Once, Redana ruined an art project. It’s important that an empress be talented at everything, after all! She sat back after spending hours working on the canvas, making clumsy figures, her anatomy wretched, her command of space in the scene hardly there, but she’d made it and it was hers. Wouldn’t you know that it was the moment her Mommy fought Molech? And then she knocked over the basin at the side of her work table, and the muddy paintwater spread, and spread, and spread, and where it touched everything was ruined, and she watched as something she’d poured her heart into was undone, and even if Bella said it was her fault for not removing the basin at once, Redana knew that it was all her fault.

As above, so below. As before, so now. As mother, as daughter.

And no wonder she’d been yearning all her life. And no wonder her mother shut all of her beloved humanity in that walled garden. And no wonder she’d been forbidden to leave, to come out here, to fall in love with a ruined universe. Before her, the stain spreads, blotting out colors, details, treasures, languages, mothers, daughters, futures. And the worst part of all is that this has all been seen before; is that her mother remembers, and she can hear her voice now, and it is a small, brown, brittle voice, without any of the bombast or pride she recognizes, simply the elevated register of someone reciting poetry meant to be memorized:

[i]”Next those from Asterom and Melonian Orphidaeus, ruled by the Twin Kings, sons of Ares who the fair queen Astelia bore the mighty god, for they loved him and all his sport in defiance of Molech. Then the Phoecians, who sang to make Apollo weep, daughters of great-hearted Iphero, who held Cyprusa and rocky Pythan, Alena and Panopsus; the dwellers of Anomene and Hyrapolis, who sang their ships from the living coral; those from Lisbea by the clouds of Sephisus, who hid their reavers within those shining storms. Next the Lokirans…”[/i]

She’s sorry. But no amount of being sorry will make her mommy stop. Her memory continues, relentless, because to relent would be to forget, to allow that awful blot one final victory. To let everyone who tumbled down in their millions into Hades be forgotten one last time.

And so Redana curls up, and sobs herself hoarse, trying not to listen, incapable of not listening, of not understanding, of not seeing flashes in her mind’s eye: Iphero’s mottled fur, the precise color of the Anomen corals, the trophies of the Sephisean reavers. And later she’ll have time for the existential revelations, to grapple with her relationship to Iskarot, to look at her own face and see the shape of Hermes— but right now, all that is required of her is to witness. And so that is all that she can do.

That’s all her mother could do.