Every Saturday, the servants brought seventeen buckets of hot water up from the kitchens to Lady Melusine's private chambers. It was a habit, she told them, inherited from her mother, who had instilled in her during her youth a strong sense of the proximity between cleanliness and godliness. Modesty, too, the servants knew, was a virtue their mistress treasured. Hence, not even the great lady's handmaids were allowed into Melusine's chambers on Saturdays. Instead, they simply poured the steaming bathwater into a small metal basin on the outside of the chamber, the drain of which ran via a narrow sluiceway through the stone wall before emptying into the copper tub. It was, all the servants agreed, a very ingenious system and a testament to the great wit of the Duchess of Lusignan.

To Melusine, it was a reminder of the absolute solitude to which her mother's curse confined her.

Blood—hot and cold intermingling—pulsed rhythmic in her veins in this umpteenth experience of her weekly dysforming, a cruel mimicry of a sabbath rest. Melusine still remembered the first time the transformation had come. How could she forget? It had been like glimpsing a second sun in the sky at dawn. Terrible. Cosmic. The whole horizon filled with a blaze of that-which-ought-not-be. Such was the sensation that had accompanied the awakening, if an awakening it could be called, of that other.

A cruel punishment, mother, she mused with a wry smile, but deft. One cannot deny the precision of your art.

She felt that second self now as she had then. It lurked murky, its essence confused and confusing. Like a maelstrom current it pulled her in towards the center of it all, towards the overwhelming question: what is this I which is me?

She had dreamt up countless answers to that question, stacking them as sandbags against the relentless onslaught of this weekly tide, that wave that threatened to overwhelm her self with that un-self. Even now she felt it slithering in slow shudders, its dread thoughts sloshing oozy against her psyche even as the sudsy water of her bath slapped against the copper walls of her tub.

How easy it would be to send these droplets spewing into the air, she thought with a wry smile, I could soak this room, this castle, all Lusignan in a flood of my thought-essence.

She discarded the notion. It coincided too neatly with the motives of the un-self, the embodied form of which seethed beneath the waters of the tub, in shape like some great dragon’s tail. There was no naming that part of her. It was abject, the not-this-not-that which defied both her own categorizations and those of this world to which she did not and could never really belong.

As if responding to her mind's wanderings the thing wound itself serpent-fashion up against the wall of the copper vessel, its barbed tip sliding up over the lip. She shuddered. The shimmering scales sang slickly with a slish-snack against the shining side of the tub.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Despite herself, Melusine laughed. There was an odd poetry to this dread existence. Her mother had told her, all those years ago, that Melusine's punishment would be the most severe of all her sisters—retribution for her daughter's preeminence in sealing their human father into a mountain for his unfaith to his lady. In the beginning, Melusine had not believed her. She alone of the three sisters, after all, had an escape. She needed only wed a mortal—needed only find one who would consent to avert his gaze from her on these strange sabbath afternoons.

The mounting years, however, had revealed the grim accuracy of her mother's assessment of the punishment. Now each passing week revealed to her the truth in greater detail, as though it were a mountain looming closer with each passing step, ominous and violent as the three-eyed son whom she had christened Horrible. Now she knew. Now she understood, during those moments when she dared. She could be rid of the serpent's tail that weekly swallowed her lower half. This and more. Eternity stretched before her, inviting her in, asking only one thing in return: complete and total unbecoming.

"I must surrender that which is not mine to give," she whispered, "and thus am I cursed. If he looks on me, I am betrayed. If he never sees me, I have betrayed myself."

Then it came.

From the direction of the heavy oaken door she heard the slow gnawing of a steel tooth biting into wood. Here it was, then, the moment foreseen a thousand times if foreseen once. The sword of her husband Raymondin, chewing bit by bit into this one sanctum of her thought, this one space which she had forbidden him to enter: Never must you seek me in my chamber on a Saturday, my love—thus saith the Lady.

Melusine's fingers strayed to a tortoise-shell comb that lay submerged within her bathwater. Grasping it tightly, she lifted it and ran it with steady, even strokes through her long, damp hair.

Ironic, the thought came to her unbidden, Mother Eve chose the Fruit-That-Was-Not-A-Fruit because it appeared pleasing to the eye and good to devour. How unhappy that Father Adam thought the same of her.

The itching scrape of Raymondin's sword slowed. There was a faint crackle as the tip of the blade pierced through, its silvery point stained with the dark meal of wood softened by years of steam.

As it was in the beginning, she mused, it is now and ever shall be. Treachery without end.

The steel retreated from the door.

How I wish you had simply knocked, sweet Raymondin. Could you not permit me even that final dignity? That one choice?

A beat passed. A faint ray of light spilled through the tiny hole-in-the-wall, a tunnel made so slowly and so patiently that no ears other than Melusine's would have perceived its creation. No eyes other than hers detected its existence. No mind other than hers guessed so quickly the motive which had conceived of it.

Slowly, dreadfully slowly, the ray of light vanished as a famished eye pressed itself hungry against the other side of the door.

Melusine closed her eyes. She smiled.

In my beginning is my end, then. Ahh, mother! How obscenely clever of you.

With a watery roar, the serpent tail rose ascendant—and droplets soaked the air.