Prelude / We hereby conduct this post mortem.
[ TW: Physical violence/assault. ]

♰

WITCH: Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?

          The first monster I create is a man.

He is brought forth before the witch and I in trembling strokes of graphite. I draw him not from memory, but from stories the older girls on the island have told me. He is ordinary and terrible; both the knife and the hand that turns it. From his paper confinement he leers at me, his skin a sickly yellow like the rot of cigarettes and stretched tight over sharp bone. The afternoon sun casts shadows through the window panes, splitting his face in halves. 

He has one hand reaching out to me through the paper. Still and unmoving, I stare back at him, at the twin chasms he has for eyes, where I'd colored in black because I could not withstand the thought of being seen by him.

He cannot hurt me here, I remind myself. Here, on Aeaea, he cannot touch me. This is where wounded girls go to for shelter; I know that no man who stepped foot on the island has ever made it out alive. What happens to them, I do not know, and the witch tells me it does not matter so I bury my questions like they bury their men.

And yet somewhere out there I know he is real. He is the young boy that grows to become a collection of sharp objects, the angry father slamming the door and the husband who checks in and out of his home like it's a hotel.

"Look what you have done," says the witch.

There is nothing scalding in her tone and still it pricks at the shame sitting dormant on my skin. I crumple up the paper. I cannot bear to stare at the monster I have brought to life in illustration.

Every girl on this island has been hurt by a man. They show up in their torn dresses, wounds leaking blood all over the shoreline, and they fall at the witch's feet and beg her to save them.

Goddess, they say, tears pouring through the cracks in their skin, have mercy.

Goddess, Goddess, Goddess. I watch them, tucked behind a marble pillar, and I mouth the words to myself like a prayer I have forgotten to recite but still remember the shape of. It had meant something to me once, I know it. I just don't remember.

At times during dinner I sit at her feet and she strokes my hair. Goddess, goddess, goddess. The notion of godhood suggests superiority. I look up and she has never been as distant as she is now, presiding on her high chair at the dinner hall. The entirety of the island lies weeping before her and perhaps it would be humiliating if she weren't such a saint. Goddess, goddess, goddess. 

I saw a picture of a crucifix in one of the girls' pockets once, a martyr hanging from a cross as it dies for its people. The witch has saved us all but sometimes I wonder whether she would die for us if it came to it.

Goddess, I say faintly to myself. She looks down at me at that, a forbidding sun on the horizon. There is a severity to her face that makes me flinch whenever my eyes meet hers.

The witch smiles. Perhaps she had heard my thoughts. I learn her name later on: Circe. The girls on the island call her Mother. Mother as in the title, Mother with a capital M, not mom or my mother because she is nothing familiar even though she is all I have ever known.

Of all the girls on Aeaea, I am the only one who is yet to be wounded, the only one who is born here; I bear the weight of my mother's sin.

My mother, who has been strange since the beginning according to the older girls on the island. Who wanders along the shoreline from dusk till dawn, haunted by a ghost girl who disappears the same time she does— they say she was taken, whatever that means; I am what remains of her.

This is one of many things that I know is wrong with me. Sometimes I lay at night under the stars and I count my flaws with my hands held up to my face— my mother, the sinner. My cruelty, my cowardice. The woman, always smiling with her chin on my shoulder. I tell no one but we share the same eyes, and sometimes when I look in the mirror I think I see her staring back at me.

One, two, three. Look, I can count. Some of the girls have superstitions that they carry with them from their past lives. Terrible things always happen in threes, one of them had told me, and in that moment I thought of the shrine of the goddess with three faces.

Hecate, was it?

I learn to kill at her altar. 

          Is it so much of a surprise that I am the second monster I create?

It happens on my thirteenth birthday. Thirteen is an interesting age to be, a point in your life where you cross the threshold from not quite a child to not quite an adult (yet). You know everything and you know nothing; the weight of your mortality begins to encroach upon you with this new title.

The monster finds me at the altar of Hecate. He is nothing like the man I had crafted into existence all those years ago, the drawing that I threw away as if the mere sight of it burned me. Before me he stands; he is dying, already, and desperate. I tell myself he cannot hurt me but he is far taller than I am and my back hits the altar. I have nowhere to run.

I do not know this man. I have never spent enough time with any man to know one. He says something to me in a language I do not understand. It sounds like begging but it could be anything, really. Does he know where he is? Does he know what the others will do to him if they find him?

Of all the girls on the island, I am yet to be wounded. In hindsight I will wonder if suffering is a rite of passage for all young women, if girlhood does not exist unless it is stained by the slaughter of your innocence. There is a kind of violence that is inherent in everyone; it exists in me in the form of the woman on my shoulder and yet I have never known what to do with it.

She seethes at me to run from him. An interesting thing about mortals is their capacity for destruction; I was given hands and I have used them for cruelty, to tear up flowers and tapestries and to wound the very island that has done nothing other than nurture me. It is strange, now, that this is the moment my cowardice chooses to rear its head— my hands stay, aching at my sides, unable to move. My voice seals itself in the chasm of my throat; I try to call for one of my sisters but nothing comes out.

For the first time that I remember, I am afraid.

I watch as his expression shifts, desperation morphing into anger and then something punishing as he glares down at me. He must know that this is no stalemate; if begging had gotten him nowhere then he is taller and stronger than I am and really, what need is there for words when you have violence?

Run, girl, run, hisses the woman. I feel the rough edges of the stone dig into my feet, feel the warmth of the altar's candles against the back of my dress. Where to? What place do I have to run to where he would not catch up? If I were to run the stone would cut my skin and I'd bleed a trail for him to find me. I cannot escape him now and I could not outrun him even if I tried.

I open my mouth to scream and his hand comes down across the sides of my face so hard that I lose my balance and stumble sideways. He has the panicked frenzy of a cornered animal. He must know he cannot leave this place. Did he think of that before intruding? Not all land welcomes you and the world is not for your taking. I wonder if he knows that.

"Quiet," he says, and this I understand. "You need to take me off this place."

My face burns from the impact and from the shame. This safe haven has been breached, already— most girls find the men at the shoreline and take them to Circe. This one has made it far enough inland to know where he is and what this means. Everyone knows the rule is that no men make it off the island alive; I love my home but I am selfish and I would not die for it.

He grips my hand. I tell myself that monsters are created out of brutality and the fear of it, and he is only doing this because he is afraid of what this place means for him.

"Let me go," I protest. "I'll let you leave if you let me go."

I don't know if what I say is a lie or not. I only know that I have been made desperate, too, and I want to leave him just as much as he wants to leave the island. I would not betray my home, of course, but I would not die to save it, either.

He blinks at me, studies the girl standing at his mercy. "You're lying."

"You don't know that."

Wrong answer. He twists my hand roughly and turns us around so that he is positioned right behind me, digging his fingernails into my arm with one hand and holding a knife against my throat with the other.

"You get me off this island or I'll slit your throat."

I start crying. It is soundless, a silent shuddering as the knife kisses my jugular. He inhales sharply but does not waver; I'd say desperation has made him violent but I'll never know if he was kind to begin with.

"Come on now," he says. "Move. Take me back to the docks."

The blade digs into my skin as I gasp for air. I am hyperventilating now but he doesn't seem to care. Can he not see that we are as easily killed as him? My legs give way but he holds me aloft; my arm is probably bruised but that means nothing to him.

Enough, the woman says, placing her words before me like cold dead bodies. Do you know what you have to do?

I think of the witch. Goddess, the girls had called her as they dragged the men, soaked and shivering, before her. I realize now that the men had been sacrifices. Expressions of gratitude for the woman who has saved them— Circe is no god but we polish the pedestal we raise her on because she is all we know.

"Goddess, goddess, goddess," I murmur to myself. 

He makes a sound like choking, I wish he would. When I inhale the knife digs deeper into my skin but it throws everything into sharp relief— the air smells of candles burning and I know what I must do.

Girlhood is just like godhood: it is violent, and it requires sacrifice to exist.

My feet find their way back to the ground, heels digging into stone as I anchor myself before Hecate's altar. Every day I have sacrificed to this goddess because it was her son that my mother betrayed the island for, and this is the greatest offering I will ever make to honor her part in my existence.

With my free hand I grasp the blade of the knife and tear it away from my throat. Blood splatters onto the stone from the open cut and I hear him shout in surprise, perhaps startled by the fact that I wounded myself before he could. I cannot take the knife from him but now that his hand on my arm is the only thing caging me I am able to wrench around him towards the table— he grabs the back of my dress the same time I take hold of one of the candles and shove the flame onto his shirt.

He cries out, haloed by fire. Shuddering, I rip myself from his grasp as he turns to clutch at the burning skin. He reaches for me like the man in the drawing with his knife; tears blister my skin as they run down my face. 

I cannot bear to stare at the monster I am slaughtering and yet I cannot tear my eyes away from the height of my violence, and I will not describe to you the exact method with which I kill him but what you need to know is that he dies before the altar in an abhorrent blaze. Smoke claws at the sky like a messenger on its way to tell the entire island of what I have done, of the monster I have made of myself.

"I didn't mean it," I say to myself, over and over again as if to drown out the sounds of his screaming. My eyes are watering and I continue to shudder but I do not blink or move to leave. The woman leans her head on my shoulder and watches with me.

"I didn't mean it," I tell no one. "I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it."

I never say I'm sorry. Maybe I hadn't intended for him to die this way but I know I'd do it again if it ever came to it. It is in my nature to be cruel, after all.

Of all the girls on Aeaea, none of them have never been wounded.

When they find me, I am bleeding and my dress is torn, and this is the moment where I realize I have become one of the girls that show up on the island begging the witch for mercy.

"Naomi." Rushing forth, Circe pulls me into her arms and cradles me like you would a child. I hold on to her, my lifeline, with my blood stained hands and I cry for hours on end until she becomes distant again and tells me it's time to let go.

The older girls take me to the ocean and wash my hands off in the salt water. It stings and I wonder if it was intended as a punishment for the way I handled things. Whatever the case, I do not complain.

"It was an accident," one of my sisters says, "you were defending yourself."

I think of the way I had forced the man's head into the burning flames. It scares me, the extent of my cruelty. I have always known there is something wrong with me but I never expected myself to be so merciless.

"Maybe," I answer. I sink deeper into the sea and imagine that it washes away the memory of his hands on my skin. I imagine that it washes away the violence in me even though I know I was born with it. 

This is what I am, the result of my mother's sin. There will always be something wrong with me no matter how many times I try to drown it out.

          The last monster is one I create from the remains of a god.

NAOMI: It is a violent thing. That is what makes it a monster.

Author's Note . . .

so i did not proofread this... no beta we die like ethan nakamura! HELLO HI, welcome to the prelude of kingdom come! it's still sunday as i'm posting this so i like to think that i've kept my promise to post every sunday until i run out of chapters, sorry this was a little late!!

some things i think i may have failed to convey properly in the prelude so i'll just say it here— naomi is the daughter of one of the girls on aeaea & a son of hecate, but girls on aeaea aren't supposed to fall in love with men because the whole point of the island is that it's a safe haven AWAY from men! this isn't very important to the plot as a whole but it does affect how she perceives herself & the concept of girlhood in her earlier years.

this is a lot shorter than my other preludes (cough heart in hand cough) but all the earlier versions of kingdom come had shorter chapters compared to the rest of my fics so i figured i'd try to keep the word count at roughly 2-3k in this rewrite!

ok that's everything, thank you for reading & i'd appreciate it if you commented to let me know your thoughts <3