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you are young; birthed from the mouth of blasphemy, ears ringing with the pleas of the wicked. you are born under blue eyes, and gifted the name of your grandfather; they carve expectation along your spine, spill wine into the cracks of your flesh and convince you there is love there.
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you are newborn. you do not understand; now, you know all you should have seen was the blood.

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you are four years old; the press of a mattress into your back reminds you that you are human; the cold touch of a hand reminds you that the light of her eyes and the ravens in her hair are the only things that speak of a mother.
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you are a toddler. you do not understand; now, you know she was not meant to sing— she was born to burn.

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you are eight years old; your nanny cradles your hands in her palms, has you etch the outlines of your fingers into her flesh, teaches you there is more to you than your name.
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it is your birthday, and you woke to the soft heat of the late july air, and all you could remember was that she was the only one who smiled; she smiled as you told her you were a leo, because july twenty-eighth said it was so, and she smiled when you asked her for another plate of ice cream, and she smiled when she put you to bed, even when you asked for your mother.
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she knew, perhaps, that you would have known if she didn’t; that you would have known your mother was not to come back.
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five weeks following your fifteenth birthday, you felt yourself shift; like your center of gravity had displaced itself, no longer anchored in the trenches of the sea but rather nestled in the folds of power; you knew what was happening— you had known it was to come.
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you can remember when your voice first broke when you were twelve; how your father’s eyes darkened and his lips thinned; how he took you into his study, slender fingers steepled at the top of the wooden desk, peering over the edge of his spectacles as he looked at you: a mess of a boy, with neatly cut hair at his demand and a body that refused to agree with his family’s expectations.
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“you will become, soon, boy. things will differ from now on. am i understood?”
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you could not have known entirely what he meant, but now, as the autumn sun waned over your windowsill, and the bedroom was dressed in honey, and the breeze had pressed the curtains away as a lover’s hand would stroke a cheek, you see him emerge.
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he took his time; he was careful, precise, knocking forms and figures together in your mind to find a suitable counterpart. he knew more than you could when he came, and sometimes you wonder if this ever changed.
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when he broke from you, he at first didn’t seem like an extension; he, to you, looked like a god. you were fifteen, you tell yourself now; you wanted to believe such a thing existed.
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neither of you slept that night, yet only the moon and its children remember you were there; at times, you wish they would forget.

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you had not seen your mother for ten years when you met her brother. it was a sunday morning; the sky had grown desolate, weeping over the trampled flowers and the weathered stone markers half-risen from the soil. you wondered what would happen if the field would flood;
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would the ground litter itself in tooth and bone, god’s word etched into the marrow of the lost? [break]would the meadow instead bloom with half-eaten petals bowing under cloud’s watch, fearful to look the crow at its beak? [break]or would it instead weep your name under your own feet, silent as you throw yourself further from amnesty?
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he tells you that your mother loved you. you do not ask him what she looked like. he tells you she never wanted to leave. you do not ask him why she did. he reaches his palm forward, fingers shying your gaze away from their treasure; he tells you she wanted you to have something. you do not ask, but your arm raises, and you pry back his grip with the eyes of the child you have long devoured, and you see instead.
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quando mors est, dicere deum ad suas a facie; clamores simul horrendos ad eam, quam vigilo cum dolore sui victimarum: videte ne velut arce
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you slip the ring into your pant pocket. your forefinger never leaves the rim; you find yourself thumbing it even after celestine blythe was lowered beneath the earth.
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you continue to feel the ridges, even as it rests on your third finger nineteen years later.
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[break][break]it did not take you nineteen years to realize you were not like other men your age, or who ever were your age. it did not take you nineteen years to understand that the woman to whom you were betrothed did not hold your heart so much as she hid it for someone else to find; when you married her on the eve of your twentieth year, you did not make love to her, but you told her how you could not.
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she understood, and this was all you could ask for; from then, she did not want for much from you— appearances you obeyed, wishes you bent to, but never did she demand more than you were willing to give.
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you only ever made one request: you wanted simply for an heir, and to this, with eyes glassed over in the thick of the afternoon air, she acquiesced.
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your child was born from her a year following, and brought with its life the absence of their mother’s.
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you loved the infant; you loved it even after it took from you the only person who understood, even after it forced you back into the home of your father, even after it gave you the courage to tell him that you had no desire for a woman.
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even after your father ran you from your family. even after he refused you to see all you had left in life again.
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on the day of your burning, you realized, perhaps with a laughably belated thought, that the blythe family never seemed to hold on to a family for long; you wondered whether the same would happen if a husband took place of a wife.

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[break][break]you spent an inordinate amount of time at your uncle’s estate; matous wolfe, to whom you owe your second name, called for you mere hours after your discorded fate. you wondered how it was he knew, and he told you not to ask him; that you would not enjoy his truth. you lived with him for years; you found in him a different part of yourself, a part you had rather kept hidden; a part he allowed you to be.
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in your twenty-second year, you spoke to him of a man you loved; he did not ask questions.
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in your twenty-third year, he told you of the same; you did not have to voice why he didn’t marry— at this age, you already knew.
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in your twenty-fourth year, he took you behind his manor, along a winding path cut open through dandelion feathers and sunflower eyes, showed you a newly built stable with one occupant.
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“she is yours,” he said, cheeks bloodied with an apprehensive cheer. “treat her well.”
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you named the filly marissel, and you could not help but think, in passing, how easily her pale hair could fall into crimson.

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you were thirty years old when you arrived home one night to a mocking drawing room and a long drenched fire; you followed the reaper’s ash down the halls and through the rooms into a bedroom you had never step foot in, and you approached the leaking blackness edging along the sides of the mattress, and you had no time to think of whether the expensive wood beneath your feet was bruised from the weight of your knees collapsing; all you knew was your chest was leaving and your air was drying, and your sky was cracking like dropped china, and a will was read out to you the following sunday.
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you did not bother to dawdle on the reality that matous wolfe had given you in death what your father never would: a home, a calling, a living— and a family.
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[break][break]you spent the next half of the decade remaking the estate to your heart’s content:
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you paved way for a garden, blooming even in the coldest and darkest of times, with a name to each section; a dedication at every corner.
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you filled the stables with more horses, and you found solace in their gentle quiet and their strong legs.
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you took up the sword your uncle had refused to teach you, and you earned a name for yourself beyond what your father had bestowed upon you all that time ago in the eerie corner of his study.
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you learned to love, and to let yourself love and live and cherish, and you learned to never be ashamed.
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you even, at the age of thirty-three, decided to pursue the power vested in you that you had long lost sight of; you became a witch, and he — the god who had come to you that fateful night — could at last roam free beside you once more.
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[break][break]you are thirty-seven now; you have not seen the inside of your uncle’s bedroom for years, and yet— here you stand, your mother’s eyes peering at the archaic detail on the door, your father’s hand pressed against the cool frame, a nudge of restraint keeping the place from sight.
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your ring glints in the moonlight, and you look to it, and you hear, for the first time since it was given to you, a voice you have long forgotten ring out:
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when death comes, speak of god to its face; watch how it screams with the grief of its victims; watch as it cowers in fear
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your eyes close. your breath stiffens.
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and at last, you push the door free.