The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [6]
The monster’s outbursts contained nuggets of truth. They always did, if one was patient enough to sift. Twelve gods had indeed descended. The sky became obscured by clouds that never again parted. Now, in Nowy Solum, empty temples disintegrated.
And time—for people, anyhow—was a relentless river. Every citizen—except for the youngest of children, and those of infirm minds—knew this for a fact.
The monster snored. Parthenogenesis took its toll. Her sides rose and fell, rose and fell, in almost peaceful rhythm. Without a doubt, something growing inside that infamous womb kicked.
Had there been lies in the speech too, or speculation? Had words been said only for the sake of their sounds?
Most likely.
Moments slipped away, to become the past, joining millions of others mingling in the fading torrent. Only subjective memories would live on, and, even then, briefly, flickering in the minds of just a few.
Like the fecund had implied.
Elements of decay, elements of entropy. Now that the era of gods was over, taking with it the promise of eternal salvation, contaminants of impermanence and mortality had once again been integrated into each event, into each moment, into each human life. Thankfully, though, small fragments of beauty remained, entangled with the abominations. Laughter and music were inseparable from pain and injustice.
Grumbling, the fecund stretched again in her sleep, and let out a bubbling fart.
Night fell on half the world and day was about to begin in Nowy Solum. But there were in-between places even the fecund could never understand. Nether regions haunted flickering gaps between sickness and health, between gods and godlessness, between life and time and the inevitability of death. Nether regions straddled night and day.
The snoozing monster would never hear of this, even if she were awake; she would dismiss these claims forthright. Because, she would tell you, she knows everything. Then she would demand food. Or make lascivious comments. Or, in the particularly garrulous mood she had been in of late, lecture endlessly.
The fecund mumbled in her sleep. One clawed hand twitched.
Best tiptoe away.
Abandoned, the twin brother was, like the chatelaine, plagued by dark thoughts. Being a kholic, though, this was the expected state. All those like him, tattooed at birth, veins thick with treacle, were thus inflicted, to greater or lesser degrees—especially those whose hearts laboured to pump the thickest, blackest of melancholy. At this boy’s birth trial, no fluids at all had leaked from the cut made by the palatinate physicker; the officer had squeezed the tiny arm, and squeezed it again, to finally reveal the slightest ooze of the pitch black humour that gave the baby life and condemned him, forever, to the ostracon, with the others of his temperament.
Naturally, the twin sister was also marked and removed, since they had shared a womb.
Their weeping mother was dismissed, empty handed, from Bedenham House.
Without his sister for the first time, the boy had slipped into an uglier and more self-destructive phase than usual. Seeing his twin led away by the chatelaine and her servants, without so much as a protest, or even a backward glance, had caused him, as the fecund would say in her vernacular, to snap. He howled, and he fumed, and he consumed vast quantities of ale and the hallucinogenic drug cultured from certain mould on stale bread, known in the streets of Nowy Solum as bud. He wanted to die. He got into