#breyona

She heard the Pale Lady’s poisonous smile in her voice. “Tell me your name.”

“Greta Dreiss.”

Dredda felt the cave yawning ever back from her, the Pale Lady’s voice growing to fill it.

“Tell me your name.”

Like camera flashes, dark images laced with sickly green and glowing eyes shutterclicked through her mind: her sisters in the Darklands. Their name for her: “Ravga.”

The Pale Lady’s voice flowed like smoke. “Tell me your name.”

Dredda gritted her teeth. Dictatious’ name for her: “Greenhorn.” She spat the word.

“Tell me your name.” Singsong. Lilting. Relentless.

Further back in her mind lived a blackness as total as the one in front of her, so she sent her mind forward to light, to Aion the Fae Queen’s name for her: “Young One.”

“Tell me your name.”

Dredda sent her mind forward again, grasping. “Gregory Dreiss.”

“Tell me your name.” There was no pause or lag between the Pale Lady’s words and the lazy bursts of her catacomb breath.

The darkness in front of her, a dead totality, filled her with senseless rage. Through curled lip and around snapping fang, Dredda spoke her favorite names. Alexa’s, which closed a clawed fist around her heart: “Beloved.” Blinky’s, and the urge to glance back so strong it made her drunk: “Jade beauty.” Moina’s, which tightened the fist and squeezed her heart into her trembling throat: “Kitten-nose.”

And the last of her names, which she spoke against the thick, belligerent dark and the malignant source within it like a talisman, a fae-light, like a flag planted in the ground at her feet: “Mama.”

Pale yellow light flickered and pulsed in the darkness. “No.” The wailing echo behind her voice nearly overtook the word. “What name did you have before you had any other? Before you had anything else at all?”

The names lined up behind her like soldiers fell like them before the Pale Lady’s words, each of them a named bullet. And Dredda’s anger diminished to the fear that had been its seed. In her words, a declaration. In her tone, a begging: “I will not say that name.”

“You will,” the Pale Lady said.

Then the shutterclick of memory began again. Slowly at first, speeding up: Trollmarket trolls casting suspicious glances at her. The blank contempt in Dictatious’ gaze. Lofoten trolls peppering her with human garbage through the bars of her cell. The wild fury leaving Sigrid’s eyes as Dredda twisted the knife in her heart —the images came more quickly now-- Bular’s hand around her throat, his hulking shape above her, his tusks shiny with drool.  A Janus Order agent stopping her at the door of a meeting and telling her her security clearance had been revoked; the blue beam of Gunmar’s eye looking past her, through her, as she jammed herself down on his knot—she watched her life flick past faster like the view from a speeding train-- the Fair Folk cringing from her, even after a year; Moina cringing from her even after three; Ismar’s gleeful hateful grin, which Dredda could only see through one single blood-glazed eye; more blood, gushing out of her, her guts gripping themselves and deathrolling her newly planted pebble out of her; her last look at Alexa’s beautiful freckled face: screwed down in anger, anger at her; Blinky’s gaze which was the inverse of his brother’s but still, still, if she happened to catch him unguarded, carried the exact copy of the quality she could not name other than he looks at me like a zoo animal he’s only seen in pictures and Dredda clapped her hands over her ears and screwed her eyes shut, unaware of the wordless pleading whine escaping her. She opened her mouth to say the name the Pale Lady wanted her to say. Opened her mouth to say anything, anything the Pale Lady wanted, if only to stop this, oh stop, stop STOP

(mama)

Then the spinning shutterclick of memory stopped on a last image: a declaration

(“Mama?”)

written in mottled blue-green flesh, a flag on the ground that walked on two unsteady legs, a four-eyed, four-armed little fae-light that faltered and flickered and shone, and shone, and shone.

Dredda uncurled and turned from the darkness to her daughter. Knelt to her daughter, held out her arms. But Breyona tangled one stubby toddler leg on the other and smacked the hard cave floor face first.

“Oh, Brey,” Dredda lunged forward to scoop her daughter up but her muscles locked. Panic lit up the space behind her eyes like lightning.

Behind her, behind the screaming white fear for her crying daughter and her tightening lungs, the Pale Lady laughed. It was the sound of a landslide. “I’ll ask one more time. Tell me. Your name.”

The Pale Lady had immobilized her head, but she shook it without moving it an inch, shook it madly as she watched her daughter cry alone on the ground. Her tiny strange daughter, who couldn’t walk as well as other pebbles her age, wasn’t as big as other pebbles her age, couldn’t eat well, couldn’t breathe well, had strange, sensitive skin, her weak runty little daughter, the accidental, troubled child of a troll and the purposeful pollution of a troll, something that was once pure but was no longer.

Guilt drifted in her lungs and in her mind like ash and made them both burn; she screamed but the Pale Lady had stopped that too. Breyona’s cries had quieted to sobs and she regained her wobbly feet, gazing at her mother through watery eyes which said why didn’t you come pick me up when I fell, Mama? You always pick me back up when I fall down.

Because I’m Impure and I’ll always be Impure because I’m polluted and contaminated and unclean because I was made not born because I’m Impure I’m an abomination I never should have existed never should have mated bred created you because now you are too you’re Impure too just like your mama because I’m Impure I’m Impure IMPURE IMPURE IM—

“--PURE! IMPURE! IMPURE! THERE, YOU BITCH! I SAID MY NAME! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?”

Dredda, her paralysis broken, and fury returned, shrieked at the Pale Lady’s guard-darkness.  

The Pale Lady smiled again, and Dredda heard it rather than saw it. “There. Was that so hard?”