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I am. I am the part of her she sacrificed.
“What part?” I ask. Her soft and loving features flicker, like a mask being momentarily lifted. Her face wars with another face, one that’s imperious, distant, and far from human. That other face, at once incomprehensibly beautiful and inescapably brutal, is the true face of the Storm.
She gave me her heart. I took the mother. The lover. The wife. All she kept for herself was the conqueror.My chest grows hollow. That means she gave me up. She gave Pa up. I don’t say it out loud, but the woman hears.
She gave her heart in exchange for power.
A little voice speaks in my head, a childish, petulant voice, one I thought I’d silenced long ago:What power could be more important than me?
She contemplates me at her leisure.The same power you search for.
“Can I talk to her?”
The cruel face drops away entirely, features rearranging themselves and stilling into Ma’s. The woman reaches out a tentative hand, and I step closer, hoping. She cups my cheek.
“Ma?”
It’s a warm and familiar presence that smiles at me through those eyes. I don’t know if it’s truly Ma, but I want to believe.“My little darling.”A single voice, Ma’s voice, whispers half to the still air, half into my mind.
I have no words—I have too many words. Years and years of words get tangled up in my tongue and stumble before they reach my lips. I cup my hand over hers, soaking in her warmth, her love, the strange foreign-familiar feeling of a mother’s touch.
I weep like a baby.
Why did she make such a stupid choice? Why didn’t she choose to stay with me?
“You know. You know, my love. I see your heart; you are of my blood. We do not make peace with the great miseries of the world. We do not forgive injustice. We fight. I loved you, but I never could have stayed.”It hurts. I was never enough for her.“You would have made the same choice.”
My insides grow cold.“I’m not you, Ma.”It’s a familiar thought, but for the first time, I don’t find the comparison in Ma’s favor.
Ma—the shadow of her, at least—grows soft, her lips parting in a bittersweet smile.“You have my strength at least, and I am glad.”
The childhood stories I spun about Ma fade as I stand before her. I’d imagined someone who would fight for me, who would wrap me in her arms, who’d smell a little like cardamom. I drink in all of Ma, knowing we would have butted heads, knowing nothing would have been simple between us, knowing I would have loved her.
Her smile falls and her eyes tense just like mine do before I cry.“Vesper...I meant to come back to you.”
I crumple. “Ma—” The hand against my cheek turns cold. I let go, knowing that when I look up I’ll find Ma replaced by the other face, her features replaced with ones savage and breathtaking.
“Who are you?” I scrub my face dry.
She waits until I meet her eyes, so like Ma’s.
I am the Forgotten.
The things she doesn’t say echo over and under her words, in a thousand borrowed voices:I am the moon I am the shadow of the sun I am creation I am destruction I am monstrous I am unknowable.
The echoes fade, leaving me shivering in the shadow of the giant trees. “What do you want from me?”
She laughs a thousand laughs, some mocking, some joyful.You have shown strength. With eyes unflinching, you faced yourself and embraced all of what you beheld. You found me bound and chose to free me. For all of this, you may ask of me what you desire.
For some reason, I find myself thinking of the old temple in the fifth, of the rubble on the ground, the proto-ikon of the tree in concentric circles. I’d assumed that ancient statue was of the Great King’s other face, but I was wrong.
“You aren’t the Great King. You aren’t his other face, either. You’re not the King of Wrath.”
I am the Forgotten.
“A Great Queen.”
Yes.Her voices ring triumphant.
