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She accepts my arms and my body as I work to ensure every sharp edge is retracted so she is not hurt by being close to me. She lies wrapped in my arms, and I ask her the question which at first did not seem worth asking. I assumed I knew what led to this, but perhaps I did not.
“Why did they do this to you?”
There is no possible answer I would take as reasonable, but I want to know the twisted thought that brings these vicious humans to such lengths of destruction. Scythkin fight to claim territory, freshly hatched broodkin will consume one another, and our matriarchs do battle to protect their clutches when they are laid, but we do not do… this. We do not weaken one another and leave them to slow deaths. We do not put artistry and ceremony into misery and torture. We do not take such obvious pleasure in it. They wanted her to die slowly. They wanted her to be aware of her passing, for it to be solitary and painful.
“My mother was condemned. Killed by Trelok. She was pregnant with me. I was supposed to die with her, but he cut me from her womb before I died and gave me to one of his women to raise as a sacrifice.”
“What was your mother’s crime?”
“She fell pregnant by another man. One of the hunters from the village around the mountain.”
“There’s another village nearby?”
“Yes. Trelok hates them. They don’t come to our side because Hyrrm protects us from him. When he found she was pregnant, he tried to kill her. She ran and she hid. But he found her just before I was born, and he killed her in front of the tribe. He was going to kill me too. But Mira, the woman who raised me, she had milk from a baby she lost. She asked to keep me to relieve her supply. Trelok agreed, but he said I would be sacrificed to Hyrrm. But Hyrrm only accepts virgins. And they saw you mate with me. So he said I should be sacrificed to the ancestors.”
I listen to her story, marveling at the simple nastiness of it. If not for me, she would have been thrown into a volcano. I have interfered in this world already, and I do not regret it one bit. This girl never had a chance. She was captive from birth, stolen from her true father, her mother murdered, her soul nearly crushed by the weight of being sacrifice. Has she ever known a day of love in her life? The woman who saved her life did not save her from the death the tribe decided for her.
“I am sorry.”
Those three words are not enough. I am not sorry. I am furious. I am outraged. I am filled with the desire to utterly destroy the people who hurt this sweet girl who did not know how to fight, who was never taught that she could make a decision of her own. They broke her so thoroughly she now accepts her death and even yearns for it.
Krave tells me that everything that is now happening has happened before. So, in the original timeline of Earth, she was thrown into a volcano. She was cooked alive, hurled to her death for the crime of ever having been conceived. I have changed history by saving her, I did the one thing Krave told me explicitly not to do down here on this planet. Oh well. He is used to me doing things he explicitly told me not to do.
“What are you sorry for?” She looks at me, thoroughly confused.
“I am sorry they treated you so badly,” I say. “I’m sorry you never learned how beautiful you are, how much you are worth, how charmed you are in every way.”
A small smile appears on her lips, then flees almost immediately.
“You shouldn’t apologize,” she says. “None of this is your fault.”
She’s wrong. Everything which has happened since I arrived on this planet has been my fault. And the trouble is only going to grow. I am a stone thrown into a calm pond. The ripples of my existence are going to keep traveling forever outward no matter what I do. In the original Earth timeline, this woman should have died. Or perhaps not. There is no way to know. There are so many tendrils of cause and effect, one wound around the other. I have already set a million events in motion which would otherwise never have happened. It’s not possible to remove myself from this net of effects. However, I can try to minimize my impact, and hope that Krave comes for us soon.
“What happens if your tribe discovers that you did not die?”
“If they find me alive, they will stone me.”
It takes me a moment to search the recesses of my mind. Krave made us study human history when we became guardians of the far flung colony which exists many thousands of years in the future. She is making reference to a particularly barbaric practice where a human, who could be easily dispatched in a matter of seconds with a blade, is instead set upon with rocks thrown by others, hitting them until they die. It is a painful method of death, much like being left in this cave was, designed to make the end as long and frightening as possible. Once again, I feel a surge of hatred rush through me. It takes real effort to not let the sharp ridges of my body rise and accidentally hurt her.
