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@sluaghter
𝖞𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖇𝖔𝖉𝖞 𝖎𝖘 𝖓𝖔𝖙 𝖞𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖔𝖜𝖓. fandomless fantasy oc nicholas teague, a priest possessed by a fae of the sluagh and the host of purgatory. hien, he/him, 32. carrd. rules. nicholas. purgatory. verses. affiliated with: @abysswarden, @afteriimage, @laperlina, @lunarscorching, @sinsuerte, @soursoil, @toherdemise
it hadn't been until she'd left the chalet that jester had understood the reality of how others look at her and ( most importantly ) her kind. inside momma's establishment , the world had felt softer somehow [ . . . ] warmer. the workers drifting between the upper and lower floors had been kind in the way wounded things often are to one another. tieflings. half-elves. people with sharpened teeth or strange eyes or stories they didn’t like telling aloud. they'd formed a sort of PATCHWORK family around her without ever making it feel forced. lifting her up while the world outside seemed intent on teaching her to shrink. taught her how nice it was to do that for others.
so many strangers looked at tieflings like omens. trouble waiting to happen.
not nicholas , though. that was what made him feel so easy to be around. he never HESITATED to walk beside her in public. never carried that subtle flinch people sometimes got before they masked it over with politeness. his teasing lacked cruelty entirely [ . . . ] all warmth at the edges in those creases near his eyes , all fond exasperation and soft amusement that never once made her feel small for being strange. " i wouldn't ever want to do that to you , nicholas , " she hums with a grin that twinkles. no mischief or trickery for the cleric this time.
somewhere farther down the carnival path , a bell clangs loudly as someone rings the high striker. laughter bursts after it. the scent of fresh popcorn hangs thick in the air alongside spun sugar and smoke. " very well. " of course she's happy to show off. from her palm a little hamster with a unicorn's horn shakes it's raspberry ethereal form. it leaps to nicholas , scrambles up his arm and nestles close to his neck. " she likes you. " a beat. " which is important because she's VERY judgmental. "
He is the great-something grandson of an Irish wise woman, the son of a fisherman. He was born in the witching hour and extracted from a barleycorn. His mother had pinched her nose, swallowing fertility tinctures made by her own mother with the bubble wrap joints. He was always going to love magic.
So when Jester turns her palm and something takes shape—the soul of a little girl; that’s why it’s pink—he’s mercilessly charmed. It sprouts four legs and a spiral horn. It scuttles up his arm, roosting against his neck.
“Yes, well…” His cheek twitches. “She sees only half of me.”
Nicholas wonders if he can touch it. He uncurls his finger.
“And what else can you do, Jester. Can you put a curse on someone, then their children. Can you make them love you,” he says. His eye acquires a seditious glint. “I’m not happy yet.”
Then he’ll show her what’s in his attaché.
What does she think is in there? A relic of St. Peter. A book of everyone’s secrets which he’d snake-charmed from within a confessional, hoarding them because he likes having something no one else does. Jester with her horns and her tail—the brothers say she photocopied them from the Devil.
He smiles. “I think you’re very in danger of being loved.”
⠀⠀⠀𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐞. Lemuel fears himself more than any other. It is blasphemy, he understands this. He should fear God. Instead, he is a slave to Fear before he is a servant to God. Elohim, Am, El, OLAM, YHWH, Heavenly Father, Saklas—whichever God commands him will not have his genuflection. Lemuel has known God. He is cruel, sadistic and heavy handed in His wrath. Having mistakenly known Him by the name of Fear, Lemuel had for so long failed to recognize their difference. It is Fear who drove him to defect. Away from OLAM’s army, Fear follows him still. Heavy is Its presence, ever demanding and stringent.
⠀⠀⠀Fear is a jealous God and Lemuel has never been Its obedient devotee. For Lemuel loves Nicholas before Fear, before God, before Kings and Angels.
⠀⠀⠀“What you say is true.” His voice is ever tender with Nicholas. As brass dipped in gold, every layer of his words are steeped in warmth. “I fear myself, but not more than I adore you.”
⠀⠀⠀Blinking through tears, he holds the other’s gaze. He is made of clay, ruin and carnage. He is suffering incarnate. His request is far from humble—he knows what he is. He has little right to ask for this much. Still, he fixes his lips to Nicholas’ ear.
⠀⠀⠀“Will you take me as I am? Would you desire a beast that starves and wails? A beast that lays waste to the land before it? A beast that knows little more than anguish and terror? I ask not for your pledge, but for your consideration.”
⠀⠀⠀A sommelier indulges in bitter tannins as Lemuel does with the acrid chenin blanc of torment. The sweet and acid of it intoxicates him. Desire, denial and pain; He can take all of it. His heart will beat in time with Nicholas’ gate. He will cling to him as his shadow, his penumbra and the light that kisses his forehead.
⠀⠀⠀“I will take what you give me.” Lemuel confesses. “Give me your torment. Deny me, abandon me, scorn me if you wish; I will not forsake you. I will not forget you. Angels are given perfect memory, heedless of advantage or detriment.”
⠀⠀⠀He presses their temples together. Denial is anticipation. Anticipation is ecstasy. Lemuel wants this torment. He wants all the torment Nicholas can offer him.
⠀⠀⠀“I would like to bare myself to you, if you should want to see it.”
⠀⠀⠀A second breeze brings a tremor to the tarp over their heads. The beast writhes beneath flesh. It rumbles. Purring or snarling, he knows not. Its vacuous head rams into bone in increasingly erratic tempos.
⠀⠀⠀His heart throbs out.
⠀⠀⠀Dame tu tormento, corazón mio. Mátame. Desnúdame. Harás conmigo lo que quieras, y yo estare aquí esperando tu orden—Soy tu esclavo. Tu devoto.
⠀⠀⠀The Morpho menelaus spends its life with its wings folded. Baring its sapphires only for an instant, they close themselves off to the world when they have matched. They die knowing no other. Lemuel will live and die by his devotion.
⠀⠀⠀La carne de mi piel será mi sacrificio eucarístico.
Lemuel’s eyes have refilled. Soon, they’ll streak down his face. Lemuel flower presses his ear, whispering secrets against it.
“Yes. I would.” He’s merciless. He hates miserable things. “If it’s for me.”
He wants something to squeeze.
No, that ship has sailed. The time has passed. He knows all things are meant to die. Like humans, and stars, and the home he grew up in. Nicholas noses his hair, dark and spun by the legs of shiny black spiders, and keychains their bodies together, both rapidly generating and losing heat. One day, he’s going to blow. They’ll have to declare an evacuation zone.
“Then show me,” he tells him, holding Lemuel face-to-face.
He lets go.
Somewhere in the world, another Nicholas has just begun to stir. A tangy burst of sunlight maneuvers past his blinds, finalizing his form as a yellow zebra. He’s cocooned under the covers, performing in-place cat stretches and savoring life, when he unglues his eyes to two 8 balls. This Lemuel smiles, whispering good morning. This Lemuel had watched him sleep, now immune to him knowing, and pulls the covers up over their heads to warm in shared thermal energy. They have never heard of OLAM.
Somewhere else, a village burns down to carbon, a mother hiding her baby in the dog. A bishop sucks the red out of a cruet before slapping the milk marble floor, his body smallpoxing with new eyes. A man in white steps out onto a balcony while his sister fuses with the altar, expanding her nervous system. He gives his first homily.
Here, they are out of the tent.
Nicholas Teague stands among the trees, black like an open door in the night, and away from Róisín. The moon is a peephole and God is looking in.
It throws silver rays onto Lemuel’s armor, and he glows.
“Lemuel,” he says, waiting. He thumbs a buckle. “It will still be you.”
It shows on her small face, her small severe face. As he speaks, her eyes widen. Language may not truly shape understanding, but it is often our only reference point. If you take a religion that equates devotion with devouring, you get a girl that believes every temple is a mouth. This enigmatic She, this god he truly serves, will eat her. Miriam imagines herself as Alice in Wonderland, falling forward, falling down a tunnel that is nothing more than a gullet. Of course, all falling feels like floating until it stops. Dying can be a dream until you hit the wall. Nothing quiet about it to her upturned mind. Belief runs its old rivers. It sounds horrific.
Miriam’s gaze jerks to the door, contemplating cowardice. She could cut loose, throw herself to the wilderness. There are men out there who want nothing more. Her men. Men who would be so glad to see her, who’d throw open their arms and call her name. It’s enough to set her brain on fire. What does She know about what Miriam wants?
She fixes Father Teague with her bloodshot gaze, her tear-drenched gaze. Her lower lip threatens to tremble. It all tastes like being thrown to the wolves, one way or the other someone will be cleaning her hair out of their molars. “I need you to love me enough to do what I don’t want. Can you do that?”
Her brain shutters in MRI clicks. Miriam’s eyes rip to the door. They wheel back, wet, red spider legs.
“Yes,” he says, because he’s a Christian. “I will love you enough.”
His door whines open.
Now she has three options. The first: Miriam joins him in the raining dark, vaporized by the hydrogen bomb of his porch light. Maybe she pads barefoot down the loose teeth of his stairs. Maybe she staggers over the crack in his driveway wanting to break mother’s back, don’t break mother’s back. Maybe her eyes pinprick at the corpse of the church and she careens to the back door of his used Bronze Age sedan. The ignition takes three turns before the engine coughs pneumonia. She lies down, holding her knees, maybe afraid of red lights. Afraid of green.
The second: she stops halfway to the house of God. Cain has entered her body. Maybe it tells her to grab something. Anything. Maybe she cracks his head where it’ll cook scrambled in the citric acid Mojave morning. Maybe she splits her feet on twigs and rocks and ancient dog teeth as she runs for the trees to the wild Yucca man. Maybe she runs to an old widow who lost a daughter fifty years ago, and she’ll pretend she’s her because she believes in second chances. Maybe she’ll run back to the man who has her eyes.
The third: Miriam follows him inside. Father Teague stands like the black crack in an open door; he has been here longer than this desert. Maybe she’ll inch like the Lord to Calvary. Maybe she’ll hang her face overtop. The water won’t move, immune to her breath and cellular division, and the Miriam looking back isn’t Miriam at all. This one smiles. It laughs. It has only one voice in its head and has never known a pair of twins, or Nevada, or the trauma of being an only, perfect daughter. He lays his hand to the neck of her dirty hair and says, “I’m sorry if you’re happy.”
She can breathe. It isn’t water.
The church is gone and she’s in a kitchen.
im going to switch gears and will be dusting off my lenny blog if you want to find me there
𝒫𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑒, 𝒪𝑝. 28, 𝒩𝑜. 15; 𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑜𝑝. Chopin notes murmur along the luxury velvet walls, an elegant, unobtrusive choice that would not dream of imposing itself on all the sophisticated conversation going about the room.
❝ How are you weird? Are you serious? Papa, you're a Catholic. ❞
Who, after an unfortunate turn of events in 1988, adopted a half-dead, eight-year-old, Kazakh, Cherkess, Lipka Tartar girl that has no business talking about Catholicism, or Islam, or even God for that matter, or the thousand hands and thousand eyes of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, considering --
Well. We'll get to that part later.
❝ Horror movies make you laugh. Which is extra weird since you're hard-programmed not to smile at anything but me. You lecture me that I don't love or take care of my Tamagotchi enough. You performed exorcisms in Soviet Kazakhstan. You know more about Dinmukhamed Kunaev than I do. You only eat when people are watching you. You keep pixies inside of empty Altoids tins and tell me it's like a Polly Pocket -- I agree, by the way, but it's not like other people do. You're reaaaally nosy about absolutely everything -- there's nothing you won't be nosy about. But you're, like, reaaaally polite about it at the same time. ❞
She refuses the bread, thinking that it is the fashionable thing to do so.
❝ I can keep going, you know. ❞
She’s grown up and no longer needs father’s bread. Father’s hairline has begun its final evolution. There are creases on his face that weren’t quite there in 1989. Soon, when she achieves immortality in home video format, he will be gray and slender in a way that, once chic, will only be sad.
Nicholas redirects her rejected bread onto his plate. He feels his fingers sparkle as she laundry lists his strange offenses.
“Alright. Then I will be very, very normal, so someone will like me.” He ignores his menu, already knowing his choice. “I will become an Evangelical” —the majority in America— “and scream when I’m afraid. I will never ask questions, because the wives tell me their husbands never do, and I will make everyone think I don’t care.
I will eat three meals a day. Even in secret.”
The server with the boot camp hair is already coming back with their water. One fizzes.
“And you will be normal, because a normal father has a normal daughter. So you will hate horror. You will scream at mummies, and anything with more than four legs. You will have many friends, one for every day of the month, and never want to be with me. You will believe in love,” he says. “You won’t even lie.”
These are the Ten Commandments of being normal. The waitress arrives. Their glasses bubble like Alka-Seltzer, and with black magic, she conjures a Blues Clues spiral notebook, ready for their orders. She’s unaware that she’s just narrowly avoided death. Nicholas neutralizes her. They live together as a quarantine protocol.
“Promise me,” he says, after ordering tortellini, “so someone will like us.”
@tooth--ache asked: “ why do you think some people play god, Father ? is it so easy to believe that the mighty would never fall someday ? i don’t understand this greed . and yet it’s all around me. ”
By now it had become an immutable fact that Nicholas Teague watched nothing but local ballet production VHSes, the news, and classics. Tonight, it was Top Hat, although historical pattern dictated he would soon switch over to a novel or homily. In an hour, he would leave for compline.
Nicholas uncapped a pen. It scratched over paper.
“Wanting.” He smiled, because Howard already answered it. “We want what isn’t ours. To keep what we have,” he said. “We want to run from what we don’t.
“Or maybe they want to fall. And in three days, return,” he said, glinting. “And they’ll come to Heaven.”
Finally, they’ll really be God. He wrote with a doctor’s slant and psuedo-cursive. Astaire and Rogers began a dance.
“Do you think you have everything.”
@empyreau asked: in each of us there are two natures. 𝗕𝗬 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗢𝗙 𝗠𝗬 𝗧𝗛𝗨𝗠𝗕 (accepting)
he knows, and he intends to expose you, his brain warns, generating froth. it isn’t murder, but preemptive problem solving.
only dead men keep secrets.
He thinks of the devil on your shoulder, an angel on the other. He remembers six hundred years ago watching morality plays from an anthropological distance, a man dressed in scales and wings, a tongue for a tail. It was named Wrath or Pride or Lust, tempting people to give in. There’s a little bit of Hell in everyone.
Now, the sun undergoes osmosis. It seeps through the windows of the church, dyeing this boy’s oolong hair rainbow. He has pale eyes. Like egg whites.
“And what are yours,” Nicholas asks. He wears a purple stole, and the last confessor leaves, windshield wiping her cheek. “Do you hide one. Do you hope no one will see you.”
The nanosecond his neurons registered the words 'bless the food', Howard's hands were already clasped together, his head bowed down. Muscle memory slotted through the slit between his lips, already beginning his prayer with the standard -- bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, -- and as he was about to enunciate an expected Amen, Father Teague continued.
He was in the presence of the head of this congregation, after all. There would be flourishes, extra blessings, unto him, unto the farmers who had sown and reaped, the miller and the grocer, and the rest of the world needful of a slice of mercy, amidst rolling steam that scribbled a mental note for him to repay this kindness somehow, some way.
"Amen." At last.
A vampire and a priest, blessing the food and praying for world peace. A start of a joke somewhere, surely.
"Surely you've heard worse. All parishes have their own sets of characters. My being the least of its colourful constituents, I say in confidence," he laughed softly, taking a modest portion of the pie into his mouth. He wished and wished and wished to be able to taste it. Perhaps placebos do work. It was heavenly.
"'Marry' is the polite way to put it, Father, I'm sure you know." Howard shrugged, more pie coming down his gullet, though he was careful to pace himself, taking breaks with small sips of tea, to also be polite. "I don't personally know any woman of the sea who suffered that fate, but I could build an army of women who would say they feel as if they are. Matrimonies are holy, but not the average men." He snorted. "Perhaps I'm biased; our dad left us high and dry one day. We thought he'd perished at sea, but his boat was dry on the shore. The hunger begins then."
Abject poverty, even in the embrace of a much kinder age back then. He remembered the pain, knotting in his stomach, in the dead of winter. He remembered how angry he was.
"Anyone can marry before God if their intention is true." Not holy, not good, but true. "Long as they feel love, I suppose, I'm sure He's alright with it," Howard pointed at the cross with his shoulder. "First Corinthians, chapter thirteen, verse thirteen. Faith, hope and love remain, the greatest is love, yes? Our Lord would not have granted us the greatest of all feelings for us to suffer it. He would have wanted us to relish it, be good in it." The echoes of Mr Sealey's voice shiver on his tongue. Howard believed in it truly. "Why, did you not believe it so? Would you tell me how you feel?"
The implication that Jackie was waiting for him put the fear of everything in the black of his eyes, and he laughed nervously, shaking his head.
"No, no, I cannot accept Jackie, or any aspiring merfolk's wish to be married to me," a troll and a mermaid! Imagine a pair worse suited! "I cannot marry. I can't promise my spouse that they'll be safe. Look where I've washed up," nearly twenty years back in time, "having no clue what had happened, if it was an attempt at my life. I will not subject my love to such torture. I don't want to ever see my mother's hopeful eyes for the return of their husband in anyone's eyes, ever, ever. I no longer hate my father for leaving, he must have had his reasons, but forgiveness will not wipe the hurt my mother felt in his absence."
Nicholas peeled off his acetates and absorbed this thing in high definition. His grated polenta hair, turned brown, retained water like a mop. His skin may or may not be flushed pink from temperamental bathwater. He clasped his hands as Nicholas said grace the Catholic way, only more.
“You drowned in America and woke in Dublin,” he said. “You don’t know if someone wanted to kill you,” he said. “You’re owned. And you don’t know who owns you.”
deception as modesty. he is the definition of ‘colorful’ and not ‘like other guys’.
Nicholas’ tea fogged like a crystal ball. “Howard. Would you like to be like everyone,” he says, “because you’re not.”
This foreign invader began forking mouthfuls of cottage pie. The insides of the boiler hummed with rapidly expanding vapors and the rectory hissed like a dragon. His brain cigar puffed memories.
Howard James Pike was illuminated on the page in shades of isotopic beetle blue, etched with his entire life in a book. He read about Hávarðr. He read about Vicar Sealey and his unfailing heart of gold. He learned about his father then a woman named Malena, the queen, who fed his brother who fed him. When he turned the page, he saw a nephilim without an angel. The next page, a man was staked.
The Irish had tales for such things. Abhartach. Carmilla. Blood drinkers and black hearts. In the library, Purgatory showed him Howard made people go cold, then he buried them.
The silence suspended like insects in amber. A fork clinked the plate and Nicholas hasn’t drank.
“No,” he answered. “I don’t.
“A marriage must be open to life. It must be a man and a woman, who are made in His image. Love is not marriage.” Nicholas smiled, but he didn’t. “God does not care what I want.”
The dust settled and his stovetop clicked. Nicholas’ face never changed. It stayed like this always: a single frame and a paused screen, as immutable as death and mathematical law. He had a way of looking you in the eye. Like he was searching for something there. Like if he weaponized the hurt, you couldn’t use it against him.
Howard protested. He had a pincushion heart, afraid of absorbing the needle of being his father.
“I’m sorry you can’t marry,” Nicholas said. Then, in the way only he can: “What reason is good enough to forgive him.”
𝓡𝒂𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒔 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒇𝒊𝒙 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈. Raisins will teach her how to behave like all the other little girls, as though Baba Yaga had never taken a special interest in her upbringing, and exorcise from her the need to see Caroline Honey horribly injured within the next few days, so that she may never again intrude on Father-Daughter time. Marzanna likes raisins. And during an episode of Popeye, where she had watched him eat spinach, grow very strong, and defeat all the supervillains in Sweethaven, she had imagined for herself that her favorite snack might also do the same thing. Today, she feels awfully confused, and sad too, but supposes that a handful of champagne grapes dried beneath a smiling sun might do the trick. Make her strong. And push every bad feeling, the Baba Yaga and her demons, far, far away.
Raisins will fix everything.
The emergency pipe cleaners have now come in handy. She retrieves a red one from her lunchbox, shapes it into a heart, and delivers it to the vendor as additional payment, as well as a gesture of forgiveness for the sin he'd committed -- to think that Caroline could ever be her mother.
She hums I'm Popeye the Sailor Man as she starts eating, which distracts her, thankfully, from Nicholas and Caroline's conversation.
And then, the offer.
❝ I know how to do all of this by myself, ❞ comes her proud lie reply. Her free hand clings to Nicholas' pant leg. ❝ I'm the smartest girl in my class. I'm the Line Leader. Papa says I'll go to college when I'm fourteen. ❞
That, at least, wasn't a lie.
Suddenly, she yelps, ❝ We forgot to visit Mahatma Gandhi! Let's go! ❞ Then bolts, south of the Market.
She means the statue. The bronze statue. Of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Established in Union Square just four years ago, on October 2, 1986.
It's thirty paces south.
The midday crowd undulates like blood through an artery. A woman with the curled Shirley Temple cherry hair knocks on watermelons, the beneficiary of age-old wisdom. A baby cries in its stroller as mother weighs eggplants like Anubis. Miss Honey absorbs vitamin D, glowing like the center of the yolky sun.
“Naturally. Any girl worth her salt can,” she agrees, looking down to Marzanna.
“I told her the teachers wanted her to take first class—when we arrived.” The Irish first grade, a year behind. “I think she thought I was flying her home.”
Caroline laughs, her eyebrows rocketing for the clouds. “Did she enter first class?”
“No. The third,” he tells her. “And she will be applying for Harvard.”
Caroline smiles at their conviction. “And what will you be when you’re a woman, Marzanna?”
A tiny tea kettle yelp. This ladybug’s wings fan out, and she releases a pitch heard only by anthills. Marzanna wants to see Gandhi, and she takes off.
The chase is afoot. One step for him is eighteen of her millipede scuttles, and they spear through the planetary atmosphere of homegrown cucumbers and organic stop light cherry tomatoes, Nicholas attached to her like a poltergeist. A subway rattles the street. A man steers his poodle. They breach gravitational pull, and in T-minus fifteen seconds, they’re here.
Caroline huffs a breath. She pushes back her effortlessly tousled hair, which rustles her real mother of pearl earrings.
“You would think it was Christmas.” She glows, looking up.
“I wouldn’t,” he tells her. “It’s quiet.”
Gandhi stands at a bronze eight foot, as tall to Marzanna as the Statue of Liberty, and the moon, and the Empire State Building. He’ll burst the sky like a sewing needle, unleashing Biblical floods.
Nicholas stands in the intervening silence, feeling the question already radiating off of Caroline: why Gandhi? She’s only ten.
She begins humming “Part of Your World” instead, a ploy to wheedle a song from her.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀he feels like nicholas is teasing him. and in a way, he always is. but he also knows that the other is genuine in his fondness for him. for some reason . . . the old priest puts a lot of value in a young vagabond that walks him home at night, and watched him die, unable to protect him. he swallows, and luckily nicholas' hand on his cheek pulls him away from those memories. they are here now, safe.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀siegfried wants so dearly to prove himself worthy of that fondness. it feels somewhat like a home. a feeling he hasn't felt in a long time.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀nicholas asks him, commands him almost, to guard his heart. and the needy boy inside of siegfried embraces this thought, wants to bounce on his tip toes and eagerly nod his head in acceptance and gratefulness. and adult him is grateful too, for the other's trust. but he also knows that he wants nicholas to have more . . .
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀so he stays quiet, not nodding in acceptance. somewhere, although quieter, that defiant hope to find something better, someone else for nicholas, remains. he swallows, leaning slightly against the other's palm to show that he relishes in the physical comfort, if not in the other's nihilistic disposition.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ i'm so sorry. ” he shakes his head then, at the sudden piece of information bared to him. how horrible to imagine your mother taken from you. and even worse to not even remember her. “ how did it happen . . . ”
“No one will tell me.”
Siegfried leans into his hand. A thought unspools like proteins into their amino acid memories, and they come to the fore.
He was young when he was ushered to the priesthood. He imagines being Siegfried’s age now, only half of it, and standing at the precipice of his family home with the margarita salt-crusted doorframe and the fishing nets. His father did this, too: hold Nioclás’ face, never letting himself cry. They both knew this was the last time.
He thumbs Siegfried’s cheek. His mouth twitches, signifying the end. Nicholas lets go.
“When I was made Host, they were stolen.” He has a personal philosophy of watching the hurt head-on. He wants to see it coming. “I know her hair but not her face. I hear her voice, but in water,” he says. “I have stories with no ending, and I remember she laughed that I was a changeling, and a miracle, and she kissed me into bed.
“I forgot her name.”
She wasn’t taken. Her face was. And her voice. And he remembers only parts of a whole. Nicholas daydreams in cliffhangers and the weather is hot. He is not a miracle.
“She keeps them so I won’t hurt Her,” he tells him. “Purgatory. Siegfried, don’t forget your mother.”
𝓖𝒓𝒆𝒈𝒐𝒓 𝓜𝒂𝒓𝒛𝒂𝒏𝒏𝒂, 𝓘𝒏𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒂 𝓑𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒐𝒅𝒆𝒂, 𝒉𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒔 𝒂 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒄𝒉 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒚𝒆𝒕 𝒎𝒖𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒆𝒏𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒕𝒐 𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒚𝒑𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏. To a teenager, no one in the world looks twice at parents. Like servants and interns, they're meant to be reliable, but invisible. They exist to feed their kids, love their kids, talk about their kids, and do nothing else -- certainly nothing that would distract them from achieving these three sacred labors, such as . . . having girlfriends (ew) or boyfriends (yuCK) or crushes (BARF).
Indeed, despite the leathery wings sprouting out of her back, and the sensory antennae atwitch atop her head, Marzanna's stomach is still laughably human. And suddenly, she has no interest in looking at the menu.
❝ No, obviously. But you're, like, super weird, Papa. I'm weird, too. That's why no one likes us. ❞ That's why no one ever sat with her at lunch, signed her 4th-grade yearbook, or invited her to birthday parties. No one likes the little Kazakh girl with the Cold War accent, with the Irish priest for a father; the girl enamored with cockroaches, mummification techniques, and the radioactive secrets of the Chernobyl disaster. Only authors and forensic scientists take interest in those sorts of subjects.
Reality treats them quite differently.
❝ I think we'd be crazy popular if being weird was en vogue. Or if we were cartoons! For consumption! Like the Addams family! Maybe we'd have consumption, too, for the flavor. What d'you think? ❞
Nicholas still has the stomach to look at the menu which boasts gold trimmings and Slavonian oak wines. He’s won. She thinks there’s a lot to love.
“How am I weird,” he prods.
There’s a blonde in a one-shoulder cocktail dress like a ruby wedge of Communist China. She sips on a flute of champagne and has a husband who wears an ascot instead of a tie, whispering into someone’s thumbtacked ear. They skulk up to the pianist. Chopin begins.
“You live with an Irish priest which already is very strange. I think you were doomed from the start.” Nicholas takes a knife and begins spreading the in-house mango butter. “You saved metro cards in a lunchbox—where they don’t belong. You drew me invitations to the executions of terrible boys. And you wanted to read me the secrets of Chernobyl to bed,” he says, plating her bread. Fatherly habits. “Once, you cried over ice cream. Because it was lonely.”
He smiles because they are not flaws if they impossibly charm him. Nicholas even not-laughs, which gets the corners of his eyes to crinkle like dumplings. Or pressed by a fork.
He does not think of the plague and dying.
“Yes. We have consumption now. Eat your bread.”
something in emmrich went still, dangerously so. he were accustomed to people questioning the integrity of their friendship. johanna is an acquired taste, you see. she means well under the bluster. you wouldn't understand. nicholas ignored the script. emmrich was furious yet fascinated. copper doused his wagging tongue. "i daresay it works in your favour," red dappled the young watcher's lips, for the wound was sucked clean, "my tolerance for venom, that is."
choice was a luxury. the mourn watch had been decided for johanna and emmrich. mages of such promise didn't belong with the mortalitasi. generational talent were wasted on them.
emmrich's mouth quirked fondly. "inability and a lifelong commitment to prove someone wrong are vastly different strands of thought, nicholas. you're well capable of making your own choices. i only hope the right reasons motivate your final decision."
“What tempts you to her.”
Nicholas detected their atomic vibrations going still. They were rigid, paralyzed with a soft spot for this brilliant woman who spouted third-degree burns. Also, perhaps, they withheld for something else. He was weak against that: curiosity. Pandora’s Box.
He took the napkin that came with his tea.
“If I appear sharp and disagreeable, that is an unintended side effect,” he said. “Not by design.” He passed it for the bleeding. His face never conveyed emotion. “I am forward by necessity—to avoid confusion.”
Emmrich’s mouth tugged, the result of some static shock. The air savored of freshly imported Indian teas with a front door wind chime a local artist claimed warded evil spirits. Their round table was too small, and it wore a doiley.
Something in Nicholas’ chemical makeup shifted. He said, in a manner of asking, “You don’t doubt my ability. It is my heart, and my character, that you suspect.”
Cottage pie. Cottage pie! An honest to god taste of home. Whatever the Lord has planned for him, drip-feeding him comforts of his old life was surely one way to strengthen the soldier in him. Howard swallowed hard at the smell, marbled blue eyes glistening in a silent beg to see if he could demolish the platter before him. "Are you… not having your tea as well?" He gestured at his plate, a timid opening. A troll would eat you out of house and home, but a half-troll would have the decency to ask.
The explanation simmered for a few beats without reaction, then a spark in his eyes burned with recognition. Then confusion, which made him hum in question.
"Haw-var-dr. That is my name, yes. My father..." was a troll from Iceland, "was from Iceland originally. I'm only half as English as I appear. Mum's from the north. Don't ask me how they wound up in Sheringham. Running theory is that they eloped… Howard is the Anglicised version of the name my father gave me."
He cocked his head to the side. "Well, I will keep it for life, I think being married to me is surely a curse. Or married to any man, if one is of a scaled persuasion," Howard picked up a spoon in one hand, and the scale in another. "I go stir crazy when I don't visit the sea often, imagine if I was born in it, and some bloke whisks me away inland. That's cruelty, surely."
Mermaid. Well…. she was a kind of mermaid. "I have an idea who it was, but far as I can tell, seals don't… have scales. But there's only one merfolk I'd ever known living in Sheringham as long as I did, and it'd be Jackie."
She was very tall -- or he and his brother were short; memories can be porous and unreliable -- with auburn hair falling all the way down to her ankles in dusty, sandy curls. She was naked when the boys had found her in a bush, tears that fell hardened into pearls as they touched the sand, tied up to a post shrouded in a fishnet. Howard remembered how stricken he was with her beauty, but only for a moment -- when her black eyes pleaded with him to be released, he was awash with a feeling of disgust for the treatment she had suffered.
The lady of the sea had told them her name, a strange agglomeration of sound it was, and Bigby, being insufferably creative, had taken to call her Jackie instead.
"A fisherman had stolen her sealskin with full intent of marrying her. I remember quite clearly that Mr Sealey, our vicar, was headed off elsewhere for the week and surely no marriages would be officiated without him. When I grew older it dawned on me what she'd meant, and it sent shivers down my back to think that her fate hinged on two daft young boys who had every chance to worsen her life by virtue of our idiocy." Howard snorted. "We had fun stealing the sealskin back on her behalf regardless, returned it to her promptly, and she… well… She told that if ever she was near and me or my brother find ourselves in trouble, she'll always be there for us. Then off she went."
He'd realised now that he was rambling about mermaids and selkies to a priest. Howard hid his face as he shyly prodded his dinner.
"She said she was from Cork." This was more than two hundred years ago. The priest would not believe in him. "Her hair is a kind of auburn that burns into your memory. I've always wondered if she's alright. I guess… I guess we're even now? Doesn't explain the scale I'm afraid. I suppose it's not hard to imagine Jackie making friends across… species."
"A-anyways." Howard cleared his throat. He'd planned to bury the scale so deep no human would be able to find it, and even if they'd found it, they were not called Howard to claim a wife out of the owner. "Do you run the church all by yourself, do you not have anyone else to second you if you have errands or if you fall ill? This place is big enough to house two priests, it looks like."
His meager mint fridge doubled as a meager bomb shelter, dispensed onto Howard’s plate. The only thing he had was tea.
“I will.” Pushkin was permanently ajar. His mug steamed. “Will you let me bless your meal, Howard.”
Social norms dictated you don’t say no.
The Spirit punched ‘1’ in his binary coding, compelling Nicholas to fold his hands. The floor beneath him had chair skids like cat scratches, a feature that existed nowhere else. Howard’s seat was recently dusted.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.”
Howard might have thought ‘crack open your eye. Vivisect the pie—’
Nicholas continued.
“Bless those without a home, and no one to share one with. Bless the hungry, and those with life without living.” He had terracotta rosemaries dying at the windowsill and a voice that lived in walls. The kettle clicked. “Bless the forgotten, and the sick—in body and heart. Bless those who carry on without hope through Christ our Lord,” he said.
“Amen.”
The hypnosis lifted, leaving behind silence. The sink dripped. The cassette of muscle memory popped. This drowned Jonah which the ethers saw fit to fashion with second life was now free to thaw and dig in, and Nicholas’ brain hoarded these rubies:
Sealskin. Mr. Sealy. Merfolk. He saved a thing named Jackie with long streaks of strawberry jam hair.
“You know a selkie.” He was good at making questions sound like dares. Nicholas smiled. “You’re not afraid I will think you’re mad. You won’t lie,” he said. “Not even try.”
But he was ensnared. A son of Cork, and sea-born, and fae-touched, he was charmed like shoobies to the beach. His napkins had flowers on them.
“Is it true. That a selkie will marry whoever steals her skin,” Nicholas said, not having moved an inch. “Has one ever lived forever as a woman, something she will never be, and missed who she was.”
No, he was not interested in how big this place was. Or his storage-room bedroom. Or the one toothbrush at his sink. Nicholas, this half-man, half-fae, had eyes like the Celtic Sea and an Anglicized name; these were things they both shared.
“Howard, do you think something that isn’t human can marry—before God.” He smiled. “Maybe your brother married her.
“Or she is waiting for you to ask.”
He imagined Howard, possessed by the ghost of Englishness, protesting in the most alarmed, agreeable way. Being married to him is a curse.
❝ Blugkh. Like being married ever stopped anyone before. ❞ She says this because she believes it, all the movies tell her so, and also because she can read every scrap of dialogue that scans through his mind. All girls on the precipice of adulthood are gifted with powers of telepathy. ❝ It's not 1346 anymore, you know. Catholicism is super out of style. And teachers get crushes. ❞
The waitress hesitates.
❝ -- Sparkling water, please. ❞ Marzanna addresses her in a sudden, brave attempt to save face. At fancy places like this, you aren't allowed to say ' tap is fine '. This she also learned from the movies.
The waitress' gracious smile is split halfway between father and daughter. She bows her head a tad, and leaves.
Then, Marzanna pounces on the subject, refusing the shared bread that Nicholas offers with a toss of her freshly feathered black hair. ❝ It was Missus Linda. Unless you think some other lady joined your fanclub. ❞
Sometimes Marzanna cracks his skull like a Kinder egg and can read his thoughts as a result of living together. And she’s right. All life used to chemically fuse into his church. Now, even God has left.
But no one needs to hear that. Or that he’s much older than forty. Or that something is coming. Tonight, he’s having dinner with his daughter who is currently undergoing metaphysical mutations, and who will one day wake as an insect. The waitress with the army bun smiles like it was put through the rack.
She leaves, and Nicholas’ laughs are only smiles.
“Marzanna, do you think I can only be loved by one woman,” he says now, poking the hornet’s nest. “You think there’s very little of me to love.”
To children, parents aren’t supposed to be wantable.
The coast is clear of a parishioner with the boarding school London in her voice, and his bow tie is tight.
