As a child, Bexley had not thought once about god.
If there were any godlike thing at home, it would have been the land itself: not a bleeding watercolor but tempera, the edges clearly defined, each leaf perfectly pointed and carefully veined. Plenty of room for details. None for smudges. When the sun shone down it was not hazy or even translucent but came down thin spears of pure light, gold all the way through; they were so solid might burn you if you tried to step into one. If there were any godlike thing at home, it would have been the land, or it might have been her grandmother. (Who birthed the land, so really it made no difference.)
Things have changed. Things have changed quite a bit.
Now when she thinks of god, she thinks of her homeland and her family dead last. What comes to mind first these days is pain.
Pure pain. Bright-white pain.
The pain of a broken knee. The pain of one long, sharp slice down the length of a face. The pain of losing everything and everyone a woman has ever loved. The pain of her magic draining out of her, cell by cell, that day by the shrine. The pain of that desert-red dust in her lungs, scraping at her from the inside out; the pain of darkness in every direction; the pain of so many tons of rocks pressing down on her, threatening crack her open, threatening to break each and every bone—
God is pain, Bexley thinks resentfully. But by now she’s come to terms with it.
She emerges from the city the day after the Ieshan’s party and strikes out into the desert. She can’t explain why; she doesn’t know what exactly it is that draws her out from the comfort of life in the capitol. But it’s strong. It pulls at a spot deep in her chest. It sinks into her bones, fishhook deep, and drags her into the sand like a ragdoll. She is powerless to stop it, if she cared enough to even try; and anyway, she has never been one to refuse herself anything.
The fishhook yanks her over dune after dune, not caring what injury it inflicts—little scorpion bites on the back of the ankle; the needle-sharp pain of the sun as it beats into her back, like Solis is personally seeing to it that the weather makes her wither as much as it possibly can. By the time Bexley realizes she’s a good few miles from the city, her throat is raggedly dry, and sweat is beginning to drip down the back of her shoulders.
The oasis is still visible on the horizon, a little gem of blue and green. She trudges toward it with a little sigh.
A few minutes later, the oasis rises up above the edge of the world. The palm trees appear first, their fronds swaying high in the wind and making frilly silhouettes against the cloudless sky; but one of them is weighed down by the hunched shoulders of a large, fuck-ugly bird. Bexley realizes with a sharp and sudden grin that it must be Ereshkigal. And sure enough, a few steps later, Seraphina’s graceful form appears like a statue half-planted in the water.
“We have got to start meeting on purpose,” Bexley remarks.
