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You birth a child to be a bomb.
The eggs you’ve been given all died. You don’t have the knowledge. You don’t have the equipment. But you have yourself, and you have your body. What is nine months of your life, what is your blood and flesh, when it’s for your cause? What is nine months when it has been given your whole life already?
You were sent to kill a baby and open a locked tomb. Whose baby doesn’t matter on your end.
So you do what has to be done.
For nine fucking long months, you carry a bomb beneath your heart. For nine fucking long months you feel it kick and live and consume you. For the first trimester, you’re sick every day. For every trimester you’re sick every day.
You do what has to be done until you’re caught. Until His loyal leech finds you, until you’re offered mercy, until you fall and you freeze and you die spewing the venom of his hateful name between your lips.
You do not have a choice. You cannot choose between you and the bomb. The oxygen won’t redirect from the payload, and so you do not choose. You do not live. All you have is your death.
You die, and you die a human, which is much more than the desecrated corpses haunting your natal solar system can say.
But you do not leave.
You are dragged, you crawl back, you sink your bloody ghostly nails into your flattened, empty lungs and your still unbeating heart and you do not leave. You do not leave.
The bomb survives. The bomb is given his hateful name. The bomb is undetonated.
The bomb is a girl.
You are locked in this decrepit, decaying, diseased pit at the edge of His kingdom, wrapped in your own bones, smothered by your own flesh, sealed away from living eyes and light.
And it’s seven years before this changes.
Seven years. You do not know, yourself, it’s been seven years. Your consciousness comes and goes. Who could tell time by the tedious, syrupy, tasteless flow of day and night in this hole? Who could tell time with no heartbeat and no breath?
You know it’s been seven years because it tells you.
It says, The Captain told me which one is yours. And it says, I thought you were out in the fields already.
And it says, I’m seven.
Your undetonated bomb, your wasted blood and flesh and time, sits next to your coffin. It knows not what it is. It knows not what it was created to do.
It knows Him, and it calls Him God.
But it calls you Mother.
The child comes, and the child talks, and the child leaves.
But you stay.
The spoiled milky membrane that’s settled over your eyes begins to clear. The bloody rage fog that’s clouded your thoughts begins to fade. You’re dead. You’re here.
The child talks.
You awake.
You move. You’re no longer bound to your bleached bones, no longer wrapped in decaying flesh and held down by your ashen tongue. When your remains are set to work in the fields, you’re no longer with them.
You lay across the child’s lap, in sharp, inhuman, beloved metal.
You walk behind the child. You see. You learn. You know.
The child says, Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left.
You know this. You saw; you were.
When the child fixed her placement, it was upon you it was fixed. When the child blocked or slashed, it was you she did it with. You had not helped. You had not assisted. But you had been there.
The child says, Harrowhark was a giant bitch today.
This, too, you know. You know Harrowhark, one more of the filth born in His wake. You have seen her nails bloodied with the child’s blood, your blood, His blood, a key that never found its lock.
The child says, I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now.
You know. You walk. You see. You are.
The child says, I love you.
In the dead natal planet of humanity, under its dead natal sun, you are locked away from the child. You do not walk, and you do not know.
But you are not gone, and you have not waited this long for not knowing to bid your time.
You know her when the child at last comes back for you. You know Harrowhark, one more bloodied, life-sucking daughter of His murder. You know Cytherea, the undead abomination that serves at his feet. Served.
You do not know all, but you know enough.
You walk, and you see, and the child’s chest is speared through with iron.
The child is not dead, but consumed. She is not gone, but burnt. The child is no more, and Harrowhark is made more.
And that, too, is an abomination.
The dead body you’ve stolen is heavy and wooden, but wrestled at last into submission. The gun in your hand is smoking, and the weight of it is a blessed, lovely gift that burns your dead palms.
You know, but you do not know all. You do not know the intricacies of His death cult, the inner workings sucking the universe’s life dry. But you know you are here, and you know you are below. You know you have almost killed Harrowhark, and you know that you failed.
And you know the child’s eyes.
You know them when they stare at you in Harrowhark’s body. Shrouded in this foreign body, you look at the child’s eyes through the stolen flesh that stole her soul. At your feet, one of His desiccated leeches, she of the dying eggs, writhes in zombified pain.
The gun is a lovely, blessed weight in your hands. The gun is loaded. The child’s hateful name has never left your lips. The child’s hateful borrowed body, unlike its soul below, cannot be saved from you. The gun is loaded and you stare at the child’s golden eyes.
The child does not move. The child does not sit next to your blonde-haired coffin. The child does not say I love you.
The bomb is yet undetonated.
You created life to sacrifice it at the altar of your cause.
You birthed a child to be a bomb. But the child never knew it was a bomb. The child came, and she sat, and she talked. The child held you in her hands. The child held you in her arms.
You sat on the child’s grip and cut her enemies through.
You birthed a child to be a bomb, and you became her sword instead.
The gun is a lovely, blessed weight in your hands. You lower it, inch by inch, you lower it for nineteen years, until it points away.
The child looks at you from inside another’s body, and you look back from inside another’s body, and what is nine months for your cause, what is nineteen years, what is your fresh and blood and your mind and soul?
You lower your gun. You let go of the trigger.
Your child does not say, I love you.
You say, Goodbye.