looking for heaven found the devil in me; witching

[Witching]

She eyes the bright, red skin, taut (like perfection – like hers, indeed, except by all rights, she would never look as he had; her own flesh is timeless and her own clock without hands, though she does not know this yet) over bones, now hiding their modesty. It seems to her his reasoning rings fair (though his darkness she does not know – or does not know to recognize it), she cannot recall if he had been tatters and rags the day he had named the three of them in succession, and touched them each with some pride, so she accepts that his rot had been a passing phase. She does not know his heaven, either. That this wreckage could be a firmament for him is lost on her, because she feels no different, only that she is indelibly separated and the hurt burns deep. She is too single-minded to read into the brightness in his eyes, to find that in that nutmeg and glint, there is freedom.

He had loosed himself, from his shackles and his ancient, long-braved darkness.

She has only lost. And because his eyes are not Two or Three’s, she does not understand them enough to celebrate with him.

“Oh,” she tucks her misgivings in the back of her mind (after all, neither Two or Three are red… at least, not on the outside), and considers that he (no longer so nauseating) could be just who she needs. “We have to find Two and Three,” she says, not softly but firmly (perhaps a forwardness that comes from being One) and moves towards him, indifferent to the pain in her torn-up knees, to herd him back to the Meadow, where last she had been with them (and so foolishly wandered away to chase that stench). 

Until he comes and she is stilled again by memories that bite and bark.

He had come to them like fury. He smelled like war – what would have been gunpowder on his skin anywhere else, was smoke and ash and magic bent for violence here – she had blinked up at him, as cremains fell from his shoulders and back in a bellow that settled in the blood and dirt and lifelessness that welcomed them to earth. And since mother had perished once again, just as soon as Three slipped from between her legs – never meant to last, just to labour for their gestation and birth – it was they she imprinted on in her stead. Two. Three.

‘Set.’ 

And to this day it tastes like treachery on her tongue. The first thing to worm into her soft, young brain. Mistrust. She had been so welcoming to it, as he no doubt had planned (and hoped) for. Witching has picked it up from him in fat fists and considered it, turning it over and over in her babe’s mind until she thought she had a grasp of it. Thought it could not possibly be a lie, because who would lie to babes, still damp? 

“Set,” she mumbles, tilting her head at him, blinking.

(Before it had been ablaze and a roar it had been such quiet, warmed-up peace. It had been the strange, hobbled rocking of reanimated flesh, a place made just for them, One, Two and Three. A galaxy unto its own, with three planets in orbit around a blue and oxygenless heart.

And then came Set. 

And Rodrik.

Welcome.)

“Darkness?” she questions, and devil and it becomes one. One big thing that she does not know, but suddenly feels as if she grasps. An image of sinew torn and split down the spine, dancing around two heaps of skinless meat, with formless darkness in waltz. She turns back to her father – his living eyes and the blood-quenched muscles beneath his skin; much like her – “what does Set mean, Rodrik?” There returns that air of wariness – an insidious and rotten thing her great-grandfather had planted deep in fertile soil those many years ago – and she once again considers the bolts of beautiful, glossy pelt, with narrowed, dark eyes.