Callisto

Paths

Father-Mother sat silently in their tent, listening only to the gradually dying braziers of azure flame that flanked them.

Their eyes had been closed since making it back to their prayer mat. They had silently offered a final blessing to the Great Spirit before crouching with great pain in a pose of grim meditation. Their reverie was broken only by the raspy, fragmented breaths from their mouth – remnants of the pain radiating from their open wound. Their eyes had opened only once since their coming – seeing the crimson snake uncoiling from their belly to pool on the floor and the room growing ever darker. It was like a spectral entity was quietly snuffing out the light of the candles.

"To end," they said to no one. "Like this."

The words caused a groan of pain to shiver up their gullet, yet they swallowed the blood that congealed there in a great lump.

No visions had come since they returned from the site of the battle-that-was-not. They concentrated on the flames, willing them to take flight and take the body of this Elder with them. But no pictures swam within their head. No music played to please their ears. There was only the gradual shift into nothingness. Into a world where only the dark remained.

Then they heard it: the flap of their tent opened, and someone walked inside.

Those feet were strong on the earth. They tread the sands like one born within them.

Father-Mother opened their eyes, though they did not gaze upon the visitor's face.

"So," they said. "You have come."

The girl said nothing. She simply stood there, her toes touching the pooling blood of her Elder.

Father-Mother fingered the blade in their sleeve. But though their will was strong, the strength to let it fly was simply not there. Their fingers fumbled and shook like the legs of a newborn calf. The futility of the situation was almost laughable.

"How shall you do it?" they asked her, breath growing heavier. "Shall my head leave my shoulders first? Or shall I be flayed in the marketplace, my entrails draped around my neck?"

Only then did they hear the girl's voice.

"You wish to die, Father-Mother?"

There was power in that tone. Something tinged with primal rage. Father-Mother knew, then, that she had grown strong.

"You always did ask pointless questions," Father-Mother chuckled. "I, your enemy, sit here defenseless. I, the architect of all your pain, lay before you, debased and defeated. Your traitor brother saw to that. And you have come to finish the work begun by his hands."

They felt their whole body shake, spurred on by their own words. The world beyond waited. They would die a warrior's death, and the Great Spirit would still accept them.

"So how shall you do it, Rain-Born of the Snake?" They asked. "How shall you walk the final step of your path?"

They felt the girl lean in close, and they shut their eyes abruptly. They could not look at that face that had so haunted their dreams in countless visions of a future that now would never be.

"Why?" Was all she asked. "Why have you done this?"

Father-Mother's eyes refused to open. They would not look at that face.

"You ask that?" they spat. "Fate is cruel, Rain-Born. We thought it was always a web spun by a spider, wracked by the winds, yet always solid. Immovable. Our eyes saw the thread under our feet, we read the signs, and the Hanakh danced to our commands. But they were never truly our words that the people followed. So long were we focused on the threads of Fate that we never saw the true webspinnner."