Just a little side story to "Snake God", set during "Ragnarok".
I've been thinking about you a lot lately, Mother. I'm not sure why that is, although the time of year must have something to do with it. I'm glad that I am able to remember, now, although sometimes the memories just... hurt, and I wish that they were lost in Talpa's two-edged mists again.
They tell me that it would have been Mother's Day today, which is undoubtedly the reason why, as I sit here alone, your face swims into my view. It brings with it mixed feelings, the first of which is hate. I hated you for your neglect, for your coldness. How you always seemed so hypocritical. I always wondered why you didn't love me. Why didn't you just kill me when I was born? Maybe I hated you the most for that... it seemed as if you wanted to torture me with life itself...
But then I think past that, remembering now as one over four centuries old how I felt when I was only twelve. Then there was fear and all the hate, and the pain. When I killed your husband, all I could think of was freeing myself from his abuse, freeing myself from being afraid to be in my own house.
All of that I felt, but there was more than that. Looking back, I know now what I really wanted, why I squeezed the life out of him and enjoyed every minute of it.
I thought that maybe, if Viraz was gone, you would love me. I wanted you to love me, Mother. Why couldn't it have been that way? You and me, against everything. Like the singer and her daughter, her daughter that was like me.
She was killed for what she was, but I was not. There were excuses I heard, that the clan wanted to break me, that I must be punished for being born. I accepted those, understood them. I could not control Viraz; he needed to prove that. But even now I don't know what he needed to prove with you. We both had bruises, we both bled because of his angry fists. Mine I wore like chains and yours you hid away from the world behind thick robes and the thin paper of a fan.
Why did you love him instead?
Did you think that he really cared for you, just because he was better when he was sober? Because he apologized and kissed you? He only beat you once a week then, such a good husband. I was never safe, I never heard any apologies, and I gave up trying to protect you from him after the first few broken bones. I was much too young then to selflessly and purposelessly bear the pain.
Even now, so many, many years after the fact, I am angry at you for not caring what he did to me.
I am about to try to stop thinking about this, to put it behind me where it belongs. I am almost successful, and I start to get up, to leave the darkness of my room here and find something useful to do. There is always something to be done around here, especially for a Guardian.
But then, I remember. It is one of my earliest memories, mostly faded away so that Essah did not bother to show it to me when he made me watch my past and see how I became what I was. I discovered it for myself while meditating, and afterwards I realized that this snatch of my being is the key to everything I know of my mother. I can see it as if I was watching it from the other side of a screen, like on a television but too horrifying for anyone to have ever shown.
I was four years old when it happened, maybe five. Something I had done had angered Viraz, and he was beating me for it, his huge fists and the pommel of his knife slamming into me, again and again. I cried out for my mother as she sat there on a mat near the wall, quiet, submissive, as a good wife should be. It seemed as if she was trying not to be noticed, for he would likely turn his violent attentions to her when he was done with me. She never responded, never moved, never said a thing, hiding her face behind a huge pristine white fan. He would beat me until my blood covered her, and she would still sit there as if she could feel nothing.
I don't know how long he kept hitting me. Hindsight tells me that he could not have been that brutal or else he would have killed me, but at the time it was as if my world was ending. As I was beginning to fade out, one of his blows with the knife missed, and he slashed my chest.
I screamed for you, Mother, but you did not answer me.
At the very last he threw me towards my mother but missed, and I hit the floor instead, spraying blood from my mouth as my head hit the ground and snapped back. There was only red, and black, and the metal of blood as I lay there in front of her.
I could see her face, her eye puffy and her skin lightly mottled with his old bruises and specks of my red blood. I stared back with a kind of dazed fascination as my vision multiplied her and then just as suddenly went black. It came back in time for me to see Viraz standing above me, drawing back his foot. I just looked at him.
Then there was a sudden movement, and all I could see was a huge splotch of red against a span of white. Only a paper fan stood between us, and him.
Much to my confusion even now, it stopped him. Viraz looked down into her eyes, at the face he was not afraid to hurt, and then he turned and left. I don't remember anything after that. Did she hold me, bandage my wounds, cry for me? Did he punish her later for it?
It is so perfectly clear now, Mother. It was not that you didn't love me. It was that you loved too much. For whatever reason you had, you loved Viraz, and for whatever reason you had, you loved me, too. You were helpless in the face of such love, torn between one and the other. He would not let you have both, and so you had none.
Still, I wonder if you could have loved me again, when he was gone, if I had tried just once to love you in return. If I could have forgiven... would things have been different?
I will never know. Possessed by my evil, by revenge and hate, conquered by irreversible loss and constant pain, I ran my swords through you and killed my entire clan. Talpa must have been proud of me. I can still feel the metal in my hands, the slight resistance of your flesh, the way your body fell and the way I laughed. I had made you hate me and then killed you for it. Such sweet revenge. Such blindness I had.
I am a gods-damned fool.
Time has run out, and I know I am too late to say this. But say it I will.
Your son begs your forgiveness, Imasuté Rielvia. I am so very sorry, Mother. I am sorry.
Happy Mother's Day.