The silence at the breakfast table was loud. Veridia and Sym usually dined together for breakfast and dinner, with lunch left to their own devices. Today was no different, only they were now joined by Hiru. Sym recalled the first time she had a meal with Veridia and how a hint of amusement cut through her steely indifference as she had noticed the golden silverware on the table.
Hiru was as cowed as she had ever seen him, though that was unsurprising. Veridia let out a sparkling laugh. ‘You both are so quiet this morning. Perhaps you saw something that shook you up? Something you shouldn’t have?’ She raised a glamorous eyebrow, its curve perfect and poised. Hiru mumbled into his granola, but Sym stared straight at Veridia, ‘It’s amazing that you’re up this morning, I would have thought with what you went through you would have been out for a while,’ Sym replied.
Veridia paused a second, gauging Sym, taking her measure, before letting out another charming laugh. ‘Oh Sym, aren't you just darling. Hiru,’ she barked, turning her attention to her son, ‘why can’t you be more like your sister?’ Hiru finally looked up at Veridia, his eyes just as razor-sharp as his mother’s ‘she’s not my sister.’ Sym felt a strange twang in her heart at the prospect of being unwanted again. He didn’t want her here. Veridia’s lips quirked. ‘She is what I say she is.’ A muscle in Hiru’s jaw tensed. His eyes flickered to Sym’s for the briefest of seconds, some unidentifiable emotion in them before he looked back down. Veridia’s eyes flicked to Sym. ‘Do you want to know what it was you saw?’ She asked. Sym paused, this felt like a trap. Was this a test to see her loyalty? Because she would fail that test, and she wasn’t afraid for Veridia to know it. She raised her chin. ‘Yes.’ Hiru spoon paused over his bowl, looking up through his lashes, clearly curious as well.
Veridia hummed, thoughtful, before carefully continuing. ‘You and your friend Iseult made a very curious discovery. I had been investigating godseed for a while, looking for it under the mountain in my mines, but you discovered it so easily underneath the city.’ She paused, her face twisting into a grimace, ‘and though it took sacrifice,’ Sym thought of her screams last night, those twisted, inhuman sounds she had made as she was cut open, ‘I came out able to wield it.’ She paused again, this time in order to look intently at Sym, her eyes burning. Her shadow moved of its own accord, a hand, one of many from a wriggling mass, reaching out from behind her to pass Sym the salt for her eggs, shaking it gently over top of them. Her voice low throaty with passion, ‘it will change everything.’
Sym lay on her new bed, stretching her limbs out to reach the edges. She couldn’t quite reach. It didn’t have the same safe feeling her own bed had. And the sheets smelled all wrong. Everything was wrong. Her life was wrong. And Veridia wasn’t the only one to blame. If the stories of the zombie king and godseed were real, couldn’t Ketsuri be real as well? A cruel and indifferent goddess. Fickle, just like Grandmother had said. And she was completely at their whims, just like she was at Veridia’s. She felt tears of impotence and rage tingle in the corners of her eyes, making their way through the haze of her indifference. There was so little she was in control of in her life.
She got up and carefully took red ink from her new desk. She inked a message on the fine paper prepared for her use, folding it carefully into a cochineal beetle, her hands moving in just the way Grandmother had shown her, so long ago. She placed it on the opened window sill. She didn’t have any wish, but she did have a lot of fury. Ketsuri, god of luck and bad endings should know she had made an enemy.
