This was another way to be her body. She strained against gravity, against her own weight, against the weary ache of her exhausted muscles as she forced her arms to reach, her hands to grip, as every muscle in her body strained to push and pull. She scaled the building with a gasping eagerness, focused so much on the strength of her muscles and the movement of her limbs. Indirk was surprised when she reached the top of the building, pulling herself up onto the crooked tilework and scrambling to the roof’s peak. There she could go no higher, so she just stopped and pivoted, looking at the night around her.

No electric lights. Not here. There were lamps in the distance, but no streetlamps in the Angolhills. At this time of night, even the smokestacks were cold. She was above darkness, alone and naked and alive, empty of all thought, staring into the wind as the humid, salty wind surged off the sea to lick the sweat from her body.

“It could find you up here. The serpent.”

“Let it.” Indirk looked over her shoulder, down to where the shingled roof led to a flat platform where the tenement’s smokestacks emerged. There, among the stacks, like a creature hidden in the reeds, the one-armed Writhewife eyed Indirk with a flick of yellow in her eyes. “If I see that serpent right now, I’ll kill it with my own hands. It has no idea what I can do.”

The Writhewife narrowed her eyes suspiciously. The hard eyes and dark lips of this Writhewife had become as familiar as any face Indirk had ever known. “You’re still you.”

“Am I?” Indirk got to her feet and took loping steps down the roof, picking up speed.

“What are you doing?”

Indirk was among the smokestacks in a moment, grabbing the Writhewife by shirt and pushing her against a cold, metal stack. “Do Writhewives fuck?”

Eyes wide and flashing with magic, the Writhewife huffed out, “What?” There was that honest surprise again, the confused gasp of a woman, not a god. Then she was pinned and Indirk’s mouth was on her mouth, and the Writhewife just stared and let Indirk move against her.

The Writhewife had a seasalt taste to her that Indirk barely noticed, the coldness of her mouth and tongue unusual, but Indirk persisted. She got her claws under the Writhewife’s cloak, and there the cotton clothes split readily, and Indirk had her hands on the smooth, pale, cold skin beneath. As Indirk grabbed at the woman’s body and moved her mouth to her neck, the Writhewife said, “It won’t work for you, Indirk Correlon.”

“What won’t? You’re not-“ Indirk stopped suddenly, going still, looking down.

This Writhewife had been killed by the serpent, Anbash, stomach down open and ripped apart. The Writhe had repaired it, so she’d said, but the repair was unnatural to behold. Indirk had slid her hand down the cold body expecting skin to touch, but there was nothing but a hollow where the serpent had emptied the body, a darkness inside where churned strange, undulating shapes. Indirk held her hand where the skin should have been, having touched something chilly, firm, smooth, unsure what it had been. Then it emerged from the wound, a bundle of tendrils uncoiling as one where they’d been tangled in the woman’s belly, unfurling then into many thin appendages that took hold of Indirk’s hand. Indirk flinched at the touch, but stood still, watching all these dark tendrils exploring her fingers and claws as though they were each an independent creature that did not know what they had encountered.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“It won’t work for you,” the Writhewife said again. “You can’t join this body in the way you can conjoin with bodies like your own. You can’t become a Writhewife. You’ve been touched by the voice of that which is elder to me. I can feel the Green’s word in your blood. You can’t become a Writhewife.”

“That’s not what I…” Indirk said, turning her hand slightly, curling her fingers to watch the tendrils slide over them. “That’s not what I wanted.”

“No?” The Writhewife shook her head. “Then what did you want?”

Indirk looked into the Writhewife’s confused gaze. Of course, this was an appendage of a great thing that barely understood that a person and a nation were different things, that death was final, that war was slaughter. What had Indirk expected?

“Sjeze.”

Blinking, Indirk looked up. “What?”

The sound the Writhewife made was strange, words that required no movement of her lips at all. “Sjeze-ze-ezje-reth.” She licked her lips, as though they needed to be awakened, white tongue on black lips. “IN the Satorian tongue, it would mean, Sjeze Who is Twice Wed to the Roil of Betrothal. My name, as near as I have one.”

Staring, Indirk could only manage, “But why are-?”

The Writhewife stepped back. The tendrils on Indirks hand released her, some seeming reluctant, and coiled back into the gaping hole in the Writhewife’s body. She pulled her shirt and cloak closed over them. “The spy you called Amo told you that nothing you have here is real. That’s a lie. I hold you to be real, Indirk Correlon. Hold yourself likewise.” As though this had been said in farewell, the Writhewife turned and slipped out from among the stacks.

Indirk lingered in empty confusion, unsure she’d heard all of that correctly, trying to remember the strange sounds that the Writhewife had said served as a name. Snapping out of her shock, Indirk called after her, “Don’t hurt them! It would hurt me if you did.”

Without slowing, the Writhewife let out an unhappy huff and muttered, “So demanding, my love,” as she left.

Indirk found herself alone, her hand still held in front of her. She looked down at her fingers, seeing their early age. There were strange, senseless red lines on Indirk’s hand, as though some venom or scratching thorns had irritated her skin where the tendrils had touched her. The beast inside of Indirk, the instinctive memory of the Laines, had vanished into the depths of her heart once more. She was full of thoughts, again, now, reeling from this strange encounter. This day.

She looked at the sky, the perfectly dark sky, not even stars visible for the clouds that gathered over the city. The wind blew over her naked body and she shivered at the chill. She felt suddenly trapped up on the roof, vulnerable, in the open. She quickly hurried back across the roof’s tiles, then very carefully, slowly, anxiously climbed back down the way she came.

When she was back in Mardo’s apartment, she closed the window and dropped onto the bed beside him. In her exhaustion, she hoped to fall asleep right away, but instead she lay awake aching. She curled around herself and whispered in the night, “It hurts. Fuck, it hurts.”