Heir of Beasts

Ch. 2.4- All Unspoken Words

I walked to my own hanging with a lighter heart than I now carry with me. It feels like the organ has been transmogrified to the same old, dark stone that peaks out at me from the Goddess-House. Maybe it's simply turned to metal to match the dress, a sheet of silver I could heat over a forge and hammer into a sword. Or at least a shield. Something to deflect the gaze of ten thousand eyes, the cries and cheers of five thousand voices. The only weapon I now wield is my face, and I do everything in my power to keep it from betraying my rising panic. My pained desperation. My hate, hot and thick, as they call out well wishes.

I liked the hanging better, to be honest. Many of the spectators called me a traitor and a whore, many cheered at my supposed betrayal of my family, but there were still those among the assembled Arzsans that looked on with sympathy. Pity. Their eyes told me they still, as Kaza said, 'flew my flag in their hearts.' Now, there's an almost rabid merriment, a determination to be joyful as the world around us burns and smolders. There's a desperation peeking through the celebration, a need to abandon the past they have so thoroughly betrayed. To forget whose blood stains the streets they walk and dance on.

If I could tell them one thing, besides the truth of my loyalty to my family, it would be this: there is no way to cut yourself off from your beginnings, from your past, and still be whole. There's a reason plants in the desert grow from thick, deep roots. Those that just scratch the surface of the sand lose their footing in dust storms and droughts. They die. People are no different.

Forgetting is unfathomable.

Even now, the ghosts of the past walk beside me. The ululating notes of the Asenah played for my processional take me instantly back to a green and gold eyed boy who played it like he carved the first one from river reeds himself. My cousin Riva rarely talked, but his voice still carried. Music flowed through his fingers like silk through a half-open fist. His brother, older by three years yet shorter by a foot, talked a great deal. Dama will always be to me the little boy who snuck his way inside the private rooms reserved for greeting foreign dignitaries to steal the besmo'ín chocolates and imported Mirrenovese dates kept there. The handsome idiot who cut one of Alya Morevni's braids from her head as she slept and mounted it atop the flagpole the next morning.

We would sit beneath the stars on summer nights and, if we were lucky, Rivashi would pick up the Asenah and play a few notes, and Damaros would stop his flirting long enough to join his brother in any number of old songs. I remember my uncle Nather saying that even the old songs sounded new when Iddra's sons sang them. Haim was their father; that's where Dama got his drinking and whoring from, I think.

And now they're just.... gone.

And I'm not.

And I still can't decide which is worse.

I steel myself, imagining that my dress is armor wrapped tightly around me. The thousands of diamonds flashing silver in the sunlight are tiny daggers. My eyes burn, but I do not blink. Everything is so fragile, so dependent on everything else. A million memories flow back to me from the deepest rivers of my mind. A twig snapping in a dam upstream might undo everyone living along the banks. Another blink, another breath, the wrong scent on the wind, and I could crack like the old Harrowin stone beneath the Goddess-House facade.

I do my best to keep my head up, my eyes ahead, as I am washed by the tides of the life I lost. It seems fitting, almost, that if my family cannot be with me on my wedding day in body, they are here in spirit, haunting my mind like unquiet ghosts.

Maybe I'm the ghost, I think. What a strange turn that would be, to wake up one morning and realize that they all still lived, somewhere far away, and it was I who had slipped down dead into some indeterminate hell. I know it's not true, but if I closed my eyes I could half convince myself of it. Reality feels as thin as reeds along the riverbank.