‘Mother?’ Alene asked, hesitant and wondering. She could see it now. A blurry picture settled softly in her mind, overlay on top of her own thoughts like a veil of her as a baby. A little chick with more fluff than feathers, rocked into sleep like a lullaby on the back of some great arcane beast. ‘I was… I was a bird once. From a nest that was in one of the branches growing out of your shell…’ Alene eyed the massive snail’s massive dappled shell, laced with a hypnotic spiral teeming with what looked like an entire village full of fossilized sacrificial bones, calcified into the shell body, veiled in long trailing wisteria blossoms, the six thick branches heavy with the weight of their blooms appearing to grow out of the shell itself, bizarrely grafted on, or rather in some mysterious way growing from the shell itself. ‘And then, I fell into your slime. And was transformed. Different from Sym, I, I was…born.’ The snail hummed, the very air vibrating around herself. ‘You are my one and only, my Una,’ she hummed, as if it were a spell. Alene who was also Una felt a warm rush of air pass through her, a flush of heat, of affection, from the snail’s pronouncement, filling her ghostly form with deep earthy forest breath.
More images followed, of her growth, from a tiny blind baby bird into a more mature godling, human-bodied from the contribution of the human skull in which she hatched, with hair as wild and fluffy and brightly colored as it had been when she was a chick. Her pre-transformation baby-hood, flailing in the carnage that was her chick siblings before falling from the nest to land inside a deteriorating skull emerging from within her mother’s shell, eating the godseed and incubating there in the snail slime to become a full god herself. Her childhood playmates, Izar and Sabea, the tiger and star maiden constellations respectively, connected via their shared heart and the devotion and celebrations from sister-villages, and the games the three of them played together by her mother’s silvery pool. All her flower and mushroom sisters, poppies and oyster mushrooms and lilacs and enoki, inadvertent acolytes of her mother, transformed into massive ancient things through her mother’s corrosive slime. They were not her own memories, but rather those of her mother, viewing her growth from the perspective of a being that clearly loved her very very much.
‘And now I have another sister? Sym?’ She asked her mother questioningly. ‘You asked me to take her as an acolyte, to give her my power and protection.’ Csialeide rumbled. ‘Did I say what she needed protection from?’ It occurred to her that while Sym had mentioned power, her mother alluded that her past self had thought Sym needed protection, and if she needed the power and protection of a god, perhaps that offending or offended party was another divine being. ‘You did not say,’ the snail replied, from her distant, distracted tone indicating that she found this line of questioning uninteresting. She seemed surprisingly ambivalent about her acolytes, her priestesses both human and other-bodied alike, but perhaps that was the case with all gods, Oongx too watched her acolytes from a great distance, not intervening in their lives, from what she could tell from Ceit’s account.
‘I missed you, Daughter, you don’t visit as often as you used to,’ the snail’s hum seemed to take on a chiding tone. ‘And what is it you’re wearing, is that how young gods dress now, like ghosts? Where is your human skin, you used to love going about in it.’ Alene paused, startled. Her mother was so motherly. It hadn’t really caught up with her. She had a mother, family who cared about her and wanted the best for her, and missed her when she wasn’t around. Just as she had hoped in her heart of hearts, secretly with subconscious desperation. Everything she had been longing for was right next to her, on this island next to the city the whole time. It wasn’t the family she had expected, being a god, and not human in the slightest, but it was hers.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
She felt a smile pull at her lips, a rising glow of affection for this monolithic creature. ‘I did lose my memories, Mother,’ she reminded the snail god, mildly. ‘Humph. You were right there in the city and you couldn’t find time to visit.’ The snail seemed unsympathetic to her condition, but sent another warm wave of memories her way. There she was bursting into speckled feathers for the first time to soar around the island, crying over her first lost baby tooth terrified she was cursed by some malevolent tooth spirit, the first time she called out ‘Mother’, emerging fully formed from her mother’s slime, a memory so cherished by the snail she could feel the emotion of it through the telepathic bond.
Regardless of this being her first time meeting her, she had longed for this familiarity, missed it despite never having had it before. ‘I missed you too, Mother.’ She wrapped her arms around the snail, the snail’s slime a strange new sensation on her ghostly flesh, cool and viscous, causing her form to become surprisingly humid. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. Warm. Like a hug that fulfilled you from the inside out.
Csialeide seemed sad when she insisted on going by Alene, but she couldn’t bear to be called after a girl she still didn’t feel much connection with. She felt she understood her better, knew more about what had shaped her, but she was still almost a separate entity with a separate life. This is Una’s island, Una’s sisters, Una’s mother. And when Izar and Sabea came to visit, Sabea riding on Izar’s back, her long thick hair trailing down the tiger’s back, Una’s friends.
She spent a long while on the island, lolling about in the soft mossy banks by the soft blue algae fluorescent light of the pool and talking with her mother, doing her best to listen as her previous self’s friends reminisced, as they attempted to prompt her missing memories, Izar interjecting on occasion as Sabea chatted rapidly, her hands animated. Time seemed to pass strangely, without sun or moon to mark it, the dark interwoven canopy above obscuring the sky entirely, the only stars those contained within Izar and Sabea’s constellation forms visible in the forever twilight. She met her other acolyte sisters, the extraordinarily tall flowers and mushrooms growing throughout the forest, connected by mycelium and roots beneath the soil. They were a quiet bunch, preoccupied with their own rich inner lives, but would chat for a short while with Alene if she initiated, the thoughts projected as a softer, less disruptive hum than her mother’s. The whole forest was more soothing than she expected, to be surrounded by whispers, a humming lull that more often than not coaxed her to sleep, a deep, dreamless, refreshing slumber. If this was the eversleep of the old gods she could see the appeal.
Her mother had tried to help her unlock her memories, had found the frequency of her mind and hummed deep and long, oscillating at the same wavelength, but they stubbornly stayed out of reach. They had halted only when it seemed Alene’s form was starting to lose coherence, phasing in and out of time. She ended up phasing out entirely, waking up several days later without knowing if she had simply stopped existing during the missing time or if she had somehow jumped through time to arrive in the future. Csialeide had been a flurry while she was missing, searching for her with the edge of hysteria, almost to the point of seeking out the help of the god of dreams to track her down, despite the dangers inherent in revealing a vulnerability to another god, especially a dangerous and capricious one like Noctua, trickster god of the small blue moon that orbiting the ringed planet in an intricate dance along with the larger silver one high in the sky. Luckily she had formed back into existence before her mother had actually made the call.
Her mother had been overwhelmingly relieved when she had reappeared, refusing to let her leave her sightline for several days. She had refused to try any more approaches to regaining Alene’s memory, saying she would rather have her daughter than her daughter’s memory. Alene had been touched by the sentiment, if a bit frustrated. It was difficult being on the island, it felt a bit like Una was just out of reach, that if she tried just a bit harder she would be able to grasp what was missing.