#the prettiest jigsaw trap survivor ever

[etching-bones-moved]

There are many curses that can pepper this land and its people; famine, devotion, patience. Mine is being born a middle child.

Not youngest not oldest not prettiest or wittiest, just there. Responsibility is thrust onto Niska's bony shoulders, adoration is swept up by Liryae's youthful charm. I remain locked in a stranded sort of half world, utterly overlooked so long as I perform what is needed to me. I live lonesome and invisible.

Luckily, it does not take being seen to be able to see.

Our village is dying. Our people are dying. Fifty years since we fell from the sky has been fifty years spent /rotting/, entrapped within the same half mile plot, too cowardly to leave but equally not wanting to stay. The elders are what keep us here- fetid, broken things- they remember the days where our people sat in heaven, where our Gods walked among us, where we were the blessed.

All these stories… they disgust me. It is perfectly apparent that our Gods have not lost us, rather they watch and smile at our starvation because they do not care. Such talk is blasphemy, but I /know/ it to be true. Such mindless worship of imperfect powers is costing lives. I hate it. I hate it more than I can find the words to express.

I've forgotten myself. Let me return to my original point.

As a middle child, I am primarily ignored. In younger years this shaped me to be as I am- quiet, cold, malevolent- and now it allows me to do as I please. Take for example now, during the harvest, once I am done with my patch neither mother nor father notice my disappearances into the woods. Niska does, of course, Niska has perception that I would murder for, but she is only sixteen and therefore has little sway. This is another fault that bubbles beneath us, the smothering of anything the young might have to say.

Anyhow, the woods are important, because the woods listen. You cannot sneak up on the animals here, nor can you stand motionless and have silence suddenly fall. The grass is teeming with life, the trees dripping with it, the air fizzing with energy and everything that our people so desperately need. We should come here. We should live out here. If it were up to me, I would lead our people into better lands, fuck waiting for the Gods.

I never tell anyone, but once in the woods, by the dead tree, there was a boy.

Black hair hanging limp like the crippled branches above him, lips cracked like bitten tree bark. Eyes that oozed sticky with sap, fingers trembling like sticks in the wind.

I knew instinctively that he was dead, long dead, and yet there was something that made me stay. Come, he beckoned, taking me inside the great hollow of the dead tree. He split open my palm and took it to his mouth, drunk, then kissed my brow with bloody lips.

Thank you, he said, stepping away into the night. The shadows lapped around him, poised to gobble him up whole. Hours had lapsed from the balmy afternoon I last remembered, hours and hours and hours.

I'll leave a gift, he said, before I took to my feet and ran. Rarely am I fearful, rarely do I flee. But then, after I'd handed him my palm and waited like a docile beast… my own compliance terrified me. I am convinced he was not human.

He does, however, leave his gift.

One elder dead, murdered, snuffed out like stamping on an ember. Five still remain, and stay as petulant as ever… still, I am glad they learn to fear, glad they see some of the blight in this wretched place, even if it is by no means enough. Patrols and curfews spring into life, but we do not move. Still, our people stay. Dying.

My frustration at this fruitless monotony boils over. It sours the neutral expression I try and keep, I hear it seethe in my voice. Those of my age notice it too- Liryae, that boy Ilyas who occasionally fucks Niska behind the school-house; Terise, our cousin. But not our lawmakers. Not our parents. Famine sweeps through the land and they lift not a finger, waiting, waiting, waiting for their precious Gods.

When the opportunity arises I go again to find the boy, the Darkness I call him now. This time I bring Liryae too, for Liryae is trusting as she is beautiful, and it feels important to me somehow that she is beautiful. I fully intend to offer up my sister, and when we find the Darkness he is perfectly happy to accept. Liryae walks into the dead tree as if in a trance, gone, but I am promised my payment and so leave her without much guilt. My parents are distraught, of course, Niska suspicious, but it hardly matters because within the month all the elders are dead. Snapped into little pieces, strewn around the village like an overturned jigsaw puzzle.

But even this is not enough, even as hunger runs rife our people will not budge from the sacred landing site. A madness wraps around my bones now, for I know that I have killed my own sister and worst of all perhaps for nothing- so I go again to the Darkness. This time with Niska. I tell her that I heard our sister singing in the woods and she follows me, for Niska is as loyal as she is intelligent, and it feels important to me somehow that she is intelligent.

There is no trance for Niska, she fights, she loses, I lose my mind. The Darkness promises payment with his shattered lips, skin touching mine like frost spreading over the night-lands. Days later, our crops are burnt, our woodlands razed, our stores destroyed. There is no food now. None.

But the zealots say we stay, and threaten with fire those who do not. Sinners, they proclaim us, and sinner I realise I have become. We must pay for our crimes, they say, we must wait for the sign. Still, our people refuse to move, aside from the few like Terise who manage to run.

I am an only child now. My parents begin to see me, and suddenly they have questions about how both my sisters vanished after I led them into the woods. I am already dying- we are all already dying- but I fear burning at the stake more than I fear starvation, so I smother them both before they gather the strength to spread their accusations. Then I leave, stumbling now, for the woods and the Darkness, one last time. I bring only myself, for I am determined as I am desperate, and it feels important to me somehow that I am desperate.

It is important to the Darkness too, I can tell, his smile holds a sweet kind of joy that I have not seen before, as he takes me into his brittle arms. I walk with him, willingly, though I am no longer sure my choices are my own. Am I the manipulator, or the manipulated? I have been catastrophic either way.

This has a price you'll never pay, he said. This has consequences that will echo down your bloodline.

I know this, I said, I know. But I still want to try.

And then he kills me. Mauls me until I no longer breathe and my blood is sticky all about me and my bones are unlatched and discarded at the foot of the dead tree. My body decomposes so quickly that my spirit does not have time to leave it. I feel that my sisters are here too, trapped in a completely senseless limbo, just waiting, waiting, waiting.

I wish I could describe rebirth. There is something glorious to it, something devastatingly raw. It is as if being restitched from the remnants of thousand year olddreams, as if being cobbled together from stolen memories. I became vibrant, I became mighty. I also became inherently wrong.

Myself, Liryae and Niska are recreated that day, fused with magic and bound by new, vicious blood. They didn't quite return as I did, but it hardly matters. All it takes is one demonstration of magic and the villagers flock to us, our Gods, they cry, our Gods. They have come for us, they are showing us the way.

If I had my way, I would wrench every God from the sky and butcher them. But it pays to pretend, so we do, we become smiling puppeteers as we lead our people into prosperity, finally. We find food, water- the descendants of other survivors of the Fall- we find new purpose. We build cities, and in time my sisters and I are known as Queens. My children will be born Royals, my legacy is engraved in their lifespans too. I will live, and live, and live, even though I may die.

I am forty years old when the Darkness finds me again. Niska is already gone, Liryae only has a year left. I am not afraid. I have built my people up, I tell the Darkness, proud. I am no longer a child, but a woman, and I fell able to fight my own battles, able to meet with him as an equal.

But the Darkness only laughs, his teeth so small, his voice so disjointedly melodic. I demand he explain his laughter, he only vanishes, leaving me confused. Was I not supposed to offer up my borrowed life? Was I not supposed to be taken?

For a short while, I wonder if I have triumphed. If I have cheated death, somehow, or else convinced him that I deserve my life in full. But when I rush to tell my daughter, she looks straight through me. A ghost, I have become. Less than a shadow.

In the years that pass, I learn why the Darkness laughed. I built my people up, yes, but I also witness them fall. There are wars, rebellions, criminal acts of such depravity that I rue the day I ever made to /save/ my people. We all should have died, we all deserved to. The world keeps spinning, and my descendants keep spilling their life's blood in return for more power. Liryae and Niska's lines are both cut short by the schemes of my own, and I wonder why this causes me even momentary surprise. I wait. I wait, yearning to slide into oblivion, unable to leave, I wait. I am more lonely than I've ever been. Bound by nothing, without any hope.

Until.

Until there is a child. For no obvious reason I am drawn to her, plagued with curiosity as to why before I finally see that she bears the eyes of Terise, before I realise that she is of my old blood. As she grows, I notice other things- she carries Niska's mind, Liryae's lively wit, my plain but pretty face. Magic seizes her shortly after her twelfth year through no deeds of her own, and she grows beautiful, intelligent, desperate. This all feels important to me, somehow, for this can be no coincidence. Why else would a child be born of my old blood and of my memories?

Behind me, the Darkness stirs with involuntary fear, and I become certain. The girl is chosen, the girl has a task.

The girl will right the mistake I made.

The girl will end us all.

More writing

More on Astrometric

[yes-i-have-a-judgemental-duck]

Let us speak Not of Fairytales

There are many curses that can pepper this land and its people; famine, devotion, patience. Mine is being born a middle child.

Not youngest not oldest not prettiest or wittiest, just there. Responsibility is trust onto Niska's bony shoulders, adoration is swept up by Liryae's youthful charm. I remain locked in a stranded sort of half world, utterly overlooked so long as I perform what is needed to me. I live lonesome and invisible.

Luckily, it does not take being seen to be able to see.

Our village is dying. Our people are dying. Fifty years since we fell from the sky has been fifty years spent /rotting/, entrapped within the same half-mile plot, too cowardly to leave but equally not wanting to stay. The elders are what keep us here- fetid, broken things- they remember the days where our people sat in heaven, where our Gods walked among us, where we were the blessed.

All these stories… they disgust me. It is perfectly apparent that our Gods have not lost us, rather they watch and smile at our starvation because they /do not care/. Such talk is blasphemy, but I /know/ it to be true. Such mindless worship of imperfect powers is costing lives. I hate it. I hate it more than I can find the words to express.

I've forgotten myself. Let me return to my original point.

As a middle child, I am primarily ignored. In younger years this shaped me to be as I am- quiet, cold, malevolent- and now it allows me to do as I please. Take for example now, during the harvest, once I am done with my patch neither mother nor father notice my disappearances into the woods. Niska does, of course, Niska has perception that I would murder for, but she is only sixteen and therefore has little sway. This is another fault that bubbles beneath us, the smothering of anything the young might have to say.

Anyhow, the woods are important, because the woods listen. You cannot sneak up on the animals here, nor can you stand motionless and have silence suddenly fall. The grass is teeming with life, the trees dripping with it, the air fizzing with energy and everything that our people so desperately need. We should come here. We should live out here. If it were up to me, I would lead our people into better lands, /fuck/ waiting for the Gods.

I never tell anyone, but once in the woods, by the dead tree, there was a boy.

Black hair hanging limp like the crippled branches above him, lips cracked like bitten tree bark. Eyes that oozed sticky with sap, fingers trembling like sticks in the wind.

I knew instinctively that he was dead, long dead, and yet there was something that made me stay. Come, he beckoned, taking me inside the great hollow of the dead tree. He split open my palm and took it to his mouth, drunk, then kissed my brow with bloody lips.

Thank you, he said, stepping away into the night. The shadows lapped around him, poised to gobble him up whole. Hours had lapsed from the balmy afternoon I last remembered, hours and hours and hours.

I'll leave a gift, he said, before I took to my feet and ran. Rarely am I fearful, rarely do I flee. But then, after I'd handed him my palm and waited like a docile beast… my own compliance terrified me. I am convinced he was not human.

He does, however, leave his gift.

One elder dead, murdered, snuffed out like stamping on an ember. Five still remain, and stay as petulant as ever… still, I am glad they learn to fear, glad they see some of the blight in this wretched place, even if it is by no means enough. Patrols and curfews spring into life, but we do not move. Still, our people stay. Dying.

My frustration at this /fruitless/ monotony boils over. It sours the neutral expression I try and keep, I hear it seethe in my voice. Those of my age notice it too- Liryae, that boy Ilyas who occasionally fucks Niska behind the school-house; Terise, our cousin. But not our lawmakers. Not our parents. Famine sweeps through the land and they lift not a finger, waiting, waiting, waiting for their precious Gods.

When the opportunity arises I go again to find the boy, the Darkness I call him now. This time I bring Liryae too, for Liryae is trusting as she is beautiful, and it feels important to me somehow that she is beautiful. I fully intend to offer up my sister, and when we find the Darkness he is perfectly happy to accept. Liryae walks into the dead tree as if in a trance, gone, but I am promised my payment and so leave her without much guilt. My parents are distraught, of course, Niska suspicious, but it hardly matters because within the month all the elders are dead. Snapped into little pieces, strewn around the village like an overturned jigsaw puzzle.

But even this is not enough, even as hunger runs rife our people /will not budge/ from the sacred landing site. A madness wraps around my bonds now, for I know that I have killed my own sister, and worst of all perhaps for nothing- so I go again to the Darkness. This time with Niska, I tell her that I heard our sister singing in the woods and she follows me, for Niska is as loyal as she is intelligent, and it feels important to me somehow that she is intelligent.

There is no trance for Niska, she fights, she loses, I lose my mind. The Darkness promises payment with his shattered lips, skin touching mine like frost spreading over the night-lands. Days later, our crops are burnt, our woodlands razed, our stores destroyed. There is no food now. None.

But the zealots say we stay and threaten with fire those who do not. Sinners, they proclaim us, and sinner I realise I have become. We must pay for our crimes, they say, we must wait for the sign. Still, our people refuse to move, aside from the few like Terise who manage to run.

I am an only child now. My parents begin to see me, and suddenly they have questions about how both my sisters vanished after I led them into the woods. I am already dying- we are all already dying- but I fear burning at the stake more than I fear starvation, so I smother them both before they gather the strength to spread their accusations. Then I leave, stumbling now, for the woods and the Darkness, one last time. I bring only myself, for I am determined as I am desperate, and it feels important to me somehow that I am desperate.

It is important to the Darkness too, I can tell, his smile holds a sweet kind of joy that I have not seen before, as he takes me into his brittle arms. I walk with him, willingly, though I am no longer sure my choices are my own. Am I the manipulator, or the manipulated? I have been catastrophic either way.

This has a price you'll never pay, he said. This has consequences that will echo down your bloodline.

I know this, I said, I know. But I still want to try.

And then he kills me. Mauls me until I no longer breathe and my blood is sticky all about me and my bones are unlatched and discarded at the foot of the dead tree. My body decomposes so quickly that my spirit does not have time to leave it. I feel that my sisters are here too, trapped in a completely senseless limbo, just waiting, waiting, waiting.

I wish I could describe rebirth. There is something glorious to it, something devastatingly raw. It is as if being restitched from the remnants of thousand-year-old dreams, as if being cobbled together from stolen memories. I became vibrant, I became mighty. I also became inherently wrong.

Myself, Liryae and Niska are recreated that day, fused with magic and bound by new, vicious blood. They didn't quite return as I did, but it hardly matters. All it takes is one demonstration of magic and the villagers flock to us, our Gods, they cry, our Gods. They have come for us, they are showing us the way.

If I had my way, I would wrench every God from the sky and butcher them. But it pays to pretend, so we do, we become smiling puppeteers as we lead our people into prosperity, /finally/. We find food, water- the descendants of other survivors of the Fall- we find new purpose. We build cities, and in time my sisters and I are known as Queens. My children will be born Royals, my legacy is engraved in their lifespans too. I will live, and live, and live, even though I may die.

I am forty years old when the Darkness finds me again. Niska is already gone, Liryae only has a year left. I am not afraid. I have built my people up, I tell the Darkness, proud. I am no longer a child, but a woman, and I feel able to fight my own battles, able to meet with him as an /equal/.

But the Darkness only laughs, his teeth so small, his voice so disjointedly melodic. I demand he explain his laughter, he only vanishes, leaving me confused. Was I not supposed to offer up my borrowed life? Was I not supposed to be taken?

For a short while, I wonder if I have triumphed. If I have cheated death, somehow, or else convinced him that I deserve my life in full. But when I rush to tell my daughter, she looks straight through me. A ghost, I have become. Less than a shadow.

In the years that pass, I learn why the Darkness laughed. I built my people up, yes, by I also witness them fall. There are wars, rebellions, criminal acts of such depravity that I rue the day I ever made to /save/ my people. We all should have died, we all deserved to. The world keeps spinning, and my descendants keep spilling their life's blood in return for more power. Liryae and Niska's lines are both cut short by the schemes of my own, and I wonder why this causes me an even momentary surprise. I wait. I wait, yearning to slide into oblivion, unable to leave, I wait. I am more lonely than I've ever been. Bound by nothing, without any hope.

Until.

Until there is a child. For no obvious reason I am drawn to her, plagued with curiosity as to /why/ before I finally see that she bears the eyes of Terise, before I realise that /she is of my old blood/. As she grows, I notice other things- she carries Niska's mind, Liryae's lively wit, my plain but pretty face. Magic seizes her shortly after her twelfth year through no deeds of her own, and she grows beautiful, intelligent, desperate. This all feels important to me, somehow, for this can be no coincidence. Why else would a child be born of my old blood and of my memories?

Behind me, the Darkness stirs with involuntary fear, and I become certain. The girl is chosen, the girl has a task.

The girl will right the mistake I made.

The girl will end us all.