Heirs of Cain
Venus in Charge
Locked in battle I was, with none other than my goddess herself, my dearest who so transcends the term wife, the mother of my child with so much more potential than I will ever have: Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.
The grueling ordeal entered its fourth hour, judged by the sun's journey, as Wanda controls my sense of time's passage and could have been using it against me to gain an edge in our high stakes contest. Half my army was gone, banished to their dark central grave, and there were traitors in the midst of those that remained.
These wounds were not inflicted without reprisal however. She too was down on her forces, but her strategy remained aggressive: her trio of moons, harvest, goblin, and blood kept my world serpent and my crater surrounded. You will notice these are not the names of men conscripted, but of tokens.
The battle, the contest, was the game of amblush, a thing I learned to play even more slowly than I learned to author prophecy in service of my gorgeous opponent. This game was the oldest in the world, played by the first heirs of Cain, the tribe to which my Wanda belongs and which she so ravishingly embodies. Perhaps Cain himself, first of the murderers, was the strategist that set down the rules. Or perhaps another party beyond man itself... though I should back up, as that's a few too many moves ahead.
As I said, I learned amblush slowly, in phases, originally introduced to it by her just so she could enjoy my curious frustrations; the mild pain of my fruitless contemplation amuses her. First I had to come to the revelation that it could not be played alone. As the earliest game, at least the earliest of real tactics, it had not yet advanced to ideas of practice or self-play. If one was not earnestly fighting, one was just moving pebbles and sticks about.
After I learned that, I had two regular opponents: my duck Mergini (Wanda had made his mind more than rival mine in some regards) and my Venus herself. The latter loved to defeat me, and that was all she ever did. Such a strange mix of joy and consternation was felt each time I fell to her. Her victory was my own of course, but only in the sense that her positive emotions ripple through me, even when based upon my own negative source material.
She never offered any lessons, only the fact that I could not defeat her because I did not know how. Obvious, yes? But oh, not so, as that was foreshadowing on her part, to something she wasn't sure would come to pass, something that eventually did. I knew. Not strategies gleaned from muttering in her sleep. Not insight into the history of amblush. Nor the product of late night study sessions with my waterfowl companion and our compared notes. What I knew was what only the heirs and the world serpent knew: the very nature of death.
It is found in one of the more philosophical layers of the cosmos, where the concepts of being sleep and ruminate on the ways to deal with pesky lifeforms. A black orb was its form, colossal beyond description, wreathed in foggy white-gold. It taught me the cold of oblivion, the numbing of thought into dissolution. The soul is soluble, and will eventually disappear back into the whole of the whole.
One needs to know this, know it, to perceive the full rule set of amblush and develop any real skill at the game. Now I outclassed Mergini greatly, and my Wanda did not want me summoning any of her siblings as opponents, so she offered herself up, aware that I might finally be able to challenge her in some respect other than general sensitivity, a thorny proposal for us both.
The only challenges I ever wished to issue were to her faults, for her to correct so swiftly and completely that I looked the fool for ever even mentioning them. My criticism was of the minor wounds she took in the process of living, serving only to agitate the area and speed her divine healing. I was no more than a medicinal leech on her mistreated perfection.
Yet I could win. Just as I'd seen the world serpent encircling a collapsed star, the diamond of death's nature, I also saw an opportunity to use the game piece representing him to encircle and ensnare any of her pack of moons. She was using their numbers to intimidate, but once the serpent occupied an adjacent space to any heavenly body he could not be taken by any other, such was his mastery of the permanent midnight beyond the Earth and its drifting refuse.
And the crater, currently his neighbor, was the key. It generated paths along which other pieces could travel, straight lines, like those that led to its formation. So I used it to launch my world serpent across the circular board, an impact in reverse, which erased the crater piece from existence, though it might return if I could create another destructive incident.
My world serpent found and trapped her goblin moon, but rather than banish it to the center of the board, which I now realized might be a representation of that conceptually and literally distant diamond, I chose to keep it prisoner, thus I was granted a great deal of leverage on all three of her most capable pieces.
She could not retreat without scattering them, and in the process destroy most of their power. The limbo of shuffling a piece back and forth wasn't safe for her either, as I could then approach and mop up with my constellation piece. Either I squeezed the life out of her moon by moon or she was swept up by my reserves that had waited so patiently in a nook of the night sky.
Victory now appeared inevitable. Dread filled me, and shame. Something was wrong. It was not my place to bring her down, the opposite! To support, to bolster, to champion, these are my roles. If she loses sight of why she should shape the world with her magnificence, I supply it.
Both of us realized my position on the board at the same time, looked up, locked eyes. Not a word passed between us. I had the initiative, so she made no attempt to infiltrate and examine with her vivisecting green eyes that could do so easily. Instead I was to make a decision, pluck one from the electric rain streaking in her green, hanging precariously on the tip of her impish fang, hiding in the brush of the bunched freckles stuck crossing the bridge of her nose.
For a moment it was too difficult to face, and I was the one to retreat, to the perspective of our surroundings. We hadn't set up on the dock of Miss Ulterrine's duck pond, where Mergini and I had failed at playing amblush most often. This spot felt new to me, whether or not it was. The first time I'd witnessed this small clearing was in a vision of someone else's memory, then we'd climbed the hill overlooking the entrance to the cave that was my prophecy workshop. Form its summit, despite being only a short way up the mountain that helped hide Quarantown from the rest of the world's view, you could see everything we'd built: her brother Ruthven's grave to the distant railway station.
But no market or homestead was most notable. That honor went to a humble divot in the ground, close to where we sat with the board between us, legs crossed, no table or chairs preventing us from leaning close enough to the board to sniff out each other's brewing strategies. That was where I'd found one of the serpent's very scales, a gemstone of levitation, which I'd used to ascend into his realm.
My Venus in furs was distressed, and here I was reminiscing about my own accomplishments, which she'd achieved just by being born. This very moment had the potential to be an accomplishment, all I had to do was match my conviction in my knowledge of death with that in my knowledge of Wanda.
Death was inescapable. Wanda was inescapable, as I had made her. Both were true. Once my mind was equally full of these two colored mists, one roseate and sensual, the other necrotic purple and frigid, I reexamined the amblush board and the predicaments of its pieces.
Defeating Wanda was not victory. This game had only ever defeated me, and would do so again if I only scrambled over an opponent in an insecure need to dominate some aspect of it. But I did not need the game's approval, only that of my loving goddess. So who truly stood to benefit if I demolished her forces? Of course. Death. He wasn't conscious in the world, merely a force, but in the game we lent him such capacity. The black at the center of the board, so like what I'd seen, was the game's true master. He set the snare, a trap of prey killing each other because they couldn't see beyond themselves.
Thus I became more aware of the spaces that matched the black center in color, the compressed-kite shapes between the spiraling circles where all the tokens started and mostly stayed. They were extensions of Death, those that encompass us and watch hungrily, those that that stay glued in our blind spots.
"Blind spots," I muttered, reaching out for my constellation. If I moved toward Wanda's moons she was done for, but fear didn't so much as flash across her eyes. Instead I moved along the board's rim, turned the piece toward the center. It was uncontested territory I'd just entered. Nothing to fight over. But that was the point. We had nothing to fight over. Our eyes met again. "We must see what we know."
My idea transferred to her, almost an erotic process, an influence she added to all our interactions (nary a touch from her is ever felt in one spot alone, always in the nethers as well). Wanda breathed it in, sucked on it, panted it back out. Her concern became hunger, and she went to work moving her harvest moon away from my serpent, disregarding the danger.
Back and forth we worked in tandem, spreading out the remnants of our armies, ignoring all dangerous proximities, until we had pieces ringing the entire board and all facing toward the black pit at the center. Now there were no more blind spots. The beings of the board not only knew death, but spied also all its radiating pockets, nothing extending behind them out of their sight.
So we acknowledged mechanically the true nature of amblush. Though one player could defeat another, they were themselves defeated by the third player, of whom they were never aware they had begun a contest with. To Death went the spoils on two tiers, but he couldn't collect while we watched him, while we were vigilant against his approach. Our actual eyes matched those of our devoted figurines, wooden and unblinking, until the third player we had sensed was fully revealed.
And there he was. A new token. It hadn't risen from the black waters of the center, instead stamped on our perception with a jolt. That piece had always been there, we'd just failed to spy its slinking before, weaving its way in and out of a most distracting conflict, a crow swooping between bullet paths.
Depicted was a crashing meteor, the threat from beyond come to roost most explosively in our lives. What a discovery it was... but we had no idea what to do with it! When Wanda has no ideas, she tries pouncing, and this was no exception. Her arm shot out to grab the piece, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.
"I shouldn't dare to hope for such a thing," she sighed, but then her attention turned to me and a grin split her lips. She was pleased with me, which I get to feel as a spark-throwing fire in all my flesh. Another pounce was being readied, but I wanted to catch my goddess off guard, tantalize her all the more, and the only shelf I could reach that she couldn't was the future.
The cave where I drew prophecy from a coursing subterranean river was beneath us, but if I treated it as a lance of spiritual energy, one that pierced all rock and continued beaming into the sky until death darkened, then I was still in its path. Some dreg of its power could still reach me. I thought back, mentally sidestepped, into a past that wasn't my own, in search of a sparkle of prophecy.
"With the contagion of a mother's hate, breathed on her child's destroyer; aye, I heard thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not, yet my innumerable seas and streams, mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, and the inarticulate people of the dead, preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate in secret joy and hope those dreadful words, but dare not speak them."
"Hmm," she purred, drawing closer, shadow swallowing the amblush board. Her draping furs picked up the tokens, vanished them into their recesses. Both her arms bore her leaning weight, framed me as her prey. "Was that the demented little Byron boy again?"
"No," I intuited, "Shelley I think this time. What do you suppose it means?"
"First we must interpret what I am feeling Severin." My favorite heir of Cain lunged, and then gave me full documentation of what she felt: my chest, my neck, my thighs, et cetera, et cetera...
Eventually we did get to the business of interpreting what I'd managed to snatch from our game after its ever-victor Death fled back to intangibility. At least I assume we did, for I, just as you will be now, was thrown from that most joyous tumble at the lookout's edge straight to a time I think many days later.
Whatever Wanda has me skip she eventually returns to me, when she thinks I will enjoy the memories most, and it has not been in my nature to question her craft. Instead I, and here we, must do our best to adjust to the circumstances. I knew at least where she had dropped me back into myself: a field not far outside our open air market where the children often played.
It was not a sight of play now however, but much strange activity that required its unobstructed open space. There were people, our people that we were very much responsible for, floating about in the air like bubbles!
Some panicked, raining tears on those waiting below, others effervesced with laughter enough to send themselves spinning. And those raining tears I mentioned were just to prepare you for the other precipitation that was less common but far more concerning, which was all the vomit caused by wingless men, women, and children challenging gravity.
What I witnessed was far too chaotic and disorganized to be anything of Wanda's design, she often had spiders synchronized in the same web and centipedes marching in company, so I searched for an explanation. Unnecessary, as it turns out. The answer drifted down to the earth before me, touching delicately with a single bare toe.
Some questions are better left unanswered, especially when the naked truth is presented so close to literally. Doppler Burstyn, light as a feather despite his rotund form, was wearing less clothing than usual, which I assumed was part of a series of calculations over several hours where he adjusted his own weight to find the perfect balance between levity and control.
Less luminous than his gilded grin, it took me a moment to recognize his flat gray bracelets, anklets, and strategically placed pins. Their dull material would never have caught his eye naturally, but he was already fully aware of the power of the world serpent's scales. Had my smoldering stare been drawn away, off to the side, I might have seen a heavy iron cage half as high as a man, lidded with a heptagon, holding in and down a stack of broken, carved, and complete scales like piled griddlecakes.
I knew it best for him to talk as little as possible, so I answered as many questions with context as I could. Where had he gotten them? I asked the imaginary version of myself standing in front of the bobbing ninny. Simple, right where he knew one to be. We'd dug up the one I used to visit the serpent right by the lookout above the mine shaft. Burstyn too had assumed his expertise extended vertically, replacing my prophecy with industrious extraction.
He had dug there in the hopes that the scale was not alone, his hope proven right. Snakes do shed their skins all at once most of the time. We might've discovered what length he was if we uprooted the whole sleeve and measured it.
But why? The magnate couldn't sell them. We were now at the point where he couldn't sell anything within Quarantown's borders. With Wanda's nature revealed, all present turning themselves over as worshipers, her glory had replaced currency entirely. Needs were met to meet her approval, avoid her disappointment. Anyone who dared dream of inter-acolyte exploitation would be tossed out on their behind, into thorns, if they were lucky.
Also as simple as the man, I told myself. It was in his nature to maximize his own contribution to any pit he stumbled into. The lack of financial opportunity did not technically remove his ability to do that, especially when replaced with another powerful material resource. All of this was just his latest effort to usurp my position as chief disciple, prophet, and quite possibly lover, to the goddess Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.
Now I did not learn this until later, but his little symposium of flight training and stomach emptying was not merely for whimsy. At that very moment Wanda was off trying to address a very specific problem I had created, or at least delineated. This was all over the pearls of wisdom I'd shucked from a Shelley over a tricky game of amblush.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Several times over now we'd learned that a prophecy wasn't a contract or a shopping list. It was instead a map bearing no names or legend, and you place yourself by putting your finger upon your best guess. Creating it is a skill, and so is realizing it in your favor. Wanda had been particularly troubled by the line 'yet my innumerable seas and streams, mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, and the inarticulate people of the dead, preserve, a treasured spell'.
She had taken the first parts of the list, streams, mountains, and caves, to mean my oracle's workshop and thus Quarantown at large. The 'inarticulate people of the dead' were the ghosts of old heirs, eager to help me prognosticate to better their own reputations and desiccating fortunes in the tomb of the past.
'Yon wide air' gave her pause. For years now she'd been setting up wards, charms, familiars, hexes, and curses to safeguard our home against her siblings, her mother, and her kind at large, covering the waters, the railroad, the mountain, the creatures big and small... but not the wide sky above. That was a vulnerability, so she sought to seal it and settle the prophecy at the same time.
My goddess was mediating a conflict just as I was about to start one, not far from all the foolish floating, but obscured by the dense screen of the forest. She'd made the decision to enlist the various ducks of our town as the familiars tasked with safeguarding our sky: both those with enhanced intellect and those without.
It was a logical decision, as the ducks already lived integrated with the populace, their numbers were high, and the smarter ones could act as commanders for the rest in her absence. This was a matter of nature however, which does not always think or feel logically. Some of her disciples among the animals, namely the crows, had taken offense at being rejected in favor of web-footed and spatula-billed bath toys.
They had guarded her woods capably ever since her arrival, better equipped with their versatile refuse-curating bills and dexterous claws. In their opinion they should've been the ones to move into town as the new constables, unaware they would be perceived by the citizenry as a swarm of ill omens. Could you imagine how difficult it would be to optimistically interpret a prophecy when surrounded by crows who only, in their efforts to keep a beady eye out for intruders, ever managed to look hungry?
So in the high branches the crows were trying to pick a fight with the ducks, cawing dares and insults down at their idle waddling. Both were plumed in black, so it was like the crows had dripped their shadows to the forest floor in a heat wave and were now trying to call them back. Wanda was in the middle of it, leaping from tree to tree, swapping animal tongues even faster, to broker a peace. Not a compromise of course. The ducks would guard the skies as per her decision, but, tragically, they would not do so in time.
"What is the meaning of all this Doppler?" I asked the man, swallowing down an angry froth. He took a flagging balloon's step toward me.
"The skies are in need of guards, aren't they?" he asked. "I'm equipping and training some guards. Bu-hah!" One of these 'guards', too unsure of her position to scream but not too unsure to honk, slowly spun over his head, forcing him to brush her hair out of his face. "They need practice, but I assure you I've perfected the equipment.
There's a formula the boys and I have worked out, based on weight. Once we know yours we can give you some braces of the correct thickness." He clicked those around his wrists together. "They make you almost as light as the air itself, but not quite. You remain just a feather or two heavier. Meaning we can do this without worry of floating away." He jumped, to a height beyond comical.
Our conversation was so delayed in waiting for his descent that I simply could not stand it any longer. From my perspective there was no rhyme or reason for Wanda to shift me forward or back in time, only trust, so I might've been tossed to another knot on the chronological rope before he finished a single protracted hop.
My only option was to find one of his elder sons, Zachariah, the one following in his footsteps most precisely, and get him to outfit me with some of the scale braces so I could go up there and argue him out of all this. Anything of the serpent was not to be trifled with, especially for people who couldn't possibly know. Their fledgling flailing might've been misinterpreted, could've invited the beast, or worse, the meteor his coils kept imprisoned.
Zachariah was right where I expected him, managing the cage that was so much lighter than it should have been despite the chains draped over it. He was twenty already, but much shorter than his father, and must have lost several teeth all at once, for a fused but expertly molded chunk of gold was taking the place of three of them in his lower smile.
"Could you get me up there please?" I asked sternly, trying to remember nobody was particularly at fault. Those who knew should be keeping lids on all their pots, keep the steam from escaping.
"Yes sir Mr. Pelts," he said politely, a twinge of fear in his voice. I often forgot I was now an authority figure. Perhaps the young man had to listen to his father plotting every night, desperate for ways to pickax at my responsibilities, even though he already held the coveted position of being the first citizen who learned my Wanda's nature within the town itself.
By the time I was done charging over these notions, Zachariah had given me all four rings on my wrists and ankles and put several carved pins where they apparently needed to be positioned. Were I in a better mood I would've told him my Uncle Piotr could use his subtle fitting skills if he was ever in need of employment far enough away from his father to not hear that boisterous chortle that was currently overhead.
Now I was already the most practiced despite having just donned the equipment, as I'd flown all the way out of the sky in a similarly empowered ballgown, where I danced with the stars themselves. My knowledge helped as well, making me innately aware of the undetectable elegance with which death flew about us always.
Getting up to him was trivial; I only had to weave past a dog-paddling Mr. Hammerstein and Giselle's boys, who were already skilled enough to chase each other through their elders like minnows darting around stones.
"A marvel isn't it?" the man said as soon as we were eye to eye again. Light as we were I could still feel gravity's nagging tug, which made it clear he had used someone else as a stepping stone to stay up there that long.
"It was the first time," I couldn't help but gloat. "Now that the novelty is gone I only see the risks."
"No, I've accounted for all that," Burstyn insisted, shaking his head. "There are no worries as long as you're properly weighed and outfitted. A strong wind might have something to moan about, but we won't get anything that could take us away this time of year. Where is our goddess? Imagine what she'll be able to do with the power of flight!" He spun in a tilted circle, checking every angle for her approach; when his face came back to my orientation it looked a little disappointed.
"What she does with every power: bring respectability to it. And our concern is not the wind Doppler. It's what may be riding it. Have you considered that you might've just served up a hundred defenseless morsels to any predator that has mastered the sky? And you've done so before we've instituted any protective measures. We need to get everyone down, now and not later. Am I understood?"
"Poppycock! You don't need to be a prophet to see the skies are clear of everything but sunshine. If we all practice now we can have guards perched on chimneys like vigilant owls by tonight... Now that I think of it, we could attach a bead of scale to some twine and some wrapped-up food... send it right up the chimney so they can eat while they work! Oh Wanda does fill me with such clever ideas."
Getting him to stop producing baubles of a profiteering mind would be fruitless; I had to take matters into my own hands. Take them back rather. Burstyn was very much overstepping his position. If he wasn't he could've done what I did, which was make several assumptions based on my intimate knowledge our goddess, thus leaping over the gap in time that left me without much of the context surrounding me.
I had no way of knowing Wanda was perfecting our duck guard a short distance away, but I could access our past even more easily than those of the poets and authors of Diodati. She always went to the animals first, sometimes overlooked the foolishness of the Abel-bodied. It was a safe guess she was patching our sky with feathers or bat leather, so I wagered on it.
"Did Wanda assign you to training guards?"
"No, but I know she appreciates initiative!" he blustered.
"She appreciated it once, while half-drowned in fever and delirium. Now she's back to despising presumption from anyone but those who can see the future. Stop this aerial posturing and help me get these people back to where they belong."
"Beneath you," he spat. It was the most outwardly hostile I'd ever heard him. I decided to take the higher path, without gaining elevation.
"Beneath Wanda. If she does not ask, she does not want. Therefore she will be providing any guards our skies need, and they will be birds. I will help you undo this embarrassment before she gets here and sees." He stared at me for several moments, but did not respond, speaking instead to everyone below him.
"Are you all having a good time?" he shouted, to a cheer from half those he'd equipped. The others were still learning which way their contents were sloshing. All the while we were slowly descending, and as soon as he bumped into someone he used them as a springboard, to, with surprising grace, deliver himself into the thickest part of the crowd-cloud.
The man started riling everyone up, giving them little pushes in random directions they didn't have the nerve to protest. The sky became a chaos of kicking legs and hands in search of things to grasp. Perhaps he hoped to accelerate their mastery, akin to pushing someone who has not yet learned to swim into a pond.
I detest anger, mostly because I am not immune to it. I find it to be ill-fitting scalding armor, put on involuntarily, yet almost always used in a scuffle. Fully encased in the stuff, I unwisely dove in after the man to try and calm things down. The problem was that I sought something more reserved and cautious, while he wanted roughhousing. One is significantly slower than the other.
For every person that I helped down, who had had their fill, three more were scattered and sent higher by his pushes and daring them on, efforts in which he was joined by Zachariah and two of his other children. Minutes later I had made little progress, and a few of those I'd pushed down had buoyed back up when I wasn't looking.
Not only did Doppler succeed, it was a runaway success! Everyone got louder. Some of those who were confident they were about to complete their first straight shot through the air felt cut off by those drifting into their path. Collisions abound. Ricochets of both body and insult. This was the least united the town had been since they learned of Wanda's heritage.
And I was right in the middle of it, looking as guilty, lost, and foolish as the rest of them. What would Wanda think if she suddenly came across us now? After all her hard work scouting locations, people, opportunities in time... only to come home and find everyone had forgotten how to walk.
My shame was making me even angrier; I couldn't realize, in the thick of it, that this was not truly one of my duties. As the conduit between Wanda and her people, my actual responsibility was to smooth over incompatibility. When it came to the population itself, only Wanda's hand could guide them, or push their heads out of the clouds when needed.
Almost everyone adrift was arguing with one another, fists flailing just out of reach of faces. Frustrated hands of the earthbound were outstretched and grabbing, catching barely anything. Someone unknown accidentally kicked me in the face. I was rolling the taste of shoe around in my mouth, trying to dispel it, when I first heard the quacking charge.
Like the Valkyries storming into battle, the flocking ducks of Quarantown crested and swept over the treetops, their calls quickly drowning out our bickering. At first the people were frightened, assuming these black wings belonged to scavenging crows, but those birds had lost their appeal to Wanda, and were now sulking in their knothole dens of pilfered treasure.
We were treated delicately, despite being swallowed by the mass of them. Every feather brush actually made the tiniest of adjustments to our positions, weightless as we were. The newly appointed guardians of our sky reoriented me right-side up, spun me along with all the others to face her.
In came Wanda from on even higher. Her furs were cast wide under her arms, catching and holding the air like the gliding folds of a flying squirrel. Whenever her altitude faltered a ball of ducks would toss themselves up into the furs, push her higher, and so she flew from her woods and back into her town, where yet another dispute had to be addressed.
My heart went out to her. Powerful and wise as she was, she didn't have the temperance of a diplomat. With me she could unleash her wildest spirit, her evilest desires, possess with permission rather than brood in scolded yearning. I took pleasure in grooming the furs that would otherwise bristle.
But she showed remarkable and admirable control by tackling the issue with her own strengths. Our troubles were resolved without her speaking a single word, in a tremendous dance of ducks, a waltz of waterfowl, the many mallards' mise-en-scène. As she supervised from above the birds rearranged everyone, took them from the person they were angriest at in the jumble and paired them up with the best choice out of everyone entwined in the serpent's coils.
Wanda had confessed to me a mere idea on our first night together, aboard that fateful train, that she suspected there was only one way in which she could be a god to people in a rapidly modernizing world of canneries, photography, inoculation, and a hundred other things too fastidious and finicky for a god's temperament.
She wanted to be a goddess of love, and of sex. This was a realm in which, hopefully, the machines could never invade. A man would not want to make love to a furnace, nor a woman a printing press. There were no improvements to be made on the human body in these affairs, as, no matter what entity was responsible, the bodies were made for each other.
Just as she had gripped every aspect of my physical existence, she could influence elements of her disciples: rush their blood, reveal a suppressed blush, tickle to tantalize, gently redirect their eyes to a person they hadn't properly observed the first time they'd seen them, and all the other licks that could make up a case of puppy love.
Properly wielded, these powers made her more than a match for Eros, as well as making some of the Quarantowners more than a match for each other. All of this was happening before my eyes, and I wasn't prepared for it, given that Wanda actually told me precious little of her plans for godhood.
We shared everything in terms of our relationship, but her rule was her prerogative, and I was meant to patch up leaks as they appeared. Unto her I delivered silver platter prophecy, which she then took under advisement, producing miracles at the other end of the process. So to watch her work in real time, and to be intentionally glued in that moment by her, would have been the most beautiful thing I'd ever witnessed if I hadn't already spent a whole life in miniature witnessing my Wanda.
Problems that had weighed on my mind since I started compiling a dossier of our citizens were all but obliterated in the slow romantic spins of this airborne dance, the pairings carefully curated.
Take Miss Giselle Ulterrine, who owned most of the ducks now showing her the floorless steps. Her boys gave her some fulfillment, but she was terribly lonely, prevented from venturing out in search of a lover by the butchering hook in her back: obligations to the distant man that had set her up with her homestead and the birds in the first place. He was never going to marry her, I knew, just use her.
Vainly I had worried she would become attached to me, but I was too grounded and too dense to see the solution that Wanda now made look like the very breeze through Giselle's faded hair. My closest friend in Quarantown was Porter Montbel, whom I might have competed with if my relationship with Wanda did not put us in separate leagues.
Perhaps you see where Wanda took it. A woman who might have had eyes for me, and a man running about town delivering things and doing favors just as I liked to do, made to embrace each other in midair so they could stabilize together. Ducks spun them slowly as their hands joined, found comfortable positions.
I could see they were talking already. I couldn't read lips, but I could see laughter on them plain as day. He was younger than me, than her, and his interests more varied than mine. Giselle was a listener, a contemplater, so he could go on about whatever caught his eye and she would never get tired of taking it in.
Her legal obligations to that distant man would remain, but they would mean nothing if that debt was ever called in under the claw-tipped umbrella of Wanda's hand. She was freer than she realized, to spend the night with Porter, to let him take the boys out to skip stones in their pond, to marry him with the goddess Pelts as officiant.
"Incredible," I muttered, but it was lost even to me under the thwip-thwap of the birds' hairpin maneuvering. Wanda's efforts were not limited to just those two. She had also paired Giggles, a neurotic woman with access to far too much alcohol than could be beneficial to her condition, with Godwin Hammerstein, our resident playwright who hadn't yet written a play.
Just as with Giselle and Porter they had almost snapped together, and it suddenly made sense to me, and likely made far more sense to them. Now she could distract herself by encouraging him, babble to keep him from self-doubt, and their combined efforts to coax a script out of him like a crab from its sandy burrow would either succeed or wind up far too lubricated by the bottle of wine they'd opened and shared hours earlier. They might make something else instead, with even better results.
My own confidence in the both of them shot at the sight of their spontaneous joy. (They seemed to compliment each other's dancing, though Wanda had complete control over their orientation and speed.) Giggles had the tendency to blurt unhelpful things, but so loved to be social, and in this new light I saw her as an actress, saying only what Godwin had written, partly inspired by her wine, their strengths and resources and affection feeding into each other in a spirited tumble that I hoped would not end.
Many other couples were formed, some of them only functional enough to create calm in the moment, but all of them successful to at least that degree. Mr. Burstyn's wife, who had produced children for him the way he expected his mines to turn out various minerals, had her hands and her staff's hands full at all hours, and the twenty-fifth through twenty-eighth hour of the day Burstyn would have purchased for her if he could, so she was not there to be paired with him.
Instead he was holding the shoulders of his son Zachariah, who had ascended to try and teach balance before Wanda had come along and made it entirely unnecessary. His father was rattling off to him, concentration on his ruddy face, and I don't doubt it was some adjustment to his plans now that his goddess had entered and solved his 'contribution'.
That was the man's realest problem. Wanda granted security, in a physical sense yes, but in the long run danger can come for anyone, just less frequently under the full protection of an heir. What was most valuable was peace of mind, the knowledge that always you were in her thoughts, and that there was real power being deployed in your best interest, good health, and eventual happiness.
If he had been secure in this, rather than desperate for approval in excess of what his peers now received by default, he would not have dug up those accursed scales like they were nothing more than shale, and would not have put on this charade of a training ground. Then the targets would have been far more scattered; it would have been harder to strike so mortal a wound with a fiery arrow in our meadow flank.