Memory 7
Rita led us to her home—the very brick building that formed one of the alley's walls—shepherding us through the lobby and into an elevator composed of sorcerously treated glass decorated with brassy floral filigree, a design motif that trailed us all the way to her floor, its walls hidden behind manicured—though very much alive—foliage meant to evoke a lush-yet-unthreatening wilderness.
At her door, a roughly hewn menhir of onyx ill-fit for the duty, she raised her cane, gripping below the mirror finish silver sculpture chimerizing crow and bat that served as its head. "The door, Ornimant," she said, her command skipping across the creature's surface, reflections rippling into incoherence as moulded metal feathers ruffled to attention and marble-sized eyes sparked with roused cognition. Wordless—far as I could hear—Ornimant leaped from cane to door, corkscrewing into the crystal with all the poise of a diver breaching water. While it saw to the sorcerous tumblers holding Rita's lock in place, my thoughts were seconds behind. Enraptured by her voice, firm as a fist and wrapped in the satisfying touch of velvet, I almost craved a command of my own…until I saw, standing beside Rita though unbeknownst to her, Secretary.
They didn't yell at me in rage nor strike my heart with a well-placed barb, but I wish they had. It'd have been easier to take such a recrimination of my infidelity. Instead…instead, their eyes slid from me, cast to the floor in search of my scattered words—dedications of loyalty—that'd I'd sown in the intent of not forgetting, preserving our…affection for the other. How the march of time makes liars of us, and how blessed my phantom is; in memory, they could be immortal and unblemished, confident without question, and cruel without compassion. Loyal beyond their end.
Hmm, interesting…
What?
How you speak of them—conceive of them—as something they never were in life. That's the other power of memory: to let us love an idea in the way we failed to love the real thing. The romance of cowards, you might say.
I'll let your bosses decide that one. I had no chance to prove myself courageous or cowardly—Secretary was gone before I could assemble the scantest of sentences. Snapping her fingers, Rita fished my attention back to present—the door had opened, and across the threshold, on the otherside of the shimmery translucent pane that'd been opaque onyx moments earlier, stood Rita with her hand outheld.
"Only one more step, love; are you with me?" she asked, curling her fingers in polite seduction.
"'Are you with me,'" Secretary mocked from behind my eyes. "Go on, little brute, be with her. It won't be the first time you chose someone over me, using one woman to erase the pain of the last."
I wanted to argue against that estimation—to promise this wretched embodiment of my regret, my weakness, that I was—I am—a wreck. I will forever be a broken thing. However, not all their words were meant for me; these raised a chill in Nadia's spirit, even as they handed her—us—permission to pursue.
Nadia led us inside, sparing not even a glance toward the origin of Secretary's passive verbal violence nor toward Rita's gemstone door as it rippled back to opaque solidity; her focus and her hope was planted firmly ahead. Taking a seat at one of the pale wood stools set against the counter marking the border between the kitchen and living room, she whirled about to face our host properly with neither sun nor tears to occlude our estimation of her: Rita was old.
And what does 'old' mean in this context? I've come to understand that most of your lovers are your seniors. Some by a few years, such as Marduk's grandchild or the secretary, and others by decades like the godtender of Masks—your older sister. Alls below, depending on how we factor in entities—
Old, in this respect, is someone who wears Time's touch with an appropriate gravity. Entities are beyond time, and Amb—Redacted is the type for whom years and experience are nothing more than paints to dress her masks; time is an unserious concept to them. Rita was different. Despite living in a city that undoubtedly had all manner of treaments and ointments to present a facsimile of unchanging maturity, she embraced the faint brushstroke of years that marked her forehead, the corner's of her eyes, and ends of her mouth, treating each as an award that said, "I've lived." Her eyes, a glassy blue, shimmered with sparkles of wit and wisdom in equal measure. Removing her hat, a floppy thing with a wide witch-like brim, she tousled her hair, curly and grey as spring clouds.
"Not so feral after all," Rita said before disappearing into her bedroom, leaving us with only Ornimant for company. At the sound of her shower, Nadia and I scoffed; the trust she was extending to us was…confounding, a madness of confidence—we could've been thieves, murderers, summoners who'd stepped off the upright path of worldly stewardship Dad always said a summoner of the New World should walk. Though, as Nadia and I took in the decor of Rita's apartment, glimpsing into this woman's heart, the true madness wasn't in her but me.
The worst I could say of Rita was she possessed an eclectic taste and a design sensibility that could be summed in one word: overflowing. She didn't possess one of anything. Not her living room furniture, in which she had three sofas in the form of two love-seats and the longer couch all in different colors and construction; not her plants, of which I could locate at least six visible planters despite stems and leaves of twice as many species obscuring her walls and ceiling. She didn't even have one loaf of challah but two, each sitting on their own upraised dish, blue and red respectively, and both in even states of partial consumption; Nadia lingered on that—the bread.
Her spirit rumbled with waves of desire directed solely at it, reminding our body it'd been weeks since our last non-liquid meal—that having been our Deathday cake. The memory of it, its colors and multitudinous flavors, was a catalyst that only intensified the arousal within my sister-self. Back then I'd cautioned her to patience; we didn't know this woman nor her Court, and I worried what she might be capable of—Brightgate might've been free of the Lurkers but who knew what monsters stalked the streets as we did. Though now, I reckon with a simple truth: the Deathday cake was the last non-liquid meal I'd eaten. Nadia's last was longer, so long I can't remember what it was, and I doubt she could either; the meal was likely whatever random snack we'd had before the ball—before I'd banished her from our body.
"You can have a slice," Rita said, taking us by surprise—the rumble-clatter of the shower having concluded in the missing minutes of my lapsed self-awareness. I didn't know how long she'd been watching us, leaning against her bedroom's doorframe in a black-and-purple satin robe, but her offer—so tuned to my sister-self's desire—unnerved me; how well could she read us, and what had she found? Reading into our hesitancy, she added, "I'd made it for yesterday's shabbos, so it's not perfectly fresh, but you'd be doing me a huge favor in eating some."
"How much can I have?" Nadia asked, tail lacerating the air while her voice wobbled with trepidatious sorrow—ready for disappointment.
A scroll-curl smile rolled itself open across Rita's face. "As much as you want," she said.
I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't hungry, but the pain of it—how it hollows you—settled well beside my numb mood. Nadia, on the other hand, fell upon the half-consumed braided loaf with a gusto that could rival Nemesis's rapaciousness. While our claws split the bread with ease, shovelling the cold yet still faintly buttery chunks toward our mouth to be scooped up by our prehensile split tongue, Rita prepared the cup of tea she'd promised us, finishing right when Nadia polished off the first loaf and was in need of fluids to shove the mass down into our stomach.
Lost in a trance of satiation, she knocked back the mug of tea, quaffing three gulps before stopping…returning to true awareness…and crying. Rita fretted over us—worried we'd burnt our tongue—but in the casual magic of our new existence Nadia'd instinctively Divided the heat to a bearable temperature. No, it wasn't the heat of the tea, but its flavor—raspberry and hibiscus; Melissa's favorite.
Nadia and I were of one mind in that moment—wondering where she'd gone, if she'd properly escaped the fallout of our ascension, if she left with—ugh—Ina, of all people. Did she loathe us? Did she mourn us, the difference between the philosophical grave she left us in and the news of our "execution" moving her to some final feeling? I only hoped—still hope—that she's not haunted by us; Nadia diverged from me there, turning her face from the tangled roots of our heart.
"Do you have something harder?" she asked.
Rita's eyes narrowed as she poured over our face. "I do," she said, "but I think you should finish the tea first before I give it to you—wouldn't want you to drink when you're underhydrated."
"Please?" Nadia begged, tears hanging from our lashes like gift-stockings—the sort Melissa's family would hang every year off the tassles of their Lady Gracemourne tapestry. The thought made Nadia cry harder, but whatever levee ringed Rita's heart refused to collapse, forcing Nadia to bring the mug back to her lips and drink. Drink and drink and drink, memories flowing across our palate of every time we'd taken tea with our once fiancee.
"We don't have to do this," I said, pushing a bubble of my spirit into Nadia's to carry the message. She lanced it with a thorny extension of her own indignation, "I have to." And she did, until any trepidation in her sorrow had been shoved off a cliff into the murky seas of despair; Rita was pleased.
She swept the pad of her thumb across our cheek, cooing heavy and slow at how plump Nadia's tears were. "Good girl," she said, eliciting a smile and a shiver from my sister-self; her spirit felt limp against mine, a juiced fruit. Taking hold of her expression, that mad looping smile with too much teeth, Rita followed through on the deal, and poured vodka into Nadia's drained tea mug, which disappeared down our shared throat.
Choking down the burn, I addressed Rita for the first time. "Why me?"
"Some chase after joy's sweetness," Rita said, before resting an elbow on the counter and leaning in close, conspiratorially so, "and others—whose likeness is to that of the purple monarch—prefer sorrow's rot. Yours was too beautiful to leave to the gutter."
In an instant I Divided space, relocating our body to Rita's lavender velvet sofa, perching on the edge of the cushion, fangs bared and tail high. Beside me sat Secretary, their legs crossed and chin resting in their hands. "I might've misjudged her, little brute," Secretary teased. "Her tastes are impeccable—even Lupe admitted that you're irresistible, 'a broken pretty thing.' Why be surprised when others see it—fall for it?"
"I don't ask them to," I hissed.
"You don't," Secretary replied before fading once again.
The shuffle of Rita's feet against the carpet drew my eye back to her, though now it smoldered with the embers of past pains. She pointed them out as she dropped onto the loveseat perpendicular to the end of the sofa. "Right there," she said, waving the head of her cane to circle the ailments of my heart. "So much pain you're carrying—why not put it down?"
"I want to," Nadia said.
"But I can't," I added. "You wouldn't get it. It's the only way to make sure I—"
"Don't make the same mistakes?" Rita asked. Smirking, she shifted her robe to unveil one of her legs—the source of her limp. It was twisted outward, as if something had tried to wrench it from her body, and flecked with as many scars as there were stars in the sky; an old pain, one she'd grown with. "I understand it a little bit. Much like I understand that the cat which hisses loudest isn't the scariest—it's the most scared."
I lacked a retort, but refused to be seen as scared—soft. It was Nadia who settled our body into a catlike curl against the sofa, a necessary adjustment considering most furniture wasn't designed for girls with tails. Rita shot us back a thumbs up and another 'good girl'; the phrasing dosing Nadia's mood into the early bloom of a smile. Bitter, I asked, "Why talk like you know what I'm going through—did you use sorcery on us?"
"None at all," Rita said, chuckling to herself. "Unless you consider the privilege of growing old to be magic; I know more than a few survivors of the Changeover who'd agree with you. But otherwise, no—I'm only an old woman whose seen faces come and go over the years. I understand, at least a smidgen, how time subjects us to its rhyming schemes—the second chance at the tests we've failed over the years. In this way, you're not that unique…"
"Nadine," Nadia answered. "It's not my original name, but I'm trying it out."
"A pleasure then, Nadine," Rita said. "Can I tell you a story?"
"You will anyways," I grumbled, and that's enough of an answer for her.
Her story began, as most Changeover stories tend to, with a clash of monsters. Fights were common then, their causes even more so, and left the 'noncombatants' of the world to scurry from place-to-place in search of a peace that wouldn't exist for decades. It was a search that saw Rita leading her friends—her few years leaving her the closest thing to an adult their group had—toward safety after two summoners came to blows in the ramshackle detritus they called a 'village.' Other adults tried to reason with them, these summoners having been their protectors for so long, but at the time humanity knew so little of what climbing the Chain could take from you; that those you've laughed with could so easily be rendered hollow, a vehicle piloted by the power they sought.
Rita and the kids ran the moment her father tried to intercede and for his swollen heart, so confident in the goodness of these two men, was melted; his body's dimensionality stolen, leaving the spot he stood looking like a painter's palette. His death made her an orphan. It made it easy for her to not look back, unlike some of the children whose concerns stayed with those left behind; no matter how long they looked, every child that did paid a harsh price for their curiosity—their bodies twisting into fleshy saplings, the lies they'd spoken and rules they'd broken igniting into a blaze that consumed them from the inside out, and so on. These screams stayed with her, she told me, but she didn't turn back for them.
She thought that meant she was strong—that dedication allowed her to lead the group to a bunker of some kind—safety—after all. It was in the heavy dark of this place, where a fallen water droplet's echo was the howl of a bound fury, that Rita realized she wasn't strong…only broken. Her heart reduced to bloody sand unable to support anything: not her pain, not the children, not even a basic skepticism as to why there was that steady fucking drip of water.
Rita paused at this point, rubbing her leg as she mulled her next words. "We'd survived so much magic, avoided so many monsters, and in the end it only took a drop of water. Just one."
It was unfair how fast the violence found them; they'd been there for less days than the youngest child could even count. Alas, peace is a transient thing, a concept we often forget until it leaves us as a sacrifice to its natural predator: disaster and tragedy. The disaster that day? The same which saw them flee—a clash of monsters who'd made no attempt to see if their battlefield was someone's home. It rattled their bunker, smashing them against the floor in violent warning—run—but they were tired, they were hungry, and the idea of running from their shelter which had been so safe until now was inconceivable.
"And that," Rita said, "was the tragedy. We were never safe. Only lucky until we weren't."
Their shelter convulsed with each beat of the battle above, shuddering and squealing as its Old World supports cried a dying song of shorn metal and crumbling stone. They were lucky none of it crushed them. They were less lucky when that steady drip of water, howling with a bound fury, achieved emancipation, roaring triumphantly as nature proved that it would outlast the designs of men; their 'bunker' was in truth the interior of a dam designed nearly three centuries ago. That drip of water Rita had ignored was the sole courtesy fate had deigned to give them.
"I can't say it'd have been better if they were crushed," Rita said, "but drowning is an awful way to go. They were so conscious of the air they lost, whether it died in their lungs or bubbled beyond their lips.
"I watched as these children, the infinite potential of their lives, were swept away, leaving me—the one who'd left so many behind—behind myself; my leg having been skewered on ancient rebar. This old thing, this non-magical thing, being what bound me to the world. The water thrashed me, stolen stones broke my bones, but that single metal branch held onto me with a possessiveness until the only remnants of the water were the puddles on what remained of the floor. Then it broke, snapping off like that."
There's a 'brand' that marks survivors. It burns hottest in the aftermath of tragedy, but inevitably it mellows—there's too much of life to retain the same state; that was the wedge which split Nadia and myself. Other conditions exist which stoke the heat of that mark, the warm embers of guilt; one of them was to hear the story of a survivor like yourself.
At some point we'd leaned in, Nadia and myself, allowing—maybe craving—our own brand to burn hotter due to the stolen embers of Rita's tale. I'd forgotten my own wariness because of it, so used to allowing my pain to sweep me from any sense of time or space; agony as a key to my heart.
"Your leg then?" I asked.
"A memento," Rita confirmed, before smiling. "As is my cane. It's not wrong to try and remember, Nadine, but there's a difference between that and self-torture. I'd let my leg be the latter for so many years, grinding my teeth as pain chased away sleep until I was little more than a nub."
"What changed?" Nadia asked.
"I realized that I'm alive." Rita stroked her leg, a strange tranquility cooling her words. "I'm alive, unfair as that sometimes feels, and it means I'm the only one who can remember them. If I torture myself to a grave then this cruel luck of mine would be ill spent, leaving those children to a most final demise. Afterwards, I got my leg healed just enough that I could sleep, and in honor of their memory, internalizing my mistake, I bound myself to Ornimant—the Court of Omens."
Using the cane as leverage, she swings herself up and over to lay against the loveseat's arm—the one nearest our head. She reached toward us with such slowness you'd think her hand was still—she wanted our approval, and Nadia gave it, bowing her head to receive Rita's hand, her care. She stroked it through our curls, lavishing our scalp with such tenderness that we purred. The action brought Sphinx to mind—how much she loved it when we did this ourselves—and brought tears to our eyes, tears Rita kissed away, licking the salt from her lips as we looked up at her.
"Nadine, there isn't a pain in the world that can fill this wound we feel," she explained, each word chosen over so many years of trying and failing to address her own, "but there are other applications of pain: the sting of a salve as it consumes an infection, the prick of needles before they close a laceration, or the crack-pop of a bone set back into its socket."
Pain as medicine. Pain as relief. A way to see us freed from the unbearable weight of my atrocities. It was a tantalizing offer, and Nadia knew it as well. She saw it in my hesitation, stealing into this moment with a batting of her lashes, a soft sniffle, and a dash of coquettish skepticism.
"What do I have to do?" she asked for us.
"Be mine, for awhile. Be as you've been, a good girl." Rita chuckled. "I'll hurt you in a way you've never been hurt before, and through it we'll bridge you back into the world, to be amongst the living rather than ghosts. If you're still wary, let me promise you, if at any time it's too much or you realize you don't want it—"
"I want it," Nadia said, cutting off Rita's disclaimer. Though to me, she was more verbose, oscillating her weary spirit. "I want a bed, Orchard. I want to not be hungry. To not be cold. If you can't handle this—"
"I can handle it!" I snapped, gnashing my spirit around a pitiful rage. "We can handle it…in some other way, but without needing to give ourselves up to Rita. It's not like she wants to help us, she wants to—"
"Feast on our beautiful, irresistible sorrow? I know, and that's a fine trade with me. This carcass you're carrying around, the phantom of Secretary, that decrepit promise of "I'm yours and you're mine," I want to let it go—for the both of us. Rita might not care about us, but I care about you! If there's a chance that this could heal you then I'll take it. Alone if you make me."
I tell it to you like this, with spoken words, but what we exchanged was faster and deeper; sublime expressions of will and desire that mere puffs of air—speech—could never rival. It's how I knew that Nadia—Nadine—was firm in her position. She who understood people better than I ever could, whose feelings were rich as syrup, and who, after everything, still sought a way forward. I'm a killer, but she's the true fighter between us both.
"I'll wait for you." I told her, and stepped aside as she kneeled before Rita, and crawled after her into the bedroom to receive a treatment I couldn't bear, leaving myself with my beloved ghosts.