Evening was falling when they came for Lily-Bridge, knocking, knocking at my door. She was sighing, half-sleeping, and exceptionally small in the new jagged shadows of our visitors. I had been alone in the two months since her birth, and beside them we both waned fragile and immaterial. All the caring had made a child of me.
They came to say that Merrywine had fled with her son, meeting a conspirator at the outskirts of the village. Now, on the evening of the ceremony, they needed me, for Lily-Bridge was the next youngest. They needed my blessing for the unspeakable.
My heart's pondering turned sour and loud, then, and their words were nearly drowned by the tide of acid rising in my throat-mind. These were my friends and neighbours, now tax-collecting shadows, now hyenas bearing evil news. The cruelty had a dreamlike quality to it—two dooms swapped, as though in fairytale. I thought of the gifts piled at Merrywine's doorstep, of the lamentations we had sung for her, of the lullabies crafted exquisite like gold-trimmed toys to please her ephemeral child. I thought of my secret, sordid relief that her son was the younger of our offspring, and the night-terrors that ate my sleep until Lily-Bridge's early birth. So I could not begrudge her taking it all, and leaving still, for the sorrow was greater than any gain.
I thought of refusal, and the meaning of it. I would not be cast out, nor would I be hated; the community would stand witness to my weakness, but in this place the pathetic was admitted and sheltered. We took pride in our caring—it distinguished us from the world beyond. The women who refused were pitied, in a crooked way, as much as the victims. They were, in their sunlight, excluded from the deeper bindings of grief. An easy life, never to be relied upon, living in ignorance of sacrifice.
Steeped in guilt. The next youngest one was nearly two years old. Would not the pain be greater if she was taken, a child more human, more embedded in the world? I could never meet her mother's gaze. From her crib, Lily-Bridge was staring, discerning and serious, her eyes like ladles of light; but she could not recognize herself, or speak, and her attachment to life was shallow.
Not babbling yet, but she had just begun to smile, in response to my voice, my face, handfuls of my hair, and sometimes privately, warmth flickering across her mind. Two months of memories, worth less than twelve. The mask of the nearest shadow cracked, and I could see the pain through it. Was his grand-daughter next in the chain, or after-next, or had he endured the tithe, in ages past? Our hearts wailed together.
I wondered, where had Merrywine to go? Even in our village, under the cool willows and beside the lake, there was a taint in the air from distant war, enough toxicity to force me inside so Lily-Bridge wouldn't be poisoned. Her son would live in drudgery and among demons, breathing the heavy sighs of machines. I imagined my daughter with blackened, blistered lungs, voice too hoarse to sing the song she was named for¹; but voice at all, unclogged by dirt.
Eleven months wasted, better than twenty-one. Body-sapped, and so long from work that my hands were forgetting the art. Yet though I pined to be back in the council hall and at the canvas, painting my murals, I pined more for Lily-Bridge's laughter, for her first words, and for her first gleams of interest in my craft. I thought she might be left-handed, like me, from the hand she sucked and the twist of her mouth. I thought she might like to illuminate the walls, as I did.
Truthfully, I no longer cared about art for its own sake, or for its laudations and glory, and I now regretted every instant I had spent wishing to return to it. An audience of peers, of nebulous descendants to be bribed into enshrining my legacy, had been replaced completely by my daughter. I wanted to paint stories for her, of vines and veiled assassins, spiders, sword-swingers, and metamorphosing robots; I wanted to turn my talent to delight. To delight, and to preservation, as so much of the world we knew was slipping into myth.
There were flowers in my garden that would be extinct in fifty years, even behind the walls of our conservatory. There were meals whose recipes were lost and whose ingredients, like cocoa, could only be scavenged, dead to the tongue but alive in my memory. I wanted to drag the beauty of the past into the present, that Lily-Bridge not be deprived of what was lost, of what we had lost, neglectful stewards. I wanted to paint her imaginary friends, I wanted to see for a moment through her unpolluted mind, our land as something growing rather than broken.
The future as we imagine it is never real.
Our founders had gathered to build a safe haven, and been reminded that nothing in this world exists without demonic permission. The ceremony could not be cancelled. It bought us the willows, the evening breeze, the soothing water that was almost clean. We abided, because the monsters were secure in their power to destroy us, to point to the queue of weeping mothers and shrunken corpses and declare the extermination just. Evil allowed good its redoubts only when it was complicit, when a small corruption ruins the whole.
They offered to take Lily-Bridge immediately, to hide her elsewhere until it was time. It would have been easier, a cleaner separation, but what sort of mother would that have made me? So I held her for her final hours, playing with her, or with the spectre of what she might have become, for the games didn't yet mean anything but gazes and comfort. I tried to smile, so she wouldn't know sadness. I felt glass break in my chest, again and again.
Once, as a young artist, I had painted a small portrait so perfect that it brought me great pain. It was no bigger than my palm, and I put it away, somehow too embarrassed to share it. I was possessed by a wild jealousy for my former self, convinced the peaks of accomplishment were now behind me. I was angry and depressed, and covetous, greedily terrified it would decay, this exclusive testament to my skill. It weighed heavy on me until, finally, I destroyed it, and all my anxiety, selfishness, and pride were discharged.
Darkness spread. My sleeping daughter was taken away, bundled in her shroud. I left my home to attend the ceremony, dazed by so many months of isolation. The night was cellar-cool, the torches bright, the crickets laughed. A man squeezed my shoulder in appreciation, and mothers shed sympathetic tears. The cameras were set to record; video demanded by the demons. Wide-eyed, Lily-Bridge cooed, and for a moment I wondered whether I could ask for a copy of the tape, the final evidence of her existence. Abruptly, they snapped her neck, and dropped her body into the coals. I felt my ears pop before I knew the grief, a puncture wound, the roar of static in my ears and eyes; and on some distant, shrinking plane, I waited for release.
¹
There was a bridge of lilies sat Upon the black-dark endless sea A road of milk across the depths I pray one day to walk with thee From withered earth to starlit court Far from the weary shores of death Oh loved one, when your time runs short Await me at the lily bridge
This was amazing. Thank you
Just shockingly good.