I see her in you.

Mother, maker, keeper. A remarkable thing that all children clung to– that all children were cast from, all of their mothers sown deep into this timeline as woeful beings struggling to contain hope for their wayward spawn.

Betrayer. She thinks and gazes towards the hearth.

Better yet she be born into a house aflame, to know the world as an eternal conflagration and her lungs filled with smoke. Better yet that she be given to the fire, to know only pain, for when was her life ever not set ablaze; to simmer as embers, coals, to bide time and patience until it was struck anew to rise as a beast of magmatic wrath?

And this woman, who claimed kinship to her, beheld those trembling gestures that dug nails into the damp wood and bled, nails splintered with the force of her disbelief: the convenience, the timing, the place. To be brought here, in this realm of unknown hell that tormented her dreams and warped them into the nightmarish reflections of other-selves and could-be’s that left her barren in all manners of heart and soul. Had she her powers, Amma would’ve tasted the ashen sorrows of hidden lies and truths, the viperish maw that would sluice through her pores and fixate on the lingering emotes of the world that subjugated to her vengeance, the pooling of hate on her wicked tongue stricken with the need to lash out and tear everything asunder. Water-spiked lashes drift closed on a withering sigh; the silence stretches on into a drone of flame and stuttering breath.

She thinks of the only other families she knew of to compare this revelation to, the name of Roth so well known on the island and deeply ingrained into the foundations of the school, even interwoven upon the seas of the Atlantic with their renown spoken into the waves. She cannot help but equate the disparity of her ancestral claims to the near royalty of such a lineage. The prince, she inwardly shudders, so blessedly charmed with life and home, whereas the name Cahors is a specter, a remnant of time fleeting and sorrows eternal. It is a shroud, an eclipse, a lament of death, destiny, and fate as she knows it to be. The name Baxter so delicately aligned with their downfall, the whispers once uttered by Sierra and the sister she both loved and hated and needed all the same. She sees Harper's pleading face in her mind and those eyes that saw everything they could not. Her Grandmother stands there so readily and maternally, a glimpse that fractures through her porcelain reserves to be faced with her kin and knowing such to be true. It does something to Amma as she remains there, still and silent, and dares this woman, dares herself, to deny such convenient dominations. To be brought here to this world so violently, accosted, thrown into the chasm of the dark that surfaced her latent fear of it, to be brought here, rested, and healed. It remains like some grandiose tale of fortune, a written prophecy of the forsaken child placated with familial contingencies; little did this woman know that she harbored a monster in her home. If her Grandmother knew of her sins, would she carelessly absolve them and bless her whole?

Amma had to speculate if she actually wore her mother’s face– if she was easily deciphered through Charlotte’s likeness. Her memory often remained shadowed in a veil of white, difficult to discern, clothed as if a maiden that wept over her misdeeds for the life she had given away. Even her dreams were haphazardly assembled to present that woman of pale skin and blue eyes, midnight hair likened to her own and donned in the mother's warmth yet so dissociated from what Amma thought she knew of the grace of god. She could not help but reflect on when another had looked at her as if a ghost, as an embodiment of someone else, and now she wondered, what had he seen? Who? Was her visage such a haunting shadow of the woman she thought she knew?

A mirror of mirrors reveals the truths of this world but conveniently conceals the lies of life in its embedded reflections, which bear all manner of self and other in this world and the next.

In the shadows of her mind's eyes lies a vacant spot on a hospital wall, ceramic remains, and the lingering confession of weakness to never face oneself again. Not for a while. Perhaps not ever. The bitter fear and self-hatred that lingered as stale and still coffee would in a perpetual ring of spiraling madness. Would she, too, be cursed, unable to face herself ever again and not see what they all saw? To witness the face of the one who had betrayed her more than anyone ever had? The raven-haired transfer written as an enigma, the paradox of who and what she was.

The water has now gone lukewarm and clouded with blackened swirls of detritus, and Amma finally wills herself to look up and lock eyes with her– her grandmother. Her pale hands wring together, and when she steps forward, taking that gaze as acceptance, something inside her swells and snaps and pierces through the rungs of bone that cage a grieving heart.

“Don’t.” She bites, teeth snapped against her tongue, lips paling in violet bruises, a split of flesh that peels against the constraints of a wound that begins to weep, blood washes against her hated mouth anointed as the kiss of death. “Don’t touch me.”

Kylmie looks almost perplexed, a shade of hurt crossing over her features, and Amma immediately loathes how the scrunch of her brows and the purse of her lips remind her of a shadowed face in the darkest corners of her mind. A dark, depraved voice slithers against her lobe and breathes aloud: how much would she look like Mother Dearest if she plucked those blue eyes from her head? She almost trembles from her cruelty envisioned, but would it entirely be out of character from what she knew of herself? What she could remember from sins gone past.

Since when did she care?

“I only want to look at your wounds.”

“Oh,” Amma deflates, a weariness threaded through every pulsating vein. She merely lifts her hand, fingers bruised and marred, and ignores the silvery line of scars that flicker in the hazed light of the fire; how many has she gained anew over the last few months? Did it matter anymore? Would she be fated to walk eternally donned in these laces of hate? Water splashes over the basin as she stands, wet strands of her hair sobbed and wed to her figure, like tentacles of darkness warped against the black lines raised against her skin. She gestures down to her thigh, the bandage now a shade darker.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Are you always this…”

“Defensive.” Dain lists, curiously tacking down his raised fingers. “Abrasive.”

“Difficult.”

Amma could entertain the banter; a quip danced along the edges of carmine-washed teeth, copper wetted against the fullness of her mouth as she merely glared through the casted shadow of her lashes and willed her stare to answer for her.

“Dain.” Kylmie snaps and hands Amma a thick wrap of grey cotton to conceal herself, which she lazily pulls from her familiar hands; she stares at those sapphire jewels adorned on her fingers and remembers a curious red jewel her mother possessed once. She deliberately wraps the material around her body with a feigned slowness and snaps the wet whips of her hair down her back before stepping out from the basin and settling back onto the blanket of furs. Dain growls but looks away, muscles and scars thick and taut, bunched under tan skin that gleams golden under the bathing of firelight before he snarls. It rips through the space that strikes at her bravado. She shivered from the fury she felt.

“You certainly have her eyes,” Kylmie muses offhandedly while kneeling beside her, and something in Amma crumbles beneath those words.

“Don’t do that. Don’t compare me to her.” She drags heavy pieces of her hair over her shoulder. “The woman you’re talking about…”

“I don’t know her.”

Silence resumes, and Amma pulls her fingers through her hair, knots snagging against every tug as she merely yanks through them, wetted pieces of black coming away through her fists, sharp pricks against her scalp that detonate the ringing betwixt her ears, the pain at least cements her to the now with the lingering fog of her nightmare gradually fading away. Though Kylmie doesn’t say anything, she can feel every flinch at the quiet brutality she displays and silently moves to unwrap Amma’s thigh, exposing blackened lines and finely pin-holed wounds of jagged teeth, but also the peculiar scarring that lay beneath and the thick lines of ink beside them. Beautiful, strange, and macabre.

“What happened to you?”

Had anyone ever asked her so blatantly before? There had been rumors and traded stories of things The Foundation had done to her over the years. Ghosts that bore an unknown face and name until they came for her once again. Speculated whispers tossed out over the sea carelessly abandoned, all confirmed during the trials when the simulation had cruelly displayed bits and pieces of truth and lies and spoken her name into the wavering spirit of her dread.

I know that what they did to you - the ghastly, abyssal things they must have done to you, to bring forth what you are now.

It’s a delicate inquiry, spoken carefully, almost in a whisper. Still, she hears it all the same as if a shout into the void of her past, every annunciation ricocheted off the rungs of her bones that splinter with every breath she takes. Amma goes entirely too still. And with her stillness comes the eerily silent reaper of her pain, the ache in her muscles, the fissures in the flesh of her scarred palms and battered feet, the weight of everything endured and lost and forgotten that manifests as more than just the paled crown that bleeds over her brow. She could have meant the markings on her skin, the tattoos she wore as a shield against the hated fragments of her past, to gain ownership of her body once more that had been plied apart over and over again, the violation of her sanctity of heart and the touches of chaos she bore through her trembling hands. She had said yes. The scars she had gritted her teeth against every time needles had graced the silver membrane of her malcontent, the burden she had to bear, the decimation of self. She had said yes.

Kylmie could have meant her time spent within this Limbo they spoke of; she could have meant anything really as she delicately worked and redressed her wounded leg with a cooling salve, a gentleness that she had never known, or perhaps forgotten, mesmerizing as she looked down and then back towards the hearth that swelled and burned.

“Crushed chrysanthemums,” she said, merely to fill the silence. “It’ll help fight back the lingering toxins. You’ll be just fine in a manner of days.”

“Days. Weeks.” It was slowly settling in, like a stone plunked into the recesses of her heart. “I’m stuck here, aren’t I?” It was a simple whisper, dragged over shards of glass, her throat convulsing with thirst and weariness.

“There are… ways to cross realms. But we no longer possess them. She was the last ever to cross over.”

“My mother.” Amma clarified and pulled through her hair again and again.

“Yes. The council forbade us from using that power, but not before she crawled through a conjunction to seek out Midyeden. She always claimed to see things, feel them, and whatever was happening in your world was fated to spill into our own.”

“But…”

“She never came back, and we never heard from her again. The dragon woke up right before she left, and she claimed she’d find a way to send it back wherever it came from. It came, fed, gorged, and slaughtered before it went back to sleep on the neighboring island. She sought answers, answers we would be constantly denied here. Some still remember what happened long ago, and some still whisper our old name.”

Kylmie raised her hand, almost as if she intended to touch Amma’s shoulder, but she quickly lowered it and asked instead: “Do you know what happened to her? Did she ever talk about her home? Did she- is she…?”

“I don’t know,” Amma confessed in a whisper, flinching instinctively at the mention of home. The rapid-fire questions that rang hollow with her Grandmother’s concerns, the sort of affections she envied at that moment, because when had anyone ever thought the same about her? “Bits and pieces come and go; it’s all jagged shards and a ringing that won’t stop.”

Dain stalked closer along the edges of the wall, hearing her uttered whispers and the lulling draw of her voice, the accent that fell off the edge of her words as she spoke.

“I can’t remember many things; I can’t even remember her face. But I hear her voice sometimes, in the dark, and it speaks about a red moon and a Tree of Life. Sometimes, I hear another voice, a roar, a screech, a wail. Something that taunts me constantly, reminding me of what I’ve done. What she did.”

“What-”

“She gave me away.” Amma stares into the fire, the flames that she can feel burrowing deep into her pores, lancing away through her veins and marrow, boiling within and without; hidden within the depths of this contained malice lies the maw of her personal hell that roars, so loudly, so keenly, it vibrates against the heaving cage of her ribs, threatened to rend her asunder as her powers would, and she welcomed the distraction of the panic and pain as she said:

“She keeps telling me to run away. She keeps telling me she’s sorry. She keeps crying, and she won’t stop. She looks out over the sea and says his name, but I can never hear her. She weeps and screams and begs for something, but I can’t remember what it was, what it is. She tells me she’s sorry. She still gave me away to them.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorrysorrysorrysorry.” Her heart beats faster and faster; her heart pounds louder, over and over; it hammers at her ribs ruthlessly as she breathes unsteadily.

Forgive me, dove. They said you had to go; they said they could help you!

“But they didn’t help me– ”

“- They hurt me.”

Amma’s eyes flicker to where the flower remains, glittering with red shards, tiny fragments of who she was, of what she lost.

“I wanted to find her. I said yes. I wanted to find him. I said yes. I only wanted to go home. And here I am, in her home, trapped. Just when I thought maybe I could belong with them. I wanted to try.”

I said yes.

“I wanted the name they took away from me. The name she gave me. I just wanted to mean something to someone, and he promised me…”

Dain moves closer, and Kylmie only stares, unable to speak as Amma begins to shake. It starts as small tremors in her hands, her arms, her shoulders hunched inward, and her head bowed, pieces of her hair shaded over a quivering mouth as she grits her teeth and hisses with the weight of the life of lies that smother her in a choked shadow of dismay and anger. Her rage is a felt and thriving thing that pulsates with her broken heart, her soul shredded into ribbons of wasted remains brutally picked clean and left for naught, the only thing in life that she knew to be her own, something she chose in the darkest pits of gleaming needles and ringing voids, the only thing she could claim as her only means of purpose. She begins to whisper, lost to the toils of her sorrows:

“My name is–”

An exploding wail is there to answer her, a screech that shatters through Ünterland with the powerful thunder of wings that pierce through the shaded clouds of black and red as the dragon begins its attack on the blackwood coven.