Resurrection Never Goes Right

Hi guys! I'm really excited about this short story. It's a little dark and is a fairly clear metaphor for rape/rape recovery and if that's not your cup of tea, don't worry! I have something lighter planned for tomorrow.

Based on this prompt (X) 

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 “You’ve already carved your name on my bones, on my heart, on my soul. Why is this so much worse?” 

He remembers asking her that question, the words burning his lips as they tumbled over each other. He couldn’t catch them in his hands– they were too preoccupied with holding his ribs around his shattering heart.

She didn’t say anything then. Maybe she couldn’t have. It would have sounded like a lie any way she phrased it and those types of words burned things like her.

He shuddered around his pain and was so conscious of her eyes on the top of his curly head that it felt like a slap when she gently closed the door behind her.

—————————————————————-

He learns to live with the agony of her name as he always does. His bones ache when it rains until the drops still in the air, throbbing and wavering until they spell out each letter in ancient script. Magic slips out under his feet, leaving her initials in flower beds. He finds himself murmuring the syllables in his sleep, a muted litany of obsession that he never wanted. Never needed.

He once called it his prayer. His salvation. He believed a lot of fairy tales back then.

————————————————————

He goes to school. Physics, chemistry, and biology. Too many varied sciences for a degree, too many sciences to ever be called a witch. His defense is an offense, a wall of text and references that can dissuade even the most ardent believer from seeing what’s right in front of their eyes. It’s not magic, dear one.

It’s science. 

He remembers watching his mother go up in flames, her eyes as empty as her hands when they came to take her away. The modern days were never supposed to gift them with heat and death, but the that’s the price of the old gods’ resurrection.

 He wonders if his father would have thought twice before chanting into the fire if he knew. Would he have shoved those screaming hands back into the coals? Would he have bellowed as the heavens opened above their apartment building, banishing those creatures back to the abyss he’d called them from? Would he have taken his son’s hands and said fight instead of run if he knew what name his son would whisper into the night?

It’s the cost of ignorance, this age. Violence and fire and mayhem and above all– Well. Above all what’s gotten him stuck with an old goddess’ name scribbled into his bones.

Too much belief.

————————————————————

The symbols press through the skin of his palms two weeks after she blesses him for the fourth time. It’s only then that he knows what she’s done, what she’s dared to claim after so many sacrifices, what he’s allowed to happen to him after all.

(No. Not allowed. He would never have allowed this. He never wanted this.)

There are no more covens or witch-circles to turn to. The old citadels have been burned and eldritch gods play in their ashes, uncaring of the femurs and ribs they overturn. He has no mentors, no brothers or sisters, no higher authorities that speak his language.

This…this he must solve alone.

The symbols bob underneath his skin, her name in ripples and surges.

—————————————————————–

The first blessing came as he stuttered over the Latin his father dared not read, printed on vellum and sealed in flesh.

It’s a piece of his mother, the grimoire, and he wanted to be close to her again after so many months of theorems and formulas. He knew it was a summoning but didn’t see the harm. His mother’s magic had always been so soft and warm. What could come from her spells but more of the same?

He’d thought the goddess who crawled from the woods was a different sort of creature than those his father researched tirelessly. She had been small, mud-covered, with the blue-green eyes his mother had taught him meant Seer.

She’d looked at him with those eyes and seen deep, deep into his heart. He’d fallen in love, he’ll admit, with magic and creation. Just like when he was a boy.

He’d carried her back to his dorm, bathed her in milk, and kissed the pendant she wore around her neck.

In turn, she’d pressed her thin lips to his throat where he held her and gifted him her name, tucking it away into his heart where no one but her could see it.

———————————————-

The second blessing was one of necessity. His mother, he reasoned later, would call it fitting.

Beings like him aren’t meant to be alone. The world is raw and untamed, unnatural flare ups of magic even more common in the Knowing years. Humans pull and tug at the magic like a rope, uncaring of the ripples that threaten to throw witches like him into the dark.

A coven, a family, a sibling would have saved him. The tether from the bond could have acted as a siphon when the magic roared around him, protecting him and them from overload. But witches are dying and she knew it.

She knew it.

She watched as he staggered into the open fields, drunk. She hungered as he lost his bearings and, though he can’t prove it, he thinks she pulled the weeds around his ankles when he tried to find his way back to the concrete and iron party.

He was alone. He was defenseless. He was vulnerable.

She knew.

The golden light seared around him in the pitch black, a never ending wave of magic that he couldn’t hope to divert, even if he were sober. He felt it like the flames that lapped at his mother’s feet, like the char that started along his father’s throat when the magic grew too violent to control. He felt it burning and he didn’t have the air to scream.

Then she was there, small mouth pressed against the center of his chest. She blew her name into the maelstrom of power, quieted it, and sealed it out of his core.

Her name burned as it wrote itself along his bones, as it laid claim to his structure. But it didn’t burn like the magic did, it did not threaten to destroy him like the magic did, and he thought that that meant she’d saved him.

He feels sick remembering the way he thanked her for her gift.

————————————————————————–

Gifts, given often enough, are no longer gifts but burdens.

—————————————————————-

He took the third blessing, though that doesn’t make sense. He’s not a taking witch–he’s always gotten by with what he’s had, even when the world took from him.

This time he took and he won’t let himself shy away from it. He didn’t want to but–

But he longed and he thirsted and he hungered. She was growing so big now, maturing on the weight of his belief. Surely she wouldn’t mind if he sampled the radiant power that leaked through her aura? Surely she wouldn’t mind if he used what was hers to become bigger himself? Stronger?

(He never wanted to be strong. When did he start wanting to be strong?)

She slept in the forest, covered in the damp soil. He snuck to where she rested and he clawed a piece of her power for himself, tucked it next to his own where they hissed and fizzled like lava meeting the ocean.

He called to the Moon, an untouched goddess, and he offered the Moon her power. A sacrifice that was not his to give, a power that was not his to take.

The Moon turned cold above him. She had no room for thieves and takers.

Behind him, his little goddess loomed.

He made his apologies. He cried. He sobbed. And in the end, he offered her what little he had left.

She was gracious enough to leave his soul with him–so long as he kept her name in it.

————————————————————

(And so, now, if he remembers the way she needled him into practicing, the way she crooned strength into his ear, the way she begged him to keep up, does that make what he did right?

If her power was perfectly sectioned off for his questing hands, easily detached, does that mean she wanted him to take it?

If, maybe, the moon felt too far away to see him, and the cold came from behind and not above, does that mean it was her? All her?)

He won’t shy away from the atrocities he’s committed.

But does that excuse hers?

———————————————————

Three is a magic number. If she’d stuck to three blessings, he might never have questioned. He might never have looked.

But he had one more thing that she hadn’t stamped with her name and she couldn’t have that. Could she?

———————————————-

“I know why it hurt more,” he says when he finds her. 

She looks like a woman now, but more. Her flaxen hair shines in the moonlight. Her green-blue eyes blaze. The red dress she wears is a present from a worshiper he’s never met, a human who saw her in the forest. 

She’d once told him that she needed other worshipers since he’d never be strong enough to sustain her.

He feels his hands curl into fists over her fucking name.

“What did?” she asks. Her voice is husky, a desert wind in the middle of a humid eve. 

“Your blessing.” He stops short of where she stands at the edge of the forest. He can see the wild magic curling around her feet and he feels sick at the sight. It hadn’t even been able to touch her when he pulled her from the mud. This is all from him. “You claimed my hands.”

“Blessed them,” she corrects. “So you would be successful. A gift.”

A gift. A gift. He laughs without humor, a horrible sound. “A gift for you maybe. Not for me.” He brandishes his palms at her, shows how her symbols glare an ugly red, like burns. “Who crafts my work? Me? Or you?”

Her blazing eyes don’t look so blue-green now. Not with the heat rising behind them.

“You do not own the things I make,” he says. “You tried to take my creations from me. You tried to make me an extension of you. It hurt because it was the last piece I had to myself and you–” he chokes on his rage and his pain “–you took from me.”

“Only,” she says, “what you were willing to give.”

He thinks he’s going to pass out when he recognizes the heat in her eyes for what it is. Fire.

“No.” The word comes from a deep place inside, deep where his ancestors' screams still live on. “You took what you could and you never asked. You never asked.”

“Neither,” she says, “did you.” There’s something in the way she’s holding her arms that remind him of a snake. Coiled to spring.

He didn’t. He remembers prying her power from her sleeping aura like a thief in the night. He remembers how he doesn't remember. His hands shake and he makes himself ask, “Did I want that? Tell me–did I want that? Or did you?”

She’s tellingly silent, watching him with her blazing eyes. The wild magic waves along the ground, heat mirages.

He really is sick then, right there in front of her. His body rejects the truth because it’s–it’s complete violation. She got inside him and she made him think he wanted something so abhorrent. So against everything he’d been taught. He’s not a taking witch and she’d made him believe he was. 

She’d made him believe he was every bit a monster as she is.

“I want to scrub you from my bones,” he says, hunched over his knees. He doesn’t know when he fell to the ground, but he did. The cold earth seeps through his pants and the acrid smell of his own vomit is all around him. “I want to delete you from my soul.”

“It will pass,” she says. Her eyes are old and knowing. “It always does. Remember–you called me.”

He did. He wants to let the horror in that overwhelm him but–he can’t. He can’t because he has no coven and the world is dying and he’s had to make new lines just to survive. Her presence had muddled them, erased them, but he does have lines. Boundaries.

Rules.

“I,” he says, shakily getting to his feet, “am the last of my legacy. I am the first son of two witches, of darkness and light, of nature and stars. I am the wind that howls through the trees of my ancestors, rattling their leaves until they fall away and grow anew. I am the blessed of my family and I can’t–” his voice breaks on the word “–can’t belong to you.”

“You do,” she says and then gasps as her lips blister at the first falsehood that’s passed them. She brings a hand to them, fingers fluttering over the seeping wounds. “You will.”

“I am not yours,” he says. He watches the fire in her eyes and the blood slowly coming through the burns on her lips and plants his feet. “I renounce you, Venus. I spill your name like blood from my heart.”

The ritual words work. Invoking her name works. A red gash appears in the ground between them and, from it, a wall of magic rises, just in time. 

She lunges, lips curling and bangs her small fists against the golden wave until it rings. “Stop!”

“I reclaim my bones,” he says. This isn’t a painless process. He feels like he’s gasping out each word, like each one could be his last, like each one is coming from someone else. He swallows air like he’s dying. “I fill the gaps you leave behind with my own power and will.”

She howls. Her skin is no longer smooth and youthful. It’s dried. Decaying. Resurrection never goes right. She gnashes her teeth at him, parts of her skull peeking through where her rosy cheeks once were. “You’ll die without me. I’m too much a part of you, just as you are too much a part of me. Stop.”

She’s begging. Pleading with him in the same breath that she commands him. It’s not his job to obey her. Her life (or unlife) is not his burden to bear.

And neither are her gifts.

“My soul I make unblemished,” he says. He brings his hand to his chest. His bones are screaming without the weight of her name and he’s almost afraid what this will do to him. He presses his hand to his sternum and doesn’t falter. “The only essence it bears is mine. Mine alone.”

The wild magic is no longer tame at her ankles. He watches as it sinks claws into her rotting flesh, tearing at it and the power underneath. Before his father called the old gods, they were a part of this. They were a part of the earth and then they weren’t.

That's the crime his father paid for, in the end.

“Please,” she pleads. She’s reduced back to the mud-covered child he found in the forest. Tiny, with big blue-green eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

It hurts that it’s the truth. She didn’t meant to do it.

She did it. He can’t stay here because of what she meant to do.

“I take back my hands,” he says. He wants to look away. She’d meant something to him. Salvation. Hope. He makes himself watch her shrink. “I am the sole creator of my world. I weave my fate without you, Venus. I walk alone.”

The golden magic explodes outwards, flaming and boiling. He takes it as the purification it is, welcomes it into his wounds like a salve. He’d been too tainted before to see it for the beauty it is. For the friend it is. For the right it is.

When he blinks the light from his eyes, Venus is gone. All that lies where she stood is a small, spiky plant, mouth gaping wide. When the moonlight falls onto it, it shrivels, blackens, and dies.

He tilts his head up to her, to the Moon, and lets her magic soothe the hurts in his soul.