[aw] through mushroom clouds and black fields

Siv Helsi · 09-11-2012, 11:11 PM

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Things had been easy. They had been almost too easy, as it had been in the Hearg. Men were meant to break. She had thought—she had dared to dream this—that Eris would collapse upon herself like a dying star. Indeed, had she not become a phantom? Had not her blood rose against her like a new sun?

Siv wondered if Eris imagined herself immortal. Of course she does, a soft and jealous voice whispered. She has a son. For the first time, Siv was conscious of her jealousy of this. Once she might have had a son, now grown as her daughter was gone. Once she might have betrayed herself for what she was not. Would that truth ever chase her here? It had, already—her cousin was here, all doe eyed over some dark she-trollop that ran off with her slave. Then again, who was he to tell her what the gods did or did not bless? They would not take him back any sooner than they would have her again.

“Ravens,” she corrected gently. “The thought and memory of my father.” There was no movement, but in the half-light of the fire she might need only think of moving for it to look so. Her hands fell from her belly, and the fur there gleamed a cerise color, false looking in this way. “Do you remember the face of your father, Dark Lady?” There might have been mockery in the title, but her voice did not betray her—only that mirror-light in the rolling thunderclouds, captured like the fire.

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