“Oh, settle down, Ashlan Ley,” said Hollis, hanging under her like a sloth. “It’s not as if she’ll let you go.—I’m confused, Tanka Equinox. Aren’t the Gone-Away dead?”
“They are, yes,” said Tanka. “But living parts remain. Such as the gazing-trees,” she said, gesturing all around them, “once the belongings of Gone-Away Nex, the Connector. Lady Ley, in any incarnation, is like a gazing-tree in human form. An avatar, if you will—a fragment of Gone-Away Gen.”
“So Ashlan’s mother,” wheezed Hollis, “met this avatar, and her baby boy was—transformed?”
“Eaten,” said Tanka.
Ashlan ripped at the black loops writhing around her wrists, hard enough to pull off her hands.
But they let her go.
Then seized her up again.
“The brood,” Hollis gasped. “That’s why you ran!”
They’d passed a house on the city’s edge where a tall, gaunt man, mistaking Hollis for the world’s ugliest child, had invited them to share his shelter. Tempted by the smell of food, Ashlan had glimpsed his wife sitting on a dusty blanket, surrounded by their seven newborn babies.
Their fingers and toes so tiny, so impossibly fragile.
She could almost feel them bursting between her teeth.
It was hunger that had sent her running, a bottomless void that she’d spent a century trying to forget.
Who needs seven? its voice always whispered. Would life really be harder with six?
No one could stop you if you tried.
“Okay,” she said, laughing desperately, her mouth watering even now. “You got me. I’m a monster.”
“You are a living fragment of divinity,” said Tanka. “Monstrosity is a concept that simply doesn’t apply.”
Ashlan looked up as Tanka pulled the darkened veins from her skin. Shining with sweat, she rose, her breasts impossibly swollen.
She’d given herself milk.
“The temple-keepers once viewed it as a great honor to give their first-born to the Shard of Gen. The child did not die, after all—it joined with the avatar, and became her.” She passed the blanching shawl back to Umber, who packed it carefully away. “According to the legends, each incarnation will live a hundred years, then reach the end of her natural span. By then, she desires nothing but to devour a human infant and be reborn.”
Ashlan remembered it happening.
She’d gotten drunk the night before, and woken to hear a baby crying.
You’ve finally lost it, she’d thought. Not long after, she’d gone away.
“The child lives on, and so does Gen, each folded into one another—though the avatar remembers nothing of what she was.
“It was the temple’s job to raise you, you see. But the temples fell, Lady Ley. And without the truth, you’ve—struggled.”
“That’s one way to put it,” whispered Hollis.
Tanka climbed down the hill and stood before her. “You are no monster, Lady Ley. But you’ve been fighting your nature for a full century. So long as you keep fleeing, you’ll never find rest. Aren’t you tired?”
“You know I am.” Ashlan gripped the black reins, testing their hold. Tanka flicked her wrist, and they slackened. “But I’m not doing it,” Ashlan said, struggling to her feet. “I’m not stealing someone’s baby.”
Tanka laughed. “You don’t have to! You devised your own solution, just before your will to live ran out. Out of instinct, I suppose.” Tanka looked down at Hollis. “Though it seems you barely understood what you were doing at the time.”
Hollis gave a grunt. “Surely you don’t mean—”
Tanka pulled a torn sheet of parchment from a pocket, unfolding it. “The language is tricky, here, as it always is in Ancient Ethian. Once a century, the Shard of Gen must devour an infant to live again. Now, infant is one possible translation, but I would call it—oversimplified. The actual phrase is closer to a child given life who has not yet grown.”
“Oh, you would,” muttered Hollis.
Umber was pulling something from the trunk.
A handmade quilt.
Ashlan pulled away.
And stepped backward, her legs freed.
Tanka had twisted her fingers, and the threads of the gazing-tree were now pouring into the silver-buckled trunk, and all around it.
Into the shape of a wheeled black cradle.
“I won’t force you, Lady Ley,” said Tanka. “But you have a chance to die and live at once. And I will raise the babe you become—as my own.”
“But it’ll all be the same,” said Ashlan. “I won’t know it, that’s all. But even if I start again, it’ll all be exactly the same.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” said Tanka, giving her a stern look. “Any child of mine would have better sense than this. At the very least, Lady Ley, you would grow up shaped by the knowledge of what you are—in place of this yoke of shame.”
Something in Ashlan broke.
The heat came rushing out, healing the gash on her wrist, bringing her skin to the boil.
Beneath it, the hunger swelled.
She wanted devoutly to die. She’d been careening towards it for a hundred years, for any number of reasons. And this might not be death, exactly, but she wouldn’t know any better.
It would be the end of her. And the only cost she could see was the brief knowledge that she’d be stuck with Hollis Runt forever.
Which, now that she thought of it, had been true all along.
He rolled his head up, his scuffed buttons regarding her with disgust. “Of all the reasons to create a life, Ashlan Ley, this is, by far, the worst.”
“At least you’ll get your wish,” she muttered, peeling back her tunic.
“How’s that?”
She pulled his body away from hers, and decided not to bother undressing him, for fear that he’d simply collapse.
“You wanted to destroy your creator, didn’t you?”
“Bah.” He pursed his lips. “A technicality, at best.”
She shrugged. “Looks like we all have to compromise, Runt.”
Umber had finished making the bed. Tanka cleared her throat, one hand at the front of her dress, where her milk had soaked through the fabric. There was sadness in her, and a touch of panic. “Have you two come to a decision, then?”
“I mean, fuck it.” Ashlan sighed, with finality. “I can always eat.”
Her jaw came unhinged, both sides at once, with a startling double-pop.
With the barest yelp of protest, the tiny, broken body of Hollis Runt slid down her distended craw, boots and all.
Then, bathed in a sweat whose beads boiled as they emerged, Ashlan’s body shuddered. Her arms slowed as they fell, and through the lattice of her bloody fingers she saw the sudden swelling of her belly, watching as the skin blistered and peeled. Below, the flesh was gray and shifting, like muscular stone, or living ash.
Then her round, stony stomach burst in a wave of heat and brightness, just as Tanka approached.
There was sadness in her stride. What she’d sought, after all, was to be the creator of a new life, not its steward. But with every step, she seemed more possessed by a sudden, trembling certainty—and as she reached into the otherworldly forge of Ashlan’s womb, she, too, was renewed.
As for Ashlan, she could see no more, because her eyes were sizzling into streams of liquid rock. But her hearing persisted a moment longer—and as it went, she could hear the cry of the child she’d become, righteous and aggrieved, with lungs strong enough to shiver every leaf in her mother’s wood.
Gabriel Squailia is an author and professional DJ from Rochester, New York. An alum of the Friends World Program, they studied storytelling and literature in India, Europe, and the Middle East before settling in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with their partner and daughter. Squailia’s first novel, Dead Boys, was published by Talos Press in 2015.
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