“I’m the one who died!” Orchard yells, stabbing her thumb against her chest as she stands above me, her fist speckled with my blood. “All the fighting, and scrapping, and fucking dying happened to me! Not you, me. It’s not your story to tell.”

  “Really, okay,” I say, using the chair to help prop myself up, hiding with my body, the curling of my hand around one of the bars that forms its back. Orchard’s too upset to realize her punch may have messed up my face, but like her entire identity…it was superficial. So she’s not ready when I whip the chair at her. Sure, she has the reflexes to duck and does so, but not the awareness to be prepared for my knee ramming into her face. She tumbles onto her back, eyes swimming, nose very broken. I snort—it comes out wet, with a little blood.

  “Now we match,” I laugh, before I get serious, get cold. “Let’s amend this whole idea that it’s your story. See, I was around longer, from the very beginning of our fucking quest! It was me. Me who pushed us into the Underside, me who assembled allies, and it was me who built everything up that you broke. You violent, little creature, who betrayed me and stepped beyond your purpose to hijack my body in a moment of simpering worthless pleasure.”

  I crouch low so she can hear me when I say, “So fuck you, and fuck any idea of ownership you think you have. It is my body, and it is my story. You’re just the actor in it, Orchard.”

  “‘You're just the actor in it,’” she repeats, making a brittle mockery of my cold fury. “I’m more than the actor. I’m the whole character because while you were around in the beginning, I had to live with your choices. Teaming up with Amber, that was a choice that bit us in the ass; deciding to do the wild hunt and getting us cursed, was definitely an Earl-tier fuck-up on your part. I made every hard choice with the shit options you left me, while you got to hang out with…”

  She gropes the air for an answer. Ishi gives it, “Ishi, you can call me Ishi. But girls—”

  “Thanks, Ishi,” Orchard says, cutting her off. “You got to hang out with Ishi the entire time. While I was busy actually avenging Mom and Dad.”

  Her head snaps forward to find my face—I turn in enough time to not let her fuck up my nose further. So it hits me in the cheek, rattles my jaw and head, as she shoves me off. Though at this point, we were both in our more combative mind states, with me rolling back to land on all fours, growling with every piece of emotional artillery that I had stored since her betrayal.

  “Let’s talk about vengeance, shall we,” I say, “because you were close to giving it all up. In fact, if it wasn’t for you trying to be the most fuckable and lovable piece of butch bait for Sinaya—or his futch sis, Lupe—you’d never have discovered that Marduk was under your nose the entire time. Wearing our father as an earring!”

  “Take it back,” Orchard growls in reply.

  “Sorry, I’m a baaaad liar,” I say, “and so are you. Cause in your eyes, I can see how easily you’d have given up on Mom and Dad, if it meant some cute girl gave you affection. Though I guess we saw how strong your commitment is to even them, especially after you get a bit peckish.”

  She pounces toward me, the same time I pounce toward her, our claws ready to rend the other and our fangs more than equipped to bring the fight to a swift close once one of us had proven the victor. However, Ishi, who’d been the conscientious observer of our verbal fight up until now, chose to step in, quite literally I might add. Flickering from one side of the table to the other in the span of a single frame, and pointing upward with her finger. Orchard and myself fly up toward the ceiling, pinned in place by no power or force, but the raw redefinition of what up and down even mean.

  “Nadia, both of you, stop fighting,” she says. “There’s no reason for it.”

  “Oh there is,” Orchard hisses, “I’m pissed that you just listened to her telling my story. Who I am, what I’ve done—she’s probably already turned you against me.”

  Just like mom, Ishi presses her brow together with her thumb and forefinger. Phoenix eyes shut in frustration, pondering how she’d ever get Orchard to understand. When she opens them, smiling softly, she points to…me?

  “Nadia, no one’s turned me against you,” Ishi says, “and in fact, you should thank her. If anything, Nadia softened you. Small lies to make sure that you were seen in a charitable light.”

  “W-what,” I say. “I never lied.”

  Ishi tsk’s. “We’re beyond causality, love. I can easily peek into reality to see everything that’s happened or happening and verify for myself. It’s much easier to be omniscient here.”

  I bite my lip, unable to deny that I colored the narrative some. Not to help Orchard, alls below it wasn’t for her…but, we—I—had it hard. When I glance her way, I see that she’s covering her face with her hands. A useless replacement for a privacy that could never be found when your mother was omniscient, and seeing the truth of things was no harder than opening a window.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Orchard says, forgetting that Ishi isn’t Mom—I don’t blame her, it’s hard when she is so similar, so like her.

  Ishi coo’s, “Nadia, it’s fine. I saw everything, but that means I saw everything. You went through everything without a buffer for yourself. I know that every blow hurt, physical and otherwise, and I don’t judge you. Honestly, Nadia, for what Kareem and I have done…I could never judge you.”

  “That’s nice,” Orchard says, “but I’m more sorry that you saw me having sex.”

  Her words briefly stun the role of ‘patient mother’ that Ishi had assumed, breaking it down into a tumble of laughter. She points downward, Orchard and myself floating back to the flower, while still laughing. “Sweetie, you have no idea how many of my memories are of accidentally walking by your room, my tea room, or the bathroom as you and Melissa had sex. The amount of incense I had to buy for the house—”

  “I think we get it, Mom,” I say, blushing and hiding my face as well.

  She places her hands on her hips, assesses the damage done to the kitchen, and decides it’d be better if we take this conversation by the fireplace. Orchard’s eyes widen, her ears—wolven like my own—flick upwards in attentiveness, the place looks the exact same as when we’d visited during the first exam. Like me, when I first arrived, she glanced at the bed, confused about why whatever had slept beneath the blanket was gone.

  “It was that piece of us that’s an entity,” I explain. “The blanket put them to sleep.”

  “So we’re what, a trinity?” Orchard asks, and I chuckle as I’m only able to give her a shrug.

  “We’re complicated,” I say, shrugging off further questions I can’t possibly answer.

  Then the two of us pile into the plush chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. I slouch a bit, though largely sitting properly, and Orchard sits in my lap, her legs dangling over one of the arms while she nurses her hot chocolate. She notices me staring at it, and lets me have a few sips—it’s not that bad having someone who recognizes how important hot chocolate is.

  “So, what did you want to say?” Orchard asks between chocolatey slurps.

  I swat her knee, “Sorry, Mom, she’s just really direct.”

  Orchard sticks her tongue out at me, and being the older one, I do my best to resist snatching it between my fingers—I was fast enough to do it.

  “It’s fine,” Ishi says, “we don’t have forever here, as much as forever is more normal than not in these parts. What I wanted to say is, I’m sorry for leaving you both like this. It wasn’t what Kareem or myself wanted for you.”

  She accompanies her apology with a bow, her body leaning past the arm of her chair. It’s weird seeing her—Mom—bow like that. Mom was a hilariously prideful person, never bowed but would maybe write you a card with the words, I’m sorry, written inside. So I reach out to lift Ishi back up, but Orchard stops me, gently, with a hand on my wrist.

  “What are you sorry for exactly?” she asks, still slurping from her mug. “I mean, when you say ‘like this’ it can mean a lot of things: dead, alone, an awakened—awakened?—yeah, awakened hybridae. So, which is it?”

  My smile sputters, this is…not the kind of conversation I was ready for. It wasn’t like Orchard didn’t have a point, but it was still an apology. It should be enough. Right? When we shared a glance, her eyes said, wrong.

  “All of it,” Ishi says, “I’m sorry for everything that you’ve had to go through and—”

  “Pssh, I don’t need an apology for all of that,” Orchard says, blowing off Ishi’s second attempt. “Least of all for being a hybridae. I’ve seen the memories, Mom, at least what I’ve been able to recover. You’ve seen them too?”

  Her question is sent my way. Looking between Mom and myself—Orchard, I give in to the truth with a tiny nod. I’d seen them. I put them in the story, felt like it contextualized something for myself. Orchard strokes my face, again so softly, in a way that I hadn’t thought she was capable of—I’d seen her kill with those hands so many times before. But, maybe it was because she was fresh from causal linear time, hadn’t had so long to find a remove from everything, that the furnace of indignation still roared in her gut, fueling her through the winter of, maybe it wasn’t that bad and they like had a reason, which came for every hot passion at some point. It was just too hard to keep in the mindset that…it still sucked.

  “Mom, Ishi, whatever,” Orchard says, shaking her head from the confusion of addressment, “we’ve been hybridae since we were a kid. It was our normal, and you took it from us. Did to us what you were pissed another family had done to their kid to prevent them from transitioning.”

  Ishi raises her hands, trying to ward off the anger radiating from Orchard. “This is different, we did it as a safety measure for you. Nadia, you were casting Division sorcery at a rate that expanded faster than we could believe. You were cutting things, splitting your very ego in half— nearly destroyed yourself because a piece of you was in the Underside—”

  “You said I made it up,” I whisper, my vision suddenly stigmatizing. Orchard pulls my head toward their arm, rubbing the back of my scalp—she’s not as good as Every Train, but it helps.

  “We needed you to stop thinking about it,” Ishi argues. “You’d gotten too hard to cover up. One agent of the Heaven Sword Administration had already found you, remember!”

  Orchard nods. “I do, but what I don’t remember was any actual help. Neither you nor Dad taught me how to control it!”

  “It didn’t matter if you could,” Ishi yells, “we didn’t want you to have a hard life. Dodging the Tenken-bumon forever, dodging anyone who’d see you not as our little girl but a treasure trove of sorcerous scientific insights to read in your entrails.”

  Orchard sets the mug down on the side table. When I peek up from her arm, she’s glaring at Ishi without a care that our Mom—what was sort-of Mom—was a Sovereign. I nearly laugh; Orchard never cared about even tilting her head in a bow toward power, not really. What was wrong was wrong, and what was right was right. If the powerful fell on one side or the other, then that was what mattered.

  “Fine, we didn’t turn out how you and Dad wanted,” Orchard says, “but let me ask you, at what point did you ever think about us? What we might’ve wanted. You saw what we were once I named us?”

  That last question was a volley toward me again, to say my thoughts, and all I had to say was, “Yes, I saw. We were powerful, awful, and so very beautiful.”

  My words came through like someone who’d seen the face of heaven, and I suppose I had—we—had. Ours was a face that I couldn’t get out of my mind, couldn’t stop the ache in my heart when I realized that…I could be something more than I was. Orchard’s words, in her beautiful brutish fashion, destroy the last dam holding back the truth in my own heart.

  “Mom, you’re listing problems that are just, so fucking small!” I scream. “Alls below, we can be eternal, more powerful than every problem and—”

  “You’re never more powerful than every problem,” she hisses, “or did you forget that I also died? Sovereignty is not everything you dream it to be. It won’t solve every problem. You could die before ever reaching it, I mean, girls you did die!”

  “It doesn’t mean you get to deny us any choice in being who and what we are!” I scream. “For all you know, what if I’m meant to split apart? Orch—Nadia—Nadia and I could’ve split around the axe, circled the desk, and gone out the window. Maybe use each other as Godtime targets. Don’t know if that works, but maybe we’d be more capable if we just knew. If we had a lifetime of learning and being. Maybe…”

  “Fine,” Ishi says, throwing her hands up, “I’m sorry for being a terrible mom. I’ve never done it before you. Alls below, I’m a deity of War and Death, for whom the demise of old ways and ancient mores, the supplantation of order through brutal violence, has been the only thing I’ve known across countless iterations of reality and existence. Nadia, I did the fucking best I could, you were not an easy child.”

  Nadia and myself, grow still, Ishi’s words could’ve been tossed aside as not coming from Mom, but in so many ways she was Mom. If the two of us were both Nadia, split apart in something of a hack job admittedly, then she was our Mom…and our Mom thought us difficult. I look up, the first time I try to meet her gaze, make her see how much all of this hurts. The slow pressure on an oozing emotional wound that had so much pus to expel.

  “Mom, did you know we were going to be a hybridae?” I ask.

  She meets the challenge of my expression, her pride rising and then falling at the sight of my burning tears—in my own eyes she was an impression of herself, splotches of color.

  “Yes,” she answers, “I knew.”

  “Then…” I wheeze in, catching a sob, “...why have us? Why bring us into a world you knew would hate us? Why!”

  Before she could answer, there was a zipping sound behind us, the undoing of reality on countless levels. In my spirit and Nadia’s, we felt a harmonization on the deepest level, and then we felt fear once we heard her honey-coated voice. A sweetener for sharp knife-words.

  “Nadia, girls,” the Sovereign of Revelation says, “don’t be too hard on your mother.”

  She pulls Nadia’s head back—I and Mom can’t help but watch—as a cloud of four-pointed stars brushes close to Nadia’s face. Briefly consuming it by the measured radiance of each poppy-sized astral body, hiding visually the very wet and hot makeout that she granted Nadia. I do my best to breathe, and not pant, thinking about how I don’t want her to kiss me right now. Yet also thinking, I miss Sphinx. I wish I could kiss her right now.

  “Remember Nadia,” the Sovereign of Revelation says, “Sphinx is me. At least, an index finger’s worth. Do you want to make out with that, Nadia?”

  She releases Nadia, and from the flock of stars stretches out a single arm, extending a single finger tipped with a long nail—almost a claw, but nothing so brutal or base. She’s teasing me, I know she’s teasing me, and…fuck, I miss Sphinx. My mouth parts, opening to receive her—until Nadia forces my head forward. Her eyes are still wide, nearly manic off of the high that must happen when a Sovereign tongues you nice and deep, but she focuses on me, being there for me. As if to say, we’re in this together against them all. Her brow knits tight, making me believe.

  “Hmm, shame,” the Sovereign of Revelation says. “However, I’m sorry, I just had to visit my bondmate. It’s been so long.”

  Ishi’s jaw clenches, she asks through gritted teeth, “Nadia, did you really…bond to Revelation?”

  “We did,” Nadia and I say together, it was easier that way.

  Revelation laughs, adding, “She even swore an oath to me—the contents of which, should probably stay between us, I think. Though, I’m sorry for interrupting, please, Ishi—”

  “Don’t call me Ishi,” she snaps.

  The cloud of stars obfuscating Revelation’s body drifts to Mom’s chair, settling on its arm. I can hear her eyes rolling as she says, “Fiiiine. Ishisaga-no-Maturama, please, enlighten me and my bondmate. Why did you have her, when you knew her stock?”

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  “I wanted to…” her voice trails off, when Revelation extends an arm again, this time settling her hand on Mom’s head, stroking her hair. Mom starts again, “I wanted to nurture the last remnant of an old friend, to be a mother, and Kareem needed a change.”

  “Interesting reasons,” Revelation hums, before her voice bounces toward us. “Thoughts, girls?”

  “Yeah,” I say, finding that Nadia’s rage had finally conducted into me, making a brand of my heart, “you didn’t think about us even once.”

  “Nadia—” Ishi tries to say something, but I am done listening.

  I snap, “You don’t get to worry about how our life would be ‘hard’ when you knew it would be. Alls below, you made it harder with that fucking solution of yours. I remember, not perfectly but I remember in my fucking muscles and in my teeth, how it felt to have a war going on in my skull. How often my feelings would spin around in chaotic swings that devastated everything around me!”

  Nadia can tell I want to get up, my feelings want me to get up, and so she slides from my lap. I rise on the updraft of my rage. Standing, now taller than my mother—even if not really, I point at her with all the fury I’d used in pointing Atomic Glories at my foes. She gasps, able to tell from my stance and the tone in my voice.

  “The only benefit of what you did to us, choking us for so many years” I growl, words slipping through my fangs ragged and torn, “was that you made us so good at trying to be what other people want us to be. So much so, that in the absence of you, of Dad, there was no life we could envision for ourselves save the cool embrace of a deathly void.”

  I’ll say this, it seems gods can cry. Tears, probably so potent that you could destroy a continent with a droplet, well in the corner of Ishi’s eyes. Her hands cover her mouth, a drawbridge to the wail that escapes, muffled slightly, from her throat. Nadia looks at me, stunned, but doesn’t gainsay me—she knows it’s true. It was true when Amber asked us what came after vengeance, it was true when we tried to blow up Marduk, and it was true when we sought our answers in the jaw of that awfully honest beast, Nemesis. We don’t know what we want to be, we live according to our desires in the moment—like an animal—because we never got to actually grow into a person, as we were so busy having to play catch-up to a normalcy that was never ours.

  “I-I wish I could do more,” Ishi says, “but I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Nadia, I just…”

  Nadia nods, slurps her hot chocolate, and says, “That is the apology I think I’ve always wanted, Mom.”

  She finishes the last of the hot chocolate, sets it on the table, and stands beside me. Though where I face Mom, she faces the photo of Dad that sits over the mantelpiece—the photo of our family, where Dad carried us on his shoulders, and we held a sparkler in our hand, our first Declaration of Thunder festival. She doesn’t turn around, but sighs hard, the feelings in her chest heavier than air and harder to evacuate from her lungs.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asks. “I didn’t see him in the Ghostlands, and I doubt he’d pass beyond the Gates of the Afterlife without talking to us. If this is apologizing time, then where is he?”

  Ishi’s hands fall, as she looks away. “Nadia, he’s not dead.”

  Nadia whirls around, grips my hand for support—I don’t cry out even though her claws are digging into my palms; I need the pain to stay stable.

  “What?” she asks. “I saw him die, crushed into a diamond and—”

  “Nadia,” Ishi says, “you also saw Nemesis lose her entire body remaining just a head, she told me that part of the story. There are many ways to defy death, and there are just as many ways as to render unto someone something akin to death. When Marduk crushed your father, he destroyed his body by mortal standards. In truth, Marduk just turned Kareem’s body into a diamond cage for his spirit.”

  Revelation adds, “Abyss, my dear bondmate, can be a cold and unchanging place, where even Death, fundamental element though it is, can find it to be a recalcitrant kingdom. Fitting, as its Sovereign is quite the same.”

  “Marduk did this,” I say, new depths to my disgust for the man being hollowed out for fury to decorate.

  “If it helps,” Revelation says, “Marduk did it by accident. He likely has no idea that nearly every foe he’s crushed is imprisoned in those diamonds of his. A great torment constructed by an idiot.”

  “It doesn’t…help,” Nadia says. “Mom, how’d they even kill Dad in the first place? Nemesis told me defeated all ten of the Black Wombs at once, before.”

  “He should’ve been able to win, right?” I ask, equal in my confusion.

  Ishi rubs her hands, nervous about how we’ll receive the answer.

  “Just tell us,” I say, and Nadia punctuates with a grunt of agreement.

  So she does, and says, “Kareem did beat them, but that was before he abdicated. Girls, every mortal does not handle Sovereignty well—most actually hate it, finding it to be a trap more than anything—and in that way, abdication is an option many take. They hand over their crown for us, their incarnate bondmates, to hold onto. Relinquishing all right to the sorcery of their Court, but also finding a freedom as the gnostic boundary no longer chains them to the shape of their power.”

  “Girls,” she explains, “Kareem was dying as City Killer. He’d become a hollow version of the boy I’d bonded to nearly a century ago, but he also needed a task, a push that could let him make the choice and choose rest compared to the lifetimes of service he’d envisioned would define his immortality.”

  “We were that push?” Nadia asks, her voice soft like powder-snow. Though her actual feeling, the words that echoed in her spirit…that I could hear, sort of, in my mind. We made him weak?

  I squeeze her hand, drive my claw into her palm this time. Tears well in her eyes as she looks at me, and I shake my head. This isn’t on us, I say, watching as her eyes close, squeezing off the valve of sorrow inside of her—I think she heard me.

  Before Ishi can answer Nadia’s question, I ask, “Did Dad know the Black Wombs would come back?”

  It would make all the difference if he did. He’d have chosen knowing the risk, decided to do this to himself, and it wouldn’t be our fault. My heel taps against the rug, repetitively, as I need this to not be our fault.

  “No,” Ishi says, and Nadia bites down an invective that bounces into my head—I was in more than minor agreement. “We knew we had enemies, so I held onto you Nadia, kept you from growing for a couple years as Kareem and I tied up loose ends, settled old scores. We wanted to make the world safe for you.”

  “But the Black Wombs didn’t die,” I say, only for Revelation to hiss, drawing attention to herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, with nary an apologetic tone, “but Nadia, you’re better than this. Think about it, what happened when you fought that White Womb?”

  “It…came back,” Nadia says, realizing. “After every death, it came back, until we burned it.”

  “Good girl, I’d give you one of my stars but I need them so your brain doesn’t explode,” she says. “Now, while the White Womb reformed Conceptual muscle and flesh over a Real skeleton in Realspace…what do you think Black Wombs do?”

  Then it fell into place, so many things fell into place and most of it was because of Amber. She’d said that we gave her a reason to live again, that she’d experienced death, and had little fear of it. She quibbled about ‘true deaths’ like someone for whom a partial one was nothing. Implied that you could even keep score…

  Nadia speaks first, “The Black Wombs automatically resurrect as well.”

  I speak second, “Forming from the spirit in the Underside, like where we first encountered Amber. They’re immortal?”

  Revelation wobbles a hand, swirling it to hold a platter of ideas. “Conditionally, perhaps, but do understand Nadia, no one truly knows the depths of what the hybridae are capable of. They’ve never shown up in any iteration of reality the Parliament has constructed. You, my dear, are one of a very small kind. In fact, you’re one of a kind even for your kind.”

  Our heads hurt, the infinite implications of what Revelation was saying were too much, digressions from what matters. Dad, how did they kill? Why did he die? This was our focus, and all of that could wait. Had, to wait.

  “So Dad takes the crown back,” I say, “couldn’t he just un-abdicate and then abdicate again.”

  Ishi shakes her head. “Abdication is a reprieve from responsibility,” she says. “You get to put away power, once, and if you take it up again then you take it up for forever or until death.”

  I let go of Nadia’s hand, I can’t fucking do this. For every option and question that we come up with to make this make sense, there’s some stupid fucking rule or clause that prevents it. As if fate itself was screwing us over. Was Dad’s death that unpreventable? Hammered into place by a hundred little choices, and any singular nail removed would never be enough?

  “Why us?” I ask, to the two gods in my weird fucking paracausal cabin. “Why us!”

  Ishi shares a look with Revelation.

  “What?” I ask. “What aren’t you telling us? Did you and your stupid Parliament plan for Dad’s death? Was that his fate, did he have some bad karma or something—”

  Nadia wraps her arms around me, stopping me from storming over to Mom, to Revelation, my fists clenched as if I could batter answers out of heaven’s jaw. She says words to try and soothe me, to keep me from going off the deep end, but why try—she was our cold pragmatism, our burning righteousness, and held all our capacity for violence. I was the fucking deep end, and I need an answer. I look to these supposed gods and want an answer. Why did we have to lose Dad?

  “Kareem, he…” Ishi fails to put the words together.

  So Revelation tries, her voice lesser in glibness—this for some reason, she takes seriously.

  “He could’ve lived if he wanted to,” she answers, “but not as your father. He would be City Killer, a mass murderer, the greatest swordsman since you mortals abandoned the blade in truth, and if he assumed his true crown, you would be dead. Your town would’ve been wiped from the Earth. Their battle would’ve been immense, and while your home was small, if any news made it out, the devastation would cast a shadow over even the destruction of Tokyo. And his slaughter would not cease, he would seek out new things to overthrow, to send into violent unrest and upheaval. His sword would turn against the Godtenders, and though they would strike him down, Nadia, many of them would first fall. The Changeover would begin anew.”

  Revelation rises from her place on the chair’s arm, and joins Ishi where she stands, just past the rug and almost in the kitchen, and wraps her arms around her. Tears flow from Ishi’s face, as she nods along to every point Revelation speaks. Nadia and I are quiet, we don’t consider arguing against their omniscience.

  “Kareem, the first godtender the world ever saw, had a bold heart and made bad bad decisions about how he climbed,” Revelation states, regret dimming her stars. “The gnosis shards he gathered were vile, born of your broken disgusting Old World, and he knew that. He made bad choices for the best reasons, and while most will likely always remember City Killer as a monster, well, who says heroes can’t be monsters? So, it wasn’t fate or karma that caused his death. He made choices, those had consequences, and in the face of the end of the world or the end of his life…Ishi, what did he think about?”

  “Nadia, he thought about you,” Ishi says. “He wanted to die as Kareem, your father, more than he wanted to live as City Killer, and destroy this beautiful world he’d fought so hard to build for you. The Black Wombs may have fought him, but Nadia, he chose his death.”

  We both find that fact hard to swallow, and it’s to no pride that we respond poorly. I kick over the table that stands between both chairs. Nadia knocks the photo from the mantelpiece. We flail, whirl to face each other, fangs bare, and sob, as we see in each other the face that our father saw when he died. He didn’t just quietly accept death, but he tried to fight in whatever mortal means he had yet when the end came he…

  Nadia and I, us, had thought we knew that night so well. That we remembered it perfectly and would never forget, but I had colored the story. I knew I did. In Revelation and Ishi’s words, I could close my eyes and see that night. Dad was still surrounded, his wounds were no less awful, but I wasn’t the distraction that caused his death. No, Dad had seen me and mouthed the words, I love you, Dreamdrop, before choosing to lower his sword, make that opening, so they would kill him. So they wouldn’t pay attention to the girl hiding on the steps, or turn a baleful eye to our town.

  Our town, I was so mad at them for not helping, but…Dad chose to build the temple so far away. Far enough that you could see everything. He hadn’t known the Black Wombs would be back. He only knew someone would come, some day, whether for him, or me, or some other reason. So he’d made sure to move the target away from anyone to be caught up in whatever battle occurred. I can’t say for sure, but maybe everyone back home who needed to know had some sort of warning. Maybe I just didn’t listen.

  The realization of memory’s fallibility drove me to my knees, where I cry without wailing. My mouth just opens so wide because I know there’s a sound in me, a sound that would express everything, but it is too big to come out, to vacate me. My claws drag against my arms, skittering against my scales, and I realize that I am not my father’s daughter. I am an incapable beast, kin to City Killer perhaps, but I am not—maybe never—worthy of Kareem’s legacy.

  Nadia doesn’t like this realization. She paces, a beast much like myself, and howls her rage, gnashing her teeth, demanding, “One reason, give me one reason to not go after them! Dad may have accepted this, but they made him make the choice!”

  Ishi tries to hug her, but Nadia swipes the air as if brandishing a knife. Needing comfort in the simple promise of violence’s Dividing stroke, to sever right from wrong, heroes from villains. In this, Revelation laughs at her and her pain.

  “I can give you ten reasons,” she says, eliciting a look of terror from Ishi.

  Ishi says, “Please, no, for anything we may have had…”

  “You’re cute when you beg, you do it so rarely,” Revelation states, “but it is not my Court to keep secrets, whether they be mine or yours. Nadia, put the facts together, Every Train last saw your parents on their way to destroy the Cradle, you were not allowed to properly gestate for two years, and you are a hybridae. Similar more to Marduk, Nemesis, and Amber than you are the White Womb with which you battled. So where, or rather what does that leave you, my beautifully emotional and stupid summoner?”

  Nadia argues, “Nemesis said there were ten of them, herself included.”

  “She did,” Revelation concedes, “but she also said there was one of them per Principle. There are eleven Principles, Nadia, you explained this to Sphinx. When you named yourself, you knew what you were composed of.”

  “Dreams and War,” I mutter, able to admit the defeat I saw on Revelation’s rhetorical horizon.

  “Good girl,” Revelation purred. “Now, Ishi, dear that she is, is Upheaval which is War and Death. Division, which is you, is Dreams and War. I can clearly see where you gained War, but Nadia do you see where you gained Dreams?”

  She backs down, the logic in Revelation’s words swatting at her nose. Over nothing at all, Nadia trips, falls to the floor, her arm rising as if to shield from truth. Both of us, bowled over by awful woeful Revelation. We do not and can not see her expression, but we feel it. This moment, so painful and horrid for us, was for her sumptuous in a way that the greatest meals could rarely compare. So many secrets were laid atop us, intended as blessings to ward away foul fate, but instead, baleful curses that sunk into our bones and being.

  I had thought us torn due to the love of a Black Womb and needing to avenge our father, but there was no vengeance to be found for us—he’d chosen his demise—while we were unable to see the web, for a spiral was far too simple, of red strings that entangled us. I came, at some point, from mortal stock but was nurtured in a divine womb. Our foe was family, and there was no weapon we could cleanly turn to find otherwise. As a hybridae, we were something New, but crafted by something Old and awful, condemned by the Godtenders.

  “There it is,” Revelation says, “true enlightenment. You don’t walk the Canonical Path because you’re just a hybridae Nadia. You walk on countless levels, you are a Divided being, the Divided being, incapable of ever falling off the path and failing the Sovereign beauty you can become. Now, our jaunt is over and your time is done.”

  The cloud of stars opens, shifting with the mathematical precision of a kaleidoscope, the beauty of spinning dancers seen from above, shaping into a frame for the infinite dark that extends beyond her astral rim. Nadia and I crawl away from that maw with which we know, in our spirits we know, leads back to life, to reality, to pain and the awful horrid legacy we’d left for ourselves in what we’d done.

  “Please, don’t send us back,” I beg. “I can’t do it again. Let me stay here.”

  In a voice of power, of quasars scouring face of the void with their destructive brilliance, Revelation says, “Sorry Nadia, but the lands beyond Causality’s Rim are for entities. Mortals such as yourself, can not stay long. Though, if you work hard, nurture your spirit and climb to my throne, walk the path and ascend to your own, then you won’t have to worry about any pesky mortality preventing you from claiming what’s yours.”

  Nadia cries out, free of self-reflection, “Mommy, please don’t let her take me. Let me stay with you!”

  While Ishi was not our mother, she also was, and she made a valiant effort—yet for the first time I saw a depth to Revelation’s schemes, as they trounced Mom’s maternal fury.

  “No no, Ishisaga-no-Maturama,” Revelation says, wielding Mom’s Coronation Name like a sickle, “they may be your daughters, but they are walkers of the Canonical Path. Theirs is a journey that must be sacrosanct, save for those bidden to walk with them, such as their bondmate.”

  She froze, and in that instant Revelation unleashes a stellar gale that sweeps her into the kitchen, slamming her into the sink. From around the rim back to life, I watch as my mother does her best to fight to reach us, even as she knows there is nothing she can do.

  So she yells, telling us, “Nadia, your father and I made every mistake, but it was never a mistake about loving you. If you can’t let go of vengeance for you, then please do it for us, for me! Instead, just live girls, live. Live with every stubborn bone in your body. Live to laugh, to eat good food, to fall in love, fuck people, fuck up, and alls below, fuck the Nine, the gods, and everyone! You’re my daughters, Kareem’s daughters, and your life is yours alone!”

  The stellar winds reverse, sucking us toward our revival, and in our last attempt to plead with a god more selfish than us. We say, “We’ve died. Let us stay dead.”

  To which Revelation replies, “I already told you, I won’t let you stop; not for exhaustion nor love nor even death! Now say goodbye, you won’t be seeing her again, most like.”

  Our bodies lift from the ground, and we cry out, not goodbye, but, We’ll see you again. The first brick in our resistance to whatever Revelation’s plan for us was. Then, we fall from this place beyond causality. Past Causality’s Rim. Down into guttural reality, where everything is lesser, and in our descent we know we’ll climb our way out.

  As we fall, the stars around us open to reveal eyes in the shape of four-pointed stars. They rippled in the prismatic flames of a hundred colors, the lines of which oscillated as we were bombarded by the Sovereign of Revelation’s divine voice.

  “So, what have we learned, girls?” Revelation asks.

  I cry out, “Fuck you!”

  “Maybe one day,” she purrs, “but that’s more a given than a lesson.”

  “We’ve learned about who we are,” Nadia answers, “where we come from, and that you’re a massive bitch!”

  “Alas, Revelation Bitching is not one of my Barons,” she chortles. “Your trial is coming to an end, and you must choose.”

  Nadia and I look into the other’s face, we know our answer.

  “We won’t let you isolate us,” I scream.

  Nadia yells, “We won’t let you unmake us!”

  Together we bellow, “And we renounce our quest!”

  “Then what becomes of us?” Revelation asks.

  We answer, “You’ll be beside us while we live.”

  Nadia says, “But our hearts are ours.”

  “Despite what you think, our futures are ours.”

  We answer, “We won’t climb for you, but for us.”

  “To seek answers in the small things,” I say.

  “In the big things,” Nadia says.

  “We’ll find the answer for who we want to be,” we say. “For ours is a living Revelation. Heard in the beating of our heart, stolen in every breath, and you can take this or fuck off!”

  Our answer resonates, compounds on itself into an echoing significance that I doubt I could truly understand—this was my first graduation trial. It must have been a good answer because Revelation’s eyes smile. I don’t know if it’s one of sadism, inflicted because we’d jumped through her noose, or an appreciation that we’ve found some new awful path only readable in the omniscience of a god. Either way, I stick by my answer, and while she’s sometimes a bit stupid—likely thinking just as harshly as me—I can tell in her eyes that she’ll stick by me.

  “Then live you shall,” Revelation declares. “Live Nadia, live until you sit two thrones, until you have interred every mystery. Live you beautifully wretched girl, and kill all who’d seek to keep it from you. I pronounce you, Baron!”

  From there, it all goes black.