Prologue for "The Worst is Yet to Come" on ao3
He remembered how she held him against her chest when she read to him at night.
Sitting on the edge of his deep blue sheets, singing a song he couldn’t understand just yet, but she promised to teach him the words.
Telling him the stories of the people before the church that lived on the land he grew up on, the same stories her mother told her, and her mother’s mother told her, and so on. It was something passed down long before both of them came to be and would continue to be sat deep in the soil they planted it in.
His favorite one was of the owl.
“ A great Giant Owl was the first of our family, she had found a lost man wandering deep in her territory and watched him until she believed he was ready, and maybe that ‘ready’ was delusion, maybe that’s what all these stories were based on.” She always sounded so sad when she read to him . . . But she cupped his face and laid him into bed, tucking him in tight enough that the pressure on his chest turned soothing before she continued.
“The Giant Owl swooped down on the man and there in the middle of the forest she gave him something special, and days after the owl left him to wander, a women, the first women in our family, burst through his chest,”
“Did he die?” His voice was small, tired from running through the open field behind the church all day well the adults sat inside talking about ‘adult things’ as his Mother put it.
“Yes, but when the wolves came to eat what was left of him they found they owed something to the women, so, until they became human they stayed by her side, following her through the woods. And when they had babies, the women gave them a gift to see things other people can’t.”
That was the last one she told him before she left. Before his father sat him in their kitchen that him and his Mother used to stand by the sink and gaze out the window at the new builds the town brought in and the houses being put up down the road.
He remembered his head burning.
His sister sitting next to him got the same treatment until they both shared the same bleached yellow hair, stringy and half falling out when he ran a brush through it, whatever texture he shared with his Mother was gone in a single day.
After that it was just them and Father.
The food started tasting odd after that. Madeleine always said it was because Father couldn’t cook right, he never added all those spices and things Mother did, and until Maddy learned to cook that spice rack sat empty, collecting dust.
Everything was different after she left.
