fucking incredible

Marajoara

Reluctantly, you inform your cousins that you intend to take the Anajás River down to Marajoara, an island at the mouth of the Amazon. You have become adept at using the portals in the water's depths to travel quickly across the river systems, and so have they, but even so they complain. It's too far; it's too close to the ocean; it's too narrow. You argue that it's been ages since you visited what was once a fledgling city digging itself out of the flood waters, so won’t it be interesting to see what you've missed? You mention the women, dangling the idea like a fresh cut of meat, and predictably a few of them take to the bait like the mongrels they are.

You’re not even trying to convince them to come with you, not really, but you do not want Maocir to accuse you of trying to sneak away. He will bark it like a joke through the smile of a threat and the idea itself has you hissing through damage control before you've even turned north.

Maocir insists on accompanying you, as he always seems to. As if to make some grand show of your loyalty, he wrestles you to the ground in front of the others. You don't have to understand why he does it to understand that it is not worth putting up an honest fight. It's better he takes his wins in public, anyway; he remains pacified for longer.

It is the middle of the wet season and the river rushes headlong towards the ocean, driven by rains hailing ever ceaselessly down from the grand river in the sky. You shed your animal bodies and steal a boat from upriver, where few live but several fishing lanes have been erected.

There, atop a large flat expanse in a series of tiered hills, is a celebration bursting at the seams of a longhouse. There is a brief respite where the sky takes a shaky breath in between her tears and the humans are taking advantage of it. Maocir goes up first. You all have a way of smiling and slipping slick as oil around anyone who might question you, but it's harder with multiple of you in tow. Personally, you think your softer touch is better suited to this, but it's not your call.

Language is never a barrier. Though there are hundreds of languages and dialects that change in the blink of an eye every time you return to the Gated Place, the river people are as connected to the water as any of you. The mother of the water must connect you enough to communicate, to bridge the gap. You can hear the words physically spoken, but superimposed is the understanding between you. The humans don't seem to notice. It just adds to the enchantment they fall under in your presence, not so different from the jaguar turning its coarse chuffing into a high-lilting mimicry of agutí. Even you sink deeper into the water at the sight of the big cats, but it's impossible not to watch as they speak to their prey. The agutí have the good sense to be suspicious, trying to trick their way out of danger, but the jaguars don’t have your shapeshifting advantage. Not usually, anyway. 

You join the revelers inside, twirling around a central fire. It’s easy to watch and pick up what this new or adjusted style of dance is, but you like how consistently it always tells the story of a beauty coquettishly flaunting herself, daring you to follow, to chase. You like the push and pull. You like that there is no touching until she deigns you worthy, electricity shooting between you and drawing you closer and closer. It feels like the mating dances of the birds. Maocir has already spirited some young thing away into the dark, but you don’t find it fun without the playfulness, without the permission. 

You are breathless and feeling ready to make your ask when the people around you tense, abruptly stopping their movements and gesturing with reverence toward a figure behind you. The music continues and as you turn you are pinned in place by eyes so emerald as to rival the new growth of the fall, so sharp as to cut down towering trees with a glance. 

Child of the river, she does not say. She is outfitted more ostentatiously than even the partying women, her tanga plate ornate with a snake winding meticulously around itself. Colorful clay beads adorn her wrists, her hair. You notice that she does not seem to cast a shadow in the flickering firelight, and you suddenly understand the reverence. 

There is a spirit in her.

Follow me, she does not say. So you do. 

You hear one of your cousin’s crude voices jeering behind you but, for the first time in a long time, you are not particularly worried about what they think. Here are the things that they care about: a beautiful woman leading you, a special privilege being afforded to you. But this isn’t some sort of social power play, even if Maocir decides to interpret it as such. This has nothing to do with them. There are hooks digging deep into your limbs, pulling you forward, and you have no choice but to abide. 

You are led up a hill. The path is lined with stones and flush with undergrowth on both sides, small plants that find eager purchase among disturbed earth. The moon is high and bright in her arch across the sky, illuminating the hill as if it were but a fuzzy day, sparse as it is with trees to cast shadows across the ground. There is only your own, tumbling its way back down the clay steps. You can see small clusters of men and women peering up, whispering to each other, and you feel a sudden pang of self-consciousness. 

You approach a circular hut, the door high and arched, much different from the buildings below. The woman leading you steps aside to beckon you in. The air is heavy and aromatic and there is a low fire burning, smoke pouring clumsily out of the hole in the roof. You hesitate. The woman gestures to you impatiently. You go inside. 

It’s more plain than you might have expected but it is an armory of healing implements, bursting with things that are a bit unfamiliar to you in form but not in function. She seems too young to be in charge of all of this but, then again, she has no shadow and yet seems perfectly healthy. She communicates like you. She is something else. 

She touches your arm to turn you to her and her eyelids flutter, gaze flashing rapidly between the piercing emerald of before and the deep, dark bottom of the river, all movement but no light. You press fingertips to her jaw and stare, looking for a god, for your god, looking for where the mother of the water sits slick and smug beneath the skin of this woman. The ancient waters fill up her veins and marrow like a fire burning through the core of a tree, leaving it somehow alive and standing but fundamentally changed.

The woman grabs you by the back of the neck and pulls you down to press a firm kiss to your lips. Her grip is shockingly unyielding. You feel your consciousness being pulled into her and suddenly you are no longer a human-thing standing in a hut on an island at the mouth of the river. Instead you are a snake-thing, curled up and frightened and somehow miniscule before a creature larger than the world should ever hold. Her shimmering scales are as black as night, her eyes burning, powerful and unpredictable, like wildfire. The vast nothingness that surrounds you—without sound or light or space or distance beyond the incongruent existence of you-and-her—is so momentarily overwhelming that it is as if your every scale and muscle is trying to tremble apart into nothing.

Despite her lifelong distance you can feel a cruel fondness radiating through this strange bond between you, sharper than anything you recognize. You are but a small piece of a small clutch, one she molded from mud and viscera with a single purpose. You have persisted where many of those children have failed, and though you do not seem to remember what she made you for, she is proud.

This is new information to you, slipped into your head almost carelessly.

You should feel reverent. This is the mother of the waters holding counsel with you, this is the creature that—as far as you are concerned—is the most important force propelling the heart of the rainforest forward, but behind your fear there is a mounting anger. Her presence is ever-absent in the Gated Place, nothing but a thin whisper that reverberates down the hollow halls. If she made you, if she called you home, she should have left you instructions. Directions. Anything but a vague sense of snakes-that-came-before whose thoughts and feelings are impossible to parse. 

The massive serpent moves closer to you like a child inspecting an ant. She scents the air with a cavernous hissssssssss that you echo without at all meaning to, pulling just slightly away. 

Pathetic thing, she doesn't tell you, oozing with pity. I forgot about that prison centuries ago. She tilts her head very slightly, seeming to consider you. Did you ever wonder at your superior control of the water?

Instead of a vast nothingness you are now on a small boat, both of you cast inside your human guises and staring out over a large expanse of water. The moon is a fair-faced reflection, drawing your eyes toward another vessel farther out with two men crouched inside. The woman takes one step out over the water before collapsing into it, form shifting the moment her flesh falls beneath. The water that carries the distant boat begins to roil wildly, bouncing them back and forth. Their shouts are only momentary before they capsize.

They do not surface even as the river calms, even as the boat floats placidly away. 

You don’t know what those men did to strike the mother of the water’s ire, but you’ve seen men be careless with the creatures of the forest, seen them be cruel; you’ve done this very thing. Your pink-skinned river dolphin cousins might jostle and terrify, but they cannot command the water to deliver humans into its waiting embrace, not like you. It didn't occur to you to ever question why.

Eventually, the woman hauls herself back up onto the boat, dripping wet and grinning like violence. “That is how we treat threats,” she says, in words you recognize out loud this time. “I see now my mistake, putting you in charge of things that don’t hurt me.”

The woman lays back, swinging her legs out over the side of the boat. She looks like a wet rag laid out as she lounges. It's not exactly a pretty sight, but it captivates you nonetheless. “When the Marajo asked me to keep their worst ancestors from re-entering the life cycle, it was simple to pick a room and lock it. I made you and your siblings to babysit, but I made you too protective.” She turns to you, ripping a sharp nail down your jaw. “Too sweet.”

You wince away, mind racing. “There was no one there when I came through,” you say. “There was no one watching.” When you followed the call home through the gate, you emerged from the water not as a predator, but as a child in need of guidance. 

The mother of the water is far sharper than the woman whose body she inhabits. She smiles, all teeth, though it is distinctly devoid of humor or happiness. “By the time you heeded the call, the Marajo had already killed your siblings and stolen their magic. They learned how to get through. How to change shape.”

It's hard to imagine human spirits so lacking fear of anacondas as to overpower them, but if your siblings looked like humans out of courtesy or favor, then of course. Death is a simple fact of the forest, but it seems like so much more to them, these humans, like something to rally against or to shove others into as if to create a barrier. Frightened or furious, they distract death with offerings, poor souls sent early in their stead so that they may walk the world just a little longer. That humans would ask a god to manipulate death in punishment is… stunning in its audacity but not, you suppose, surprising. That the modified few would resent being denied access to the world makes sense. That they might see you, ignorant of your role, and take you in to raise and to mold and to laugh at is… 

“I’m a pet,” you say. That has to be it. Like an orphaned jaguar kitten found and stolen as a curiosity, you were immediately indebted to the banished Marajo through the lack of your death. 

Her expression is pitying again. “I made you from their blood. Unless they harm me, you aren’t compelled to reign them in.”

You bear the weight of your bonds like fallen tree trunks across your chest. If the mother made your body from the Marajo, how could you possibly have bit the hand that feeds? Yes, she made a mistake. 

It is both a weak relief and a bitter embarrassment to know that you were not, in fact, supposed to be following Maocir all this time. Equally is it impossible to take comfort in the mother's implication that it was not entirely your fault.

“I am going to change you,“ the mother of the water declares, hoisting herself up, “But when I do, you will be on your own. I have grander things to worry about than stray spirits. The other river guardians have been rumbling, and I need to prepare us for what the humans are going to bring.”

You don’t understand and are not given the opportunity to ask. She holds up the meat of her palm below her thumb. She commands: “Bite.” 

You must run your tongue over the dull human bones that fill your mouth in order to dissolve them into something better suited to this request. It is strangely intimate to have the meat of this woman's hand sliding past your lips only to snag on rows of hooks, rear-facing teeth built to insure that prey, once caught, was hard pressed to escape. When you sink down and pull, feeling fissures of blood pushing their way into your mouth, the mother of the water looks at you sternly for a moment before demanding, “Release.” No sooner is her hand unhooked than it is she smearing a bloody line from the corner of your mouth to the cut she tore above your jaw. It is not the taste of iron and salt that sits heavy on your tongue but instead of fresh water filtered through root systems and algae, thin and sharp and bright. Where it touches your open wound you can feel it invading, rushing in, lighting you up from the inside. You inhale shakily. Something inside you is reset.

“Since you are so connected to humans,” the mother of the water says, sounding unhappy, “You will protect them now.”

Despite the small span of the woman’s hands, the mother flattens her borrowed palm against your face. “You are still mine, your magic is still borne from my waters, but I am trusting you to finish this. Destroy the human spirits that were locked away. Chase them out, and I’ll bar them from my realm. This is my task for you.” 

She pulls her palm away and cups it in front of her, her hand filling with water that soon glows to heal the jagged punctures from your teeth. You gather a palmful and do the same, washing away the strange water-blood that clings greedily to your face. You didn’t know how to do this before, but she’s just shown you. It shouldn't be so simple, but it is. 

You are tugged suddenly backwards out of the boat, bait on a hook. You fall into the water, into the echoless chamber of nothingness, into your human body in a hut on an island at the mouth of the river. The woman’s lips are pressed to yours as if not a moment has passed and you pull her closer by the swell of her hips. It is half instinct and half, you think, this thing that makes you do whatever she wants before the thought even bubbles to the surface.

Let us make your false master jealous, she does not say, and something about that makes you hideously, furiously acquiescent. You’ll do whatever she asks if it means making Maocir even the slightest bit unhappy. She laughs as she leads you further into the room. 

When you return to the party below, Maocir is staring at you, eyes reflecting the firelight and its heat. He can tell something has changed, that the balance has shifted, and his weight is on the balls of his feet as he decides what to do next.

What is it? You can't look so different from having learned (some of, you're sure) the truth. He's grown so used to you looking at him in anticipation of some need or mood, is it so very obvious now that you've the eyes of an enemy instead? It's not as if you're blazing with hate and rage, you are not incandescent with violence the way he sometimes is, but perhaps the mother of the water has lended you her snake form's wildfire eyes to hone in on a target. 

You're too far away to run and catch him, even if you jumped down the hill and hurt your ankles in the process. He will disappear the moment he hits the water; he's a much faster swimmer than you. The mother of the water steps up beside you, laying a hand on your arm, and whatever he sees on her human face is enough to send him sprinting to the dock. One of your other cousins notices and, glancing at you in confusion, follows. 

Moacir knows that this human woman contains the mother of the water, the creature that imprisoned him. He must.

You worry about being able to find them now that they know to run from you. You worry even more that Maocir will rally them to kill you before you even get the chance. The mother leans up to whisper in your ear, pointing down at the remaining cousin that accompanied you. “Start there.”

“What happens to his soul,” you ask, “If it won't travel back behind the gate?” You don't really understand the process of souls traveling from one realm to the next. For all the mother demands of you, she gives very little by way of explanation. 

“Does it matter?”

You suppose it doesn’t.

You grab her wrist before she can turn away. “And your realm? The gates lead to more than just the… door to the Marajo?”

The expression on her face is impatient now, but she offers a tight smile. “Worry about your task. When you are done, maybe I will invite you through.”

It's a non-answer to questions she is not giving you the opportunity to ask, but you are given the impression that you are pushing your luck. You give her a nod, respectful once again, and you descend down a path that feels like you haven't touched it in days.

When you approach your cousin, it is with purpose and a firm clap of a hand on his shoulder. He looks up with surprise and irritation. There is a young woman wrapped in his arms, a girl really, and her eyes are too glazed for her to have had any meaningful say in being there. The blood-water that the mother put into you burns with the knowledge of this infraction. Your cousin is a danger, he intends to hurt this girl, this child of the river, and it is your responsibility to stop him. You feel like you ought to be disturbed by how dispassionately this directive rings in your bones.

You knew it was wrong, before, this use of magic. You spoke up against it, to great amusement and then great irritation, but you didn't have—the strength? The inclination? To do anything about it. Who were you to punish your older cousins? What right did you have?

You smile pleasantly, shoving your thoughts down into the depths. This, at least, is familiar. “Maocir said we go.” 

Your cousin looks around and, seeing that you are the last two there, growls. “I'm busy. I'll meet you when I'm done.”

You shift your weight, shrugging playfully. “You know how he's been,” you say, looking around for a matronly sort. You pull her attention to you, to your cousin, to the girl, and immediately she comes forward. “You really want to test him?”

Maocir hasn't been much worse than usual, not really, but he's been more domineering to the other cousins instead of just to you. He's getting too comfortable being in charge and, though they are all unhappy about it, no one is willing to challenge him. 

Your cousin steps away, groaning, and the older woman’s attention slips off you both like broken water tension. You lead your cousin away with a hand on his back while he curses a furious diatribe; it's easy to let him focus on that, on his irritation directed at your common enemy. It takes until you're almost at the dock for him to realize there's no one there.

You wrap an arm around his neck to steady it and all at once you are around him, bearing down with the full force of your snake body until he tumbles clumsily into the river. He tries to shift, to break your grip, but with each thrash and breath you hold tighter until it is impossible. You're made for this. You can feel the blood stagnate under his skin, constricted too much to move, and his heart stutters in confusion.

When his spirit leaves, it is not the same as simply killing an animal. Whatever else he is, whatever his previously human soul has become, it is corrupted by magic it was never supposed to have gained access to. Now, there is nowhere left in the world for it to return. You understand that the mother of the water is keeping her word to the Marajo in the best way that she can. These ancestors will not be returning to the life cycle. Not again. Not in any way that matters. 

The Gate

When you slip through the gate into the bleached-bone hallways of what was once your home, it is with a horrible dread curling like electric eels in your gut. It used to be more difficult, propelling yourself far enough below the water to access this place, but after so many years (and years and years) of practice, it is as simple as shutting off your brain and stepping through a door. It used to be graceless, too, the way you stumbled in, but you shift as you enter now, one foot preceding you as you step delicately through.

You have a curved blade already curled in one palm because you are not stupid, and it is with full knowledge of who your cousin is that you have it held up protectively to catch Maocir’s club before it smashes into your face, your arm dropping several inches with the force of the hit. Your blade catches hard into the polished wood and you wrench it back, kicking out to strike Maocir’s hands.

It is not enough to fully release his grip but it's enough to wrench the club away. You fling it with an ugly grunt and toss both it and the blade across the room with a dull clatter against the floor. 

Maocir is upon you like a devil, as he ever is, all weight and fury and grabbing hands that dig dark bruises into flesh. He tries to grapple you, to pull you to the ground, but for the first time in many-many years you do not let him. A river dolphin has nothing on an anaconda. Not in this. 

Over and over he attempts to toss you down, trying to make the ground do the hard work for him, but he might as well be grabbing slippery fish with human hands for all he manages to keep a hold on you. This is not like any other fight, this is not like any other time, and you understand that the only way to get what you want from this man is to avoid engaging him at all. Oh how you wish you could imagine digging your thumbs into his eye sockets until they squelched, imagine staining this too-white floor with bloody imprints of his face as you stamped his shocked-and-furious expression over and over into the ground. You wish you could will your limbs into attacking him with intention, into going for the kill. Maocir had, after all; that club had been angled at just the right height to smash your face back through the portal it came through, likely doing enough damage to make you drown. What an embarrassing way to die. You wish you could imagine humiliating him with such a stupid death. 

While this prison has granted many things to the banished Marajo, it has never once graced you with a wish that came true. 

Maocir is not a patient or obliging man, but neither is he particularly wasteful. He only tolerates your refusal to fight him for so long before he disengages. You take the opportunity to bounce back on anxious feet to put distance between you. 

His sneer is a palpable weight. It is the heat bearing down on the sun-baked crust of the arid north during the dry season, oppressive and searing, and after so many years your skin is burnt dark beneath the ever-present sting.

“Moa,” you say, over-familiar and lacking the respect he's always demanded of you.

“Itiri,” he offers, his tone sickly-sweet around the mocking diminutive of your name.

It is not a question when you say: “You always knew.” It is not bitterness that drives: “You tricked me from the beginning.”

Maocir laughs, head back and mouth wide, his body melting into something completely unconcerned with your presence. You are picking up halfway through a conversation that never happened but still he understands, of course he does, because he knows you. “Why wouldn't I? You came through willing to trust anyone who seemed confident.” He adopts a mocking pout. “Poor baby.”

“Anacondas aren't raised,” you snap, but it's not much of a retort. You had needed guidance, and there was only this man willing to give it. You begin to move. Maocir follows in a circular, assessing dance.

“All the more embarrassing for you to be so desperate for me,” he says. You are flooded by the sense-memory of his hand palming the back of your head, his thumb hooked into the divot behind your ear like a boat returning to its place at the dock. You swallow. You're not here for him to talk down to you like he always has.

“The mother did you a service, giving you this place to rest. She did your people a favor. Why couldn't you be grateful?”

Maocir laughs again, but this one is dry and doesn't come anywhere near his eyes. “My mother was a fucking coward who couldn't even put me down herself. That they put her back in charge after everything I did for that village is a disgrace.”

You don't know what he's talking about. You meant the mother of the water, not whatever poor human was responsible for embodying Maocir’s foul spirit into the material plane. You pause in the corkscrew path that is bringing you closer-and-closer. “That's it? All your treachery and violence just because your mother didn't like you?” It feels a lot like disappointment in your chest, this pang of disbelief. Though he is an ever-present phantom to you—the hands that hold you down even when he isn’t there to do it himself—and though he has been so twisted by the mother’s magic as to be incapable of further recycling, he is still just a human man with silly, human motivations. “No one likes you, Moacir. I don’t know why this is a surprise.”

Moacir's expression twitches. He has never once talked about his life as a human, about any sort of history. It would have been too obvious a clue. You suspect he's realizing his mistake. 

“You’ve always disgusted me, Itiri,” he deflects. “For all you claim to be the snake you shift into, you are desperate for someone to follow.” He is aborting your avoidant dance, stepping directly towards you, and you take a step back. “So what, you've replaced me with a spirit that doesn't give a shit about you?” Another step forward, another step back. “I shaped you into what you are with my own two hands.”

And you know exactly what those hands are capable of. The humans may fall for his charms, but he is nothing but a disease to you, a pestilence, something buzzing and hideous. Casual violence is kind in comparison to all the things he might do. 

It seems the mother made him jealous indeed. 

You take a steadying breath. “I was made to keep you and the cousins in line. Now that I know, I intend to do just that.”

A step forward, a step back, a step forward, a step back, a step forward and you are backed up to a wall, incapable of further retreat. Maocir’s amusement has twisted into something so molten and furious that you fear it might set you alight. His hands clench. You imagine that they are desperate to be clutched around your throat.

It's not that you are afraid of him, exactly. It's just that you know he is willing to do anything to put you in your place. You have persisted (because what else was there to do) and you will continue to do so (because now you know what else) but that doesn't change all the ways Maocir has burned his way into you or how you are habituated to heeding him. There is no desire in your body to surrender. Still, fighting him in earnest is an unfamiliar concept that you are struggling to put into action.

“Did everyone leave?” There is no heat of presence in this place. It is as cold as the tomb it was intended to be.

“Obviously,” Maocir hisses.

You sigh. “You'll lead them against me, then?”

The disrespectful cluck of his tongue grates against your nerves. “You're not nearly worth the effort you think you are,” he says. “I'm about as worried now as I was when you first crawled through that gate. You're a pliable little worm and I know,” he says with a leer, “I know I've made my mark on you, Itiri. You aren't killing me today or in a thousand years.”

He isn't even wrong. But, “I will exterminate each and every one of you. You are perversions of the river’s magic. No matter how slowly, I will finish this.”

You could theoretically overwhelm and distract him long enough to kill him. You know you could. As much as he knows you, you know him, and you are intimately familiar with how he uses this human form. 

The river dolphins don't have dominion over the mother of the water’s powers like you do. Theirs is a tenuous hold, stolen regalia, an ability to siphon the magic of the river but not to embody it. You have every ability to serve as the warden and executioner that the mother has asked you to be—except that you have been under this man's thumb since you were old enough to be fully embodied. 

This will take time.

The other cousins, though? You have no concern about your ability to snuff them out. There are a handful you are certain could even be threatened into behaving for the time being, lazy and self-serving as they are. There would be no love lost. Despite how you have all heeded Maocir at every turn, the others are not loyal to him, and you hold half their regard for the way you can withstand his tempest. 

Simple human men with simple human motivations. 

You sidestep back towards the gate, not remotely interested in retrieving your blade from across the room. Let Maocir keep it as a trophy for all you care, there is no way he's touching you again today. “She'll seal this place soon. You should consider leaving before you lose the choice.” 

“That's it?” Maocir straightens up, echoing your previous incredulity. “You just wanted to chat?”

You haven't turned away from him, so you feel the pull and buzz of the portal touching your outstretched fingertips. It hums with the knowledge of where you’d rather be. “I wanted to hear it from you,” you tell him. You trust the mother of the water only as much as your body dictates you do and it is not so different from Maocir’s hold. “It's foolish, but I felt I owed–” you pause. You don’t owe this man anything. “I thought I should.”

You fall backwards through the portal and it is only because you still have not turned away that you see some ugly and complicated expression overcome Maocir’s face. You have no way to know what it means. It doesn't matter. You got what you came for.

Kuhikugu

You are inhabiting the Upper Xingu, having heard stories of river dolphins that sound horrible enough to be your cousins, and you’ve fallen in love with a man.

Maybe love isn’t correct; you wouldn’t know. But you are obsessed with him, haunting the choked river and dense forest where he sings. You like that about these people. There is a designated shaman to commune with the beyond and specific spells that ride on the individual spirits that grace him. He borrows power, with permission. You are not used to humans being humble with their ability to take.

His practices, which cultivate the relationships on which his spells rely, are ritualistic to draw spirits’ vain attention but not overly venerating to the point of detachment. He seems to fully believe that if he respects the spirits, they will respect him back, wary though he may be of the forest and what creeps out of it. That blind faith is charming, in its own way. 

You watch him from a distance, sometimes lulled into quiet dozing in the water, and occasionally you sneak up to where the treeline gives way to farmland to catch a glimpse of his people. They’re not particularly raucous, not like the tribes you can slip easily into with the distraction of music and movement, but you’re endeared to the way their children sprint and play like wild things, the way they let embarrassment serve as its own corrective punishment. There is no hostility here that you can see, nothing more than petty grievance. You watch with rapt attention as the men tend the earth, sun on their skin, and you notice that even your shaman’s specialty does not preclude him from the menial work. You sink into a human form, belly flat against a tree branch, and watch every minute movement like ripples in the water. 

You don’t quite realize why you’re so intent on studying them until it occurs to you to court this man. Not really, not like the humans do it, but you want to give him a gift. Gifts, maybe. You travel the river system in search of something novel and useful, something he wouldn’t easily get nearby, when you land amongst the Wauja. 

Personally, you dislike them. You feel like they open themselves too easily to be taken advantage of, composing a complicated social strata based on spirits that hold their shadows hostage in exchange for ceremony and fineries. You see the spirits that are attached to these people, the serpents and the cats and anything monstrous enough to cause a fright, and they’re hideous to you. They are fat and mean and gorged on attention, each of them lacking any modesty or connection to the honesty of the life cycle. The smell-taste sits heavy and acrid in your mouth like too-sweet rot-death baking untouched in the wet heat. 

You don’t feel bad for intercepting a ransom. You slip in, curling around some sick fool and pulsing time and strength through their blood. You still allow the twisted arassari bird to take the credit, its spirit dissolving into something intangible to commune with the shaman, but its high pitched tsee-eet, tsee-eet sneeting follows you loudly to call its offense. You take your spoils in the form of fine pottery and, when no one is looking, you spirit it away into a stolen boat to travel back. 

You leave the gift in the clearing where he practices, a splash of water in your harried descent drawing his attention. You watch, just-eyes visible, as he warily inspects the pottery and looks out into the trees, then back to the village. It occurs to you, belatedly, that he might just see this as a gift from another human, and for some reason that pulses a petulant rage through your lungs.

You continue to bring him things, smaller gifts now, and you can see the confusion taking his gaze further and further away from the village. Good. You drop prey from the canopy, noticing how his people barely eat anything that isn’t from the earth or river, and he hardly knows what to do with it. You think only the context of the other gifts makes it seem like anything other than a threat. He sings songs to draw you out, question and accusation in equal measure trilling through words you mostly-know but only understand by virtue of your strange river magic. You’re too busy luxuriating in the smug pleasure of being sought out to even think about answering. 

He calls for you. He doesn’t know who or what you are, but he calls for you. He has a wife, some sweet-faced woman who helps with his practice, but he takes extra evenings in the hot, dry months to call for you.

It's only as he seems to grow tired of asking that you decide to meet with him. It has to be with a purpose, not just you being as greedy as the arassari for his attention, so you decide to be his spirit of healing. You are not much—a failed guard, a contradictory protector, an inadequate hunter—but healing is a power the mother of the water shares with you and you are willing to share it with this man. 

You approach him as a snake one evening, slipping out of the water while his back is turned. You feel fat and clumsy on land in a way that doesn’t usually make you self-conscious until his rattle stops. His attention is rapt on you, and you make wide, intentional curves with your body as you try to make it obvious you are not just some dumb snake going somewhere you should not. 

He asks after you, wary but steadfast, and you feel a mean fondness bubbling up. He tries and fails to not be afraid—you are, after all, a monster of story and legend, a massive serpent with magic shimmering through your scales—and he takes an involuntary step back. In a moment you trip him, shifting into a man as you slide over and above with hands landing with a smack of finality on either side of his face. You are flush with resplendent pride at your own maneuver. 

He’s panting, breath punched out from being taken directly to the ground, and the fear-awe rattling through his chest and fanning out from his lilypad pupils is delicious. This is the cruel part of the mother, of the cousins, that sits like a small pool in your chest, never able to mix or suffuse the rest of you. It’s disparate and difficult not to drink from when it spills over but even so, you are not your cousins. Your grin is sharp and you are pulsing with smug desire but you make it a point not to touch him, not to take anything that isn’t freely given. All he’s offered so far is his attention. You most certainly have that.

He brings you stories and you meet him in his clearing, sitting cross-legged across from each other as you tell him what you know. There are some things that are not so much spirits as predators too small to ever see, tiny invaders that hide from sight, but that's almost the same as a spirit to a human. You struggle for some time to find an understanding that is functionally helpful between the two of you. He is round-faced and intent, skin dark brown like bark returning to the earth, and you want to pull him apart with blunt fingers into crumbling pieces that fall into your lap. You want to make a mess of him. 

You don’t know how to lend your magic but you figure it out, manifesting it in the way the mother of the water showed you, all intention-and-bravado. Soon you’re blessing balls of flickering light into his hands, sharing your magic with him like a prayer and an intention, and he is able to do the impossible job set before him.

His people do not like spirits attending their ceremonies, in your name though they may be. You would just as well wander into his home and touch hands to eyes, easy as you please, but there is a protocol here, and he's nervous of how easily you lend yourself. Even now, he thinks it might be a trick. You do everything in your power to show him that it's not. 

You imagine holding him too-close. You imagine biting down and pulling him into the depths, claiming him as your own and chasing the other spirits away. You do neither but you do spend your time with him, too much time, and you refuse to feel bad about it. You're protecting humans, after all, fulfilling the intention the river mother bled into you, and time is the only resource both you and your cousins have to waste in spades. Their demise can wait while you work through this obsession that's overtaken you. 

Years pass. You convince him to let you wander through the villages as a man, as a guest, as a distant relative, perhaps, if you muddy the details enough to make sense between all of the people who know him. You have to keep your hands to yourself—you would have had to, anyway—but all of you stays angled toward him like new growth to the sun. You accompany him to a Feast of the Dead in a neighboring village and try your best to not dominate the wrestling competition following—in part to not draw undue attention, and in part to allow the humans their small victories. He looks on with an amused smile, expression melting into indulgent pride when he sees you concede well before you need to, and it soothes the dull ache of your ego. You want to kiss the look off his face. You want to swallow him whole. He claps a too-friendly arm across your shoulders and you sink into him, all but pushing him to the ground as he strains to accommodate your petulant weight. 

He laughs at you and all you can think about is how different this feels. Your cousins weren't like this. Of course they weren't, and you understand why, but… these people are so kind. There’s physicality without violence, even in these wrestling tournaments, and something you don't recognize flutters around in your chest at being permitted to take part in it. 

This is you. You fulfill the roles given to you as soon as they are, as best as you can, and you are so waylaid from the mother of the water’s vague quest that you pour yourself into this man like a vase into a cup, desperate to spill over. 

You may not be your cousins and you may not be a god but they have taught you their lessons. There is something to be said about the inevitability of sex for a creature that charms intention out of others, knowing without a doubt that something you want will eventually be yours so long as you assume it already is. You had to puzzle out your desire for this man, and you don't even know if this is it, exactly, but other than life, it is the only thing that you've ever been taught how to take.

You can't carve him up (you could) and you can't eat him alive (you might) but you can drown him, you can leave him begging and gasping under the cover of night away-from-his-family and weak in your arms. He flushes with confusion and trust as he gives himself over to you and you want to tear the fat from his face to hold that expression with you forever. He's in love with you. You're obsessed with him. It might be the same thing, but you’ll never truly know.

It's hard to feel very noble about only taking what's given to you when you knew that he would be yours. I didn't trick him, you have to remind yourself. I waited. You ensured it was a decision he could make on his own, that you never used your magic to enchant him, just sometimes, maybe, to snag his attention when you became too jealous of it being turned away from you. You would have sat pressed too close and sticky with humidity for years and years (and years and years) if that's what it took. When you're separated for too long, because he has a human life still, one you cannot be a part of in the way that you want, you have to talk yourself into believing that you didn't blink and somehow become the evil you are failing to hunt. 

When you are not curled up in thoughts darker than the depths of the river, you are fit to bursting with happiness that seems to stretch your skin out of shape. 

Sometimes, when people speak of the mother of the water's realm, there is the talk of a prison but more often the talk of a paradise. A place where there is no pain or death, where time is an endless expanse heedless of the river brushing up against it, where the stories of pretty women-like-things called Yara dragging cloudy-eyed-men to be servant lovers forever and ever make sense. It's impossible to believe you'd ever find something like this (sunlit smiles and the warm press of a companion) hidden in the reality of those haunted halls, and this is how you can understand why the banished Marajo would beat their spirits against the gates of a comfortable limbo, why you can understand the mother of the water stealing bodies to touch the world on this side. Sure, there is pain and death hiding behind tree roots and buried inside rotting fruit here, but for every moment they are absent, they seem impossibly far away. 

The illusion is shattered when a traveling trader comes through with strange and foreign goods, things you’ve never seen before, and the shaman’s people are enchanted by the novelty. The shaman and his wife offer to share dinner with him in exchange for stories. You’re nervous about it, far more wary than your lover was when you first slithered out of the forest, and you warn him vehemently against it. He placates you, stroking you like a docile pet, but you feel like a jungle cat, all deep-growls and raised-fur as your world comes crashing down. 

A “spirit” overtakes the sprawling series of villages you’ve come to call home. You offer to take him into the river, to find a way for him to join you there as something more like yourself so he might flee whatever this is, but he scolds you for daring to assume he’d ever abandon his people. 

You are not a beautiful woman-thing of legend who drags men to questionable salvation. You are a snake disguised as a man who has tied yourself beyond all reason to this village.

You do what you can to help. 

There is a difference between knitting wounded flesh and curing it of an infection it has no way to fight. There is no spirit here to banish or magic to dispel, no way to flood river water through human veins the way the mother of the water does to you. You were not prepared for this when you promised yourself to the shaman and his people. You are nothing more than a spirit embodied in a snake and turned into a man, a fool with river magic in your palms, and it is not enough.

You’ve never sobbed before. This is new for you, this human emotion of sorrow, but you are bent over his body and sobbing into his chest. He’s smiling, because of course he is, and you hate him for it.

“You were always going to say goodbye,” he reminds you, as if that's any form of comfort. You know humans don't have long but this feels like nothing, like a breath, like a fleeting glimpse of the sun through the great river in the sky as it pours down. 

“This is worse,” you say.

He doesn’t argue. Instead: “That pottery, when you first came. Did you steal it?”

The absurdity of the question has you coughing out laughter. “What?”

“My wife knows of you,” he says, and you have absolutely no idea what to do with that information. You think of all the times you’ve met and spoken to her and she gave no indication. “She was afraid of you, at first, when neither of us knew what you were. She thought you might be a woman seducing me to another village.”

What a strange feeling to find out his wife holds his confidence enough to know about you, but you do not hold enough to be aware of this shared secret. How much, exactly, does she understand? This isn't jealousy, exactly, but it feels like the wrong time for you to have to reframe your memories. 

“Better a snake sliding into your bed than a woman stealing you away,” you murmur. His body shudders and hacks its way through small laughter as he tells you that is almost exactly what she said. 

(Enough, then. She knows enough.)

You tell him of how you wiled the pottery away from another spirit’s ransom only to toil through delivering it in a clumsy human body. You almost shattered it twice in the boat. He smiles toward the canopy. “I think she’d appreciate the dedication,” he says, probably thinking something-or-other about how the pottery was always going to have been more a gift for his wife than for him. A token in exchange for something taken. “You should watch over her when I’m gone.”

If you were human it might be a sweet idea, to come together with this woman over the death of your shared partner, to pair your magic with her herbalism in an attempt to save those that remained. You are not human, though. You are a snake made of blood and clay and this man, this creature, he was yours. You have no interest in crying over ceramic shards as you destroy the pottery you gifted him, in sewing his hammock shut over his puckered eyes and burying him in the ground. You dig your nails so deeply into your thighs that you draw blood if only to keep from doing the same to him, to keep from holding on and never letting go. 

Never in your life have you been forced to understand loss in this way. You have no idea how to do it with any kind of grace. 

It is agony to watch him waste away. The only benefit to the wife being aware of you is that you can visit him at his home hearth, tucked into the far end of a longhouse he shares with what remains of his extended family. She diverts attention away to give you space as you try to lessen his pain without drawing terrified accusations that you're actually a devil cursing him instead. You try to keep the sickness from spreading to the others. It's worthless, but you try. 

When he dies, you do not remain in the village. You do not try to save his doomed family. The last tether to this iteration of you has snapped and you cannot bear to stay a moment longer once his rot is sealed beneath the earth (because you would not disrespect him by refusing to dig his final resting place in the ground). 

Your cousins are not here, it is a detour you never should have made, and you are regretting it with every passing second. You wish you could flee to the bottom of the river, through the portals and into the hollow prison where your cousins used to be kept, but that gateway is gone. It's just as well that you go nowhere near the river mother's domain. Right now you are furious at her for creating something that was always doomed to fail, for creating you, and she'd kill you for the disrespect that would show on your face. Instead you thrash in the water, overwhelmed and aggrieved, and you expend every last ounce of energy trying to batter the anger-shame out of your body. Your soul screams so loudly that even the trees lean away.

You lay half-submerged in the muddy water, panting with hiss-whines whistling through your nose, when you hear the sound of a rattle in the distance. There is a high-lilting voice singing his song for you, calling you home, but you think you can hear the resignation. She knew better than he did that you had no more loyalty to their people than you did to the pacuri trees. You shift if only to feel the release that crying affords you and you think that she'll make a fine shaman in her husband's absence. Perhaps she'll even find a real spirit, something better than you at protecting her and her family. 

It is a hard lesson to learn. Maybe it's only pain and fear that secures it, but you know that you were not created for frivolous distractions like this, not for this long. You were too ambitious to use your magic for something other than it was intended and you are not man enough to return to set your mistakes right. It's not cowardice. There is simply not enough reason to stay when the thing that threatens these humans is something you are powerless against.

The area becomes a chaotic tempest of new river routes and sorrow-flooded pools, the scales that rattle off your body mixing with the silt and soil. This is the most permanent mark you can make in his honor, and even this will erode with time and whim. When you are wrung dry, the wound of your loss a cleaned-and-wrapped ache, you disappear into the water and mindlessly seek the scent-sense of the monsters that raised you.

Misi-ziibi

From across the plaza she catches you like a speared fish. Her eyes are all movement, no light, and though the body is different the flash of muddy darkness is the same. Her face is framed in a halo of thick, curly hair that almost softens the weapon of her gaze. You never expected to see the mother of the water here, not on an entirely different continent, but you feel that it's her in the marrow of your bones. 

As always, there are hooks sunk deep into you, pulling you to her with an urgency you can’t question. In an instant you are by her side. “Mboiuna,” you say. It's a word she's well known for by now, so it's as good a name as any. 

She grins, all teeth, not at all surprised to see you. “You could be called that too if you went home.”

It's a hideous thing to throw in your face, this idea that you could have become more than you are, something more like her, if only you'd succeeded in your task by now. You cannot possibly dignify it with a response. Instead, you ask, “Why are you here?” 

“You know it's not actually me,” she says, as if you’re teasing her about a joke you’re actually in on. “It's just a teeny piece.”

Her laugh is a harsh and throaty percussion as she falls into you, hanging onto your arm. You move to accommodate her automatically, thoughtlessly. “It’s so hard to get kids to do their chores these days,” she fake-whispers. “Easier to do them myself.”

You can’t tell if she’s mocking you or if she’s role-playing, pretending she has someone on her level who likes her enough to commiserate. “So what, you stole this body off the street?”

She shrugs, tugging you along. “I hitchhiked.”

You smell it, underneath the muddy waters of home: human magic like a sparkling wine, small-bubble effervescence that struggles and fails to really push itself up through the power of Mboiuna. You know what happens to humans without their shadows: they wilt and rot like a cut flower, not made to take root and live on despite the amputation. “Habitually killing medicine women sounds like a great way to get banished,” you say, hiding your displeasure behind concern.

There is no obvious reaction besides the tightening of her smile. “I don't recall asking.” 

You miss a step, mind flooded all-at-once with a million years of sacrificed worshipers, blood and tears washed away as hands are held aloft to the sky. Those who take and use the power of the gods should be grateful to serve. This woman revered the water, her body a half-filled vessel with just enough space for Mboiuna to top her off, and now she lies dormant in her own skin, comfortable and sleeping. Just as Mboiuna’s magic is a residual glimmer in your body, so too will this witch have lifewater left behind when Mboiuna’s partial-spirit slips back into the Encante.

The tsunami of this illusion slows into ankle-deep floodwaters into a heavy downpour, lightning crackling in the distance. The human is still going to die, you are informed, hollowed out by what Mboiuna took from her, but she'll have the power of a river mother at her disposal for a short time. It never quite makes sense to you, the way humans bargain their limited lives, but it's not like you have much to show for the centuries you've spent laying in wait. 

She needles you. “How’s it going with your human spirits? All destroyed?”

You try to mask your breathlessness behind a scoff, feeling like you’re spinning out in an eddy while you get your bearings. Your illusions are a heat mirage in comparison to the deluge of her magic. “Hardly fair to compare us,” you say. “I think you have to be good at creating things to be good at destroying them.” 

Gods create. Humans create, and you think that’s why gods are so captivated by these strange creatures who destroy everything around them in their haste to advance. All you know how to do is bide your time and strike when the opportunity arises, reactionary and far too patient. You’ve tried to learn from the jungle cats, to stalk and seek and rip and tear without remorse, but it is fundamentally against your nature. Some protector you are. 

Mboiuna squeezes your arm, laughing lightly. “Maybe that’s true.” She sounds thoughtful. 

She pulls you into a lonely corner shaded behind overgrown city flora that's meant to cool down tourists in between spending all their money. The city is still loud around you but the foliage takes the edge off, making it seem farther away. You feel the way Mboiuna distorts the space, tucking it away, shooing human attention away like gnats, and she is looking up at you with a challenge in her eyes. 

You lean in close, tense but reckless with the undue regard of a god. “Can I help you, mother?”

Her eyes light up, as you figured they might. She doesn't seem to catch you in human form without taking something. She drags a wet tongue slowly across her upper lip, looking at you from under her lashes. “Don't call me that.”

She is perched on a bench and her sun dress is bunched up around the top of her thighs and her fingers are a cruel vice in your hair. It's strange; without the peer pressure of the river dolphin cousins, you're not nearly so overtly sexual, but Mboiuna claws it out of you like breath from your lungs. It's not against your will or anything, you'll do whatever she wants, but it feels like play-acting, picking and choosing the best you have for your god's embodied indulgence.

You spend the week accompanying her with the promise that she'll show you where to go next. She's trying to meet with the guardian of the Mississippi, but apparently it's not so easy to get an audience even as a shadow of another god. You jokingly attribute it to haughty American exceptionalism and she gives you the dirtiest look you've ever seen; it's like saying she belongs to the Portuguese, she says, but you don't think it's outlandish to say that a river is shaped by its inhabitants. You keep that thought to yourself. You don't think she likes reminders that she made you more human.

Eventually she stomps up out of the water, clothes drenched and a terrible look of fury pinched upon her face. Though the creatures of the river flock to her, feeling the power she holds, the father of the river is silent. She tugs and all but throws you down the embankment. “You try, then,” she spits. “You have my favor, you're actually here. Maybe he'll talk to you.”

You're skeptical. You've never been anything besides a man or an anaconda, neither of which belong in this water, but when you look back at her she simply waves at you impatiently. “Go.”

So you do. 

You dive. The water is muddy and slick, hard to see in like your home but you can feel the corrosive oils and pollutants sinking in even as you shift, a million needles like you've stepped barefoot into bleach and forgotten to wash.

Taking another form is not intuitive, or at least it isn't for you. It's like relaxing into the friction-tension of two tectonic plates desperate to alter the landscape, like handing yourself over to be reshaped. You feel like you're digging fingers down into meters of silt to find an origin, something similar to yourself but better suited to this, and all you can do is allow it to take you over as you spin out of control, unable to fight or even match the current. It's a kaleidoscopic tumble, but eventually it settles, and you feel like you're armored against the water itself. It feels alarmingly foreign, organs there that were not before, but you flex stiff fins and adjust. 

You’re not sure what exactly she’s expecting from you. The most you’ve ever communed with a god was with her and at her discretion. You haven’t been here long, you don’t know this river very well, so all you can really do is empty your thoughts and swim. Gods are vain, jealous, possessive things; they like to be revered, for their creations to be appreciated. You resign yourself to aquatic tourism. 

You move steadily upstream, low enough to avoid any watercraft, and with each passing mile you feel little barbs of curiosity sinking into you, pulling at you from in between your scales like a parasite. It's a tiresome journey; this body isn't meant for prolonged, swift travel. As always you are better suited to laying in wait, but you're less a hunter now and more a worm pierced through a hook. You do your best to feel… bait-ish. It's a different kind of enticing than you're used to painting on a human face. 

As night falls, you shimmy up to rest behind a boulder, feeling the water come alive as the creatures of shadow slip out to play. You worry Mboiuna will be frustrated with you for being gone so long, but she must be aware that you will fulfill her request as best you can. You imagine her still on the side of the river, soggy and pouting, and you would laugh if you could. 

You're not shocked to be led to where the river deepens, navigating the swift and variable currents to an area heavy with rocks and debris that slow and swirl the water around them. There is a dull glow from within the water, one that pierces through the murk, and you find yourself suddenly confronted with the bulging, grinning face of the largest catfish you've ever seen. 

You are not a small fish, but this thing is a monster in comparison. You wonder briefly if the gods continue to take such large forms as a relic of time gone by. Maybe they're just the embodied spirits of ancient creatures that outlasted the rest, the last standing to inherit responsibility for this world. You suppose that's all you really are, the last remaining of a magical clutch, managing to hold onto your power by your teeth. 

The barbs of control that hook impossibly under your thick scales pull you closer, close enough for the god's barbels to smack at you rudely. Looking down, you realize that this is a nest, and the curious father of the river is protecting his young even as he investigates what on earth a false fish like you is doing in his waters. He opens his massive mouth. You wonder with sudden dread why the gods are just like this, apparently. 

Helplessly, you are enveloped, and in an instant you are transported back into that vacuous space that Mboiuna took you into all those years ago. It is dark with no sense of distance or time with only an entity before you, permitting an audience. This time, however, you are in human forms—a sort of bridge between you, an easier way to communicate—and the man is staring you down.

You, he does not say, Are not one of mine, little snake. 

You can't help it; you laugh. I've seen your snakes, father. I am hardly little.

That, at least, gets a smile out of him.

He gestures for you to follow, and now you are walking along the bank of a river off-shoot, the sun setting behind the mountains, the sky cast in orange and red. It's still strange to you, to see so much of the land all at once. You are accustomed to towering walls of wood blocking your sight. 

“What do you want, then?” the father asks. He's clutched his hands behind himself, not bothering to look at you as you stroll. 

“Amazonia would like a word with you,” you say. “She sent a piece of herself, but it doesn't seem to be enough for your attention.”

The father huffs. “Oh, I felt her.” 

You wait, anticipating he'll continue, but he does not. 

The scenery is beautiful. It’s clear the father takes pride in it, like an old man showing off his well-cultivated garden. 

You take a breath, hesitating before saying, “This conversation is for gods. I can't have it for her.”

“And yet she sent you.”

“I don't believe either of us thought you'd actually speak with me.” You keep your voice light and companionable. Your back is tangled as tightly with tension as matupás, the floating islands of matted ground cover that float atop the water, and you're grateful for the privacy the father is offering you by having you trail behind him. 

He hums once in recognition that you spoke and goes silent again.

This feels like a test. It's always a test. You think this test is about patience and deference, so you match the father's pace, taking in this scene he's showing you. You figure this is someplace wildly rural or otherwise in a time before it was settled; there's nary a path nor a cattle fence to be seen. This is little more than a stream, the water babbling gently over rocks and tree roots, and you find yourself relieved that he's not subjecting you to the mighty power that collects behind all the water making up this river system. Doing this, allowing yourself to be bat around between realms like a toy, is nerve-wracking enough without petty shows of force.

“As you saw,” the father says after what feels like hours of contemplative silence, “I'm busy. If she can't come to me herself, she'll simply have to wait.”

Dread is a not-unfamiliar weight in your chest. “Of course. I'm sure she'll be fine with that.” She won't. “Is there a… place you'd like to meet?”

He stops, turning to you now. There's a mean grin on his face and it makes you want to duck away. You hold still.

“Yes,” he says. “At the turn of the season, she can find me where the great serpent eats the sky. If there is enough god in that body to be worthy, it will call to her.”

All at once you are thrown back into your body and spit out like a rock, tumbling before righting yourself. The father is done with you; he returns to tending his children. They don't seem special, you note, just… tiny little fish. No embodied spirits, no special creations. They'll lead simple animal lives. 

When you return to Mboiuna, you expect her to boil and thrash at the idea of being tested, indignant that she should be forced to wait around. Instead, she sighs and crosses her arms, accepting that a river god would not go out of its way for a stolen shadow. 

You don't know what to do with your tension. You almost want to goad her; you're confused by how unsatisfying it is to be left limp and ignored when you expected to be punished for the message you carried. 

She invites you to the home of the woman whose body she inhabits. When she's not ordering you around, she rouses the woman and puts her back in control, unwilling to deal with the tedious minutia of maintaining a human body in modern times. She didn't have to worry about money in other bodies; her station provided for her, assuming she continued the medicine woman or priestess’ work. Now, she has to pay for the right to offer healing, and it disgusts her too much to navigate.

The woman (Aditi, it turns out) is perplexingly fine with the arrangement. 

You're sitting in her kitchen, staring at her. You feel like an intruder. She's acting for all the world like she always has strange shape-shifting guests, like this is a normal morning, and she offers you a cup of coffee from her French press.

“Truly, you are fine with her doing whatever she wants?” you ask, trying (and failing) to process the shame of not even thinking about this woman when Mboiuna took from you. With the others… It didn't seem like Mboiuna ever gave them back control. It seemed like they were already functionally dead, puppeted like those ants that explode with a fungus that leads them toward the sky.

The expression on her face curls up, sly and molten. “Believe it or not, Mboiuna did ask,” Aditi says, looking you up and down. 

If you were a different kind of man, you'd blush. Instead you tut a laugh, not-quite-relieved by what is not-quite-an-answer. “She said you were asleep.”

Aditi nods. “Mostly. But she's had enough daughters cursing men in her name. She knows better now.”

You think of Irece, who ached for your blood on her tongue until she learned that you hunted the same kind of human monsters she did. You think of the Yara, that handful of  scorned-or-murdered women who Mboiuna resurrected into entities of violent retribution. You think of the child that your cousin was sucking the spit out of all-those-years ago, her dazed body pressed up against a wall just barely bothering to be out of sight. 

Mboiuna forced you to face your complacency, but what has she done? None of you are a solution. You are, at best, slow-acting poisons poured down very specific throats.

What the fuck is she doing to us? Irece was the one who screamed this, once. What did Mboiuna do to protect her? 

While you're lost in thought, Aditi slips her fingers in between yours, palm dry and warm, and you're startled by the realization that Mboiuna may have offered more than a few years of river magic in exchange for obeisance. Maybe not so overtly, maybe it was just a suggestion, but it is clear that this woman believes she has the same easy claim over you as your creator.

You feel your pulse where your elbows dig into the counter.

The coffee is untouched.

Her hands are very small, all considered.

You smile. It's the slow, crooked kind that slides across your mouth as you snatch the loose threads of her attention from the air. All at once you snap them to you, centered on your eyes, and you look up at her in a way that frames desire where there is none. It would be rude to deny her. 

She pulls you away like a dance partner and she guides you to her bedroom. You allow her to push you down, to undress and crawl atop, to move against you and pull you inside and you do your very best to make it pleasurable for her. You are but a body made of blood and clay and at a certain point all you can do is wait for her to be done. As you are brought along, Mboiuna bleeds through with a sharp reshaping, fangs sinking deep into your flesh to spit intention like venom into your veins. You hear your own voice morph from relief to pain and you wonder if this is the wildfire from her eyes turned molten to burn you. Your body constricts around her even though all you want to do is shove her away.

Her lips are puffy and wet when she pulls back. “To make you more vicious,” Mboiuna hisses.

You shudder, feeling something horrible and indescribable pulsing through you. You have been the same kind of predator for hundreds of years. Now, a god-shade with acrylic nails is playing you like an ancient instrument, vibrating new resonance down into your core. You find yourself grasping uselessly at your own chest to try and pull your heart out, to throw it to the ground before your whole body catches fire. There is screaming and it is yours and you can't even find the feeling of it in your lungs, let alone the strength to stop it. 

Mboiuna laughs at you, rolling to the side and dragging her nails down your damp skin in a poor mimicry of comfort, just shy of tearing. She's fixed what you thought was broken, she's made you more like the jaguar you envied, and now she places in your mind where to go next. The jewel of the West. Another water system, but cold. You imagine yourself dead and rictus in the water.

Your name is Irece, of the Jureira. According to your second mother—in stories offered as pitiful reassurance of your first mother’s love—you were named in the wake of your father’s disappointment. That isn’t how she said it, this mother-who-did-not-bare-you, but that is what you heard. 

Your mother lost two children before you. They were hollow promises of bodies that bled out of her like wicked words delivered in the night, losses she would have been too terrified and confused to even understand if the medicine woman had not whispered the ugly truth into her ear. The fact that you survived long enough to be embodied was a miracle that stole her breath with helpless awe. She had prayed and bled offerings to the river spirits, begging for her womb-water to keep you safe and nourish you strong, and for her efforts your medicine woman delivered a pink-and-screaming devil into your father’s heavy hands.

Everyone knew the chieftain wanted a boy. He had been newly promoted, his father stepping down in an acknowledgement of old age and an impatience for youthful squabbles. Your father was ready to begin a family so he might raise a mighty leader to succeed him when his time came. 

Your mother feared that his desire for a son would make him unwilling to acknowledge you. Praying to the river spirits, your mother wished for you to bear the power of the water’s surface, always reflecting back what was given to you. If someone was cruel, let you have the power to dominate them. If someone underestimated you, let you slosh back in their face when they least expected a wave. If someone looked at you with love and with kindness, let you be strong enough to offer it in return.

Personally, you don’t believe the well-wishes of your name bestowed any sort of blessing, but the second-mother said it like the word of the gods.

The mother who bore you died in her next attempt at summoning a healthy child. However great the love in her heart, the second-mother said, She was not meant long for this world.

Whatever your father’s true feelings, he did his best to honor his dead wife’s wishes by doting on you. It was your grandmother that watched over you when he could not, but once you were old enough to not serve an immediate risk, he began bringing you along on walks of the village. Occasionally, he would allow you to help him oversee training sessions where he watched the development of his tribe’s young warriors. You remember seeing these young men, likely only 13 years old or so, as larger-than-life and so lucky to receive your father’s attention. He shouted and corrected and taught, and you howled in fury every time he denied you the ability to join the boys with their sharp-things and limber movements.

It is entirely possible that you never would have cared to learn the art of battle if no one told you that it was inappropriate or impossible. Perhaps you never would have snuck out of your hammock to join the old men talking late at night around the fire and puffing smoke from their mouths like devils, your eager little ears ringing with the retellings of victories (sometimes too grand to seem real) and the earnest grief that struck when discussing those taken from the world through inexperience or poor luck. Perhaps you never would have started crafting your own makeshift weapons from refuse to practice with just outside the village, out amongst the oh-so-very-dangerous trees. Perhaps you would not have become comfortable with the idea of overcoming all challenges set before you. Perhaps, if none of this had ever happened, you would have seen the firstborn son of your father’s new wife for the threat that he would eventually become.

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There is a boy named Aratiri. He is a few years older than you, prouder than the sun and delighted by the idea of holding the favor of a chieftain’s daughter. His pride is really the point of him; he is too enamored with the idea of using your regard to be fearful of fighting a girl, too distracted by his own genius to be angry and ashamed when you knock him into the dirt. You've heard the old men talk about youthful conquests. You’ve heard them talk about what, exactly, they think of the women who bare their children, and so you are mindful of the gleam in Aratiri’s eye when he looks at you. Though you were flushed a deep fuschia of shocked embarrassment when you listened, tree bark digging into your back as you hid, this knowledge from the old men served an even greater motivation to ensure that you were fast and blustering and vicious enough to keep the older boy on his toes, to assure both of you that there was nothing he could take without being given.

(You are not exactly sure what is involved in the taking or the giving, but you can read tone and implication just fine.)

He gets protective, eventually. It's not like you need him to shove the other boys for leering, but you find yourself feeling quite like you've tamed a very stupid beast. The hunters should just fold you into their ranks now.

It is impossible to keep your efforts a secret, if you ever did it all. A season later, with bugs flitting and buzzing near your ears, your father brings you to the practice ring and demands you show him what you know. It will be sequential; the boys of your age group will take turns testing you. To your furious dismay, most of the boys are too afraid to hurt you, chief's-daughter-in-front-of-the-chief, and their useless fat hands are too soft to even mold dough. You spit taunts in their faces and don't realize until later that your father does not remind you to watch your mouth. 

Aratiri, at least, does not shy away from you, and he punches you so hard in the chin that your head snaps back and your eyes alight with stars to prove it. You grin, mouth flooded and coppery from biting your tongue, and you tear into him with pale-knuckled fury.

You are well practiced with each other. Now, before your father, Aratiri’s knee is pinning your arms to your back and your face is shoved roughly into the dirt. Your breath is kicking up dust but you know that Aratiri’s pretty face will need tending, at least, in the wake of his victory.

“Up,” your father instructs, and you scramble to stand before him. Your raw chin is tipped in defiance and your heart pounds in your throat as you wait to be shooed back to your grandmother, out of the boys’ way. Your father’s face is an inscrutable force that bows fully grown warriors to his will. You feel it is a bit much to be wielded against knobby-kneed children with bleeding faces.

“You are too hasty,” he finally says to you, eyes narrowed with scrutiny. “It is not impressive when an agouti manages to strike the hunter in its desperation.” He looks at Aratiri. “And you are not well-trained enough to be giving lessons. Do not be so arrogant as to suppose you can.”

You glance at Aratiri to find that he is flushed with embarrassment and little-boy fury. 

“Irece, you will stop wasting Aratiri’s time.”

Despite yourself, you begin to wilt. It is one thing to do what you know, but have not yet been told, you are not supposed to do. It is another thing entirely to disobey your father. Instead of sending you away, however, he steps forward to raise your chin up from where it has sunk to nearly hit your chest; there is the hint of a smile on his face, just for you, and you don't even mind the sting on your raw skin. “Take the same time for training as has been carved out for the boys. You will begin and end your days here now, if you insist on this.”

As his steadying touch leaves you, you are nearly vibrating with excitement. “Thank you.”

“You will not be grateful very soon. Tauk, see to it that you start with my daughter today.”

Your father has the training mentor run you ragged as the other boys pair off to spar under his watchful gaze. The mentor, even more than Aratiri, has no leniency in his strikes. You appreciate it in principle but find yourself limping miserably home in the aftermath with one of the boys sent to make sure you don’t collapse and die on the way. Aratiri might have been teaching you skills, but he could not replicate the endurance being asked of you now. 

“Why do you want to fight?” the boy asks. The question is a sharp and nagging blade stabbed into the soft nothingness of your thoughts. “There’s a reason the men go to battle and the women stay at home.” Your body sparks as if to burn with fury, but you simply do not have the energy.

You can tell he isn’t malicious. He is your cousin (or something), another stupid boy that you’ve caught hiding behind bushes with stolen treats during large family gatherings, and you don’t think he means to be the culmination of every offhand comment he’s ever heard. You don’t have the words to sum up the disappointment you feel burning white-hot against the back of your neck or the aspirations of a dead woman nipping like tiny fish mouths at bare feet. Instead, you say: “I am not a woman and you are not a man.” Then, before his little-boy pride can properly bubble up with a retort, “If I want to, I will. Now leave me alone. I can get home just fine.”

He doesn’t leave, but he does follow you at a distance. That, at least, means he isn’t likely to pester you with more questions while you focus on putting one foot in front of the other. 

Your father never outright encourages you but neither does he prevent you from learning. Your second mother seems disinclined to do more than tell you just how much you’re missed during the day and how your pretty face shouldn’t be uglied up by bruises and scars (and how will you find a husband?). Your grandfather laughs at your efforts but you think he likes to see what trouble you cause. He’s never tattled for finding you out after dark after all, listening to stories that certainly didn’t concern cute-little-girls. Most of the boys in your age group whisper derisively and refuse to pair up with you, but that just means you get more time with the man in that ring who actually matters, the trainer who decides when you are strong enough to beat sense into those stupid boys’ greasy little skulls. 

Your father finds you one day as dusk is closing in like a shroud. You are hidden away with your naked toes drifting in the river, contemplating whether or not the water will help soothe your aching muscles. He sits down beside you, looking silly-ungraceful, and you smile at how much softer he seems when he isn’t busy being a chief. You sit quietly while the birds find their way home and the river creatures slip in-and-out of the water, always just out of sight.

“I am not letting you do this because I think you should,” your father says, looking out over the water. “It is because your mother would have insisted I let you. She might have snuck off and learned herself if only to share in your disobedience.” He’s smiling indulgently to himself, and you stare at him and wonder at this woman you’ve only ever heard about in stories. You were too young to have remembered anything when she died.

“Sometimes,” you offer, a child ever willing to share secrets with her one true parent, “People say you’re a poor leader for not keeping track of your women. Only when they don’t know I’m listening, though.” These are words you hear but don’t quite understand, only the brash way in which they are said. Your father grunts an unhappy noise before he looks at you.

“I think you already know this, Irece, but men try all the time to pretend they are not afraid of the fearsome, capable women who make this village.” You think of your cousin, who whispers curses and insults under his breath only to run away with a yelp the moment his mother overhears him. 

Your father brushes some of your tangled-wild hair out of your face, fiddling with it as if he has any hope of saving it. He has a wrinkle between his bushy eyebrows that you, equally, wish to reach up and smooth away. “It would be a waste of everyone’s time to try and scare you out of doing what you wished to do. If you cannot be a warrior, it will be because you are bad at it, not because some fearful men are made uncomfortable to know that you are their equal.”

You think about that for a moment, leaning decisively against your father’s side if only so he’ll stop tugging at your hair. “I will be a good warrior,” you say, quiet in your conviction.

Your father hums, wrapping his arm around you. A slight chill descends with the impending dark and you feel distinctly cradled and protected, tucked away from the village and anyone else whose opinion does not matter.

“You must be faster and smarter, because the men will almost always be stronger than you,” your father says with his wise-lesson voice. “You will have to work longer and harder and they may never fully respect you. You will struggle to find a husband who does not see you as a challenge to overcome. Are you sure you are willing to undertake that battle?”

You try to embody your second-mother’s shrewdness to consider these reasons that all sound very important as adult concerns, but it’s hard to imagine a world in which you simply give up because something sounds difficult. Your father says he sees your mother’s defiance in you. She made her wishes for your future clear. You, no matter how silly they seem, intend to honor them. 

“Either I’ll succeed or I won't," you say, confused about how there could be any other answer. 

Your father leans down to press a kiss to your temple and squeezes you so tightly that it borders on painful. You squeal, pretending to struggle, and his laugh is filled with equal parts relief and affection as he scoops you up to place in his lap. You can feel the way his breath stutters and his stomach trembles and you think, with mild horror, that he might be ready to cry.

You let him hold you because it seems like he needs it. “Do you miss her?” you ask. Your father sighs and presses his face against the back of your head. His voice is muffled in your hair.

“I do,” he says, sounding more vulnerable than you think you’ve ever heard him. “I love my wife very much, but she will never be a replacement for your mother.” He pauses. It is a long moment where he seems to be collecting himself back into Chief, not Father, and the transition requires effort. 

“I am honored that she delivered you to me, carrying with you her eyes and her ferocious spirit. I will support you,” he promises, “But I will not insult you by making your path easy.”

You cling to his large forearms, feeling the way he is distancing himself. “You better not,” you say, because it feels like he needs your attitude to contend with this sudden grief. 

It doesn’t sound like weakness, not in the way the little boys yap and sneer about men being emotional. It reminds you more of your grandfather and his friends speaking candidly to one another about all-the-things they've lost and all-the-men they’ll miss. The river rushes by with the same strength it always has and you try to take comfort in the idea that movement and change are both familiar and necessary.

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It comes as no surprise when you steadily become the dominating force of your age group, mouth mean and hands quick and blades sharp-sharp because you spend as much time out of the practice ring preparing yourself as you spend in it (and that is a lot). Your father promised never to step in and he doesn’t, but he also keeps your family from demanding that you return to your second mother. You still learn your home lessons—how to care for the home and process the food and heal the stupid boys—but only because it continues to set you above those same stupid boys who will likely die in the wild the moment they don't have a skilled woman to keep them safe. You say this to their faces just to see who will explode in impotent fury over it; it is an endless amusement for you. 

Your young-woman body is covered in a patchwork of thick and brutal scars, near misses and furious retributions painted in pale lines across your skin, and there is not a single moment where your family does not hm-and-haw or pinch-and-pull in constant disapproval of how you act like a son and refuse to be a daughter. You make efforts to be outside of their reach as often as possible, glued instead to Aratiri’s side as you both anxiously await any opportunity to leave the village. You go on as many hunting trips as you're allowed and spend months learning at your father's side so that he may feel confident enough to take you on trips for intertribal affairs.

Mind your tongue, Irece, so that no one seeks to rip it out.

By the time you are a real adult (not just a Bleeding Woman, but someone trusted to lead expeditions and make demands of your clanmates), you have three younger brothers who have not stopped pestering you since the moment they were born. You try to do as your father does, to stay out of their business and not shame them with your interference, but you’re so used to throwing your weight around that it is difficult not to smack mean children and threaten loose-tongued adults who send your brothers crying like ever-infants into your arms. You are the hand of retribution that your father refuses to be and you convince yourself that it is not such a big deal to protect them. You’ve spent so much time learning the art of battle that it doesn’t even occur to you to be worried about what your little brothers might think about their place in the village. About yours.

When Piata, the first brother, is just old enough to begin walking the village but not old enough to enter the practice ring, he is all spitting-fury just like you remember being. Unlike you, he does not puzzle out a way around this barrier. Instead he finds his way into your hammock when you are napping the midday heat away, curling up like a burning coal under your arm and sticky in the way only children manage to be. You mutter threats about drowning him in the river but he squirms around until he can stare at you. Out of spite more than anything else, you refuse to open your eyes until he riles himself into enraged growling and moves to pry your eyelids open himself. 

“Make him let me!” Piata demands, and you struggle for a moment to determine what, exactly, he’s even ordering you to do.

You yawn, large and painful and entirely unsatisfying, while holding him by the face so his tiny grabby hands cannot reach you. “You’re little,” you say, and it’s no surprise that this only makes him more upset. “I had to wait, too,” you try instead, “And I was just as mad about it.” You let go of his face and very specifically do not laugh when he topples over onto the ground. Like an idiot. Because he is. “I have a secret for you,” you tell him, peering over the edge of the hammock, “If you think you’re old enough to hear it.” 

He is little-boy-seething with a scrape on his knee and tears in his eyes. He stares at you expectantly, sniffling only once.

You sigh. “You have to sit back and watch. Look at what the older boys are doing. What’s working? What isn’t? You can’t just get all starry-eyed and demand to be like them. Preparing is the first step to doing.”

This is the first lesson that Tauk properly beat into your head. It was a waste to act as if watching the boys practice wasn’t a learning opportunity, wasn’t a chance to internalize his instructions before you had the flat side of a blade smacking you for not adjusting to his recommendations in time. 

You try to think of examples to drive the point home to your brother, things like how he can't even fetch water by himself yet (too heavy, tiring, boring) or be trusted to listen when his mother says to run to his aunty’s hearth to grab something, but you are tired and a little cranky and Piata already has that look on his face that says he is thinking-very-hard and cannot possibly be made to listen to anything happening outside of his own head. You shove him away, twisting around decisively to ignore anything else out of his mouth so you might finish your nap in peace. 

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Despite your speed and might, you have never been good at words. You are not like your father with a wise lesson ever at the tongue or your second mother with a comforting word for every youthful tantrum. You are not like your grandfather who tells stories like it’s all he was made for, gathering the village around him like flies to fruit. You are not even like your oldest little brother (Piata) who can pick out the sorest wound on any person he ever meets or your middle brother (Ruda) who somehow manages to broker peace out of chaos or your youngest brother (Kan) who learns every person by name and background and aspiration. Your words are a blunt instrument, never shrouded by deeper meaning than exactly what you say, and all of your peers know better than to take something personally that you say in the heat of the moment. You know when to be calm (of course you do) and when to be careful (as if your family wouldn’t teach you), but it is only because everyone has known you for so long that you don’t require Ruda’s finesse to keep from starting fights you never mean to finish.

Genuinely, it is something you try to be mindful of. When you lead groups to visit other tribes or hunting parties to corner prey or warriors to protect your village from an enemy that your father knew-was-coming, there is no question about whether or not you should be followed because you have proven time and again through blood and sweat and blustering bravery that you will always place yourself between a threat and Your People. You’ve fought tooth and nail for this respect and you will not undo it simply because you did not study the art of nuance like-a-woman-should-have.

When your brothers are all Real Men squabbling about who will take over for your father, it is everybody that laughs and sighs at how they don’t even acknowledge you. Not everyone in the village likes you, and indeed there are some who still seethe and hiss at the idea of a woman being in charge of anything, but no one at all seems to think they have a hope of usurping your rightful place as leader when the time comes. It’s Aratiri who tries to remind you to keep an eye on your brothers, a soft hand on your elbow and urgent words in your ear, but you only ever laugh him off because the idea of the three idiots being dangerous is ridiculous. 

On the eve of your middle brother being married and sent off the live with his bride (a wily young woman who challenges him at every turn, who flirted with him every chance she got since they met), your brothers invite you to go view the waterfalls to commemorate the last time you all will be siblings under one roof. You don’t question it. The younger two are sentimental like that.

You spend the morning hiking up-and-up to the height of the falls where there is a beautiful view of the forest stretched out below. Ruda is bright and glowing with excitement and none of you can keep from teasing him, making crude jokes you would never say to his fiance’s face about how she is sure to lead him by the throat in all they do. Kan is bubbling over with ceaseless questions about his brother’s plans once he moves away and Piata is barely bothering to hide his jealousy at not being the first to find a wife, but it is all meaningless in the face of Ruda’s impenetrable good mood. At one point you wrestle Piata to the ground for some annoying snipe disguised poorly as a joke, and it is by sheer luck that you don’t both tumble off the lip of the canyon to your death, Kan shrieking like a little girl all the while.

It is early afternoon when you arrive, out of breath and overly warm from the hike. The crash of the falls creates a fine mist that dilutes the salt on your skin and you breathe it in, imagining it coating your insides with an armor of sweet water and new beginnings. You will need it to protect you from your brothers’ incessant bickering. You don’t even startle when Piata stands next to you, flinging a heavy arm over your shoulders. It sounds like Ruda is climbing a tree and Kan is shouting warning threats from his place on the ground. 

“You think you’re next?” Piata asks, loud and enunciated to be understood over the falls.

You laugh. “If Aratiri had his way, we’d be married years ago.” It’s the only thing that explains how he hasn’t settled down yet, glued to your side as he’s remained since you were both snotty little children. “Can you even imagine me as a wife?”

His shoulders move but you don’t hear amusement. “No. No, I don’t think you’re even capable of knowing your place anymore.”

You round on him, a look of furious disbelief screwing up your face so tightly that it feels like an obscene exaggeration. “Excuse me?” This is the same man you rescued as a child from being shoved down and beaten, screaming and pissing himself out of fear. 

Piata strengthens his hold around your shoulders, glancing back at your other brothers for a moment before leaning closer. “You only ever fight fair, Irece. That’s just not how the world works.”

“What are you even–”

Now, you’ve been stabbed before. There is a feeling like understanding that fills the body with wrong and danger as your flesh parts and blood rushes out, but there is rarely pain in that immediate moment. It takes a second for your body to recognize the damage. 

You are looking into your brother’s flat eyes and it feels like looking at a corpse. You glance at the ground just to check if he still has his shadow, to see if his soul has been stolen by a devil of the forest come to punish you for some unknown indiscretion upon the trees. Why else would he do this? It is iron that invades your body, a rare and precious gift traded up along the river from strange pale men with loud sharp mouths, and it is the blade that you passed down to Piata when a better, sharper one was gifted to you by your father. The new blade is strapped to your hip, now. Your fingers are too numb to even reach for it.

The sudden wet heat is shocking enough that your attention finally catches on the bright red blood flowing out of you as if to imitate the falls. Piata is smiling, expression too placid for the hate that makes his hand tremble, that jiggles the blade (yours!) deeper-and-deeper into your lower belly, where the womb water lies, like a perfect mockery of what killed the woman who came before you. 

You are immobilized by your disbelief, all instinct and reaction grinding to a painful halt. You’re so close to the edge of the falls. You were being careless, standing so close, and all Piata has to do is scoot his foot in front of yours and push. 

You are tumbling head-first down a towering waterfall and there are demons at the bottom with sharp claws that pull children down into the depths and you are so numb that all you can think is:

Aratiri was right. 

You feel the force of the water all but tear flesh from your bones as you plunge beneath the spray, eyelids ripped and eyeballs flooded and lungs burst with the strength of the water smashing up and against and inside of you. The weight of the water creates a divot where the river floods down to meet itself and all you know is a tumble over-and-over-and-over-and-over again as the water batters you in a terrifying cycle that deprives you of any sense of up and down. 

The water does not care who you are, your grandfather once said. It cares not for your wealth or your status or your strength or your health. You will tire, and it will not, so do not underestimate or disrespect it. It will kill you with ease and without remorse if you do not know its ways. 

Knowing its ways, to you, was precluded by not falling off a cliff, but this is meaningless as your lungs bloat and your brain fails and you disappear into a nothingness that no one should ever expect to return from. 

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You turn to ash in the water. 

All is nothing, all is darkness, but at least the pain fades. 

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You come to in a squirming, water-logged tangle of confusion and hate.

You flail around to find a thick tree root soaking in the water and cling to it with all your might. Slowly, agonizingly, you drag yourself out of the water and tremble your way through each movement that feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Wheezing, you heave yourself onto the moist dirt of the river bank and take one, two, too many minutes catching your breath. Aratiri was right, Aratiri was right. Your breaths are a dull hiss through your nose. Aratiri was right, Aratiri was right. Everything hurts. Everything is wrong. Aratiri was right, Aratiri was right. 

You close your eyes and fail to respond as someone (something) picks you up and flings you over a tree branch like a limp mat left out to dry. All you can manage to do is to curl around the smooth bark and sleep. 

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Your name is Maria, now. 

That is what you are told, but you know the truth. 

You are Irece-the-slain, you are the would-be chief, you are a warrior defeated by your own complacency to not see violence in your brother’s eyes and now you are nothing more than some pathetic excuse for a snake. It was your (new) brother that woke you, yellow-and-black tail smacking you in the face. 

Wake, sister! he said, and you’ve still no idea how he managed it because he, too, is a fucking snake. 

You fall out of the tree.

Over time it is uncovered (by your brother, mostly) that you are the regrettable children of a woman so foolish as to pray to a water snake for fertility. Mboia-acusy, they call her. The great snake mother. You knew of some water-entities before, knew your own mother once prayed to one, but never this tricky-mean serpent that cursed infertile wombs with snakes and laughed when the poor bastards got tossed out to die. If she were really a great spirit, she would answer you when you scream into the water demanding to know why the fuck she did this. You want to know what happened to your brothers, what happened to your tribe. Did Piata get caught? Did your death ruin Ruda’s marriage? Were you ever avenged? What happened to Aratiri?

As far as you can tell, these people know nothing of them or how to get to them. You don’t know how much time, if any, has passed. Everything is unfamiliar.

Your stupid snake brother is named Norato and he is not like you. You are a soul snatched from a human corpse and tossed into a strange body fashioned by womb-water and magic, but he seems to have been birthed genuinely from the aether or else too stupid to remember a life before this.

He’s never been around humans before (does not, even, understand what you mean when you try to explain that you were one), and he is enthralled. He wiggles and whines and prays to the great snake mother for a way to join them. One day, having heard her deep rumbling instructions in his dreams, he sheds his skin at the riverbank and walks nakedly up the hill to your human mother’s hut, hugging her and chatting with her and forgiving her for her sin of forsaking you, of trying to drown you both. You watch from the water and think venomous thoughts that grow all the more furious the brighter their smiles shine. 

This village is worse than your own. The men here are cruel and domineering to women who they view only as tools and vessels, and though you think hateful-mean thoughts about your (new, horrible) human mother, you feel bad for her. You have a hard time imagining a world in which you could have risen in ranks amongst these people, where you wouldn’t have been cut down and beaten as a child until you stayed down. It is clear that praying to the great snake mother was a final and desperate effort. When she failed (once again) to produce real, human children, the woman’s husband left. She has nothing to keep her company besides your stupid, shiny-eyed snake brother when he pretends to be a man, and she still will not tolerate the black-and-yellow scales of you. You refuse to take on a human body that is not your own just to appease this stranger. When Norato is not there to act a fool for the delight of her laughter, you hear the distant sounds of keening and tears.

You struggle to reconcile pangs of sympathetic sorrow with how deeply you resent being reborn. 

You wonder if you should hate your original mother just as deeply. 

It all started with her. 

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Norato makes human friends.

It is a special skill of his. His human face is so earnest, skin gleaming in the sunlight as he laughs and grins and dances amongst the humans, and you think he might have more charisma than all of your (real) brothers combined. He’s dimwitted though, easily distracted by novelty, and you can see the men of the village pulling him in by the shoulders and pouring foul words into his ear. He’s too delighted to be involved to question it and, as far as he is concerned, everything they say is irrefutably true.

He won’t listen when you try to tell him about Before This. 

“That’s just how it is!” he says, flippant as ever, and the hiss you offer in return almost rattles your bones. 

“It need not be so,” you insist, violence curling tight-and-hot in your body at being so easily brushed off. “Not everywhere is like this, Norato! Women should be honored and respected! This is obscene. You think your human mother is happy with how things turned out for her?”

Norato is flinging himself like a monkey up-and-up-and-around a tree, barely even listening to you. “You know too many words, Maria. Calm down. If you’re so worried about Mother, maybe you should go see her!”

You can’t tell if he’s being malicious (he knows, but does not understand, how you refuse to forgive and bond with that woman) or if he’s just so clouded by the Men’s Ways that the idea of contending with you is simply not an option. He might as well have his ears cut out for how useless they are. You shed your skin, draping it around you until it becomes something like clothing, and you stomp off towards the village to leave Norato to his childishness. You are furious and you need to bleed the feeling out through your fists. This, at least, is something of your old self that you have retained.

It is not hard to pick a fight. The men here invite it.

But this is not like your village. There is not a sense of honor and pride in conflict. There are no practice rings where the children watch wide-eyed and hope to emulate the skills of their betters, no arenas for men to learn the art of battle and demand each other’s respect. There is no quiet-and-firm teacher watching and inspecting them and raising them up to battle their shortcomings. No, these men are terrified cowards who would smash the world into a pulp just to know it could not jump back up to bite them.

When you deck a man point-blank in the face, bones ringing with the force you put into it, he falls back in shock, screaming before he even realizes what’s happened. Vile piranha! Stinking whore! You sneer, bouncing on the balls of your feet for a moment while the familiar feeling of adrenaline makes everything slow and sharp. You are practically running circles around this man. His friend fumbles, making abortive movements back and forth, and by the time he decides to join in you’ve flung your body weight up and around the first man’s neck in a chokehold. The friend strikes your arm, your side, and in an apparent attempt to curl around and get your face, the friend smashes a poorly-angled fist into the first man’s eye socket. He goes limp against you and you let him fall, laughing hysterically at the idiocy of it. You’re laughing so hard, in fact, that you’re not even mad when the friend shoves you hard-as-he-can into a wall and a vase shatters against your calf.

“Like fighting drunks!” you giggle, buckling over a bit. “You’re embarrassing!” You deflect the friend’s fist and shove away from the wall to duck under his arm, descending on the first man trying to get up from the ground. You bounce violently off his foot once, raised as it is to keep you back, but he locks his knee and you immediately have room to go between his legs and shower punches against his arms and face with the weight of your fall to power it. The friend is around your middle now, trying to grab and pull you off, but the way he’s trying to put you in a chokehold now has his weight too far forward. You leverage yourself into a forward roll, tossing the friend off you as you somersault away into an awkward, diagonal arch. The first man does not get up.

“You’re a disgrace to women, Maria Caninana,” the friend says, spitting on the ground. You’re a little shocked that he knows who you are before you remember your scale-clothes, this shock of yellow and black that no one here (except Norato) sports. “Go drown in the river where you belong.”

It is a pitiful excuse for a taunt. “Feeling inadequate? I’ve heard that’s not uncommon for you.” You haven’t, actually, because you don’t know who this man is and the humans do not talk to you in such a way as to hand over idle gossip, but he is bright red and huffing-and-puffing and you think about how many years it took for this to stop working on the boys you grew up with, these insults you gathered like overripe fruit from under the old-men-around-the-fire’s feet.

In the end you bring the friend to the ground by tripping him on the ceramic shards, following after to grasp one arm between your hands and the other between your thighs before you flip him on his back. This lets you both pin him and wrap one arm so far behind itself that it is creaking and he is screaming and you are laughing in his face, asking if he gives. You can see fury and panic warring for ownership over his expression as he tries to knee you in the face, but his inability to comprehend what you’ve even done has whatever strength he had seep out as indecision. You twist his arm harder and you know that in a moment it will either break outright or be torn from its socket.

He gives in and you roll away, laughing in delight. “Terrible job, but thank you for your time!” It doesn’t feel like a win. Sure, you are certain to be bruised and tender tomorrow, but these are not warriors. Brutes, but not trained. Still, the feeling in your body that felt like fratricide is a coating of red on the ground and you feel lighter than you have in days. 

You muscle through the small throng of onlookers and retreat back toward the tree you and Norato have been using as a home since you awoke. You are going to show him how to inflate his snake throat to look bigger-than-he-is and deformed enough to be startling. He saw you do it once as you scared children away from your tree and he has been pestering you to teach him ever since. He was so upset about it that you think he might be happy to listen even though you  are only a woman.

It excites you, actually. The idea that you might teach him something. 

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“You need to stop this, Maria,” Norato tells you, all hush-hush and smiling through gritted teeth.

He is trying to save face in front of his friends. That’s fine; he’s never once taken your side in anything, and you don’t expect him to do so now. Still, you hoped he’d be too distracted by the festivities to interrupt you. 

There is a festival happening in the village. The men dance with abandon and the women have worked for weeks to bake and weave offerings to the great snake mother of the river, begging her to keep them safe from the devils in the water that threaten to impregnate young girls too naive to discern charming river spirits from human men. They are all devils, as far as you are concerned, but there is a pale-skinned creature in your midst with dead eyes and a sharp smile and an air about him that is hungry, hungrier even than the men with whom you pick fights to keep from bothering the women of the village. He reminds you of Piata so deeply that every single scale, physical and spiritual, is tense in warning. 

The women are not grateful to you for your protection. They think you make a poor name for them. It doesn’t matter; village gossip has never bothered you when you knew you were in the right. 

You snatch your brother’s human arm in a vice grip, hissing with snake-tongue into his ear, There is a devil here, brother. The kind they protect against. I see him. Why don’t you?

But he has been poisoned by these men. There is nothing he seeks more passionately in this life than to be like them, to be them, to become the human he doesn’t believe you’ve ever been. He quite nearly bares his fangs at you, so angry is he suddenly at you threatening his peace, and you recoil. Norato does not know how to fight. You’ve never taught him. He’s never needed it. But at this moment, you think he might give it a try. 

You are a venomous witch, Caninana, he hisses back at you. You hate humans. All you do is vex them. You drown their sons and destroy their boats. You refuse to see our mother. Why should I ever believe you?

Your throat constricts with sorrow. This snake creature is not a true brother to you, to your soul, but he is to this body, and he reminds you so much and so often of all three of your true brothers that it makes you sick to your stomach. You always did your best to protect them, even when you shouldn’t have. You doted on them. You wanted them to fill the hole in your heart that your dead mother left. 

Norato, like Piata, hates you for what you represent. Norato, like Piata, sees you as a barrier to what he wants. Norato, like Piata, you think, intends to kill you. You simply do not know when, and you do not think that you are any more equipped to stop him in this life than you were in the last. 

Very much in spite of yourself, you have come to love this horrible egotistical asshole. He is all that you have. 

You pull away from him, hurt and angry that he will never see your words as wisdom. I am trying to protect the women, Norato. The river knows you will not, because you are blinded by these human men. Please. Let me help them. Let me be the answer to their prayers. The snake mother put us here for a reason. 

He dismisses you. 

You hide in the shadows, eyes trained on the pale man until you can see him weave magic to charm a young woman into the forest. You know this woman, too; she has a promised man. She is to be married, but those proceedings take time in this village. This devil of the water will put something inside of her that will ruin her life, and you refuse to allow it.

You tear the girl out from under him. You hiss and spit and wrestle him to the ground. You use your snake fangs to hook into the arterial blood of his throat and you rip it out with your mouth. When the creature dies, he becomes some strange, pink amalgamation of man and dolphin, and you stare down at him with vindication, drenched in river-blood that is so very different from the lifeblood of a human. It should be obvious. You killed a monster. This girl should see you as a savior. 

She does not. She screams.

You are the monster, and this is the final indiscretion the village will permit. 

Norato decides, finally, that he will no longer allow you to threaten his chances of becoming a man. It hurts to know that you have been reborn just to relive the same betrayal. Norato takes a knife and slits you apart, belly to chin, womb to throat, and you let him. It doesn’t even hurt. When you fall into the river, all you can do is hope that you do not awaken again. 

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You are not granted this wish. 

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The great snake mother is a cruel entity. She seems to take joy in making monsters of spurned women. You meet the Yara, after some time, these siren creatures with souls whittled down into the singular purpose of dragging men as sacrifices down into the oblivion of the deep water. They are but mindless hunters giving offerings to a hungry god, and you refuse to become one. You refuse to forget who you are. Irece of the Jureira, you were once the chieftain-to-be. You were a leader. You are more than the monster that men or women or gods could ever make of you. 

Your life becomes your footfalls upon the ground. 

You seek out men with blood on their hands and hate in their hearts and you beg them for reason enough to grind their faces into bloody pulp. Sometimes, infrequently, you kill women. Bad women. Women who sell and hurt girls, women who pluck organs from young bodies and toss the rest out like refuse, women who make their children do unspeakable things. You don't like to kill these women, especially when they have children, because you are frightened of what will happen to them. Certainly you will not care for them, as you are not that kind of spirit, and you are not smart enough to find them alternative means of survival. Despite that, you know that sometimes an unknown future is better than a certain one. 

You think of Aratiri often. You try to decide whether or not you should have married him before Piata killed you and you land on a different answer each time, usually while mounted on the lap of another man. It is not that you are comparing them against how you think Aratiri would have been, exactly, but more that you are wondering how safe and comfortable you would feel right now, in this moment, with Aratiri instead of this negligible and nameless human. You wonder how he might have sounded, if he would have yielded to you or if it would have been a laughing-but-vicious battle of wits and ego like it always was. You resent the men you're with when they aren't rough and mean, and equally when they are. You are filled with so much hate and confusion and aggression that you often feel like an overspent cleaning rag, drab and gray and sopping with undesirable things. 

You didn't even know Aratiri all that well, you eventually realize. You knew him in his boyhood bravado, you knew him in the sting of his flesh against your face, and you knew him in the thunk of his weapons at your back on the few times a fight was truly life-or-death. You didn't know him as a man. He appointed himself as your second, the one to stand beside you when you took control of the village, the kind and warning word in your ear when you were too naive or blustering to see a situation properly. You trusted him, but you never heeded him, and oh how you paid the price.

Sometimes, you wonder if his intentions were ever even sexual or romantic in nature. Sure, he said stupid things about women, but so did you, and so too did you play into this idea that strength was masculinity and masculinity was mean. You modeled yourself after your grandfather and the horrible things his friends said in the dead of night. How reassuring might it have been to a young man to hear that same filth from a woman’s mouth? What if he was attracted to your hardness and your sharpness and your poorly executed masculinity because he didn't think he was allowed to be attracted to it in his fellow men? You think about this while you look at women, while you (eventually, sometimes) lay with them and luxuriate in how soft they can be. You know he loved you, but could he want you as more than a palatable version of what he was never allowed to have?

Maybe he took your place. Maybe he killed Piata. Maybe Piata killed him, scornful of you as he was, ruthless enough to destroy your most fervent supporter.

Did Piata get away with it? Did Father know? Did he suspect? Did Piata convince them all that the river took you as a sacrifice, and not that he offered you as blood and meat and entrails to the very water that birthed you, once and twice again? You dream often of how the waterfall tumbled you beneath its beating fists. It's no wonder your body didn't survive. You just don't understand why the river plucked you from that meaty pulp to become Maria.

It doesn't matter. 

You have no way to know.

Your best friend and most beloved human is long dead and you are some horrific immortal being, now, puppeted by the river. You hope Aratiri died in victory or in old age with a friend at his back. Or at least at his side. He must have found someone, anyone, after you disappeared. He must have. 

When you realize that the great snake mother has taken your body and, with it, any ability you might have once had to embody a child into this world, you laugh about it. You only would have wanted it to be Aratiri's, anyway. 

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Your dreams guide you to different places on the map. As the decades change, so too do your methods. So too does your rage. In one fitful night that leaves you drenched with sweat, you see the visage of another victim of the great snake mother, one you have met before in your hunts through the forest villages, and you accept this wordless summons for what it is. There is a child, both human and snake, and the great snake mother means to take it as a vessel. She wants you to help keep it safe long enough for it to grow into something she can use.

You don’t know if she realizes that she has preserved a creature that will tear out a god’s throat at the first opportunity. You are a chieftain's daughter. You were always meant to fight, to protect. You will kill the god of the Amazon river, if that is what it takes, and you decide all at once that you will protect this unknown child with whatever could possibly be left of your life. If you are slain again, it will be for the last time.