01-25-2020, 05:06 PM
The Devil was evil, mad―but I was the devil's wife.
I was taught, she says, and Gail wonders what she herself would say, were the question turned on to her. Was she taught, trained from birth to revolve around him? Or was it more intrinsic than that, something in her blood, in her makeup that draws her to him, and vice versa?
(For surely, if it had just been training, he would have tired of her. It would have made sense when they were mortals together, before his godhead made itself known, but he would have had his fill of her, if all that she was was something trained.)
“Who taught you?” she asks. What she does not say is they did a good job. That’s something he would say, and she thinks it, briefly, though she does not know Ryatah in any real way. She only has what she tells her, and her own guesses, her intuition that it may be more than that, some vein run deep within her, a likeness shared.
She listens to the rest of the story Ryatah shares. She is surprised to learn that she was born elsewhere, and thinks, unexpectedly, of her father. He was born elsewhere too, though he had not shared many stories from that time – she had not been close, to her father, which worked in her favor when her own lover killed him, and she barely blinked an eye.
Gail mostly knows Beqanna, albeit warped versions of it. A version of the beach, at the end of the world, time repeating and folding on itself a million times. And now this other realm, this death-place, like Beqanna viewed through fogged glass.
She notices the other name, how something crosses her face when she says it.
“Would you ever go back?” she asks, and she isn’t sure if she is asking about the old world or the old name. Maybe they’re the same.
Gail