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1. [Innocent] rest
Everything blinks on and off, like the world opening and closing. Warm sun against your skin like honey, seeping through the little cracks in you—the scrapes where you’ve fallen on sharp rocks while playing and gotten sand in all the gashes and cried while your father dug it all out and petted your hair and hushed you better. The bruises from punishments for stealing apples from the market that your mother cooked into the soups with a tired, tired smile. Your father would scream at her about it, fights that made the table shake, that your family wouldn’t devolve to thievery, that we aren’t that poor , and you listened with rapt attention as you ran your hand over the ragged and threadbare excuse for linen you wore.
T he aching places where larger men and larger boys hit and kicked you as they made away with the gold necklaces you’d been forced into the markets to sell, even though Alsamawi clung to your side and begged and pleaded you not to, that it was hers and to be without it was agony, like it was a part of her. Gold was not a part of her, only you were. But you hugged her and cried into her hair, because you didn’t want to sell it either. Because it wasn’t yours to sell, nor your father’s. It was Alsa’s. It was hers, her treasure she kept under her bed. She rolled over you one night, her legs tangled in yours, like you both made a quadruped. Her hair tangled in yours like a pillow, a pile of feathers, and she told you that the way men and beggars watched her made her want to cut her skin open and sew the gold inside where only she could have it.
Y ou didn’t know quite how strange that was, both so small and fragile, close-eyed kits. Even before the concept of wealth had been ruined before, before the glimmer of gold made you ill and the wearing of it was a reclamation, you watched the royalty with contempt. They never looked back at you, just another impoverished child in a crowd of so many. But your sister, your twin, your other half, she loved luxury, was always trying to get scraps of what they left behind. Alsa loved to wear gold around her neck and on her arms and in her hair, even though it taught you to fight and defend before your time. Even when it was stolen from her and she cuddled up in your arms to cry. She should have seen it coming, but you couldn’t blame her either. Everyone wanted a scrap of hope—
T he sun kisses all of those places, rests soft and heavy over eyelids that don’t want to open. The sand is warm under your small body, cradling you. Your eyes flutter open at the sound of small footsteps over the sand, padding happily to you, stumbling with glee.
The sky is a dull and deep grey, gritty with flecks of sun, seeping gold. The kind of half warm that makes grime gleam on every surface, like the sins of the place are real and crawling, on the buildings, the people. There are no sins, of course, no sins but survival, and if survival is a sin, than you will never be a feather, and oh, yes, these are the days when things like gods mattered to you, when you prayed for the prey and never ventured to the west bank.
The sky is a dull and deep grey, gritty with flecks of sun, seeping gold, and it rests like a halo around the head of Alsamawi, glowing through her white hair, sunshine inside a cloud. Her eyes shimmer, bright and pretty, deep and yet so wide, so innocent. That rich chocolate brown color that ripples like pudding when she cries, sparkles like sunshine when she’s full of joy. This is the joy, you can taste it in the air, sweet and tangy. Tangible. She rests down beside you in the sand, skin so much darker, white hair so much brighter. You move instinctively to wrap around her, your hand slipping into hers like you’re made for each-other. You’d been holding hands ever since the womb, of course. It was unsure how it had happened, your mother doesn’t talk about it much, the pregnancy that’s left her with scars, with a broken body that can’t do more than rest beside the fire and stir and sleep, and your father would call it an excuse to sleep away from him if she didn’t try.
Y ou and Alsamawi were born togethe r, hands held, joined at the hip. Her blood in your veins, your soul in her throat. They split you apart after the midwife said it was an ill omen, although your mother saw you as an innocent and Alsa an angel. You always thought it was sweet, the slight curve of your hand that still tried to close around the place hers once was. The slight favor to one side, because the other’s been cut into to get her flesh out of you. Her flesh, yours. They’d waited until you were big enough to handle the separation , old enough not to die of a rancid knife. Three years ago, a lousy fourth birthday gift. Alsa had cried, and curled up in bed beside you that night, her side pressed to the chink in yours. A missing piece. Your mother watched you with a deeper sadness after that day, the miracle that caused her agony undone, yet her wounds still couldn’t heal. Her two halves of a child become two individuals . Identical white hair, surgery scars, big brown eyes. You changed from two minds and one body to two bodies and one mind.
I n the present, her hand is warm in yours, she’s laughing so hard it shakes her tiny frame, even smaller than yours.
“What did you find, al'aqrab?” Al’aqrab, your closest. The one who knows you like nobody in the world ever could.
S he giggles and holds our her hand to you. “A nice boy gave me these,” she says, and you stare in excitement at the few meat skewers in her hands. Neatly shaven sticks and juicy meat that smelled incredible, smoked. Back when the thought of smoked meat didn’t make your stomach chur n, back when you didn’t eat raw meat for the sake of heresy and disgusting the rich and pretty, and for the hatred of the taste of burnt flesh settled in the back of your mouth. You still burned the cities though, you certainly did.
“Can I have one?” you can feel your mouth beginning to water, the scent working its way into your tongue. You feel so hungry looking at it. Food often is scarce in Kul Elna, in a tiny little border village where the monarchs send no aid, no money, no food. Wealth leaks out of Kul Elna like a sieve sifting sand, leaving only chunks of poverty and crime behind. Crime, theft, it stems from desperation, from a town held hostage, shaken down for what meager crumbs of money could be considered left, shaken till the neck breaks, and then tossed aside, a rabbit in the teeth of a dog. Shake, snap, crunch, thud.
“I would not have brought them just to tease you,” Alsa laughs. She has a sophisticated little way of speaking, a tiny little fantasy where she’s bigger than this town, where she’s made something of herself. You hope it someday will come true. She speaks with fancier words than any other child, any other villager. You speak roughly, not as roughly as you will someday, throat ripped and battered by inhaled smoke, the hatred of the ghosts in your blood speaking through you.
Y ou take one from her, and you don’t wait, no pretenses of anything but hunger. You don’t thank her, you don’t need to. It’s an unspoken smile between you. The meat is soft in your mouth, juicy and deep. Sweet and tender. It falls apart between your teeth. You sigh in bliss, the luxury dripping down the front of your shirt. You pass it to Alsa, and you watch the rest vanish into her mouth. Meat into meat , a voice niggles in your head. You don’t know where it’s from and you don’t like it. Perhaps you are cursed, you and Alsa both, pestilence leaking from your half-severed bond.
“Mmm…” she mumbles. “It’s good…” Her voice is soft, but bright.
“Should we take the rest home?” You want to eat the rest right here, right now, shovel it down like a glutton, but the scarcity mindset moves your hands away.
“I don’t wanna get in trouble,” Alsa mumbles, putting her hand in her lap. You trace the deformed bends of her fingers with your eyes, the places where they bend because they’re designed with your hand in mind. The other hand holds the bundle of treats close to her chest, like the most precious treasure imaginable. “I don’t want anyone to think you’ve been stealing.”
“We can tell them a friend gave them to you, that’s true, isn’t it? Who was it?” You believe she didn’t steal it. Alsa can’t steal, she doesn’t even want to. You steal for her, to give her what she needs to feel pretty, to feel wealthy.
“It was Sashelt and Kalan,” she says, slowly. Sashelt and Kalan are two thirds of a trio of brothers, the feral little sons of what once was the Nah family. You didn’t know them too well, other than that they were always slightly poorer than you since their father died in a visit to the capital and their mother wasted away from age in her bed, so similar to yours, weary at the hearth.
“Really? I hadn’t seen them in a while.” You hum, rise to your feet. “Well, it sounds believable.”
“Alright!” Alsa grins, reaches out with her—your—hand, and you locked with her effortlessly. Her extra finger fitting into the slot where your missing one should be, the way it used to be.
You see the Nah boys on the way home, back into the town proper. They’re laughing amongst themselves, with large bags slung over their shoulders. They’re older than you, bigger. You always thought Ma’kl, the third brother, was the sweetest, frail and gentle, even though Kalan was most your friend . You don’t see him with them now, when they once were a set. A set less bonded than you and Alsa, but a set nonetheless.
Y our mother looks up weakly as you enter, Alsa dragging your forward to show off her new treasures. Mother smiles, softly, pats her head with a peeling hand, sunburn on a woman who never goes outside, from the heat scalding her skin, so close to the cooking pot at all times. Her hair is damaged and greying, and her eyes are glassy and hollow , and she can’t stand, but you’ve always thought of her as beautiful, as powerful.
“These are lovely,” she creaks, that smoke filled voice, crackling like the fire that is her home, her comfort. Her respite and her deterioration. She runs a worn finger over the food, directs Alsa to lay them down on a small table.
“The Nah boys gave them to me! Isn’t that kind?” She bounces happily, that white hair fluttering around her shoulders. The white hair is a difference, yet another curse. Your mother’s is greying, from stress and heat and age, your father’s is black and shiny. White hair is out of place. Not albinism, your skin as dark as anyone’s, your eyes deep and brown. You and Alsa look nothing like either of them. Of course, you have the slant of your mother’s eyes and the curve of your father’s smile. Alsa has the regal point of his nose, and the thin waif frame of your mother’s demolished body. You look like a sweet young boy with a feral edge, she looks like a beautiful corpse.
“It is, dear,” Mother says. “I think we will all eat well tonight. We’ll need to send a thanks to those boys, won’t we?”
“Oh, yes,” you say, happily. “Perhaps a baked good? Bread and honey?”
Y ou ate well. You never learned what kind of meat the Nah’s gift was. You never learned how they’d gotten so rich, so much food when they’d once been starving. You never learned where Ma’kl went.
Y ou can’t sleep, no matter how exhaustion pulls at your tiny eyelids, your small muscles. Your body so young and so tired. You can still hear the fighting across the meager thing you call a house. Alsa seems fast asleep in your arms, summer sweat sticking your skin to hers, like the universe is trying to knit you back together, a wound healing. Her breathing is slow and comforting, her heartbeat a perfect ring to yours, echo, echo, but it doesn’t quite drown out the whip-crack of your father’s voice, shouting about money again, always about money. That Mother is too lazy, that she needs to work harder. You clench your fist tight enough your chipped and worn nails cut tiny fissures into already-rough skin. More callous than hand, more sunburn than skin, seven years old.
H e’s saying “It’s your fault those cursed children are under my roof to begin with, you should work harder if you want to keep them.” And you know he doesn’t mean it, that he certainly wouldn’t disown you and Alsa for the sake of money. He loves you—he smiles at you when you help him with work. He laughs when Alsa tells her favorite jokes, however morbid they are: why did the ibis cross the river? He loves you, but you hate him, the sound of Mother’s exhausted, creaky voice makes you hate him. You love her, you want to stand between them.
Y ou curl around Alsa, the misery driving into you like a knife. You stand, peel yourself apart from her like slices of a clementine as you gently settle her down in the indent where you’d been. You creep to the window, open, you can’t afford anything more luxurious than a wide gap and a loose, fluttering curtain. The air feels unseasonably humid, and it unnerves you. A shiver going down from the sky and through your entire body, all the way to the ground. You can feel the roots all below you, like you’re the connection between realms. It all feels ethereal, late. It’s easier to breathe outside, where the smoke and the poverty and the domestic agony doesn’t surround you, sneak into young lungs like a toxin, a disease. You don’t want to suffocate in that house. You can see the lights of the capital glowing in the distance, lamps like the city is aflame.
A soft, whimpering thump catches your attention, a sound so close to Alsa’s distress that it frightens you. You hurry to it, fast, the sound like a pulse in your body , a pulse in your chest, a pulse in the bob of your throat. You don’t know if the blood rushing in your ears belongs to you or to the creature in pain. You can taste that metallic tang so unfamiliar to your young mouth, not yet accustomed to bloodshed. You don’t know if the feelings drumming in you are those of a predator or a prey. You can feel your stomach church, panic rising up your throat. Prey, then.
I t isn’t Alsa, but in the moonlight, the white fur makes your breath catch. You kneel before the crying creature, watch the tiny chest heave and quiver. You trace a finger over the fur, feel muscle twitch under your touch. You can almost taste the pain, as you carefully lift the tiny rabbit into your arms, feel the softness of the fur, the white so out of place in the desert. You would have expected a brown rabbit, lithe, with big ears and twitching eyes. You suppose nobody had expected you and Alsa. Nobody had asked for you. The rabbit is limp in your arms, breathing erratically, the tiny body shivering and fever-hot.
You take a seat on the sand, such a yearning to stay with the poor thing. You know it isn’t going to survive, there isn’t anything you can do to protect it. It’s going to waste away in your arms, die because you are weak. You think of Alsa asleep in bed, white white hair. You stand again, stroke the rabbit’s fur smooth, and hurry with it to the home of the woman who had been Mother’s midwife, the woman accustomed to strange, white-haired animals in pain. You want to save it, you want to protect it, something so small. An animal you had never known, an animal you had never had a chance to become attached to. And yet, attached you are, like the way you’ve always been attached to Alsa, a kinship with the tiny, fearful thing.
T he midwife, Nal’ma, opens the door with a soft creak, her eyes gone wide when they’ve landed on you, the rabbit. She steps aside to allow you in, and the air rushes into your lungs. The whole place smells like herbs, salt. She pours you hot milk with honey, and it swirls, gold and white melting together. Small details like that are something you someday will remember as the mockery of gods beyond uncaring—cruel. But in the present, you drink the warm milk, sweet, soothing, while the rabbit dies beside you.
N al’ma doesn’t know rabbits, of course she doesn’t. You hold it in your arms like a cradle, rocking back and forth under her windowsill lamp, in the alcove there. You cuddle its crushed and twisted body close to you as that labored breathing stops. You hold the rabbit until body becomes corpse, becomes dinner. You cry, eyes flooding like the river on a wild day, fall to your knees, try to force your warmth and breath and life into the creature that has none. To give and give and give, the opposite of the thief your father slaps you for being. The opposite of the thief Alsa understands. The rabbit would want you to eat it, to use the body for something, make it good and useful.
But you cry, and cry, wrenching sobs that wrack your whole frame, hot tears leaking down your face, coughed from your throat, dripping onto the dusty floor. Your lungs burn, your cheeks ache. Nal’ma reaches to lift the lifeless rabbit from your hands, and you wail, fall back with it, tumble across the floor in your delirium, clutching it to you. Your heartbeat pounds against its empty, silent chest. You stumble to your feet and fall out of the doorway, clumsy with young grief. You haven’t truly cried since you and Alsa were cut apart, and your body is so unaccustomed to it. You never knew this rabbit, but it feels like family as you sob into the fur.
You want achingly to bury the body, to give it a proper afterlife, to lay the poor creature—no, the dear friend—to rest. You scrape at the sand with your hands, but the tears in your eyes make it difficult. And then your father is resting a hand on your shoulder, gentle with the tiniest hint of force. He has you stand, sees the rabbit.
“Bring it in,” he says, and you trod after him, horror sinking into your skin. Tears dry on your face as you stand before the fire, present the rabbit to your mother. Alsa peers up from the corner bed, eyes big as she slinks over to your side. She interlocks beside you, and somehow, the sting of the loss of the rabbit isn’t mended, pushed aside. It only makes you cry harder. Mother reaches out and gently strokes your face.
“Don’t cry, Ake,” she murmurs, and her voice is so comforting to you that you want to fall into her arms. She pets your hair, kisses your head, wipes the tears from your face. “I’m sorry the poor bunny didn’t make it.”
“I want to bury it,” you babble, but you know it will never happen.
She puts a hand over yours. “Shh, shh, I know, baby, I know. We’re gonna have to cook ‘er, but I’ll make her something really good, alright baby?” That wheezing purr, the crackle of the fire. It all seeps into you, blood into the sound.
“Alright,” you mumble. “I want to watch. I don’t know why.”
“I want to stay with you,” Alsa comforts, leaning against you. You wrap your arm around her shoulders, hug her close. She shudders into you, pieces clinking together.
“I just wanted to give it a good burial,” you cough, and she takes your hand in hers. Mother sighs. She would have wanted to too. It was this day you learn the world is unfair. Even in a three to one, the three are two children and a disabled aging woman, against a strong and well-built man.
She cooks it in her favorite honey sauce, and you watch it bubble in the pot as she pours in spices.
While it simmers, she strips the hide from the flesh, then the flesh from the bone. You stare at the empty rabbit skin, and feel a sense of horror wash over you. You stifle more sobs. Alsa doesn’t, bawling into your shoulder, a little girl’s first vision of real death.
You think of white fur and molten gold. The drink that Nal’ma had given you. Everything hurts. You’ve always loved Mother’s cooking, her passion, the only passion she’s able to have, but the glazed rabbit tastes only of blood and ash and pain.
3. [Mortuary] take
It happens on a perfectly normal day. You see more guards around town than usual, yes, chatting in their posh capital voices, smoking herbs in their little pipes, leaving litter around, but it isn’t strange . The clouds are heavy, fat with blackness, like a violent storm is hanging over Kul Elna, hungry to destroy, but it isn’t out of the ordinary . You can see one guard outside the main window as you eat breakfast, smoking, thick wisps of it pouring out, miniature stormclouds, moving towards the sky like a smoky viper, like the snake that bit you once, playing around in some rocks, the snake that could have killed you, had Alsa not knelt to drink the venom from the wound. She had leaned back with blood and something glossy on her lips, and she was so so pretty, like an angel, a savior.
Y ou’re eating chickpea mash, with apples, skins sticking into your crooked teeth. Mother is quiet from her corner, but Father keeps watching the guard. You pay him no mind—guards from the palace come, sometimes, to pretend they care about the place, even if all they do is stand around and smoke, maybe bring people back to lives of luxury, mostly the women they consider pretty. Sometimes, kids you know gush about being whisked to riches in the capital, but you know it must be Hell. Alsa was one of them, for a time, until she learned she could make it there on her own.
“I want to die in a palace, not in Kul Elna, not some rickety hovel,” she mumbled one night, her face pressed into the crook of your neck, her breath warm on your skin. You both wore the same clothes, minus the jewelry she still wore to sleep, shimmering under lamplight when she stayed up, moonlight when she slept. The same clothes, the same hair—you never were able to cut yours, and you wouldn’t have wanted to. So young, with your round face and her undeveloped body, you were completely identical. People questioned if you were a boy, a girl, something other. If she was a boy, a girl. Which one was which.
“Oh?” you had asked, your own head against her own shoulder, a perfect mirror. Your synced breaths, your synced pulses. You were glad she wanted out, didn’t want to rot in poverty forever like you knew you’d be destined to. However young, you couldn’t lie to yourself to think your dreams would come true, dreams of being wild and free, only Alsa and the gods at your side. She smiled into your skin. Hers, yours. Soft skin and white fabric, folded over itself. A temporary fusion, an intimacy that warms you.
“I want to die surrounded by luxury,” she proclaims, like the conviction will make it mean it. You like that about her, the strength in her voice. The force in her words. It makes all of her I love you’s feel real and vibrant. “I want to die surrounded by so much gold it’s crazy and excessive.” She laughs. You don’t want to ever hope she dies, but you hoped her wish would come true, with all of the magic in you, the shooting star that streaked over the sky that night.
T he modern Alsa is laughing, bright and pretty, white hair bouncing around her shoulders, chickpeas half falling out of her mouth, at some joke Father is telling, one of the gross ones she likes. You aren’t paying attention to the words, only able to think of her smile. Mother is beaming from her corner, eyes glassy but bright. Everything has the glow of a memory, late morning sun shimmering through those stormclouds.
T he guards have moved, you notice, in the corner of your eye. You don’t know quite what to think about that, until the smell of smoke perks your senses. Alsa is still playing, tugging on your arm excitedly. Mother is turning to her beloved cooking pot. And then her voice is coming out in a horrible ripping gurgle: “ Run! ”
T he afterbang of the door flying open hums in the air like a thunderclap after lightning.
Alsa screams and stumbles away from the guard who’s sword is buried deep in her chest, blood dripping red and glossy onto the floor. Father leaps to his feet, desperation to save a wife that just last night he’d come so close to slapping. He grabs a fire poker from the floor and swings it at the invader, the monster. The ferret in the rabbit hole. The man crumples with a good blow to the head, but another steps forward from behind him, kicks his comrade aside, derision. He grabs Alsa by the shiny gold necklace and tries to drag her away. She shrieks and flails, the necklace clasp snapping in the struggle, sending her tumbling to the floor.
Y ou lunge for her, grab her hand, but he’s pulling her away from you, and you’re too small. She’s screaming, loud, terrified, her eyes huge and desperate. She scratches at him, bites, tries to claw him and he slashes her face with a short blade, a sigil . She wails. This isn’t a rabbit dying slowly in your arms. This is fresh and sudden. She screams for you, and you run to her, but Father moves between you.
“Go, Akefia!” he commands, but your feet are rooted to the floor, the horror seeping into you. No, you can’t let it, for Mother, for Alsa. You run, but you feel like a coward, like a monster, leaving Alsa to die, Father to die. The taste of blood and chickpea wells up in your throat, thick and vile. You pant, desperate for air. You wish you hadn’t breathed at all.
The air tastes of fire, like gas pumped into a warren, and the rabbits are dashing desperately through the runs. You can barely make out anyone through the thick smoke, flickering fire of burning houses and burning corpses , but you hear them, voice s , screaming, desperate. Men, women, children, rushing for exits, for escape. You can feel panic driving you to do the same, but Alsa’s face, the last you may ever see of your other half, it drives your young legs forward. The pain, your body want s to give out, but you force yourself forward, even if every breath is agony in bruised lungs and your throat contracts, rejects the air because it all tastes like fire and death, fresh blood and mangled flesh.
Y ou know you have to hide, wait, but you need to find her. To sneak away and trail the man who took your Alsa, the second part of your incomplete body. You pause, watch as one man, you should know his name, Alkek , makes a mad dash out of one hole, to be cut down in an instant by a spear to the leg that trips him into the sand, yelping in pain, a horrible, ear-splitting sound. The soldier who hit him goes over and stabs with the sword, and Alkek is no long Alkek, the sweet man who taught Mother her favorite fried fritter recipe, Alkek who taught you to read numerals just two years ago. Now, he is Alkek the corpse, just another obstacle for you to navigate around.
The air is sour, rancid, like poison. Kul Elna is the vein and everything else is the venom, and there is no Alsa to draw it all out and make it better. The panic is spreading throughout the town, as you creep through the smoke, hide behind crates and rubble of what once was a wall, what once was a couch, what once was a good door that defended well, but not well enough. You can’t see them.
Y ou’re injured now, a leg crushed by fallen rooftop, burnt and scorching. The world is dizzy and wild, like you’re suffocating in the smoke and it’s making your vision into a mirage. You lean against the wall of the Nah house, half caved in, and as you step forward, you collapse to the ground as a half eaten peach rolls your ankle hard. You crash to the ground and lie still, aching, spitting out too much blood for someone your size to lose. You raise your head, and see the empty eyes of what used to be Kalan staring back at you, half his skull crumpled in like the home he once lived in.
Y ou scramble back, nausea roiling in you, blood on your hands, yours, his. The soldiers are laughing, you can hear it. Those yipping jackal voices. You’re praying, praying for prey, but nothing is happening. Everything hurts and burns. A pair of them pass you by, dressed in gold and bloodied white. To wear white to a bloodbath, as if a competition of who can taint it worst. You feel sick, but you’ve expended your stomach enough already, so you gasp and pant your throat raw, to finish the job the smoke started.
I t’s anarchy in the streets, in the homes. Women with their children fighting to stay in burning buildings, screaming and crying because they don’t know how to fight a threat this powerful, this unexpected. One man rushes to grab his daughter from the flames, but she’s cradling a screaming baby in her arms, and she lashes out with her own knife and stabs him through in her panic and confusion.
C orpses litter the streets, and the people stumble over them, fight each-other for hopes of getting out first. They rip and tear at each-other, and you want to scream for them to stop, that the smoke and the panic is all confusing them, that they’re killing one-another in their desperation, but your voice is broken and wheezing. You sound like Mother once did, her charred lungs. Your soul aches . You duck down a route and slip and fall, because the ground is running red with blood, entrances to homes are clogged with bodies, the soldiers are still patrolling.
You saw a few, in their spattered robes, talking, so casually. One was saying something like “Get the young ones, they need to be innocent for the ritual to work right,” and the other was sighing in boredom, because the young ones aren’t as fun, they don’t fight.
You duck around them, fall to your hands and knees. And then, you see it, a tiny spark, like a miniature sun, but it is no Ra guiding you. A lantern . The secret way. That place Alsa showed you in the back of town, a hidden little route down to the open desert. A way to escape, and the soldiers don’t know it. You move for it, ignored in the smoke and the chaos, guilt digging claws into you, leaving the fellow villagers behind to die, tripping over arms and teeth, head spinning from the trauma of smoke and brutality. But the secret way yields to you, as you smash the lantern behind you, to hide it. The smoke isn’t as thick back this way, and you find yourself almost able to breathe again, the rancid air with its scent of death. The secret way isn’t a real street at all, but a series of nooks and crannies behind and under buildings. Its claustrophobic and smothering, the darkness and dirt stench seeping into you. The tightness that even your tiny child’s body is crushed through. There’s another corpse down there with you—no, not another, you’re alive, alive .
Nal’ma’ s daughter, who gave you a cookie when you were sad, asphyxiated. You hack at her with a piece of glass to cut enough of her trapped body away for you to pass through, an excruciating task, you bite at her when the glass doesn’t work, tear with your teeth like an animal. Filthy, her blood in your mouth. You pant and sob once you’ve passed her, because she’d died in pain and panic, but whole, and to get through, to ensure your own survival, you’ve condemned an innocent, gentle girl to eternal devouring, no whole body to bring with her to judgement. A child in hell, torture for eternity, your fault . But the air is open before you, and you go forward, into the light. You run . And in the chaos—Apophis coiling around what was once Kul Elna—people screaming, babies wailing, the real guards shouting and trying to direct, the fire and smoke and concentrated misery, nobody hears you. Nobody sees you. You stumble into the sand, turn and watch the smoke rise up to kiss storm clouds, rumbling.
Y ou see soldiers in the distance, herding captives, and your heart leaps up your throat. White hair in the throng. A piece of the sobbing, shivering mass, when she should be only a part of you. Your other self. Alsamawi. You chase them. You need to, even though the journey makes your injured leg scream. You have to see her, save her. Father isn’t with her, and you can only imagine what’s become of him.
A nd there, hiding behind a wall, peering with huge eyes, blood splattered and awestruck in the most horrific of ways, you see a sight no eyes were ever meant to see. The scent of gold is overpowering to you. Spicy honey sauce, little white rabbit. Strip the bone from flesh, screams of agony, some longer than others. Some die instantly, some fall from the heat before the liquid itself even touches them. Not Alsa. She’s always been too strong for her own good. She’s looking at you, you swear it, the only thing you can see, a grounding point in the midst of atrocity, beyond atrocity. A surreal nightmare.
She cooks it in her favorite honey sauce, and you watch it bubble in the pot as she pours in spices. While it simmers, she strips the hide from the flesh, then the flesh from the bone. You stare at the empty rabbit skin, and feel a sense of horror wash over you.
“I want to die surrounded by so much gold it’s crazy and excessive.”
The heat burns your tears away before they can hit the floor.
And then Alsa is gone, your other half. Skin, flesh, viscera, muscle, blood, bone. Yours. Hers. Gone.
You turn tail and flee.
When the lights dim, you’re alone, shaking as you go back to scavenge. It’s a horrible thing, taking from the dead. Mortuary cannibalism. You take clothes, food, a bag to put it in. Your tiny hands tremble with exhaustion, pain, shock. Alsa. When you know you’re alone, you scream for her, scream her name to any god who cares.
“Alsamawi!” A shout of anguish and pain and soul crushing despair. You picture her, smiling at you, her eyes fluttered closed. Then open. That awful scar a brand on her face. She doesn’t look like you anymore. A shattered mirror.
4. [Survival] cut
She shows you how to do it, carve the wound onto your own skin, the opposite side, to make you mirror images again. It hurts, hacking hard at soft flesh to get it deep enough to scar like hers has. Her, the ghost of your other self, watching you with sad, sad eyes. You can barely look at her without seeing her final moments flash behind your eyes, visceral, the throat-wreaking scream she let out. And you, sitting on the edge of a long dried well, blood dripping down your face, the victims of a massacre your only company. And you, the only survivor.
It disgusts you first—you should have died that day, died to bring them back, died to do anything but stand like a coward, damn who you could with your own wretched hands, and damn all the rest by inaction.
“You were a child.” Alsa says, simply. “There was nothing you could do.”
You know it isn’t the real her, that her soul is still there, in that gold, whatever it’s been made into, pretty gilded roads for royal feet to trample them underfoot all over again? Goblets and plates, that the decadent can feast and drink and take from their eternal corpses? Prisons. They will never be buried, no matter how you burn your skin off in the hot afternoon sun, layer by layer to dig a chasm for them all, a resting place for so many rabbits that will never go to paradise. A hole in the ground makes a better mass grave than a king’s stomach.
These remnants of the people you once knew, they aren’t real, although they’ve raised you, to take what you need, to kill who angers you. To do anything it takes to survive. That was a lesson you learned at seven years old under your midwife’s porch, with a hand full of glass and a mess of flesh and gore you can’t bring yourself to think of ever having been your friend. You have no friends, you work alone. No friends, not after what happened to the first batch, flitting specters unable to leave the traumatized land. Blood sunk into the earth, sunk under your skin.
When you were younger, you and Alsa dreamed of escaping Kul Elna, of getting away. Now, you can never leave. You are Kul Elna, the sole survivor, host of the victims, host of the dead. They swarm in you like locusts, ghosts in your blood, Alsamawi in your veins like you’re a kid again, like you’re both the same child before everything tore you apart. Before your bond was ripped to shreds, strand by agonizing strand. Kul Elna has settled under your skin and made a husk of you, driven by the ghosts who haunt your hollows. Vengeance. Survival.
You need to kill to survive, simple as that. You aren’t a royal soldier, you aren’t a royal anything at all. You don’t enjoy killing, you don’t want to. You are an animal that needs to eat to survive, and the corpses of your kind are the only food in sight, even though slow roasting the flesh of some royal guard over the spit makes you disgusted. You eat it anyway, because it’s food, and it’s there, and you need the flesh better than he ever did, damn his wife back home, you are the incarnation of a tragedy. They have made you this. They have made you the monster they decry.
The shadow of Alsa blends into yours, fake, false hope. Her soul is inside a piece of gold jewelry now, worn around some entitled priest’s neck.
Alsamawi clung to your side and begged and pleaded you not to, that it was hers and to be without it was agony, like it was a part of her. Gold was not a part of her, only you were.
Gold is entwined with her, in a way even you never managed, inside of her fully, and her inside you. It makes pain and hatred burn in you, inferno in your lungs. You had once said you would never wish for her to die, but now, you want nothing more than her freedom, to let her rest in the black and quiet. You don’t put faith in gods anymore, eat raw pork to spite them, and you’re already sick, how much worse could it truly be?
The ghosts like to follow you, drawn to your living flesh, your warmth. The stay beside you, murmur ideas, advice. They help you to become the King of Thieves, but you hate the title of king so much it makes your very being feel torn apart every time you hear or say it. Mother teaches you how to skin a man, how to make use of him. His palace armor you would rather die than wear turned to a fire for warmth against chill nights in a blasted cursed place, his body a meal, his bones made into weapons, primitive but effective. The town beside yours, Kelma Tara, sent no help at all, although they must have seen the fires, tall and glowing, the storm raging. They sent nothing at all, but betrayal and empty allyship. You storm them. You know how to torch a building, alcohol and a broken lantern, but Father shows you how to make it a good one, and for all of your hate of him, you have greater enemies.
Sashelt and Kalan show you how to steal and how to sell, one swipes an item in a deft hand and the other hawks it with a beakish mouth. Nal’ma and her daughter forgive you, and they show you how to mourn, how to find yourself within the self that’s been created around you.
And Alsamawi walks side by side with you, hand in hand with you, shows you that you are not alone, that even among ghosts, you are loved, you are special. She is alive somewhere, suffering inside a Ring made of pain and metal and blood, waiting for you, waiting for you to save her, and she knows you will come, because she loves you. A silent shared smile between you. She waits, screaming in endless torment for you, you dream of her, her voice, ringing in your ears like a bell, pain exploding in your vision with every toll. She knows you will not leave her, she is your other half.
The lavishness of the world beyond the great gates makes the ghosts impatient in your bones. They lap at your body like flames, flickering inside of the lantern you hold, like a lantern to lead you to the secret run that saved your life, a flame to deliver from fire. Your lantern is a burning bush as you raise it up, the oil burning in that simmering, pretty way. Dinge and yellow-gold glow through dirt speckled glass. It’s hot to the touch, dancing. The ghosts in you hate fire, the memories of burning buildings, the taste of ash and smoke, charred flesh. The visceral horror of flesh sloughing from bone, bone ceasing from existence, blood evaporated. They hate fire, but they also curl up close to your campfires at night, like stray cats, feral spirits hungry for death. They rejoice as haystacks go up in flames, glows of orange that spread through royal stables, palace libraries, like a plague.
These people deserve fire, these people deserve pestilence. Razing their crops and torching their homes. These servants of a so-called Ma’at. What order is it to slaughter children, women, everyone, until only a spectre remains? What order is it to trap innocents inside prisons made from what once was their kin? A twisted type of fusion that makes your Alsa hand twitch and tremble around the knife your spirit taught you to hold in it. Your spirit, not a spirit of a loved one, a wretched remnant to cling to in grief, but a spirit birthed from your own soul, venom-tainted veins twisted into a serpentine abomination. A being born from your agony, a leech, but a loving one, a darkness in your mind to fight by your side. You will bring your own order, blood for blood, wrongs to right the wrongs.
Survival hurts, burns. You want something more, the other half of the ghostly need. Survival has bored you to bones, twisted your mind to shards. You’re done with survival, now is the need for vengeance.
You don’t put faith in gods, but you believe in Hell. You know it’s real, because someday, you’re going to send the Pharaoh there.
You head for the capital. You are a wasteland walking.