Iseult was dead. She had watched, half conscious as her father had slit her throat. Coated her blood thickly on the blade before plunging it into his own heart. She was surprised there was anything there at all for him to stab, heartless man that he was, she thought with distant repressed rage. She had hoped that she meant something to him. All her life, she had wanted to believe that his dismissal was just a lack of time from his demanding council work. A city needs a councilman more than a daughter needs a father. How futile her life had been, chasing after his attention. But now she knew just how expendable she was. He had forced the realization down her throat. The anguish of the betrayal was almost as painful as the incision on her. No. No it was not.

She had cut herself once. Just to see how it felt. How much pressure was needed to be on a blade for it to slide through the skin. The way her red blood pooled in the blade’s wake, drops falling slowly, like freshwater pearls. The kind her mother wore on occasion to her society dinners, the events that Idelos made both her and her brother attend, the ones that made her want to carve out her own throat at a chance to leave. She was regretting that thought now.

This was nothing like the small delicate cuts she had made, spiderweb thin with their pin prick pain. Instead, briefly, she felt nothing, deceiving her for a moment into thinking it wasn’t so bad, before the nerves lit up, screaming, slit through, severed. She was suffocating, choking, drowning in blood as it pooled in her brutalized throat. She could taste it, the coppery tang of it, metallic but almost sweet. She couldn’t breath, her brain woozy with lack of oxygen, and then all she could think about was breathing. She did her best to contract the mangled muscles, swallowing with a gurgle to remove the liquid obstruction from her throat as best she could.

There was a dreadful knowledge that the cut was too deep, that there was no going back from this freefall. A flush of endorphins swept through her, even as the heat of her life blood cooled on her chilled skin. The clarity of that fatal knowledge set her life into relief, shades of gray and other ambiguities resolved in the starkness of death, so many things that she had thought important lost their urgency, a bizarre, unwilling sort of peace, imposed upon her. 

‘Hm,’ a voice mused, calm despite the chaotic flurry of activity around her as her brother held his hands over her injury, attempting to put pressure and keep the blood from spewing out without crushing her windpipe. A futile balance, she thought, distantly. ‘What an anomaly,’ the voice continued, ‘usually godhood takes easily when the conditions are met, however whimsical the interpretation. But it appears your father has failed, despite his kin-blood and godseed dagger. The godseed has been removed before the bond set. Unusual.’ From the corner of her eye, behind the blurriness of her tears she just make out the being as they approached her, a sort of humanoid cosmic tornado, whirls of stars, universes even, swirling around their form, like a diaphanous veiled wrap, writhing but encompassing their figure intimately. They had no mouth, no eyes, no senses that Iseult could make out, only a pulsing constellation of stars lighting up in different patterns with each word, as if their resonance alone was transmitting sound. A beautiful impossibility. Iseult had never seen a god before, but what else could this starbeing be, fantastical as it was? 

‘Usually the soul of the murdered kin is the first meal of the god-initiate, consumed into the void of the newly formed god’s corrupted soul, but it appears in this case you will be passing on to the land of the souls unfettered.’ They stroked Iseult’s hair as they spoke, their hands soft and comforting as fingers gently carded through the curls, soothing away the violent terror of death. ‘It appears the claim has been renounced.’ Iseult’s attention shifted to follow the god’s directed glance, a ghostly apparition of herself rising above her body, apparently invisible to the surrounding humans. She watched her brother Mnomo remove the dagger from her father’s corpse, raising it above his head, only to bring it down hard, shattering the crystal of the blade. Glyphs flashed once before they were destroyed forever, glittering fragments all that remained, pinging across the room erratically in a shower of glass. 

Poor Mnomo. She could see why the blade would draw her twin’s ire, having taken the life of two of his family in such a short time. Father and sister, gone. Only their mother Idelos left for him to mourn with. Would he tell her of their father’s treachery? Of how he brutally and without conscious murdered his only daughter? Would that feel like yet another betrayal? For her brother to remember her father in his life, without the folly of his last actions? She knew she wouldn’t be around to answer those questions. Unless she stayed. She hesitated.

How hard had the decision been for him, to choose to let their father die rather than let him live, remaining alive but with a corrupted soul? Kin killing left a mark that couldn’t be removed, kept the murderer from the soul world, trapped as lurking ghosts in the land of the living. Was Mnomo’s action of removing the blade akin? Would he remain, like their father would? Like she would be if she didn’t let go of her resentment. ‘It’s not worth it,’ the starbeing soothed, ‘let it all go, let it wash over you, you are stone on the shore and life is just another wave.’ 

Her apparition sighed, ghostly chest contracting despite the lack of air her new lungs required, a blessed relief in the action she was now able to take, even if it did come too late, the familiar gesture comforting amongst all the new sensations. Or lack thereof. Her sense of touch felt duller, when she touched the table her mortal body remained on, the metallic surface that had felt so ominously cold was now dampened, a more faint chill. And instead of touch she could almost taste the sensation rather than feel it with her hands, an emotional resonance of cold. Like she was touching something that had great potential for coldness, or had a history of being cold. It was a confusing thing, and her mind had not yet acclimated to the change, like she was a baby that was not yet able to grip a spoon, but was rather holding it in a fist rather than with any finesse. It would take time to become accustomed. She wondered how it might change if she went to the land of the souls. If she did.

Did she want to release her resentment, she wondered? Was it even possible? All her life she had been a disappointment to her father, not naturally gifted enough at school, not interested in the right extracurriculars, always falling short at the pedestal that was Mnomo. Her feelings for her father were actually less complex than those around her brother. She loved Mnomo dearly, he had never made her feel less than, for all their differing interests, but the constant comparison to his perceived perfection took its toll. A thread of bitterness in the tapestry of their relationship, one she had done her best to suppress, unwilling to complicate her relationship with the family member who most supported her. Her deep seated longing for her father’s approval, for her mother’s consideration faded into wistfulness, surprisingly, it was the resentment around her brother that now lingered. She didn’t want him to forgive their father, the father that had chosen to sacrifice her rather than him. He had chosen his favorite long ago, but to his credit Mnomo had always acted embarrassed about the esteem. She wanted this, his guilt transforming into anger on her behalf. She needed Mnomo to demonstrate his love for  her by loathing their father, despite his close relationship with him. 

Discovering her intense feelings surrounding their biased family dynamic resolved a good deal of the internalized turmoil. A sense of contentment or perhaps satisfaction at the untangling of her emotional gordian knot flushed through her. The emotion in this body was a wholly different thing, more diffuse. Now that the complexities of her feelings for her brother were resolved, her heart felt helium-light. Delight at the new sensation filled her, and as the starbeing respectfully watched on in silence a shift happened in Iseult, a transformation, an evolution of her soul. 

Her perception of time stretched, events overlapping, imbricating. There was Mnomo, moving towards her, lunging to capture back the blood spewing out from her throat, a hot torrent, an unstoppable tide of ebbing life. Him, a moment past that, collapsed before her prone and cooling body, ragged breath and red hands shaking in his lap as shock overtook him. There he was, moving as if through a dream, towards their father and taking the blade, pulling it with a slick shlucking sound, hand bracing against the still chest, removing it from the sheath that was once their father’s heart, before raising it high high up above his head. He bought it down in a violent arc, the blade shattering on contact, the pinging of the shards filling the laboratory loudly. All of these actions occurred to her as one, a single snapshot of energy, a smooth overlain cycle, both physical and emotional as if they were transpiring simultaneously. 

It didn’t stir her heart, she was a rock on the shore and this life, these events, they were just another wave. Her rock skin was well worn, smooth and guileless by the endlessness of the metaphorical ocean, little more may be water-chiseled from her, but she was resilient, a steady eternal stone. 

As Iseult released the last of her resentment, her attention shifted, mortal grudges no longer holding the same importance to her. This was no longer her time, all of her ire, her bitterness, all her mortal emotions both good or bad had simply become too strong for her ghostly form to hold onto. They were too weighty for such an ethereal form, so they simply fell away, as if she was unpeeling herself layer at a time to find her pure shining center. Her soul. She was phasing out of this plane of existence, her soul untethered by her human desires. The vitality of life was important to the mortal, but the same urgency did not exist for a soul. Like the sensations of the flesh, emotions too became more dampened. Iseult was no longer just a human ghost. Her soul had transformed. Now she was something different.