Noemí, just because there are no ghosts it doesn’t mean you can’t be haunted. Nor that you shouldn’t fear the haunting.

The patriarchy speaks with my mother’s voice.

Monsters don’t age. They live forever.

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.

“The name doesn’t matter. You know me. I have no silks or gold, but I’d promise to eat your enemy’s heart and tear their lungs out with my claws in exchange for your kiss, dear Judith, which is more than a prince could say.”

The war on earth may have yet to start as the gods claimed their vessels and set their stakes, but the war in heaven had already begun. For what was earth but a mirror of heaven?

Orquidea didn't like it because she knew she wasn't a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what?  To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.