01-12-2020, 07:20 PM
The Devil was evil, mad―but I was the devil's wife.
She might have been envious, once, but jealousy was a thing long drained from her. It would have been impossible to exist otherwise; envy would have eaten away at her like a cancer. She knows Beqanna is populated with his blood, knows there are other dalliances, too, ones more convoluted and somehow more intimate. But he does not speak of these often to her, just as she does not speak of her other activities.
(Here, they diverge, for the dark god is willful, and less inclined to share her, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.)
But she knows Ryatah’s name, he has spoken of her. She remembers when he first spoke of her, of his actions at the forbidden dale – a general murdered and a queen blinded. For no reason, of course, other than the delight of chaos. His tone had changed more recently, as he spoke of the lair, of the ghostly kingdom he had recreated. He had been tactful in not mentioning the children conceived there – she learned of them later, and did not care, other than a faint wistful jealousy. She has tried to conceive here, and there was one child – Annapurna – but Carnage had taken her, and their other efforts had amounted to naught. It seemed a world of death was not kind to fertility, and all the magic they held between them could do nothing for this problem. He had offered to bring her a child, or make her one from the earth, but she had refused.
This is the real jealousy, perhaps – of their livelihood. Their fecundity.
“He talks of you enough to lead me to believe otherwise,” she says, and laughs, “and besides, anyone who keeps…coming back, willingly, is interesting.”
She assumes it’s willing. He has been more interested in things offered freely, as of late.
Ryatah asks another question then, one that Gail has thought of a hundred times. She’s tried, of course, to leave through the portal, but encounters the same strange membrane that had surrounded her when the others had first brought her back.
“I tried,” she says, “it didn’t work.”
She’d returned to the world of the living, once – at the power of a shaman. She had not sought Carnage out, had instead been with Ramiel, a beautiful and fleeting time that left her with twin girls, beautiful as anything and long grown.
“This place was made for me, so I guess it can’t permit me leaving.”
It sounds arrogant, maybe, but it was the truth. She’s powerful, here, more powerful than she ever was on earth. She likes that aspect, but would give it up in a moment for the chance to breathe again, to walk among the living.
“You can leave, of course. Whenever you wish. I just…I wanted to know you, a little bit. Hear your story. If you would share.”
Gail