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distal phalanx
“Will you tell me what she was like,” Anna asks one of those nights when the star-facing windows Rosamaria’s made for them show nothing but the infinite, all-encompassing darkness of space, “your sister, I mean? The one who hates you.”
It’s a very blunt way of putting it. Very Anna. (Very Ssrin.)
It’s also very, very true, and Ssrin in that moment wants, very badly, to allow the three of her heads currently clamoring for Anna’s blood to have their fill. Strike her, quick as anything, and bury their fangs deep inside her throat. Her flank. Her chapped, fragile lips. Shut her up for good.
But she’s not what she once was. Time and experience and her stint on Earth have all left their marks on Ssrin, most of all in the way Anna’s presumption no longer even sets off her Ssovosial glands.
So instead she says, “Ssenenet. Her name is Ssenenet,” and pretends as if the nervous curl of her tail is only brought on by the high-grade venom currently coursing through her veins.
hamate
A two-tailed khai is a sign of ill fortune. Everyone knows this.
Oh, yes, at least three of the current members of the Capitate are twin-tailed, of course, but doesn’t that simply drive home just how damned they all are? Here’s a thing that even an objectively, irrevocably evil species is afraid of. Let’s watch them elect it to the top of their government.
But it’s one thing, after all, to have an ill omen guiding the fate of your people, and another entirely to have it slowly developing inside its shell in the heat of your homestead.
This one, the clutch-mothers had cautioned when they’d first beheld that final brood of the – until then – long, and prosperous line of sumersenect khai, will bring ill fortune to your line. Twin tails coiling inside these eggs.
---
There was no twin-tailed snake to be found within the brood that Ssrin hatched from. The clutch-mothers were wrong – unusual, that, but not disastrously so. Ill fortune of another kind, but one that meant little to those consigned from birth to a death in Hell. The sumersenect nest on Khas bore it with bared fangs and veiled threats to the clutch-mothers, but no open violence. This wasn’t that kind of mistake.
There were twenty-seven eggs in her brood, and Ssrin tells this to Anna, sprawled out there in front of the doomed universe, with all the gravity of imparting a great secret.
Three of the eggs did not hatch at all; the fetuses dead while still tethered to their yolks. Four eggs were deemed unsalvageable mere hours after having disgorged their inhabitants into the world, the stain of some other nest’s machinations too dark a taint on them. Of the remaining twenty hale and hatched eggs, eighteen would never amount to much of anything at all, killed before they could reach maturity.
And as for the remaining two: One egg contained Ssrin, and one contained Ssenenet.
They hatched at the same time. Ssrin thrashed her way free of the brittle shell, and though her eggtooth had already been knocked clean off her fangs struck at the length of the egg stuck next to her, and so arrived Ssenenet.
“It’s not like with your get,” Ssrin explains, waving off Anna’s interjections and instead handing her another drink interlaced with her own venom, “you’re all round and fleshy when you come out, aren’t you? Little pudgy things. Easy prey. And you all look very similar to each other, don’t you, because you’re so unfinished.”
“Are you saying your kind come out fully formed?” Anna makes a face at that which Ssrin fails to properly decipher.
“No, but we’re—as we molt our colors may intensify, but very little changes on the whole. When we escape the egg, we’re already all that we will ever be.”
She’s always had her white arms, she explains, in such stark contrast to the rest of her body. One of her heads has always been more aggressive than the others. Two of her bellyscales never quite managed to molt the way they should. These things you are born with, she tells Anna, and these things stay with you, always.
Ssenenet, even then, had been her opposite in all things: a lighter body, and then dark, glove-like arms. Like someone had taken the both of them, and allocated them their parts without paying much attention to uniformity or any sort of aesthetic coherence.
Perhaps you were not meant to be apart, one of their clutchmates said to her once, not long before Ssrin and Ssenenet finally decided that enough was enough and culled the whole lot of them, perhaps you were intermixed inside of the eggs, sisterkin. A part of you, in her; and her, in you. Perhaps that is why you will never be whole ever again.
The two of them did look strikingly similar, Ssrin thought, with the blood of the last of the sumersenect line obscuring both their miscolored arms.
ulna
You cannot define an absence.
Ssrin learns this during her last, doomed night on Khas: that there’s a hole inside of her, now, where something once used to be. A nothingness-where-there-should-be-something. A spot that isn’t hurting, exactly, because nothing remains to yet experience pain, but it’s a dull, insistent feeling regardless. It niggles at her. Chews at the edges of her soul with a persistence that borders on the tragic.
Khai theologists have tried their best, over the millennia, to quantify this feeling. They’ve all of them failed, of course, because the khai weren’t meant to understand the underlying narrative principles of the world – they were always only ever meant to weaponize them.
(And be weaponized by them in turn, Ssenenet has posited, and there’s no need for narrative omniscience to know how that ended up going for her, in the end.)
But there in her spaceship, careening away from the planet at speeds that would put even the best ibeian pilots to shame, Ssrin pries past the anger and fear yet clouding her perception, and examines the yawning emptiness spreading throughout her insides with the same kind of conscientious care she’d previously levelled at the gaping wounds in Ssenenet’s flesh.
Her personal wound—this absence—she knows, will fester. It will rot, and then it will turn hard and sharp and cut her whenever she gets too close to its edges.
Ssrin knows exactly what shape the absence inside her holds.
scapula
“You’re brilliant, sister,” Ssenenet tells her after her first sortie for the Exordia. Pride swings in her voice with such fervor that Ssrin cannot help but fall sway to it, grinning wide with all eight of her heads. Yes. She deserves this praise—has she not laid low a whole planet of hydraean semi-kin? Has she not stopped them from conjoining their narrative to the khai’s, in a desperate if entirely understandable attempt at escaping finality?
With an appreciative coil of her heads, Ssrin glances sidelong at her sister. Ssenenet, too, is a vision to behold, if in an entirely different manner than herself: where Ssrin is decked out still in the dark, shifting armor plates and defensive configurations of the Exordia, Ssenenet has come to adapt well to the raiments of an aide of the Capitate. They suit her well, those soft-looking garments—because Ssrin knows well enough that, much like Ssenenet herself, the shifting fabrics hide a plot-prohibitive armor exponentially more potent than even the ones she, as a decorated Exordian operative, was outfitted with.
Later, she will blame her next words on the celebratory cocktail of endorphins coursing through her veins, slowing her brains down and muddling her thoughts. For now, though, Ssrin is moved only by the need to have her sister close once more.
“You could still join the Exordia, sister. They would surely miss a mind like yours in the Capitate, but consider! All that you could accomplish with us,” Ssrin mutters in a low voice, pressing the coiling length of her tail inquisitively against Ssenenet’s. “All that we could do. You and I, sister, we could lay low the whole of the doomed universe. We could crush it all beneath us—you and I, together, we could ensure the narrative dominance of the khai forevermore.”
The thought alone is too enticing by far, and has Ssrin shivering even in the hot Khasian summer air. Her tail coils tight around Ssenenet’s, and it’s only a scant width of space that keeps her from pressing her shoulder to her sister’s. They are still in public, after all, even if said public is currently milling about the streets far below the balcony they’re on.
Ssenenet, however, rather than leaning into her in turn stills at her words. Her heads twist about each other, and it takes a too-long moment before she finally says, “Perhaps, Ssrin. But I feel like my skills are needed more in the Capitate—and besides. If your recent sortie is anything to go by, you’ll have pinioned the whole universe by yourself thrice over before I even finished basic operant training.”
Because Ssrin is good at what she does, and perhaps just a bit too high on her own recent success, she readily agrees that this would probably be the case—and because they’ve been sisters long enough for her to catch the low, suppressed hiss coming from Ssenenet’s fourth head all too easily, she does not for a second think that her sister meant any of it.
Her sister is a good liar.
For now, basking in a sun hot enough to take away the sting of Ssenenet’s rejection, Ssrin is happy enough to let her be one.
She presses the snouts of her seventh and eight heads to Ssenenet’s in lieu of replying, therefore. It almost feels like something beautiful.
clavicle
There is a body, bruised and broken and lying on the cot in her Capitate-issued living quarters like a pitiful low-born beast, and there is a terrible wound. These two things are not the same, but there is a narrative connection between them that Ssrin cannot hope to excise.
Because look, this is the body: Ssenenet’s blood drips onto the floorboards. There is a pattern to it, governed solely by the steadily slowing beat of her heart. Ssrin’s wiped away at it for the better part of the last hour or so, and yet it continues to grow—the narrative parallels of it are beautiful, and Ssrin doesn’t care for it in the slightest. There is no stemming the flow of blood, in any case; no matter how many rep-patches she winds around her sister’s arms the deep gouges in her flesh refuse to heal. It’s been three days since Ssrin’s so carefully-thought-out plan failed. It’s been three days now that her sister has not been her sister, but rather an unconscious slab of flesh.
And look, this is the wound: even unconscious, Ssenenet flinches from her sisterkin’s touch. When Ssrin leans close, three of her sister’s heads bare their fangs in reflex from smelling her alone; when she slithers around the cot, Ssenenet’s body tries to roll itself further away from her.
For three days, Ssrin has allowed this.
But now the wound has festered, and with its edges burning with the onset of infection she decides that there is nothing else for it. The wound is already there, after all. To finally heal, she reasons, it must now deepen.
In the bathroom of her quarters there is another body. This one has been torn into several pieces, all of which are now haphazardly swimming in the dregs of Ssrin’s basking pool. Little yet remains to mark the body as khai, and yet the smell of it slowly beginning to decay amidst the warm water readily sets Ssrin’s maws to slavering.
On that third day she reaches into the basking pool – water more slime than anything at this point – and fishes out the torso. The meat here is torn and shredded, but beneath the ribcage there is a plethora of organs to feast on—Ssrin tears at it until she is splattered with blood, cradling heart and liver and kidney in her hands.
(Blood, yet again, stains them to be almost unrecognizable as her own.)
As she slithers around to leave, her tail agitates the water once more, and two of the body’s heads float ungently to the surface. Milky dead eyes fail to follow her as she makes her way over to her sister’s bedside once more—Ssrin knows his name, and pretends she doesn't. Weak flesh deserves no remembrance.
She sets out her tools on the low, cot-side table with more care than she has ever shown them before, and sketches the signifiers of her own brand of operancy into the stone with a deliberateness she’s not had reason to give them since her graduation, but: this is Ssenenet. This is her sister, her clutchmate, the other half of her in body if, perhaps, not currently in soul. After what Ssrin has done to her, the greatest amount of care in the world still wouldn’t be enough.
The organs she arranges easily enough. Blood splatters onto her own belly and on Ssenenet’s in turn as the heart hits the stone, but there is no reaction from her sister at all. No: only when Ssrin reaches out to take the first piece of meat in her hand – that delectable, soft kidney squelching between her fingers – and gets too close to her does Ssenenet flinch, almost coiling off of the cot before Ssrin manages to wrap her free hand around her sister’s shoulder and drag her back around.
Swallowing down her anger at her sister’s reaction, Ssrin raises the kidney to her own heads. Decades of practice make it easy enough to turn that world-destroying operancy to the meat in front of her instead: there is a flash of heat, and then of terrible cold that makes her fingers twitch into sharp-nailed claws, and when Ssrin finally manages to pry them open again the dead meat is vanished, leaving behind only a faintly shimmering sliver of fluid.
She makes her first, second and third heads lick it up with quick flickers of their pale tongues.
The liver is next: thicker, heavier, and the operancy required to ground it down into usable energy more intricate. But as her fourth and fifth heads gorge themselves on the remains trickling between her fingers, Ssrin reminds herself that this is nothing compared to the delicate application of operancy she’s wrought on the khaleia, or the gas planet of the scyphozoan creatures, or—
No. This is nothing, compared to the sheer power she’s become used to wielding.
The heart of the Exordian operative she keeps for last. There’s no operant calculation to be made for it, no intricate twist of narrative coercion to level at the lifeless thing. A heart holds its own kind of power—one that is far more easily taken advantage of, even in this state.
With enough gusto to surprise herself, Ssrin raises the heart to her final head—and tears into it. The muscle is harsh and stringy, but she swallows it all down regardless, paying no heed to the way her own body tries to revolt and choke it all back up.
The stolen life courses through her with only faint agitation, but Ssrin knows that this won’t last: she has to act quickly.
Her hands leave bloody prints on Ssenenet’s shoulders as she presses down on them – off-white on the same off-white, like this is where they were always meant to be –, until her sister is spread out flat on the cot. Easier, this way, to hold her down when she begins to thrash as Ssrin moves the own length of her body to lie alongside her; easier, too, to coil her tail around Ssenenet’s and pull her close until they’re flush against one another.
As with all things, the sisters are matched in size.
Stolen power coursing through her Ssrin coils her necks around Ssenenet’s, head for head; matching each of her sister’s deceptively light span of scales with her own darker flecks. It doesn’t take long until she’s got her sister all but immobilized, and where she does try to feebly twitch away from her still, Ssrin is now able to compensate.
And then there is nothing else for it: like that long, terrible month in their childhood, when they had only been recently hatched and a windborne plague had struck the brood and the sisters had writhed on the ground while their hatchparents had watched in silent judgement, Ssrin opens wide her maws and fastens them around the vulnerable patch of throat beneath Ssenenet’s jaws. The shared warmth of their bodies had driven off the plague, back in their youth. Now the heat comes from Ssrin readying her most brilliant piece of operancy yet.
“For you, sister,” Ssrin hisses, and as one all of her heads bite down.
The reaction is immediate. Ssenenet freezes beneath her for a breath as Ssrin’s fangs pierce soft skin—and then she begins to thrash, her body trying to coil in on itself and simultaneously get as far away from the creature inflicting this harm on her. Her hands – the only thing Ssrin hasn’t been able to hold – flash into talons and she lashes out indiscriminately in her unconsciousness, a predator caught out injured and unable to do anything else but give her all in her own defense.
Ssrin holds her fast throughout, bearing the wounds and moving with her to and fro in turn until the Exordian venom begins to course properly through her sister’s veins.
It’s not long before Ssenenet’s eyes begin to flutter.
humerus
“You still haven’t answered my question, sisterkin.”
Ssenenet’s voice is a sensuous growl pressing itself into Ssrin’s auditory receptors, snuggling itself inside her like it has never belonged anywhere else. She sighs, and winds her tail around Ssenenet’s in turn. Pressure for pressure. Warmth freely shared.
If she could, Ssrin would burrow deep into her sister’s ribcage and stay there until the very gods themselves collapsed the universe back down into its base parts. Pull close the curtainous drape of Ssenenet’s gold-trimmed Capitate robes, and hide beneath them until they have finally become one in truth.
A nip at her torso draws her attention, fangs deliberately blunted by the angle. “Ssrin. What’s come up? Do you need my support?”
And oh, how she would’ve rejoiced at that offer mere months ago! The mere potential of them standing side by side once again, like they had in their youth—but even then, she’d have known that her sister’s words were hollow. No violence to be found within her, not for years now: she’d have offered whatever problem was plaguing Ssrin the slow death of a political approach, or the well-meant if useless reproach of a stern conversation.
Because here is what’s come up: for all the violence ingrained within the khai, given to them from birth and embossed within their very areteiaic archetypes, for all that she has strength to match Ssrin’s prodigious own—for all that, her glorious sister has chosen the path of the azazophage instead. She has willfully cast away all that makes the khai glorious, and in doing so she has rejected Ssrin, too, for all that she herself would no doubt argue it being the opposite.
If we are meant for hell, she’d told Ssrin one warm night as they’d lain coiled against each other, breathless and slick, then should we not ensure that we remain the only ones bound for it? There’s no escape for us, sister. But why drag the rest of the universe down there with us, if we can be their saviors instead?
Ssrin hadn’t known what to tell her, then. She’s similarly at a loss for words now, even if for entirely different reasons.
She takes in the glorious whole of Ssenenet instead: her sister’s sleek, lithe form silhouetted beautifully against the strangely-scented air of the alien planet. The coil of her body isn’t in any way relaxed, Ssrin can tell that at a glance, but there is a certain ease to it that she’s found only comes to her sister when they’re away from Khas.
She looks absolutely beautiful, does Ssenenet.
She’ll look more beautiful soon enough, with the blood of her supposed wards dripping down her arms and nestling itself between the gaps in her scales.
Therefore, the hardest, most terrible words Ssrin has ever had to press out in the whole of her doomed, damned existence: “It’s Exordian business, sister, you wouldn’t want to get involved.” Which is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? “I’ll only be gone for a breath. Don't worry, it’s nothing serious.”
And Ssenenet believes her, because why wouldn’t she? The narrative here is clear: for all their differences over the years, the sisters have always been true to each other. It’s what got them out of the eggs, and it’s what made them succeed into maturity. Never, not once, have they had reason to even suspect that the other would take advantage of that trust.
It makes it very easy, of course, for Ssenenet to wait there in the alleyway, heads swaying in and out of the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves while she listens to the distant sounds the locals make as they patter down the streets on their myriad legs. It makes it very easy for her sister to not question why her assigned protection is choosing to leave her side, if even for a moment, and it makes it very easy for her, too, to keep her arms down at her side, and the coil of her body at ease.
And it makes it incredibly difficult, too, for Ssrin to turn that corner at the end of the alleyway, to move out of sight, and to wave for the group waiting there under her own weave of claudication.
Subjugated species and failed khai operatives with a fang to sharpen against those yet preaching salvation, all of them. She’d pulled them straight out of the Capitate’s local prison station, high up in orbit—little more than a whiff of her operant status necessary to get the wardens to heel. Much like Ssenenet now, they’d trusted her to know what she was doing.
Ssrin nods at her gathered troop now, and that, for once, is very easy. It’s what’s best, after all. For Ssenenet. For her. For the khai.
It’s surprisingly easy, too, to follow along with five of her heads as the group turn into that alley. To hear their slithering approach, and Ssenenet’s questioning hisses.
Only when she hears the first blow fall does Ssrin turn away.
sternum
“You still haven’t answered my question, Ssrin.”
Anna’s voice is not quite pleasing to the ears. It’s rough from the heady mix of venom Ssrin’s flooded her endocrine system with, and perhaps it’s rough from the lack of sleep, too—they’ve been here for hours. Perhaps foolishly, Ssrin had hoped that Anna’d long since drifted off into unconsciousness, lulled to sleep by Ssrin’s steady hissing remembrance.
The rest of the ship is silent, even Rosamaria having gone to pretend at sleep, and only Anna’s voice – Anna’s so very beautiful, human voice! – is there to now cut through it.
Ssrin sighs. An affectation she’s picked up from the humans, but one she’s come to appreciate: there’s a discernible sense of relief that comes with dispelling air needlessly. Her second and fifth heads snap at each other idly as she mulls over how to answer—but in the end, it’s easy enough.
There is only one thing to say, after all.
“She was – and will always be – my beloved sister. What else could be more wounding?”