Arianna’s thoughts skittered across my heart after I delivered that bitter inquiry, and strange feelings spilled into my chest from her, though I knew not what they signified. I was rather too overcome with myself to pay much mind to her indecipherable feelings, for I had only a tenuous grasp on my own emotions, and how was I to parse this complex mood that came from her while I was so otherwise affected?

  “Umm… just… what are you trying to ask me, Mira?” My Arianna’s uncertainty rang throughout her own question, and I could feel her almost trembling with a hesitant indecision inside me. Still, a small resolution must’ve persuaded her to speak on, for she continued on even though her voice still sounded as if she remained at a loss for why I might be asking such a thing, and in so serious a tone of voice,

  “I mean, I love you, if that’s what you’re wondering about? I really do. Really, what’s got you so… upset? No I don’t mean that, I just… Mira, what was all that about? Are you okay? How do I… help?”

  Of course I was upset, but I wasn’t about to be frustrated with her just because her word choice might’ve been ever so slightly entirely warranted! She naturally wouldn’t have understood me with the way I’d asked her, after all: I’d barely been able to understand myself of late, and I was now so utterly absent the knowledge of who I’d become that I’d been absolutely brooding from dusk to dawn, and well into the next day, and then some besides!

  Such a bothersome thing it was to consider myself in such a manner, but I just had to, for I felt that I was unraveling, thread by thread, and that I might soon be so well unmade and replaced that I couldn’t even say anymore that I’d been who I’d thought I was in the first place! My lifelong reckoning of myself seemed to have been so totally misfigured that I simply couldn’t believe that the person I used to be had always been this same foul and terrible creature that I now knew myself to be!

  But… I might’ve been mistaken even in this awful knowledge that had come to me, for the people I loved continued to call me Mum and Mira as if nothing had ever changed in me! I just had to know what it was that they still saw in me that I couldn’t recognize for myself! I considered these concerns of mine, and I put them to words as best I could… though in my wretched state: it would be a wonder if my Arianna could actually disentangle my worries from the emotions which spawned them,

  “I love you too, Rianna. Tell me though, am I still me? I need to know, dear: what’s still the same about me now? Has your love for me not been at all shaken by these… by my changes? What remains of me in this undeath?”

  A short ‘ah’ ran up from the muscles around my trachea, and my jaw clenched all of its own accord as this strange trespass was visited upon my person. My beloved’s thought-ants crawled over my heart’s surface, and this discomforting focus she had upon each of my questions lasted long enough for me to bring myself back upon my feet, even as my limbs trembled from the unpleasantry I’d put myself through.

  I very much doubted that my arms and legs were overmuch bothered by what I’d done to the pine sapling as a test, for it was so much more likely that it was my emotional upheaval that was responsible for how my hands shook, or for how my knees struggled to maintain my balance! As disconcerting a thing as it was to think: there wasn’t so much as an overture of soreness in any of my muscles!

  Tearing any tree out by its roots was a difficult enough task, but this one had been twice my size! Not with ten men could this have been done without levering the poor thing out; even with aetherial assistance: most people wouldn’t have accounted for enough to have budged a tree half that size from its earthly connections! Yet it had come out so easily for me that I’d broken down for the sheer madness of it all! 

  What of my control… what of my artificial peace… what of my sanity: I could not have known that I would be so affected by such a small thing as being a little too strong. I was no gladiator engaging in bloodsport, and I was certainly no inquisitor, so why should such a strength as this be had by a doctor like myself? I didn’t need to be strong to press a spine back into place! No great power was necessary to hammer a hip back into its socket!

  Although I didn’t have any good and proper reason to dislike this attribute I’d been blessed with — and by all rational measure it should be considered a blessing! — but as objectively positive a thing as it was: I wanted positively nothing to do with it! My relative weakness was just one more treasured aspect of my person in life that had been flipped around in this unlife — which was so completely opposite to everything I was that it might’ve been a mirror to me!

  Unfortunately, even as I considered these frustrations of mine, the world carries on, and my Arianna had quite finished with her musing while I’d been ineffectually attempting to brush the wet dirt from my leggings. Her voice rose inside me as a warm and gentle wind blew across my body, and I was not so blind to aether anymore to ascribe it to anyone but her!

  “I love you more every day, Mira, so yeah it’s been ‘shaken’, because I love you like two days more now than ever. Yes, you’ve changed, but God knows, Mira: I’ve changed too… I’ve changed a lot, and maybe more than I actually know. So, that just means we get to rediscover ourselves together again, I mean we did it once before, right?” My beloved took a great considering breath here, and my heart leapt in my chest as she continued,

  “We can do it again, except this time we have like, tons of advantages. You know, all of my favorite parts of you are still here Mira — and I don’t mean your body — but I, well actually, fuck I am so bad at this, sorry.” Arianna had said these heartening things to me with perhaps an overfond appreciation, but her efforts were certainly not wasted, for I had to close my eyes as relieved tears poured through the tracks left on my dirty cheeks.

  Although my eyes were well shut from crying, I’d finally regained a point of pride, and as I’d had quite enough of wearing mud on my face and sodden dress upon my skin: I summoned up the blackness from within me, for if I had such a power within me, then I could surely keep my clothing even as I rid myself of the filth and excessive dampness which clung to me!

  The dark mist surrounded my body, and I had to smile in self-satisfaction even as my tears continued to fall from my suddenly much cleaner cheeks, so I chanced that my Arianna’s continued gushing would only lead to pleasant places for me,

  “What are these parts of me that you still delight in, Rianna? Don’t hold out on me, honey: I need this. You’re doing wonderfully, so don’t stop.”

  My Arianna never knew how to leave a good ‘opportunity’ to lay unmolested, and so a queer lusciousness seized around my heart with heat as the giggles took her quite far from this rather seriously-intended request of mine,

  “‘Don’t stop’, she said,” and still more tittering came from the hopelessly wicked woman I’d had the fortune to fall in love with as she attempted to mimic my voice… if not exactly in a similar tonality. “‘I need this! Don’t stop!’” and my Arianna fell into such an uproarious laughter that I couldn’t help affecting a shameful snort of my own, for her emotions and mine were no longer so separated that I could entirely hold to my own poise.

  A single wall of stone arose between myself and Katherine as the blackness began to depart from my form amid my lover’s complete descent into shrieking barks of laughter, and I couldn’t keep the smile off of my face, even as my attention was disrupted and the black mist started to steal my clothing from a few spare bits of my skin!

  There were no circumstances by which I would have appreciated more spontaneous nakedness than I’d already been subjected to over the course of my unlife, so I’d immediately imagined my clothes back upon my person while ‘dried’ and ‘clean’. To my tremendous relief: I was able to remain wholly clothed despite the treacherously playful diversion my Arianna had provided to me! A smile of triumph came to my face even as my own chest heaved with tremendous humor, and I had to laugh out of the sheer joy of successfully remaining clothed!

  I recovered long before her, and so I let Arianna’s laughter echo into the background for me, as it was clear that she wasn’t going to be answering my genuine queries until she’d come out of her hysterics, so I looked upon the fragile-looking stone ‘wall’ my Arianna must’ve raised in anticipation of my failure to contain the dark powers I now possessed. How she’d found the capacity to work with aether while otherwise single-mindedly overcome with amusement: I did not know, but her aethercraft was certainly uncharacteristically shoddy in this example.

  Regardless, the fact stood as incontestable that her protective interference had been wholly unnecessary! My pride just soared at my so totally eclipsing her expectations of me, and with a more confident step I rounded the flimsy stone partition she’d raised as I made my way back to the wheelbarrow. As I neared the barrow, I saw that Katherine had a pondersome expression on her face, and so I spoke out to her in twofold apology and explanation for the volatility I’d shown her,

  “Katherine, I am deeply sorry for that display, but I pray that you can forgive me. Rianna and I are but two days dead and risen, and we’ve hardly had an hour pass since without some tumultuous new truth revealed to us.”

  Arianna’s self-inflicted euphoria was rather nearer to its end after I’d addressed Katherine, for she’d been reduced to merely chuckling over her own buffoonery now, but the rusalka before me rather had my attention. Katherine shook her head, and her long scarlet hair passed through the bucket’s water as if it’d never been physically impeded by the water’s presence.

  “No, sweetie, you don’t have anything to apologize for.” Katherine said to me, and as if she knew how vehemently I disagreed with her assessment, she carried on with a reminiscent muse upon her mind, 

  “Dying is really hard on a person; it was way too much for me too. I was alone for a long time, and I cried something awful for those first couple of years. Even my Faith was shaken from the isolation, as every time somebody came upon my river: they ran from me, or they threw stones to make me go away! But you didn’t, beautiful, and when you arrived before me so distressed as you were: I knew. I knew I’d never been forsaken from the start. He delivered you to me for both of our sakes. My mission in His name didn’t end with my death, and His plans for you are greater than you know.”

  Katherine’s support for me was sobering my Arianna up inside me at such a pace, and I could feel my heart tensing with a tremendous concern for me. She shouldn’t have worried, however; although Fate had been such a cruel thing to me for so long: I never saw reason to shrink back from it. If the Lord truly intended that I suffer, then I could not help to feel as Job: that I’d been created to endure this wretched unlife by the Lord, and I would not abandon Faith for adversity’s sake.

  But was it truly all that necessary for His plans that I’d been so extremely tormented by his other creatures? What benefits did the Mother’s threatening me with a life wasted in hapless servitude serve? What virtues had been spawned inside anyone by the Father’s perverse fascination with the interior workings of the human body?

  The Devil whispered these seductive things to me in his usual manner, but I’d never given in to these absurd statements before, so why should he think I’d have changed now? How was someone so low as I to know what the Lord willed, let alone why He’d willed it? What an abhorrent suggestion it was that my wretched feelings should be greater than the Lord’s plans for me!

  I breathed deeply there for a moment, before I nodded my head in acceptance, and I steadily gripped the handles as I moved the barrow to rise upon its wheel. I addressed both of the women in my presence in turn, one with an amiable expression, and the other with an ever-so-slightly stern affect to my voice,

  “Katherine, thank you for saying that. I really do appreciate hearing it; it matters to me ‘more than you know’. Rianna, I will hear what I asked for, and more clinically this time, if you would please.”

  Arianna swore to herself, which she used to ‘hide’ behind her eyes in a brief closing of them, but which now announced its presence in the sour feeling that she’d unintentionally produced inside me. There were no pretentious eyelashes to keep her reactions ‘secret’ from me anymore, and she could likewise feel my that my pique rose in immediate response, so her emotions were shortly replaced with an embarrassed and ashamed mien,

  “Sorry, right. Ummm, well, I still like this part of you a whole lot. The anger’s new for sure, but the demanding and that... drive are definitely not. Mira, I love you, if I were able to properly touch you again, I’d be all over you right now. Or well… I guess it’s that feeling that you’d be all over me if I did anything, and it is really distracting me from a more academic assessment of your character, Mira.”

  A smile came upon my face in whole to hear this from her, and it was a wonder to me how well she could manage my worst impulses. She had always been able to manipulate me through my love for her, even before she’d come to love me as well, and long before she’d known herself to be guiding my reactions. I was an easier thing to control for her back then, when all it took was her expressing an interest in doing any particular thing, and I would be agreeing to do whatever it was… I’d have done anything for her touch.

  That only changed after we’d become lovers, for my addiction to her caress was well rewarded almost regardless of my behavior, and so it was no longer the guiding principle behind what I might’ve done. No, I became rather more enamoured with exploring every aspect of her, and the cries that I could elicit from her became my newest fixation… but she better knew me by then, and since she knew I wanted her so terribly: she would use herself to bargain with my disposition towards her.

  However, that appreciation reigned equally in both of us, and it wasn’t long before I’d also realized this. Her ‘management’ of me over this last decade had necessarily evolved towards distraction and delay instead of deliberation and denial, and it was quite exemplified in her response to me here: where she’d masterfully framed the result of my rising anger upon her as weighing too heavily upon her mind for rational discourse in an entirely desperate bid for our conversation’s deferment.

  As appealing as she’d made it sound to me, I wasn’t having any of it, and although she had taken the surging irritation from me in her struggle: she had only smothered a symptom, and she’d completely failed to take the cause into account as well. I chided my Arianna lightly as I spoke to her, for I’d seen through her machinations even while I’d been physically preoccupied with returning with Katherine to the village,

  “Rianna, really… you forget yourself.” I said, and I was well aware of Katherine’s presence before me, so I rather attempted to cloak my diatribe, “Which of us was waxing arcane secrets just yesterday? I believe you can do better, and you will do so.”

  Arianna’s disappointment was a visceral thing to feel, though she needn’t have been so disappointed: I was most certainly not uninterested in investigating her appeal for me in such a manner at a later time; I only wouldn’t allow for her to ‘distract’ herself in this particular instance. She surely knew how I felt well enough, for she displayed her full knowledge in what she said to me,

  “Damn, I’m sorry Mira; I know that you need to know that you’re still you, and you are — you really are — and I’m trying to tell you that — I really am — but I just can’t help it, Mira! I’ve got some of you in me now, and you… did you always love me so strongly as this? It’s just so dizzying, however did you ever hold this back? I’m just… is there no peace from this?”

  It stung so to hear that my Arianna was suffering from my love for her… and my chest tightened — for it just ached so much to be told this — but I wouldn’t leave her any illusions as to my feelings, not even if they were to hurt her,

  “Always, Rianna, and only with great difficulty. It’s harder than before, though… your emotionality is a part of me now, and it’s…” I stopped here for a moment, and I had to interrupt our journey to breathe, even though we were so close to the village now; only a quarter of the journey remained. I delivered the most important answer to my beloved, and a few tears came down as I choked it out,

  “It never stops, Rianna, I’m sorry. Not ever has it stopped... not even now has that changed; if anything, my love has grown all the stronger. I suspect that it’s the same for you: has your fury at all relented by my feeling it?”

  My beloved positively growled at this ask, as if she’d meant to answer it long before she spoke, but she elucidated her emotions to me regardless,

  “Not. At. All. More than ever actually: that fucker has to die. He did this to us, all the way the fuck out here; did you hear those bastards ‘speaking’? I’m going to fucking murder him this time. So just… please Mira, please don’t say that you’ll stop me again?”

  My fingers found their way back to the wheelbarrow’s handles as she spoke, and I gripped them there a slight bit more tightly than I should have, for the wood creaked as if I was going to break it. I lifted the barrow, and I pushed my feet to move, even as I swallowed this emotion I shared with her back down. 

  Lord help me, for I could not bring myself to deny my Arianna this once… I certainly could not have made myself stand between my love and her own father again. I used to wear those particular scars proudly enough, for I’d protected my beloved from committing patricide that day. Her desperate redirection to avoid absolutely killing me led to her destroying the Cardinal’s palace in my place, and she’d fled with my scorched form in her aetherially enhanced arms.

  Those scars were gone, and so too was any respect I’d ever had for what family had meant to her father. Whatever he’d tried to do: he’d killed me, and his own daughter… and he would have killed our son too. My family meant more to me than my morality when pressed too far, it seemed… and she was no longer the only one of us who wanted the Cardinal dead.

  Even if I still could not rise to anger for myself: what had been attempted would have left me furious regardless. If his men hadn’t begun killing us all, then it still remained that he’d sent armed men over two thousand kilometres into the wilderness after us. There was no pleasant way to view his actions, and I very much suspected that the original intent had included kidnapping, and quite possibly murdering me and Luca before her. 

  But I could now feel the righteous anger of the wronged self, and it swam within me alongside the ocean of justified hatred that pumped out of my heart. I breathed as deeply as I could, to search for the slight clarity of mind it might have brought to me, and I exhaled with the same conclusion that I’d first come to.

  I steeled myself, even as the clearing where the village used to be came into view, and Katherine gasped with what must have been at once excitement and shock. I leaned upon the wheelbarrow heavily, and I finally released my Arianna from the prison of my morality, as I said to her what could never be unsaid,

  “I won’t. Rianna, I won’t stop you. I promise you this.”