My world flipped onto its head as her words struck me, and the echoes of her voice rung within me like tremendous bells, in that they sent mighty reverberations down through to the very core of my person, and there threatened to shake apart everything I’d ever known! I wasn’t aetherless? I’d never been?! Her joint assertion was not so much ludicrous as it was surely impossible! 

  Now, I’d heard my share of the incredible, such as when a southerner had declared to me in all grave seriousness that the Ancients had set their very feet upon the Moon, and taken sizable chunks of it back to the Earth with them! That’d certainly constituted an extraordinary claim, and the man had been declared stricken with madness… but to even consider that aether had dwelt within me all this time? 

  That was such a terribly unbelievable contention that my very Faith in God and His Precepts was probably the lesser! What terrific buffoonery it was that my Arianna should say such a thing! But I wasn’t laughing, and I could feel her certainty evolving into something more iron-clad by the second.

  Mine was a life so overabundant with harsh lessons to the contrary that I might’ve been her argument’s very antithesis made flesh! The mere suggestion brought me well past a healthy skepticism and deep into a profound sort of incredulity! How could it even be possible?! I’d had to wonder, for I genuinely had no basis on which to begin to process her allegations! 

  What immense and unshakable proofs had my Arianna uncovered which so convinced her of the justice in tearing open these old wounds of mine, and if they were so obvious to her now then why couldn’t I see them for myself?! Why should I have to abide by her indulgence in this cruel fantasy?!

  “Rianna… why?” As the immediate shock retreated from me: so returned my emotions, and I began again with a shaking tremor in my throat, “Why do you say this to me?”

  She knew well what she’d done in saying this callous thing, for I could feel her apprehensive dread so strongly before she’d said it, and all the while after I could sense her reeling from her very own revelation! This… this insinuation of hers had hurt me irrevocably, and it was something that could not be taken back once put forth! 

  Arianna never hurt me intentionally, not when she could’ve at all avoided it — she’d have gone to infinite lengths to delay, distract, and otherwise devil me just to keep a mildly malicious matter from possibly offending me! Why did she not refrain from speaking of this; was it somehow an inevitability that I would find out? But that’d never stopped her before, no: that only made her all the more desperate to obstruct my discovery! 

  Surely, she cannot have thought that just because the scars upon my flesh were gone that the ones upon my soul were also healed?! To be born Cursed was a death sentence for most, and by all rights I should have been put to death at once if only for the convenience of convention, for that was the common practice!

  Failing that, I should have been disposed of shortly thereafter… just one more body drifting along a river that unceasingly knew the company of corpses. I’d long looked at the Tiber with reproach, and as it sent the deceased downriver, I would wonder to myself why I hadn’t been made to join those men and women in death. What was so pleasant about me that I was denied a fate that was shared by hundreds every day?

  What was it that’d stayed my father’s hand: insecurity, or perhaps embarrassment? Was it grief that spared me strangulation by my own mother’s arms? I should never know, for I was delivered to the Foundation so shortly after my birth, and I had never known of the circumstances by which my death was deferred. It was nothing short of miraculous that the payments kept coming in for long enough that I should have survived babyhood in the Mother’s midst! 

  When I was a young girl, I’d liked to imagine that my parents had been royalty, and had wealth beyond my wildest imagination! I dreamed that they would reconsider their abandonment of me, and that I would someday know why they’d been rid of me in the first place — surely some great plot against my life had arisen, and this was the only method by which they could protect me! 

  I’d harboured that ridiculous thought in my heart for much longer than I should’ve in this world that never wanted me… one which could scarcely tolerate my very existence! It wasn’t until the gold stopped coming, that the direness of my reality had quite set upon me, and I’d been forced to turn urchin to request my stay of the Mother. She always took most everything I’d come by, and she could command that I give her all the rest as well with but a hint of aether; a princess’s fate indeed.

  “I’m sorry, Mira. I really am, but it’s true! Well, I don’t know how to classify your aether yet, but the answer is definitely on this track.” She said to me with a voice filled with equal parts sorrow and certainty.

  The ‘answer’, she said. To the problem we’d long had with understanding my nature. We’d investigated it for years, and yet our conclusions were simply so inconclusive that we’d wholly given up on ever being the ones to expose the secret mysteries behind my aetherless form. All the while we’d been stymied and frustrated by my very changeable nature, and how significantly it was affected by miniscule amounts of aether.

  Someone might have just looked at me with a hint of aether, and my body would have simply morphed to suit their whim — if not always in the way that they’d expected, as my Arianna and I had long been wary of — and yet, at other times I seemed almost invincible to the thoughts of others, such that it wasn’t until they put their excruciating spells to voice that they might’ve take effect upon me!

  Arianna herself had tested these aspects of me extensively, though she always sought out my permission before any test, and she would describe it all in her particular manner before she would begin. We’d found that the introduction of foreign aether into persons with none originally, such as myself, tended towards the bizarre, and were often dichotomic in the extreme. 

  Perhaps it wasn’t much of an inference, but I was a difficult creature to test upon by anyone who cared for me… for it could be quite painful to change in accordance with the wishes of others. We hadn’t had cause to investigate further since we came to care for Luca. Small and safe changes for mutual pleasure? Those weren’t so unpleasant, even as they brought my vulnerabilities to the fore, but we’d done no more testing since she’d first found those scars.

  For her to now be telling me that all along we were mistaken, and that I’d really had aether within me since I was born? I didn’t know what to think, but it hurt. I was so revolted and hurt that my Arianna was the one to strike upon this matter which was so critical to me as to be called a foundation of my person!

  “To the point, Rianna!” I shouted through the tears that poured from my eyes, and I wasn’t going to let her obfuscate upon this subject any further, “Tell me your damned premise, and don’t you dare apologize!”

  I’d once thought myself lucky, really. People didn’t just go down the streets of the Vatican wishing that I’d implode upon myself, or that my face would turn inside out… but it was bad enough to be wished ill, and I would not have been all that surprised to have dropped dead if anyone ever truly willed me so!

  The Mother and Father had delighted some in tormenting me until I took Arianna’s interest, and they would make me stand upon my toes for hours with but a word, or even harm myself for their amusement! They were sick creatures… not fit to be called human! But they were still all I'd had before my benefactor changed things for me.

  The Mother would come upon me in a drunken state, and she would delight in commanding me around with aether, knowing full well that I could never simply say no to her! If I was made to move, then I would move… for I was not the only master of my own body when aether was involved, and this feeling of total control over someone in her turbulent and out-of-control life took her with a manic glee. 

  So lucky was I that the Mother was an unimaginative cow throughout, and her terrible habits came to a close when Arianna first found out about them, when she’d returned to my life once again. She’d threatened the Mother to within an inch of her life, and the Father was the first man my Arianna ever put to death. 

  I was immensely grateful for this, truly, for his sick and twisted fantasies grew with every year, and though my interactions with him were far rarer: they were a thousand times more brutal than mere commandments to move about, and it was only my luck that his comeuppance had come for him before his taste in punishing me had grown towards the sexual in nature!

  “I’m sor-” My Arianna caught herself mid apology. I felt her trying to clamp down on her overpouring emotions like a wet sponge in a vice; I knew that they were surely as terrible and wretched as my own, and she didn’t want me to feel them…  but she couldn’t hide from me that she was about to explode with emotion as she spoke, 

  “This… this is the worst. Fuck! Mira, you were willing yourself to follow other’s directives. All along, the aether was yours, which is why it gets weird when you didn’t know what they wanted you to do!”

  That… couldn’t be. The merciless and sadistic tyranny I’d long suffered under… it couldn’t have been my own, there was no path to that conclusion! I couldn’t- I would not hear this! But that I refused to listen any further didn’t stop her from talking, and although I covered my ears: one cannot stop hearing a voice that comes from inside themselves!

  “You only knew that what they wanted was probably awful!” I could understand that she was trying her damndest to stop me from internalizing this, and her panic was readily clear to me as she continued, “So, you’d ended up going through something as awful as you could imagine! It turned out you could imagine some really really fucking horrible things, and since you could use it so freely, you were able to… you just didn’t know, Mira! I’m sorry. I’m so sor-”

  “So what, you’re saying I inflicted it all upon myself?! That’s madness, Rianna!” I cried out with rage and interrupted her, though it was certainly not she who was more afflicted with this insanity! Still, it was my only recourse as the ground under my feet shifted, and I recoiled under the colossal weight of this revelation.!

  I cannot know when I’d left the chair, for I was no longer armed with the knowledge of its presence, and I was shortly on my hands and knees in the dirt, bawling all while she desperately denied that terrible truth I would never be able to purge from my awareness,

  “I’m not saying that! I’m no-well, technically I guess I did- fuck, no! Mira, they were the ones who made you do it! They’re at fault! How could you have known any differently?! I’ve got two arms but if someone made me hit myself with them, that’s on them, right?! Fuck — oh fuck she’s gone off — Mira, come back to me!”

  My face buried itself in my hands, and then I was slamming it down into the mushy ground with not a care in the world for how disgusting it was! A number of older drives, long absent in my life, sprung back into being. I wanted to hurt, I deserved to hurt, I needed to hurt so badly that all I knew was pain! 

  If I’d then had a knife, I might have stabbed it into my arms, or perhaps I could have sunk it deep within my breast and cut out my new heart! But I could not even rake my face with my fingernails, for I’d always had cause to keep them clipped and filed. 

  Was it lucky or the opposite that my mind was no longer cognizant enough to have considered bashing in my brain with the wooden table and chair, or drowning myself in the river? Who could say, but I came upon a method in my relentless pursuit of self-destruction.

  It was always my power, then? Then… couldn’t I use it to hurt however much I wanted?! A fanatical glee settled upon me as I made my arm come apart as if by its seams! A sharp rending sensation affected me as my skin and muscle unwound before my eyes, and my tendons and bones were bared before me, though as usual: the blood formed a string of its own.

  The blood’s state was strangely disappointing for me, but I was shortly seized with an unhinged curiosity, one I’d never been ‘made’ to do before! A wondrous rapture came to me as I unwound the bone in the same manner as before, and it peeled away with that delightfully cold and nauseous agony to form solid curls! 

  The marrow was left in a state similar to the blood: forming a spiral of interesting matter, and with that I was taken with the madness of bringing it before my mouth, and I drank of the wonderful goodness until it was all gone! That finished, I bought the bone, flesh, and skin back to me — I replaced all the marrow too, for it was well within my power to recreate that wonderful substance — and I was delighted by the steep cliff of agony the healing process brought me as well!

  In this manner, I caressed the anguish that was entirely within my power to provide. It was real, and it was wonderful, and I had to smile with tears in my eyes as the last of my unstrung arm reknit into the limb it once was. How empowering it was in the moment that I just had to grin with exhilaration… and how terrifying it was to recollect with a grimace at the very imagery!

  One might have thought that was surely sufficient damage to have put oneself through, but it wasn’t enough. The strange thing about that state of mind is that it can never be enough. Never while we are sane can we grasp upon that state that lies within us, beyond logic, but still within emotion. 

  I wondered what more I could do to myself, and I got to weighing my options, but before I could draw myself too deeply inside them: a blackness began pooling a short ways from me, and grabbed upon my errant attention. 

  Curious, I didn’t think I’d done that, so it must have been my Arianna’s doing. Perhaps it would be another corpse, but she’d had me read wrongly if that was the case, so I thought I’d save her the time,

  “Hey Rianna, what dish are you conjuring up for me this time?”

  “Oh my God, Mira, I’m getting help.” She’d told me, rather unhelpfully, but her follow-up was better, “I’d come out myself to hold you if I could, but I can’t, so I’m getting someone who can!”

  This tickled me so. Was this person going to end up like Bart, as some kind of undead monstrosity, simply to try to console me from myself? I had to chuckle, and I asked her as the blackness began to form up,

  “So who’s the lucky villager, Rianna? Can’t have been Nestor, you hate him. Is it little Elissa? Going to have the sweet little Cursed girl cuddle sense back into me?” 

  “Sweet Fuck, Mira, you’re so awful when you get like this.” She said with a palpable disgust, “Just shut up and let me surprise you out of… whatever your medical fucking term for that was.”

  I considered it for a while as the blackness began to resemble a human in shape, and an answer came swiftly for her rhetorical question, in defiance of her demand, 

  “Probably self-mutilation, Rianna. But medically speaking, keeping me talking is about the best medical ‘fix’ I’ve heard of for it, short of binding me down for lunacy. It’s highly unlikely to become patterned self-harm, so there’s no need for any help. I’m okay now. See, I’m already all better.”

  Arianna’s voice came back with a total rejection to my self-diagnosis, “You can’t hear yourself I guess, because you don’t sound at all better to me, Mira. But hell, yeah I’ll keep you talking until she gets in on this. We’re fucked, Mira, not just you, me too! We need her.”

  That sounded suspiciously unlike anyone from the village during the attack, especially since Lisset was still around. Her? Well, the black mist was starting to rather resemble a… remarkably well endowed woman. Who could she be talking about, though? 

  A new source of dread was sinking into me, so I asked her with considerably more emotion than I’d felt before, starting with concern, and rapidly shifting into anger as my subconscious came upon the realization,

  “Rianna, tell me who she is. Right now.”

  Strands of black hair came into being, and specks of her bronze skin appeared. Arianna spoke to me as if she were performing the most benign and reasonable procedure that'd ever been invented,

  “She’s Carmen, obviously, even you can-hey!”

  My fury rose to the top of my being, and I began dissolving the black mist that had almost formed into our dearest friend. I told my beloved in no uncertain terms,

  “It’s my power, Rianna, and you will not use it to bring back someone suicidal.”

  “That was then, Mira!” She argued with me, as she kept trying to rebuild the body, and I could sense her despair at being made powerless. What I was doing to her now was probably near so damaging to her as being told I’d never been so powerless was to me. She swallowed back her tears and shouted inside me,

  “We need her now, Mira, we need her now more than ever. We’re not okay! She can make us better! She always did! We can do better this time too, and she can meet Luca!”

  She’d always blamed herself, but just this once, I would not allow her to have her way. I’d have let her turn even little Elissa into a goddamned ghoul before I would let her put Carmen back into this world. Not that I’d have let her do that either, but I’d have been willing to entertain the idea.

  Not Carmen, though. She’d done everything in her power to kill herself with no regrets. She was not unjustly put to death: she very deliberately sent herself into the beyond.

  Our Carmen had left such a hole in our lives that day, and I hoped that she never learned of it in the afterlife. She’d intentionally waited to do it until Luca was old enough to survive without her, and she’d killed herself on the only day that both Arianna and I would not be present to save her by any means arcane or medical. Two hours, that’s how long of a gap she had to do it in, and if she'd missed it: it might have been years before we were both so seperated from her by distance, and she… she'd succeeded.

  The fear that we’d been the ones who trapped her in this life was all too real for the both of us, and it was weeks before I could convince Arianna to touch Luca without her shrinking away with renewed horror! Of course I wanted her back, but her very choice of when to seek death for herself belied a terrible truth: that she did not want us back.

  My Arianna wept with helplessness, and I knew not what to do. There was no possibility that I was going to head back while we both felt so unstable, and so I went to the river and I sat beside it in silence. This one had no bodies in it, we should be relieved, and on a whim I pulled the table and chair back inside me too.

  One would think that sticking a dining table inside themselves would feel uncomfortable, but it didn’t really feel like anything. It grabbed at my attention, sure, and I could vaguely feel it even if I wasn’t looking at it, but of all the disquieting feelings I’d had since my resurrection: this was actually among the least disturbing.

  I absently pulled off my shoes, and socks, for I was struck with a much less harmful interest, and I rather didn’t want to get them wet. I plunged my feet into the chilly waters, and they flowed around my feet in a very pleasant manner. It was autumn again, almost to the start of winter. My existential muse flooded me as if my feet were absorbing the water, and I had to wonder what was the point of surviving that night. What was it even for? Just to live as we always did? But we couldn't anymore.

  Arianna’s weeping wasn’t subsiding at all, but my existentialism was distracted by a fascinating idea. A blackness coated my feet, and the water began to flow inside me, though I could no longer feel it. What a strange sensation, and I had to ponder some about its nature when a sultry voice sounded from the bank across from me,

  “Are you drinking with your feet? I’ve never seen that before.”

  A young woman with vibrant red hair and pale white skin sat opposite me, and trailed her own naked feet in the water — not that any of the rest of her was any more clothed than them. It would appear that the Orlovs had the right of it for once, as a rusalka had cut into our miserable silence, but one must never be rude to the spirits of nature, so I answered her,

  “It’s the first time for me too, and I can’t imagine it’s too regular an occurrence.”

  She shifted her body entirely to show her curiosity, though how she looked I wasn’t at liberty to say, for my eyes were boring into her red and pupiless ones so that I might avoid looking at anything… so dangerous. Even Rianna’s weeping was coming to a close, which was a great relief, because if this situation became… dangerous: I was really going to need her help. 

  Well, perhaps I could manage somehow to ‘eat’ an unclean spirit of nature with my dark and terrible powers — though that thought put something so very splendidly dangerous in my head that I really could probably have done without it in there!

  “You look terrible, sweetie! Oh, you should just bathe in the river!” The nameless spirit famous for death-by-drowning made her move with infinite cheer, and that was oddly a tremendous relief to me, though I had to laugh at her ‘offer’.

  “I thought you only went for men, though?” I grinned, of true amiability this time, because this creature that surely meant for my death was being so pleasant and cheery to me about it, and I found it just terribly lovely after mine and Rianna’s argument.

  She looked aghast at my accusation, as if it were the most unthinkable and awful thing I might have said, only to have that give way to an attractive smirk, and she pondered a while as my eyes tried to betray me. They only sometimes managed to get away from me, but both the ‘women’ in my company unfortunately knew it. 

  “Mira,” Arianna spoke to me then with, full of a jealous righteousness, “I swear to the God of Mercy, if you do anything like what you’re thinking, I’m-”

  “Men? Don’t be silly, sweetie.” Mercifully, Arianna’s threats were cut across by the gorgeous spirit of watery graves, “What man could be so wonderful upon my eyes as you? All you need to do is get that grime off you, and you’ll be able to appreciate your beauty too!”

  Right, and drown, it’s tenuous enough that even my toes were in the river with a rusalka around, but since they were not really touching the water: maybe that much was actually safe? There was no need to find out, though I did have a question of my own for her, as I'd always had a lingering interest in spiritual matters,

  “What brought you here to gaze upon my underappreciated beauty, Miss...?”

  She pouted, and I rather expected that she wouldn’t answer me, firstly because she’d have to make a name up on the spot, which is not something that the spirits of nature were particularly gifted with if stories were to be believed, but mostly because she’d probably have to back off on the prospect of drowning me. It came as a surprise to me, then, when she spoke rather solemnly,

  “I’m Katherine, and it was your anguish which brought me here, poor girl.”

  My stunned silence rather allowed her to get more words in than I’d expected to hear, as her voice turned increasingly chipper,

  “I really won’t drown you. I just want you to cheer up, and the first step in that process is cleaning up!”

  To trust a heathen spirit that ‘lives’ to lie? I must've been mad, but I did feel a spot of trust, or perhaps it should be said that trust didn’t even need to enter into it. In the worst case scenario: I could probably pull the entire river and embankment inside me, or Arianna could manipulate them such that Katherine could ‘drown’ like a fish does in the air!

  There was really no reason to worry, as far as the danger goes, and the peace I’d felt earlier, before that terrible secret came forth, started to come back to me. I peeled off my dress in my new dark method, and I most certainly wasn’t about to forget the socks and shoes I’d left on the side.

  “You can’t be serious right now, Mira!” Arianna exclaimed at me, and although there was still a seed of jealousy in her: it was nothing next to her fear for me, “She’ll try for your life, of course she will! You don’t even need to get in the water to be clean: you can just leave it to me!”

  I had to smile at my beloved, for this is still what suited her best, even if she had to feel some of my old fears beside it: she was headstrong, and protective, and she loved me. I could do better, and I would do better… I had to, but I might as well start cleaning up my afterlife with cleaning up myself, and the shock of the water upon my skin would be a delightful thrill. 

  My feet stopped swallowing up the water, and I stepped into the chilly river under Katherine’s excited eyes. Her 'body' rapidly shed its human facade, and fell back into the water without so much as a splash, only to rise again around me in defiance of gravity! It was to my immense relief that she really didn’t try to drown me immediately, and instead she started to wash away the filth and grime that had gathered upon my skin — although I might've been marginally happier if she'd taken more advantage of my nakedness. Men, and spirit-women's taste in them, should just disappear from this world, I thought, except for my Luca: he can stay.

  As she scoured my body with her more natural form, I felt a little wistful that she hadn’t done this with her illusory form instead, and I could tell that Arianna knew it from the feelings that came from her! She got to clean Lisset all by herself, so I wasn’t about to hear any complaining from her on the ‘bathing with beauties’ front!

  Thankfully, Katherine let my face be, probably so I wouldn’t think she was suddenly trying to drown me, so I asked my beloved,

  “Rianna, would you do my face for me?”

  A warm blush radiated from within my heart, and I had to wonder how I’d managed to make her do that, since it seemed mildly more than romantic... or perhaps she was just thrilled that I'd even remembered her in the presence of the decidedly less-deathful-than-expected spirit? I felt oddly compelled to ask her, though niether of us were able to say anything before someone happily answered me,

  “I’m Katherine, sweetie! Don't you remember?”