Plot Points
Sully slays slavers' family after their patriarch dies in battle. She did not feel any remorse nor relief.
The etherworld thrived on the impermissible. A young and tender girl murdering a family, and maintaining her rage after the fact, was so impermissible that it cut a path between dominions.
The etherworld births a teenage Ziza (died 200 years prior) through Sully, and then later births four more revenants, for the five kills that she’d committed.
To secure more supplies and permanent safety, Sully killed 20 more and birthed 20 revenants. They then lured the sheriff with tales of the murdered slavers, and then mounted a full-on attack on their home territory. Sully and the revenants succeed.
Despite winning the battle with the townspeople, Sully couldn’t answer why that mattered. She felt a loneliness so great that she ripped out her uterus and bled to death. But she was then reborn through her womb!
Sully envied Ziza’s relentless happiness because it was not out of obliviousness, naivete, or ignorance, but out of knowing pain and overcoming it.
Sully wasn’t numb for lack of want, but for wanting too much. As Ziza hummed her soothing hymn, Sully understood that she’d never know peace, but there was Ziza, and with Ziza, there was a future. Sully was content to just listen.
Memorable Writing
She stared up at the crescent moon and spat at it for the way it mocked her with its half-smile.
The Missus’s family hadn’t been the most skilled of farmers, their approach to tending the earth one of brute force. They beat the ground with their hoes and rakes and called it tilling. The dirt was hungry. It needed feeding, cajoling, coaxing, singing to.
She was small and birdlike, her mannerisms sharp and jittery. Her body was too small for her spirit.
I’d love you forever if you’d just try. Not that I don’t already love you forever.