Ketsuri smiled as looked at the new inhabitants of her old town. Her lips pulled in a vicious, livid shape born of her ire. She had been attending another gathering where she had encountered the witch-god Zsa Zsa, a crotchety old god pie-bald deer-god, mother to all witches, the kin killers, who had been bragging about a technology her devoted witches had created. Necro-biotics, she said, proudly. Her children had found a way to animate the corpses of animals with technology rather than just spell work. Robotically manipulating the dead bodies of cochineal beetles to create a powerful blood-red storm.
No god knew of Ketsuri’s affiliation with the bugs, she had guarded her secrets fiercely, not even confiding in Nhet. Gods, she had learned, were finicky beings, full of guile and mischief, herself included. She would trust none of them with her secrets. Let them lie in her past, undisturbed. But that didn’t mean she was alright with the disgraceful manipulation of her devotee’s corpses.
Impotent rage boiled in her chest as she had listened to Zsa Zsa, her body winding tightly, muscles tensing as she kept her demeanor demure. She couldn’t confront Zsa Zsa, to do so would reveal her vulnerability as to a source of her abilities, the cochineal sacrifice giving her significant power, enhancing her propensity for luck and its manipulation. And Zsa Zsa was more powerful than she could ever hope to be, one of the most ancient gods of this planet. She would have to act in subterfuge, against the witches in question directly.
The witches in question had overtaken her old village, sacrificing the flesh of the inhabitants to their god. In their ritualistic sacrifices, they would conjure Zsa Zsa, a given follower embodying her spirit and eating the flesh of their victim, often gaining some form of temporally restricted immortality in return. As kin killers their souls were corrupted, cut off from any afterlife, and so they lived entirely for the present, seeking to lengthen their lives and gain riches and power from Zsa Zsa, postponing their inevitable fate as lonely ghosts, doomed to travel this realm in anguish.
She would definitely want to avoid any confrontation with the old god, so though they would be vulnerable during the ceremony, their attention fixed, she would not attack them then. But how would she effectively punish them? She wasn’t resigned to simply put an end to their sacrilege, destroying the bodies of her children, the witches had to suffer as well for her to be satisfied. Hm. Perhaps…she could simply collect most of the entire cohort’s luck and give it to one of them, stroking the envy of the others. And when they were adequately enraged she would remove the luck from them all entirely. Perfectection. And a plan that both utilized her strengths and was suitably devious. She smiled coldly. The cochineal would be avenged. Let no one say she didn’t repay her debts. They were, after all, an integral part of prayers to her personage, she had come to discover.
She watched as one of the witches writhed behind the flames, contorting their body in a wild dance, invoking the witch-mother. The woman’s mouth opened wide, wide as a python, something sinister and vicious smiling behind her teeth. Zsa Zsa, Ketsuri realized with horror, she could see the old god’s familiar smirk. She hurriedly ducked back behind the building she was watching from. Where could she hide while she waited for their ceremony to finish? She couldn’t be here, she thought, frantic. Perhaps…perhaps she would return to her old temple.
It was much as she remembered it. The ornate carved columns, the many incense bowls. She wondered what they had thought when they discovered her missing. And that all the cochineal were dead. She wondered if they knew the two things were connected. Probably not, she sniffed, humans weren’t the brightest beings, in her opinion. She wondered, idly, what had been done with her burial wrappings. She had been kept in a box, she remembered seeing it as she was unwrapped. A box with intricate carvings, just like the ones on the floor, along with supplies for turning the cochineal into ink. There was a small cabinet in the corner of the temple, the wood it was carved out of similar to her box. She opened it. The box itself was missing, but all the supplies it had held were in the cabinet, along with her wrappings. She pulled them out.
This is what she had been so afraid of? She held the cloth in her hands, feeling it's fine, whisper thin texture, similar in material to the cloth used to strain the ground cochineal, only more closely woven. She wrapped it around her hand, slowly in the beginning, a sense of urgency growing, prompting her to wrap faster. She had to know. Was it true that covering her skin with the wrappings was what had taken her animacy? Even if she was trapped forever, she had to find out. She wrapped and wrapped, covering her whole body, the cloth seeming to go on and on, lengthening to the exact amount she needed, spooling around her body, not limiting her movements as much as she would have expected, the fabric flexible rather than stiff, despite all the time that had passed.
Finally, she was covered, and in blessed consciousness. Tears dripped down her face, wetting the fabric covering her cheeks, causing it to cling to her skin, faintly revealing the gold of her skin underneath. She didn’t have to be afraid of the dark anymore, it held no sway over her. She had thought she was free when she had left, but this was true freedom. She had overcome her greatest fear. Nothing could subdue her now.
