Divine Rivals(6)
Author: Rebecca Ross

 

She stared at the paper for a moment longer, frozen on the street corner. Rain dripped from her chin, falling like tears onto the monstrous illustration.

 

Creatures like this didn’t exist anymore. Not since the gods had been defeated centuries ago. But, of course, if Dacre and Enva had returned, so could the creatures of old. Creatures that had long only lived in myths.

 

Iris moved to drop the disintegrating paper in the rubbish bin but then was pierced by a cold thought.

 

Is this why so many soldiers are going missing at the front? Because Dacre is fighting with monsters?

 

She needed to know. And she carefully folded the Inkridden Tribune and slipped it into her inner coat pocket.

 

It took longer than she would’ve liked in the rain, especially without proper shoes, but Oath was not a simple place to travel by foot. The city was ancient, built centuries ago on the grave of a conquered god. Its streets meandered like a serpent’s path—some were hard-packed dirt and narrow, others wide and paved, and a few were haunted by trickles of magic. New construction had bloomed during the past few decades, though, and it was sometimes jarring to Iris to see the brick buildings and shining windows adjacent to the thatched roofs, crumbling parapets, and castle towers of a forgotten era. To watch trams navigate the ancient, twisting streets. As if the present was trying to cobble over the past.

 

An hour later, Iris finally reached her flat, sore for breath and drenched from the rain.

 

She lived with her mother on the second floor, and Iris paused at the door, uncertain what would greet her.

 

It was just as she expected.

 

Aster was reclining on the sofa wrapped in her favorite purple coat, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. Empty bottles were strewn across the living room. The electricity was out, as it had been for weeks now. A few candles were lit on the sideboard and had been burning so long the wax had carved a way free, puddling on the wood.

 

Iris merely stood on the threshold and stared at her mother until the world around them both seemed to blur.

 

“Little Flower,” Aster said in a drunken lilt, finally noticing her. “You’ve come home at last to see me.”

 

Iris inhaled sharply. She wanted to unleash a torrent of words. Words that tasted bitter, but then she noticed the silence. The roaring, terrible silence, and how the smoke curled within it, and she couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the sideboard, where the candles flickered, and noticed what was missing.

 

“Where’s the radio, Mum?”

 

Her mother arched her brow. “The radio? Oh, I sold it, honey.”

 

Iris felt her heart plummet, down to her sore feet. “Why? That was Nan’s radio.”

 

“It could hardly pick up a channel, sweetheart. It was time for it to go.”

 

No, Iris thought, blinking back tears. You only needed money to buy more alcohol.

 

She slammed the front door and walked through the living room, around the bottles, into the small, dingy kitchen. There was no candle lit here, but Iris had the place memorized. She set the dented loaf of bread and the half carton of eggs down on the counter before reaching for a paper sack and returning to the living room. She gathered up the bottles—so many bottles—and it made her think of that morning, and why she had run late. Because her mother had been lying on the floor next to a pool of vomit, in a kaleidoscope of glass, and it had terrified her.

 

“Leave it,” Aster said with a wave of her hand. Ash fell from her cigarette. “I’ll clean it up later.”

 

“No, Mum. I have to make it to work on time tomorrow.”

 

“I said to leave it.”

 

Iris dropped the bag. The glass chimed within it, but she was too weary to fight. She did as her mother wanted.

 

She retreated to her dark room and fumbled for her matches, lighting the candles on her bedside table. But she was hungry, and eventually had to return to the kitchen to make a marmalade sandwich, and all the while her mother had lain on the sofa and drunk from a bottle and smoked and hummed her favorite songs that she could no longer listen to, because the radio was gone.

 

Back in the quiet of her chamber, Iris opened the window and listened to the rain. The air was cold, brisk. A trace of winter lingered within it, but Iris welcomed its bite and how it made her skin pebble. It reminded her that she was alive.

 

She ate her sandwich and eggs, eventually changing out of her wet clothes for a nightgown. Carefully, she laid the sopping Inkridden Tribune on the floor to dry, the monster illustration more smudged now after being carried in her pocket. She stared at it until she felt a sharp tug within her chest, and she reached beneath her bed, where she hid her grandmother’s typewriter.

 

Iris pulled it out into the firelight, relieved to find it after the radio’s unexpected departure.

 

She sat on the floor and opened her tapestry bag, where the beginnings of her essay now sat crinkled and damp from the rain. Find something good to write about, and I might consider publishing it in the column next week, Zeb had said. Sighing, Iris fed a new page to Nan’s typewriter, fingers poised over the keys. But then she glanced at the ink-streaked monster again, and she found herself writing something entirely different from her essay.

 

She hadn’t written to Forest in days. And yet she wrote to her brother now. The words spilled out of her. She didn’t bother with the date or a Dear Forest, as she had with all the other letters she had typed to him. She didn’t want to write his name, to see it on the page. Her heart felt bruised as she cut to the chase that night:

 

Every morning, when I wade through Mum’s sea of green bottles, I think of you. Every morning, when I slip into the trench coat you left behind for me, I wonder if you thought of me for even a moment. If you imagined what your departure would do to me. To Mum.

 

I wonder if fighting for Enva is everything you thought it would be. I wonder if a bullet or a bayonet has torn through you. If a monster has wounded you. I wonder if you’re lying in an unmarked grave, covered in blood-soaked earth that I will never be able to kneel at, no matter how desperate my soul is to find you.

 

I hate you for leaving me like this.

 

I hate you, and yet I love you even more, because you are brave and full of a light that I don’t think I will ever find or understand. The call to fight for something so fervently that death holds no sting over you.

 

Sometimes I can’t draw a full breath. Between my worry and my fear … my lungs are small because I don’t know where you are. It’s been five months since I hugged you goodbye at the depot. Five months, and I can only assume you are missing at the front or are too busy to write me. Because I don’t think I could rise in the morning—I don’t think I could get out of bed—if news came to me that you were dead.