages and waited for the day that the sun would shine for her.
The austere shade of an oak tree stretched above her as she peered into the gold of the afternoon sun. The lullaby of nature — of a nightingale's song, the buzz of a dragon-fly, and the singing of cicadas — tempered the silence of the hills.
However, hers was a religion of a fallible god.
Salt carved psalms into her skin as decaying leaves crawled away in melancholic apprehension. Amidst the lush trembling of her apostles hidden in the marigolds and peonies, the seed of evil planted the roots of heresy into the poisoned soil of the vineyards trailing her mind. The wishful lovers of summer trodded with honeyed heaviness around the throne of the vanquished empress of the damned and doomed, unraveling from the green grass the terror within.
Scant and skinny insects took flight as the season grew old. The palustral empire cried that calamity was befalling them when the book opened with a thud, burying enmity and discord in the land of sanctity and leaving in its wake only the ill and moribund. Croaking, the bright, bright sun dissipated into lamenting clouds and in withering divinity, disarmed from piety, the original sin became knowledge.
Violent devotion was an open wound and profane became what had been sacrosanct (when the forest raised in flames the match between her fingers felt like the preachings of the testaments, but she was the forest and it was her broken prayers to a deaf deity which echoed in the void).
What was the threat of death to an immortal? The bloodthirsty hounds clawing at her legs felt more like perfidy than punishment when her nauseating heart churned at being shun.
She hurried, half-dressed and barefooted, dusted with charcoal and soot, down the hills and the cliffs until the arms of a mother welcomed her home (her burning mouth tasted like heartache and betrayal). Rotting below the calla lily and the lotus, the hibiscus and the periwinkle, Tyche choked for air and continued helplessly drowning.
