Disenchanted

i. a circle of hatred

The day Fury breaks into the world, the crickets do not sing. The crinkled trees are silent, and the air hangs hot and heavy, cloying with the perfume of heat. When a boy stones the pond, his mother hushes him for reasons she cannot understand but on a base level.

The day Fury comes, the sky is the blue shared by a storm’s eye, with the element’s wrath spiraling closer, like some grim afterthought.

The woman of the house holds a refined and aged beauty, strange on her young face. With dignity, she swells and aches, rubs sweet water into the skin of her ankles and eyes, wets her tongue with the sweat on her upper lip. In the heat, her mouth parts just slightly, eyes limpid and dewy and unsettlingly light, too full of water. Hers is a serenity untainted by the honesty behind her house’s walls. Glory revels in the held breath of silence.

And then, Fury comes. She comes with howls and blood, with thrashing and containment and the sweltering, boiling heat, in which her mother’s tears and sweat pool, slide, slide. Her husband is fetched to take his position by the door, and the physicians and doctors and witchlights all rush to put Glory together again.

Fury comes into the world screaming, scream her rage, and she is the aftermath of the battle, as Glory fades out.

In the hall, there is only the whispers of Violence. His heir is here, and the games have begun. Violence takes his daughter from the young witchlight, their curiously unisex face devoid of any beauty or flaw, and suckles her with his finger. Fury gnaws at him, but her eyes are his own, and they glint with the light of copper, proof of the royal line.

Violence commands action, and the witchlights take her away to be raised, and to be fed fat, and strong. Violence calls his servants, and bids them to his evils.

By the next morning, he has met his brother’s wife, a woman with proud jaw and still hands. Her stomach is as large as his wife’s once was, and with a hand at her back, Violence steers his law bound sister through the garden.

In the next night, one marked by the frivolous and flighty blue moon, Wrath and Fate are born. Destiny has run her course, and falls into the background, her duty as a mistress served. The witchlights lead her to some far-off room, in a castle by the sea. The witchlights take the twins now, and leave them with Fury, to nurture and raise, and Violence is left with little else to do, but simmer.

There are, as always, cracks in his plan. Wrath grows the fastest, and by the time the three of them are eight, he has learned to smash in a human skull with his large, crooked fingers. His eyes shine the same copper as Fury’s, though Fate’s have been melded a sweet silver. Fury grows in height as quickly as she grows in hate, with her hatred pointed towards Wrath’s heart. Fate, who is loathed by Wrath and conspires with Fury, skitters between the two with his sneaky fingers and trickster’s smile.

And so the children grow, the two princes and a duchess, while Violence ponders, watches, and waits for the day he might explode.