does anyone want an isha short story bc um. well ur getting one
ISHA HARASAEON – THE BEGINNING OF DAYS
Dreadim. A Kuserian noun. It's meaning being creator, with roots in the common Old Kuserian verb dim – to make, create or construct. The evolution of Old Kuserian into the language spoken today sees the addition of dreea to form the final product of dreeadim, with the reference to the Mother Goddess nodding to her as the original creator. She is also used here as a prefix. The beginning of all things, in all senses of all words.
This, too, can be seen as a creation, in the very etymology of the word creator, and while it is understood that Dreea exists as the kingdom’s divine matriarch, it would never be appropriate to substitute the word dreeadim for ama, despite ama also being used synonymously to mean creator. Linguistically, creator and mother exist at once as twins and strangers, like that of a mirror’s reflection, alike entirely in appearance yet separated, in fact punctuated, by the very border between them. Even the Harasaeons never translate creator into anything other than dreeadim. It is these subtle distances between Burnos’ most noble family and the very goddess who endowed them with such esteem that illustrate a wound in the Royal House of Harasaeon – proof that, despite their previous history, they have been abandoned by their goddess, left to writhe like a snake with its head cut off, forever regenerating, forever bleeding.
The mother wound, dripping down the family line and staining each generation with the same infection, inflicted first upon Isha, who bore it so terribly that she ensured the damnation of every Harasaeon after her. How do you imagine that grief? How do you translate it? Historians leave the restless remains of Isha covered in dust. They do not dare disturb a woman whose spoiling was such a cataclysm. Time, language and geography all altered forever upon the sheer intensity of her devastation.
How do you imagine that grief?
How do you translate it?
------
In the overwhelming rage of a battle just won, Isha can smell her flesh burning.
Before the noise or exhaustion or even the pulsing, writhing pain splashed across her nape, the smell is what she notices first. There’s an uncanniness to it, like something cooking, and it disturbs her that she’s initially reminded of sneaking near the kitchens as a child, trying to figure out what meat was being cooked and if she might be served her favourite, except there’s a note of something... wrong. A smell she can’t name. A meal she hasn’t tasted.
A shaking hand raises in her blurring vision. Distantly, she knows it to be her own, past the growing roar of blood in her ears. She stands on the death splattered marble of the throne room at the Palace of Kusig, bodies around her and soldiers awaiting her command, because what now? What now, after retaking the capital for the first time in years? Isha does not know these halls anymore. None of them do. They left home for only a short while but something, everything, is wrong, yet all she sees, distant like it belongs to someone else, is her own hand, covered in blood and blisters and trembling completely, as it reaches behind her head.
She feels the singed ends of once long hair, now rough and choppy, and past the scream of agony, she clasps her hand to the nape of her neck where, for twenty-one years, she has memorised her mark, her physical tie to Suzu, to the gods themselves. An outline of the self-eating snake – the ouroboros, carved into her skin at only twelve-years-old. She still remembers how she had bared herself before the court, how the blood had dripped down the exposed skin of her back, shoulders hunching at the discomfort, and in the glistening sunlight, Suzu had appeared to her.
She hardly remembers the time before, when her parents still lived. The only companion she has known is Suzu. The only mother she has known is Dreea. This mark is as much a part of her as the freckles she was born with.
Except now as her fingernails tear at peeling, burnt flesh, she cannot feel it. The victory against the Gathering of Wisers was not easily won, and they went down fighting wildly. The last wiser Isha engaged with had been fast, ducking away from Suzu’s bite and grabbing Isha by a fistful of hair. The fire appeared in the next moment, a shocking burn that lasted a moment and an eternity before a member of the Queen’s Guard cut the man’s head clean from his shoulders.
Everything has been distant since that, a strange fog. Isha knows the battle is won, knows her home, her birthright, her crown are all hers to reclaim.
But her mark is gone. Burned from her, as if the connection it symbolises could be so shallow as to be skin deep. She falls to her knees, oblivious to the soldiers watching her, the silent, concerned looks they throw one another in the post-battle uncertainty, and a sob catches in her throat.
“No,” she mumbles, her other hand reaching for her neck too, scrabbling for something that isn’t there. “No, what have you done to me? No, no, no, I don’t- I didn’t...”
The pain doesn’t register. She digs her fingers into the wound like she might be able to claw an answer from it, a child chasing a rope they didn’t mean to let go of. Suzu lets out an anguished bellow and begins to wrap herself around Isha, a loose circle to keep everyone out, but when Isha reaches out to place a bloodied palm to the basilisk’s familiar scales, it feels... cold. Something is splintering deep in her chest and panic sets in, a dread so formidable that she finds herself looking around her, searching desperately for someone to give her answers. Through the cracks in Suzu’s protective embrace, Isha sees the desolated throne room, the unease of her soldiers, the sinking sun on the balcony, but Dreea does not appear to her.
“Your Majesty...” the soldier who saved her dares to speak, expression etched in worry, and Isha throws up a hand to silence them. She ducks her head, shrinking against herself, the hand still on Suzu beginning to dig into the basilisk’s thick skin, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing.
“Kalinai,” she whispers, voice hoarse and desperate. “Suzu, my dearest one, I can’t feel you... I can’t... I can’t feel-.”
Suzu twists until she can push her head into Isha’s side, and Isha brings her hands up to hold her. The creature dwarfs her, Suzu’s fatal gaze resting in yellow eyes each the size of Isha’s head, but there is no threat there, only a terror mirrored in Isha.
The thing in Isha’s chest shatters completely, and Suzu slips from her grip as she folds over herself completely, forehead pressing to the cold marble as she lets out a rough scream. It breaks on itself in its sudden volume. The soldiers flinch back, as if physically repelled by her devastation, but no one moves to her aid.
“Ama...” Isha moans weakly, yanking so violently at her own hair that it pulls out. “Ama, please. Where have you gone?” She breaks off into sobs too fierce to still make out her unintelligible mumbling, wailing and screaming against a truth she already knows cannot be reversed.
------
A week passes and Suzu is killed.
A tremor shakes the earth so violently that it seems to snap apart, and Isha’s beloved aineanum is crushed against it. It happens too fast for anyone to do anything, and she is dead upon impact, but it does not stop the queen from pawing at the rock, tearing her nails trying to unbury Suzu. For a week, Isha hasn’t stopped crying. She does not sleep. She does not eat. She just cries with a dazed look in her eyes. Suzu's death redoubles her efforts. The queen is known to be irrational since the battle, but now, she seems to stand on a precipice teetering dangerously into rage.
“It was not an accident,” she slurs, slouched back against her throne with a chalice of wine and an almost finished jug. She swirls the drink around with a concerning amount of focus.
“Your Majesty?” a counsellor inquires. It is empty save for them, the room lit only by the glow of the moon through the colonnades. Isha had asked to be alone, and instead, her council rotate watch of her like she is a baby with a rattle.
“Suzu.” Isha’s mouth curls around the name as if biting into a heartbeat. “Kiren shook the earth and tore it apart. He killed her. He killed her, to punish me.”
It is silent in the wake of such an accusation, until the counsellor manages to stammer out some bravery.
“Your Majesty, that is a rather harsh stance to take,” he says, clearly disapproving. “After all, what could you possibly have done to warrant punishment? You are the hero of Kusig, the emancipator of Burnos, and queen of your kingdom. The Gathering’s five-year reign of terror is finally over, yet my queen can do nothing but grieve. The loss of an aineanum on a Harasaeon is... dire, I can admit, but your behaviour predates that. No one understands, Your Majesty.”
Isha drains the last of her wine and lazily holds the chalice out in a wordless demand for it to be refilled. The counsellor sees himself above such a task, made clear by the annoyed tick of his eyebrow, but he moves for the jug regardless, and Isha at least finds a mean satisfaction in that. Someone still must listen to her. It does not abate a depth of aloneness so vast she feels she might drown in it.
“You’re right,” Isha sighs, shaking her head. “You do not understand. No one ever could, for as long as I am the only Harasaeon. You do not know what it is to feel a part of your very soul fracture within you. My blood turned red before my eyes. I do not feel magic in the air anymore. My hair is cut short. My teeth are blunt. How could you understand that?
“I was given a gift. The Harasaeons are the only wisers to have the same hereditary ability passed down. We have forever shared etalmu, engraved into us during the Scarring, but when I was fighting, my mark was burned from my skin.” She gestures vaguely at the salve-coated cloths wrapped around her neck and thinks briefly of dishonesty. “It does not matter whose fault it was – in the eyes of Kiren and Dreea, who have always gifted the Harasaeons with etalmu, for me to lose my mark meant I was not defending the bond appropriately, which could only happen if I did not care enough. To them, I spurned their gift, and they have responded by taking it from me. It is not just Suzu’s death... It is.... It is everything- It-...”
Isha doubles over suddenly, clasping a hand to her mouth against a gag that tastes like blood. Her lips are wine-red. The counsellor does not even step forward. She's been like this all week.
“Then Dreea...?” he asks instead, fearful.
Isha steadies the chalice in her hand before it can tip with her. A libation, against the very marble she died upon.
“Do not fret,” Isha says dismissively. “Dreea’s punishment for me came even before Kiren’s. There is nothing to anticipate now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” Isha laughs brokenly, “you do not. She has forsaken me. She is nowhere now. I beg for her, and she ignores me. The gods have taken that which I loved most, but I think even she did not comprehend what that meant. We are all... We are all doomed to this... It is forever now... And you don’t even understand... Only me... Only me, alone... Forever... All of us...”
As she slips into muttering, Isha thinks again of a libation. Perhaps it would serve better here, since she has been too frightened to pray. She knows if she goes to the temple, it will be empty.
-----
Public opinion on wisers is at an all time low. The Gathering of Wisers held Kusig for only half a decade, but their rule was a violent one, full of paranoia and a cutthroat determination to hold their seat against the growing threat in the west. They let the power get to their heads, kicking down on those beneath them, and generally, the commoners suffered most under their tyranny. With the Gathering felled by Isha and her forces, the people are able to voice their opinions without fear of being silenced, and they are making themselves clear: the thought of beings with such ranged and intense magic that they were able to nearly kill the entire royal family in their own home horrifies them.
The Harasaeons were the first wisers, Dreea’s first humans and later gifted the first of her magic. They have always been her masterpiece, her most beloved, but the people feel her absence keenly too. It is known that she does not visit the queen as she once did. It is known the Harasaeons no longer walk the line of divinity. It drives Isha mad to think about. As a wiser, as the first wisers, how can a Harasaeon be cast aside like any other? How can her Mother Goddess disdain her as she once did the Gathering of Wisers? If not Dreea’s favour, then what on earth separates Isha from the monsters who killed her parents?
It's a sickening thought. She curses the Gathering as harshly as the commoners. She ignores the growing disdain towards wisers and the appeals for support from a group she once saw herself in. Isha is not some two-piece wiser to be ignored. She is a Harasaeon, and if no one else will understand the separation of that into its own category, then she will carve one out for herself.
She is angrier than she has ever been. She wants someone to blame. Revenge, maybe, or just an excuse for bloodshed. Her trembling finger points to the wisers and she does not feel remorse. The hatred inside her festers and grows until it’s too big for her to make sense of. Dreea severed the bond between them, but Isha can still feel the loose ends that once pulled tight. She wants to reach into her own chest to claw the feeling out, because if her Mother Goddess thinks she can just cast her aside like she never mattered, then Isha will reject her too.
Isha will reject everything. Every gift, every feeling, every memory until the kingdom knows nothing but her rage. An entire history eradicated, and perhaps then... perhaps then Dreea may be forced to do something. If Isha is unruly enough, noisy enough, then perhaps Dreea will return, even if only to punish her. Isha would take it. She would be glad of it. Anything, anything, anything, but this awful, damned silence. There is not a single person in the entire kingdom who understands. She, a Harasaeon, alone. She, a daughter, forgotten. Godless. Motherless.
The grief is without words. It cannot be written or archived. It exists in the chasm of a mother’s vacancy, so Isha swears to cleave the very foundations of life apart to match.
-----
She targets the libraries first. Every tablet or scroll archived over the entire kingdom that so much as mentions the Harasaeon’s wiser history sees the march of her soldiers through library doors, torches in hand, devastation in their wake. She is called a monster for it, a killer of reality itself, a mad queen. Then come the executions. Anyone who protests or speaks out against her is made an example of until, sooner or later, the kingdom knows the same silence she does. They have learned what it is to cry out to a matriarch who no longer wants to listen.
Paintings burn. Tapestries burn. Books burn. People burn. Certain architecture is chiselled back. Statues are torn down. It is a thorough and awful erasure felt in every part of Burnos. One drunken, hysteria-blinded night, Isha takes the Book of Wild from its mantle and rips pages from it. They burn too. She wonders at that, at their flammability, in the face of everything. There is not enough holiness left to extinguish this fire. It is all gone.
Last, Isha tears through the Royal Archives. They have the most exhaustive records in the entire kingdom, a copy of every single text archived in Burnos since record-keeping began. She does not send her soldiers this time. It's her, alone, and with no more than her two hands, Isha Harasaeon does more damage to the very essence of history than anyone before and anyone will again. It is a killing. A murder. Ink smears across her hands like blood and pages burn like a pyre, and it... it changes nothing. She cries as she shoves over entire bookshelves, screams her throat raw at every text that so much as mentions the Harasaeons and Dreea on the same page, but it does not dislodge the vacancy she has felt in her chest for weeks now. It is all she knows. An emptiness, in place of something holy beyond words, and no one, no one, no one to understand her.
Soon, every record even implying the connection between wisers and Harasaeons will be irreversibly destroyed, and anyone brave enough to so much as whisper it will be dead. Isha will make herself such a spectacle in the sheer intensity of her grief that, when forced to start over, the kingdom brushes over her in its history, like a skipped heartbeat, or a hitched breath. As if even muttering her name will bring upon her curse.
A grief so terrible, and loud, and ruinous that Burnos had to start its own history again. The little death, they called it, turnamta. Every day marked since then. A disaster made unspeakable.
Dreea never comes back, and Isha never learns to bear her curse. She is spoiled, entirely. She falls in love at arm's length. She becomes pregnant because she is supposed to. She never decides on a name.
She wonders, did it feel like this for her? As her daughter grows inside of her, feeding from her, immortalising her, is this how it felt for Dreea? To create something you are so convinced will be perfect, to feel it so close, and know that the moment it is outside of you, you will lose control of it entirely? Is this how it feels, to be a creator? A god? A mother?
What separates those words? Holiness and goodness swallowed from the same chalice. What separates them?
No one understands. No one has ever understood, until the day comes, and Isha never holds her baby. Poison drip-feeds into her womb and makes a gravesite of it and Isha knows, suddenly, that she was never meant to survive this. How could she? Motherhood and creation – how could she? It is the last truth she knows; no one understands, but Turisha will.
She dies begging for her mother.
