[This scene contains content some might find upsetting. Please check the post/chapter titled Episode Five: “Broken Earth” Content Warning List and Pronunciation Guide for a list of content warnings.]
As Belle climbed the pale, winding stairs up the tallest tower of the castle, the tower that split Heaven’s Fall, she let all of her worries fall away. With each step, the small bag of shaving supplies at her hip jangled, and another worry dropped to the stone staircase to bounce off every step on the way down. The worries would be there waiting when Belle returned from this journey, and she wouldn’t be able to survive it with them weighing her down.
It was Mama B’s one night of magic for Singing Moon. And Belle always went to open her mother’s Elleipsium-lined cell herself, despite the fact that Auxica offered again and again to do it for her. To step into the Nothing, the absolute lack, so Belle didn’t have to.
But Belle made herself go every time. Made herself face that Nothing, let it hollow her out. Because she wouldn’t let herself forget what Mama B was living in. Dying in.
Belle didn’t have the appropriate status to ride the lift up the tower, so she had to climb the near-infinite spiral staircase step-by-step. Auxica always walked the staircase—up and down, twice a day. She said the act of climbing this tower as well as the act of descending from it were a type of meditation for her. A kind of prayer. That it made her feel like she was walking up into heaven itself. Belle could understand that—she often felt, by the time she reached the last few steps, that she too were close to death. And that was only one way.
No wonder Auxica had the ass of an eighteen-year-old.
The Priestess knelt in the center of the temple, the last bit of twilight filling the windowed room. Mother Light, carved from pure white marble by Thorne I himself, towered over the room, her back to the river. Belle felt much the same about Thorne I as she did about Arantxa—both selfish leaders obsessed with power and control, but incredible artists. One would never guess this statue weighed ton upon ton from the way Mother Light’s toes so gently touched down. Her naked form seemed to float, like a body in water—her arms drifted out to either side, and when Belle had come here when early-morning sunlight slanted through the enormous windows, it looked like Mother Light’s long, slender fingers were playing absently with the sunbeams, toying them like ribbons. The details of the statue, from her long, delicate eyelashes to her powerful thighs, from her fluid pose to the mane of hair swirling around her, were exquisite.
She looked so full of life that Belle wondered sometimes, if at night when no one was looking, when it was moonbeams filtering through the windows, if those fingers did toy with the light of the night. If the marble awoke and Mother Light descended the same stairs Belle had just climbed to once again meet her love, Mother Dark, here at Mt. Mares. Belle smiled at the thought—in many ways, this statue reminded her of Mama T. The weightlessness and grace, the long, wild hair. And right beneath them waited Mama B, trapped in the earth below. If anything could break the cell of Elleipsium that kept Mama B locked away, it would be the Light Mother.
Belle came to kneel beside the Priestess, and together they craned their necks to gaze upon Mother Light’s flawless face. Auxica offered Belle her right hand, which Belle took happily before letting her other hand come to rest over her heart. She offered the Mother her own quick prayer, a thanks for this day and the opportunity it gave her to see Mama B, and an ask for her blessing to free Mama B forever. Someday soon.
Eventually, Auxica spoke softly, her stone-gray eyes still on the statue’s face. “Our Mother, as always, I beg guidance in leading my family in your Order. In the building that must follow for breaking to have meaning. Show me how to show my family that Order is the giving of freedom, not the taking of it—that what one names Order, another may name Chaos. I pray for this sweet girl and her sweet mother, that they find their freedom. I name you Mother—”
“I name you Mother,” Belle echoed in a whisper, and together they continued,
“—Of Light and Order, of knowledge and life. And that name I praise.”
Together, they bowed, and when Auxica squeezed Belle’s hand, they stood. Auxica pulled Belle into a hug. “How are you, Sweet Belle?”
Belle hugged back. “Any day I get to see my mother is one I name Good.”
Auxica pulled back to smile at Belle and cup her face in both hands. It was so strange to see a warm expression on a face so like the queen’s. Auxica was a few years older than Aran and close to sixty now, but the soft curve of her lips and the smile in her eyes gave her a youthful aspect. Plus, there was all that stair-climbing. Where Aran was usually decorated with makeup, silks, and metals, Auxica was bare-faced and plain-clothed in a simple, white peplos, only the beaded braid of hair down her back and the beaded band just above her eyebrows denoted her role as Priestess.
“Then let’s gift Berattare some fresh air, sweet girl.”
The dungeon was deep in the mountain—it felt about as long a walk into the dull, gray stone as it was to climb those steps to the temple, but there was no breathtaking view nor beautiful statue at the end of this walk. No homage to the divine. There was Nothing.
When they were halfway along the dingy tunnel, Belle could already see the Nothing ahead. Where the magic of the mountain and the Earthbreaking that had cut this tunnel weakened and faded and finally died. Belle’s own magic remained unaffected so far, but already her heart sunk into her belly and fear climbed up her arms like spike-footed spiders.
How had Mama B lived in that void for five years? How could she still think and speak and breathe? How was she still a person?
Belle stepped forward.
There was no name that did justice to the sensation of feeling her magic die. Having the world, having herself taken from her. To feel Nothing. To be Nothing.
There was no panic, but no peace either. No sorrow, nor joy. She couldn’t even remember what they felt like, or why they mattered. As if she’d never experienced them.
She felt Nothing. She had always felt Nothing. She would always feel Nothing. She couldn’t imagine anything else.
The only way Belle could make herself approach this dungeon every month was the knowledge that the emptiness would end. It was only for long enough to unlock Mama B’s cell and help her out of the dungeon. A few minutes, and then her magic would be back. The world would have color again.
She knew this, but the moment she entered the Elleipsium’s range, she stopped believing it.
The dungeon was lit only with a few torches since magic couldn’t be used to wake glowstones here, and the orange glow illuminated a dingy but multi-colored lump atop the little cot that sat against one wall in the nearest cell. At their arrival, the lump stirred and sat up.
It wasn’t until Belle approached the bars that the lump, in its rainbow of colors, became a figure that stood and shuffled quickly toward the bars. In a hollow voice, Mama B said, “Sweet Belle?”
This would hurt later. In a moment, when they were out of the Elleipsium. For now, Belle knew that the sight of her mother, so weak and hunched, her hair thinning and her eyes lifeless, was heartbreaking. But she couldn’t feel it.
Mama B reached through the bars to touch Belle’s cheek with a dirty hand and smiled. Mama B was a performer just like Belle, and she knew how to fake a smile as good as the best. She said, “Your other mother shapes your features more and more every day—don’t be surprised the day you open that door and I name you Taissi.”
Those words too would weigh heavy, later.
Auxica unlocked the cell and Belle took Mama B’s arm over her shoulders to help her make the long walk out into the night. Her mother had once been so tall, strong, and sure. She had strode around the Great Cassiix Circus’ main stage in her brightly colored waistcoat and heeled boots, often finished with one of her many top hats, captivating her audience with words that carried them to new worlds, or colored the one they lived in a little brighter. Even then Mama B’s hips had given her trouble, but she’d had her cane, and the circus’ healers. Now the only relief Mama B received was when Belle could sneak her down some non-magical remedies, which wasn’t often. As it was, Mama B could barely walk, and even with Belle’s and Auxica’s assistance, the trek to the outside would be painful.
When they stepped back into the world, into magic, Belle gasped like she’d just been drenched in ice water, and, as usual, Mama B recoiled, then retched. Belle and Auxica held her up while she bent double, dry heaving. And then, the hyperventilating.
Belle talked Mama B through it, guided her breathing. Feeling magic again after so long, Belle knew, was an assault. It was Everything, all at once.
But people, especially Mama B, were strong. They adapted. They were meant for magic. And they always remembered how to live in it, eventually.
Mama B’s breathing evened out, and the three women started forward once more.
In the center of the little private courtyard where they usually took Mama B was a fountain carved from the same white stone as Mother Light’s statue. They settled Mama B on the lip of the fountain and Auxica excused herself to give the mother and daughter their time alone. Belle wet a handkerchief in the fountain and began to wipe her mother’s hands. She would have used her magic to call up the water, to warm it and massage it over Mama B’s skin and send it back to the fountain, but she didn’t want to further overwhelm the trembling woman.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
While Belle cleaned her mother’s grimy skin, she told a story. This time she didn’t weave any extra magic into her words—stories were magic enough as it was. Belle smiled into Mama B’s hollow, unseeing gaze as she recounted the tale of how the Moonlit Princess met the sweet Broken Beast, how she and her sister, the Sunlit Princess, had freed the Broken Beast from her Cruel Captor.
As she spoke, Belle watched her mother’s dull, feeble magic carefully. As gradual and gentle as a sunrise, a blush began to bloom from the side of Mama B’s magic that Belle was speaking into. Mama B’s face stayed empty except for the moments she remembered to put on her performance, but her breathing steadied and Belle felt her muscles loosen with each pass of her handkerchief.
Belle told of their adventures in finding and charming the Giant Grump they’d been searching for, and meeting his many friends, of climbing up into the hanging city within the great green clouds where he lived.
Once Mama B was clean, Belle prepared the items from her bag. A wrapped bar of shaving soap, a razor, and a hairbrush. She brushed back Mama B’s thin hair, then wet the soap and worked it into a lather. She gently drew the lather over Mama B’s scraggly little beard that had grown out since last month, and began to shave her dull skin carefully.
While Mama B had always liked her body, loved it even, despite the fact that its anatomy made most people name her Man, she had been particular in how she presented it. She never let her facial hair grow out—except in the madness of the days immediately following the loss of Mama T—and she always dressed in her bold, colorful way. Belle did what she could to help Mama B maintain that. But she had no idea if it was making any difference.
Belle decided to end her story in the middle of the party within the hanging city that celebrated the Princesses’ presence. Adding how the party had ended might be too much right now. If not for Mama B, then for herself.
She swiped Mama B’s freshly-shaven face clean, tucked her supplies back into their bag, and then settled into stillness and silence.
It took Mama B several minutes to realize Belle had stopped speaking, but when she did, her thin, weak fingers squeezed Belle’s arm. “Ah. Who trained your tongue to craft such skilled stories, Sweet Belle? She must be brilliant.”
“And beautiful,” Belle agreed, grinning. “Just look for her reflection in the water to find proof.”
Finally, Belle found warmth behind her mother’s green gaze. Life.
Mama B cupped Belle’s cheek and said, “These eyes much prefer the sight before them now.”
Belle pressed a kiss to Mama B’s clean, damp forehead and her mother smiled. She drew a thumb over Belle’s freckled nose and mused, “You do look just like Tai. I thank both Mothers for it. These days my memory runs between my fingers like water, and your face is the only thing that keeps hers in my grasp.”
Tears pricked Belle’s eyes even as she smiled, and she was reminded of that graveyard magic, those echoes of joy bouncing around inside a cavern of ache.
“Would you craft me one more story, Sweet Belle?”
“And another, and another,” Belle said. “Until there are none left.”
“Paint me a picture of her, please. The woman who gave me the greatest gift.”
The greatest gift. It was clear that meant Belle, but those words opened up a cacophonous pain in Belle’s chest and sent sheets of ice-hot shame cascading down her spine. Belle had lost all right to the name Gift when she had damned Mama B to this slow, tortured death.
Aran did that. Make her carry it.
The words came so sudden, so unbidden, and so clear in her mind that for a moment Lady Belle couldn’t place them. Then she realized why—those words had been given to a different Belle, in a different world.
And yet, Lady Belle seized on to them. Gripped them tight enough that had they not been so sure, so firm, they would have been crushed to pulp in her palm.
Grounded, Belle smiled and took a moment to choose her words.
“Can you call up that memory of the day we all met Sarus?”
Mama B gave a gentle shake of her head.
“It was during that drought when I was nine, maybe ten. One day, a hungry nightbeast dared to climb inside the beasts’ enclosure and went hunting for the little ones. This big, leathery bird with a long, thin neck that folded over itself, a jagged, shining black beak, and a shredded wing that named her Flightless. No wonder she was so hungry.
“I’d seen nine birthdays come and go, but I’d never seen a lone, wild nightbeast try to face down our hundreds of beasts, both day- and night-. Of course, as great and cruel and foul as our beasts looked, they never had much bite, did they?”
“Not after a month or two with Daph, they didn’t,” Mama B agreed, but she said it like she was reading the title of a book that she’d just cleared of inch-thick dust, surprised to find the knowledge was still stowed in her head after all these years. “He could spoil the Bear herself into a great, lazy lapdog.”
“True shit.” The bright, tinkling laugh that came out of Belle’s own mouth surprised her. “All teeth and claws and snapping jaws for their performances, and nothing more than well-fed housepets on any other hour. So when this wild beast cracked their enclosure and went snapping after the little ones, our beasts did what any lapdog worth their weight in treats would do in response to an intruder in their home…”
Mama B spoke just above a whisper, her eyes closed and her graying brows wrinkled in concentration. “They panicked. I can hear the racket they made. All that monstrous screeching, the crashing of the troughs and fences. The way the ground shook, I thought it would crack open beneath my feet.”
“Fear locked up all my joints,” Belle added. “In my head, I was watching them all die. I couldn’t wipe the scene from my mind long enough to see what I should do, which path would lead me to a world where my friends were safe. Do you remember the words you gave me when you swept my trembling little body into your arms?”
“I said…” The creases between Mama B’s brows deepened. “I said…”
“‘Listen, Sweet Belle,’” Belle supplied, “‘It’s alright if you don’t know what to do…’”
And Mama B picked up her own fifteen-year-old words to speak new life into them, “‘Your magic does. All you have to do is listen to it.’”
Belle grinned. “And while I was frozen, while you were thawing me, while Uncle Daph was calling up every calming rune he knew, shouting in Xo at the top of his lungs—what was Mama T doing?”
Her mother scoffed suddenly, her eyes bolting open. “Head and ears as full of her own sweet shit as they always were, the woman ran right into the stampede! And in front of her daughter! Melted through the fence, through a hundred rushing legs, flailing heads, and bumbling monster bodies like the Ghost she was. Didn’t matter how loud Daph and I shouted at her, how many cusses I slung her way. I knew that the next time I blinked, I’d open eyes to see her bloody limb come flying out of that screeching, writhing mass of monsters.”
“But I knew,” Belle said. “I knew she’d fix it. How long was it before they calmed enough for Daph to make us a way through?”
“A week!” Mama B exclaimed.
Belle threw her head back in laughter. “A week?! Mama, it couldn’t have been five minutes.”
“Real time isn’t measured in seconds, Nyxabella,” Mama B protested.
And together they said, “It’s measured in moments.”
Mama B recited the line she’d spoken a thousand, a hundred thousand times, one whose origin had been lost to the very moments she spoke about, “And moments begin when they begin and end when they end, and they follow no rules aside from that. So—it was a week that I held you and waited for the love of my life to get herself killed.”
“But then the monsters parted and the three of us rushed in,” Belle said. “The ground all torn up, boxes and barrels and troughs and habitats and homes, crunched and thrown and lost forever. And in the middle of it all—Well, there was no way to tell who between us and the beasts were more surprised at the scene we found in the midst of all that Chaos.”
“Wasn’t me,” Mama B said, as exasperated as she had been that day. “Decades I’d known Tai at that point, and it took her no more than a year after our meeting to rob me of even the ability to be surprised.”
Belle dissolved into giggles, not at her mother’s words, but at the memory of her other mother. Of Mama T’s solution to the issue of a wild beast and the stampede it had caused. The most terrifying moment of Belle’s young life, seeing Mama B and Uncle Daph so panicked, not knowing which of her monster friends might be hurt or dead, and then they arrived to see—
“She’d challenged the beast to a fucking dance battle!” Mama B shouted, voice cracking in exasperation.
Belle’s giggling became cackling.
“And the beast actually obliged!”
Belle slipped sideways off the fountain and fell to the grass, laughing harder than she’d laughed in a long, long time.
With Belle incapacitated, her mother took up the story’s reins. “How could I forget! That gangly, lopsided bird that was as tall as some of our tents, strutting and bobbing her head, wings straight up in the air. The way she hopped around on one leg, then the other.”
Between snorts of laughter, Belle added, “Mama T always said Sarus had excellent footwork.”
“And then—the beast would wait! She would stand there and watch Taissi respond with her own dance. That was another week as well. Another week that woman burned off my sanity. None of us in the audience could find a single word all the while we watched.”
“For me, that was because my mouth was busy spraying laughter,” Belle said from the ground. “What chance did it have to actually form words?”
“And she won! Of course she won—that madwoman never lost anything. Sarus threw her wings out and took a bow, then looked around at her audience like a lost kitten.” Mama B huffed. “Barely left Tai’s side after that. If she were smaller, she’d have spent the rest of her years perched on Tai’s shoulder, I think.”
“She would have.”
The evening quieted after that. Belle picked herself up off the grass and reclaimed her seat on the fountain next to Mama B, and both women fell into a silence so thick with bittersweetness that it took painful effort to breathe. The smile on Mama B’s thin lips faded, and a weight settled over her, dragging down the features of her face, the shape of her shoulders. Her hands once again began to shake.
Belle took Mama B’s hand, and the older woman gave her a squeeze, but quickly retracted her trembling fingers, all of her disappearing into the colored rags she wore. Into the safety of Nothing.
“We’ve both been free too long,” Mama B said, nodding toward the castle tower before them.
It was true. But Belle didn’t want to send her mother away again. Mama B caught her daughter’s gaze and put on a smile.
“But they’ll never know how long, will they?” Mama B asked. “To them, it was just minutes. Just time. But in those minutes, you gave me back moments. Moments fuller with love and family and joy than any they’ve ever had. That, Sweet Belle, is a magic more powerful, more ancient, more holy than any other…
“You feel her here, don’t you?”
Fat tears slipping down her cheeks, Belle nodded.
“Me too. And it’s enough to last me another five years in that cell, and then some.”