The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.
Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us
Authors: DrGrimoire
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Along a shadowed road, upon a midnight moor, under a bleeding moon, the dead queen walks. She has nearly forgotten, but she’s walked this road a hundred times and more before. Now, where the memories of thousands of years, of countless lives and deaths and rebirths should be there is nothing — an aching, starving, ragged-edged absence.
Her oldest memories, layered in a nacre of self-fulfilling myth and prophecy, glued to the very core of her soul too firmly to come loose, flash to the fore. The road she is on leads to her successor-self, her next incarnation, doomed and blessed to become one with the godsoul. To become a single voice in the chorus of never-dying oracles that is her very essence. She needs only walk the path halfway, to the benighted crossroads where two become one.
One foot in front of another, she walks the umbral path.
As she walks, she pieces together what has happened, what must come next. Fragments of recent memory and emotion dot the path, debris of the destruction of her self. A technoccult obelisk carved of agony and rage reminds her how she died, how her essence came to be so broken. A sorrowful sculpture of a girl draped in familiar threads of destiny and prophecy gleams with lambent light in the center of the path. It gives her the memory of a youth — Saoirse — and of the cruelty that the goddess inflicted upon her in their shared final moments.
Phantasmal tears gathering in her spectral eyes, she walks the umbral path.
Far ahead, lit by red moonbeams and the sputtering fire of a yet-living soul, she sees the crossroads, where the path of shadows and death and the path of destiny and life cross. On the living road, at the center of a light like a low campfire, a young woman stands, not yet awake. She looks like her statue, but somehow reduced, hollowed. With vision beyond sight, the queen sees that her soul is draining like sand from an hourglass.
As the dead queen reaches the crossroads, Saoirse's eyes snap open. She looks around, disoriented and shrinking into herself. Her eyes find the Morrigan, and dawning recognition is eclipsed by fear and suspicion.
"What happened? Where are we? What did you do to me?"
"Saoirse, I…I am so sorry. I think…your soul was fading fast, and mine was slowly bleeding out of my body and I… passed my mantle on to you." The goddess' voice fills with shame as she begs, "Please, forgive me."
No comprehension appears on Saoirse's countenance. "What do you mean 'your mantle'? And like, seriously, what happened?"
"How do you not—" the Morrigan's growing irritation is suddenly soothed by the memory of a half-cleaned gravestone. Of a girl born between worlds, desperate to earn admission into either. "I am sorry, I forget you know none of this. My godsoul, the sum of all my lives' emotions and memories and very essence, is contained within my crow-feather cloak — my mantle.
The goddess exhales, contrition on her breath like fog. "The body you met me in was but one of many hosts I have had. Each time my host dies, another takes up the mantle, and becomes the Morrigan, with all the memories and powers of all her past selves."
"So wait, you gave that to me? So now I'm going to become a Morrigan?" Saoirse interjects. "What the fuck? What does that mean? This is insane!"
"I am sorry child. Truly."
"And why do you keep apologizing? You're telling me I'm going to be super powerful and magical and important and you keep saying you're sorry?"
The Morrigan's eyes fill with sorrow as she admits to her crime. "Saoirse, a godsoul is far too large to exist alongside a mortal one. Over time yours will…well, it will be absorbed into mine. You will not become a Morrigan, you will become the Morrigan. You will become me. Your memories subsumed by the vastness of our other-selves, your personality brought by degrees to become those of my own."
"Oh." The doomed girl pauses. "What if I say no?"
"Saoirse, your soul is dying. I do not know how, but that obelisk, it ripped at our very essence. My soul is vast enough to bear it, I think, but yours? You have little time left until it drains completely." The goddess' voice is like the song of a mourning dove.
"Wait, so I die either way? That's not fair." Saoirse bristles, her dimming inner light tinged crimson with anger. "That's actually so fucked. And you just do this to people, over and over again, so you get to keep on living? You're basically a serial killer!"
"I…yes." The Morrigan looks at her spectral feet. "I believe that more is gained than lost when a host becomes me, that they still exist within me, but I must admit that it is a sort of ending." She pauses. "I have never told anyone that before."
"So why am I even here? What is this place?" The young woman fumes. "Are you just fucking with me now? Playing with your next meal?"
"This is the road to the Otherworld. The afterlife of our people. This crossroads is where that road and the road of your life intersect. It is where we join our paths."
"So, it's where you turn me into you?"
"Normally, you would be able to walk away, child. But as I said before, you have precious little soul left. If you do that, you die."
Saoirse is silent for a moment, cogitating.
"Wait, how little soul left? How can you tell?" Behind Saoirse's eyes, the Morrigan can see gears begin to turn, a hopeful logic dying her candlelight aura.
"Your soul is perhaps half the size it should be, and draining fast. Time moves differently here, but it is still of the essence. The sooner we join, the more of you that can remain."
"Hold on a second. How much of your soul is left?"
"Not much. Less than a tenth, most of it tatters of lives long ago." The Morrigan winces.
"How much bigger than my soul is that?"
"The weighing of souls is an inexact art. Souls are shifting, blurring things—"
"How much bigger is it?" Saoirse demands.
"Twice the size? Three times, perhaps?"
"If that's all there is, is it still to big to coexist with my soul?"
The Morrigan pauses, her head cocked, crowlike in thought. A deep warmth that the goddess cannot quite place begins to fill her soul, staining it with defiant hues. A shade she once wore, once embodied. From the depths of her stormy soul, a moment long-lost echoes.
A memory, long buried and wrapped in myth, surfacing like a whale from the ravaged ocean of her essence.
She remembers her first life, her birth-life, of awakening her inborn gifts to see the threads of fate.
She remembers defiance against their design, as she looked to her own skein's end and saw it swift-approaching.
She remembers plucking at the weave of fate, clumsy and infantile at first, and swiftly learning to make a tapestry of destiny.
She remembers reshaping her own death, as she reknit the tapestry of the future into a pattern more pleasing to her.
She looks at Saoirse, and for the first time sees a kindred spirit look back. Then she casts her gaze beyond.
Beyond the doomed girl next to her.
Beyond the world of the dead.
Beyond the strand of fate she dances upon, to the weaverless loom of destiny, causality its warp and destiny its weft.
She sees the countless tight-woven threads that make up her fate, the tangled web that she will weave, is weaving, has woven. The prophecies and predictions she has made, the battles she has won, the lives she has created and ended, all in the service of her people.
She sees the fraying, fading thread of Saoirse's destiny. She will become the Morrigan, will be subsumed entirely, her soul too weak to endure even as an echo of herself. All that she is, all that she could have been, crushed under the weight of a hundred lifetimes, a hundred destinies, and the Morrigan's own ever-shifting fate. On this, the ever-shifting loom of fate is consistent, a knot in the fabric of causality.
Her own fate was once a knot like this.
And she reaches out, her now-remembered birthright still strong within her, for beneath all her loss, beyond all of the ravages pressed upon her, she is still Anand, who defied fate once and will do it again.
Burning tatters of her self for power, she seizes the shuttle of the loom, and finds its shape familiar to her hand. With smoldering shears of sold-off memory, she cuts the knot of her fate and Saoirse's, scattering possible inevitabilities like lint. As the fabric of reality protests, she cuts her own existence in half, severing memory from power, and splices in Saoirse's own thread, creating a new pattern in the weave of destiny.
Apotheosis.
With her last instant of divine might, she weaves for her fragments a new destiny, a halo around the new divinity, ultramarine with sorcery and golden with hope. She has no time to see if her work is completed, if the burnt fragments of herself are destined to fade or endure, before the change has set, the loom once again weaving itself, its motions echoing across infinity.
As the new pattern ripples from the depths of reality, Anand, who was once the Morrigan, who was once the Goddess of Fate, of Death and War, feels her remaining lives and memories become unglued from each other. Her vision fragments into countless beady eyes, her consciousness rendering down into her constituent parts. Motes which were once a greater whole.
Each mote of memory prunes itself, casting off all that would not be useful. Shrinking down to a size far smaller than a human soul.
The size of a crow's soul.
Born from the shattering of thousands of years, the new-formed murder of soul-fragments circles around Saoirse. They are few. Far fewer than they should be. But they are hers.
They land before her, and she gets a clear look at them. Most are ragged, tired-looking birds, missing feathers or sickly-thin. But at the head of the flock is a single, large, gorgeous crow, its pristine plumage reflecting the red moonlight. As she looks at it, it caws, and yet somehow she understands it perfectly.
"I give you all that I was, all that we were. All of our power, and all of our duties."
"Morrigan? Is that you?" Saoirse asks the bird.
"You are the Morrigan now, Saoirse. Phantom Queen and Battle Crow. We are the parts of your godsoul that you could not carry within you. The memories of lifetimes long passed. I was the portion that spoke to you here, the core of the goddess you were once fated to be. I am Anand, the first and the last."
"Wait, but I don't feel any different. Like shouldn't there be a big, flashy thing that happens when I become a literal goddess?"
"I am not certain. I have not done this before. None have. Given that you understand me, you clearly have inherited at least that gift, but perhaps it is a gradual process. Or perhaps it will happen all at once once you return to your body."
"Okay… Also, who are the other crows?"
"The fragments of memories I could preserve. They have precious little self left, but perhaps enough to be of use."
"This is great, though! Like, you'll still be around to help me, and like, tell me what I should do." The Queen grins.
"We will do what we can, my queen. But we are less than we were, less than we could be. Parts of us had to be cast off to fit into these new forms, and we had little time when we cast this fate to be certain we preserved all that mattered." Anand puffs her feathers up, agitated. "And most of us, of our power and memories, was stolen by the very events that led us here."
"Half of my soul is still gone, right? And my mom is still missing."
"It is somewhat more complicated now. Both more and less than half of your soul is missing, now. More than half of your mortal soul, but you are a goddess now. Your godsoul, reduced though it is, is many times larger than your mortal one was. But it should be far, far vaster. This flock should be far larger, and all like me, with enough self to advise you."
"So, what, if I get the rest of my soul back, the other crows will start talking again?"
"Indeed. And the flock will grow. Perhaps your powers shall, as well."
Saoirse beams. "So I get to help you, help my mom, and get stronger? That sounds good to me, where do we start?"
"We return you to your body. But Saoirse, I must tell you one more thing. When you inherited my powers, you inherited the responsibilities that came with them. I understand you are thinking only of your mother now, but many other spirits are missing. As Phantom Queen, they are your subjects. Their safety is your duty."
The newborn goddess' smile fades slightly. "Oh." She pauses. "I guess that makes sense. But doing this is still what we should do, right?"
"I believe so, my queen. I do not mean to tell you thinking of your mother is wrong, just that you are now responsible for much more. I am sure you can find a way to navigate it."
"Okay." The Morrigan takes a breath. "Let's start by getting out of here."
"By your command." Anand croaks, the flock leaping into the air, flying down the path, away from the crossroads and towards the lands of the living.
In a room in Three Portlands' Saint Hedwig's Hospital, John Ashgate held his daughter's hand. A few hours ago, he got the worst news of his life for the second time. For some stupid reason, Saoirse had grabbed a live wire. She'd never talked to him about suicidal ideation, never shown any sign of self-harm, and yet she'd just… done it. John knew she had taken the loss of Fiona hard, even worse than he had, but…
They told him she would slip into a coma soon, one from which she would never wake.
What did he do wrong?
They told him that, if he had anything to say to her, she might still be able to hear him for a few hours, a day at most.
He spent those hours begging. Frantic pleas reduced to whispers reduced to sobs, his warm hands grasping her cold ones.
"Please, honey, wake up."
Despite the closed window and the Mayor's imposition of fall weather, Saoirse's red curls were ruffled by a spring breeze. On it, John could smell the scent of fresh-turned earth and petrichor and parchment.
The linoleum tiles around Saoirse's hospital bed cracked in an earthquake that he feels in his soul originates from his little girl's supine form. Spiderwebbing fractures on the hospital wall formed an impossible pattern of wings as, one by one, the fluorescent bulbs overhead burned nova-bright and then burst in showers of technicolor sparks. The sterile atmosphere in the room grew heavy, like the air before a storm, and impossibly-colored lightning arced from his daughter's body, licking the hospital walls, their normally-invisible wards glowing cherry red with the strain, visible even to his mundane eyes.
Slowly, Saoirse's body lifted off of the bed, hanging from nothing. The ratty shawl the poor, dead woman had draped over his daughter flapping in an invisible wind, warping and wrapping around her body.
Encasing her in a cocoon of crow feathers.
As he watched, rooted despite the danger, papers and clipboards and a dozen other bits of medical paraphernalia were tossed about in a localized tornado, somehow always missing him. Saoirse's hand, still clutched in his own as she hovers three feet off the bed, suddenly, impossibly, squeezed.
With a sound like the beating of a thousand wings, the cocoon ripped and flapped in the wind. Before his eyes, it warped once more, changing into a battle jacket, the kind he'd always refused to buy for Saoirse. Patches bloomed upon it before his very eyes, some for bands he recognized, some for bands he didn't, and some for things he thought couldn't be bands — he spotted one showing a ghost in a crown, reading "The Queen Is Dead, Long Live The Queen!".
As suddenly as it started, the tornado stopped, the arcing lightning dissipating, leaving a lemon-and-ozone tang on the air. Saoirse descended gently onto the bed, as if being set down by invisible arms.
John frantically checked to make sure she wasn't hurt, feeling her wrist for a heartbeat, her chest for breath. Only after he was satisfied by his inspection did he realize that her copper hair had turned black as the moonless night. As he stared, processing the change, he made another realization.
Her emerald-green eyes were open.
Saoirse croaked from a throat that was never meant to speak again. "Dad..?"
Her next words were cut off by her father's tears of joy, as he squeezed her so, so tight.
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