Brontide

Brontide—the low rumbling of distant thunder.

One of your earliest memories is the children of the village pelting you with stones, and having to remember to bleed.

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(In your mother’s stories, you father is a creature of flame and wings, strangeness and magnificence. In all the rest of your life, he is only an absence, sighted slantwise in your reflection on the surface of the river.

You have his eyes, your mother tells you. You wish they looked more like hers; then maybe the villagers would not desire to tear them from your face.)

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Sometimes strange men pass through the village, men with wine-dark eyes and cloaks that shift and billow even when there is no wind. They speak to one another in a language none other knows, and you follow them as close as you dare, looking for some resemblance to your own features in their strange faces.

Are you my father’s people? you ask once, when the latest wanderers catch you trailing behind, when you will not be turned aside by a proffered coin. I am Tamiel’s daughter—

Some Nephil’s spawn, the elder of the two sneers, regarding you as though you were one of the diseased dogs that scrounge in the marketplace. Pay it no mind, it will leave us alone.

They abandon you there in the street, with questions you are not certain any other can answer. You watch them go, their cloaks shifting without wind, and hate them.

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There is a girl in the village whose dark eyes smile at you when you pass. Once, she invited you into her home, called you a daughter of gods and shared with you the rice-cakes she had made. Afterwards, you imagined it is not only her fingertips that taste of saffron.

You watch her marriage-ceremony from a distant rocky hill, the wind tugging at the membranes of your wings. She was not for you, you tell yourself. She was not for you.

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Your mother’s body is small, at the end, small enough to fit in your arms, small enough to wrap your wings around her as she weeps with pain and shame in her body’s weakness. Small enough for her to tuck her head under your scaled chin as you tell her of your visions, those terrible lucid stars and the dark of the sea where the leviathans live. You name your mother’s brittling bones in tongues that have not been made yet and when she is wracked by fever you sing to her in a voice that makes the air warm.

And, when it comes time, you reach out and snap the trembling string that binds her spirit to its pained flesh.

She is somehow even smaller, after.

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You scream, you claw, you curse by every god you know, curse the wind and the river, the dirt that is so hungry to embrace the woman who gave you life, the water that would not replenish her, the villagers, who would not call the healer to her side. You curse yourself, curse Tamiel-your-father, curse the One True God who could not bend in his terrible power to save her. You rage until there is nothing left.

No tears have come. No tears will ever come. You wonder at a father who would give his daughter wings, but not allow her tears.

You finally dissolve into a quiet, desolate keening that lasts the night, nursing the emptiness in your chest like poison.

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Your mother’s body is barely cold in the earth when half the village is at your door, their eyes flat as snakes’ and full of hate. You are taller and stronger than even the strongest of them, but they move as one, the men pinning your wings and dragging you out, forcing you to your knees in the dust. The women and children jeer as your mother’s house is set to burning.

When it is mostly ash and blackened bricks, the crowd turns on you.

You run.