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Humans need a way to explain the unexplainable. In all her long, meandering years of existence, this is something Rio has learned. Mythology; religion; a dictionary of words put to feelings too big to be encapsulated by a series of sounds in the first place, but by god, have they tried. Humans are uncomfortable with mystery.
Because humans need a way to explain the unexplainable, and death is the most unexplainable thing of all, there are a lot of iterations of Rio floating around in the human consciousness. A tall guy with a bird-beak mask and a scythe is a pretty common one. A swarm of bugs, she’s seen once or twice. There are a lot of skeletons. Like, a lot of skeletons.
And then there’s the woman with the white veil stained black. The crying ghost who wades in rivers. Rio has heard, often, of her.
Some of the stories say she drowned her children in a jealous rage. Some of them say she was pushed down and hardened by the world around her and lost her children in a fight for survival. None of them are right, because the woman who wades in the waters of Mexico and cries has only one child – a beautiful boy named Nicky, who could have ruled the world he was never meant to exist in if only he had been given more time.
Rio could not give him more time.
The death of the children is, perhaps, the most unexplainable part of the most unexplainable thing. Children are hope. They are the future; they are light. They are not meant to be so suddenly snuffed out the way Rio so cruelly must. When children die, their mothers and fathers weep. They beg at her invisible feet for another chance. Sometimes, by a foggy riverside, they beg for a chance she could never give, a chance that stabs a million needles into her skin minute by minute, and sometimes they never forgive her.
Rio needs to stop drinking Mexican beer. It makes her horribly sentimental.
If death is unexplainable, and the death of children the most unexplainable of all, then there will be, without a doubt, a myth to explain the death of one’s child. This is the natural law of the universe; Rio has abided by it for millennia. And thusly, she carries the mantle of La Llorona around her shoulders. The visage of a woman stricken by malice she didn’t know she was capable of, weeping in the shallow waters of the Magdalena, carried on in folktale. Rio supposes she has the features and the grief-hollowed look in her face. It must be a fair enough comparison.
In truth, the myth came to be long before Rio’s own son ever set foot on the soft green earth. She would carry bodies through the water at night and hear the whispers of another woman’s title around her on the wind. It was something almost amusing at first. They think I am this other woman, this sad woman, but that woman was not real. She was a blip, a collection of stories. She is the reason for all of their sadness. Rio pitied their sadness, but it was – what do they say these days? Not her circus, not her mortal, fallible animals.
Grief, back then, did not feel real to Rio.
And then Nicky. And then all of it was real.
And now, Mexico City. 1979. Rio sits in a smokey bar and plays game after game of solitaire. Something is going to happen tonight. Something she must be present for. She does not yet know what.
Down the street, a witch has been playing a show. The witch sings and does so very well. This, Rio knows by osmosis. The witch sings a song about roads and hands and Death and love. It is a song Rio has heard before. She cannot stomach the song for longer than a minute, because all she can hear is purple.
The bar was quiet for much of the night, but now the witch’s show has emptied out and patrons have wandered out for a drink, a cigar, an extension to a pleasant evening. The air is warm. Summer is on the horizon. All of these humans have something to look forward to. Rio is playing solitaire and soliloquizing at a bar, alone, when the witch pulls up a stool beside her and sits down.
She wears the comfortable shawls and colorful dresses of a woman who knows herself. She orders a whiskey, neat. Rio sneers once in her direction when she’s not looking, then goes back to her cards.
The woman sips at her drink and begins to hum. A familiar melody. Seekest thou the road to bullshit bullshit bullshit. Rio completes a triple klondike and resets her cards. The witch, the popular one, the one with the band and the money and a small, gentle daughter – she doesn’t even sing the words right.
Rio chances a glance at the woman beside her, still humming. She recognizes her then.
“Come for a drink after your show?” Rio shuffles her cards and stacks them neatly on the bar. Lorna Wu’s ears prick in her direction. “The beer is shit. Sorry to say.”
“Good thing I don’t drink beer.” To a casual observer, Lorna’s smile might seem kind and magnanimous, but Rio sees the tiredness beneath. The urge to dive into a deep pool and disappear. She gets the feeling, but such escapes aren’t meant for beings such as her.
Lorna Wu gives Rio a curious look, up then down again. “You look familiar.”
“Has anyone in your family died recently?” Normally Rio is not so glib about her profession, but she’s mildly drunk and depressed and has been playing solitaire for six hours.
Lorna’s eyes widen, the hand wrapped around her whiskey glass beginning to tremble. “Sǐwáng nǔshén.” Lady Death.
Rio sighs heavily. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to reap your soul or murder your child. Just,” she lifts her beer, “getting a drink.”
“People accuse you of that often?”
“People don’t normally see me unless I want them to.”
“So I guess I should feel special.” There’s an amused smile on Lorna’s face. Rio, against her better judgement, is starting to like her. Something about that gentle voice.
Rio finishes her beer and signals the barkeep for another. He brings it without question.
“Tell me,” Lorna asks after a few minutes of companionable silence. “What is… all of this like for you?” At Rio’s confused (possibly unimpressed) look, she clarifies. “Are you a witch like me, or something greater?”
A sharp knife slashes through Rio’s chest and leaves blood dripping on her cotton pants and leather sandals. “It depends.”
Lorna’s curiosity is not satisfied by brief answers. “On what?”
Rio shrugs. “What form I take, what plane I inhabit. Whether I want time to move slow or fast around me.” And yet, Rio has not stepped on foot off of the earth since Nicky died. Almost as if it’s some kind of punishment to herself, allowing the grief to fester.
“I should think unlimited time would be a blessing.” Lorna smiles into her whiskey. Rio can tell she is thinking of the little girl in the hotel room down the road, fast asleep in a bed far too large for her, trusting that her mama will return home and kiss her goodnight even if she’s not awake to feel it. “Do you have a family?”
It feels like the sound of the bar whites out around Rio. A rushing fills her ears and refuses to stop. Lorna smiles placidly, completely unaware of the wounds she’s torn open with such a simple question.
“No,” Rio says, then, “yes. Once.” The words sound choked to her own ears, but Lorna does not seem to notice. “I latched on like a weed until I grew too cumbersome and they cut me away.”
Lorna leans in close, a conspiratorial smile on her face. “That doesn’t sound like much of a family.” Rio finds herself smiling grimly back, as if they share a little joke – as if Rio can spill her unending trauma surrounding Agatha Harkness, Witchkiller, and the whole thing will end with a pat on the back and a motherly there, there. As if it would not put her monstrosity on full display.
For now, she will play the victim. Lorna will never know the difference.
“I have a daughter,” Lorna says. She smiles wistfully. Rio hums into her drink. “The thought of her dying makes me sick. But I’m sure you hear that all the time.”
“More often than you’d think.”
“I’m talented in protection,” Lorna continues, staring down at her hands – marred slightly, Rio can see, by burn scars. Her shoulders, hunched beneath her shawl, bear the same marks. “But there is a curse in my family, one I am afraid I cannot protect her from.”
Rio sets her beer down on the bar. She bites her lip. She tries to be very careful, but truthfully she is numb to having to say these words. “There is no bargain you can make to spare her from anything that might be coming.”
Lorna looks up at her with such fear. “Is something coming?” She reaches out and grabs Rio by the shoulders. No longer the teasing songstress, now just a mother. Rio sees something far too familiar in her desperate eyes. “Is that why you’re here? Is Alice all right?”
“Alice is fine.” Something catches Rio’s attention. A waft of smoke, drifting from Lorna’s shoulder; a red burn the shape of a claw mark. “Nothing is hurting Alice right now.”
“But something will.” Lorna Wu, it appears, is a smart woman. “The curse will come for her, and you’re saying there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“Not without breaking it.” Rio takes a mournful swig of her beer.
“We’ve tried to break it for centuries.”
“Then tough luck, darling.” Rio stands up to leave, but there’s a tugging in her chest. A reason she’s here. A memory of a riverbank; a promise of more time.
Lorna shrinks into herself, wrapping her shawl tighter around her shoulders. She sees Rio gathering her cards and halts her with a warm hand on Rio’s cold, bony wrist. “Wait. Tell me something.” Against her better judgment once more, Rio hesitates. “The Witches’ Road. What do you know of it?”
Rio’s easy smile falters the slightest bit. She prays Lorna doesn’t notice. “Only what is sung in the song.”
“Is it real?”
Rio doesn’t answer. She can’t lie again.
“That’s the point of the Ballad,” Lorna explains in a fierce whisper. “For years I’ve been trying to open the road. To walk the path and save my girl. It’s all I’ve been trying to do.”
Saving a child, Rio knows, is a pointless endeavor. Even the barest of successes ends in pain and heartbreak. Sometimes, children just die.
But looking at this woman now, who reminds her of someone she once loved, Rio can’t bring herself to say that.
She leans in closer. “Forget the Ballad as instructions. Adopt its magic. Turn it into what you know best: protection. That is your best chance of saving your daughter.” It will do her no use to sing fake words of veneration to a witch that despises them. There is nothing magical about the Witches’ Road.
The real magic was always a mother’s love. That is the only thing, Rio thinks, that is possibly strong enough to overcome her. To ruin her.
Lorna nods, taking in every word with zealous intention. “Thank you,” she breathes, then hesitates. “I don’t know your name.”
Rio smiles tightly. “I don’t have one.”
With that, she slips from the bar, ducking her head against a gust of wind so strong she can almost smell lightning. But her once-familiar tether is gone, and she is too powerful to crumble into ash. If only it were that easy.
She spends the dawn wandering the streets. She sees men coming off the night shifts point at her and stare. A figure dressed all in black, with black tears down her cheeks. How scary a sight. She does not approach. She does not tell them it's just mascara, that she's just a mother who misses her son. She lets them whisper behind their hands in rapid Spanish and walks away.
She is not come to take their children, but grief is an unexplainable thing.