Holy Wrath

by Victoria Mier

I have been good, and I have been kind, and I have been faithful, and still, it has landed me here—at a man’s mercy, my own agency, my own flesh more under his command than mine.

“Because he delights in your pain, your misery. Because to the men of the Host, there is nothing more satisfying than a woman’s suffering.”

Goetia, your people call it. What they mean is ‘any power claimed by someone who should not have it.’”

I would so much rather be going mad than giving into sin.

I tremble, starved for the approval of my God. It is so pathetic, I know, how desperately I wish to be told that, despite my confession, I am good. That’s all I need, I think—to be reminded that I am good.

Is the suffering sweeter, I wonder, if the woman is considered beautiful? If they can take a thing they see as near-perfect and mar it with the teeth of a flail, the bite of endless rebukes? Is the reward a woman’s beauty, or is it the ability to do with that beauty what they see fit?

Nausea stirs in my stomach, my skin hot and clammy as I watch. But this must be holy, mustn’t it? This must be right—for the entirety of the High Ecclesia stands before me, a rare, sacred thing. They are the closest thing to God. They speak for Him because He is too grand and glorious to descend among His people. They are His right hand and most trusted counsel.

“What you don’t understand,” I tell her, my eyes focused on the shadowed hallway, “is that I’m already dead.” And I won’t even get to choose what eats me. Renault, Sergio, the stake, my Lord Himself—any might make a feast of my flesh.

But it is hard to fear death when I see nothing in my future, when pain already strokes my limbs as surely as any flame, when my vast, violent sea of sorrow may well drown me.

liberated by the best warrior of my people’s enemy.

Shame overtakes me, a reflex as natural as anything,

Freedom is a knife. All I get to decide is where to plunge it into my flesh. But there’s one blade I’ll accept over the other, my soul be damned.

“I can’t even trust my own eyes any longer,” I whisper, tears dripping down to my lips. “Nothing feels real.”

For the first time, I allow myself to wonder what it would feel like for my death to come one day and for there to be nothing. Just darkness, just unmaking. In my last second of life, if I realized there was no Caelus after all, would I feel cheated?

“But the place you come from is not the entire world, Ophelia. And the world is much wilder than you think.”

There is a thrill, I find, to snatch at a man’s garment the way they so often snatch at a woman’s flesh.

A delicate thing, I think uselessly—to apply just enough pressure with such a large, heavy blade. To not break the skin, to not spill blood, but to so clearly make a threat of doing all those things.

It’s his own ambition that drives him to this madness, that allows him to show his not-so-sharp teeth to the Lupa Nox. That’s all. Not love. Not even devotion or friendship or goodliness. Just lust for more power.

No place that cannot protect its people could ever make me feel safe.

“You have suffered, Ophelia,” she murmurs. “How you wish to come to terms with that truth is your prerogative. But I need you to understand that you have suffered in a way many cannot imagine.”

How could it possibly be right for my city to die so yours can live? And yet.”

“No more of this. No more of your pain for the sake of a man’s pleasure, his dominance, his ambition. No.”

Everything is too much, and I am not enough. That’s the way it’s always been.

When I decided to leave with Nyatrix, was I truly running from Lumendei, from the Host, from Sergio, from Renault? Or have I always been running from myself? And yet, even all the way on the other side of the Sundered Lands, here I am, still.

Orphans are made, not born.

There is, I realize, no true difference between Mysterium and goetia. It’s all framing. All a game of who should have power and who shouldn’t.

“You freed yourself. You were gnawing at your chains long before I arrived.”

“If you only do the right thing to avoid punishment,” she asks, “is that truly goodness? And can a god so eager to punish you truly love you?”

Gods are terrible things, even to the people who worship them.”

“Now I know,” I murmur, “and I do not see you any differently.”

At least in place of her god there is not a gaping wound, a milk-white eye, a corpse-light.

Perhaps this is why it was so easy to cling to the Host, why even with that horrible, ever-present twist in my gut, I still convinced myself everything was all right.

Without the reassurance of an afterlife, wouldn’t I fight until I am battered and bruised to make this world better? Wouldn’t anyone?

And for the mortals who participate in it—do they think it brings them any closer to godhood? Do they not understand they will never be divine, will never have the kind of power the First Son wields? How do they not understand they are so much closer to the cobbler who goes out every night, calling his lost child’s name into the mists, than they are to a god who eats and eats and eats?

“I am so tired,” I breathe, my chest heaving as I gulp for air, “of everyone thinking they need to protect me and then using that as an excuse to control me.”

Caelus, even if it exists, is worthless if I have to abstain from her to gain my entrance.

“You are so soft,” she says, her thumb tracing my lower lip, “in a world that is so hard.”

“Your pleasure,” she tells me, working her way closer to the apex of my thighs, “is the most divine thing I have ever known. I would gladly bring an apocalypse upon the men who taught you otherwise.”

We are always forgetting, mortals. And when we do look back, we look to loot, to mine, to take. Never to understand. Never to learn.

“Do not forget that once you have destroyed the old world, you must then birth a new one.”

Our leaders command us to commit violence as they kneel to pray.”

If only I had not been trained to doubt myself so thoroughly.

“What you love most, Renault, about your god,” I tell him, my wings spread wide, my body humming with all that unleashed power, “is that you can be utterly horrible your entire life and still be forgiven in the end. But you should know,” I continue, leaning over into his face, “that I don’t forgive you.”

Or, perhaps, no one is willing to speak the truth: that they were cruel and monstrous on their own terms.