And now the dance was at its end. The supplicants stood together at the center, the Mother with knife in hand. She severed the youth’s loincloth, let it fall and watched him rise like the excitement inside her in anticipation of the Father’s vision. She could feel it; it would come like a dream, a reverie. Incessantly, the youth repeated the psalm of the King as Lilum sank to her knees, lips nuzzling her sacrifice’s body—the hills of his abdomen, the trunks of his thighs, then to the throbbing bough of his manhood. She enveloped him in slithering tongue and soft, warm cheek, stroking with the rhythm of the drums. She could feel the beat of the sticks at the back of her throat. The instant was at hand, root and stem severed by the chosen knife as the Mother of old Iisah swallowed. Salt and blood. The youth was raised up on the fangs of the forsaken and paraded about the congregation that in the sanguine shower they might be blessed.
His prison, Lilum witnessed in the fit of her vision the Traitor’s black walls as a serpent devouring its tail. She saw the maw of a lion clutching the neck of a lamb. A wolf in the oasis where the Father is buried. The dawn rising in the west. A dead snake in the sand, succumbed to its own venom. A hundred years of darkness, of rule by the damned. The Father, our King.
And Lilum awoke, her ears ringing, the congregation singing the psalm of the Queen—of spirit’s returning. It was her most hated thing, to be stolen from the Father’s arms, yet this day she rejoiced the herald of her regent. “Your Mother has seen it,” she hissed, and the crowd went silent. “He is coming. The Father has whispered the fall of the Traitor’s tyranny! And I saw it. I saw the betrayer poisoned by his own blood! His son will rise against him, and hark! Thus shall we know this progeny. He will bring slaughter to the Messah! He will slay the Black Beast! And we shall see it all within our times, for this sun is yet an early dawn, yet rising to become the harbinger, the key to the seal, the bearer of the Father’s crown. Soon, my children, the walls shall come down, and for a hundred years our King shall reign!” And I alongside him, she delighted privately while the members of her flock frothed and praised her promise of revenge.
Then their Mother turned her back, suddenly bitter toward her children’s revelry. For she loved them as man loves a hound—for its obedience and inequitable reverence—and this celebration was mockery. How could they remember, how could they hate when they had never known the home stolen from them? How can they rage without knowing the pain? The betrayal? She started for the steps, desperate for distance, to separate herself from the fools extolling their own doom—though that she kept from them, had kept it from congregations for more than a thousand years. For the pain was too great to lose children whom loved her despite the truth. This way, she could love them as hounds and puppets, though it left her tired of being the Mother of old Iisah. But soon I shall be the Queen.
“Mother! Mother!” repeated a voice from the crowd just as Lilum reached the idol throne. She was remiss to return her attention to the altar, but then the voice called louder, gasping, desperate for breath. “Mother…foreigners…transgressors…three of them profaning the river. We have them at bay, but—”
“But what?” she might have snapped. The impotence of her sons never failed her displeasure. Savages in loincloths with bone-tipped spears, defeated first by the craven Black Beast, and now they struggled with a few mortal men—a few ignorant foreigners. Foreigners. The thought made her pause. The dawn rising in the west. Could this be His answer, so soon?
Tempering herself, she silenced the messenger with a flick of her wrist and questioned, “Where on the Vereringeks?”
The man stammered.
“Where?” Lilum lashed him with her tongue.
“To the south, on the bank beyond the crucified.”
“Show me.”
“But Mother, It’s not safe! These heathens fight like animals, like they don’t know death. They’ve killed two brothers already. If you come and we can’t hold them back—”
She started down the stairs. “Then you and who ever remains of your brothers will feed yourselves to the riverwyrms, and your bones will never know the grace of the Father’s reign—the rest of you,” she said, descending the final step, “the blooding is done. Scour the altar and begone before I return.” For I will not have your faith tried by heathen snakes. Not again, she promised, the image of that false prophet imprinted in her mind—a man pierced, crucified, and cast into the river alongside his apostates two years prior, condemned to their fate, to consumption at the great Father’s black table. No, I will not risk that these snakes spit venom. I will hear them alone. I will see them for myself.
Indeed, she would find those heathens a breed of beasts unlike anything she imagined while pursuing the winding river passed ruined homes and pock-scarred streets to where her sons held the transgressors captive. A wretched march despite the wind at her back, for, even two years after the attack, the breeze weighed tainted with the Beast of Tsaazaar. It hounded her nostrils, the odor, the memories of desecration—the sole instance she’d questioned the Father’s gift—questioned herself, her judgement. Did I execute the wrong man? Lilum had fretted years ago hiding helplessly behind the temple walls as the Beast
