My grandfather was a fire and brimstone preacher, and for all that it would have been deeply petty of me and unfair to his legacy, I still regret that I couldn’t crash his funeral to say so.

I come from a religious and cultural background where a religious authority is supposed to be a calm, measured civic pillar. They’re supposed to teach, not preach, and their rulings are said to come from a place of reason, wisdom, and empathy. To call him that wouldn’t have been just a reference to a piece of popular, secular culture, and not just a demeaning comparison to the leaders of other religions; it would have been an attack on every aspect of his legitimacy, power, and social standing.

The titan of his generation, he could be a vicious, vile man, spitting bile from his pulpit and using every piece of power he had to build a separation between the broader world and those he considered under his authority, whether or not they rejected him and that authority. My father, first heir-apparent and then inheritor of that clerical throne, and may that throne be soon nothing but rubble and dust, hybridized my grandfather’s occasional moments of foul brilliance with his own vanity and hatred; his was the determination that he and his rhetorical kindred should be supported by the State, and his was the demand that the people he so despised should be second-class citizens beneath the true members of his, our, religion.

But my grandfather, unlike my father, was a loving, warm figure to those within even the outermost reaches of his circle. He preached and lived a solidarity between all those who came to us from the South and the East, which I hope might return in a generation to come. From the City of the Gate to the atrociously now-inappropriately named House of Burnt Visage, where our people lived in a land that burns more relentlessly than the deserts where I was born, he brought them to where he believed they could lead better, safer lives. And when his fellows in power and in his congregations acted against that dream…

I grant him this respect: his commitment to that better future cost him as much as it gained him, and he worked against discrimination within what he considered his community with a genuine drive. He held the lives of his enemies to be more sacred than almost any religious law, by divine law, and would rather have celebrated a near-secular co-religionist’s one moment of observance than so much as acknowledge their assimilation.

That’s why I still believe that if I’d been a child of my grandfather—if he, rather than my father, had been making the call—he’d have stood by me. But he stood by, didn’t speak up; so fuck him. May every good thing he brought into the world stand the test of time, while both of their names become lost to history and are stricken from the Book of Life.

So: my grandfather was a fire and brimstone preacher. My father was respected and valorized, and my mother was precisely what she was expected to be. Warm, kind, and supportive, she raised us, kept house, maintained all of our social bonds and calendars, and was the distaff mirror of my father as a pillar of the community. She never once contradicted my father, stood between him and something he wanted, or asked for his respect; and she only defied him once, silently and invisibly.

I grew up in a perfectly reasonable way, if under a tremendous amount of pressure. I rose to it, though. I was brilliant, scholarly, clever, charming, and a dozen other things besides. I studied the law, our history, and our traditions; I learned how to speak to one person or to a thousand, to sing alone, as a leader, and as a follower; and I learned the liturgy and the canon of our religion.

My education, to be clear, wasn’t just doctrine. Reading, writing, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and a dozen different things you could call history lived alongside learning how to empathize with people and show that empathy, how to nurture a person and a community, how to politic and negotiate; and all of these were different across different cultures, and my grandfather was determined to unify the vast world of those who had been flung to its farthest reaches.

I also learned an absolutely enormous amount of eclectic skills, enthusiastically. By the time I was eighteen, I could play a dozen instruments, speak fluently in six languages and haltingly in four more, sketch almost adequately, and form abysmal bowls out of clay. I’d butchered a dozen animals in accordance with the religious law, worked every job that a farm had, and become passably capable of cooking a half-dozen recipes with herbs and spices I’d grown and ground myself.

Against my father’s preferences, but wielding a logic he was incapable of arguing against, I learned mathematics—algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—and science. We were devout and my father disdained a secular education—may all those who thanklessly support his parasitic lifestyle withdraw that support, to leave him drowning in his own bile—and considered anything past day-to-day arithmetic to be better left to the women who ran the households in our community, but I knew better. It took math to build a structure that would last and biology to understand how the body fails as we age, and how could I issue a ruling on any such subject otherwise?

I had worked in the fields and milked a cow, copied a scroll and held a mourner as he wept, for both respect and understanding. I would not insult those who build houses or tended bodies by thinking I could hold their respect, and command their adherence, without doing the same for their domains.

But above all, I learned the law and the history of the law: that which we were commanded to do, as written both in the original texts and in the vast bodies of commentary that came after. Two thousand years of exegesis, of scholars and community leaders engaging in a tug-of-war with the past and future in order to usher in the world they preferred through the mechanism of religious practice; it was a vast, vast body of writing, and I mastered it.

I was, in other words, the perfect heir to my father and his father before him. They sent me off to the greatest and most respected of all the academies of religious learning in the country, a school that was the child of the mother of all such academies, as it was said; and I threw myself into my studies. To, yes, be the perfect student of the texts I needed to master and become the pinnacle of what my father was doing his best to groom me into, but it was more than that.

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By correspondence, I’d enrolled in the best academy of learning in the country, a real academy. I studied science in the Technical School, and when I was twenty-two years old, I graduated from both of them simultaneously.

I told my father I had some news for him, when I came home. He said he’d heard, that everyone had relayed how my peers had been calling me a giant, blessed; that the teachers had nicknamed me the head and the great one, that they were calling me a titan as they had never called him, like I was my grandfather come back to his youth.

And then I told him that I’d come to realize something about myself, and that I could never be the heir he was looking for. That I was a woman who loved women, and that I had lost my faith and no longer believed in the path he’d raised me in, or even the gentler one of his father before him.

I told him my name, the name I’d chosen for myself. Sophie, for wisdom; Nafash, ensouled—and then shifted by one letter-sound because I liked the sound of it better, and that was as good a reason as any. Sophie Nadash, a woman with the wisdom to be fully ensouled within her body, to be the embodiment of her soul.

I don’t remember what I expected. Maybe I didn’t really have any expectations at all. The way that animation just sort of drained out of him, the way he went cold and a mixture of shock and hate took over his features? That was one of the things I might have expected, but I don’t remember.

He demanded I recant. He threatened me with various things, though to his miniscule credit, none of those things was physical violence. And then, when he realized that the only thing that was left to him was damage control, he coldly told me that he’d had four daughters the day before, and no sons; and now he had four daughters, and still no sons, but perhaps it was time to adopt.

There were documents, he’d said, no longer deigning to notice my existence. They belonged to a stranger, and if that weren’t so, they would have gone either into the garbage or the archives, where all sacred and consecrated papers went. My mother acceded, and once my father had stormed off, looking at me as though she’d just been torn asunder in every way, she blessed me for the first and last time as a mother blesses a daughter—that our God should bless me and keep me, that God should shine his face upon me and bestow grace upon me, and that God should lift his gaze to me and grant me peace.

I left, weeping no less than she was, sheaf of papers in hand. Part of me wishes I’d ruined him, gone public and stayed in the country and denounced him from the rooftops; but I wanted my own life, and to leave, not to stay and wage a futile war against a man for whom a thousand people would happily leave my body in a ditch and destroy my mother in the bargain. So I took what would have been the equivalent of a Journeyman’s certification in the sciences and went over the ocean to a shining city on a few dozen hills, and there I’d wind up living for seventeen years, for better and worse.

Unburdened by any need to placate a family that had erased me from even the most sacred of their written records, fleeing my past, I threw myself into secular life. I couldn’t stomach any degree of observance lower than what I’d grown up knowing, in my gut, was the correct way to live, so I left my religious practice behind entirely, telling myself that it was all lies and falsehoods anyway. I studied science and modernity, advanced mathematics and the tools of what I meant to make my trade, and by the time I was twenty nine, I was qualified to push the boundaries of knowledge and advance the art.

I did neither of those things.

By the time I was that age, the grind of the work itself and the pressures and dysfunctions of the workplace had completely erased any spark left to me. Sleepless nights and exhausted days running and analyzing experiments were still preferable to the filthy work of begging for money to do those experiments with, selling the usefulness and criticality of laboratory’s research.

In the end, a position where I could see my own research done meant becoming entirely that person, that peddler of lies about how instrumental and certain to pan out my work was. So I discarded that dream and found I barely had it in me to care—and out of inertia and a need to justify the decade of study, I became a pair of hands in the direction of those who still clung to the dream.

I guess it says a lot about the places I worked that the abuses were only business. We lied and cheated and stole, in spirit if not in letter; we abused statistics and rewrote our history, we filled in our records after the fact. They were all, even those in charge, overworked and socially stunted, and we were always understaffed and pushing each other to do more with less time rather than dialing back our promises.

The borderline-abusive pressure and repeated violations of scientific rigor and the law were where it stopped, which shouldn’t have been a blessing. But there was no harassment for who I was or how I lived my life, nor for the color of my skin or the fading accent of my speech, and these weren’t guarantees, even in the most progressive of places. Nor was there any disdain of my having departed from the illusion of ever having a shot at accolades and a lab of my own; there was, if anything, a real sense of envy that I’d gotten out.

They were still researchers, and I was a technician, so I worked fewer hours for more pay and got to file for vacation days.

The vacations were still always yanked out from under my feet, and demanding that the laws of compensation be followed still resulted in the end of my employment as soon as it could be arranged, but these were easy to overlook. After all, should I not have been grateful for what I had? Was I not an immigrant, being paid munificently to work a job that was undemanding in a country that far outclassed where I came from?

Tell it to my fucking pancreas, maybe it’ll stop needing the medication, I told one person who said that to my face. Tell that to my knee, that still needed physical therapy; tell it to my wrists, more damaged day after day as my duties crush ligaments and bone against nerves.

Ten years passed in an eyeblink.

I learned to cook new food and forgot old recipes, took up new languages and left more behind. I trained my voice for speech and let it waste away for singing, and if I didn’t have romance I did still jump into bed with—or, by preference, got tossed into bed or bent over a couch by—well north of a hundred of my sisters-in-persuasion, women who loved women like me. I hiked through stunningly gorgeous mountains and forests, and did my best to build and maintain a body I could love.

But none of those made more than a shallow impression, in the end. I blinked, and a decade had passed me by as my body fell apart despite my best efforts; and then, a fortnight and a lifetime ago, I met a Goddess in the woods—and it made all the difference.