“All the gods!” Carra looked up, surprised at the uncharacteristic display of affection. “What did those mages do to you?”
“That’s a damn good question.”
“Did that fuckstick Renthorn hurt you again?” Carra clutched the neck of Thomil’s vest and pulled it sharply as if expecting to find cuts and glass fragments.
“No, no.” Thomil caught her hand. “It’s nothing to do with him.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Carra, you know how I tell you never to trust any Tiranish, no matter how sweetly they talk?”
“And I always ask if you think I’m stupid? Yeah.”
“Well… I’ve been stupid.” Thomil looked down into the dark, unable to meet his niece’s eyes. “I made a mistake. I didn’t follow my own rule.”
“That lady you work for.” Carra’s voice took on an immature note of delight, and she nudged Thomil with her shoulder. “You like her, don’t you?”
“That’s—beside the point. I trusted her.”
“Gods, Uncle, you’re serious! After all the lectures you’ve given me!”
“I know.” Thomil swallowed the derision because he deserved it for letting himself fall so deep into those green eyes. “I lost myself a little. And it took today—took something terrible—to bring me back to reality. You know, I always thought that the cruelest thing about Blight was that it was senseless. You and I are alone here without our people for no reason. Our tribe is gone for no reason.”
Carra pushed away from Thomil to look him in the face. Her smile had vanished. Thomil almost never spoke about the crossing.
“What does any of this have to do with Blight?” she demanded.
“Everything,” Thomil said quietly. “All of this is because of Blight.” He stretched out a hand to indicate the city below. “All of this is the reason.”
“I don’t understand.”
So, Thomil explained. He told Carra everything he had learned in Sciona’s lab earlier that day. Because she deserved to know and, more selfishly, because he didn’t want to be alone with it.
Ultimately, selfishness had governed Thomil’s entire relationship with his poor niece—beginning with the way he had raised her: wildly, defiantly Caldonn. He told himself it was how her parents would have wanted it. They would have wanted the last of their line to remember their names, feel their absence, sing their songs, and speak their language. There was probably some truth to the assumption, but the deeper truth was that Thomil couldn’t bear to be the very last of his people.
A kind guardian would have let Carra be Tiranish. Let her put her hair up and fuss over dresses like a Tiranish girl, let her grow up to speak without an accent, then come to resent her stupid uncle for his poor manner of speaking and the dirty Kwen habits no amount of time could break. Let her be embarrassed by him. Instead, he had raised her Caldonn, and Caldonnae did not hide from the truth. So, he told her what he had learned of Blight, adding this night to the long list of wrongs he had done his niece.
“I’m sorry,” he kept interjecting, even though he knew that few Caldonn gods cared how sorry a man was for the harm he did.
“I’m sorry,” because he knew the anger that ran in his niece’s veins and how easily it could turn to fatal poison.
“I’m sorry,” because he knew telling Carra all this was cruel.
“I’m sorry,” because, knowing the cruelty, he was still too selfish to bear the truth on his own.
Maybe that was the resonant chord that connected him to Sciona Freynan and her hateful magic. Without his community to hold him to account, he was a selfish creature. And this was the real death of his tribe.
Caldonn deities were all gods of community. Eidra of Motherhood, Sierneya of the Hearth, Mearras of the Hunt, Thryn of the Fields, Nenn of the Rivers. These gods were great because, through all their push and pull, they left the world more than they took from it. The Caldonnae had been a great tribe because they had lived by those ideals. The tribe was the self, and the self was the tribe.
But when there was no tribe, there was only Thomil piling his pain onto his sister’s daughter. And when did trying to keep that pain alive become an act of weakness? Of ego? Thomil had used Carra’s precious few memories of her parents, twisted them, to take some of the pain off his own soul, and at some point that pain had to supersede all that had been good about the Caldonnae. At some point, Thomil had to concede that Tiran had eaten the entirety of his tribe. Perhaps that point had already come and gone with the relentless and monotonous turning of Tiran’s gears, and Thomil had just been too spent to notice.
It was still dark when he numbly finished explaining the horrors and answering his niece’s questions, but chimes from the surrounding churches said that morning had come. The factories that towered over the Kwen Quarter were waking, conduits clunking as they prepared to siphon energy for the day’s production. Carra didn’t say anything. Just pressed her lips into a thin line and nodded. Then she descended the ladder to the rooftop and faced the textile factory that loomed over their apartment complex. She balanced right on the edge as the factory lit with siphoning spells in lieu of morning sunlight.
Had Thomil stood on that ledge with the knowledge of Blight, he would have doubted his balance, his will to live. He didn’t feel that worry for Arras and Maeva’s child. She was made of stronger stuff.
Her shoulders rose and dropped in breaths of increasing intensity until, at last, a great breath filled her body. And she screamed, hair wildfire about her, arms thrown back with the fingers flexed as if to claw the heart from the world. The sound was bone-grating, echoing with the voices of a thousand lost Caldonnae—but it only lasted a second.
In the next moment, the factory’s central conduits roared to life and drowned her human voice.
Carra didn’t relent in the face of the noise and the blinding light. She roared back at the factory and went on roaring even though no one in the world could hear her.
In the artificial light of the textile factory, Thomil looked on what he had done to his niece and knew that he had served himself before his family—just like a Tiranish.
Eidra, forgive me. He closed his eyes and prayed, Thryn, forgive me. Nenn, forgive me.
His gods never answered. How could they in this world of metal and gears where they had no voice? Why would they when their last son had forsaken them for a pair of false green eyes? The only god to answer was the bottomless maw of Tiran.
Thomil opened his eyes and knew for certain in his broken heart:
This was how the Caldonnae truly died.
In pain too big for two small souls to bear without corruption.
"As Lord Prophet Leon and so many of my esteemed predecessors in alchemy have noted, the female mind is fundamentally different from its male counterpart. As such, the treatment of the madwoman constitutes a distinct and delicate art to which I have dedicated its own section. Where the masculine mind may innovate and discover and derives contentment from accomplishment, the feminine mind derives contentment from submission. Thus, the ills of the female mind arise from a rejection of the authorities within the subject’s life and may be treated with lobotomy, the correct application of which I have outlined in the pages herein.”