Imago Dei by Paul W. Thomas

Author:Paul W. Thomas [Thomas, Paul W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Thomas
Published: 2021-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

Heirloom clouds carbonate the early cobalt sky. Smoke curls from the still-warm embers of last night’s festival, and Parnassus lies by it without shirt or tunic.

He stirs and grunts his way up from the ground. His memory is dimmed and he can’t figure how he slept the whole night, and without his shirt. The greater mystery is the whispers. He looks, all around him he scouts, and no one. He is alone, shirtless, and he is hearing whispers from some far-off throat. They won’t stop.

“What—who, who’s there?” He scans about himself in a more hurried fashion. Still, there is no one there. He grows angry and yells, trying to cut out the tongue that slithers in his ears. He is thoroughly vexed, and in his agitation, he rubs his forehead from which he pulls black residue. His fingers are black as coal. He looks around himself again, panicked, and runs into the monastery, to the courtyard and into the building in its center where he knows mirrors stand. From a tall, dimly lit mirror, he can see some kind of nonsensical lines patterned on his forehead. They look like letters of a kind layered on top of each other, like a word written with the letters stacked.

He does not remember Antania’s finger tracing over his head because he was sleeping in a stupor when she did it. She’d waited till the coronated fools left him to sleep off the drink. She came dragging a stick, which she used to dig a circle around them. She inducted Parnassus into her malfeitoran appeal to the Samodiva and any other resident nymphs that would oblige her. She stuck her finger into a pouch of ground, moon-cleansed charcoal and traced while she whispered foreign things. She felt rushed and hurried, for she heard others not yet sleeping. She couldn’t be found out—they wouldn’t understand—and there was much at stake. What is understood is that, when anyone casts a spell, there needs to be complete focus.

Antania’s mind still rakes over what she saw during the ceremony. It wasn’t less than two decades ago that she gave any thought to the Theron of her old life, to the Eco Revs that brought her and Alexander together, to the daughter she would chance to bring into the world. She somehow sectioned off and quarantined that part of her memory till the only thing that would persuade her into such thoughts would have been a face. She’d seen two—Alexander’s and what could have been her daughter’s.

It had to have been. It was her, my Anna.

But the very thought of Anna frightens her. She fears that, if the gorgeous young female was in fact Anna, that she will not be as effective and capable a Crone if Anna were to become the Maiden. She fears that a shameful accounting will be demanded for so many years lost. She fears that motherhood for her is only ever a lonesome memory. She has since hardened herself and made herself capable of things no mother should ever do.

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