The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (36 page)

Across the deserted Gardens, into the centrum, she stopped to peer at the ruins.

The chatelaine wandered in a daze all of that night, knowing it would be her last. Images of destruction, and of the maelstrom—bodies of the huge gods, lifting above the blazing skyline, shattering the dungeon—would never leave her.

She hoped her father was at peace.

Scrambling up the embankment to the River Crane, and onto the promenade, the chatelaine scraped her shin. Pain, blooming, was exquisite. She stood there for a second, focusing on the wound, on her dark fluids spilling out, before peering over the sluggish waters. She wondered how long would it take to drown, and if her body would leave Nowy Solum, floating on the filthy river until it fell off the edge of the world.

Clumsy, fumbling, she began to negotiate the slippery rocks, hands fluttering ahead of her.

A dark and silent funeral barge headed toward the gates. When she was knee deep, she was surprised by the sound of wings, approaching. Turning, she nearly fell.

The cherub, coming from the sky, cried out, “Mother, mother! At last!”

With a gasp, the chatelaine caught her pet, snugly, bringing it close, holding it as tight as she had ever held anything before. She closed her eyes, clinging to the trembling cherub as it folded its wings, afraid her baby might vanish once more.

“I’ve been looking for so long.” The cherub’s breath, hot in her ear. “The things I have seen, mother. The things I have seen.”

The chatelaine stroked the cherub’s head, her sobs diminishing.

Over the shattered silhouette of Nowy Solum, clouds were turning to amber, but these clouds seemed very thin today—the thinnest, in fact, the chatelaine had ever seen. She wondered if she would ever recover from the shock and heartbreak, should she make the foolish choice to continue living.

The cherub was already asleep against her shoulder.

Turning, to make her way back to shore, the chatelaine sighed, and the horizon past Jesthe ruptured with an astonishing patch of blue.

Brent Hayward’s fiction has appeared in several publications and anthologies, including
Horizons SF
,
On Spec
,
ChiZine
, the Tesseracts series, and
Chilling Tales
. In 2006, his story “Phallex Comes Out” was nominated for the StorySouth Million Writers Award as best online story of that year; it received an honourable mention.
Filaria
, his first novel, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2008 and has since garnered solid acclaim.

Born in London, England, raised in Montreal, he currently he lives in Toronto with his family. He can be reached through his LiveJournal at: http://brenth.livejournal.com