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At dawn, they lay flowers at her family’s graves.
Yairi blossoms, yellow like long-lost joy, picked fresh from the sunwarmed meadow. They smell sweet and earthy. Her brother would weave necklaces of their blossoms when they were younger, for her to wear.
“Did you have any help with the graves?”
There is a rhyme taught to the little children of Holzherr when they are old enough to understand death. After seven moonrises, at dawn, to sanctify the spirits of the dead. Three blossoms, for the three parts of the soul. One blossom over the hands of the deceased, clasped under their eternal shrouds of stone. One blossom over the heads, to bring peace to their now-perpetual dreams. One over the hearts, so they may always know that their lives shall be forever cherished in the memories of the living.
Her mother was always dismissive of such nursery rhymes. The pragmatist in the family, her mother was. Ruthye supposes she took after her mother, in a sense, while her brother took after her father. Dreamy and hopeful and willing all too quickly to forgive any wrong.
“You dug them all by yourself,” Kara murmurs when Ruthye does not answer, and Ruthye nods.
Coiled around Kara’s ankles, Krypto lets out a faint whimper.
It took her three days and three nights, Ruthye remembers. She did not eat for that time. She did not sleep. It is in the tradition of Crying Anne, Firstmother of the Gods, to fast a full turn of the sun after the death of a loved one, so it was only her due to observe it threefold. In truth, she did not care much for faith, for the traditions of her ancestors in the name of the divine. She still does not believe in gods now, and she certainly did not pray for the pleasure of gods back then. After all, the gods had not protected her family, so what could she ever owe them? But she fasted, and she prayed, for there was nothing to lose from praying. It was another observance, after all. Token of a childhood yesterday and yet long past.
She prayed as she rummaged through the shed, and found her father’s swords, and a shovel, and took the shovel and dug those graves on the grassblown hill where she would once chase her father as a happy little girl. She prayed as she peeled burial stones from the pond next to their farmstead where her mother taught her fishing, hauled the stones back by her lonesome as her hands bled on the handles of the wheelbarrow and dug splinters into her palms and her legs burned and her head spun and she prayed. She prayed as she dragged her mother’s body, then her father’s, then her brother’s out of the house. Cleaned their faces, wiped away the blood. She prayed as she lowered them into their graves. As she scrubbed the scabbing gore from the kitchen floor and rummaged through the burned ruins of their pantry for any serviceable foodstuffs that would not spoil, that she could carry with her away.
She prayed for many things, for little things, for grand and senseless things. She prayed for Krem’s death. She prayed that the little money she had unearthed among her parents’ belongings would be enough to sustain her on her journey. Tomorrow could take any form for her, she’d sworn, so long as the day thereafter ended with Krem spitted upon her sword.
At the very end, she prayed that she would stop feeling fear. For her parents had felt fear upon seeing Krem, and then they were killed, so it was only natural that if she did not fear, she would live to inflict fear upon Krem, and triumph over him, and achieve her revenge.
But no, she is lying to herself, is she not?
She prayed for more than that.
She prayed that she would stop feeling anything. She prayed to find the strength to cut out her own heart, use it as kindling to burn her life on her family’s funerary pyre. Revenge would not have been the consummation of her pain. No, she was pursuing her own consumption. Consumption of the self.
Love. Pain. Two faces of the same quicksilver coin, balanced on the blade’s edge of revenge.
“Mind if I say some words, Ruthye?”
She nods. So the last daughter of Krypton, the girl who would be a goddess: she kneels, and lays her yellow mourning blossoms, then places her palm to each of the blankets of burial stones—brother, mother, father—and whispers. The heroine of the stars is whispering in a strange tongue. Her mother tongue, Kryptonian. It is a lyrical tongue. It is a lovely tongue, and now it is a lonely tongue, now only spoken by one in the whole wide universe.
“Rao, First of the Gods, Guiding Light of the Heavens,” Kara switches to the common tongue. She speaks as if in sermon, as if entranced. “Let these souls and bodies rise by your light, to follow your celestial path. Let their way be guided by the torch of your flame. And may you grant your strength to us, the living. So we may drive away the darkness with the hope of coming dawn—”
And Ruthye watches on. Watches the red sun and the green plains and the brightening golden skies dappled with fading indigo, framing everything in that vibrant, terrible, wondrous riot of colours. And she thinks back to Bilquis: asking Kara that question about the ending of pain as they were sequestered in the abode of a family marked for death. How Kara looked at her, and smiled through lidded and pain-rimmed eyes, and gave an answer that was not an answer.
Any day now, Kara said.
Because they’re all too similar, the two of them. And perhaps that is the way of little girls who have lost their worlds. Cursed to wander, to search. In the eternal pursuit for something.
Of what? one might ask.
Perhaps justice. Perhaps explanation. Perhaps the answer to that very question.
At Kara’s feet, Krypto begins to bark.