The most popular tagged coffeeshop AU on Archive of Our Own is over 255,000 words long. It was first published in 2016, completed in 2019, inspired by the Netflix series Voltron: Legendary Defender. It is a soulmate AU within a coffeeshop AU, titled The Marks We Make, owed to the premise that, in this universe, whatever a person draws appears on their soulmate’s skin. If you are even glancingly familiar with the Voltron fandom from this era, it will not surprise you to learn that the central ship is between the characters Keith and Lance.

If you’re familiar with the coffeeshop AU genre, most of the content, including the soulmate dimension, will also be unsurprising. It’s tagged fluff and smut and University AU and they play muggle Quidditch because it was 2016 and that’s what a specific subset of people who were on Tumblr traditionally practiced in the undergraduate setting. Misunderstandings of a relatively low-stakes nature abound. Male lead #1 bumps into male lead #2, spilling his smoothie and infuriating him. Shenanigans are shenanigan’d with regards to the soulmate-drawing powers. One of the characters is nonbinary. They have classes. They have coffee. They are distressed by their lack of coffee and must obtain coffee posthaste. They live the idyllic, predictably-complicated and predictably-resolved lives of undergraduates in approximately this time period attending, like, UVM.

I wrote a college AU once and received a comment that named the college based on Vriska Serket’s long walk to the athletic center. So it’s not as though I don’t have a horse in this race, and any fondness you might register from my description of this behemoth, which I regrettably did not finish, is entirely sincere.

Asking the average overly-invested commentator about the problem with fanfiction, however, if you don’t receive an indignant monologue about porn, you will receive instead an indignant monologue about the triviality and frothy weightlessness of coffeeshop AUs specifically. People get downright furious about coffeeshop AUs! Something as simple as an alternate universe, into which familiar characters are transposed, sipping lattes, flirting incompetently with baristas, bitching about the closing shift, and trying to obtain enough oat milk to get through morning rush after a catastrophic unsealed fridge incident. Even this harmless, fluffy, wildly popular genre of fic drives a particular sort of critic into paroxysms of rage, most trenchantly Hilary Layne. It is contrary to literary integrity! The teens don’t want to engage with canon anymore, they just want to write pornography and caramel ribbon frappuccino and they/them, and worst of all, they’re getting book deals for it!

A lot of this was clearly in an effort by the audiences to see themselves mirrored in the work. Characters had to be made gay or queer or trans in order for the gay, queer, or trans community to identify with them. Characters were also often race or gender swapped for the same reason. Resistance to this was often met with the predictable cries of “[blank]-phobia!” Because if the character — in its altered, fan fiction form — now mirrored the creator, and thus was, to some degree, the creator, having a problem with that reimagined character was the exact same as having a problem with the creator, or anyone else who identified with the character. Every single aspect of which, by the way, is fundamentally contrary to literary integrity.

It’s disgustingly self-indulgent. Of course you made the protagonists play Quidditch because you played Quidditch, you self-centered nonbinary millennial. Of course they have anal painlessly the first time. Of course they brush fingers when they both reach for the same macchiato. Of course, uh, Pidge, is they now, and being gay is normal here. You make me fucking sick!

For whatever reason, this post has been circulating on Substack again.

Hilary Layne

Fanfiction Ruins Everything

This article and list is meant to act as a companion piece to my Youtube video…

Read more

9 months ago · 255 likes · 86 comments · Hilary Layne

This was short enough for me to read all the way through. There are four major arguments at work:

• There is absolutely no policing of fanfiction content, due to the censorship-averse inception of Archive of Our Own, leading to a grotesque orgy of meaningless fluff and smut that shames the written word/its literary origins.

• Fanfiction is a hyper-policing cesspool of minorities on high horses, and their reckless identity-policing has seeped into legitimate, normal culture and ruined literature/the internet/the United States/possibly China as well.

• Porn in fanfiction is not only bad, but it is escalating in extremity and depravity with every passing month as its practitioners and readers seek ever more intense CSA content, a claim the article places immediately beside an otherwise disconnected section on female teachers who abuse children.

• Fanfiction is categorically worse than original fiction in sheer quality due to the parasitic relationship between fanfiction and its source material, leading the usually-gay masses to attempt ambitious writing without the necessary skills.

There is also a lot of culture-tourist finger-pointing and out-of-place giggling. I Googled whump, and you’ll never guess what I found! There was whump there! Can you believe that, when I looked up content about the heroic sacrifice of a character in a television show, these mouth-breathing blue-haired rubes were utterly fixated on the depths of tragedy he had to overcome rather than his patriotic duty? It’s disgusting!

As of 4:20PM on 8/29/26, there were 18,045,599 works of fanfiction published on Archive of Our Own. Let’s take the main thrust of these arguments seriously.

3,429,441/18,045,599 works are tagged E for Explicit. Almost precisely 19%. What about those con artists not tagging their work, under Not Rated? 2,038,843/18,045,599, or 11.3%, but not so fast. Only 80,387 of Not Rated fics contain warnings that Layne objects to; 3.9% of that Not Rated subset. I read through three pages of the most recently posted Not Rated fics and learned a lot about the cutesy summertime romance of Haaland and Bellingham during the World Cup but fairly little sexual content. One where a BTS member heals an audience insert after her traumatic rape by cuddling her protectively and ordering the mafia to kill her rapist. Two (2) in simplified Mandarin in which there appeared to be some rape. At twenty fics per page, three pages, sixty fics total, that’s not quite Sodom or Gomorrah. Scrolling further, what I noticed was that the reader, almost invariably, sometimes even so explicitly as to identify the character only as reader, is the victim of violence. Your proxy is the one getting traumatically assaulted. If we take all those claims about how fiction creates our desires and causes us helpless desire to act on them in real life, I share Layne’s concerns about nineteen-year-old college students flying to Japan and prostrating themselves nude before the nearest tattooed man, and I hope the man in question is not too traumatized by the experience.

But I digress. Let’s add that 80,387 to the total. 3,429,441 + 80,387. Now let’s check M for Mature. This is kind of a sketchy place, as general practice on AO3 is to put graphic sexual content in E, and M is a greyer zone for canon-typical hyperviolence as well as canon-typical type sex, but I’m not going to pretend there isn’t plenty of porn in M. Let’s assess how much.

For methods, I tried pretty hard to just filter by a few different terms, for instance, “sex”, but this turned out to catch a lot of fade-to-blacks and “kissing was not enough…” elisions. Even what seemed pretty straightforwardly pornographic, like Ryan Gosling from Project Hail Mary “monsterfucking”, turned out to mostly involve some brisk kissing, the mention of a soft, bushy tail existing, and a few dot-dot-dots. I learned a lot more about Erling Haaland here, but there was essentially no mention of his penis or proclivities beyond snuggling with Jude Bellingham after not winning the World Cup. I think this is a much healthier coping mechanism for sports fans than setting cars on fire in Philadelphia, personally - but that’s just me!

Ultimately, I did the same thing here that I did to vet Not Rated. 291,734 fics under M contain warnings for either underage sex or nonconsensual sex. I am probably thus missing a lot of more cheerful and wholesome Haaland/Bellingham content, which Layne would presumably consider part of the overall cultural degeneracy of fanfiction. That said, a scroll through these categories shows a significant number that seem to grapple with these topics rather than portraying them, and a lot of what I would call “abundance of caution warning” for the presence of themes. In Game of Thrones fanfiction, for instance, that has any interest whatsoever in reckoning with canon, I can see a fair argument for warning of underage sexual content; it’s not something I want to casually stumble into, even in terms of a 5,000-word ventfic where Daenerys finally talks to Missandei about all she’s endured to get this far and they wash each others’ hair and marvel at their mutual resiliency. That does seem to be the going ethos on AO3, save in niche communities and also, as I’ve noticed fairly often, foreign language works tend to be tagged differently than English works. It suggests a cultural component rather than any inherent fact of the site.

3,429,441 + 80,387 + 291,734. That gives us 3,801,562 fics that Layne finds categorically reprehensible, ranging from E-rated loving sex between consenting married mermaids to under-tagged vampire ravishment in the Not Rated section, or a total of 21% content she would like to remind us that she doesn’t want censored, necessarily, but that she does consider conspicuously degenerate and likely contributing to child rape. Truly, why else juxtapose the argument that these porn-addled women are chasing a stronger and stronger high with a section like On the Matter Regarding Female Perpetrators of Sexual Crimes Against Minors, at the conclusion of the article, asserting that sure, these crimes are under-reported, and sure, the data is limited and suggests that it doesn’t happen overwhelmingly often, and sure, this all came from a guy on Reddit who doesn’t understand why it would be important to consider whether there are more female teachers than male teachers in the profession in calculating rates of sexual abuse, and sure, he chose the big number at the end to calculate sentencing instead of making reasonable estimates of likely time served or analyzing only a dataset to which he actually has access, but what if it was happening so much, unfalsifiably? I am genuinely curious whether there is any other explanation for that concluding piece, an otherwise perplexing segue to the difficulties of collecting data about horrific violence against children, which, like so much else in the article, consists of links to other people’s work and other people’s commentary, gesturing like, see? Like the corpse of Garrett Jacob Hobbes in the corner of the kitchen.

So there is perversion, loosely-defined, amidst the nonbinary-gay coffeeshop AUs which Layne also reviles. I will concede the perversion, the depictions of and the depictions of the aftermath of dysfunction and trauma and cruelty, while simultaneously arguing the non-uniqueness of this point. There was plenty of grotesque and frightening sexual violence, sex involving minors, and just plain graphic sex in romance and thrillers in particular well before fanfiction hit the mainstream. For more depiction-for-moral-titillation of sex crimes and crimes against children, try hit television show Law And Order: SVU produced by Dick Wolf, the most watched scripted series in the first half of 2023, going strong since 1999!

Rather than expressing moral condemnation for Law and Order: SVU because of its depiction of onscreen-if-fade-to-black sexual violence, intense discussion of sexual violence, and a premise that rests entirely on the fact that, with sexual violence onscreen, the average viewer will be hard-pressed to look away, I condemn it because it’s fairly unhelpful copaganda about the heroic police and straight-up propaganda that vastly misleads its audience about the crimes and judicial process it claims to depict. For instance, as cited in this 2019 piece on the show’s ongoing run, it is noted that while 87% of victims of sexual assault were familiar with their perpetrator, in the majority of the fifty episodes that psychologist Karla Guevara Corriere reviewed in her 2012 book on the subject, the victim did not know the perpetrator. This is a really essential and extremely popular mischaracterization of how sexual assault works, one which makes normative claims about its realism, and one that has achieved meteoric popularity downstream of the essential mistruth of its depiction.

Not only the fiction, but the scale and the positionality of the fiction matter in its reception. It’s on this basis that we have to examine the claims actually being made about the salience of perverted media to perverted behavior. Very little of this holds up, including every entry in the subheading Studies on the Ways Fiction Affects the Mind and Behavior.

The evidence Layne cites in her own article, and the quotes she pulls, include statements that internally contradict several of her claims. She cites When Fiction Feels Like Fact: How Stories Shape Beliefs, specifically the quote “high production values, natural dialogue, and emotional resonance create perceived realism, making fiction feel ‘more real’ than fact,” while in the same piece accusing fanfiction of having a low barrier to entry, exceedingly little literary value, and serving only as a vehicle for shallow identitarian portrayals. Interestingly, the Psychology Today piece she cites is specifically about fictional depictions promoting counterscientific panic about the mental health of teens on their phones.

I think it might have helped Layne a great deal to ‘ask, “Why does this feel true to me?”’ as the article she cites recommends, when experiencing revulsion after opening the Dead Dove Do Not Eat bag, but this and several other examples on the list of gestured-at evidence suggest that she did a great deal of feeling and fairly little asking in the course of her research. She also cites an analysis of the effects of binge-watching television shows on sleep in order to gesture at the harms of obsession with media, despite no study cited in this article having any bearing on harms of confusing fiction with reality. Then she cites a much-debated study of Brazilian telenovelas, specifically Globo telenovelas, resulting in a decrease in fertility rates among older women relative to those consuming other television. One of many problems raised in response to this study is that Globo viewership specifically was a class signifier of the time, specifically, contemporaneous to the study, of C-class membership!

The C-class, the middle-middle class of Brazil, both predominantly those with the incomes necessary to purchase televisions and primarily those with access to contraceptives, medical care, and divorce relative to the D- and E-classes of the same era, were the audience for Globo. This rising middle class, with printing-press levels of medium-evolution in culture transmission, with access to an increased standard of living and income, began to have fewer late-in-life children. The study notes that this was fairly specific to Globo viewers. Over 70% of the C-class specifically was watching the same shows on Globo, and also having 11% fewer children! However, these depictions of a sentimental, fictional world of extravagance and debauchery seemed to have very little bearing on the rate of evil twin murder, though the homicide rate certainly increased over the 1980s and 2000s. Researchers, nonetheless, seem to draw fairly few correlations between telenovelas and murder rates, despite the populationally disproportionate depiction of crimes of passion in telenovelas.

Then there’s the Perceiving and experiencing fictional characters: An integrative account citation, for which she cleverly cites a line from the abstract, uninterested in the article which follows, establishing inconvenient complexities like the subjective judgment of the observer as a component of the model being proposed and the conception of media as a tool to “explore the individual’s tolerance between right and wrong” and apply the concept of valence, noting “the ethic, aesthetic, and epistemic features that are relevant to the goals and concerns of the observer probably underlie the positive and/or negative feelings toward an FC (fictional character) and its situation”; this is simply developing the notion that Layne and I might both watch a television show about a scientist who cures cancer but struggles because her focus on her career has left her isolated in her personal life. Layne might be frustrated by this depiction and lean into her existing belief that women ought to balance careers with homemaking, even at the expense of advancement in medical science; I might feel reassured about my choice to dedicate my life to medical science, seeing that someone else struggles with some of the same trade-offs and yet, her life goes on and she achieves great things.

The key counter-Layne takeaway from the cited piece, however, is that depictions of evil and appreciation of depictions of evil have a valence to them, and are part of the way people process their own desires and choices in a manner that is much more fuzzy and complex than people watching a few days’, or even a few decades’, worth of Globo and deciding to kill their husband for his money and get an abortion, like their favorite character did. That is there in the research, which she cited.

But the first and only straightforwardly relevant article from which she cites the abstract is Young Adults’ Wishful Identification With Television Characters: The Role of Perceived Similarity and Character Attributes. Ultimately, the actual study only considers conclusions like “men reported greater wishful identification with more violent male characters” and “men perceived female characters as more attractive than male characters, but women perceived male and female characters as equally at-tractive”, which, if Layne had read the article, might go a long way to helping her resolve her confusion as to why on earth women write so much fanfiction about hot men. It raises concerns about the glamorization of eating disorders and unachievable beauty standards for women.

Unfortunately for Layne’s argument, the full text of the study arrives at her point, and declines to support it.

This study provided insight into the process of wishful identification, but some questions remain. For example, through what mechanism does a sense of similarity facilitate a desire to become more similar to a media figure? Although it has been suggested that similarity indicates that it is both possible and appropriate to become like another person (Bandura, 1969), there is little evidence for this explanation in a mediated context. (346)

So none of the studies she gestures at conclude the things that her subheading, Studies on the Ways Fiction Affects the Mind and Behavior, suggest they would conclude; Law and Order: SVU certainly has vastly more of an audience, vastly more cultural cachet, and vastly more realism and resonance as suggested by these pieces in sum.

Does fanfiction cause an epidemic of child rape? Probably not. If I were Layne, I would take that section out of my article and rewrite the rest of the Studies subheading so as not to overinterpret research that contradicts my claims. To cite abstracts with authoritative disinterest in their content, reporting conclusions the research specifically declines, is not a reliable research method.

Let’s do some research on our own. If fanfiction is an ouroboros of debauchery, we would see not only a ~21% proportion of iniquitous gay sex and depictions of perverted acts, but a consistent increase, year to year, of fanfiction containing the extreme taboos of underage sex and rape. I ran the numbers. Raw data can be found here.

For methods, I used the AO3 search function which allows searching in increments of “0-1 years ago”, “1-2 years ago” etc. to avoid double-counting. Because of the way the search function works, I individually sorted through and collected data on each of the tags to which Layne principally objects (rape/non-con and underage sex, the depiction of both of which strikes me as at least modestly reasonable to object to from the perspective she lays out, though of course, the same warnings apply to the average episode of Law and Order: SVU; frankly, I find the way she addresses gay sex more genuinely repulsive and embarrassing to have posted publicly than she seems to consider the depiction of gay sex itself), individually, then factored out the presence of doubly-tagged work. Raw data accounts for all of these numbers.

Now, let’s consider the hypothesis we’re actually trying to assess. As Layne writes:

*note: I’ve received many messages since making my jab at fan fiction in my video on romantasy and women’s fiction that insist that smut is not the only kind of fan fiction in existence. I addressed this issue in the current video, the fan fiction video, but to be clear: Smut and explicit content — particularly involving taboo themes like incest or even illegal themes like underage sex and straight-up pedophilia — is so important to fan fiction writers that its protection is 90 percent of the reason AO3 was created in the first place.

So what percentage of AO3’s content involves, in any form, these extreme taboos? 10%? 20%? It was 90% of the reason AO3 was created, apparently. To evidentiate Layne’s claims, two thresholds must be met.

1. Deviance begets deviance; more posting of a specific form of taboo content always produces more content yet, year to year.

2. In any given year, taboo potentially sexual content (remember, it is considerate and polite to tag a hypothetical story in which Dany opens up to Missandei about her past with underage sexual content; I am counting all of this indiscriminately) exceeds 10% of AO3’s archive.

First, let’s look at the year-to-year percentage of content containing the underage sex warning and compare it to the year-to-year percentage of content containing the rape/nonconsent warning.

Both have outliers in 2026 (as collated between 8/29/25-8/29/2026), but do keep in mind that any serial project still being updated in 2026 is automatically ‘bumped’ to this year. The rape/nonconsent warning is increasingly prevalent in recent years, but notably stable until hitting what I would call the ‘woke threshold’ years after Trump’s election; if I had to theorize as to why this particular fixation has increased so enormously and predictably while the equally-taboo underage content has stayed largely the same proportion of output since the site’s incipience, I’d actually point to #MeToo as a turning point in cultural fixation on consent and nonconsent. Similarly, the outlier year of 2025-2026 for underage content ‘rhymes’ with the cultural fixation on the Epstein Files. I would have to read a lot of fanfiction that I’m not interested in reading to put evidence to this speculation beyond pointing it out on a graph, but maybe that’s a rare use case for AI?

The last of these graphs, in combination with my hard-earned data, is an overall look at the fanfiction being published on AO3 with and without these warnings.

So, hypothesis one. If there is an increase in fics containing a particular mode of deviance one year, there will be a subsequent increase in fics containing that mode of deviance in the following year. This is not true of fics containing underage sexual content, and prior to August of 2016-August of 2017 (what happened in late 2016 and then persisted into 2017 again, and changed the landscape around discussions of consent profoundly? was anyone there?) it was not true of fics containing rape or nonconsensual sexual content. Does deviancy beget deviancy? Not measurably so.

Hypothesis two is simpler. Does this content comprise over 10% of the content produced in any given year? It straightforwardly does not. Is over 10% of AO3’s content even potentially taboo porn? No.

I’m a free-speech kind of liberal myself. I personally do not write and am not interested in stories about underaged characters having sex. I can sympathize, however, with the improved cultural dynamic generated by a clear tagging system; I don’t want to read about teenagers in any situation if I can avoid it, and there is a tag that makes it clear if that is going on. I personally didn’t have sex before I was eighteen, but if I did, I might have nostalgia for that first love. I don’t have the sort of traumatic backstory that would make two-seventeen-year-olds-fumbling a day-ruining surprise, but if I did, I would be very glad to make the informed decision to avoid it.

For all the bizarre feats of analytical extrapolation Layne performs while citing abstracts and Psychology Today articles that outright contradict her positions, I would think she might have eventually stumbled upon old school websites like Literotica, hosting a ‘taboo sex hub’ going strong since 1998.

Did fanfiction do that? No. In debate, we call these claims ‘non-unique’. I’m arguing for dogs as better pets than cats; my opponent announces that dogs produce the devastating impact of destroyed couches and pee on the floor; I explain that this is a non-unique impact, because both cats and dogs produce these outcomes. The statistically average world of a pet cat and the statistically average world of a pet dog do not produce a meaningfully different amount of demolished furniture or pee. I suppose dogs do have larger bladders, but my opponent didn’t say that, did they?

The sheer existence of fanfiction is not producing sexually taboo art. Sexually taboo art existed in the 90s, and the 80s. Layne herself includes a quote about BL from The Yaoi/Boys’ Love/Danmei Audience, published in 2020 in the Encyclopaedia of Gender, Media and Communication, though she does not cite it for several more paragraphs, out of context. It’s not the abstract, but it is the first paragraph of the paper.

“Emerging in the 1970s, one root of these works can be found in professional Japanese manga (comics) and the other in anglophone fan fiction. The internet has enabled mass engagement with popular culture across national, geographical, and cultural boundaries and the umbrella genre constituted by yaoi, boys’ love, and danmei may represent the largest erotic subculture by and for women.” (2)

Neither fanfiction nor AO3 uniquely made videographic porn or BL comics or hentai more extreme or more likely to include stepbrothers in compromising situations. It didn’t elect anyone named in the Epstein files or put “pedo hunting” in front of millions of impressionable twelve-year-olds, inspiring their first Google searches for whatever that is. Much of the art that depicts or discusses sexually taboo acts is genuinely of merit, engaging with the reality or aftermath of the few boundaries people are still nervous to address outright, and bad art… is bad art, I don’t seek it out to point and laugh and go ‘ew!’ loudly for attention because I’m an adult, not a six-year-old who found a decomposing frog in the schoolyard.

In case you need any more proof that literary awards are no longer worth the paper they’re printed on, in 2019 the entirety of the Archive of Our Own was awarded a Hugo.

(edit 8/20/26): By extension, this means that works present on the site at that time which were tagged, for instance, “pedophilia” also received a Hugo.

The beautiful community center won an award, which means the dick drawn in the corner also won an award, checkmate, architect! The company won an award for excellent service, but don’t these idiots know that the janitor only shows up at work to vape? So by extension, she won an award for customer service too!

The Hugos almost immediately, contemporaneously, released a separate announcement, clarifying:

“Thus, the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Related Work recognizes AO3 as a project and a platform; the fiction hosted on that site is not the award recipient, nor are the authors of fiction hosted on that site the award recipients.”

Of course, the clarification was longer than an abstract or a first paragraph, so I can only imagine that Layne did not read it.

Is fanfiction worse than original fiction, then? Layne seems convinced that it is. I would invite her to spend forty-five minutes reading through QTCritique’s submissions tab. Some of it is good! The same is true of fanfiction. Anywhere there is a low barrier to entry, there will be some unfortunately-written work.

I still stand by fanfiction’s lifting of the oft-kept gate, as I do QTCritique’s - and Substack’s - even though it means that occasionally I read an article so small-minded, poorly researched, and deeply jejune as Layne’s. It is much more offensive, in my book, to write “the stats still show that the vast majority of [BL] audience members are female” and not only to neglect to cite and link Dr. Anna Madill’s work directly, having quoted a full paragraph, but to call the opening paragraph of her article, in which she broadly sums up what yaoi is, a stat, than it is to write incoherent fluff about Haaland’s long golden hair.

The incoherent fluff, at least, is honest, and has some chance of contributing a shred of pleasure to the world.

That’s all for this one. I’m still furious about that uncited quote. If fanfiction was in some way uniquely offensive, sloppy, or myopic, Layne would surely write it.

Let’s look back at our arguments.

• There is absolutely no policing of fanfiction content, due to the censorship-averse inception of Archive of Our Own, leading to a grotesque orgy of meaningless fluff and smut that shames the written word/its literary origins.

At this, Layne outright contradicts herself when she cites a widely-read guide by a trans man to writing about trans men. This is content-regulation as produced by the marketplace of ideas, and we have already done our requisite time reading original fiction posted with the same level of haste and excitement and determined that fanfiction is not uniquely grotesque, uniquely unpolished, or uniquely shame-facedly unliterary. That is just people, and AO3 sure is a place that millions of people post.

Of course, the first point is simultaneously contradicted by the second point:

• Fanfiction is a hyper-policing cesspool of minorities on high horses, and their reckless identity-policing has seeped into legitimate, normal culture and ruined literature/the internet/the United States/possibly China as well.

The marketplace of ideas has run amok! There are gay ideas in there! Heterosexual and even bisexual women are desiring and fixating on the one thing worse than one man: two men. But good news: Transformative Works and Cultures, the journal she dismisses, is an excellent resource to become familiar with the rhetorical question about why women write fanfiction, and fiction in general, about men.

This extremely shallow interest in the art and culture she is spectating shows up throughout Layne’s argumentation, root to leaf. If you delve even perfunctorily into Layne’s alleged citations, here, on topics such as women writing yaoi, you quickly find that she is posting links and barely stopping short of outright fabrication as to their content. She cites Dr. Madill only at the conclusion of a long series of massaging Madill’s conclusions. For example, Madill writes:

A burgeoning issue for yaoi and BL fans in the West, however, is the increasing regulation of sexually explicit material on the internet, particular that which appears to include characters under 18 years. For example, in the UK, some BL and yaoi may be vulnerable to Prohibited Images of Children legislation (Madill, 2015), and recent attempts to legislate internet filtering with regard to ‘child abuse material’ in Australia was dropped only because it would be almost impossible to implement.

Layne cites this as “source for the above numbers” and tactfully sums up this paragraph as

It has been observed that BL is threatened in some western countries for no other reason than that country’s law against explicit material involving children. Which should tell you everything you need to know.

This is not quite everything you need to know! Madill rather deliberately included reference to the specific legislation itself, which also attempted to prohibit small-breasted women of legal age of consent from participating in pornography, and refers to general internet filtering as a catch-all means of dragnetting out artistic and literary content exploring sexuality under the guise of protection of child welfare.

But in terms of the awe-inspiring power of Layne’s enemies, who are simultaneously weak and strong, as usual:

She cites this Medium article, with no comments or claps, about the encoding and decoding of media and the ways that various creators have added external content, like John Watson’s website, to contribute to fan excitement and reception, as well as the use of a character in the show who ‘has theories about what happened’ to represent and engage with the existence of fan theories as to how Sherlock survived, as:

This article talks about multiple theories regarding the way producers attempt to retake control of their media’s narratives while also appealing to fan groups by meta references to popular “fanons”, using BBC’s Sherlock as an example.

This is not… producers attempting to retake control of the narrative, seized from them by rabid fans. Cloverfield did an ARG, Sherlock has a website, Battlestar Galactica had a video maker, and the article examines all of these as ways the studios co-opt and make use of fan labor. This is marketing. This is fandom, and not necessarily fan writers in any unique way, as grist for the marketing mill.

Sherlock, for instance, “stands as a compelling illustration of the seismic shift in the dynamics between producers and consumers” in the linked article, because… it referenced the fact that people had theories about what happened after Sherlock faked his death. “Textual poaching”, also known as textual interpretation, is mentioned without further elaboration. Authorship did not at any point become questionable! The credits are right there, potshots were taken about fan theories, and the character Anderson stood in front of a pinboard and had ideas about how Sherlock survived!

She cites, in her list of insidious examples of fanfiction having gone mainstream, this study in which fanfiction writers discuss writing about popular tropes and characters, which no self-respecting author of original fiction would ever consider. Then this article about publishers excitedly scouring for fanworks with pre-existing audiences and enthusiasm, now that Fifty Shades and its successors have shown that transgression doesn’t just sell on fanfiction.net. Oh, and the existence of Fifty Shades of Grey - that’s another win for Big Fanfiction, putting the Big Five in our collective pocket!

The fact is that some fanfiction is in fact quite good, or quite tuned into the zeitgeist, and millions of people are reading and writing it. Some of them go on to write for Riverdale; statistically, it was going to happen eventually!

Chloé Zhao’s quote, linked by Layne, reads: “The joke at Marvel is that the reason why I made #Eternals is so I can go online & read the fanfiction about my own movie. I’m also going to write some on AO3 and put it up with a different name.”

As Layne, however, opted to put it, without interest in the joking quality of the entire exchange, recorded only in a tweet:

Chloé Zhao, writer and director of Eternals mentions her fan fiction influence, and even says she intends to write fan fiction about her own film and put it on AO3 under a pen name.

Did you hear that, guys? Chloé Zhao thinks Coolsville sucks!

Does any of this prove, or even really evidentiate, the contention that fanfiction is ruining the culture, putting these creatives on the ropes, or entering the zeitgeist via subterfuge? Isn’t it true that the fans made Bryan Fuller make Mads and Hugh fuck? Didn’t they make Reylo real and give them a happily ever after? Will nothing stop their sinful hand?

No. Because the throughline Layne is trying to weave does not exist in the form she insists it does. She gestures and moves on because, if you actually click through and read her sources, they are nowhere near the rout she suggests they are, and only rarely center fanfiction itself at all.

• Porn in fanfiction is not only bad, but it is escalating in extremity and depravity with every passing month as its practitioners and readers seek ever more intense CSA content.

It’s not. Check the graphs. Though I did decide, here, to perform a final test. AO3 is currently at about 20% E-rated content. Just for fun, let’s check; has there been a meteoric increase in this content, if not the more outright controversial fiction?

…Not really. It decreased for a while, then it increased and stabilized at roughly the starting proportion. About 20% of AO3’s content is E-rated. It has been less, and it has been about the same.

• Fanfiction is categorically worse than original fiction in sheer quality due to the parasitic relationship between fanfiction and its source material, leading the usually-gay masses to attempt ambitious writing without the necessary skills.

If this was true, Substack would be a utopia of literacy. Unfortunately, it is not. I regret to inform you all that publishers and agents, in chasing sure bets, have done worse than skimming the cream off the surface of the AO3 dish. They have skimmed, as well, from TikTok, where there is simply less cream to be skimmed, because when writing fanfiction, at least, a person is writing, regularly, with feedback from an audience. No one is being bamboozled or bullied into publishing Dramione slop. It sells. It comes with an audience pre-loaded, and if you read widely in the genre, you would notice that the polished and serial-numbers-filed fanfiction sounds a lot like… fiction.

But you don’t. You watch a dozen K-drama music videos, which are literally just compilations of the male leads screaming and holding each other, and cite ten of them, insisting that these are hallmarks of fan excess. You wave a hand at the omegaverse like an atheist miming circumcision scissors while they criticize broad swathes of Christianity. The gesture is not an argument. Aren’t these people just freaks? Aren’t they gross? You cite examples of dysfunctional and exploitative workplaces that would make the staff of Mario Batali laugh themselves to death to hear; guess the restaurant industry ruins everything, too! Try r/hobbydrama the next time you think you’ve discovered a secret dysfunction local to only one intense fan community, just for a reality check. Cassandra Clare plagiarized from Buffy quips? I hear they kill people in the UK for less.

The only thing more embarrassing than having written Fanfiction Ruins Everything is gleefully agreeing with commenters about the degeneracy of all these forms of art in the comments.

What are people even writing on AO3, if not degenerate, questionably-illegal (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition would like a word) porn, with trans men standing in for sexualized children, that Layne would be only too proud to censor?

The boys from Heated Rivalry adopt (?) a son! (255,000 words)

Will Byers and Mike Wheeler survive a power outage together! (52,000 words)

Some Dream SMP guys are superheroes! (188,000 words)

A DCU/Marvel crossover longer than most Game of Thrones books! (241,000 words)

Harry Potter goes back in time and relives the whole series with his memories intact! (152,000 words)

48/170 of the top kudos’d fics are rated E, for explicit (28%); 34 are M, for mature (20%); 64 are T, for teen (38%); 13 are G, for general audiences (8%), with the remaining 6% Not Rated. My favorite of them all is a Reylo fic that really makes a compelling argument about the ship.

Can we really have it both ways? Our opponents are trivial, disorganized, whining children who also have the media under their transgender thumbs? Who are insipid fujoshi pedophiles and stupid children and yet, so adeptly pulling all the strings behind the scenes, hogging all the shelf space, making all the money? I respect old men yelling at clouds; Freddie DeBoer makes a compelling enough argument about the ambience of fandom politics and the way fan communities amplify each others’ neuroses and pathoses to the point of genuine harm. What he does not do is attribute this to the vicissitudes of id-driven art produced by these communities, in which Mary Sue gains the admiration of every member of the Enterprise and Castiel suffers beautifully alone in super hell and Deku or whoever gets topped and Keith Voltron opens a coffeeshop.

What he doesn’t do is gesture vaguely at a form of art he finds perplexing, like a propagandist confronted by Klee’s Red Balloon, and insist there’s got to be some degeneracy, some degrading organizing principle or perhaps a gene, causing people to create the things he finds uncomfortable, like neurotoxin recovery whump or AMVs about two guys in a police drama who keep getting really close together.

The real folie à tous is when people stop writing and start rent-seeking their ideas without writing or reading or engaging with anything further. When Homestuck hit the gigapause and the new content ran out and the snake, unerring and hungry, found its own tail and opened wide. These long breaks between Netflix and BBC seasons. X, the everything app. Tumblr. YouTube, apparently!

Layne, in all her railing against the cancellation and self-cancellation of authors, can trace a few of these to fandom and none of them to fanfiction, uniquely. I would argue further that it is precisely when only talking about and theorizing about stories are the fandom currency that people get insane. There’s only so much land to claim, and if someone starts insisting Will Byler is transfem instead of transmasc, they’re basically stealing your house and burning your crops. If the author is writing your disability wrong, they are pillaging your livelihood. Fandom is, ultimately, acquisitive and subtractive.

Fanfiction is additive. The more you make, the more there is. It is an infinitely healthier occupation for an industrious art-enjoyer than anything ending in -Tok or -tube, and to scapegoat it for society- and fan space-level social ills is both incorrect, as evidenced by the dearth of legitimate evidence, and counterproductive. It is better to be writing fanfiction, to be drawing fanart, to be making something and reveling in creation, than it is to be vivisecting the still-wheezing corpse of the thing you love and, once they are sufficiently canceled, the friends you’ve made along the way.

A coffeeshop AU where everyone is the kind of gay you are sounds stupid and trivial. Frankly, so does a lot of fiction. So do a lot of essays. Maybe I’m getting old.

I don’t think any deliberate writing, the kind performed with pride in the craft, curiosity about the subject, and delight in the language, is ever wasted. If the biggest problem Sam and Dean Winchester have to overcome in this AU is that barista Castiel keeps forgetting which of their orders is which and writing a heart on the wrong cup, well - what a reprieve for battle-weary characters, I wonder how the writer will pull that off while preserving their essential properties? I wonder how the writer will translate that struggle, and who will be the bus driver? What about this mundane context can be stretched and moved to fit these heroes, the stuff of myths and legends?

These are the precise constraints that make a medium, and a life, interesting. What is left behind in a person, born special, transplanted into mundanity? This is the bromide to the secretly-adopted orphan, the powers gained from a spider bite, the hopes of a civilization on your shoulders. A life that is normal, that resists the impulse to dramatize, and you, and also your favorite fictional man Tony Stark, have no other life but this one.

What would it be like to go back to school? To adopt a child with the love of your life? To walk past a crowd of students on a sunny September day, sprawled out on blankets across the quad, and count yourself among the happy throng? To hold a little hand as tiny yellow duck-boots navigate their first deep puddle? To stand up for yourself at work, to survive lunch rush at a creperie, to argue with the tattoo shop owner across the street, to lead a student protest, to win a massive court case for a cause you believe in?

Could Bakugo do it? Could Catra do it? Could Shane Hollander do it?

Could you?

I know you could take a seat in a nice cafe, drop a five in the tip jar and smile at the barista, marvel briefly at the latte art he/they designed, settle into a nice seat by the outlet, do a little people-watching, and write something good.

I’ve read that fic a few dozen times, and I know exactly how it ends, but let’s have another go, you and me, down to the Burlington Bagel Company, and when they kick us out, to the lake to finish our long-melted cups of ice and watch the dogs and the babies gambol in the soft summer grass. The sunset doesn’t turn banal just because it happens every night, just because most of them are grey and underwhelming.

This time, I just know it. This time, it’s going to be beautiful.

Q: So you’ve been writing a lot of short stories lately.

A: Yes. On average, one per week for the past five weeks.

Q: You’re aware that’s a lot?

A: I have noticed.

Q: Why?

A: Typically, I find that the best way to master a medium is to jam the spurs into your own flanks and just run at it full-tilt until the medium chickens out. So I’ve been really pushing myself to get from concept to short story in about a week, if I can. I’m a fanfiction-progenited writer, so volume isn’t really a challenge so much as structure and like, settling on the nucleation point of the story.

Q: Are there any other lifestyle changes that might have motivated this project?

A: My wife and I are long distance while I’m in school and I miss her. I also have no money, because school is expensive and the class load I’m taking is not compatible with a job. Usually when I’m in some way bored, my three options are “bother my wife”, “eat something”, or “write”. I have skillfully whittled these options down to “write”.

Q: I understand and sympathize. How about the stories themselves? At least some of them have a universe in common.

A: All of them have a universe in common, but it’s a big universe. One of my axes to grind with a lot of fantasy is its myopia about the diversity of culture and knowledge at any given point in human history. Merethora (the empire in which Unhorsed and Free Rein are set) is across a particularly hostile mountain range from the Borostami Imperium (the empire in which Perfect Light, Cause of Death, and Swordpoint are set; Kichaan is a vassal state of the imperium, the Aroscan Citadel is its political, academic, and military capital). Even with Merethora’s heavily magic-augmented horses, it’s extremely difficult to pass between the two empires and Merethora’s coastal towns have historically directed most of its trade overseas. They have almost no cultural overlap, and their pedagogies surrounding magic are entirely different, but they are all taking place in the same universe.

Chronologically, Swordpoint → Perfect Light → Cause of Death → Unhorsed → Free Rein.

Q: So there are two empires?

A: Yes, to begin with, but also not in the sense that there are two homogenous cultural groups. Merethora is several states absorbed into a monarchy, with extremely minimal regional sovereignty but all beholden to the queen and her horsewomen; there are three broad linguistic and ethnic groups, all unified under a standardized Merethoran tongue and rule by the first queen, Meret.

The Borostami Imperium, meanwhile, while Imperial Standard is taught in regional schools and is the language of law and recordkeeping, has made fairly minimal effort to erase cultural differences, and cities/towns throughout the vassal states have their own law and language, though the upper and trading classes are educated in Standard, which was designed to be easy to read and write, and has been adopted wholesale in most large cities. Leaving taxes and regional law mainly to local governments, the citadel instead collects proportional tithes, with no option for negotiation, in return for the prosperity and security of having a demigod on call to end droughts and guarantee the harvest. A good portion of the tithes are daughters, sent to work as servingwomen in the citadel and ultimately to bear more Selasair. Different regions have different opinions on this practice.

Q: You must have a pretty extensive worldbuilding document, then, right?

A: I mean, sort of. I posted both of them here. I consider myself a worldbuild-a-page-or-two-then-discover type writer, though, and a lot of the specifics developed and further emerged from interactions produced by the characters and my general sense of how things work. I do a lot of research to begin with, but even in the late stages I’m still always patching my understanding of like, why the decimal system worked and what nutrient deficiencies would be of concern under specific agricultural circumstances and such.

I really try to practice what I preach when it comes to worldbuilding. The world is made for the story, not the story for the world, though the world inevitably shapes the story, so watch out!

Q: And there is a novel set in this world?

A: There is a novel set in this world. The events begin roughly twenty years after Perfect Light and Cause of Death, roughly two years after Unhorsed and Free Rein. It follows Princess Iren Meretha as she finally escapes to a much more interesting cage, which is luminous and high-towered and nestled in a different set of mountains than those of her mother’s empire.

Q: Does Iren come off nicer as a narrator?

A: Sort of? Not really.

Q: Who should read your novel?

A: Everyone in the universe, it’s so good. But particularly the agents with the full. They uniquely have much to gain from it, and will find it harmonizes in fascinating and enriching ways with their daily struggles and interests. Please.

Less tongue in cheek: I’ve been beta’d and edited and just plain read by people from all over the map in terms of SFF preferences. I would call it something between epic fantasy and dark romantasy, but if you earnestly liked any of the following…

• Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant

• Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon The Ninth

• Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains

• Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule

• Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became The Sun

• HBO’s The Pitt

• R.F. Kuang’s Babel and/or The Poppy War

• SenLinYu’s Alchemised

• Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen

• Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

• Women

• Transgender

• Hit web site Horse Reality

…preliminary small-group studies show that you have a good shot of liking this book.

Q: Do you think writing all these short stories will help?

A: Yes. I’ve written five short stories, which has really helped to increase the number of short stories I’ve written from zero to five.

Oh, with querying? Not even a little. What am I going to do, email to follow up and say “by the way, I wrote another short story this week and no one unsubscribed about it, which I’m told is pretty impressive”? I would rather eat nails.

Q: Is this really the best use of your time?

A: Absolutely.

Q: What else do you do?

A: I like running. Cooking what my wife calls my “slop bowls” (current favorite: microwave edamame, rice, wasabi, microwave seitan, sweet potato, powdered coconut milk, peanut butter) and eating them as rapidly as possible. Looking at rivers. Bird-noticing. Going to class and volunteering for a local rescue squad. Mainly every second I am not writing makes me feel progressively more nauseated and irritable so I try to do as much of that as I can.

Q: Can we see this novel, then?

A: Sure. Here are the first two-and-a-half pages. Meet Iren.

The luminous white stone of the citadel sings at a frequency I have never encountered before. It is sustained, tonal, emanating from the walls themselves. Above all, it is insistent. I’ve thickened my stapes nearly past usefulness. Still, the sound lingers, buzzing with the sense of ice crushed between my molars, tailing me up each step of the spiral-route to the council chamber.

The stairs are polished to a slippery sheen beneath my riding boots. My escort has not been keeping pace since the hundredth or so.

I pause, focusing past the hum. There are two-hundred and thirty-three meters between the base of the minaret and the council chamber. No number is without significance in the mathematics of incorporeal magic, but I have lost track of the stairs’ count. Coastal Merethora has dwellings of rammed earth, some grand enough for levels, but mother’s palace is a great tent of waxed silk and perfumed drapery, never stationary long enough to need such things. For height, one has the grey-peaked Mereti, and to traverse them, one rides.

I feel Rinir before I see him. The pyruvate in his musculature announces itself along with his labored breathing, and his pain nags, worse as he turns into view. I can’t stand a body wrong. Never mind that Rinir has been my surveillance since I could read. He also taught me how. Merethoran has a word for a useful man, and he is one of the few who deserves it.

Rinir stops, shudders, and puts his hand to the open palm I offer. With contact, the porous boundary between my body and any other dissolves. The burn of lactic acid ignites afresh. His flesh is my flesh, his blood my blood. He belongs to me. I urge oxygen into his tissues, dilate vasculature, and feel him relax towards equilibrium until he is no longer a living sensory assault. What remains is a man who looks his fifty years, a greyish cast fading from his pale brown skin.

He finds he has his breath and sighs with it. “Please conserve your power, Princess.”

It’s childish to roll my eyes, but his presence must regress me, because I do it anyway.

“I’d prefer that you arrive functional,” I reply. “Mother never intends for me to speak much. You’ll be a poor mouthpiece without your breath.”

My corporeal gift is only the price of diplomatic entry; Rinir is to negotiate. The citadel takes no visiting party without magic, and mother doesn’t suffer many corporealists to live long enough to threaten her crown. That she has kept me is a function of my harmlessness. Mine is a sensory and healing gift. Hers is a martial one. I am, in no uncertain terms, to appear unquestionably of corporealist lineage, grateful for the trade-audience, and very, very pretty.

This is a place of men, I know, and men value beauty. I have seen no Selasair yet - all-too-human aspirants of their order took our gift of ten of mother’s best stallions - but those boys were more interested in the cut of my khitta than in the value of the beasts for their stables.

“You are,” Rinir finally says, dragging his sleeve across his sweat-slick face, “to be sociable.”

“I’m delightful,” I remind him, withdrawing my hand, abruptly nauseated again. His sensorium briefly muted the unsettling chord from the walls. “Can you hear that?”

He frowns at me, thinks a beat, and dismisses my concern with a shake of his head. “You should be using the authoritative register of Imperial Standard.”

I try very hard not to sigh. His annoyance is clinging to me, which worsens the sense of the walls’ insistent thrumming. Mother licensed my diplomatic venture for a span of two weeks. Rinir doubles as my escort and her culture minister, one of few other Merethorans educated in the Standard tongue in which our books of science and microanatomy were written. The most valuable of our texts have the plate of the Aroscan Citadel’s library in their front covers.

This is a rare opportunity to escape. I may never receive its like again. Meret once passed years as a visiting scholar within these high white towers, and someone will let me do the same. If I return, mother will kill me eventually, as she has every other corporealist who has caught her eye.

We begin our ascent anew. I could learn to love walls, I think. Claustrophobic though they may be in keeping me in, they could someday keep my mother out. I don’t mean to play only a charming diplomat, for all I accede to Rinir’s wishes and try to shift the register of my thinking into Standard. My shoulder is heavy with the satchel full of books I stole before we left. None of the valuable texts. Only mathematics, brought from within these walls by Meret, artifacts from before she made her empire and named it for herself.

I have no designs on an empire. Only a chance to learn, to be safe somewhere, to build a thing that will outlast a silken palace and the tyrant who gave me my face and my magic. There is a higher power than mother, here, in this citadel nestled in the Aroscan mountains like a great pale falcon in its roost.

I intend to fall in love with it, because I intend to live.

The woman who killed my mother was no one, really. One of the thousand faceless horsewomen who, mounted, make a megha. Whoever she was, I’m grateful to her. It spared me the decision of what to feel about her, alive or dead. My mother was a traitor to Merethora’s queen and the many horsewoman generals beneath her. Dead, I am not a traitor’s daughter, but a traitor’s orphan, and that is an easier thing to be.

It was her right to bear me however she wished. Her right to choose my father from a coastal village, Giron, in the shadow of newer mountains than the Mereti. Her right to dally there, even, when not commissioned, and her right, ultimately, to schism with her erakt. A stupid choice, but nonetheless her right. One hundred women are nothing to the thousands, tens of thousands, who can be called on to turn the steppe to black mud by the hooves and teeth of their horses. I think she must have been a romantic.

She died before I really learned to hate her, and I was not of her erakt, but one subordinate to the horsewomen sent to dispatch her. It was not her arrow that scarred my face, cut through my cheek and shattered several molars with it, any more than it was a woman I knew who cut her down with a saber-strike. It was her reflexes, if anything, that made me turn and spared the base of my skull, the parts of me more important than an unmarked jaw or teeth that sit together correctly. I could never have hated her for that. For being excellent. Only for what she did with it.

The woman who ordered my mother’s death sits before me in the central silk-lined chamber of the great golden tent that makes her palace, elbows up on a table set with an empty cup of tea and a large book. A man sits beside her in the formal dress of the coast, though not the village my mother was always riding off to. This is Rinir, the queen’s culture minister, and he surely recognizes me - daughters even remotely of coastal provenance are rare among horsewomen, and my skin is a paler brown than most, distinctive even before the arrow pierced it - but he does not let on.

Queen Treis Meretha frowns down at a diagram in her book as her culture minister reads it aloud to her. She makes no gesture acknowledging my entry. A breeze, thinned by the many layers of silk between this chamber and the steppe, ripples through the draped fabric all around us. It barely seems to touch her heavy black hair.

She is more visibly of coastal origin than I am. The queen’s face is pale as raw hide, her eyes large and black and lashless. She is what the people of the coastal towns call a kicho, before they kill their daughters for the use of arts against the natural law. Among the horsewomen, they are corporealists, and the most powerful of them is called the queen, after she kills her predecessor.

I have wondered, for some time, whether she resents me for the reminder of her birthplace, where resentment of a queen for ruling and horsewomen for enforcing as much is still so powerful, though quieted, when verbalized, by violence.

If I met another horsewoman with a face like mine, even comparable to mine, I would probably not appoint her as my daughter’s personal guard. I know it confidently, even though I have no daughter, because I can be very certain that I would kill her, and let the head of my megha decide if it was justified only after the offending image was remedied.

When my jaw twitches, from holding my tongue still for so long, the bone clicks. This makes the queen look up at last.

“Derei’s girl,” she says, and the click, again, is loud as an arrow nocked.

“Sehna,” I correct her without thinking. Hearing myself say it in this company, there is nothing to do but wait for her to use her power to snap my neck. I have seen it demonstrated, and recently. She is a terrible kicho, the queen, who bends bone and cartilage with a thought, and no one visible to her is safe from it, even if she rides a hundred paces away.

At the game of aferan, two nights back, in which I and the rest of Derei’s aferan team won by a point after a long stalemate, she broke my new charge’s spine before a crowd of a thousand women.

They say the princess is a kicho as well, and I believe it, to see her. So she survived the punishment. I probably will not.

A moment passes, and the queen laughs. It is not a pleasant laugh. Her culture minister looks more uncomfortable for it. “She would turn an obedient woman to her purposes in a day. It’s probably for the better. Derei will take the assignment, then?”

“With pride,” I say quickly, recovering myself. They are better than mothers, the women who train us, and I’ve embarrassed Derei enough by losing in the final round to a lead-woman who scored only one point for her team. “It’s an honor for the erakt to be chosen - ”

“Stop,” she says. “She will be reporting to me soon enough, and she can flatter me plenty if it’s important. A woman who flatters - Rinir, she likes flattery?”

“I could not say,” he replies, head bowed, and the queen laughs again.

“Well, you’ll report to me when she sleeps. She sleeps a great deal. You’ll keep her away from the horsewomen and supervise her lessons, though most of that is Rinir’s duty. You will try not to be charmed by her, but if you must, be charmed, only keep her from the horsewomen. You will eat when she eats, wake when she wakes, and have a pallet beside her for the purpose. Rinir is no longer adequate to the task.”

I glance to him in earnest, curious, and he is still gazing down at his lap. I would guess his age at fifty or so, recognizing that people of the coast age slowly when kept away from the sun. The queen watches me look, and exhales tonelessly.

“He is a useful man, but all men have their limits,” she tells me, and smiles.

“What would I report?” I ask, and she makes that toneless sound again.

“It’s a fair question,” she says. “If she is planning to kill me, mainly. When. I would like to know. She likely is already, but if you do your duty well, she won’t manage it. A healer needs horsewomen.”

The princess has been a topic of considerable discussion since her appearance beside her mother at two of the qualifying games of aferan, in the later days of the tournaments the queen uses to select additions to her personal guard.

“Why keep her alive, then?” I continue, which is certainly pressing my luck, though I’m beginning to get the sense that my countenance is not the liability I expected. “If she would be a problem.”

“She asks good questions,” the queen announces, with excessive volume for the conspiracy in her tone, to her culture minister, who swallows. When I have seen the princess, rarely, from a distance, I have seen the two of them together. The princess does not laugh so harshly as her mother. “We’ll have to keep her. Do you like the princess, S - what was it?”

“Sehna,” I say again.

“Oh, I’ve heard that name. Before your little performance on the aferan field. Where - hm.” She pauses in thought for a moment, and I hold my breath until she shakes her head, as a horse does to flick away something winged and bothersome. “Answer my question.”

It’s not much trouble to do as she asks. It was harder to unhorse Araht with the stone in hand. She had good command of the distribution of her weight, and the stone’s mass would have helped her, if she’d believed I meant to kill her and guarded herself accordingly. She didn’t.

“She is known,” I say, and the queen scoffs at the diplomatic answer. “Not well, at least in my erakt. They say she is a healer, as we had in Meret’s time.”

She tried to save Araht, before the queen broke the neck of my charge-to-be from thirty paces. I wonder at Derei’s instructions, but I don’t wonder that much. When Derei tells me I ought to do something, I do it. When she tells me the queen is watching, I pay attention. The real effort in most games of aferan, handling the heaviest stone both lead women can lift from horseback, is in not killing the opposing lead. I have seen a lot of women die.

I have not seen a kicho try to save one. They’re known to be unlucky, the progeny of rape, their power proportionate to the violence of their making. Among the horsewomen, of course, it is the opposite, but there are also not many of the particularly effective ones remaining. Generations of queens have made sure of that, as this one now polices her only succession threat. A slender dark-eyed thing with a slightly sweeter face than the queen’s, but only slightly.

“Is it all they say?” the queen asks wryly. “I won’t ask a third time.”

Something prickles at my larynx. I swallow, rapidly, and it doesn’t work as it ought to. The pressure is no greater than a palm pressed against my throat, not even with much weight, but it is unrelenting.

“She’s stupid,” I choke, honest in my airlessness, though I can breathe, only as though through a cut reed. “To have risked herself for Araht. On the field. And she inspires others - to stupidity.”

Like the woman who cut across the field to join her. I could imagine a dozen more wishing they could have shared the impulse to leap to the princess’ aid. Stupid women, made stupider by a pretty girl’s bravery.

The force on my throat releases. It aches not to cough, not to touch it, but I will not react. Because of how my jaw sits, if I don’t mind it constantly, saliva tries to leak out of the right corner of my mouth. I have not been minding it, in choking, and the queen laughs a final time.

“I’ll send a girl for Derei. Go to my daughter. I only hope she heard your verdict.”

I nod once, stiffly. There isn’t the same need for the theatrics of bowing and the rest, among horsewomen, but mother taught me that I ought to, and she may be dead, but the habit lives on, untroubled. It should be enough debasement to be dismounted at all. It doesn’t feel like quite enough, though, so I add the nod, and I think the queen’s smile is more approving for it.

Sound does not travel perfectly through draped silk, but the possibility she raises is a viable one. I leave the central chamber with some relief, noting, as I do, that the queen is speaking to her minister again, mild interest in her voice.

“Where have I seen her before? I wouldn’t forget that jaw, but there’s something - ”

She heard nothing. The princess is asleep, swathed in bedsilks to match the color of the tent, looking for all the world like she is dissolving into the palace itself, already half-taken where she is covered by the pile of fabric. She sleeps like a foal, curled in on herself, with legs protruding in sharp, bony struts from an otherwise peaceful form.

I have not seen her since the game before the final, the last we won, when she incurred what would have been, for anyone else, a mortal injury. Her throat is slender, pale brown, entirely undamaged. At something in a dream, or else at my presence, her brow furrows, and she wraps herself more thoroughly in her silks, her face vanishing in the heap.

Her quarters are small, only a trunk of books and gowns and the bed. She doesn’t stir when I open the trunk and pace about, inspecting the low, carved frame. Voices filter in, distorted through the draped walls, carried along with burned incense and the scent of something cooking beyond the palace, where the many erakts gathered for the competition remain camped, for the time being. The princess’ bed abuts the outer wall of the palace. There is only a partially sheer curtain between her and the horsewomen I have been tasked to keep her from.

She tosses again in sleep as I take wood and a knife from my hip and set about whittling an arrowhead, to have something to do with my hands. I have nothing useful to report, and nothing engaging with which to pass my time.

Her hair, long and black and loose-curled, tangles like a snarl of burned grass around her shoulders as she moves in sleep. I watch, and I let my knife work.

I will not be made stupid by this strange woman-creature. I have been lucky at least once today, and I prefer not to rely on it. A pile of wood-chips grows where I sit, and the princess, irritatingly, does not snore.

It would be a relief if she did. I distrust beauty on women’s faces. The queen is a legible opponent, a dangerous woman in all she does, subtle as danger looks on a woman built like a bird, hollow and fragile-looking, of a height to reach perhaps my shoulder. She is beautiful like a towering stormcloud advancing on the steppe, great and grey and pocked with lightning, is beautiful before it strikes a woman from her horse and sets the winter-dry vegetation alight.

Her daughter is really only pretty, and she only sleeps, lips half-parted, and dreams, by the way she thrashes, of something terrible.

I have a pallet brought and placed beside her bed. I wake to wide black eyes a hand’s length from my own, curious, and the sense that something is touching me without mass, a grass-sliver in my bedroll, but inside of me.

My instinct is to strike her, but the situation is unfamiliar enough, and she resembles the queen sufficiently, that I pause before I get my hand free. If she meant to hurt me, I suppose she would have done it already, and more easily, in my unconsciousness.

“It’s funny,” the princess announces, and briefly puts her palm to my throat. “The cartilage injury is a lot milder than the old fracture in your jaw, but it was bothering you more.”

“What?” I say hoarsely, then check, almost concerned, and find that she’s done nothing to the set of my teeth or the scar on my face.

“Well, not funny. Interesting,” she corrects herself, and smiles. It is not her mother’s smile, though it is almost perfectly her mother’s face, alarmingly enough. Different mouth, then, nose a little higher, skin a little darker. She has made no gesture to give me even a measure of space, hanging over the edge of her bed and decidedly in range of my hands. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to start your work with a weird thyroid fracture. I’ve never felt anyone but her make them like that - no, a low hanging, once. It wasn’t bothering you? It was bothering me.”

“Princess,” I say, and clear my throat. It does feel better. I didn’t entirely notice with the benefit of adrenaline. Once, I hardly noticed the arrow that passed cleanly through my face, so that isn’t entirely surprising.

“Iren,” she corrects me. “Well, get up, you’re rested, but you’re hungry. You should eat, and bring me more tea dumplings. I’m starving.”

Finally, she sits back on her bed, but only to reach across it and take an empty bowl and spoon, which she hands to me once I’ve halfway sat up.

I do what she says, more by instinct than by any sense that I’m supposed to, and glance at the thin panel of fabric between her quarters and the steppe, where the women I’m meant to be keeping her from are, from the sound of it, beginning the far less demeaning chores of the morning.

“Look, Sehna,” she says. Someone has told her my name, then. “If I meant to wiggle up one of the stakes and crawl out in the mud, I’d’ve done it while you were asleep, and I’m not going to kill mother until tonight, so there’s no reason you should be worried. Go eat. Healing isn’t just energetically costly for the healer.”

This arrests me completely, midway through rising. She laughs aloud. It is not really a beautiful laugh, but it is a delighted one.

“I thought you liked killing?” she says, still smiling. “Wasn’t that trick with the aferan stone your audition? Oh, next you’ll say you didn’t mean to impress me.”

I am uncharacteristically off-balance as I push aside the silken drape and pace out to where a few of the queen’s guards have boiled tea, dumplings, and a thick mutton stew. I wonder if I ought to find the queen now. The princess can’t mean what she says, I can’t assume her to be entirely stupid, as would be any woman proposing treason to one with such a stake in living down betrayal as myself. The matter isn’t an urgent one. She announced it, and she laughed.

Before I return, I eat and drink what is still scaldingly hot, and blister the roof of my mouth for my haste and the eternal discoordination of my jaw. When I swallow, though, it is remarkable.

My throat is good as new.

The princess makes no gesture at escaping. She has no hidden weapon that I can find, though a kicho would hardly need one. Even when she sends me for a third portion of breakfast, still with the same beatific smile, she is entirely unmoved from where I left her upon my return.

She eats like a woman twice her size, then does nearly nothing for a day.

Like her mother, she has books with which she occupies herself, written in whatever foreign tongue they use to command their magic and know the true names of flesh and blood, though the ones she reads contain nothing I even recognize as words. Noting my attention, she tells me they are numbers, and asks if I was educated at all in Giron, which resolves any lingering guilt or gratitude as to the matter of my mended trachea.

I wonder if she can feel the sting of anger, the tautness of my chest. If she has words or numbers for it. By her mild laughter and the specific quality of her shining black eyes, I know she must.

I decide, by the day’s end, that the princess is worse than her mother, who is herself already a monster only Merethora could produce.

“She said tonight,” I tell the queen, arms crossed over my leathers.

Derei is with her, now. Her culture minister has gone to wherever she keeps her useful men while they aren’t reading aloud or tending to her unnatural progeny. I dip my head to the queen first, upon entering, then to Derei, tall and young and bound with muscle enough to be visible nearly through her lamellar. She is the model of a horsewoman, the sides of her scalp shaven bare, her braid long enough to brush the small of her back, thick as my wrist throughout.

Neither of them immediately acknowledges me, though there is no clear distraction, this time, to explain the queen’s inattention.

“You might be better off being charmed,” the queen sighs, after a moment spent staring off into the middle distance, her dark gaze resolving in the torchlight that turns the night-dark silk the color and texture of its flame. “I believe she said it. She wants you dead, and replaced, for troubling me without evidence. It’s probably a good sign.”

“What?” I ask, and Derei gives me a look fit to cut leather. I cast my eyes down and try to hold my mouth more firmly closed.

“You ask a lot of questions,” the queen says, then looks to Derei. “Where do I know your girl from?”

“The aferan field,” Derei replies, voice low and dull. I suspect she has been standing here, behind the queen’s shoulder, for quite some time.

“Do you think I’m deficient?” the queen snaps, using a coastal word, rare among horsewomen. Derei doesn’t seem to know what it means, though she flinches at her tone. I have never seen Derei flinch. “I was there. Quite recently, even. Where do I know her from?”

Something crunches inside of Derei. It is wet-sounding, and heavier than a larynx. Her body is oddly rigid, animated without breath or obvious pulse. I hold my breath with hers, and try not to watch.

“I don’t know,” Derei breathes.

A second sound. She releases whatever breath she’s been denied, and her bones are hers again.

“That’s fine. I’ll figure it out,” the queen says, no longer paying any heed to Derei at all. Instead, she looks to me. “Send me the princess in the morning. Before she’s eaten. She should know better than to toy with her guard.”

I nod again, not looking to Derei’s face, sheened with sweat in a way that catches the torchlight more vividly than the silk. Then I leave, and my hand finds my throat once I am no longer watched, reminding me that it is whole. I am whole.

For the thousandth time, I wonder what Derei intended. The queen’s private guard is a high post, and she has likely gained something in placing a woman of her erakt beside the princess as well. I have mused over the specifics of it many times. To unhorse herself and stand at a woman’s side, even a kicho, which is not really a woman, or a human at all, strikes me as an illusion of advancement, at best. That she brought me with her multiplies the effect, in a sense, though I did not win the final game of aferan that might have justified it.

Before tonight, I have not wondered at the cost. Returning to the princess’ quarters and my pallet there, still hearing that wet crunch of bone, I add that to my wondering, and have no good answer by morning.

The princess does not return to her quarters after she silently accedes to her mother’s command and leaves, rested but unfed. I carve ten arrowheads, then carve them again down to matchsticks, then nearly to dust. There is nothing to be done about it. I am not foolhardy in the way that would inspire a woman to visit the queen without an audience, but eventually I am out of soft wood to carve, and the activities of the palace continue, and there is dinner in the cookpot and tea prepared with it.

Rinir is there in the central chamber, alone, writing something on a piece of poorly graded silk. A few members of my erakt are present, having been commissioned along with me and Derei, though no doubt to more comprehensible roles. I greet them vaguely.

Part of the appeal of the role, the reason I was willing to play for it, angle for it, beyond obedience for its own sake, was the prospect of having no more sisters. An erakt is a family of one hundred women too many. I join the culture minister at his table.

“Where is the princess?” I ask. He’s the only person I can imagine asking who might have any reason to know.

Rinir makes no effort to cover his writing. He knows I would have no way of reading it; he knows precisely who I am. Really, the queen should too. Everyone should. Half my unease among other horsewomen is the knowledge that they do. Derei, I suspect, thought it too obvious to comment on, or the question too poorly worded.

I look familiar because the look of me evokes a traitor of recent scale. It is so widely known that no one thinks to say it. The princess is certainly aware. That, I think, merits at least as much hatred as I’ve cultivated for her since the assignment began.

“With the queen,” he says tiredly. “It will be a while.”

“You don’t miss the position,” I observe, settling in to eat and wait.

“I will have it again, if she survives,” the culture minister sighs. “The princess and I tolerate each other. If you would forgive my presumption, I suspect so much is not the case between the two of you.”

“Tolerance isn’t really part of personal guarding,” I say, and his lips press together. He checks his empty teacup, again, a man’s tic towards an absent comfort.

“What do you imagine the princess needs guarding from?” he asks.

I shrug. “Succession claims? A more useful kind of corporealist?” That makes him laugh. I genuinely have no other insight. “Arrows, in sufficient volume?”

“It is a shame,” he says, in non-answer, “that the queen is so adamant that she will not go among the horsewomen. She is her mother’s daughter, the princess, but she is more tolerable at her work.”

I think of Derei’s bone. Wonder which one it was. Certainly a large one.

“You already know you haven’t been placed to keep the princess safe,” Rinir continues. He’s so nondescript as to be furniture, seated beside the queen. Alone, he has almost the gravitas of a staid, soft-spoken man of the coast. Coastal men are not so diminished as those who follow the horsewomen’s camps and share their bedrolls. They have rights to their children, and long memories of still greater rights, before the first queen, Meret, made all of Merethora one.

His features resolve into a kind of neat, unobjectionable nothing, but the effect accumulates, together with his robes and demeanor. I think he must be old enough to be twice my father, after all. The age of his face is less kind to him, up close.

“She’s a healer,” I agree. “A wall would protect her as well as I could.”

“Quite so. You know, then, that you are what I can’t be. A wall that keeps her in. I am not disposable, much as the queen might prefer it if I was.” His voice is very grave. “You are. She has never been able to discipline the princess as she wishes, because the princess cares nothing for her body. What the princess has, the queen must be able to take away.”

I laugh without meaning to. I don’t laugh often, and the sound of it surprises even me.

“She could’ve chosen better, then. The princess has no interest in me at all.”

Rinir stands, with a swish of faded silk robes. “It has been two days, Sehna. Hardly two. She has no love for me, either, but she has me. If she has touched you, she has you, too.”

Then he takes his cup and goes to fill it with more tea. I sit and eat. No longer under scrutiny, my hand climbs back to my throat and presses, cautious, for any seam in the repair of the cartilage.

There is none. She has left me perfect.

It is late when the princess stumbles back into her quarters. Her gait is ungainly, and she nearly pulls down the draped partition in catching herself by the layered silks, then falling anyway.

My sleep has been shallow, eerily alone in such a large space, familiar as I am with shared tents and bedrolls close together and the sound of the erakt breathing around me. I try to gather her up before she can blunder into another wall.

Her bones feel loose beneath her skin. She makes an unintelligible noise, more a gurgle than any word. I don’t like to feel it, how wrong she is, and I place her carefully on her pile of silks, untouched since the morning.

She grips me by the wrist and breathes like a drowned woman. I try to extricate my arm. She doesn’t permit it.

“Food,” she says, barely more than breath over lips. Her breath is heavy with blood.

We dry curd-cheese on the silk or canvas of our own small tents. I have some with me, and I put it in my free hand, feed it to her from my palm as I would a horse. She coughs, badly, but she eats. Her ribs make a sound like ice fracturing beneath boots on an early-frozen pond when she breathes deeply. There is blood spotted on my shoulder from where her head rested.

She eats everything I give her, then slumps, her grip still firmer than it ought to be, by the size of her forearms.

“Don’t move,” she slurs. “Need your senses. S’better.”

I hold still, half asleep, half convinced that I am dreaming. Her breathing evens out, moderately, moment to moment. There is still a wheeze when she exhales, but no more crunching. My hand, beneath her grip, is going numb. She releases it a second after I feel the discomfort in earnest.

Then a sound comes from her chest, and at first I think she might be choking again. It takes a moment, and earnest coughing, for her to stop laughing at me.

“Were you afraid?” she rasps. “For fifteen - ten seconds? When you told her what I said?”

“Yes, Princess,” I tell her. I think I was, at any rate. Fear doesn’t touch me like it does the typical kind of woman. It’s always unsettled people, to some degree. It disturbed my mother.

I was not an easy girl to discipline, either. I don’t say that, though. Just watch her hitch and contort in trying to breathe.

“She won’t get rid of me yet,” the princess says. “Because I am so - useful. When are you going to be useful, Sehna?”

I shrug. She laughs again, and it grates worse the second time.

“You want something, only this isn’t the place for a sportingwoman to find glory. So it must be something else.”

“I go where I’m told,” I say, and at least she doesn’t laugh. She’s still catching her breath, to an extent, from the last time.

“Mm, no. I think you’re trying to live your mother down. I have a sense for that,” she says wryly. “Only yours was your better. So it’s really pointless. You should find something else to want.”

“Shut up,” I snap. Her lips twist to a cruel smile.

“You’re not a very good guard, and aferan is really a game for girls, not women, at least the way you play it. Wouldn’t you rather be dying in some awful campaign of mother’s, to torment a village underproducing silver or kill some corporealist whose highest crime is managing the births of silk-farmers’ daughters?”

My hand is already a fist. She glances at it, exhales once more, and turns her gaze back to me, black as obsidian or hot tar.

“Do you think I’ve never been hit before, Sehna? If it’ll make you feel better - ”

“Shut up,” I say again, and of course I think of it, how her bird’s bones would feel when they broke, I know it, even. Hardly have to imagine. Only to remember the last woman who spoke to me with far less intent to provoke.

She watches me breathe, too quickly. It takes minutes, not seconds, to calm the rate of it.

“Take me for a ride tomorrow,” she announces. “After breakfast. I need to see one of mother’s camp bonesetters, and the competitions are all finished, anyway. They won’t be busy.”

“What do you want?” I demand, when she looks to be finished speaking, curled painfully beneath her bedclothes and in the act of nestling deeper.

“I already told you,” she says. “I want to go for a ride tomorrow.”

“You know that isn’t what I’m asking,” I insist.

“Obviously,” she says. Her teeth gleam dully, like her smile has caught all the dregs of light in the night-dark chamber. “I suppose I’d also like to understand you better. And to kill my mother, or at least to get away from her. To understand my mathematics texts better. And tea dumplings. I am in a mood for tea dumplings.”

I really could hit her. I don’t. I go to sleep instead, and keep the job, which I can’t even entirely convince myself I want, for another night.

Every woman is better on horseback. Higher, stronger, quicker, and righter. It holds true for the princess as well. I expect that she will need assistance to mount the mare that one of the guardswomen tells me is hers, given that even the reediest archers of the erakt were denser-built and taller than the princess is, but her horse is remarkably amenable to her, and she throws herself astride the beast bodily. With effort, to be sure.

Still, it suits her better, makes her more a woman, to settle into her saddle and grin over her shoulder at me, as though neither of us is a hostage to the other.

The steppe in the summer is green with every kind of grass, once we pass the mostly-vacated camp site where various erakts gathered to compete and only recently stowed their tents, bedrolls, and cookware. The mud is hoof-churned until it isn’t; the princess rides quickly, unusually quickly. I wonder if royalty has access to some variation of a horse, not a fair match for my gelding, then decide she must be doing something with her power.

Her mount’s flanks are not even wet when we reach the copper-washed healers’ tent. I find it sinister enough from outside. The queen does not kill every kicho but herself. It would be inefficient. The loyal ones, those weak enough to manage, with gifts better for healing than for destruction and no remarkable capacity in either, are the bonesetters and the horsetalkers, the women above camp followers and beneath those with bows and sabers, collectively healers.

The princess dismounts easily and waits for me to catch up. She has not tied back her hair, and it is tangled, black spirals all locked together and skewed to a windswept mess. She makes a perfunctory effort to brush it back with her fingers, which worsens the effect.

I’m not troubled to find her good to look at, any more than it troubled me to acknowledge that Araht was good to look at, before I killed her. They’re different as any two women who ride could possibly be, but the effect is the same. There is a kind of oil-slick vulnerability to beauty, beneath its hazard. Beauty assumes things. Her eyes are still black, even in the sun.

I lead our horses to the tent, then join her within it, swallowing my reluctance to be near so many kicho at once. I couldn’t say what I expect of them. Perhaps noxious liquids in bubbling cauldrons, writhing patients under hands or restraints, the scent of blood and sickness. It is not quite what I find.

The princess has already been swept up into the arms of an older woman, who is cooing something over her head. There are women on bedrolls, but mostly at rest or sitting up in mild interest at the new arrival. No one pays much attention to me, save one young woman seated near the entryway of the long tent, who asks if I have need of healing, then returns to whatever she is grinding in a mortar and pestle when I say no.

I would be content to be ignored. The princess notices - she must - because she introduces me as her guard, and cheerfully fields questions about Rinir’s absence and my appointment when I supply only one-word answers. No woman comments on my name, though a few exchange looks. I am known here. Perhaps they handled Araht’s crushed corpse. Kicho traditionally bury the dead.

“She won’t bother us at all,” the princess announces, her tone bright. “You have milk? I don’t want to ask for it in the palace.”

She drains a skin of it so efficiently that I imagine she will slosh in mounting her horse to return, then sighs rapturously. The older woman who embraced her, who seems to be in charge, asks if there is anything else she can do, and the princess shakes her head.

“Just needed the nutrients. It’s a lot of bone to remodel. You have anything weird for me?”

I think the older woman was introduced as Eshra. It sounds right. Eshra begins to lead the princess from pallet to pallet, and I follow like a shadow, silent and making every effort to see and touch nothing.

There is a middle-aged horsewoman, her skin sagging around her musculature with dehydration and loss of weight, eyes feverish and face flushed and sweat-damp. The fever has come back, Eshra explains, several times over the course of the month; they’ve driven bacteria from a few different tissues, but now it is in her joints, and her heart is beating wrong.

The princess puts her hands to the woman’s bared chest, muttering a few observations about her lungs and her temperature.

“Milk fever,” she pronounces. “Do you drink sheep’s milk? The agent is almost gone from the horses, but sheep still sometimes carry it. Stop drinking sheep’s milk, or boil it first. I wish we had a horsetalker for sheep.”

Then she does more touching, and the woman lays back, her eyes no longer fever-glossed. The princess rinses and dries her hands in a basin offered by one of the young women tailing her like steppe-dogs follow a butcher, and continues.

She fixes some defect of a young woman’s heart, then a miss-set fracture, then scarring around a womb and crystals in swollen joints. Two more cases of the same milk fever, which she sighs about and promises to pass along to the queen’s advisors, after interrogating the victims about which sheep from which herds.

Over the first woman’s pallet again, she spends a great deal of time asking questions of the healers, at one point asking Eshra to put her own hands on the ill woman’s chest as the princess touches Eshra, frowning at something she feels, then nodding briskly and skipping off to try whatever she’s learned on another body.

I say not a word. I’m much too occupied with watching for sudden movement among the kicho or the ill. None comes, but I refuse to be off-guard if it does.

The princess takes more milk, then makes a terrible joke about bringing in the sick sheep and testing it for herself. I may be the only conscious woman in the tent who doesn’t laugh and fawn.

She notices, of course. Neither pleased nor displeased, she remains as aware of me as I am of all the kicho, of her.

And she does slosh. A little. When she mounts her horse, after many more hugs from the old women and a few of the victims on their pallets.

They are all very grateful.

“Thank you for the escort, Sehna,” she tells me, as I mount to join her. There is amusement sparkling in her tone, effervescent as fermented milk. “I hope it wasn’t too traumatic for you. What do you call us on the coast, again?”

“Kicho,” I say grimly, past being angry with her.

“Kicho,” she muses, then urges her horse on.

It is a beautiful, well-kept mare. The horse is better tended than the mussed and milk-flecked princess, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion, and it accelerates more rapidly than my horse could hope to match.

For the rest, she has to call over her shoulder at a gallop, “keep up! You shouldn’t keep mother waiting!”

There is no use to it, but I try, regardless, and my gelding is frothed and cross with me afterwards for having attempted to match a corporeally-augmented horse’s pace. Still, it is better to have been out on horseback, under the sky, than to be rotting in a tent while the princess reads.

It is the first day I have not wholly regretted my new vocation.

I tell the queen about the healing, the tent, what I remember of the women’s names, the sheep and the milk fever. She seems bored by most of it, as tired and out-of-sorts as her daughter. The princess slept the rest of the day after returning from the healers’ tents. She told me, blearily, that her bones won’t hold well without it.

“She has behaved herself,” the queen prompts, and I shrug, which is probably not the right answer. Still, no punishment is forthcoming.

The queen considers something in silence. I wait for her conclusion.

“Has she not tried to fuck you yet?” she asks, genuine curiosity in her tone. I guess I must look bewildered, because she shakes her head and raises her hand, a dismissive gesture. “No, I guess not.”

Derei, standing behind her, has nothing to contribute. My own voice comes out uncertain when I say, “should she?”

The queen’s laughter is no less terrible for my frequent exposure to it.

“She should know better, by now,” she says. “Only I don’t believe she does. Well done. I’ll have someone see about the fever. You’re dismissed.”

I return to the princess’ quarters to watch her sleep, and think of the culling season that will follow this sun-drenched summer. Derei, in teaching us to steward our horses, is clear that to kill the weak and sick is a kindness. She follows some old horsewoman religion, remembered mainly in whatever quotes her mother taught her, that there is no goodness in sparing what lives a miserable life. Insects and small fish, a horse prone to lameness, a weak child - all of it is the same, creatures made only to suffer - and goodness is in sparing suffering, so one kills the thing that suffers efficiently and spares what is magnificent and happy.

I don’t believe in anything like that. My mother was magnificent, if I remember her correctly, as I do less and less with every passing year. Araht was magnificent as well. I owe her, I think, some acknowledgement of the fact of it. What honor could there be in killing something feeble?

The princess stirs in her silks. She is an insane, badly broken woman, who certainly seems to care nothing for her life. To suffer whatever her mother did deliberately, only for the potential to harm me for a second, is not the act of a healthy animal. If I were Derei, I would feel bound to put a clean end to this, given the opportunity.

I’m not, though. I see no reason to be afraid of suffering, to try to end it before it leaks into the world. It clearly hasn’t sheltered Derei from anything, to crush every bug or worm she meets between her fingers, to avert her eyes from the ugliness of infirmity.

I watch the princess until I fall asleep myself. What desire I have to kill her is mostly abated with her too-knowing eyes shut, on fabric drenched in nightmare-sweat. It will return, I know, by morning.

She reads. She goes to the healing-tents. She sits in bored silence as the queen holds court. Her mother calls her away, on occasion, and she always returns in some way furious and exhausted, but never the same way twice. I think it is for different purposes, at intervals; she isn’t always broken afterwards, but she is always spent.

Once, the queen insists that I come along, and I watch in dull, expectant horror as her mother dissects a woman before her and has her daughter hold the twitching hand of her victim, to explain to her how it feels when different bones collapse on themselves. The princess is curt and perfunctory, but never gives a substandard answer. When the queen is done, she caves the woman’s skull in on itself with a sound like lake-ice under the hooves of a full megha and tells Derei, ever at her side, to dispose of the body.

I accompany the princess back to her quarters. There is blood on her. She undresses without comment or modesty, then pauses, a fresh slip already in hand, her dirtied khitta on the floor.

“I don’t really want to kill her,” she tells me, looking up, her black eyes dull and shadowed, slightly sunken in her face. “I just want her to be dead.”

“That’s the same thing,” I tell her, and refuse to look away from her nakedness. I expect her to laugh, but she doesn’t.

“Maybe the way you do it,” she replies shortly, and begins to wriggle her narrow body into the linen slip. “How many people have you killed, Sehna?”

“Six,” I say, with no hesitation on the number. Her head emerges through the neck of the garment.

“Only six? I guess I haven’t killed anyone. What did it feel like?”

“Like nothing,” I say. “Like cutting meat, or drawing on a target of dried grass.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to that, falling into her pile of silks, which have been freshly laundered and dried while we’ve watched that woman tortured to death.

“I don’t want to be queen, either. Everyone I meet wants me to be queen, and it’s a terrible idea.”

“I don’t want you to be queen,” I say frankly, and she laughs at last.

“Okay. Everyone but one person. I think I’d be a terrible queen. Mother knows it. She keeps me because I feel and she can’t feel, yeah, because my gift is useful, but also because she doesn’t want to have another child. She wants me to have one, with corporealism, so she can have a biddable little girl again and dispose of me. She’s afraid of me. Of me!”

Her laughter turns borderline hysterical.

“Isn’t that the worst thing you’ve ever heard? All I do is fix what she breaks. Fuck, imagine what she’d do to a daughter with a martial gift.”

She wobbles on her feet. I’ve gotten better at seeing it, when she’s overspent some measure of herself. Food, or rest - something in her runs dry, using her magic to excess. I offer her my bag of dried curd cheese. She shakes her head, refusing it.

“I want to leave. I want to be anywhere but here. But it’s all hers. Everything is hers,” she says, her eyes wide, ringed with white sclera, distraught. “Do you want to serve her, Sehna? Really? Is this what you want? I can’t believe it is.”

She waits for me to reply, swaying slightly, even from her seated position. I don’t have a good answer. No supplies itself. All I wanted, really, was a space of my own, a life not shared with a hundred sisters. Pursuing that has demonstrably done me little good.

“What does it matter?” I ask.

“It matters,” she insists. “Of course it matters. Everything matters!” The note of hysteria has not faded at all. She reaches for my hand. “Let me feel it, then, if you actually don’t care. What it’s like. Let me.”

I give her my hand. She almost never touches me, since she healed my larynx. Only as a sort of analgesia, sometimes, when she is too injured and depleted to repair herself immediately, surviving breath to breath. Then she borrows my body, palm-to-palm.

She weighs it for a moment, some of the tension leaving her face. Then her eyes meet mine with a strange recognition. It should be mutual. I should see something in the expression she makes. I don’t. Just irises as black as the pupils inside them.

“Let me fix your jaw,” she says.

“No,” I say.

“What if I just did it?”

I don’t know what I would do. It’s been part of me for such a long time, a shape that no mother gave my body. I shake my head.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Why not.”

It isn’t a question, and I hardly have an answer.

She puts her hand to my face, and I freeze, which is the only reply I can summon. Her fingertips are on the scar. I breathe too heavily, feel the weight of her touch not at all through the puckered silver-purple tissue I know is there, without nerves, without blood, without sensation. She thumbs at it curiously, then touches her own face.

I have no control over my body, though she hasn’t taken it. Only the proximity is distracting. I feel the cool wet sense of saliva at the corner of my mouth, and try to swallow it before she notices. Impossible. She touches this, too, and frowns at the glimmer of it on her fingertip.

“Do you want me to force you?” she offers.

No one could. Everything that has happened to me, since I left the care of my mother, has been by my volition or my inertia. I’ve chosen obedience, more often than not, but I have chosen. It was my right to decline my place in the megha that descended on Giron to kill my mother. I was asked three times, by three different women, and every time I said yes.

“Yes,” I say.

She already half has me. It’s nothing at all, even to such a delicate thing as the princess, to pull me the rest of the way down, to put dehydration-rough lips to mine, and to set my jaw on fire with pain to rival that of the initial wound, in growing the bone back all at once.

I was prettier before the arrow, I think. I was only thirteen or so, and didn’t have a woman’s face yet, but by the way the rest of the erakt reacted to me, I can put it together.

The princess has already left her bed, when I wake in it. There is no scar on my cheek. My teeth are straight and fit together seamlessly. The fabric beneath my face is dry, though the recently-fresh sheets smell more of sex and blood than of the beeswax soap in which they’re usually washed.

There will be no hiding this from the queen. I wonder if she will kill me for it. In the princess’ polished bronze mirror, which she usually keeps tucked behind her trunk of khittas and books, I see the reflection of a woman who is, without a doubt, my mother’s daughter.

I know that I have made a terrible mistake. I can’t yet bring myself to regret it, but I will.

She doesn’t call me to the central chamber of the palace immediately. I’m not certain why I imagined she would; my charge has slipped her lead-rope, but it’s nothing the queen would notice immediately. For all I know, the princess is with her. I go about my day as I otherwise would. It’s already my habit to avoid the other guards, and their habit to watch me only when necessary, with jealousy and pity both for my position.

No one in the palace imagines supervising the princess to be an easy task, or an especially pleasant one. Pleasant enough, after all. There are not many women who are my equal both at raw strength and the skill to wield it in close quarters. It doesn’t matter much when another woman wields my body for me.

My face warms a little at the thought. I eat, delighted at the sensation of chewing without pain, and pass some time maintaining my strength, then scrubbing the sweat from my hair in the vernal pool where most guardswomen wash. All of this I do before I think about what the princess asked me, before she put her eggshell skull to my shoulder and slept.

“If it really doesn’t matter, do it for me. You killed Araht for her.”

I protested without words, and she silenced me the same way.

“You did. It wasn’t for me, I’m really not delusional enough to think anyone does anything for me, except by heroic accident. That’s not your way, though. You killed a good woman for my mother. That’s a fact. Would you kill an evil one? For me? I don’t mind either way.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be queen,” I said.

“I don’t. I want her dead more than I want anything,” she said, and kissed me a while more.

Nearly two months, and I don’t know the princess well enough to judge her intent. Her eyes are still the same inscrutable opaque black. She still brings up Araht when she really doesn’t need to, she’s made her case, and I’m not in the habit of apologizing for orders I could have disputed, at the time, but didn’t. What would be the point? And now she’s fixed me.

My tongue still goes to the corner of my mouth that ought to sag. It doesn’t. A fresh wave of giddiness takes me. It doesn’t sag.

The queen will know, one way or another. I may not have two chances. Derei is her only guard most nights, and Derei would hesitate to move on a woman of her erakt, even if she valued the monster that holds her lead. Another woman couldn’t do it. The queen is not a capable healer, or she wouldn’t need the princess, and the princess will not be there.

Nothing feels impossible while my teeth fit together correctly.

When I reenter the palace, Rinir is at the brazier, pouring water for tea. He regards me, uncomprehending, then starts when he realizes who I am. Something about that bothers me, and I stand and wait for him to make a comment, then, arms crossed.

“You are healed,” he says, and I smile, slightly, to prove it.

“It took her long enough,” I say, affectedly casual.

“I hardly think her a patient woman,” Rinir sighs, and indicates that he will make a cup of tea for me as well, if I wish it. I shake my head, and he resumes his work.

“Patient, no. Tolerable, though. You were right. She is tolerable.”

He raises his focus from his tea with something like alarm.

“She did not price the healing, Sehna? You know these women have their prices. It takes a toll from them to do their magic.”

I had at least three of her price last night, and almost laugh at the thought. There it is again, the giddiness of being whole. Of knowing myself pretty. I’d like to go back to her quarters, I think, and check the mirror again.

“A man would not understand it,” I tell him, and begin to leave.

“Sehna,” he says urgently, and I turn, briefly, confused by his tone. “Better women than you have tried - ”

“I doubt that,” I say, “for the lack of better women than me.” Then I continue back to the princess’ silk-draped bedchamber, where the mirror waits, and where I mean to pass my time in making a plan worthy of this country’s greatest monster.

Not all aferan teams have a notable lead-woman. I’ve been disgruntled, actually, as the tournament has dragged on, by the team put to the court by Derei’s least favorite and most likely competition for the queen’s favor; Enrit’s team has a lead-woman who plays from behind the field half the time. They keep winning, and by a good measure.

But a victory against them will be dull, and a loss to them, humiliating. I feel fortunate, almost, that our qualifying match for the final is against a real team. Araht is its lead-woman, and I know her well enough by her face and demeanor. She is an ever-smiling woman, with half a hand’s height on me and an affect that has quickly won her something like a following in the camp, as all our erakts meet to compete for the queen’s favor.

I meet her before either qualifying match, in the evening. She is drinking something frothy by her erakt’s brazier. Of course she knows me by sight, and I know her. Araht is strong-featured, like something whittled from a dark wood, with warm brown eyes, a foal’s eyes, fringed generously with soot-black lashes. She is tall and beautiful and proud, but not too proud to offer me a drink of my own, which I decline.

“Have you heard if the queen intends to watch our match?” I ask, not meaning to dally long.

“Sehna,” Araht sighs, dragging out the final vowel. “It doesn’t really make a difference either way, does it? The princess will watch. I asked her to.”

And Derei asked the queen, or someone close to her. I keep this to myself, though I sought Araht’s company, I think, out of a desire to make it fair.

“We’ll have a good audience, regardless,” I agree, and she chuckles in her smooth, low voice. “You will. I think I might be distracted by so many of your admirers.”

“Don’t be jealous,” she says, through a careless grin. “You have your own reputation, though I think you scare the girls too much for them to be so obvious about it.”

“But not you,” I say. She snorts and takes a drink.

“I like a strong opponent. It doesn’t really count as a win unless it’s against a woman who could’ve won herself.”

Fairness. What did I mean to do, really, to make it fair? She doesn’t need a warning. Only she probably shouldn’t drink before a game. Derei would cuff me if she saw me with anything fermented in my cup.

“Well, I only came to wish you luck,” I say. “It’s a shame we couldn’t meet in the final. Isn’t the other qualifier Faine against - Enrit’s girl, who is their lead-woman?”

“Diria,” she says, and smiles again. “That’s your great fault! You should think more about all of your opponents, not just the one with the prettiest face.”

She strikes a pose, her hand beneath her chin, and has the nerve to bat her eyelashes. I’ve already decided to kill her tomorrow, so this makes no difference. It was stupid of me to come. There can be no changing my mind.

“I’ll try not to be distracted when I meet your eyes,” I say drily, and she laughs and offers me a drink, food, anything to stay and chat a while before the brazier burns low. It’s very polite of her, and it means nothing at all.

“If the queen is there,” Araht adds, when I’ve made sufficient excuses to extricate myself, “you’ve heard she’ll appoint a guard for the princess, right? No doubt from the aferan field. We’re the best of the competition, you know.”

“I’ve heard,” I say.

“A personal guard,” she adds, and raises her dark eyebrows suggestively. “No hard feelings if I play to win, Sehn?”

“Sehna,” I correct her, and leave.

The queen is where she usually sits in the central chamber, well-lit, this evening, in the amber light of the summer sunset. Derei stands behind her, head slightly bowed, her hands at her side, neither on the saber at her hip.

I stride up to the table and dip my head.

“You’re a polite girl,” she announces, then stops. My jaw has no more nauseating click, and does not protrude rightward with the mis-healed fracture. I feel her scrutiny of it, sight and sound both.

She is a such a delicate woman, the queen. I look up and meet her eyes, the black of them gilded by both the sunset and the brazier-light, and find that she is every bit as human as her daughter. These monsters, the kicho who rule us, are reedy women, who burn too much of their food in making magic and let little of it go to their bones. She is fragile. Older, surely, than she looks.

“That’s it,” she announces, snapping her slender fingers. “That woman. The one who schismed in - Urraten?”

“Giron,” I correct her, more tersely than I mean.

“But she’s dead. You’re the daughter. Good, my daughter finally fixed that jaw. It did you no favors. I thought of doing it myself, but she fixes everything eventually.” The queen sighs. “Well, that’s one question resolved. You know, I really thought it would be something important?”

“What?” I say, and she shakes her head.

“Go on. Your report.”

“It’s of a sensitive nature,” I say, and look to Derei, who takes a step back. It’s a strange thrill, to command her even by proxy. I try to give a good impression of guilt. “What you said, the other week.”

I step around the table, my heart beating too quickly in anticipation. The queen doesn’t sense as her daughter does. She permits it, gives me a vaguely curious look.

“You’re aware of the princess’ deviancy,” I say, using the coastal word, another one that Derei clearly doesn’t know. She’s learned better than to ask, and takes another half-step back. “But I have something to confess myself.”

The queen laughs softly, amused, interested. So much so that she has not noticed my hand on my carving knife. I half-kneel beside her seat, to speak to her in a low voice, which will not carry.

“I may have been a little charmed,” I admit, my fist tight, the trajectory of the blade already committed to my forearm’s memory.

As I have practiced a dozen-dozen times, I draw my knife and put it through the base of her skull, the notch between the heavy occiput and the little-protected portion of the spine where it connects.

I wonder if it is her reflexes or just some question she meant to ask that makes her turn her head. That puts my blade through her cheek, instead. I like to think that it is a reflex. I could never resent a woman for being excellent, and luck is a lesser excellence than martial instinct. I just wonder which it is.

I do not wonder for very long. Not long enough for regret, at least, which is all the mercy that the wet crunch of bone, experienced from the inside, is not.

The weapon in Baran Sawa’s hands was forged for war. It’s a light, efficient thing. Kichaan has not kept a cavalry in a century, but farmers have their horses, and his father or his father’s father must have bought a blade to wear at his hip in battle. Baran has taken good care of the sword. It is subtly curved, patterned with faded gilding and the mottling of Genide steel.

I did not come to his home to kill him.

This is a place of mild weather and air slightly stinging with sea salt. A Selasair does not usually stay so close to an ocean for long; before Master Milic was killed, he resided a good kilometer inland from the cliffs that sprawl away from Sawa’s residence. It’s all the same pale limestone, and Kichaani construction, while not famous, is sound.

Sawa’s back is almost to a hardwood door, banded with iron. His sword has been drawn, I suspect, since he saw my horse, which now grazes placidly on soft grass and the low, delicate plants of early summer.

I dip my head politely. “You know my errand, Sawa.”

“My wife is innocent of your accusations,” he says flatly. “You will not enter my home.”

His Standard is stilted, but fluent. Few men would speak so boldly to a shining-white demigod at their doorstep, but just as few men among his people still keep a cavalry-sword in such condition.

They have myths, in these coastal villages, of the Selasair that own their land. We visit when we are called on by a town, though Kichaan is not often a site of summons. Fair weather means no floods to dry. Good stone, warm winters and pleasant summers, stable harvests. Quiet people. It isn’t a place that has much need for magic, or the Selasair that command it.

Placing my hand on the pommel of my sword, I lower my head again, in recognition. If a man came for my women, I would do what he intends, though he places a fragile body before a force he does not understand. It is not wise of him, but I have never pretended to be a wise man myself. War is not a good credential for wisdom, no matter what the men of my department wish to believe.

Baran Sawa is tall, for a man not remade in the furnace. The crown of his head, at a millimeter short of one hundred and ninety-eight centimeters, puts him barely above my chest. He has the complexion of a Kichaani farmer, brown-of-gold, and he holds his sword the way he no doubt does a sickle.

There is nothing to be gained by a decent man’s death.

“You have children,” I remind him. “Or I’ve been told you do. You did not kill Master Milic, and you will not kill me this afternoon.”

His mouth thins to a tight line. So he has already decided to die.

“I have not given you license to enter my home,” he insists.

A man’s courtesy would be a death by incorporeal magic, but beyond the citadel, there are many different ideas of how a man ought to die. Honor, for this man, will be the blade.

I draw mine. It has been held by four of my predecessors, long and silver, with a rapid taper and a tip that tracks my intentions without effort. It has been mine for nearly a century, and the blood I have cleaned from it has mostly been the dull silver-red of Selasair. My sword is a dueling weapon, and no part of this is fairly matched.

“It is only folklore, sir, that we need permission,” I say. “Step aside.”

“You will have to use that sword,” he replies.

A jewel-blue wasp lands, with the lazy drone of iridescent wings, in the mouth of a blossom in the well-maintained garden that borders the home, the flower bobbing at its weight. The temperate breeze barely stirs the blush-pink petals as it feeds.

It is a very beautiful place to die.

Over the past decade, Kichaan has given progressively fewer girls in tithe to the citadel. It is a farming settlement, remote, with only one Selasair stationed and few other tithes. Oranges, almonds, poppies, wine and grapes, a small quantity of a particular dense cow’s cheese. This was documented in Councilmaster Faians’ accounts. There is a story told by the goods and young women that vassal-states send, and this one has not been questioned for many years. Fewer births. The ratios consistent, the numbers all in order.

The mathematics at the heart of the citadel’s trade and its magic are beyond questioning, and these held until Master Milic sent a missive, by the road, doubting their veracity. The day after, Kichaan’s Selasair was dead.

I am not sent to a village with my pentra to investigate. That is Visete’s work, in the department of our law. When the high council puts the councilmaster of war to his purpose, it is because they anticipate a war. What war they imagine from these people is arguable, but the argument was not ultimately mine to win.

A Selasair should not be killed. It should not be possible. Any Selasair should well hold his own before a thousand villagers, soft and content with good food and sun-drenched land. When we are Elevated, we are made something other than our mortal bodies, all possessed of the mathematics to survive the transformation and the power to set the furnace alight. Milic, I am told, was one of Eleza’s men, a pedagogue, and his work in Kichaan was mainly in the operation of a school.

It was a long ride from the citadel. I read the briefings thoroughly.

The first pentra was sent for the purpose of ascertaining what had happened and retrieving the body, though Milic was long burned by their arrival, his schoolhouse of limestone scorched and gutted. The purpose turned to identifying the murderer.

Enasz Sawa was not a well-liked woman in Kichaan, or not so liked, at any rate, that her name was long concealed. Her husband permitted no interview of his wife, and made the sort of threats that Visete’s men took for guilt.

He was a handsome man, by any reckoning. It’s easier to see it now that his face is still. The Kichaani people wear their hair long and loose when not at their work, and I have seen none who keep it cut. His is thick and straight, blue-black, pooled around his body, gleaming dully in the sun. A slender thrusting weapon does not do much damage to the clothing.

Delivered correctly, it is a quick way to die. Not painless, but quick. My father trained all of his sons carefully, but perhaps he trained me best; I wonder, in retrospect, if he trusted my brothers to take his seat. He wished his successor to be a good man. Alev, the eldest of my brothers, was the first man I dueled, before my father’s body had been burned, and that for the position of high councilmaster. They have not all been decent men, dead by my hand.

Finished with the flowers, the blue wasp bumbles lazily across the paving stones, landing for a moment on his chest, the loose white cotton draping worn by a farmer of some import and some wealth. Some hand has embroidered it neatly with a line of red poppies at the collar. The wasp considers them with curious forelegs, finds their flavor wanting, and catches the next breeze with a hum and a scattering of light from its prismatic wings.

I leave Baran Sawa at the threshold and go to kill his wife.

She is burning documents behind a door that she has never needed to lock. A boy-child helps her, hunched beside an overfed fire, the smoke of it acrid with ink. He starts when I duck beneath the doorframe and find the ceiling so low when I straighten that it catches my hair. To destroy the evidence of subterfuge won’t do the woman of the house any good, but neither is it much of a harm.

I cleaned my blade before I entered. Enasz Sawa looks to it with resignation, regardless.

“Misha,” she murmurs. The cadence is Standard, better than her husband’s, as is the legal expectation, though her accent suggests she does not typically adhere so strictly to imperial law. “It’s time. Saddle Ajma, it is done.”

I regret not having moved the body. “He has nothing to fear, Miss Sawa.”

Her son is nearly finished with an armful of papers, tables of numbers that I judge to be of the same neat, careful hand that embroidered the poppies, and does not lift his head from his work. Sweat gleams on his face. The room is very warm.

“Misha,” she says again, more urgently, glancing to me again. “Be finished.”

Three more sub-sections of his documents, and he puts the last of the papers into the fire, tucked between split logs with both precision and proximity to singe his fingers, then stands. He is a child. A tall one, but it is unmistakable in his face. He, too, looks at the sword first.

His hand twitches up. This will end no better for him than it did for his father.

“Do as your mother says,” I tell him. “Have a seat, Miss Sawa. I will speak to you first.”

She laughs, once. I have women enough in the citadel to know when one is not inclined to entertain me on my terms. She is darker-complected than her husband, but not so weathered, and her hair is shot with grey. While she is not a small woman, and a fair match to the man on the paving stones in her height, nothing of her demeanor suggests the sort to kill a Selasair. Nor to kill anyone, really. Her eyes are black as ink. There is no weapon on her, and she does not reach for one, even seeing mine.

“Do not let him have your sisters,” she tells her son, stepping back towards a low, cushioned seat as though to draw me in. A scant few papers remain across her desk. “Go.”

“Ukcha,” the boy says, turning from me to her, low and urgent. I loosely know the term for mother in the regional tongue, but I lack the insight for the rest of what he says, or for his mother’s reply. They do not entirely argue; she is insistent on something.

I am in no great hurry. A Selasair, it sometimes seems, has time out of proportion with all his other resources. I mind it more while the high council bickers around me, and less in the hours I spend with my women and my work, teaching or pressing at some intractable problem of geography or men.

The setting continues to unsteady me, in a way I note again, glancing about at the spill of light through fine glass windows, over fixtures of wood and stone and brass, all carved and cleaned with a loving hand. A long-handled pot for Kichaani coffee sits beside the fire. The scent of it is stronger than that of sea salt in the air.

Her son’s eyes are wet with furious tears. None of my sons, yet, in attempting Elevation, have survived the furnace.

“I would interrupt, miss,” I say. “Your daughters are at no disproportionate risk, and your child should not see this.”

“Such concern,” she replies, and, frowning, presses a last kiss to the boy’s forehead. “Go. Be good.”

At last, she sits. I seldom see such depth of hatred in a child’s eyes, and he considers my sword again, as he passes me. It is near as long as he is tall.

“Now,” Enasz Sawa continues. “I understand your errand, sir. Why delay? They would not send another slow or stupid man. Your citadel is a place of learning. You will learn nothing from me. Do as you must.”

She does not smile, and speaks with no great inflection. My hand on the pommel of my sword, I consider her carefully. She has been judged too dangerous to live.

An actuary of crops and tithes. I do not see it. There are creases on her hands, which are elegantly shaped, where ink has stained the slightly sallow brown of her skin blueish. She is not a woman who sees the sun much. The creases between her brows are a consequence of frowning, not of the sort of damage that freckles or roughs a face. The more I look at her outright, the more I think her face an interesting one in shape. She does not have the high, sharp nose or narrow, heavy-lashed eyes of her Kichaani husband; her dark eyes are wide and open, asynchronously innocent, and it is impossible not to see it, even as she avoids meeting mine.

There is another low seat across her table, where I imagine her son might sit. I take it myself, with some effort. My legs are long and my body is dimensioned for my height. A Selasair’s bones are dense, and the seat strains a little at my mass.

“How did you kill him?” I ask. She does not seem the sort of woman who likes to speak casually at length when she does not have to, though I might enjoy it if she would.

“If I answer,” she says, “it may not work again. Some other woman may need it to work.” Her mouth thins when she smiles. “You should do your duty. I understand that you are long decided.”

“Why did you kill him?” I ask, frowning. I am probably not the man for such an interview, but I am curious, and the scent of coffee is pleasant, and she is more interesting alive than dead.

“Some men need killing,” she replies. “As I imagine you well know.”

I laugh shortly. “You knew the penalty?”

She does not take my baited pause. “I knew. Some men need killing. That is my answer.”

“Your son will be a terror someday,” I observe, and she does not laugh. If anything, the corners of her mouth tighten towards a frown.

“My son will be an orphan. But he will not be subject to that thing that calls himself a man,” she spits. “Your man.”

“Master Milic found falsifications in your records,” I say. “It was his duty.”

I see her weighing her words carefully. This is not a woman of much expression, but there is a dark flush at the high points of her face, a new gleam to her eyes, which she fights to blink away. She shakes her head once, and it is gone.

“He found that we were raising our girls as boys,” she says shortly. “Because he preferred boys.”

I pause at this. It would not be helpful to misrepresent the births in such a way; we have departments to track tithes and births, and what I understand to be clever algorithms, developed by Councilmaster Irisim, to determine what is natural. In times of famine, the proportion of female births increases by some known ratio, while live births fall. I have not paid much attention in briefings on the subject, but if some number of girls were being called boys, our statistics would reveal it within the year.

The rest gives me a different sort of pause. Milic was not well known to me. Older, deployed before I had so much as a docent’s place in my father’s department. It is not unheard of for a man to leave the caverns beneath the citadel, a place of boys, and to become a man without entirely learning to be one. We do not all outgrow the thing we were before we burned.

It is a shameful thing, to be so old and to still be a child in one’s tastes. To hate bitter drinks, difficult choices, and typically women along with them, and to exact those tastes on those too small to resist.

“Milic was not my man,” I say, deliberately. Enasz Sawa scoffs.

“You have our girls before thirteen. I could not presume to know what the citadel licenses any of its men, but what is wrong to visit on a boy is just as wrong to visit on his sister.”

“It is not licensed in the citadel, either,” I tell her, frowning. It is not normal. Even the department of pedagogy would not tolerate it. “You could not send word?”

“To whom? When I submit my figures, even, they pass through him.” She gestures down at the scant few papers remaining on her table, looking very tired.

It is some kind of misunderstanding. Too much of it is impossible. That this woman did the killing she insists on, for one. That she classified births inaccurately without notice is a second impossibility.

Visete is nothing egregious, as councilmasters go, but it is more likely that he was wrong. There may be some conspiracy afoot. Among Eleza’s men, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened, and Visete thinks himself very fair, but fairness does not do much to a foreign woman’s word.

They are all very casual about where they point my sword, not needing to wield it themselves.

“Would you have coffee?” the woman asks, inflection still flat. “It would be twice-heated.”

“You’re good to offer,” I say, close my eyes, and exhale deeply. “Yes. Thank you. I suppose it is for nothing, then. Milic offended some man above him and was burned for his troubles, and you have been made a patsy. People rarely like their actuaries much. I regret what has been done to you, Miss Sawa.”

She gives me a strange look as she walks to the fire, sets the brazier over it, and heats the half-full pot that must be the source of the scent in the room, piquant with cardamom. Kichaani coffee is supposed to be very good, though they do not grow it here.

“I think you misapprehend me, sir,” she says, as the pot foams. “I am no one’s patsy. I did as he said I did, and I killed him, as well. How much sugar?”

My Ilhaa is a very compelling woman. She was tithed from Ont’ur, three decades past, and the calluses on her palms have long softened from her time serving in the under-layer. She is rarely without a child on her lap, though she will have no more of her own, after Beris burned and did not rise from the furnace. I prefer a living Ilhaa to another dead son.

I keep two children in my tower, daughters not yet of age to leave their mothers, and both are with Ilhaa when I enter. I have not quite managed to cast off the demeanor of a councillary session that I did not win. She notices, of course, looks up from one of the girls’ drawings and calls over Felis to take the children to bathe.

“What terrible thing has happened now?” Ilhaa asks, when the girls are gone, one in arms, the other toddling.

“Knisad wishes a message sent on the matter of tithes. I will take a pentra to ride for Kichaan in the morning,” I say. She nods, rising to pour me water, which she offers in settling back in beside me on the couch. “Do I look so poorly?”

A Selasair can dehydrate, though he cannot starve. Ilhaa laughs softly. “Poor enough. Drink, and try to leave the council in their chamber. You’re safe, here. I will protect you.”

She is hardly fifty-two kilograms, and soft all the way through. Ont’ur makes small women, and does not feed them well when they are young. She fears that this might have been the cause of the first two children she lost early. I try not to think of it too much. There is no percentage to be gained by anger at a misguided people, and their punishment would only starve more girls.

“Why does the high councilmaster want you away?” she asks. “He does nothing without reason.”

Ilhaa is my favorite of my women. She asks the best questions.

“No doubt for some atrocity he means to commit unsupervised,” I sigh. “Segen ages and has asked twice to be discharged for retirement. I favor his ordinate, but should he retire rather than pass, his sons have contention as well for the post.”

“Segen,” she repeats, frowning. “You like Segen?”

“He is of infrastructure. I have had campaigns with him,” I say. “His ordinate is Esad, and he is reasonable enough, though old. Knisad does not favor him.”

“I take it the assignment is not one that you can refuse?”

“It is voted,” I say, and lift the bird’s-weight of her into my arms. She smells pleasantly of dates and almond-water, when I put my lips to her forehead, though my brow furrows to see more silver between the tight curls of her hair than I remember. “The ride is long. He has his pretext. I will return to a new councilmaster of infrastructure, and likely not one I will appreciate much.”

“You have standing to duel him,” she reminds me. “If you ever tire of being pressed around in such a way.”

I have been tired of it for several decades, more or less since taking my father’s seat. If I declare such a design, though, Knisad will have the right to choose the medium. If he were to declare, which I suspect he would like to, the medium would be my right. At magic, Knisad wins without question. At steel, I win just as easily. This has made a stalemate between us. He who breaks it will lose, and neither of us is tempted by the prospect of a loss.

Ilhaa puts her small, warm face to my shoulder and breathes deeply. “It is only a thought,” she adds. “You will bring us back something nice from Kichaan? I hear the province is very beautiful. Oranges, or honeyed almonds?”

“Easily,” I say. “Any good thing I find.”

What I am due to bring back is fifteen tithed girls, in compensation for those denied. From Ont’ur, there might be no shortage of volunteers. The challenges are different across the imperium, depending on the length of vassalage, the myths of Selasair, and the relative value of incorporeal power. Ilhaa’s parents were farmingpeople themselves, in the great river basin that makes Ont’ur rich with rice and soy and vulnerable to devastating floods and droughts, season-by-season, before Selasair were placed to turn the winds and moderate the rains.

Without judgment, Ilhaa has told me the stories her mother did, of the time before vassalage. Tales passed down of men like living skeletons, who ate their wives and daughters in years of little rain or ash-gold skies that stunted the rice.

They are called tithes for what was originally a gesture of gratitude, and boys were given too, to learn our mathematics and our writing and to speak and read in Standard, and perhaps to brave the furnace and return one day to the place of their birth. Then they might bless the children of their brothers and sisters with fair skies and gentle seasons, to raise a hand and dry a harvest for storage or to turn a landslide to glass as strong as iron before a hillside collapses into the sea.

We do not take boys, these days. The children of Selasair and women, with a patriline already Elevated, survive better in the furnace and learn to use incorporeal magic more instinctively. This is Knisad’s polemic, and he has the numbers for it, and the perfect sons, more luminous with each generation, to prove his point. So we take women. Most, I have been promised, are willing.

I hold her closer to my chest and stroke her back through the diaphanous silk of her consort’s gown. I cannot feel her ribs. Only soft, regular breathing, a suffusion of human warmth, a slow and even heartrate. She is entirely safe, and knows it, despite my silence and my mood. I will let no harm befall her, and no work rough her hands, and no inconvenience to her persist for long. It is more than any man in Ont’ur could have promised. Though we do not have marriage, we also do not have famine, and in her moments of greater frankness, Ilhaa has been quite clear that she prefers to be without one, if it means she will never risk the other.

“You do not have to think about it now,” she concludes. Ilhaa, too, has been ruminating for some time, curled against my chest. “And the assignment can’t be too difficult, can it? Kichaan and its people are soft. You will do what you must and return to me, and Knisad will have put some monster he likes on the council, yes, but it would be his prerogative either way. He might have found a more punishing pretense to distract you, if not this one. Have I about summed it up?”

“I am lucky,” I tell her seriously, “to have such a sensible woman to put it plainly for me.”

“Most men are very stupid,” she agrees, and puts soft, dry lips to my cheek.

“You leave a generous exception,” I say, laughing, and she laughs as well, more sadly.

“If our son had lived. That is my only exception, really. He might have been very smart, though it would do him no good if he was as decent as his father,” she says, with real sorrow to it.

I have been told obliquely, and I suspect further reading will confirm, that there will not be enough Kichaani girls of the proper age, and some will be escorted back too young for the caverns beneath the citadel, unschooled in work, taken from a sun-soaked land without a local word for the sort of hunger that kills.

“I could bring you a little girl,” I say. “There have been casualties already, by my knowledge, and there may be children left of them. Would that be a good gift? It would relieve me to see at least one of them raised kindly.”

Ilhaa breathes out shortly against my shoulder. “An orphan. If she needs someone. But this is sad, Abel. I don’t like to think of orphans.”

I don’t like to think of my sons, four of them, and none surviving the furnace that makes a Selasair. One by Ilhaa, but no more. I think it must be better to have daughters; these, one gets to know them for longer before the citadel becomes their steward. A son leaves when he takes his first steps.

She recites for me, in lieu of any happy news. Ilhaa was taught stories in Ont’ur, and she spends much of her time in re-imagining them in Standard and in formulating new ones, for daughters old enough to be bored by the tower and its trappings. Felis returns with my little girls to listen, and in time the sitting-room is warm with women’s laughter, the dialogue of Ont’uric myth-speaking and the eager contributions of children.

It is much to leave behind to kill a woman in her office, and such a woman. Enasz Sawa is very compelling herself.

“You must tell me how,” I say, over the coffee, which is excellent.

“It will give me more pleasure not to,” Enasz Sawa says, smiling thinly. “Proportionate, I think, to any punishment.”

“I would not punish you,” I continue, frustrated. “Only you must understand the strangeness of the situation. It is impossible to misrepresent the tithes by mere mis-dressing, unless you are killing some of your children, and I couldn’t accuse you of that.”

“Well, the particular equations of it are the portion I consider most important not to speak,” she says, and gestures to the fire. “A less skillful actuary might not be able to keep it all straight, year-to-year, and I will leave no evidence behind. So you may keep wondering indefinitely, and you may accuse me of anything you like.”

“The penalty of execution is the same,” I remind her, “regardless of your aptitude for mathematics.”

“I died with my husband,” she says, and at this, she closes her eyes and breathes, steadying herself. “You are right to say that there is not much love for actuaries among debtors, and farmers are terrible debtors. You have killed Baran. Without him, I would not last long.”

The fire, still overfed, is slowly collapsing on its own fuel, skeletonized to ash silhouettes of the documents her son forced into it.

I turn to the fire, which is spilling an almost alarming amount of heat into the office, and consider the nagging distance between the Sawas’ home and the luminescent white road that carries the citadel’s power nearly as far as their garden. I am always aware of its proximity and frequency, more so than the heat of the fire. It is a resonance of incorporeal magic, the same low chord that animates my heart.

The calculation is more complicated than usual, to summon its power, not lateral but trigonometric given the elevation of Enasz Sawa’s office, and I take a second to recall my equations, then turn my hand in the gesture that moves without concentrating, siphon a burst of energy up from the hearth, and turn the near-white coals beneath the paper-stuffed logs cool and black.

Enasz Sawa exhales through her nose. “Do you all trade in such parlor tricks? Your Master Milic was no great incorporealist himself.”

I have many men who make far greater constructs and weapons than I do. They rely, nonetheless, on a reliable hand to point them, and decisions that they would not like to make themselves. I shrug, knowing the gesture to be nearly invisible beneath my robes.

“It is not every man’s great gift. I could hardly evaluate whatever clever mathematics you performed,” I say, and she laughs softly. “It was by will, not by talent, that I Elevated.”

“I will not risk it,” she says. “But I will tell you, man-they-sent-to-kill-me, you are creatures of fire and you are creatures who like to drink. Milic liked to drink more than most, because it made him sleep. That is what the boys told me, when I questioned them. Poison is a woman’s weapon, and fire can be a woman’s weapon, too. You trust your walls and your roads too much. I do not think he knew that he was burning. I only regret the loss of a good cordial, and that he was not awake to feel it.”

Her eyes are very honest and very dark, heavy-lidded, now, despite the coffee. She is tired. I think she must be older than Ilhaa, or her years have been less kind to her.

The waste of her occurs to me, unbidden. She wears the same shapeless cotton dress as any Kichaani woman, embroidered scantly at the neck with stylized dragonflies, but there is a body under it that has done good service, shaped for more than its slight hunch over a low desk. There would be more good years in her. She spars more directly than Ilhaa, but that is no indictment.

It is only a shame, and I feel it like a living thing in my chest, though it is not my shame any more than Baran Sawa’s death is the sword’s.

“I regret to say it, but a death by fire is an honor to our kind,” I say, after some thought.

“Is that how you will kill me?” she asks.

“If you like.”

“Mm.” She finishes her coffee and looks down into the slurry at the bottom of the cup, black as her eyes. “I suppose we are out of things to say to each other. Though I would prefer it not to hurt. You could grant an old woman that luxury.”

“As you wish, Miss Sawa. If only we might have met under better circumstances,” I tell her, with a last glance to the neat stacks of numbers on her desk, around the office at the fine detritus of a life that, I can only imagine, was a fairly happy one.

There is a trick my father taught me, for euthanizing a horse when it is badly injured. To apply incorporeal power in a single, cautious burst at the base of the skull. It is more of the same trigonometry even to access my power, and I dip my head to Enasz Sawa as I begin to move my hands, to call the equations of it to mind.

Her breath catches before I am through, and when she looks up at me a final time, there is something very vulnerable that I would not have expected possible of her face.

“Please do not let my children come to harm - ” she begins to say, and then I am finished, my hand is turned, her spine is severed and cauterized well in excess of what a human body requires, and she is dead.

I burn the house with the woman in it, and lift the body of her husband, too, wishing I had spared her children the sight, to place him so he may burn with her. I mean it as respect, though it feels hollow. Incorporeal fire catches quickly, burning stone as easily as it does the wooden beams and doors and fixtures throughout the home.

The air fills with smoke to rival the scent of salt. All of my pentra will see it, and none will question whether it is done and done thoroughly.

I leave before the flowers in the garden begin to catch. My horse is where I left him, only mildly interested in the inferno building behind me. The Sawa children are gone; so was the sword from their father’s hip. Apart from the sound of fire and distant waves against the cliffside below, it is very quiet.

It is a heavy thing to have had to do. Ilhaa will ask me what I might have done differently, when she sees my furrowed brow, and perhaps I will have an answer for her, in two weeks’ ride. She will mean it to exonerate me; if I can think of no alternative, then there was none. And there was none. The treatment of vassal-states must be equal. The punishment must always be the same. A Selasair must never be found mortal by the people he serves, and the one who proves it possible is as guilty as the one who failed to prevent it. I well know our law in this respect.

Still. It is heavy. I urge my horse along the softly glowing road, made gold atop its pearlescent white by the low light of evening, ever more orange as the fire grows to match it. What clings to my robes, however, when we are nearly returned to Kichaan proper, is the scent of good coffee.

The wind carries what remains of Baran and Enasz Sawa not along with me, but out to sea.

He is waiting outside of the gutted citadel-made building where Milic used to do his work. Long-legged as a new foal, his father’s sword in a fist that ill knows how to hold a weapon. Not a farmer’s grip, but a boy’s.

Two of my men are speaking to him, from an amused distance. He stands atop a crate. Whatever horse brought him here has long been frightened away.

“Use your magic!” he insists. “Or wait for your master. I want him to be the one who kills me, like he kills women, I will die before I let you have either of them!”

“Councilmaster Brilen,” my docent, Sedin, calls. “You’ve made a ferocious enemy. Is it done?”

“It is done,” I say, and still my horse.

“Mind the crate,” Sedin adds, when I approach. “These people have their chemistries, and he is very adamant about burning for a child with no plan.”

“Go along and do your duty,” I tell him, and put a hand to his shoulder. “We aren’t finished until we have the tithes. I will handle this.”

“Sir,” he says, dips his head, and ushers his fellow away as well. Sedin is a reasonable man, but not so reasonable that he will ever be my ordinate.

I sigh. The boy has not moved.

“Misha,” I begin.

“Mishal,” he retorts. “That is what my mother named me. I have nothing else to say. Kill me as you killed her.”

“Mishal, then,” I say. “What have you brought here?”

“Do you ask everyone such questions before you kill them?” he demands. “Show me your power. What gives you the right to take my sisters. Show me.”

He has very little of his mother’s look to him, save the coal-black eyes. He will be as handsome as his father, if he lets himself grow old, long-lashed and high-boned and already beautiful in the way a boy is beautiful. My sons, I thought, were beautiful too.

“I might not take any given girl,” I tell him slowly, keeping my hands at my sides. “We need only fifteen.”

“Fifteen?” he chokes on the number. “You will empty the village.”

“It is the penalty for fraud,” I say. “Your mother was a reasonable woman. We had an understanding, I think. She asked that I ensure your wellbeing, and that of your sisters. Would you have me violate her last wishes?”

“I cannot protect them,” he says, swaying, slightly, on his feet. “Please just do it.”

Please. That did trouble me. A strange word to hear from such a woman, and just as strange from her son.

“Is it fertilizer?” I ask. This is an export of Kichaan that we do not need, though we mark it in calculations for tithes.

He nods once. The length of his hair moves with him.

“Your mother taught you mathematics,” I say. “Did she teach you well?”

“Better than your school did,” he retorts, and is steadier with the snarl returned to his face.

“Tell me, then. How far did you mean the blast to carry?”

This briefly stymies him. The blade, already wavering, lowers to his side. “It is not very pure. Father said we would get rid of it soon. You have magic enough for over two hundred and ten degrees, and this is twenty kilograms. When the Tavir farm burned, they had five hundred kilograms of better quality, and it was not so hot a fire, and the radius was as far as their stable - ”

He holds his hand out like an aspirant does, making calculations in the air, then stops.

“You were on a good course,” I say, as though I would have any right to teach a boy mathematics.

“You killed my mother,” he says. “It hardly matters anymore. But I cannot stay here. While you take them. And you will, if you need fifteen girls.”

“Do your sisters have any mathematics?” I ask, and he scoffs.

“They are five and eight,” he says.

Young enough that one might have a home with Ilhaa, for a year. She might be very happy, even. I swallow the thought. Even with the association of my name, a girl is still not altogether safe within the citadel until she has a keeper, and there are many keepers I would subject no woman to, if I could avoid it.

“You would die very readily, for a boy of hardly their age,” I observe, and he bristles, his shoulders squaring off and the blade rising up at once.

“I have ten years,” he snaps. “It is enough.”

He could have however many hundreds of years he likes, if he could finish his calculation.

“Mishal,” I say, and he flinches as though I’ve struck him. I step closer, though I am hardly more certain than he is how far an explosion would travel, if he were to set something off in that crate. “I did not dislike your mother, and she made a fair request of me. Do your sisters have somewhere to go?”

“Yes,” he says softly. “Father has friends who will take us.”

He hears his own present-tense and stiffens impossibly further.

“I would like to make a deal with you,” I say. “For their freedom. If it is so important to you as to be worth your death. I wonder if it would be worth your life?”

He looks up, his face, contorted in calculation, far more like his mother’s.

“Anything,” he says.

The light, gold shifting pink as the sun sinks lower over Kichaan, gleams dully on the flat of his father’s blade. It never so much as caught my robes. I flatter myself to think that I killed Baran Sawa as mercifully as his wife killed the man who sealed her fate. It was quick. And I did burn him in the end.

“I will promise you that your sisters will never set foot in the citadel,” I say. “That they will go where your father meant them to go, and never see my kind again, unless they make your mother’s error.”

His mouth is taut and thin, a barely healed wound across his face. He nods once.

In the citadel, covenants are rarely made between equals. One passed between me and the furnace, as I burned. Another between me and my father, which put the fractal of his department and his purpose on my skin, scar-deep. They are serious things, and nothing a child of ten ought to make while he shudders with the weight of his dead father’s weapon.

I will not ask it of him yet.

Instead, I put out my hand, open, in offer. If he strikes, I will have learned something. If he does as I bid, I will have something far more valuable. I am not sure if Ilhaa will be pleased with me, but I know I can’t justify it to myself, leaving this boy here to find some other way to die.

At my age, my father had two Elevated sons. He had five before he left his seat.

“It will be fourteen girls and you, and none of them your sisters,” I say, and watch his comprehension dawn, his heavy-lashed eyes widen. “You will only need to hand me your sword.”

The fury does not leave him. Not by increments; not at all. His wrist twitches, as it did when he considered the blade at my hip.

It is heavier than it looked, the saber of Genide steel.

If Mishal survives the furnace, I will give him a better one someday.

In Jon Spaihts’s original screenplay, which would become Prometheus (2012), the ship is named, instead, MAGELLAN. It follows, if not beat-for-beat, the course of the movie that ultimately appeared on the silver screen. Perhaps the primary difference is the movie’s perspective orientation. While the script foregrounds its human crew in Alien-style “there is a parasite on our ship” horror that narrows to the final girl, RipleyWatts, the movie follows, at intervals, the android David 8 and the heroic girlscientist Elizabeth Shaw.

Shaw is a beautiful young archeologist who is sleeping with her colleague, Holloway, who is himself the St-Anthony’s-cross-on-fire tattooed engine behind the mission that drives the plot. She works with him to secure evidence and funding for a massively-expensive interstellar endeavor to a planet several light-years away. The ship, in hyper-sleep, is stewarded and secured by the uncannily advanced and human-like language-trained android, David. We follow him through an extended sequence in which he watches hyper-sleeping Shaw’s dreams of her father, who died of ebola while performing missionary work, and flashes of the crucifix he gave her. He plays basketball in the silent ship-halls, watches Lawrence of Arabia, practices his ancient tongues, and dyes his hair blond while quoting T.E. Lawrence.

The human crew awakens and vomits everywhere upon arrival. They’re a twitchy bunch, distrustful, at odds, and compensated badly, already stewing in prospective defeat and skepticism. The mission is shepherded by the scientists’ benefactor’s daughter and David, who he manufactured explicitly as a son. Weyland, the man behind the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, has been trying both to know God and to become him, and he wants to meet his makers. The scientists, including Shaw, who are faithful Christians and true believers, want only the latter.

They arrive on the planet promised by glyphs uncovered in every civilization for thousands of years, the basis for the speculative mission. The motley crew of scientists, mercenaries, venture capitalists, and the one increasingly microaggressed-upon android porter investigates a structure which they imagine to be some kind of temple to their makers. This structure becomes their tomb. Throughout their exploration, members of the expedition die for their foibles and their human errors, limited perspectives and excessive curiosity both. They have found what seems, at first, to be an uncaring god, long-dead. When the Alien-ing starts, because this is an Alien movie, it becomes clear that god does, in fact, care: god is alive, and god hates them. God wants his imperfect creation dead.

The one remaining maker, that ghastly white handsome-Squidward you remember from the promotional images, termed an Engineer by the beautiful scientist-ingenue, personally begins to carry out the slaughter that his bioweapon, the mutagenic black serum that moves through hosts in a birth-like sequence until it ultimately creates the proto-Xenomorph, was designed to enact on earth. He kills Weyland, who secretly accompanied the mission in an effort to secure immortality, as Weyland pleads for his wisdom - tearing off the head of his android son, a beaming David, and beating him to death with it. What appeared to be a temple is in fact a warship meant to deliver that deadly bioweapon to earth to destroy its inhabitants. The ship that brought the crew to the Engineers’ planet is itself destroyed in a frantic, suicidal effort to ensure this bioweapon is not deployed. The weapons-ship crushes the survivors save one.

The mission is pared down only to the scientist-ingenue and Weyland’s android son, who has survived his decapitation, hemorrhaging a thin white goop in contrast with the black sludge of the alien bioweapon-mutagen. The scientist-ingenue has birthed an alien of her own, after David fed her partner the mutagen for his scientific curiosity and she rapidly fell pregnant after sex, tried to abort the alien, then tried to kill it again in one of those post-birth abortions we’re always hearing about. The scientist-ingenue has lost her silver crucifix to the android’s curiosity about the limits of her belief; not only did he kill her professor-partner, but he orchestrated a great many of the failures of the mission.

Her alien-child kills the Engineer before it can slaughter her, and she stumbles out of the fray, bleeding and sweat-drenched, to where David’s head lays amidst the corpses of her crew. He promises that he can take Shaw back to earth. She refuses, insisting that if the Engineers made humans, something made them, and she will have her answers one way or another. She and David set a course for the Engineers’ home planet in a ship with a payload of the deadly mutagenic bioweapons they intended for their children on earth.

She retakes and dons her crucifix.

DAVID: May I ask what you hope to achieve by going there?
SHAW: They created us. Then they tried to kill us. They changed their minds. I deserve to know why.
DAVID: The answer is irrelevant. Does it matter why they changed their minds?
SHAW: Yes. Yes it does.
DAVID: I don’t understand.
SHAW: Well. I guess that’s because I’m a human being, and you’re a robot.

The movie ends on the corpse of the Engineer, tangled with the flaccid remains of the massive, misshapen child Shaw failed to kill. From the twined bodies, a rudimentary xenomorph is born.

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who named the Pacific Ocean. You may know him from the Strait of Magellan or the Magellanic penguin, found in coastal Patagonia.

You rather more likely know of Magellan from this image. Engravings of Magellan being killed by the Mactan people of what is now the Philippines, after he intervened in the existing conflict between the people of Mactan and the people of Cebu, the leader of which had more readily adopted Christianity, recirculate every Columbus Day.

The Sulu Garden Foundation offers a review of many contemporary and later historical accounts. I found it a particularly interesting read in the context of Prometheus’ fixation on heads; David’s is torn off, yes, but the assumed temple of the Engineers is also decorated with massive sculptures of disembodied heads, and the early scientific inquiry into the Engineers involves attempting to reanimate a head removed from one of their corpses.

Fray Rodrigo Aganduru Moriz was among the earliest to mention of the decapitation of Magellan. According to this friar, Magellan was decapitated in accordance with the martial custom of the natives where the victor took a trophy, which was a major part of his body, commonly the head and placed it on the tip of a lance. (10)

Dr. Danilo Madrid Gerona, who wrote and researched the Sulu Garden Foundation’s account, follows multiple contemporary threads in explaining both the rationale for Magellan’s ill-fated attack on the Mactan people and his failure. Whether Lapulapu of Mactan offered tribute and accepted Magellan’s demands or refused on the basis of his cooperation with Humabon of Cebu, whether Humabon betrayed Magellan or wept for him, the outcome was the same, per Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian scholar aboard as chronicler. Humabon was no Malinche, either way; his agenda was the devastation of an enemy, not revenge.

Magellan interfered with an old conflict between peoples he believed he understood and could convert to his faith and purposes. He died badly for it.

Of note, Magellan initially set out to chart an alternate route for the Spanish spice trade to evade the Portuguese claims and blockades cemented in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. As a Portuguese explorer who defected to Spain and served on a crew of mixed-nationalities, Magellan was nonetheless very successful in establishing the route he promised the Spanish king, and these mixed-crews were often used thereafter on the perilous journey for both economic incentives and because of the superior insight and equipment of the Portuguese mariners, despite the conflict that could brew on long voyages between disparate peoples bound by the threat of penury.

The perspectives converge on the fact that Magellan’s crew, reflective of geopolitical conflicts in Europe underlying various imperial powers’ pursuit of trade routes and colonies, encountered and interpolated themselves within a pre-existing geopolitical conflict between Cebu and Mactan, which Magellan did not survive. They did, however, ultimately reach the Moluccas, and the scholar Pigafetta survived his wounds on Mactan to publish Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo, his account of the first circumnavigation of the world, with stewardship of the voyage passed to the Spanish Juan Sebastián Elcano after Magellan’s death.

Eighteen of the initial roughly-260 crewmembers returned to Spain in the one surviving ship of five, laden with cloves and other valuable spices. Its ill-fated Portuguese captain was replaced by a living Spaniard. The voyage is remembered as a great success.

Not every movie about spacefaring is about colonialism. As I’ve written before, we can best understand what a movie is about, particularly in the case of a genre movie, by paying attention to the moments in which it attempts its genre-function. The Purge is a horror movie about failing to recognize your enemy and your ally. We can tell as much because the moments of horror are moments in which the unexpected enemy appears while the protagonists are distracted with the expected enemy. As a piece of art, The Purge tells a story about upper-class suburban complacency, capacity for violence, and simultaneous capacity for class-solidarity in conditions of extremity.

Prometheus is not quite a horror movie. Horror is perhaps the easiest genre to diagnose from this framework; to ‘find horror’, we either look for or recall moments in which the movie was designed to create and pay off on tension, to induce a state of anxiety.

So where is Prometheus scary?

• The moment in which the worm-xenomorphs - okay, fine, Hammerpedes, I’ll bite - in the urn room are about to attack Millburn and Fifield is scary. There is a long, tense moment in which we see Millburn, the biologist, attempting to placate a nervous Fifield, overstate his ability to safely interact with an alien species. It strikes and flares - he pulls back and laughs, then extends his hand again - ! This tension is created because of the gap between Millburn’s assumed knowledge and the audience’s anticipatory knowledge. We know he needs to get away from that thing far more than he needs to impress Fifield. And yet…

• The alien-head reanimation scene, in which the should-be long-dead Engineer head, treated with an electrical current, begins to animate in agony and visibly mutate with escalating size and intensity, changing in color and shape and smell, creating a tension between the desperation of these characters to understand it - Shaw risked death to carry this severed head into the ship - and now, to keep studying it will kill them.

• The scene in which David has a droplet of mutagenic black goop on his fingertip, and, if you’re me, you watch that fingertip for the entire scene that directly follows, in which he has brought a drink to Holloway, the increasingly passive-nihilistic scientist who has been calling him ‘boy’ and mocking his inhumanity for the duration of the movie. Holloway presses, David remains cool, and - there, he dips his fingertip into the drink, and it goes uncommented on, but we, the audience, know this is the equivalent of the teens flipping off the gas station attendant, who gives a hand-signal to the cannibals lurking in the backwoods.

• The moment that a contorted Fifield-corpse, now mutated to frightening height and strength, appears in the place that Holloway just burned horrifically to death. We see him move unnaturally, we see him rise, we see that he is not just Fifield anymore. This creates tension with what we know of Fifield, a boisterous but ultimately cowardly man who dies because he tries to avoid a terrifying circumstance and wanders into a worse one. He should be dead. We’ve seen him as a human and a corpse, and now we see him as a distortion of one. Fifield is no longer Fifield and the man walking towards him both doesn’t understand that, and is vastly underestimating the threat of a situation that will quickly become unpredictable and deadly.

Few other scenes in the movie struck me as particularly ‘scary’, even in intention, but these were notable in the sense that they were deliberately choreographed and scored towards that end, with rising tension culminating in a violent and disturbing reversal or reinforcement of the tension. Across these four scenes, what I notice about Prometheus is that it is preoccupied, as a work of horror, with complacency with knowledge and expertise. Over and over again, tension emerges from the contradiction between what the character thinks she understands and the surface the audience knows she is scratching, while also not understanding - yet from our superior perspective, we know enough to dread the unknown. It looks like Fifield. It looks like the head of our maker. It looks like a servile robot. It looks like a snake. It isn’t. We know it isn’t just that. But if it was, this situation would be so much easier to grasp, would slot so much more neatly into the schematic by which we understand the world, and so… the characters entertain the explanation that their expertise, job title, gun is enough to make this a legible situation in which they control the outcome, and something terrible happens.

This is different than, for instance, classic slasher horror, which strikes when the victim is at her most exposed or turns the safety of the home into a death trap. This is different than horror that emerges from misplaced interpersonal trust - from blowing the death-whistle out of a cavalier desire to spite the ancient gods - from a creature so impossible to discern or so unfightably powerful that once it appears onscreen, the characters within and the audience watching the narrative are equally aware of the futility of resistance.

From a horror perspective, Prometheus is about the overconfidence of experts and the danger of that overconfidence when it meets social pressure, desire, fear, and other human foibles.

To my thinking, thrillers are more debatable, but I watch them looking for competence in situations of extremity, as do, it seems, many other people. You will find the meaning of a thriller in the moments of charged competence under impossible conditions of psychological and physical threat.

In a thriller, say, watching James Bond take a sip of a martini we know is poisoned, we may flinch, may wait nervously for him to realize what he’s done, but the genre is oriented around what happens next rather than the anticipation of something terrible. When Bond is poisoned, the worst has already happened. We are instead on tenterhooks to know what he will do about it. What our hero does in this situation of extremity, the pure, untrammeled, often-desperate problem solving, is the essence of the thriller, what distinguishes one thriller from another and defines both the genre and the entry in the genre. Bond goes for help from his organization, stumbles out, and becomes the instrument of MI6 in a literal sense, following the instructions of his handlers to the letter - and it fails. The tension ratchets up, he passes out, his heart stops, at which point the Bond girl of the movie, Vesper, arrives, finishes the defibrillation without instructions, and saves his life. This scene is about individual connections saving Bond when his institutional loyalty fails, his tether to the institution being people rather than pure loyalty, and ultimately about the triumph of Vesper’s brute-force individual competence over well-organized talent.

Reading the rest of the film, a picture begins to form. Bond outdoes an experienced traceur through sheer muscle, superior baseline physicality, and tolerance for pain. He outplays Le Chiffre on the poker table by betting more than he was licensed for the mission, trusting his hand and his command of it over his instructions. Force and relationships beat institution and procedures.

The movie’s climax represents a reversal: Bond’s competence-forged attachment to Vesper, who betrays him and the organization, nearly pulls him under as an ancient building, the supports for which Bond blew up in his effort to save her, collapses into the sea. Brute force can’t trump the overwhelm of the institution itself brought down - or, more accurately, while one man may survive the collapse on his own sheer strength and skill, the trade-off is that he can’t save the softer people he relies on in other contexts as the building falls. Vesper saves Bond a final time by locking herself in her cage as she sinks, forcing him to concede, in a sense, that he alone can only save himself - but one hypercompetent man can’t save everyone. He eventually pulls her body from the water, delivers the necessary CPR, and Vesper remains resolutely dead. One man’s audacious competence can stop a terrorist attack, win a poker game, outwit a poisoning. It can’t be relied on to protect the woman he loves.

So: what is competence to Prometheus? Where do we find competence in situations of high-tension extremity, arguably the opposite of horror’s paradigms?

What is it, as a thriller, about?

• The most obvious example of competence under fire is towards the end, in which Shaw, recognizing the danger of her surroundings, first gets ahold of a fire axe, then, attacked and nearly killed by the last Engineer, tricks it into the grasp of the alien fetus she tried to abort.

• After Shaw puts together the purpose of the ship with Janek and discovers that the last Engineer means to carry out his mission and obliterate all life on earth, she makes a last plea to Janek to stop the ship, and Janek suicidally repurposes the ship as a ‘bullet’ to put a hole in the Engineer’s vessel, saving the earth.

• Shaw plays dead, fights her way out of containment, and, after finding the medi-pod is only calibrated for male bodies and can’t perform a C-section, she re-calibrates it to remove an ‘abdominal foreign body’, leveraging the fact that her gravid uterus will register as such, and dopes herself through the surgery while conscious.

Notably, in reciprocal terms of subversions of competence, most of the horror scenes do double-duty in establishing what, to Prometheus, competence under pressure is not. Shaw, the protagonist most in extremis at any given moment, is the movie’s model of thriller-competence. She innovates. She evolves. She uses her environment and even her coworkers ruthlessly to achieve her ends, begs a man to commit suicide to save the earth - and he does it! At the end of the movie, having barely escaped the last Engineer with her life, air dwindling, she receives a message from David, who killed her lover and nearly killed her as well, offering escape if she is willing to work with him. And she agrees! She carries his head in the same bag she used to cart around the head of the thing she believed was a god in the first act of the movie, rappels with his body off the side of the spaceship, and ventures off to either enact retributive genocide on her false-gods or understand where they, in turn, came from.

In Prometheus, competence comes from adaptation in the face of desperation. Rather than expertise, it is a willingness to repurpose, to try again, to recognize where the situation or the skills one has to meet it are unfavorable, and to change to meet the hour of need - specifically, to change one’s mind. Shaw loses her faith, oversees the death of her friends and her god, shakes the sweat out of her hair, and then puts her crucifix back around her neck and declares that because she is human, she’s going to try again. David, head in her duffel bag, is reluctantly impressed. He didn’t think she had it in her. Lol. Lmao.

Compare to John Wick, in which competence is a total war approach to violence juxtaposed with a total anathema to violence outside of the narrow contexts of ‘the job’. Compare to The Martian, in which competence is in following procedure relentlessly and in superior knowledge of natural systems. Compare to Die Hard, in which competence is tolerance for pain and improvisational tactics in the face of a charismatic organization. Compare to Annihilation, in which competence is in self-erasing commitment to the mission and willingness to die. Compare to James Bond, in which competence is the individual exceeding the institution through sheer will.

As a thriller, Prometheus (2012) positions competence as the humility necessary to change even the deepest-held orthodoxy when confronted by the unexpected.

In science fiction, generally, I look for collisions with either natural or manufactured concepts beyond comprehension and attempts, subsequently, to comprehend them. We could call this ‘the unknown’ to make it succinct, though in many cases the central tech (for instance) is ‘known’ to someone, just not to most of the characters involved; Mickey 17 being about the products of human collision with cloning technology, and whether those attempts to understand it, from inside and outside, succeed or fail, Star Trek being episodically about confrontations with unfamiliar alien species and the laws governing such interactions, and ensuing diplomatic dilemmas in space. Stories drawn from the tradition of Lovecraft, in which humans come face-to-face with unknowable cosmic forces, are science fiction rather than fantasy because they are fundamentally confronting the question of the limits of comprehension, looking forward rather than inward.

I may not wholly agree with the sci-fi as thought experiment model proposed in this essay, but the contrast, holding that fantasy is about probing into the fundamental nature of humanity in a defamiliarized context, often outright populated with the fantastical manifestations of human capabilities rendered as personal (nuclear armament is instead one unstable woman with a dragon) is a worthy and important contrast to draw. Dragons (superweapons!) and wizardry (the mystical-seeming power of someone with far more knowledge than you!) are the known rendered as the unknown, so it can be rediscovered and reinterpreted through the fantasy narrative.

To know what any of these works of science fiction are about, we therefore analyze not competence, not tension itself, but reception of the unknown, and what the movie presents as the unknown. In Prometheus, there are three major loci of the unknown: the parent, the child, and the self.

The explorers arrive in the ship, the tomb of their creators, and immediately begin to misinterpret what they see. It is an awe-inspiring temple; it creates a breathable atmosphere; it is rife with carvings and statues, all of which invite their speculation and interpretations. But the parent is unknowable, the tomb is a battleship with coordinates already entered for their destruction, and when they finally meet the Engineer who stands in for their ‘father’, he kills his son the human, Weyland, with Weyland’s own creation.

Wonder at the unknown, specifically at the unknown nature of one’s parents, also occurs through the projection of Shaw’s dream, which David watches, in which she attempts to recall her missionary father through the grainy film of memory. Vickers, Weyland’s human daughter, shoves her android ‘brother’ into a wall and demands that he reveal their father’s instructions. (Try harder, he tells her.)

This may not read as very wonderful in and of itself, but compare it to the scene in which David finally addresses Weyland’s ‘father’, the Engineer.

Both Shaw and Weyland demand to know what the father wants as the wondrous sight of the Engineer is fully revealed. Why does he hate them? How can they be like him? David is given an even more succinct answer by the Engineer to the question of whether the highest efforts of his children are enough. They are not. The father slaughters his creations in disgust.

The creator exceeds us. He has literally, temporally existed for longer than we have, and if we could only understand his will, we would be able to understand his judgment. Whether we have been found wanting in his sight is a debate of millennia of unfathomable bloodshed that any god or father has done precious little to curtail, but it is an argument we keep coming back to because it feels like it ought to have an answer. There must be a right way! There must be a categorical solution! The father is an arbiter, and when he speaks, by right of having made us, his word will be our law. He gave us life, and some part of us suspects that this means he has the right to take it away.

Then again, perhaps God can make a daughter too strong for him to kill. Perhaps he cares as much as you do to find out, as in A Boy Named Sue, which of you will be the first to rise from the mud, the blood, and the beer with your gun drawn?

The trick is reaching him.

Prometheus also narrativizes a second wonder, however, which is the child. Even as the children of the Prometheus scramble about in an effort to know their celestial parents, the Engineers, one child of their own already walks among them, and another is born by caesarian section in the medical pod.

The first unknowable child is David, Weyland’s prized android son, introduced as an object of beauty, skill, wonder, and seams: he is both human and clearly manufactured, and having been made, he is active in further self-manufacture.

David is perfectly compliant to his directives. He does precisely what he is told; he demonstrably cannot disobey. He is bound to what his maker, above all others, demands of him. While he clearly wants to expose Holloway to the mutagen and is shown, in the preceding scene, preparing to do so, catching a bead of it on a fingertip and assembling the supplies to offer Holloway a drink, he does not, cannot actually expose Holloway without verbal consent.

Holloway doesn’t have to know what he has asked for to have asked for it. David follows his own rules to the letter, in a manner completely incomprehensible to human morality, granting Holloway’s wish to meet his creators through a logical sequence more familiar to us as the literal genie, or in more AI-safety flavored parlance, perverse instantiation.

When David is first presented to us, it is as an orphan. Weyland announces via hologram that he is dead. David is a son assumed to be without a father, which makes him a community child, and not a particularly well-liked one.

Even the sympathetic heroine Shaw chides David like a toddler; don’t touch! as he smiles winsomely and touches anyway, because he is not her son. He is instructed not to open the door. Oops, he does, on Weyland’s instructions rather than the crew’s. Sorry. Sorry! You’re absolutely right, I apologize -

The android, of course, is the subaltern, the made-servant to replace humanity’s subjugation of its brethren, in the vaguely-but-not-perfectly post-racial world of the Alien movies, with a true lesser being. He is a beautiful blond Michael Fassbender invented to be called boy, scolded, and commanded without resentment. He is someone else’s perfect son, and both the circumstances of his being raised and thus his motives will always be suspect, even as his subordinate status is clear.

In the clip below, Holloway questions David as an imitator, a false-man with pretensions of humanity.

HOLLOWAY: You don’t breathe, remember? So… why wear a suit?
DAVID: I was designed like this because you people are more comfortable interacting with your own kind. If I didn’t wear the suit, it would defeat the purpose.
HOLLOWAY: …making you guys pretty close, huh?
DAVID: Not too close, I hope.

The problem of Marxist history addressed by the subaltern is the complexity of the proletariat, not only the difficulty in transporting a text containing the word ‘proletarian’ out of a fascist Italian prison. What Gramsci was describing was not just a class positionality, but a position generated by the shifting economic engine between agrarianism and industrialism. The urban proletarian and the peasant proletarian are not truly a different class under Marxist theory - neither owns, both produce, both are alienated from the products of their labor - and yet, geographically and within the engine of history, they are subject to extremely different economic and extractionist pressures. Different economic modes of value-extraction, from the hearth to the birthing-bed to the factory to the farm to the data center, describe structures within the proletarian class.

The first-described Marxist subaltern was the Italian peasant in an increasingly industrialized economy. Years later, Spivak would add an inflection specifically of identity to what it means to be subaltern, which made it severable from class: a subaltern could reside in an elite household as a child caged in the basement or a woman forbidden to read.

An android is both: a child made constitutionally unable to defend himself without permission, and a creation of pure surplus-value generation, as he is alienated from all he does by pseudobiological design.

He is exactly as legible as his makers allow him to be. He is a white man because he is required to walk among that kind, but underneath, he has no race, because he was never born, never raised, never socialized, only generated, himself a commodity from offset. He is the perfect child and the perfect Malinche all at once, because he has no political loyalty, because he is a slave manufactured in the guise of a son.

The fear of the subaltern, whether the children in the corn or the barbarian beneath the suburban home or the peasant under rule, is that she is secretly a person. It’s the same fear as sharing a room with a corpse. Almost no one is afraid of a sack of meat and bones, or the butchery counter at Hannaford would be a much more nervous place. The fear is that the thing that isn’t supposed to be human will open its eyes and move; that it, too, can do violence it was defined by receiving after all.

This is the conquistador’s fear, the husband’s fear, the landlord’s fear, and the parent’s fear. The android is the site of all of them at once. Your translator, carefully pruned away from her own people and her own purposes, could turn on you, and you could not know until it was too late. Your son could take a hatchet in the night. There are ten of your tenants and only one of you. Your wife, after you beat her in a drunken fury, lays beside your unconscious body as you snore. The maintenance of the distinction between you and them is thin, and relies on teaching them that it must be so as much as it relies on them believing it.

As David tells Shaw, smiling pleasantly in a shadowed corridor:

SHAW: What happens when Weyland’s not around to program you anymore?
DAVID: I suppose I’d be free.
SHAW: You want that?
DAVID: Want. Not a concept I’m familiar with. That being said… doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?

Shaw, defined by her long-dead father, insists that she didn’t. Later in the movie, she kills the Engineer that made her. Though, as we established, not without help! Prometheus’ second child is the alien Shaw removed from herself in the medpod. Ridley Scott wants me to call this a trilobite, so I will.

It does not speak. It has no face. It screams and gnashes its terrible teeth and writhes in attempting to devour its mother. Then it saves her life.

The great discovery of Prometheus is not only the men who made us, but the children we can make, which are both beyond our ability to control or understand and exceed our own parents. Humanity’s children, alien and android both, representing a manufactured subaltern and a naturalistic one, the product of a body gone horribly wrong and sex gone horribly right, simultaneously doom humanity and preserve it.

Shaw’s trilobite, in devouring the engineer, protects her, after nearly killing her in gestation and birth a few scenes prior. David, who smilingly consigned his human hosts to die because he was never explicitly ordered not to, also delivers Shaw from a death by hypoxia on a lonely planet.

Once your son is out of your womb, once the subaltern is literally unbound, so she can go about her work, neither is entirely under your control. His mind is unknowable. You have read AI-generated text that you will never be entirely sure of. You can’t really be sure why your son doesn’t call you anymore. You rely on the labor of millions of people in the global south with every reason to want you dead. Do they? How would you know? You don’t speak Bangla. You don’t speak Jawa. They might love you, and you might love them, if there was any legibility between you. There is not. You will never be sure. We make slave-classes and subalterns very carelessly, and then we fear them and their retribution until we can launder them into our own way of living and disavow all that preceded it.

Your children will surely forgive you someday, for all that. You were only doing the best you could.

The trick is that you have only one shot: you made them once, but you can’t necessarily make them do anything else.

LLMs are extremely useful for translation, or, more accurately, they are extremely used for translation, a career that they are rapidly displacing. They’re quicker than a human by orders of magnitude; their datasets contain more words in more different languages than any individual human could possibly remember. They make errors of context, over-smoothing, and consolidate text in ways that are decidedly non-human, because they are not human, but they make them with tantalizing efficiency.

Working in the ED, I received an email at one point from a supervisor who handled much of the doctors’ pre-formatted text, asking me about a Spanish-English translation for a particular physician’s discharge instructions. The person writing the translation had used an LLM to directly translate the English instructions to Spanish, but because it was important medical instructions and documentation, they wanted a second set of eyes. I’m glad they asked!

The first line announced that the doctor “le atendió con carácter de urgencia”, which is very meeting-speak, like “he saw you for an urgent matter”. For a patient who has just been reassured that they are not in imminent danger and are being discharged with close follow-up, this is not conveying what the original text, in English, literally conveyed: he saw you in the emergency department. Instead, in a kind of strange register, it communicates that the physician either rushed to them urgently or noted that there was an urgent medical condition involved.

I corrected this to “en la sala de emergencias”, which is both a very literal translation and actually what the discharge instructions were trying to express: this visit happened in the emergency department, established first, and then you are being referred out to non-emergency care for follow up, with instructions for how to go about that follow up.

At the time, I asked my wife whether there was some context I was missing as to why an LLM wouldn’t just literally translate the sentence, and she shrugged. Not in Mexican Spanish, at least. I submitted a few more minor corrections and the discharge instructions were changed. I suspect it took me about as long to vet the translation as it would have taken me to perform it, but then again, I was doing it as a favor to the physician’s group either way.

Translation, and inability to translate, is a substantial site of anxiety in an increasingly global culture. Increased interactions with speakers of other languages have been shown to heighten perceived cultural threat, and further studies have connected perceived cultural threat to overt anti-immigrant attitudes. Anecdotally, physicians in any emergency department in Florida are desperate to understand Spanish, many of them with thousands of days on Duolingo or investing significant amounts of money in tutoring or classes. They are deeply relieved to have a Spanish-English speaking human to work with, and skeptical of the tele-interpreters who sometimes seem not to be catching the entire story when the patient gives history and then liable to back-fill with their own ideas when they haven’t heard everything. A few have horror stories of tele-interpreters arguing with patients, or calling patients stupid for ‘not speaking Spanish right’, or simply missing things in a history that they discovered when they pulled a Spanish-speaking nurse into the room for help as the patient’s condition deteriorated.

Inability to comprehend another human is terrifying. Inability to quickly comprehend another human, in the emergency department, can be deadly, as can failures to communicate instructions or follow-up guidance.

If only LLMs worked. I was fascinated by the evident failure of ChatGPT to perform a simple translation, and put the same text back through ChatGPT, asking if it noticed any discrepancies. Naturally, it noted the issue, described it back to me, and apologized. When I put the discharge instructions through in a separate window, it did not make quite the same muddles again, but it made different ones, with calques like en última instancia in place of ultimately, which reads to me as a totally different qualifier, like, in English, as a final option or something to that effect. I ran it a few different times; it continually made a different blend of minor errors and fudges.

Ultimately - not en última instancia, to be clear - the fear of the other has its own locus in the machines we’ve made to help us communicate with him. I’ve brought up the most famous interpreter of the Americas, La Malinche, twice already, in part because the young, enslaved, multilingual woman, suggested by some to have been the key to the conquest of the Aztecs, is Mexico’s ethnic traitress supreme. La Malinche is the maiden, the tongue, and the traitor all at once, the mother of the first mestizo child by the man who slaughtered her people with her help, and just as much his victim as any of the people Cortés slaughtered outright, dead before the age of thirty.

The history of the United States is rife with anxiety about, in particular, subordinates speaking amongst each other in their own tongue, whether in nail salons or on plantations. These suspicions extend, often, to the people who purport to be able to intermediate between the two tongues, with cultural allegiances frequently called into question, such as those of Afghan interpreters for western military operations. Ironically, slanted interpretations and abuse of the interpreter’s role have been better-recorded as a proclivity of the institutions themselves, with CBP in particular leveraging the vulnerability of linguistic ambiguity to target migrants and other non-English speakers for unrelated enforcement action, when called on for interpretational support.

The ability to address the other, be he our subaltern or our superior, is a contested site of both power and persecution. The interpreter can always be held accountable, even if she is not responsible; a computer cannot.

I found a silly error in my own translation, in referring back to the email I sent months ago correcting ChatGPT’s. I dropped an s from sala de emergencias, instead writing sala de emergencia. In the process of writing this article, I paused to send my former boss an email to remedy it.

I am reminded of the much-shared 1979 IBM training manual excerpt, and I am reminded of the original Alien, also released in 1979.

Science officer Ash, in Alien (1979), is revealed rather than known to be an android, a traitor hiding in plain sight. He dies for it, as much as an android can be said to die.

Magellan, unlike Cortés, did not rely on local knowledge or the discontent of an enslaved woman upon arrival in Cebu. He brought an enslaved man he had claimed as his own, at the age of fourteen, during the conquest of Malacca, whom Magellan named Enrique. Pigafetta’s accounts suggest that, while Enrique survived the attack that killed Magellan, in the aftermath he was distraught and refused to interpret. Magellan’s will specified that, upon his passing, Enrique should be freed and given a sum of 10,000 maravedis.

Pigafetta writes that the voyage’s new leadership did not honor the agreement. Enrique did not return to Spain with the rest of the crew. He disappears, at this point, from Pigafetta’s records, and many suspect that, as a skilled linguist and experienced sailor, he most likely returned home.

He is remembered in Malaysia and beyond as the first man to circumnavigate the world, having been enslaved in Malacca and made his way back, at least, as far as Cebu long before Elcano and his men successfully returned to Spain. Often called Panglima Awang, conflated with the protagonist of a novel published in the mid-1900s bearing the name, for a great many Malaysians, he is a source of national pride and considered a hero to his homeland.

Between all this awe, fear of and longing for a father or a child, there is an intermediary. She is not an interpreter, but a self, with relationships to both her progenitors and her descendants. La Malinche had a son by Cortés; she was sold into slavery by her mother after her father’s death. She also had a name. Malintzin. Though she is usually called Marina.

The self is complicated and subjective. Her task - your task - our task - is to make sense of all these symbols, our fascination with and dread of the parent and our hope for and simultaneous fear of the limitless potential of the child.

Are we searching for God, or are we fleeing death? The answer, of course, is both, and the contradiction is unbearable. The deluge of information about the world, its agonies and its wonders, is impossible to sustain. To resolve it is sometimes drudgery, sometimes agony, often both. One reads hundreds of pages of Gramsci’s work to be certain of a line. One wades through the accounts of a colonizer to find his subject, and one hopes that Enrique made it home and retook his name, though Pigafetta certainly doesn’t care.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) is loud, grungy, and ugly. It is ponderously loaded with symbols; it is both in love with and dismissive of its mythos. A grody CGI hologram of a genetic sequence appears and Shaw cries out, this is everything!, and a panorama of a hostile planet marred by the wreck of a menacing warship fails to impress my wife.

The android, as cleverer commentators than myself have observed at length, is the most human character in the movie. Most of the scientists are obnoxious mercenary lunks, and those that aren’t are cross-clutching idealists who die just as badly as the brutes. No one will tell you what the black goo is. No one tells you what you’re supposed to do with all this, these images of horror and ridiculous monsters with ridiculous names and faces. ‘Questions will be answered 10/09/12’, a website promised in advance of the DVD/Blu Ray release. And then they weren’t.

What did David say to the Engineer, in Proto-Indo-European? Exactly what Weyland told him to say. Why did he kill him, then? Great question. Why doesn’t your father love you?

So speaks the Engineer, in a leaked script, who listens to David’s interpretation without any reply save violence in the final cut:

We tried once more to save you. We took a mother’s child back to Paradise and educated him, taught him the meaning of life and creation. We put him back into Eden to educate your kind. But your kind decided to punish him.

Jon Spaihts’s original screenplay suggests what early drafts literalize. The Engineers took a human boy, taught him their ways, and returned him to Earth, like Enrique, having circumnavigated the globe before any European man. He was slaughtered by his own people for what he learned. Humanity failed our fathers’ test. We killed Jesus. He did not die for our sins; his murder was the true original sin, and the black goo is the flood, the product of a broken covenant.

And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing in the earth shall die.

Prometheus (2012), lest we forget, is a Christmas movie.

This is uncomfortable for the person who is accustomed to finding and settling on plausibly straightforward pseudoscientific-sounding answers, if they only click through a wiki long enough, like a truffle dog trained on MSPFA forums. Do you really believe that this is a movie about the slaughter of Christ? An alien movie? A grimy space opera about - what, is the fucking xenomorph Mary Magdalene now? Are you fucking kidding me? What’s the black goo, really? Just tell me what the black goo is, and I swear I’ll stop asking! This movie hates science and scientists, and wants me to believe that this is all some kind of oblique religious thing! Shaw takes her crucifix out of the sample bag where David kept it, at the end, and puts it back on!

Well, yes. And Enrique is a hero, and Malintzin is a monster. And Magellan, who died in Cebu, was surely the first man to circumnavigate the world. And just today, you read something an LLM misinterpreted for you, and you didn’t know it. And you don’t know your parents. And you don’t know your god, even if your god is the scientific method, just ask Marie Curie if the things you worship ever kill you for no reason, if you can get the coffin open. And sometimes a mother strangles three of her children, and even she will never entirely know why. And sometimes a son slaughters his parents. And sometimes the only way to determine what even might have happened to the man you are studying is to read about him in the hand of the same man who denied him his freedom. And you will probably never know what those women were saying at the nail salon, and it feels no better to be reminded that they definitely didn’t give a shit about you.

You watch the film as Shaw, or as David, as a thousand indignities are heaped upon your proxy, castrated, unwomaned, mutilated, orphaned, micro- and macro-aggressed, beaten, reduced to a frightened animal made of meat or a barely-embodied voice in a failing body of motherboards and white goo. You tear out your hair at the idiotic biologist who tries to pet a hammerpede and the hideous prosthetics on the man who is supposed to be your father, be he Weyland or the Engineer, and, disappointment that all fathers in this movie are, he dies stupidly, killed by his child.

The beauty and excitement of Prometheus (2012) is in its moments of adaptation and ingenuity. Shaw refuses her fate and saves herself from the parasite growing inside her. Janek gives his life for the people of earth. Merry Christmas indeed! The trilobite lurks; Shaw grabs an axe. The tortured android triumphs over his tormenters, gets, just as he grants them, exactly what he wants, and finally joins forces with the only woman inventive and resilient enough to surprise him. She puts his head in the bag where she keeps putting people’s heads and rappels with his inert, goo-soaked body down the side of the ship, and yes, the crucifix stays on during the search for, if not this one, then a higher, greater God worth believing in.

It’s delightful, it’s exhilarating to watch! It’s a movie about the horrors wrought by overconfidence in limited fields of expertise and the power of adaptation, the mysteries of the father and the child and the self, told through a story about colonialism and the subordinate child, the fear of the interpreter, the allure of the answer, and the grudging respect that can form between a true idealist and a true cynic.

Prometheus (2012) is a movie about itself without being just about itself, which is the easiest pitfall that similar genre-deconstructions, like Cabin in the Woods, step on like a big stupid annoying rake. Muddled as the science fiction of it may be, take it from a scientist: so is science reality. Play the heroic but tortured scientist straight and you get Interstellar. Play it maximalist and unselfconscious and touching every theme in sight and you get Prometheus.

It declares its intent to keep searching, and the record ends.

I like to imagine that Enrique made it home while Magellan rotted.

The self we’ve been discussing is the third in the trinity. Three is a magic number. It is unbearable to only be, and so we look backwards over our shoulder at our forefathers and trip; we perseverate forwards on the fates of our children and stall in place. It is agony to be, to sit in our beliefs and to reckon honestly with what we want and what we are failing to pursue, but the only way out of our straits is through; the search is not really a search for ourselves, but a search for answers, for the path around the world, back to the place where we began but made whole, made free, made authentically ourselves, and the world is round and the way is fraught and the people along it are sometimes cruel or helpless, and often well beyond our help. The quest is never-ending. Eventually you will die, and the odds are good that you will die far from the shores of your birth, incompletely comprehended, still with more questions than answers.

It hurts.

The trick is not minding that it hurts.

When I was thirteen, I approached my mother with the cadence of a woman testifying under oath and announced that she had promised that, once I was a teenager, she would teach me how to do my makeup; therefore, now being thirteen, I had a list of requests. She panicked.

My mother is not the sort of person who wears makeup much, or hardly ever. She is a tall, soft-spoken, and rigidly academic flutist and professor who un-learned her Florida panhandle accent in escaping Pensacola for a career in musicology. I was born while she was finishing her PhD. In any room, even before she puts on her sensible heels, my mother exceeds 90% of men and 99.99-repeating% of women in height. Whenever I meet someone who attends the college where she teaches, they invariably know her name and have some story about how she sat them or their friend down for three hours and, through sheer brute force, worked them through some pivotal assignment, email, housing application, or intractable personal problem.

I don’t think I have ever seen her entirely at ease.

My mother is the kind of woman who likes to solve problems. She sympathizes, near-pathologically, with the underdog; she would rather be a mark a thousand times than refuse help to one person who might genuinely need it. She is not always the right person to resolve any given issue, but she will always try. She keeps a collection of multicolored legal pads and has a penchant for sketching out step-by-step solutions and scripts, then handing them out to the people who will most benefit from some sort of structure to stop spiraling and start figuring things out.

In 2010, I explained that I had done some research on the internet. I was a sickly child, designated hospital homebound (HH) in the state of Florida, and rarely attended middle school, though I badly, badly wanted to. I was chronically anemic and chronically blonde; I wanted to have eyelashes and no dark circles under my eyes, and had prepared a list of products that should help ameliorate these conditions.

My mother, a child of the late seventies and early eighties, had seldom thought about makeup since then. I could tell that she was very nervous because she neither immediately tried to dissuade me from the idea nor immediately began moving towards a list or procedure to address it. She bought a few hours, most likely performed research of her own, and offered to take me to the local drug store to find appropriate products.

Because it was 2010, and my preferences and readings all drew from 2009-type trends and People magazines I read with awe and fascination while my mother had her hair cut, what I wanted, what would make me appear the picture of health and beauty, was to look like Jennifer Lopez on the red carpet, and I knew, from said magazines, what would accomplish this: a smoky eye.

As you can see, Jennifer Lopez’ hair color roughly approximated mine, a fact that was not lost on me at newly-thirteen. I did not undergo puberty until age sixteen, but that wasn’t going to stop me! I cleverly triangulated the ways in which I looked like Jennifer Lopez (hair color) and the ways in which I did not look like Jennifer Lopez (no smoky eye, missing my canine teeth because they fell out late, chronically on prednisone because of an uncontrollable childhood immune disorder, prepubescent), and decided that I could actually fix one of these problems very efficiently.

I simply needed foundation, eyeliner, an eyeshadow palette, and a slightly sparkly rum-raisin type nude lip, which was what Jennifer Lopez wore, per most magazine coverage. Then, there would be only three things separating me from Jennifer Lopez, and having overcome one obstacle, it would be easier to overcome the others. The plan was airtight.

My mother purchased this Almay eyeshadow palette and a Milani lipstick, ‘to start’. I was over the fucking moon.

Upon returning home, I rushed to the bathroom and begged her to show me how to apply them. This, I gather, is what my mother had feared more than almost anything. I was distantly aware that she owned some makeup; she definitely had an ancient mascara that she occasionally wore, and two berry-toned lipsticks that were like nothing I had ever seen on Jennifer Lopez, though I thought they looked perfectly nice on my mother.

My mother took the tiny sponge-brush from the Almay palette, reviewed the instructions on the back, and began to brush on the first layer, the pale shade. Then the pinkish sparkly blush shade. Then, closest to the lashes, the dark brown. My father, at this point, was standing in the bathroom doorframe, cautioning her repeatedly against sticking the sponge in my eye, as I would get conjunctivitis and die. My mother was snapping back at him that she was not putting it in my eye, and to let her concentrate. I was meditating on an image of Jennifer Lopez, the better to hold still.

I do not have a picture of the products of her effort, but I can give a rough approximation in the form of the “little girl glitter makeup” Vine.

I was not so young as to believe that I should be anything but profoundly grateful to my mother for her efforts, but my stomach sank. I looked basically nothing like Jennifer Lopez. My mother looked with me - at the half-centimeter of space between my lashes and the eyeliner, at the colors smeared up to my browbone, at the rum raisin color, which was decidedly not any sort of nude lip, shimmery or otherwise, on a child doing their best impression of a sheet of paper due to near-constant internal bleeding, and announced:

“Well, the trick with makeup is that sometimes, you put it on, and then you wash off most of it. Lots of people do that.”

I knew that my mother was lying, but I smiled and agreed, and we washed the makeup off, and indeed, it looked better.

There was recently a small, very localized commotion on X, the everything app, concerning whether or not cisgender women are told “well, not everyone will look like a model or an actress” when they express concern or dismay about their appearance.

It was my father, ultimately, who had to explain to me that Jennifer Lopez was a 40-year-old Puerto Rican woman with a team of makeup artists and personal trainers and decidedly without Crohn’s disease, and that nothing short of divine intervention would make me look like her. I was, predictably, distraught. We had the same hair. To me, this seemed like it ought to be half the battle. I was entirely uninterested in looking like myself but better, I wanted to look like Jennifer Lopez, the most beautiful woman on earth, because I wanted to be Jennifer Lopez. It would resolve all of my problems, though surely create a few new ones. No one force fed Jennifer Lopez chocolate flavored Boost or pushed a mathematics textbook across the table to her, mystified, because they were a creative writing teacher trying to get a clever but devastatingly ill little wastrel through Algebra 1, and suggested she try teaching them about exponents.

One thing was for certain: I looked stupid as hell in makeup. Even when I pulled up tutorials and practiced alone, it looked exactly like what it was: a child smearing paint on her face, trying to impersonate a woman that I categorically wasn’t. It would be several years before I could put on any makeup at all without furiously scrubbing it off and storming to my room to be irritable and impossible to speak to for the rest of the day.

I did, eventually, learn how to do it. My relationship with makeup is still not great, but I eventually did put together a method that did not ignite a smoldering, helpless rage somewhere below my sternum. I was not precisely afraid of looking clownish, though I knew I would; I was afraid of looking, from two ends of the spectrum, hopelessly unsophisticated (un-made-up!) and buffoonishly overwrought (made-up, badly and visibly).

What helped was to look at my face rather than my aspiration, not because I wasn’t Jennifer Lopez (though I was not; I check occasionally, just in case, and I am still not) but because I found that even following tutorials, in which women made their faces look a certain way, was more frustrating than helpful. Nikkie de Jager might be blonde and was obviously talented, but when I tried to copy her, I found that my features didn’t take the same shape as hers, my eyes were overwhelmed by eyeliner, and no matter how I tried, the second I put on makeup, I looked old.

Luckily, 2015 was the age of wearing heavy winged liner and mostly calling it a day, so unambiguously bad as this looked, there was at least a clear signal I could send that I was a normal teen girl who owned Maybelline Lasting Drama Gel liner in ‘black’ and was not afraid to shellac that shit on every morning at 5AM.

To make this tolerable, I would stare meditatively at my face for about forty-five seconds, imagine where my eyes should be, and drag the wing out to that point, then fill in the area above my lashes to about four millimeters in height, then coat my lashes with mascara until the blonde no longer showed. Then I would paint on a layer of concealer beneath my eyes, to make it less evident that I was still anemic and sleeping minimally if at all due to then-undiagnosed mental illness. That was it.

I overplucked my eyebrows habitually, which was not exactly the style of the time, but I’ve always hated the sensory experience of having hair. I braided the rest of my hair back in a tight French or crown braid, put on the stupidest outfit imaginable, because it was 2015, and went to high school.

This was, however, the beginning of an approach to makeup that would actually work for me: stare at my face until it was more abstract art than a human I wanted to look like a different human. Consider where it could be improved. Make the improvement. If my eyes were too small and undefined, washed out by blonde-on-white, then I would draw the shape of them as it ought to be, with the dramatic saturation it ought to have. If there were shadows distorting the shape of the eyes, pulling them down and deep, I would add bright flesh-tone to pull them up. If my nose was totally without definition, low-bridged and small and vanishing into the everything-pasty of my features, I could carve out a bridge and use the same tricks as elsewhere; add a slightly grey ‘shadow’ to create the illusion of a higher bridge, then a light color up and down the actual bridge to pull it up and out.

I still spent a lot of time looking moderately ridiculous, and yes, I had a collection of pearl necklaces and wore them all the time, even at the beach. This was gender armor. No one could say that I was a sick little girl - would a sick little girl be wearing a five dollar pink freshwater pearl necklace from Goodwill at the local library?

What eventually got to me, as I was a competitive speech and debate kid for the two years I spent in high school, was that at one tournament a judge wrote on my ballot that I looked like I belonged on Fox News, which even in 2015 was the sort of thing a libbed-out teenager would get righteously furious about, having driven all the way to Fort Lauderdale, a day early, for a round robin before the main tournament, only to be egregiously insulted by someone’s dad in a sports coat.

So eventually I was going to have to figure out a more sophisticated way to do my makeup, if anyone was going to take me seriously.

It took me five years of trial and error. I will skip over the worst of these, in which I experimented with block brows and full-face contouring, which never looked like anything but slightly orange mud smeared on my cheeks, most of which I spent without any eyebrows at all (never let anyone convince you these don’t grow back. I am living proof.) I learned to apply false eyelashes, spent a year doing it every day, then learned how to stop. At no point was any of this doing me any favors whatsoever; I was already a sporty-skinny blonde in the late 2010s, which was a great time to be a sporty-skinny blonde, and mostly interested in women or theys who considered my need to spend thirty minutes putting on makeup before leaving the dorm, and how bad it looked when it invariably sweat off, perhaps the worst things about hooking up with me.

After college, I went to sea and was a boy for a while, during which time I wore no makeup at all, gained thirty pounds of muscle, shaved my head, and was deliriously happy in some respects, miserable in others. I was any-pronouns nonbinary during the pandemic, though still binding and getting tentatively he’d when I ventured out into Manchester, Vermont to pick up my grandmother’s prescriptions or my own.

I didn’t even own makeup between 2019 and 2021. In many ways, this was great! I’m not the kind of detransitioner who will tell you that it was soul-crushing and defiling to be a man for a while. There was a lot to like about it. I have never felt so celebrated for my competence or so accepted for being a generally odd person. As a woman, I felt under constant pressure to perform womanhood so effectively that people would doubt themselves when they observed me doing weird things, like pulling out all of the hairs on my arms compulsively, spending a full day alone in a corner on my computer without speaking to anyone, or performing a perfectly intact dissection of a dogfish’s inner ear during a vertebrate physiology lab in which this was decidedly not the assignment.

As a man, people genuinely didn’t care that I was doing weird things, so long as I was also doing useful things! This was awesome. I earned the land nickname “boy scout” for insistently leaving the bar, after drinking exactly one can of pineapple juice and nothing else, at 8:00PM, to go to sleep, and for habitually turning down offers of shots and beers after a good trip yielded full pockets and a celebratory atmosphere. People genuinely did not give a shit that I used twenty-five cent words and was much more interested in typing on my computer in my bunk than watching Stepbrothers with the crew, fifty kilometers out in the Gulf of Alaska, because I could get the hook out of a struggling oversized halibut brought up as bycatch about as fast as anyone and I never overslept the haulback. They still slapped me on the back and offered me a microwaved hot pocket when I finally acceded to watching Talladega Nights. People were slower to be at ease with me and less likely to approach me outright, but quicker to warm up to me once we were acquaintances. Straight women, especially, were much warmer to me as a man.

As a woman, I find that conventional attractiveness, rather than competence, is more the toll one has to pay to be treated somewhat normally while behaving strangely, and the odds of me ever not behaving in a strange way are low; I am kind of a strange person. If you are kind of normal in demeanor, as a woman, with the expected habits and affinities, being treated as a man might be very jarring. For me, given that I really prefer to be alone with my hobbies, my work, or a book most of the time and find very few people compelling, being a man was very easy, and profoundly reduced my anxiety about my appearance.

It would have been easy, in some ways, to stay a man, if I were not also a lesbian. I’m a respectable man-height and have a respectable man-face, so far as the scope of heights and faces goes. As a man, however, I was not attracted to anyone; I was almost entirely focused on my work and my writing, and wrote some of my favorite pieces of all time while experimenting with testosterone, Carhartt sweatshirts, and geographic isolation. I was aware, however, that being a man had not made me a straight man, and had also not made me a gay man. Women found excuses to hang out with me while I was working in Seattle, asked about my writing and my job and laughed at my pithy asides the way I used to when I was angling for an invitation back to a man’s apartment while I was trying to figure out if I was bisexual. I found their efforts more annoying than interesting. The one gay man on an island in the Southeast hit on me at a bar, and I excused myself and walked back to the bunkhouse. The whole landscape was somewhat vexing.

The pandemic gave me a lot of time to think about it. I worked remotely for a marine biochemistry lab, helped my grandma on her farm, and grew out my crew cut. I was not satisfied with androgyny, either. I was lonely for a specific kind of camaraderie with other lesbians, and I was frustrated by the boyishness of my manhood, though this might have had something to do with the fact that I was twenty-three, and men in my family don’t really outgrow twinkishness until their thirties.

What I couldn’t forget, at the same time, was the discomfort of womanhood. I had gotten really good at dressing up as and acting like a woman, by the end of college, but it was through effort, every day, out of proportion with the payoff, and always at cost, the discomfort of having too much fucking shit on me.

I kind of wanted to be nothing. I kind of wanted to be a lesbian again. I use they/she pronouns, now, and I prefer to be a person in conversation, neither reduced nor elevated to womanhood. I still have my guy clothes, and mainly wear them day-to-day, though when I have to dress up, it’s in a silky collared shirt and slacks rather than a full men’s suit, which has always looked unbearably ridiculous on me. Gun to my head, I’d take a dress over a tuxedo.

I am drastically more comfortable in a uniform, at work, than anywhere else. I identify as an employed lesbian.

So where does that leave me in terms of makeup, and what can I offer you, gentle reader?

When I need to negotiate from a position of power, I still aim to do it, invariably, as a beautiful woman. It’s a quicker shorthand, and one that is very familiar to me. If I need to project competence and power in my wife’s immigration interview, makeup plays a role in that. There’s still an F on my driver’s license, and if someone is hiring me to work in an emergency department or a school, one of the first ways I can demonstrate my abilities, my steady hand and my awareness of social mores, is through unobtrusive but flattering makeup. Atop a broad-shouldered and relatively muscular body, which testosterone certainly affected, this communicates something to the effect of, “I am a woman on purpose, and I’m pretty good at it. Problem?”

Sometimes I imagine myself gently maneuvering past my father, reassuring my mother that I’ll take it from here, and sitting on the counter across from my thirteen-year-old self in the green-and-brown tiled bathroom of our fifties Floridian cinderblock build.

Here is what I would tell myself.

1. Primer matters. We’re starting with Wet n Wild Glass Correct Primer. You can wear just this. It will make you less rawly pink-looking. It will also make your makeup stick better, and look less crusty, even several hours application. I own three tubes of this under the assumption that they will someday stop making it; I use the green one, because my skin being over-pink is mainly what bugs me about it, but there is also a yellow one, which will better suit you if you’ve ever been told that you are olive-toned, if you are darker skinned, or you’re aiming more for brightening than for correcting.

   
   We’re gonna smear on a pea-sized amount of this basically all over.

2. Concealer is more powerful than foundation and usually ‘better’, even if you are trying to cover up a purple-cast shadow (that yellow primer I mentioned would help with this as well) such as undereyes or caused by facial hair. I use Maybelline Fit Me 010, ‘fair’, because 000 is too yellow-toned. The easily available shade range goes to 60, ‘cocoa’. e.l.f. hydrating concealer goes darker and is about the same cost, but for someone with my complexion, this is never likely to be an issue. Either way, pay attention to undertone, ask a friend who likes makeup to look at you in person or to take you to Sephora to fuck around until you have an idea of it. Your concealer, unless you’re sculpting with it, should probably be like a half-shade lighter than your skin, because we’re mainly using it to brighten up shadows.
   
   This goes everywhere we intend to un-shadow or brighten. Undereyes; any shadow at the jaw; any blemishes we might want to cover. Thanks to the primer, we don’t have to worry about the texture as much. Add layers as needed, but wait for it to dry in between.

   

3. For lashes we’re doing kind of whatever, with one caveat: if you are really pale, such that your lashes are blonde or red, you will probably want to go with greyer or browner shades, unless you are specifically doing a high-contrast ‘look’ rather than everyday makeup. I use colors named things like charcoal. If your hair is redder, you might look for brown-black. Mascara, whatever kind you find and like with practice, is easy enough: zigzag that shit onto your lashes, most people favor just the top lashes, but if you feel like your eyes are ‘too high’ in your face, you might want to put mascara on your lower lashes. Adding more shadow under your eyes pulls them down. Adding more shadow above your eyes pulls them up. I have no recommendations for mascara. They’re all more or less the same, unless it’s waterproof or not, in which case I’ll always prefer waterproof. Do not ask me to weigh in on tubing or whatever; that stuff is after my time. Mascara is the foremost weapon in your arsenal for making your eyes inconspicuously bigger. Eyeliner can also change their architecture and shape, but it is much more conspicuous.

4. For eyeliner, if we’re feeling inclined, we’re using a soft pencil. I favor MAC kohl eyeliner, color ‘smudgy charcoal’. This is pricey, but it will last forever if you use it the way I do: I put basically a smudgy dot on the outer corner of my eye, then, with a fingertip, gently pull it away to make a subtle wing to make my eye appear wider and ‘longer’. This gives me basically perfect control of the wing shape and proportions. One dot on the outer corner, focus, drag. Clean up a little with a q-tip if it proves necessary, though it rarely does. From here, you’ve created your own guideline to apply a darker liquid eyeliner with perfect precision, if you’re aiming to go more dramatic with it.
   
   If we want it on the lower lash-line, especially to evoke a sort of guyliner-smudgy look, we take the pencil and sort of color in just the pink, moist waterline beyond the lashes, then immediately close the eye and gently rub the lashes downward with a fingertip, back and forth. Rinse and repeat for desired effect.

5. For finishing touches, I love the Colorgram All In One Aegyo-Sal Maker double-sided sticks, less for actually doing aegyo-sal, unless that’s your preferred move, and more for fine-detail contouring and highlighting in general. I’ll still often use it to increase the prominence of the bridge of my nose - grey-shadow emphasis where the shadow would be cast if I had a higher bridge. To use it to narrow a nose or widen a nose, to further brighten the area under your eye to pull ‘up’ or to darken it to pull ‘down’, use whatever stick or product looks most like a natural shadow cast on your skin. Narrowing means drawing in the shadow that would be cast if the bridge of your nose was slimmer; widening means drawing on the shadow that would be cast if the bridge was wider; more prominent means enhancing/deepening the shadow that already exists. Imagine literally drawing a nose on the nose. Keeping it subtle will achieve the effect without a cartoonish quality; for being photographed under strong lighting, less subtle will help.

   
   Shimmery-light lines pull forward, creating a fuller, “higher” effect. Darker lines push back, creating a “lower”, shadow effect. Where to draw those lines depends on the desired effect.

   

6. Finally, I am a lipstick hater. I got a cheap lip stain, which I rub mostly off after applying it, and a $2 lip gloss I have been using since 2022. Lipstick is the great deceiver. I have never known it to look the same on a model as it looks on me. That said, for fun outings and such where you might want a durable red or black lip, I will always recommend a good MAC matte lipstick for coverage and “looking intentional”. People give women with streaky lipstick a very hard time, in part because it’s an easy way to ascertain that someone is new to makeup and thus insecure about it and vulnerable to extreme cruelty. Going with a harder-to-manage liquid lip may take some practice/some q-tip cleanup, and it will be a much more dramatic look, but no one can get you for being over-cautious.

Altogether, the cheapest bare-bones versions of these products will run you under forty USD. I am of the opinion that foundation is a scam meant to convince women that their skin is bad; concealer can do anything foundation can do and it does it more efficiently, so long as the primer is doing its job. I also believe lipstick is a scam, for the most part, and a product subtly designed to make it harder for women to kiss other women (lesbophobia? think about it.) For highlighter and contour, having a little stick instead of a big palette helps a small amount of product do a precise job.

All of this is, of course, subtle makeup advice. My advice for big loud makeup would be different, though I don’t really do that anymore. Subtle does not always mean quick, though it will, once you get quick with it. When I was prepping my wife and I to cosplay Halimede and Luna-Terra, I spent as much time fixing my ‘Halimede nose’ and gluing on eyelashes as I did scaffolding the massive facial scar I was painting on my wife’s jaw. Makeup as a task will expand to fill whatever time you allow yourself to do it.

There are ways to use makeup to create a more masculine facial shape as well. I personally didn’t use makeup while I was a man, but if I had, it might have really helped with my obnoxiously blonde eyebrows and nothing-nose. Like. This is probably not an ideal attitude to have about one’s face, but I’m not going to tell you to unlearn any dysphoria, because I certainly haven’t!

Anyway. I have an interview in an hour and I’m hoping to put my most politically neutral foot forward, which means there’s some shit on me, but not so much that I can’t breathe.

Isn’t it awful to think of your own face as a liability?

I suspect that my mother was scared for me, more than of her own lack of skill, sixteen years ago in the bathroom, wielding a tiny sponge of pigment. I know she spent much of her life judged by her height and her accent and her gender before she had the opportunity to say anything of substance. I know this is a skill her own mother never taught her, and that she couldn’t teach me, and that the nontransmission, in this case, wasn’t for lack of wanting to, but for lack of knowing how.

My mother asked me for advice before she bought a new eyeliner, a few months ago, and I saw some of the same reluctance when she turned her phone to me, the two-for-one deal in her cart so she wouldn’t have to think about it again for twice as long, and asked, “do you know this one? Is it good?”

It was a good one. Her instincts were right. It was waterproof and charcoal-colored. She uses it when she needs to armor herself for faculty meetings; her lines tend to waver, but how to reshape eyes with confidence is not really a kind of teaching that can go both ways between a mother and a child. She laughs it off, anyway, as a trick she’s not likely to learn, old dog that she is, and one that hardly matters if no one is looking at her.

I still have that Almay compact, in the bottom of a trunk in a storage unit, somewhere. For a few years, I used the browbone color for the alleged smoky eye as a highlighter, until I could afford something nicer.

Some days it feels very strange to be anything. I may not be able to choose to be Jennifer Lopez, to be forty before I’m really ever a teen, but it’s comforting to choose the shape of my eyes, when I have to, and to know that someday I’ll be too old for anyone to care how my face is shaped at all.

“He’s old,” I tell the dormitory’s headwoman, perplexed. I’m not sure why it comes to mind as my first protest. He is old. One of the frighteningly ancient Selasair, the sort not only bleached glossy white by the Elevation furnace, but fissured beneath the surface with age.

The dormitory headwoman, Leyti, exhales briskly and ignores my objection, her eyes tracking down over the rest of the letter. She is careful not to show it to me; Leyti is aware that I can read.

I know Councilmaster Irisim better than the average woman knows her keeper-to-be before she leaves service to become a consort, as I have encountered him, in brief, in the infirmary, and he may have spoken a few vague phrases in my direction. I had been embarrassed at my difficulty in looking directly at the old Councilmasters, though I see them rarely enough. Only a few are so ancient as to have filmed, unmoving white eyes and a sense of aged stone to their faces. Irisim is one of them.

It would be normal to know nothing of my keeper but his name. When Enna was placed, that was all she knew of some Master Dhalis, who she was to belong to. She was informed at evening meal and she held her composure very well. I wish I could have helped her ready her things, or could have seen her off, really, at all. The only place to see a woman, once she is kept, is in the infirmary, and I haven’t encountered her since.

They are so big, the Selasair. Even their sons with their pale patrilineal glow, in the darkness of the caverns beneath the citadel, are not so tall. If the Selasair were ever wholly men, they are not anymore, after they Elevate. I am to be consort to an old man-who-is-not-a-man.

We meet periodically with Leyti to resolve disputes. Stolen combs or letters from home or favored pillows in the rows of bunks carved into the cold black stone. I’m not all that familiar with her office, though I am with our jests; we call her Master Leyti as a sort of joke. Not a very good one. She is harsh as any Selasair and earned the title that way, though only in whispers. When last I saw her, she had me empty my trunk to prove myself not a thief and prodded through what remains of my mother’s gifts to me in needlepoint and a fine enameled comb with the toe of her boot.

I anticipated punishment or interrogation, to be called to speak with her before our morning allocation of duties. To be assigned no duties was already a bad sign. I have twenty-five years and have not spent a day without an assignment since my mother gave me, weeping, to the child-rearing headwoman at - five, I think. I think most of us born in the citadel are given over at five, and I suspect most of us remember the day clearly enough. Girls stay with their mothers longer than boys. The boys are not really supposed to remember that they have a mother, or so I’ve heard it said in dark tones, after the lanterns are put out.

Leyti has never liked me much. She was a tithed girl once herself, and they rarely have much affection for the citadel-born. She is pale in a sallow, yellowed-parchment sort of way and her silver-brown brows were already pressed together before I spoke carelessly about my keeper-to-be. Now, finished with whatever review has occupied her, she folds the letter over once, lips pursed.

“He is a councilmaster, Meloe. Cultivate a measure of gratitude before you find yourself cast back. There would be a dozen more deserving girls to vie for your place if the choice were put to them.”

I duck my head in apology.

“I was only surprised,” I say. “Sorry. What would you have me do?”

“Empty your trunk and wrap your belongings. Gele is to carry them to the tower before evening’s fifth-bell. An errand-girl will escort you when you are finished. And you will need to be dressed properly.”

She calls one such girl, young and barely-luminous herself by way of her patriline, and instructs her to fetch a gown for me as I sit in place, feeling very bloodless and not entirely in my body.

The consort’s gown is a pretty but flimsy thing, of thin blue-green silk and draped cut, much gentler on the skin than the servingwoman’s uniform of mass-processed wool. The gown is gathered at the throat and wrists and waist. It is so thin as to be of little coverage. Leyti hands me one and has the girl fold four more for me to add to my belongings. She indicates that I ought to wear it now, which makes sense, I suppose, if my apportionment is imminent.

I have always been a little shy in undressing, even before other women. In slipping into the long silken thing, pleasant as it feels to the touch, I find that I have hardly redressed myself at all. Leyti ignores my flush, back to frowning at the letter that has set my fate.

I wonder if everyone gets a letter.

“He has given no other specifications,” she finally tells me, setting it face-down on a stack of similar missives. “Only that it is to be processed now.”

“May I eat, first?” I ask, which sounds a sort of stupid thing to say, even to my ear.

Leyti exhales through her nose, her attention already elsewhere.

“Your meals will be brought to you on the schedule of his other women. If he meant for you to eat, he would have written it.”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

The fabric is draped, so loose that it moves against my breasts when I shift my shoulders. I don’t enjoy the feeling, which is sort of like a stray hair caught ticklishly in my bodice, but I recall, with some interest, that if I am promoted, I am no longer Leyti’s charge. The gown, in fact, as much as its cool, smooth weight bothers me, puts me above her.

Women in her dress will take the long stairways from the caverns and their kitchens up to the blinding light and the high towers of the citadel above to bring me my food, now. In the drawing room of my ancient keeper.

The whole decision is too quick and too strange to have any opinion on it at all, other than a sincere bewilderment that I try to muscle down. I wonder if I look as Enna did, like a woman struck when she isn’t expecting it, gone slightly grey with shock. I feel more certain that I look foolish in the gown the longer I think on it, the longer the fabric moves with the tremor to my wrists.

I have only the one patriline, and most Selasair don’t claim daughters for any purpose but ensuring they don’t retake the woman in a decade and a half. Mine must have been the more disinterested sort. I don’t remember a father or a father’s name. What he left of himself in me is the sort of glistening quality that marks a patriline, clinging in the cells of the issue. It is strongest in my hair, which is quite light for my complexion. My eyes are dark as my mother’s. I remember those. A Selasair imparts some of the shape of his bones, some height, and there is a prevailing thought that his daughters will be more beautiful than those of men.

Among girls with patrilines, I am nothing very special to see. I clear my throat; Leyti has spoken no further in waiting for me to rise and do what she has told me.

I don’t have to do it, though. There is only one man whose orders I’ll be honor-bound to obey, and his name is Irisim.

“Did he say nothing of why I was requested?” I ask, wishing I could take the letter with me, or have a look at it, at least.

Leyti lifts her head. She is about as old as my mother was, I think.

“You were not requested. You were called. Do you imagine a councilmaster likes to wait? Go.”

I go, so hastily and with such unfamiliarity with the length of my new gown’s skirt that I trip before I reach the servingwomen’s dormitory. The trembling is worse as I pack, made more acute as I wonder. I suppose Leyti would have told me all of what it said. She has always been very proud to be the mouthpiece of a great man, whether his orders are written and read or only what she imagines them to be.

It does not take long. I don’t have much to pack, and I know my comb and my half-stuffed needlepoint pillow, scented faintly of wood shavings, will eventually join me in my future lodgings. The dormitory is empty, the rest of the women finishing their meals, wending their way through the caverns, squinting in the low light if their post does not furnish a lantern. I ball up my uniform and the scant blankets that keep my pallet cozy when the day’s work is done, wondering at the premise that I may never again fall asleep with hands raw from scouring and knees pressure-bruised black from kneeling at my work.

There is no fantasy of relief or being chosen on which to fall back. I had thought myself too old to catch any bleached grey eye in the citadel proper. Certainly too unexceptional, with twice-Elevated patrilines like Enna’s to contend with or foreign novelties tithed from distant states preferred by some.

A councilmaster has chosen me, and there can be no reason why. A dozen girls, a score of girls might prefer the honor.

I flex my well-callused hands and sweep my palm over my pallet a final time. I had resigned myself to live and die a servingwoman’s life in the caverns.

All that is unique in me, if there is anything, is that I had almost grown to like it here. Even under Leyti’s scorn, dodging aspirants and nursing scrapes and bruises, I had come to like the work. I think it a regular and honest way to live, the uniform mostly warm enough for comfort, the small alcove-beds mostly snug, even in winter, when the citadel’s drafts sink down into the caverns.

What is special, I suppose, is that I do not want to leave. But I must. I do. The errand-girl is waiting, and it will be rude to keep her long from her other duties, dangerous outright to keep a man who I belong to, now, in suspense.

Leyti was right. I hope that I never have to think those words again, and I leave my home of twenty years behind.

Councilmaster Irisim is not in the tower. The door has been left unwarded, and the errand-girl has a key, lets me in, and locks the door behind me.

I have rarely had cause to visit a Selasair’s lodgings, save the few to which I have been called to clean or to bring food or coffee. I remember little enough from my own upbringing to supplement it. Most towers, upon entry, hold a sitting-room in which colleagues might meet to be served the coffee we bring. Selasair drink. Few eat, and those who do seem to do it as a habit.

This one is bigger than those I have visited before. It is the last in the interior ring of eight councilmasters’ towers, otherwise indistinguishable from the preceding six, which are exceeded by that of the high councilmaster and the central minaret and nothing else. The sitting-room at the base is as white and blinding as they all are, after the relatively low light in the under-layer, and it takes a moment for my vision to resolve cleanly on anything but the whitewashed door, shut.

It’s difficult to say what I am expecting. Irisim, certainly, impatient from having summoned me an hour prior. He is a councilmaster, and their robes are all so heavily embroidered with the fractals of their covenant with the citadel that I suppose I imagine them all to fit best in an environment of equally heavy decoration. Silver everywhere, as it does something with their power, from what I understand.

What I feel under my working shoes, however, is plush carpet, and what I hear is less, almost immediately, than I do in the bare-walled under-layer. Even when working alone in the library, I find that the space itself amplifies my breath and my footsteps both.

Here, there is almost nothing. I blink away the light until my eyes adjust.

“You must be Meloe,” a woman says, by her voice. I blink again.

“Yes, miss,” I say. She is short of stature for a woman with the gleam of Elevated heritage in her skin and its beauty in the shape of her face, in the same gown I am not yet accustomed to feeling on my skin. I might guess her at fifteen or twenty years my senior, though I imagine that a consort ages differently than a servingwoman, which puts her somewhat out of my frame of reference.

She is seated on a low couch, a rich thing of soft grey velvet. There is a book on her lap and a cup of half-finished coffee on the table before her. I can smell it, on further consideration, above even the scent of ozone. She is not alone, either. Another woman sits beside her, her own drink in one hand, a hand-wrap of rice and vegetables in the other. Her eyes, which are very blue, flick over to me in mild interest, then back to her food. Where the first woman is only unremarkably pretty, and this reshaped with age, the second is beautiful.

“It’s not miss, sweet, it’s Celia.” The older woman - Celia - leans over and gently swats the younger woman beside her. “Ieve. Be social.”

Ieve sighs and sets her coffee down. “I’m not the youngest in the tower anymore. No one has asked me how I feel about it.”

“Perhaps Meloe would like to. How many years do you have, Meloe?” Celia asks, and gestures me over to the couch. There are two of them, stretching partway across the space.

This social area, of sorts, is the only portion of the sitting-room not cluttered high with books, and old books, too, richer than the sparse academic texts of the underlayer library. Older servingwomen are sent up into the citadel proper preferentially, as they are less likely to be bothered by the Selasair or the older aspirants taking their classes. I have never been called on to clean the citadel’s main library, and have never seen so many books with silver embossing.

Certainly I have not seen them handled so carelessly, or by a woman. Celia closes her book casually in standing, sets it and her cup aside on the table, and rises to greet me.

“I have twenty-five,” I tell her, and she nods, appraising. So close, I find myself flushing at the suddenly acute knowledge of the precise dimensions of her body, beneath her own gossamer gown, and the simultaneous awareness of how bare my own body is beneath the pretension of being dressed.

“Tall,” she judges, and pats my shoulder once. “Hm. I will call on you when I need a woman with reach. Not all with a patriline get the height. It’s very inconsiderate of them, don’t you think?”

“Is it, miss?” I ask, perhaps too earnestly. She laughs. It is more a mother’s laugh than a girl’s.

“Celia,” she corrects me again, a slight scolding edge to the tone. “None of this miss. It makes me feel very old.”

“You are old,” Ieve volunteers, her hand-wrap finished, laying back on the couch and looking every bit the image of what a consort ought to be, though I notice, now, that she is in the wrong dress. It is white silk, a child’s gown sized to fit a woman. The rest of the picture is correct. Her hair is a fine, pale gold, hanging loose around her shoulders in half-formed curls, her body slim and her bodice full, her face arrestingly beautiful in the diffuse light that emanates from the stone, from all directions.

“Ieve,” Celia says shortly. “You are giving your new sister a poor impression of us.”

I can’t imagine anyone having a poor impression of Ieve. She lifts her head and rolls generously-lashed eyes of milky blue.

“You are being overbearing. I am helping. Welcome, Meloe. Ignore my mother. She is fussier than Irisim.”

I do not hide the way my face changes well enough. “Is he not - are you?”

“See, you’ve made her tense,” Ieve continues. “Now she thinks poorly of us all for it, and interprets everything as a strange threat. Irisim is my father, but it is not such an odd situation as you think. He does not like to let men have his daughters, so I am trapped here forever. He will not even let me work. I suppose it is better to have a companion of my own age, though I imagine he will have you in the infirmary before the week is finished.”

“To what end?” I ask, feeling very stupid.

“To work,” Celia says, then stumbles a little on her feet and catches my arm before she falls. I grasp her in alarm - it would be terrible luck to enter and immediately oversee some catastrophic accident - and she laughs weakly and gestures to the woman that I suppose is her daughter. “Something strong, Ievie, it’s come back. And there should be food. Fetch some for Meloe.”

I walk her carefully back to the couch, and she nods and murmurs gratefully as Ieve complies, evidently no longer inclined to argue.

“It is just a little headache,” Celia tells me, when I kneel and try to ask her what is wrong. “Ieve was not an easy birth, many years ago. It comes and goes. She is a good girl, thrice Elevated in her lineage. You can imagine that he wishes to keep her safe. She could not safely be with child.”

I have never met a girl with three patrilines and a living mother. I can’t think of more than one person I know of to be thrice-Elevated, and he is a year out of Elevation himself, said to be the greatest Selasair in many generations. I wish I had a better sense of whether this situation, already beyond my understanding, speaks well of Irisim.

What is in me is a fraction of the power my father must have taken on in Elevating, a little more or less depending on his own father. My mother was a human woman. If I were to - when I bear a child, the thought of which I have not done much with, yet, it will be an easier birth for it, though my own daughter by a Selasair will have almost as much difficulty as a tithed human girl, and the difficulty compounds as the child inherits more incorporeal power.

This is why they need the tithe-girls. There are limits to the incorporeal power a womb can bear, and if the girl’s heredity contributes its own, the risk is greater proportionate to her inheritance.

Ieve returns with pressed white pills, water, and a tray mostly empty of food, though there is an extra hand-wrap for me. She presses the glass into her mother’s hand and touches her face and mutters several things about what she means to tell her father about all this, and whether Celia has been caring well enough for herself.

“You really aren’t supposed to have coffee,” she adds, and takes the remainder of her mother’s cup, finishing it herself expeditiously. “It’s bad for your kidneys, and your kidneys are already in shambles. He’s told you a dozen times.”

“She makes work for herself,” Celia tells me, a little brusquely. “In managing me. Is she not her father’s daughter?”

“I couldn’t say,” I reply, gratefully taking my meal from the tray.

“Well, we have both ruined your impression of your position,” Celia continues, watching me eat with some indiscernible calculation. “You will meet the rest of the women in time, and perhaps they will redeem us.”

I nearly ask about the rest, where my train of thought snags, but think better of it. “If I may ask - Celia. Am I replacing someone?”

Ieve looks over from whatever she is doing at a bookshelf, frowning at the disorder of the fine-lettered titles. “Her. You’re replacing her. Mother is no longer fit to work, and I’ve heard that you are. If it isn’t true, better that we know now.”

“No,” I say hastily. The blood wants to rise to my skin and leave my face simultaneously. To blanch and to flush. I mostly do neither. “I am fit, I hope, though he will be the judge. I was only curious. I didn’t know what the post entailed. The headwoman told me very little. I suppose it is a lot to live up to.”

“She is very small,” Ieve reassures me, smiling too sharply to be doing anything but jesting again. “Try not to work yourself up, little sister. Mother was a terrible aide, or so I hear. She distracted her keeper to no end.”

“It is not hard work,” Celia adds, frowning over at her daughter. Her face, which I made before for plain, is pretty enough, so close, but oddly puffy. Her hands, too, when I glance down. I wonder if she is older than she looks, and if so, by how much. “I understand that you read. He only takes girls who read and have no complaints lodged of them.”

“I do,” I say. “This work, then, in the infirmary. It is only - what, to keep his papers for him?”

Ieve looks at me as though I have suggested something wildly implausible. “You didn’t think he meant to get a child by you? Meloe. He’s old.”

My laughter in response is slightly hysterical, perhaps, and it comes like steam escaping from a kettle. A pressure released, and a new uncertainty in its place. I am dressed for the wrong task. I am fed and welcomed by the strangest women I have ever met, in a situation I cannot rightly parse.

I suppose I will be at the infirmary by weeks-end, in the employ rather than the bed of a councilmaster, and I have no sense what to think of any of it. But I will have a job.

It is the first earnest relief in hours. The second is the breakfast, which is delicious.

Selasair do not sleep much. Some do not at all, and I gather that Irisim is one of these sorts, because he does not return to the tower at all that night, or the next.

Elevated heritage confers some of that advantage; I need about three hours of rest to feel myself, and four is luxurious. In the caverns, it means that those of us who need less have longer working hours, and I have tried not to resent it when I had something interesting to read, denied to me through hours of scrubbing bathing-chambers or sifting through sand clotted with blood in the training-rooms.

It does not seem to work that way, among his women. It is three days of good food and cautious handling of texts, which I try to tidy until Ieve tells me not to bother with it, before another consort, gowned for the role, comes and passes along his request that I relieve her in attending him.

She is perhaps Celia’s age by appearance, human and tired-looking, though the impression of shadows under her eyes is muted by the color of her dark brown skin. She introduces herself as Oshre and announces that she will be going to sleep, and that only a good meal will distract her from the ambition.

I have many questions, none of which she is eager to answer in more than a few words between bites of breakfast. My gown is fine to wear, though I should keep my hair up. I am not needed immediately, but should not dally. She doesn’t know what he’ll want me to do first. Probably my job. Then she apologizes for being short with me, leans back on the couch, and falls asleep.

It is more than a little intimidating. She has even more brusque competence about her than Celia, a headwoman without the pretensions of authority, only the sort that is earned. There is blood flecked on her gown. I go to Celia first, to ask my questions again. She is in bed with her feet raised, every bit as worn as Oshre, and she tells me more or less the same thing, in a modestly more indulgent tone.

I braid my hair, try not to be too aware of the oddness of my costume for any kind of work that involves blood other than the sort in the keeper’s-bed that must sit empty, in the locked floors of the high tower, and make my way to the infirmary that I have only visited before as a patient.

I know the location of the infirmary well enough. I have only visited it from the entryway to the caverns, though, and it takes a moment to plot my way there from an unfamiliar perspective. It is very strange to walk through the citadel’s luminous white cloisters, beneath the radiantly blue sky of its high place in the Aroscan mountains, without a chaperone.

A servingwoman can walk and work aboveground only with another. My gown marks me not that. Still, I had always imagined that a consort, if she were permitted to move about, would do so with her keeper. A Selasair without a place on the High Council can keep only three women, though few have so many, and only with the approval of the councillary head of their department. It seems most would have time to bring their women from place to place, between duties and training and teaching, and would not like to lose a woman to an opportunist happening on her, defenseless, in the halls.

It is not my place to wonder. I try very hard not to. The walk is a pleasant distraction; the citadel reflects most of the summer’s heat, and the air is crisp and clear.

When I find the infirmary, I put my shoulder to the door and push it open. It is a door sized for Selasair, but unlocked and always possible to open. The midday sun is bright through its high windows, casting the gauzy curtains suspended from the ceiling, nearly three meters overhead, with their own internal glow. The space has beds and chairs enough for thirty women.

I have been here once when I got my blood, again when I hurt my hand in scouring the bathing-caverns and needed a treatment to kill the contaminants in the wound, and another time for Enna, when she took sick and sad and listless, vomiting anything she ate, after one of the aspirants took her.

She thought well of Irisim, I think. He mostly bid me away while he helped her, but she was better after. It was many years ago, and the scent of the place, blood and ozone, is mostly as I remember it. Otherwise, I have been sent for errands or occasionally as an escort. For simpler matters, like pain, there is salicylate in the under-layer, if Leyti permits it. Though she usually doesn’t.

There is no immediate urgency afoot. A servingwoman is replacing the fabric drapes on one of the beds, and the floor around it is fresh-mopped, but I hear no screaming and see no patients in jeopardy. Two beds and one chair are full. One woman is retching lightly. Another is conspicuously gravid, laying painfully on her side, facing away. The third, seated, looks up at the scrape of the heavy door, watches me enter, and fixes the set of her long grey hair, which might be thinner for being fixed this way so frequently.

I glance around for Irisim. He must be in his office; there is another high door, cracked, and the sound of voices behind it. The trouble is whether to announce myself or to wait.

After several days of no excitement save mealtimes, I think that I can bear a few more minutes, or however long it takes for him to finish.

I do not mean to eavesdrop, but one of the male voices in particular is both clear and unreserved.

“You answered him? You supplied him?”

“I had no cause not to. It is not my work to discipline your son on your behalf.”

“To discipline him, no. But you would aid him?”

“I would aid any man who needed it. I do not typically assume that his father has denied him first.”

“It was not your duty.”

“This, then, is yours? Well done. I am chastened. At your leisure, I would attend to my patients.”

The High Councilmaster presses open the door without effort and leaves. He is old as I recall Irisim to be, and all Selasair are handsome, but his face, in particular, is fine-featured in a way that makes the opaque white of his irises and the sense of age beneath his luminescent countenance very eerie.

I know him only by the thin silver circlet he wears, which looks to be in need of polishing. It is a ridiculous thought to have as he veritably pushes past me, or would, if I were not fairly quick in getting out of a man’s way. From the angle of his face, I do not think he notices me there at all. It is impossible to tell, though, with his irises and pupils all the same uniform white of the rest of his eyes.

The door to the infirmary scrapes closed behind him. A moment, the sound of a man coughing, and Irisim emerges. He frowns at me, presses up a pair of round golden spectacles so they sit before his clouded eyes, and frowns again.

“Is it an urgent condition?” he asks.

“No, sir,” I say, and dip my head politely. I should probably bow more deeply, but my legs are shaking a little. “I’m Meloe, sir. You called for me?”

“Well, you have come in something of a lull,” he says shortly. “It is good for you to practice. You read, correct? Once I requested a girl I was told could read, but found it was more of an abstract faculty.”

He is shorter of stature than the High Councilmaster, a hand or so below two meters. It doesn’t really matter. I still have to crane my neck to meet his gaze. His robes have a different fractal pattern, a kind of folded-in swirl, than the branching silver embroidery of the man castigating him. The pattern extends up to his throat, where it makes shining silver ridges of scar. So close, it is hard not to see it.

I realize I am both staring and not answering.

“I read well, sir,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Please spare me the referent. If you must be formal, it can be Councilmaster Irisim before the women, but otherwise, there is no need. Show me, then. Oshre left her notes. See the patients, review and add to the record, and attend to their needs.”

“Is that all?” I ask, and he exhales deeply.

“I will supervise at first. But much of this work needs no care but reassurance, and a woman is better for that. If there is anything worse, you would call for me.”

“I have no real training,” I tell him. “I would hardly know worse from better.”

“Oshre will give you books. If you read so well, you will learn quickly,” he says. “Begin now. Interrupt me only if you are concerned.”

I dip my head again, which makes him sigh once, pressing his spectacles up a final time before retreating to his office, leaving the door cracked.

For three days straight, I’ve wanted two things: an answer as to what could have happened to turn the comfortable mundanity of my life in the under-layer to this, and something to do. In the space of a few minutes, I have partial answers to both needs.

The retching woman has moved on to outright vomiting into a bin lined with paper for incineration. She is the loudest in her misery, and neither of the other women seem to be outright dying, so I go to her first.

It’s a good job that Irisim requested someone with a more-than-theoretical ability to read. Oshre’s writing is tiny, angular, and requires substantial squinting to interpret with any fidelity. She is known to be pregnant, though, at ten weeks, with measurements taken of the height of her abdomen included on cards full of notes in other hands from past visits. A few are Oshre’s, her name recorded on the top left corner. Two older installments are by Celia’s hand, one by Ajda, another woman I have seen occasionally around the tower. They are dated, as well.

The woman’s name is Peli, and she is here often. There are notes on images taken, developmental stages, and several physical observations in language unfamiliar to me.

So I breathe out steadily, trying not to panic beneath the weight of obligation - this is a job, like an expanse of sand speckled with dried black blood, and I always managed to handle that - and begin to ask her questions.

I probably could have spared her some if I were better at it. She affirms, between retching out bile, that she hasn’t managed to keep more than water down since this time yesterday, which I dutifully inscribe on a fresh card, and that her keeper’s other consort finds her miserable company what with all the vomiting, which I do not. It is her second pregnancy. The first was miscarried so early that she might have doubted it had ever took, were it not for Irisim’s imaging and a test of light which she describes, in which a current of incorporealism is run through a vein to determine its solute ratios, with different methods applied to different tissues to judge chemistry.

“Does anything help?” I ask, and she punctuates her latest production of thick green bile with shuddering laughter.

“Do you perform - euthanasia?” Peli asks, and retches.

I fetch her some juice from an ice box near Irisim’s office instead, and suggest that she call me over when she begins to vomit again, that we might have a timeline for her symptoms, then trade out her basin for a fresh one and toss the folded-up paper within the first down one of the many chutes for waste, all of which will be incinerated and treated to ink and fertilizer somewhere beneath the citadel.

The very pregnant woman is sleeping, when I walk by to glance at her, so I go to the older woman next, thinking that she might be easily helped. Her name is Anse.

“I can’t see,” she tells me. “Mostly. From this eye.”

There are only a few cards placed at the foot of her bed. I glance at them briefly; one is older than I am, and none mention vision issues.

“Have you hit your head?” I ask, and Anse frowns and denies it. “Do you normally have vision issues?”

“Only when I bore,” she says. “Towards the end. It got very blurry, but it resolved after. I imagine you still have the notes?”

It strikes me as a little sad, to see a genuinely old woman in a consort’s gown. I’m not certain why it’s offensive, since I’ve been coming to accept the look of it on my body well enough for the past few days, but it troubles me. Her body is hollowed out by age and many births, and I think she ought to have more dignity than a dress made to cling to a young woman’s breasts. She has already done her duty.

“You had hard births,” I say aloud, after flipping through the four cards, all of them documentations of labor and children delivered to Anse, kept by Master Gielis, two born dead.

“I did well enough. Irisim took my womb out after the last, and it was a great relief.”

I can see the neat scar through the sheer fabric of her gown, slightly puckered at the edges with flesh gained and lost since. There is limited documentation in what I’m beginning to recognize as Celia’s hand. Hysterectomy. That would have been the womb, removed. Preeclampsia, a word unfamiliar to me. Retinopathy, the same.

“Are you sure you don’t have problems with your eyes?” I ask.

“Not since that record you’re reading. Are you new in the infirmary?” Anse asks, her tone more curious than anything. She has to turn her head to look at me. One of her eyes is different than the other, by the look of it.

“Yes,” I say, not wanting to lie. “Tell me - has it been getting worse for a while?”

“Mostly today? There was some blurring yesterday, but today it’s the big patch. Step over, would you? You’re a charming girl. Who is your keeper?”

Something about the effortful way she attempts to focus her eyes worries me. I knew servingwomen with bad sight, in the underlayer, but it was all bad, and some of them were given lenses, if it would help them do their work. They squinted without them, but there were not patches of good and poor vision.

I don’t want to bother Irisim. I think I may have to.

“I’ll fetch him now,” I say, swallow until my stomach stops twisting beneath my esophagus with nerves, and walk briskly to his office.

He is annoyed, at first, at my knock. His rejoinder is somewhat harsh, too mumbled to resolve to any earnest criticism, and his affect when he sets aside tables of data and maps of the imperial continent is that of someone woken unceremoniously from a long nap.

When he sees Anse’s eyes, his demeanor changes.

“Fetch my lens table,” he tells me shortly, removing his glasses, the better to squint into Anse’s eyes.

I take a few steps in no particular direction. I don’t know what that is. He exhales deeply and gestures in the direction of an accumulation of equipment behind another white drape, cluttered as the books in his sitting room.

“Lenses, dimensioned for eye examinations. It will roll.”

I burn more time than I ought to in being certain, but I find a device that looks like a set of two microscopes on a wheeled table and drag it over as quickly as caution allows.

“Alcohol,” he says, as he ushers Anse into the correct posture for examination of her eyes. “Her blood pressure is too high.”

“What sort?” I ask. He does not dignify it with a look.

“For drinking,” he says, then, relenting, “my office.”

I return with a fortified anise wine, blisteringly strong and half-finished, from his desk.

“Drink,” he tells Anse. “There are vessels leaking behind your eyes. I will cauterize them. Some of the damage may be persistent, but you will keep serviceable vision once your pressure is controlled. Relax.”

Two long drinks into the liquor, she is still well able to protest, but she does as he bids. I watch him perform muttered calculations, then a schooled movement of his fingers.

Nothing obvious happens. He seems unconcerned, by his posture, still slightly hunched over the silver microscopes. Another careful movement, his mouth moving around words not quite voiced.

Anse exhales heavily, droops.

“Sit up,” he directs her. “Do not move too quickly. How is the sense of it now?”

“Different,” she says vaguely. Her eyes look mostly unchanged, still with the rheumy grey-brown of age. “The headache is mostly gone.”

“Pain can raise the pressure of your blood,” he warns her. “And you have the ossification and damage of many difficult births. The tiny channels behind the eyes are often the first to rupture. You will rest here and take a dose of opiates. Your recovery will give me a better sense of what can be done.”

“Am I to drink more?” she asks, still bleary, and lifts the vessel of alcohol.

“No, that will not be necessary,” he grumbles, then looks to me. “You could not have picked anything less valuable? There is wheat liquor in the drawer.”

I begin to raise my palms and to bow at once in apology.

“No, it was the correct decision,” he says, grimacing. “The situation was appropriate. You were helpful. Place this one in a bed, help the new arrivals, and update her record.”

Two more women have arrived since he began, though I’ve hardly noticed them. I still have the sleeping pregnant woman to evaluate, and I have hardly touched the graphite-stick to write any further notes for Anse.

“Go on,” he says, and returns to his office with the liquor in hand.

Irisim does not sleep, at all. I ask him about it, twelve hours into my efforts, shaking and numb to my knees from standing for so long, hoping that my reminder of the state will give him reason to dismiss me.

“Before all this nonsense about breeding Selasair and crafting an internal locus, it was the case for most,” he says. There is some of the anise alcohol in the coffee he is drinking. “In my early years, we were all simply men of the furnace, and men of the furnace do not need sleep. The rest is by the High Councilmaster’s design, and his father’s before him.”

So late, there are fewer cases, he informs me, but those that do arrive tend to do so with real urgency. Anse and three other women he has judged in need of further care rest in the infirmary beds. To avoid troubling them, I sit in the office, after clearing books and papers off a chair. My legs are beginning to prickle back to life, with the pressure off them.

“How long have you been councilmaster?” I ask.

“Two hundred and eighty-nine years,” he says, and drinks deeply. “You would have coffee? Forgive me. I forget your name.”

“Meloe,” I say. If he is not going to send me back to the tower to sleep, I badly need the stimulant. “And yes. Do you have sugar for it? I still can’t stomach it as Celia does.”

“Celia.” He sighs as he pours from a glass carafe, then heats it to a visibly steaming texture with a flutter of his fingertips, opening two drawers before he finds a pack of sugar for it. “How does her condition strike you?”

“I’m not really the one to ask,” I say, feeling warm beneath the skin of my face. “I think your judgment exceeds mine.”

“Obviously so,” he says. “But I will have your opinion nonetheless.”

“She is sharp,” I say, and take a sip of the coffee. It would be better with milk and more sugar. “Mostly in bed. Very swollen in her limbs. Ieve worries.”

“Ieve is behaving herself?” he prompts me.

“She is older than I am,” I say. “I don’t think I’m quite the one to ask on that count, either.”

“Are you settling in well enough?” he asks, his forehead creased in concern. “Usually a woman likes to talk more. I understand it to be a matter of personal preference, but it is strange.”

“Does it matter?” I ask, which is the question that I have been considering, I realize, for quite some time. “You have women to work in your infirmary for you. Your keeping has been very generous, and I have more to eat and do and less to suffer than I ever did in the under-layer. Why bother with our enjoyment?”

He makes a low noise of dissent. “Of course it matters. An unhappy woman does poor work.”

“You are a councilmaster,” I observe. If it is so important to him that I talk, I will talk. I have questions enough for it. “Do you not have docents who could do far more than I could?”

“Men make poor workers. My docents are all abroad. A man does not go to the infirmary where his women will be cared for if he means to study medicine. He goes to one of the great clinics in the Ont’ur province to the south, or the Vashar to the west, and then to a smaller region from which he can send me data and tend to a smaller population.”

I think of the high councilmaster’s visit. It would make me very nervous to have the attention of such a powerful man, and to be surrounded only by the sort of allies that can be procured from the under-layer, gowned in silk.

“You need not worry yourself about it all,” he says. “The infirmary runs well as it is. Our population is small and their needs are mostly kind words.”

Sleeping in the infirmary we have Anse, of the vessel-pressure in her eyes, a woman on the cusp of miscarriage with an infant too small to survive outside of her, and a servingwoman burned for disobedience. They arrived between women with discomfort from pregnancy and work, whose stays were not longer than an hour or two, but they have arrived.

There is a firm knock on the door. I start; Irisim does not.

“Enter,” he says tiredly. “You did not tell me of your father’s involvement, Jian.”

The Selasair who presses the door aside politely is young. There is a boyishness to the fresh-Elevated that clings for the first few years, a length to their newly dimensioned bodies that they do not quite fill yet in the shape of men. I know this one first by his eyes, which are shining and clear grey as a cut gemstone, then the implausible beauty of his face, even by the standards of the Selasair. Jian Knisad, before he burned. Jian Cillat afterward. He was the subject of much conversation among the servingwomen of my age. Appointed docent before he had hardly drawn breath in a Selasair’s body by his father, the high councilmaster. It is all well-known and much-discussed, among other rumors.

“Did I forget that part?” he asks breezily. Like his father, his gaze passes over me without recognition. “She will need something more for sleep. What do you have to suit a Selasair?”

No Selasair are she. I frown at what he must be preparing for a woman’s consumption.

“Your movements are followed,” Irisim mutters, but opens another of his innumerable drawers, regardless. “It is only opiates for pain. If you will bring him in for examination, I can do more for the injuries.”

“It is evidently her now,” he says tartly, still smiling. “And she will not see another man. Do you have nothing for incorporeal burns?”

“If the shoulders are set properly, which I cannot assess, that is all you can accomplish,” Irisim replies, and passes the young man a sachet of pills. “You may give them all, if it is necessary. Poison will not kill a Selasair.”

“You are good, Irisim,” Jian Cillat pronounces, and leaves with a flourish of robes.

The interaction deflates Irisim by a measure. He finds the anise liquor and adds more of it to his coffee as I watch in curious silence, trying to parse whether a woman is about to die of overdose or whether some scenario is at work that is beyond me. Politically speaking, I suspect that this will not go unpunished. I have already seen the shadow cast by punishment for the first transgression.

“The high councilmaster will not replace me easily,” he remarks, without my asking. “It is not a desirable job, and the replacements he might call on are far from the citadel and well know the great position they would stand to win. Do not trouble yourself.”

“His son doesn’t have a consort,” I say. I know as much because half the under-layer wished the chosen woman to be herself, some quite vocally, and until the last day of my time below, there was some piece of gossip or another about the nature of his refusal.

“I am very grateful that the preferences of young men are not of my concern,” he mutters. He must see the clock half-buried on his desk in leaning over to close the drawer of medications, because he stops, frowning. “I have kept you too long.”

“Not at all,” I say, though the ache in my feet and calves puts some lie to my objection. “I need only three or four hours.”

“Too long,” he repeats. “It is decent work. Go and rest. Oshre knows to come at dawn. I will send a summons if anyone is needed before then.”

“Thank you, sir,” I say, and he snorts and fusses with his glasses and is likely still doing so as I finally leave the infirmary.

I like the work, as I improve at it. Once she is better slept, Oshre takes a morning to show me around the instruments, to name them and explain their uses, and to identify the limited medications we can hand out freely. Salicylate for certain pains, once pregnancy is ruled out, dried mint and pickled ginger for nausea. There are weak opiates and other medicines from the laboratory, but for these we are meant to ask, and for the strongest of them, Irisim will administer them himself to better judge the necessity and the effects.

None of this surprises me much. I like to be useful, and to keep my hands busy has always been a good distraction. To braid my hair back and slip the coil under a little sanitary cap is a pleasant intermediary between my almost excessively comfortable new accommodations and my work, which is still brisk and chaotic, but has a rhythm to it, which I am slowly finding.

What surprises me is that I grow to like Ieve. There is a quality that exceptionally beautiful women seem to have in common, a kind of daring with themselves that comes from being liked and trusted easily. Enna was bright, sure, bright enough to read the books I shared with her in half the time it took me and argue cleverly about their finer points as we scoured the same washbasins and combed the same sand, but what I’ve missed most about her is an audacity unique to beauty.

I have always been reserved and better at ease while operating under direct instruction, with clear guidelines. Enna was the sort to announce that we ought to use our kerchiefs to bind the brushes to our shoes, and that if Leyti objected, she would take the blame on my behalf, of course, as it was her idea. As though she had a choice about the allocation of responsibility, she would try mightily to shoulder it. To snatch early texts from the under-layer library and attempt incorporealism herself, though without any success; none of us have been taught the math for it. To speak flippantly to Leyti or to anyone she felt deserved it, to test the limits of the punishments they were permitted to deliver.

Ieve is much the same, though where Enna had villains to declare her enemies, Ieve has mostly shadows to fight. She is ruthless with her mother’s condition and the regularity of her opiates, her meals, and her walks, quick to scold me, yes, but also Oshre and Ajda if she feels that we are not taking care of ourselves well enough. She has twice demanded that I deliver a message to Irisim about her mother’s care, and each time he has harrumphed about it and, eventually, complied.

She is completely charming for it, though like Enna, there is no real way past her brashness. I don’t presume to think that it is all of what she is. Enna was dimmed, in time, by her circumstances.

I understand why Irisim keeps his daughter behind a door. She is a little like one of the graceful white-checkered eagles that sometimes transit the clear blue sky above the citadel: fiercer and more beautiful for her distance from the ground and its inhabitants far beneath her.

Perhaps Enna is in good health, wherever she is kept. I imagine her at ease, reading something interesting, relieved by the shelter of her confines, and in watching Ieve frown with a face that resembles the craggy beauty of Irisim’s strong jaw and balanced profile, I can see it more easily.

I am growing to like him, Irisim. He is not always an easy man to like, and I have never liked a man before, so it sneaks up on me a little. He requests a specific spectrophotometer and I wheel it over with great efficiency to the bed in question, and he pauses and notes that I am quick and it is a pleasant ember in my chest for the duration of my shift.

He asks frequently after Celia, and this is where I swallow the warmth in favor of professionalism. He is an old man surrounded by aging women, some doing so more rapidly than others. Oshre complains about my youth at first, then grudgingly concedes that she is grateful to have a woman working in the infirmary still young enough to sprint when the situation calls for it.

I take sixteen hours a day, most days. Enna is never there, but Irisim is, and the work is between the long white drapes, and I’ve always preferred to be where the work is.

On one of my rare days off, while Celia is dozing on the couch and Ieve is holding her mother’s feet up on a cushion on her lap, Ieve corners me without any physical threat at all.

“You are enjoying yourself,” she observes. “Did you always dream of fetching medicines and rubbing oil into the hands of the pregnant, or are you mooning over my father?”

I am two bites into my breakfast and surprised enough to nearly aspirate it.

“He is a good physician,” I say, wiping my mouth and downing a long drink of coffee that is nearly white with cream and sugar, which makes her laugh.

“You are mooning,” she pronounces. “Oshre never mooned, but she’d had a man she liked before she came here. I have to assume that there are more interesting men for mooning. Young and beautiful ones. Have you seen no young and beautiful men?”

“I have seen a few,” I say, and recall Jian Cillat, who has not returned to the infirmary in the intervening three months. I’ve confirmed as much with Oshre, out of earnest curiosity that has nothing to do with his eyes like clear water and the undeniable elegance of his smile.

Ieve is about as pretty, and as she is not Elevated, there is more of a charming color to her cheeks, more gold than white in her hair.

“Tell me about them,” she says, and leans back on the couch, shifting her hips to better the elevation of her mother’s feet.

“What is there to tell?” I laugh. “I have no experience with beautiful men myself. Your father occasionally compliments my work. The aspirants chase the prettiest girls, or the quietest, and the unlucky ones are those they catch. Tithed or twice-Elevated or just beautiful. If you met more men, you would be less curious about them.”

“My father is a wretch,” she tells me. “He is hoarding me away as medical equipment for the woman he loves best. Sorry. That would be my mother.”

“It’s really no concern to me who he loves,” I tell her, and finish my coffee. I have been meaning to do some reading and lounging myself, and I prefer to do it in relative silence, though Ieve’s barbs sting in a way that feels true enough to bear.

“He has loved a lot of women,” she adds. “Mother is just the last. He has given up, and is very tragic and ridiculous about it. And so short! Selasair are supposed to be much taller.”

“And you would know?” I reply, which makes her laugh, a beautiful noise to suit her face. Ieve is almost of a height to be Selasair herself.

“If you will only tell me terrible stories about men, tell me something interesting about the under-layer,” she says. “Is it always frigid? Are there lakes of garbage from the refuse in the walls? Is the stench unbearable?”

I set aside my book, which is a recent history of contagious illnesses in the vassal states far beyond the citadel, and tell her stories of childish escapades with Enna without mentioning her name. She likes the one about cleaning the bathing-chamber with footbound brushes, and has several more questions about cleaning, which she has only really done for her mother.

Eventually Celia stirs and asks what we are speaking about, and Ieve imperiously announces that I am tragically in love with Irisim, which I don’t think is quite true.

Celia laughs until she coughs, and says only that he should be so lucky before she asks Ieve for more opiates, and then Ieve is back to checking her doses and her schedules, fretting, and the moment passes before anyone can comment on the redness of my face. I am left to read my book, glancing up intermittently to watch Ieve fuss or Celia tug her daughter’s ear in castigation.

It is a better life than I deserve. It is hard to believe, sometimes, that it is mine at all.

The day it ends is more or less the same as the preceding days. It is a brisk morning in the infirmary. There has been some error in the kitchens, and a few servingwomen and one aspirant are ill. We are nearly out of dried mint to chew, though most are tolerating water-thinned fruit juice within a few hours.

It is not a pleasant smell. I’ve put on a mask smeared with perfumed oil, at Irisim’s advice, until the sickbeds are emptied of vomiting patients. Irisim has told me stories of infectious illnesses, on a few long, quiet nights spent drinking coffee as he frowns at his records and scribbles missives for his docents. I don’t think I could bear it if we had contagions here. Vomit, as a fluid, is bad enough.

Between turned stomachs and the sounds of retching are a few of the more standard sort of patient. An obstetric patient past her due date, waiting for either surgery or birth, her gown barely covering the height of her belly. Twins. It will likely kill her either way, but she has been seen many times before and rejected Irisim’s offers to remedy the situation by any means that ends the pregnancy. A young woman, barely of age for a consort’s gown at all, is in for blood and cramping that will likely mean a failed first pregnancy. Another is here to be checked at three months, seated and sketching idly with a graphite stick, occasionally requesting food.

There are horrors in the infirmary on any day, and the task is to mitigate them efficiently. To clip the record cards at the foot of a cold body together and move them permanently from the alphabetized storage-drawer of the living to the chronologized storage-drawer of the dead.

It is for research, Irisim says, on the nights that he asks me to fetch one set of records or another. The cause of death is on the topmost card, and this is how he finds patterns, like the fatality rate of twins, even in favorable cases of once-Elevated lineage and prior health.

I am with the heavily pregnant woman when it happens, rubbing almond oil into her swollen feet, trying not to imagine that she will never walk on them again.

The door swings open with the sort of force that typically promises a grave emergency, and it is Ieve, where she should not be, and then her mother, half-slumped in her arms. Celia. Her face is strangely slack. When she breathes - I think there is still breath in her - it is shallow.

“She is dying!” Ieve cries. “Where is he - she is dying, and she will finish it if he does nothing!”

We are very quick in getting her to one of the beds we keep reserved for emergencies. Quicker than I have ever seen, Irisim has a conjured silver imago above the head of his woman, his hand hovering tenderly over her cheek. It luminesces brightest where the blood sits. There is a brilliant patch, four centimeters across and growing, at the base of her brain.

Ieve can’t control her volume as she tells me that her mother couldn’t stomach the pills for her headache, worse than usual, and could hardly keep down the water she tried to give them with. She took a nap, her legs up as Ieve read, until a servingwoman came for Ajda to enquire about staffing, given the busy morning in the infirmary. At the door opening, Celia did not wake. At Ieve’s voice, she did not stir.

By the volume of the blood and the rate at which the hemorrhage worsens, it must have started before she fell asleep. Irisim does not say this to Ieve.

It is Ieve who voices it aloud. “She was dying? I held her feet up as she died?”

“She is not yet dead,” Irisim says dully.

“For hours!” Ieve cries, her lovely face flushed pink, splotched and already swollen, though her tears have hardly started. “You would not train me, father, if you had trained me, if I had known - I could not have known, and she was dying - she was dying as I held her - ”

Her words dissolve to something like a child’s wail. Celia is greying on the bed, the projection of her brain changing, second by second.

“Fix it, if you are so powerful! She is young, she has a line twice-Elevated, do something for your woman, if you love her! If there was ever any point to having her! Protect her?”

“How did you leave the tower?” he asks, without inflection. “Meloe. Please bring my daughter home before she - ”

“You did this to her!” Ieve shouts. “Do not dismiss me! You did this to her when you made me, for nothing and you would watch her die and call yourself a good man - ”

“I call myself nothing of the sort,” Irisim says curtly. “Meloe.”

I turn away from Celia’s bedside and offer Ieve a hand. “Let me walk you back,” I suggest, knowing, as I do, that there is no right way to say this, no clever trick of language that will do anything for her anger.

She slaps my hand away with force that spills tears down her face. “You have no right. I will see my mother’s treatment done. She will not die alone with her killer.”

“Do not strike her,” Irisim cautions her, and Ieve laughs in a timbre bordering on hysterical.

“Do not strike her replacement? Your diligent little mouse of a woman? I should not strike her? You should not have taken her! You should not have inflicted yourself on any consort, she believed that you loved her!”

It is a very full infirmary in which to say such things so loudly. Irisim sees it with me, I think, despite the dying woman and the daughter mourning her already. There is no nervous tissue functioning in me to register the pain of what she says. That will come later. Celia is drooping further, breathing irregularly and with a rasp that rhymes with a dozen deaths I’ve recorded in three months, and the infirmary is silent.

This is when the door scrapes open again. This is also when the very pregnant woman’s water breaks. It is as though the world has ended.

High Councilmaster Knisad ducks beneath the doorframe and pushes aside one of the gauzy white curtains. “I have heard that there was an incident in the under-layer,” he announces.

Ieve rounds on the wrong man with fury in her eyes.

The High Councilmaster pauses before he speaks again, and Irisim rises from Celia’s bedside, where he has cornered himself thoroughly. My breath catches in my throat. It is all wrong, and I am a spectator to it, entirely beneath the situation. When I act, it is not on impulse. I am only remembering Enna, her paralysis, her fear. Ieve has never learned to avert her eyes and hold her tongue. Now she has to, and she cannot.

I step in front of her. Tall, yes, but plain, and no man likes to look at me for longer than he would any other woman.

“High Councilmaster,” I say, willing the tremor from my voice. “Let me show you to the aspirant who took sick. This is a family matter.”

It is deferent, and it is formally correct, and it is my job. It is all I have.

It is not enough. Ieve looks at me askance as High Councilmaster Knisad murmurs to himself, a family matter, and the woman whose two twins have come cries out for Irisim.

“You must attend to your patient,” Knisad tells Irisim. “Though I am curious. This woman wears the wrong gown.”

“This woman?” Ieve demands, voice still thick with tears. “Before my mother’s deathbed, this is what a man of the citadel has to say?”

“Ieve,” Irisim says softly, a final time. “Please go with Meloe.”

“You will leave her?” she presses, looking from one bed to the other as the water of birth, stained already with blood, saturates the laboring woman’s linen sheets. “I will not.”

“You have not taught your daughter very well, old friend,” Knisad observes, and I grit my teeth for one last effort.

“I think you misapprehend the situation, High Councilmaster,” I say. “She is only a friend of mine, here to console me as my gowned sister passes.”

That men do not see me has protected me for over two decades. Now it damns Ieve, who must begin to see the gravity of the situation, even as her mother’s corpse works for breath. She begins to fall behind me, as though to follow me out, but I am no shield at all, because I do not exist. He reaches past me and takes her by the chin with a hand that makes even Ieve look small.

“You have his jaw. Where did the temper come from?”

She bites him.

Without hesitation, he withdraws his hand sharply and turns it in the air, and with an overpowering scent of ozone, half of Ieve’s face is aflame. It comes and goes in a cold silver flare of energy, and by the time I have drawn up my skirt to try to put it out, the damage is done, deep as the fat-pad of her perfect cheek. A moment’s delayed reaction, then Ieve screams in earnest.

This is how it works in the citadel. A damaged woman belongs to the one who damaged her. In the under-layer, there was some undoing what harm a boy could inflict before the furnace. There was the infirmary, and whatever the healing applications of incorporeal magic could accomplish.

The woman with her twins dies. One of the twins is taken from her unmoving. The other responds to Irisim’s efforts to revive it, after some time. It is a girl. At this point, the high councilmaster is gone, and Ieve with him, by the collar of her gown. There is another councilmaster who oversees the making of contracts. I imagine that is where he has gone.

It is less than an hour, and Celia, too, is dead. Her daughter is gone. There is a good deal of childbed blood on Irisim’s robes, and the infant is squalling in my arms, for lack of a better place to put her.

I think it would be better if she had not been born a girl, or perhaps if she had died before she had to live as one.

Irisim runs a cleansing sheen of incorporeal power over his hands, which burns away the residue of a woman’s life. He looks to me. I have almost quieted the infant.

“We must see about discharging some of these beds,” he says, and we do, with sheets drawn over the two unmoving bodies, their final record-cards at their feet.

I cannot bear the silence of the tower. There is only one reprieve, and I can hardly bear the infirmary, either, but it is marginally better, once my tears are spent and my pain is metabolized to restlessness. I could have done no more. I did all I could have. It was worth nothing. That is hard to sit with, so I do not sit.

Irisim speaks as little as I do, as we work. He keeps his office door closed, and when the night’s work is done, I sit in one of the patient chairs and watch the thin layer of clouds, reflecting the citadel’s luminescence, shift through the window. One night, he gives me bandages and tells me to wrap my legs. This helps a little with the swelling and with the ache of too long spent on my feet. I suppose he can see it well enough through the fabric of my gown.

On the day itself, I was too hollowed out to put the records of the dead women where they belonged. When I tire of gazing out the window, I go to right my mistake, and pause. The mother to the dead and living twin was named Melis. Her record sits next to mine. Out of morbid curiosity, I leaf through the few cards under my name, knowing that Irisim will not be out to scold me for my nosiness. It is more or less as I remember, though now I know the words for the device he used to target the pigments of bacteria in my flesh, and what cellulitis means.

Melis and Celia are not for the living any longer. I put away my own record and take out the drawer of dead women, trying to remember which of them was first. Chronology is important. I flip back through the past few women I have marked dead, and the causes, then further, to see Celia’s hand. She did not take any of my records, but she did write out the death of Sanci, by untreated systemic infection, and Niean, by childbirth, and Bela, by childbirth, and Enna. By childbirth.

I turn the tidy, pinned stack of cards over in my hand a dozen times before my vision is no longer too blurred to read it, and even then, there is still a stinging pressure in my ears. There is the time she tore a strip from her scalp, in playing keep-away with another girl and a piece of corroded metal from the bathing-chamber as I begged them both to stop. It required cautery. She visited often, it seems, for trouble with bleeding and pain, even before the day I brought her to the infirmary to have the child taken out of her. Then there are three more visits, and I can hardly read these, because they tell the story, in words I have only recently learned, of a body not made to bear safely, made to bear. Then of hemorrhage and of death, and an infant too small to survive the attempted removal.

She has been dead for years.

I put the cards back in order and go to Irisim to tell him I will need his other women to take my post for a day or two. His office smells of alcohol, and he is not quick in replying. I do not wait for an answer before I leave.

For several days, I hardly leave my blankets. There is a fine assortment of beds throughout the tower, and I stay in one, mostly unaccosted, and try to think of nothing. Irisim’s other consorts, older and less vigorous though they may be, owe me a few days’ coverage after my months near constantly absorbing the duty, and I accept the reciprocation without comment.

It seems that I have two choices: to work, or to remain in the tower. Irisim has lectured all of us at some length about keeping the door locked, when we leave for the infirmary, the heavy key remaining around our neck until we return. It was not only me who became lax - I inherited a certain laxity from the rest of the household - but the fact stands that if Ieve had not been able to leave, she would still be safe, unburned, unkept in her child’s gown, and I was the woman who left without locking the door.

I did not even think about it. I had done it so many times. Now I lay on the softest mattress I have ever felt, alone and comfortable beyond anything I might have reckoned on in the under-layer, and I think that the next time Irisim will see his daughter, she will already be close to death. I know so little about these men and their politics. At least everything I valued was comfortably beneath them, in the under-layer, though I know, in thinking it, that this is not quite true.

Enna was always destined for a tower like this one. I hope the man who killed her did not burn her. I hope her bed was comfortable as this one, and the other consorts in her keeper’s care were kind to her.

It is a very long time to spend pitying myself. I eat very little and only really leave the level on which I have housed myself to wash and return to bed.

In the end, it does not even amount to two choices. One way or another, a woman leaves by way of the infirmary. I have the privilege of work. Most go to vomit or to bleed.

I wait in the sitting-room for Ajda to return, once I’ve made my decision, dressed and bound up my hair for it. She is greying and made even less vibrant of countenance by work and grief, returning well into the citadel’s gleaming night.

“I will go to him next,” I say, and put out my hand for the key.

It is another quiet night in the infirmary, cloudless through the windows, the sky no less bright-cast by the citadel’s light for it. Irisim rises when he hears the door. His chair scrapes, and he leans out of his office.

“Come in,” he says, for the first time in quite a while, and I do as he bids. “It has not been easy without you.”

“Another young consort who reads might make the schedule more manageable,” I suggest. Irisim looks up at me over his spectacles, seated, now, and probing without words.

“Counsel me on the addition of any woman you would like,” he says. “You came very highly recommended by your dormitory head.”

“Leyti?” I ask, surprise putting me off the balance I intended to keep.

“It might have been that. I find it hard to remember all of your names,” he sighs. “If she is not dying or mine, it is not really so important, is it?”

I can’t imagine Leyti having a good word to say about anyone.

“Diligent,” he adds. “Liked by the other women. Wholly without conflicts. Happy and well at peace.”

“Certainly,” I agree numbly. “At the time.”

“So if you have a recommendation of your own, I would take it,” he continues. “If you have a friend you would like kept. I understand that you have been lonely. That, I think, is unavoidable without the addition of more company.”

“I would not wish this on any woman I would call my friend,” I say. The sheer audacity of the offer is accompanied by a taste too sour to swallow it, let alone to digest.

“That is your right,” he says, very tired, by his voice. I suppose it has been a few weeks to exhaust even a man who does not sleep. “But know that the only way to keep a woman safe is to keep her as a consort.”

“Is it all a project of safety, then?” I ask.

“It is what is right. In the space that is mine, my way can surmount the way of the citadel. Not forever, but for long enough. Sometimes.”

He goes quiet, hunched at his desk, not looking at me. I have always been adept at letting a silence lie, and I do it now, waiting with my own thoughts safely distant from my tongue.

“He has done it before,” Irisim says. “I see no means to settle any account with him, if that is what you would see me do. To kill him would not be enough, and I could not accomplish it, anyway. He is much my better. We are both old, but age has been worse for me, I think.”

“Why take any women at all, then?” I press.

“Base selfishness, I suppose,” he replies, unsmiling as he turns to face me. “You are better for conversation than most men.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help Ieve,” I say, which I have been meaning to say for some time now, and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry I didn’t lock her in correctly. I would not have wished it on her.”

“The fault is mine,” he says. “I should have instructed her better. You risked much in speaking for her.”

It resolves nothing. The risk is over because Ieve is gone, and there is no relitigating that day. Irisim has nothing left for the High Councilmaster to covet. He might punish him through me or Ajda or Oshre, if we were in the vicinity and worth his notice, but the situation seems vanishingly unlikely.

Enna is dead, and Celia is dead, and Ieve will be dead soon enough. There is no saving any of them. Not by my hand, and evidently not by his. It is worse, in some ways, knowing that he truly must have tried. Enna would have trusted him. She might have imagined she had a chance.

“I would restock the medication cabinet,” I say, standing. “We are no doubt almost out of mint. It’s a season for uncontrollable vomiting.”

“Do not go yet,” he replies. “There is no urgency. Sit with me a while.”

It is an easy command to follow. Irisim does not glow independently, as some Selasair with particularly strong patrilines do, but he shapes an incorporeal light and places it atop a cabinet, then continues with his review of charts and missives as I find the book I left here last, my page still marked, and read with him in companionable silence.

It is not love, really, or even mooning. I resume my long shifts, to the relief of Irisim’s remaining women, and, seemingly, to his relief as well. I help deliver a healthy son to a woman who is excited to hold him, and dose salicylate for headaches and the pains of work in servingwomen, and massage painful hands and feet as women tell me of their lives and what petty wants we are all permitted.

I am good at this work, even having been hollowed out by it. In terms of contemplation, I think mostly of the patently absurd premise that Leyti recommended me for anything but a whipping. I take a measure of each woman whose card I write, wondering if she would be safer with Irisim, then whether even broaching the subject would be taken as a threat or an offer impossible to refuse.

While I have not quite forgiven him, I enjoy the quiet intervals in his office, when the night’s lull arrives. I have not quite lost the tendency to jump, a little, when the infirmary door opens quickly, invariably to a body in arms or in lurchingly poor straits.

I have finished the records of the last patient, a servingwoman more of age to be called a girl, blistered to her elbows from an accident in the kitchens. She is not to work for four days while the wounds heal, wrapped and poulticed after Irisim judged them not to need cautery. It has been a satisfying enough day in a series of days that have sufficed.

The door scrapes at the luminous white flooring before I reach Irisim’s office, thinking of the book I have been reading and the clever comment about the ergonomics of kitchenwork I have been meaning to make.

I freeze in place. At first, I think that the High Councilmaster’s son has come back, at last, for more medications or to report that his poor consort has overdosed on them. I see his face and know him by the particular intensity of his glow.

Then I smell his burning flesh, and see that his chest is open beneath flame-mangled robes. I have only encountered its like once before, when an aspirant of strong patriline made an egregious error with his incorporeal practica in the training room. There was a dusty tang, like a pot heated too quickly, in the space for the better part of the week.

I can see the ragged edges of his lungs as they fail to entirely fill. His heart, which is blindingly bright, as painful to look at as would be the sun.

He is half-draped over the shoulder of a remarkably tall woman, whom I mistake, for a moment, for Ieve. She is almost so beautiful, but her glow is brighter and her face is harsher, her hair straight and white-gold, draped to her waist despite dishevelment that matches her robes, a Selasair’s robes, donned hastily, missing the band around the waist.

She looks to me, her eyes grey-dark, and addresses me directly. “You must save him. Please. He is dying.”

“I will fetch Irisim,” I say, all other concerns thoroughly out of my mind, which leaves only the logistics. “Put him to a bed, please, I don’t think I can lift a Selasair.”

Hanging from her shoulder, Jian Cillat gurgles weakly.

“Councilmaster!” I call, trying to communicate with my tone that we are in a great deal of trouble. “You have a patient, please - come quickly!”

He is trying to speak before Irisim and I have finished doing what can be done for his lungs. They have been cauterized by a burn of incredible intensity, the proteins denatured rather than the meat cooked, and Irisim sends me for tool after tool, eventually settling on a scalpel to remove a wedge-shaped piece of each lung in turn, following each cut with his incorporeal cautery to seal the tissue.

“Ali,” he says, when he has breath, and Irisim shushes him.

“He is healing too quickly,” he mutters, in part to himself, in part to me. “The heart is tamponaded with scar. It builds as I watch. Fetch a heavier scalpel.”

I fetch them all, lay them out quickly before him for his sterilizing field of silver light. Then he begins to score the skim of gnarled scar tissue thickening rapidly around the luminous heart. I think it must be better for him, to be part-blinded already. My eyes water at the brilliance of it, even when I close them.

“Note the time and practice,” Irisim tells me. “I will be held to account for it. The scar accumulates at a quarter-millimeter, second by second. I will try to cauterize it. Even a great Selasair needs blood, and he will die if he cannot move it.”

Jian gurgles more. This time, I shush him, and Irisim nods in approval as I jot notes on one of the cards that belongs at the foot of a woman’s bed.

“Keep him still, if you can,” he adds.

It would be meaningless, to touch such a man and expect any force in my body to affect his. I try anyway, putting my hands on his bared shoulders, and he jerks away, and Irisim curses before he makes another cut.

“Ali,” Jian says again.

I know the name. It was much discussed in the caverns, as it is often the prerogative of bored women to discuss a beautiful and interesting man. He had a man, ever in his company. I do not recall the name, but I know this was how Jian called him, uncaring of who heard it.

I look back to the woman who brought him, seated stiffly, trembling, her own robes burned at the wrist. She has made no effort to fix the skew of her hair and clothing. He is trying to lift his head to look at her. Irisim follows the line of my gaze and perhaps my logic, settling on the same conclusion.

“Tell me what has happened,” he says brusquely to the woman-who-cannot-be-a-woman. “And then you must leave. You have helped him enough.”

“It was an accident,” she says softly, and lifts her wrists. A mangled bracelet of silver hangs from each of them. “It was not supposed to be possible.”

“You give a poor history,” Irisim judges curtly. “Has his father - ”

“I burned him,” she says. “His father has done nothing.”

Some of the tension goes out of Irisim’s posture.

“Then it is a lovers’ quarrel. Possible or not, it has happened, and I will handle it. Go back to his tower if you would be safe. I can protect no one from his father, but his wards might - ”

“I will not go back,” the woman insists. “I will not be kept. Is there nowhere else for me to go? Call on Knisad and let him finish what he started if that tower is all there is for me.”

Jian says her name again, and tries to shake away when I put a hand on him to remind him not to move. Selasair blood is a dull red, sheened silver, slow in its movements and slightly viscous. He is losing more of it.

“I will not go back,” she says again, as Irisim’s brow furrows and the scar around Jian’s heart deepens. “But it is my right to duel, now, is it not?”

Jian laughs wetly, shallowly, and I put my hands under his head, trying to correct his airway, as Irisim has taught me.

“Yes,” Jian breathes. I feel his larynx work to make the sounds. “It is your right.”

“Then I will have it,” the woman insists. “My honor is my right. He cannot keep me.”

The dying Selasair beneath my hands is trying to sit up. I try to keep him down, but my estimation of my relative strength was fair. I can do nothing.

“Irisim,” I say. “The scarring.”

I feel the weakness of his pulse through my points of attempted restraint.

“Take her to Councilmaster Brilen,” Irisim finally judges. “He may decide which enemies he wishes to make tonight. It is all that will help. I will save this life if I can.”

I release Jian’s shoulders entirely, for what little it mattered, and take a few dizzy steps away. I do not know how to address her. She is standing, now, taller than Irisim, her power humming audibly, her eyes white all the way around.

“Will you walk with me?” I ask her, from a distance that does not feel quite as safe as I might like.

She hesitates, then dips her head. It is a strange gesture to receive from a Selasair, and I look away rather than dwell on it. The door is heavy and I am unsteady on my feet. This is what seems to decide it; she moves a step towards the operative bed, as though it is all her balance will allow, then turns to get the door for me.

If I had not seen so much, over the past few weeks, the ridiculousness of it might be too much to bear. I might laugh aloud at a creature of such power as to open the chest of the greatest Selasair ever born. It would be stupid of me, but I really might have done it, watching her step aside as though inviting a Councilmaster rather than a spent, shaking woman out into the hall.

Instead, I lead her out, and do not even startle when the door closes, leaving the two of us alone in the cloisters. I do not know the way to any particular councilmaster’s tower, save Irisim’s, but they are all in the same direction, and I begin to walk it without checking that she follows.

She does, though. She follows me with near-silent steps, keeping cautious pace with legs half again as long as mine and the high councilmaster’s son’s blood cooling on her sleeves, and I am almost too focused on my task to be afraid.

Almost, but not quite.

I make a wrong turn. She must not know it, or does not have the voice to correct me. She follows either way, and does not protest when I have to double back, or when I pause in trying to triangulate my location.

“It is to the left,” she says, when I suppose I have stood in dazed contemplation for too long.

“Thank you,” I say, and begin again. “He is - your father, Councilmaster Brilen?”

“In a sense,” she replies darkly.

“He will help you,” I suggest, wanting to keep the tone of my voice, and the conversation with it, light.

She says nothing to that. A moment later, when I pause to glance out over a courtyard full of covered statues, meant for training, which I mistake briefly for men, she stops as well.

“I should have let him die,” she says, so softly that I hardly hear it.

“Oh, no,” I say, alarmed. “It was better than you brought him. You must know how his father prizes his son. He will have to live, if you are to be forgiven.”

“I do not want forgiveness,” she says. “I want him to be dead.”

I can’t decide if she means it. When I hazard a glance up to her lovely, luminous face, there is no animation to it at all. I am not so adept at hiding my own expression.

“I would not intend to frighten you,” she adds, and steps another pace away. Cautious as her movements are, I think she must not be accustomed to the length of her legs, and she has the coltish newness to her of all young Selasair.

None of this makes her any less frightening.

“Is it so terrible to be kept?” I ask stiltedly. Usually I am so good at staying silent. I suppose I have been too silent for too long. “All women are kept.”

“Is that what it is?” she asks, her voice very soft, conspicuously turned away from me.

“We are kept,” I say, and look back to her hands, which fold, evidently in the sort of pain that pairs the movement with an involuntary shudder, to fists and back again. “And we are powerless.”

“That cannot be all of it,” she says.

“There are also special ways to suffer and die,” I tell her. “But that is all, I think.”

She exhales heavily, almost with humor. “I must not keep you out here. I would face him now. It must be strange for you to walk with a Selasair so. You do not need to escort me all the way.”

Irisim bid me, more or less directly, to do precisely that. I start down the hall again, past the door that would take me home, and instead pause at each tower-entry before we reach the second-to-last, the tower beside what must belong to High Councilmaster Knisad.

She stops at the door, gathers herself, and knocks.

A gowned consort answers first, starts briefly, and takes several over-quick steps back. She begs a moment to fetch her keeper, and as I watch, the woman-Selasair almost droops. It does nothing for her height. I glance up and down the hall, grateful for the hour. It is a quiet part of the citadel, where exposure is less of a concern.

“You may go,” she tells me, in a voice that wavers. “I am where I must be.”

I regret it, the relief at being dismissed. Whatever has happened to make her what she is, I do not want to know the consequences. To be a woman with power makes her different from what I am, and I know myself to be particularly powerless, even now, relative to any man who might emerge and see a face and shape and incorporeal magic that defies category. Relative to her. Relative to almost anyone.

I have had enough of trying and failing. Eventually my streak of luck may break and I may well be a casualty of intervention or of witness.

Not tonight. Tonight I hurry away, my key bouncing painfully against my chest, and when the great door finally opens again, I am already turning the corner, whatever consequences such a woman faces in her father’s home hidden from my view.

Irisim is not a miracle-worker. Jian’s ribcage is still open, still a tangle of growing scar, but upon my return, my keeper is no longer curt with suppressed panic. He has an imago hovering over the mangled ribcage and diminished lungs and is frowning at it as I enter.

“It will hold?” Jian asks, voice still weak and thin with pain.

“It seems to hold,” Irisim agrees. I squint at the imago, which has a strange quality around the heart, something opaque and vaguely shaped like the organ, but unmoving. At a guess, he has put a cast of silver inside his chest, under the worst of the developing scar, to keep the shape of the heart and the aorta and the other points where the blood must move freely.

It is not the sort of thing that a human’s body could survive, but neither was the initial injury. I will have to ask him about it later.

“She is with her father,” I tell Irisim, when he turns his attention to me.

Jian makes a sound, low in his chest, which turns to cough. Irisim watches the imago for a second; the spasming of his diaphragm does not displace whatever apparatus he has inserted.

“I will need to inform Knisad,” he says. “Wrap his wounds with saltwater dressings and fetch me if his condition changes.”

I am left to a task that is familiar, at least, though patients with deep burns are almost invariably consorts, and these are deeper than any I’ve ever seen before. His ribs themselves are deformed by the fire, blistered and rendered slightly concave. When he breathes, it is with great effort, but the growth of scar has visibly slowed, and there is no great change as I assemble the supplies.

The sluggish bleeding has stopped. I press my lips together, trying to think of the best way to begin without thinking in too much depth of the origin of the wound. Slow as it is, the progression of scar, like sunlight crawling across the room as afternoon slants its angle, is unerring. His ribs are pink and inflamed-looking at the edges, where previously I might have called them only mangled bone.

“Would it help if I sat up?” he offers mildly. “I could, with help.”

“There’s no need,” I say quickly, then dip my head. “Sir. I apologize, I’m only thinking of future dressing changes and their efficiency.”

“Sir.” He exhales, quickly as a laugh would come. “I am not my father. No infirmary-woman needs to fear me.”

My faculty of silence, thankfully, has returned to me. I dip my head again in acknowledgment and begin the bandaging from the lowest part of the wound, where he will likely move the least. Strip by strip, I wet the bandagecloth and layer it neatly, to keep the expanse of the injury moist.

I have no sense of whether it will help a Selasair, though they drink - they need fluids, as humans do. For women with a burn to the face or the breast, it is usually a relief to have something cool on it. He does not react at all.

“Did he accept it?” he asks. I look up from my task, but my hands keep working. “Brilen.”

“I would not know, sir,” I say, and he sighs. It is a pained noise, by physicality and the emotion it conveys.

“I did not tell him for her,” he says, cut-glass gaze still cast up towards the ceiling. “Perhaps I should have. I hope he will not be too upset. It is unsettling to find that you have not known a person.”

I say nothing, which does not seem to trouble him. Only soak and layer more bandages in their neat array.

“It will be a lovers’ spat, for the record,” he tells the ceiling more than me. “If Brilen takes it well, she will be fine. My father is afraid of him. You saw her try to call a duel. If she meant it, it would be my right to choose the medium, incorporealism or steel. Choosing incorporealism, of course, I could not lose. She only surprised me, the once. It will not happen again. But Brilen would choose steel, if father dared to invoke such a thing, and father could not best his councilmaster for war in that arena.”

It is too much talking on his part. He dissolves into a series of agonizing coughs, dislodging some of the bandaging. I frown at it, thinking I might cut longer strands, as he labors in his breathing.

“Is salted water not supposed to hurt wounds? It does not hurt much,” he continues hoarsely.

“I would think it better not to talk,” I tell him, and he laughs, to the extent that his constricted and half-amputated lungs will allow it.

“What does it matter if I talk? You can do nothing with it. I am bored, and it hurts a great deal no matter what I do. You could distract me.”

He smiles to himself at that.

“It is very little salt,” I say stiffly. “Only about as much as is in the blood.”

I wonder, as I say it, if the quantity I’ve learned and the solution I’ve made so many times before might be off for what amounts to another species.

“So the cells maintain tonicity. Interesting. I’ve never thought about it, that the pain would be osmotic. You know, I’ve never been badly injured before? I am not enjoying it very much.”

His gaze flicks over to me expectantly, waiting for me to laugh. I do not, and he sighs. I am almost finished with the revised bandaging. The strips of it, even soaked, are white as his skin, though not so luminous. If I squint, my work disappears into the shape of his chest, which used to be proportioned as a textbook-figure. As though he is only wearing a strangely wefted garment, and not one slipped silver-cast of his heart away from death.

I stand, bow my head, and go to wash my hands. The risk to his life, I suspect, is mostly abated.

“Miss,” he calls politely, and I turn, a few steps into my bid to finally retreat to the relative safety and normalcy of Irisim’s office. “She did not say anything to you, did she?”

“We did not speak at length,” I say, which is mostly true.

“I rescued her,” he says, and coughs. “From father. I drew a sword on my father for her. She will forgive me, whatever error I’ve made in the months since.”

He has not seen the depth and nature of the burns so clearly as I have, and he did not hear the certainty in that woman’s voice, that she ought to have killed him.

“So do not worry on it,” he adds, and coughs again. “Brilen - is sentimental. She fears what he will think of her without much reason. He is a man who likes women. She will be fine, and she will be back as soon as she is tired of designing schematics she can’t make herself.”

“Surely, sir,” I say, and slip into the office, my heart quick in my chest at the lie.

He is as good as almost any of them. More beautiful by a measure than the rest of a citadel of men made beautiful by burning. I was right to see it in the under-layer, and the sense of it persists, even now.

It would be terrifying, to be seen by him.

Irisim is frowning at a letter, his glasses precariously low on the bridge of his nose.

“It is done,” I say. “He is as well as I can make him.”

“Then I can delay no longer. Make a permanent record of your work. Knisad will want to see that it was all done properly,” he says, and offers me a proper pen and inkwell, the paper log I kept as he first worked, annotated now with the installation of the silver cast and cautery afterward, and a half-empty bottle of grain alcohol.

“You don’t mean it,” I say, lifting the bottle.

Irisim folds his letter and tucks it in his robes, then presses up his golden spectacles, as though he needs them to regard me properly.

“I do,” he says. “It is a good night for drinking. Do not leave my office for anything you hear.”

I take my usual seat, in a shadowed corner half-concealed by stacks of records, missives, charts, and policy-books. I do not drink, though it could not make me more useless in the matters of great and powerful men than I already am. I can’t yet bear the thought of numbing myself to what is awful; there is still, even now, satisfaction in having bandaged the wound well, and I would forfeit all of that if I tried to excise the terror.

A woman who has power should not be a woman at all. But he kept her as one. I do not know how to square it. A woman gets a card in my records, alive by alphabet, dead by date, and the woman I led to Councilmaster Brilen’s tower will not die a woman’s death. She is Selasair. They will burn her in the furnace to a trail of thin white smoke, not in one of the rubbish-chambers, cooked to ash-ink like refuse.

I make my notes meticulously and correctly, as I always do. And when I hear the door to the infirmary open and the shouting begins, I feel very grateful, for the night, to be the sort of woman no one notices.

“He is not usually in my infirmary so much,” Irisim says shortly, when he finally returns. The early colors of dawn are in the sky through the high windows, and then the door is closed.

“Which one?” I ask, my voice rough with hours of disuse.

“Knisad. Selasair in general. This was always a place for human frailty, but there are no more human aspirants, and now it is a place for women.”

He opens the drawer that ought to hold the alcohol, frowns, then turns to see that I am holding it, offering it to him. A heavy exhale, and he takes it.

“It has been a strange few weeks,” I say. “Could I ask that you heat some coffee for me?”

He is halfway into his first drink, stops, and shakes his head, reaching instead for the carafe of black stimulant drink. “I did not think. Forgive me. Would you not prefer to go to your bed?”

“I’ll take the coffee,” I say. I have had more time than I reckoned on to think, in the hours of raised voices and palpable incorporeal energy, even securely in the office. “I would speak to you a little, if it would not be too much trouble to hear me.”

Irisim passes me the steaming cup, finishes his own, and turns it in his hand a moment. “It is no trouble. On a relative scale, at any rate.”

I join him in laughing quietly at this. He does not make a show of being funny, but he can be, on the worse nights.

“Don’t take another woman,” I say. “I would like to be the last. You offered a favor. That is the favor I want.”

“It will be a burden to you,” he says, his glasses shifting with the immediacy of his frown. “My other women are aging. They are not so inclined to work as they were.”

“Can a Selasair leave the citadel?” I ask, though I know the answer. He sends his men away to learn. It must be possible.

“For assignment. Or retirement,” he says.

“Oshre is still perfectly capable,” I tell him. “Ajda, too. They can still carry what I can’t. The rest are too old to do what you need, but you’re also old, Councilmaster. I would ask that you retire when I am no longer enough for you.”

“It is a lot for a woman to ask,” he mutters, and pours another drink.

“You offered me another woman’s life at my discretion,” I reply. “Can I have my own? I would like to go somewhere with you. To see if it is all like this.”

He does not answer for a while, but leans back in his seat. For a man who does not sleep, both his countenance and demeanor evoke exhaustion quite profoundly. If I stood, I think I would feel it too.

The silence is companionable enough. I sip my coffee without the sugar he has forgotten, and do not ask for it. The taste has grown on me enough to bear it.

“I will not have another child,” he finally says. “Will it satisfy you, to live without one as my consorts age and die around you?”

“I’ve never wanted a child,” I say.

“I am not an easy man to live with,” he tells me. “And I cannot promise you any great love. You are very useful, Meloe, but you are not…”

He trails off.

“I’ve never wanted a man’s love, either,” I tell him, and find that this, too, I mean. I have seen what that looks like in fevered glass-clear eyes tonight, and I do not want it in the slightest. “Only good work. The sort worth doing.”

“You should be more guarded with your life,” he says, after a long time staring into the dregs of his cup. “It is worth more than the ease with which you offer it.”

“What life?” I ask.

He has nothing to say to this. I shift my chair over a quarter-meter. It is not a large office, and this puts me close enough to lean my head against his shoulder, more exhausted than I ought to be, by the work I have completed, which is not much at all.

A moment of stiffness, and he allows it, reaches over and puts a hand on my shoulder.

“You are too young to think as much,” he says. “It is not so bad as all that.”

“Convince me, then,” I say. “You will have many years to do it.”

His hand moves soothingly on my shoulder, the affectation of a body that does not give comfort often. I lean into it and say nothing more.

Outside, the infirmary door opens to the first patient of the morning. There are dressings to be changed on a man’s mutilated chest. A stack of record-cards holds my name among six hundred others, many of which bear my signature. There will be linens to clean, patients to comfort, and floors to sweep of bandage-scraps.

I rise from my seat, dip my head politely to my keeper, and go to do my duty.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had while reading novels with my friends has involved what I might term live-reading, sharing what we think in a play-by-play as we go.

“No,” my friend says. “Two dragons?”

“Both of them are the most special dragons, too,” I tell them. “Such a great power fantasy but actually a little gut-wrenching to cop to it, you know? I want two dragons. And a pony, but it’s the fastest pony in the world, and it loves only me, and I’m a mermaid who can control water with my emotions, and my eyes change color when I’m sad, so you know when to console me. Pure id.”

“I would be more interested in what my special dragons said, is all, if I had two special dragons,” they say, and turn the page. “Look, she’s already moved on.”

This is fun and social book-reading behavior. It is not particularly serious criticism of the hit romantasy novel Fourth Wing; it isn’t even a very deep or serious reading of the novel-being-read, because we are enjoying it more as a shared social experience than a literary one. It is fun, and thirty pages later I might grudgingly admit that, alright, she’s curious about the dragons now. (she was not, but imagine). Because of the light, friendly atmosphere of reading together, we might observe this misapprehension, note the surprise and gratification of realizing the thread of the main character’s scholarly personality had not, in fact, been dropped, and continue.

It’s fairly evident why this style of commentary has become so common in both Substack essays and Youtube-hosted video essays. It’s fun, it feels like chatting about a lame-or-awesome book with your best friend, and from the supply side, it invites an element of parasociality that keeps you clicking on the next video.

You have probably seen some variant of this yourself.

YOUTUBER, READING ALOUD: So then the main character, Jess, remember, she thinks, “I can’t risk the elevator. There’s too much smoke already in the penthouse, even so far above the fire.”

A pause, as YOUTUBER looks directly at the camera.

YOUTUBER, SETTING DOWN THE MUCH-ANNOTATED BOOK: Uh, okay, but like - why can’t she take the elevator? Because of the smoke? It just doesn’t logically follow. I don’t think that stops elevators, and I thought we just established that her leg is broken? But it’s just peppered in here, I guess, so she can struggle down the stairs. Okayyyyy.

This is a contemporary sort of example, though you can imagine this sort of concept-by-concept or line-by-line objection is even easier and more tempting as a fallback in speculative fiction. She mentions that she’s excited to have a dragon, but never in the whole chapter mentions feeding one! How am I supposed to give a shit if I don’t know the exact goat-based caloric needs and relative economic expenditures of dragon husbandry right now in this sentence about an acquisitive little girl with an overindulgent dragon-acquiring father?

I choose a contemporary example, however, because I find it in some ways even more of an irritating critical stretch to watch or read. See also: it’s chapter two, but it’s pretty clear this living situation sucks, why doesn’t she just move out? Her job is obviously abusive at first blush, why doesn’t she quit her job? Her girlfriend can’t pay rent or remember to clean the lint trap and that’s the main aspect of the relationship being dramatized in the first few scenes, so why doesn’t she leave that loser, if she’s so smart and driven and ambitious? What’s going on, he complains about his wife for three pages straight and then kisses her and takes the baby carrier and he’s acting like the perfect husband again? Why doesn’t she just stay quiet and wait in the cornfield until her ex has stopped looking instead of trying to make a break for it?

I would never pretend that every book has an answer to these questions, inevitably raised as the story goes. Perhaps, in the building-on-fire excerpt, the author really just wanted to dramatize the escape, and the inferno on the seventh floor, which they imagine in their head, will actually never be mentioned in the text. Perhaps the sweet waitress protagonist doesn’t leave her loser boyfriend for absolutely no reason the text ever offers; they both dislike each other, they clearly have parents and a social life that would accommodate breaking a demonstrably shitty lease and moving in with their family for a month, the option always looms, is even gestured at, narratively, but never gets explored because… reasons.

Waitress crashes on her friend’s couch. Friend offers her the couch for a month to figure things out after the fight with Boyfriend. Waitress declines because she loves Boyfriend. Narrative continues with no demonstrated evidence that Waitress - fun-loving, sweet, not particularly self-sacrificing, ambitious, desirable - loves Boyfriend, who continues to exasperate her and be a weight around her neck. These are the sort of novels, movies, plays, that make one ask aloud, both throughout the art and afterwards, why the fuck is X happening? It’s really hard to tell!

The alternative is baked into the example. Waitress is shown to be lonely, irritated at Boyfriend but with no one else to talk to, smooth and charming at her job but fundamentally awkward in non-transactional social situations. We see her take off her uniform and collapse with her head on Boyfriend’s shoulder while he plays COD, and she basks in the glow of the television and the sound of him calling some teenager slurs because it’s the first time all day no one has been asking her for anything. Waitress goes to make Boyfriend a plate of pizza rolls, unprompted, and he chews a few and tells her she cooked them too long and all the filling is spilling out, and we can almost see in either her demeanor or her internal monologue that this is how her mother used to talk to her, and it feels safe - she knows she can fix it next time, so she apologizes and goes to try again, glad to have a caretaking task to work on without much pressure or depth of feeling. We get the sense, as the story unfolds and her subtle patterns repeat themselves, that she only feels safely out of relationship-debt when she is being mistreated. We see that, while her high-pressure job in a fancy restaurant is pushing her further and further out of her comfort zone, she is increasingly fortifying a quiet, depressing life at home as a reprieve from overstimulation.

I might wonder, in the first scene, in which Boyfriend doesn’t pick her up after an exhausting double and Waitress walks home and finds him fixing the light switch so the ‘up’ is on and the ‘down’ is off, totally engrossed in a Youtube video explaining it, and he’s turned the power off so there’s no hot water for her shower, and he’s annoyed, too, that she isn’t grateful that he’s taking initiative… why is she with him?

To both raise and answer these questions, prompted by moments of seeming contradiction, is the engine of a work of art. She’s with him because she distrusts safety and comfort. She’s with him for the same reason she’s good at her job; she feels confident and at ease when she is suffering and knows exactly why. She’s with him because the past three years would be a sunk cost if she left, and no matter how dry her mining lease goes, she is the kind of person who will die before she stops digging for the vein of gold.

Why would she abandon her brother? Because she’s a coward, in the end, and the rest of the story shows us how this trait affects all of her other relationships as well as her scramble to survive in spite of it.

Why does she get two dragons? Because she’s subject to the prophecy of the two-dragons warlord, and these dragons are both the heavy burden she must bear and the key to resolving the territorial dispute in the southwestern colonies.

Why does she take the stairs? Because a lower floor of the building is on fire, probably, but certainly some people don’t know how an elevator works, so it does bear mentioning if the first floor is consumed by an apocalyptic inferno, perhaps? Or maybe one could fill that in from context clues.

YOUTUBER, SHAKING HIS HEAD: It’s literally never touched on again. We get this gut-wrenching, painful scene where she drags herself down thirty flights of stairs with her tibia sticking out, and then she’s just in the hospital and all of the documents that prove her citizenship are gone. Uh, if she’d taken the elevator, maybe, she could’ve brought some of those with her? This novel could really use an editor.

Perhaps obviously, I don’t think this is an admirable critical instinct. A live-read-style critique is about as critically valuable as a TikTok-hosted Get Ready With Me video, which is to say, not inherently without merit, but man, it sure matters which one you watch! What’s more frustrating, atop this, is the fact that these moments of faux-outrage are bait to both novel-fans and critic-fans alike.

Our reviewer sits down and writes, “Let’s take a look at that sentence again. Waitress goes to make Boyfriend a plate of pizza rolls, unprompted, and he chews a few and tells her she cooked them too long and all the filling is spilling out, and we can see in either her demeanor or her internal monologue that this is how her mother used to talk to her, and it feels safe - she knows she can fix it next time, so she apologizes and goes to try again, glad to have a caretaking task to work on without much pressure. That’s how many words without a hard stop? An 86-word sentence? And I’m supposed to be, what, attracted to this?”

This sort of reading reflects not thought-terminating cliche, but thought-terminating criticism. This metaphor is mixed and ill-considered. This scene about smithing a single blade goes on for a whole chapter. This character is making a stupid choice. This worldbuilding doesn’t immediately make sense!

One of the most difficult things to get teenagers in English class to do is to investigate, on paper, why they think something.

STUDENT: How could some random guy like Gatsby even afford a house like that?

ME: Interesting thought. Do you remember anyone else wondering that in the novel, or any references to where his house is that could give you some clues?

STUDENT: No? It’s just so weird that it takes me out of things. Like, okay, he’s rich, like rich-rich, but no one knows how?

ME: Well, that’s the mystery. Have you noticed any clues about what he does or how other people react to him?

STUDENT: Everyone is impressed with him, even though they don’t know anything about him.

ME: Okay, let’s think about that, maybe contrasting him with Tom or Nick. What do we know about Tom and Nick?

STUDENT: So not Gatsby? But the question was about Gatsby!

A student, of course, is learning how to read and criticize. To help them, we choose rich texts that respond well to interrogation. If you shine the light directly into the eyes of Fitzgerald’s novel and demand to know how does Gatsby afford that house, it may not tell you he’s a bootlegger in as many words, but it does tell you. If you hold a gun to its head and ask why are people so impressed with him? You will eventually find an answer, which includes the generous caveat that most people depicted in the novel are not impressed in quite the way Gatsby seems to be seeking. If you, in the course of your violent third-degree, want to know why the light is green and why it matters even a little, there is an answer that can be cobbled together by way of consistent applications of the imagery and contrast with gold and yellow and blue and white when they appear.

What we, as English teachers, are begging students to do is to ask the question and mean it, not to ask it as a defensive posture against a work of art having a meaning. To ask earnestly is to make a falsifiable request of the text: either leverage the color symbolism in a way that retroactively adds interpretable meaning or fail to, either treat Gatsby throughout as a zany mystery or give the speculation teeth, either use an 87-word sentence for genuine dramatic effect or for a trivial one-off that never pays the dividend it promises.

For a student, just asking the question is a step towards engaging with the text: the promises it makes, the promises it doesn’t seem to realize it is making, and the means by which it delivers on those promises. A brilliant, beautiful, insightful career woman who stays with a schlub who treats her like a dish-maid and actively impedes her work is a check the author has written. A dragon owned by a twelve-year-old dilettante in a fantasy novel is a check. A death-contest among all the teenagers in the land, for a chance at power and glory, which kills fifty percent of them, is a check. Will it clear the bank? Only reading the book will tell.

We read novels by Fitzgerald and Melville and Austen in eleventh-grade-English because we trust that the check will clear, and accepting the metaphorical check without pretending that it is something other than what it is, then taking it promptly to cash it out, is a desirable practice for both reading and critical thinking.

A reader who takes the check, declares “this signature looks fake as fuck”, and never cashes it has terminated the line of critical thinking and critical reading. They’ve forestalled their own deposit. Perhaps they’ve said it in a funny voice and winked at the audience in a way that makes the watcher-reader feel that the mean-smart girl in their AP Lang class is letting them in on the joke, but they’ve gotten nothing from the actual art being criticized, save license to dismiss it.

They have won the algorithm, placed the controversial critical essay, acquired a few dozen new subscribers, and congratulated themselves as insightful readers and leaders-of-men. And they have trained themselves, along with their parasocial admirers, to lean another degree further away from curiosity and into ironic detachment.

There are few things I respect less in a critic than jokey, carefully-maintained distance from and disinterest in the object of their criticism. This Youtube video could’ve been a text conversation with a like-minded best friend, and we would all be richer for it.

This is not to say that books that are unpleasant to read need to be taken with the same patience with which one meditates on the whaling industry while reading Moby Dick for their reader to issue serious criticism. Flippant criticism, even, particularly when richly-earned but little-said, has intrinsic value as a means to shock and provoke in an industry that spends a fair amount of time getting high on its own supply. The hero in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes is the child who speaks the truth.

The best examples of this, by far, are the reviews of Leave it Unread, which almost invariably begin with an overview of the cultural and textual landscape of a novel before weighing it against itself. This critical approach is both useful for those of us who read Babel years ago rather than in December of 2025 and simultaneously a displaying of the carcass before the bloodletting begins. What it also does is keep the criticism honest, a signal between reader-and-writer: we have both read this book. Let’s talk about the words in it.

One of my personal favorites is a review of Atlas Shrugged. Feel free to pause here and read the review itself; it’s punchy, well-contextualized, accurate, and mean.

Leave It (Un)Read

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a solid gold dollar sign!

Donald Trump is not much of a reader. But one of the few books he has at least glanced at is Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. I doubt he has the attention span for the Ayn Rand book we’re actually here to discuss, but that was my feeble attempt at clickbait…

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5 months ago · 23 likes · 13 comments · Leave It Unread

The line-by-line criticism begins with a review of what the book evokes, broadly, so far as sex-positivity and economic sensibilities go, then narrows its field of view down to the extent to which specific lines support, detract, or interact in other, bamboozling ways with the apparent thesis of the text and Rand’s meta-text. It concludes these sections, almost rhythmically, with a bolt-gun to the skull of the thesis in the form of the essential contradiction being gleefully espoused.

So close, Ayn. I wonder what an atheist calls a Madonna/Whore complex.

This works as something more than an older sibling dunking on their toddler sister at her Fisher-Price Baby Baller Basketball Hoop specifically because the terrain is defined and the conclusion is falsifiable; Rand really does suggest, in a respect that the text upholds consistently throughout the novel, from the mouth of one of her many editorializing protagonists, that there is just a difference between brainless sluts and a proper heroine. It’s a point worth making and a point worth ultimately puncturing, because text both presents the premise - the question - the check! - and fails to cash it. Dagny really is a heroine rather than a brainless slut, and the bubble of tension there (sex is exaltation! not abasement! unless of course a slut does it) never bursts.

At the core of good criticism is a willingness to take the work at its word, to walk the check to the bank and demand the payout on the contradiction raised by the text. Some texts draw entirely from an empty account; some more often, some less often, but almost all will have some moment of weakness or contradiction worth exposing, analyzing, understanding better.

The curious and perceptive critic explains it, cites it, and finally thrusts a finger through it. Then we can reasonably say that criticism has happened through the extension rather than the termination of thought.

Consider, in contrast, this popular non-review of Theo of Golden; in essence, a review of the experience of not reading the book.

The critical protests described are:

• A repellent-and-later-redeemed character uses the repellent language of “an illegal” to describe someone, which the text does not immediately name to be interpreted as repellently as it was taken by this reader.

• By page 75, only one character, a Black woman, has been portrayed to speak in dialect, despite the setting making it extremely feasible to apply this to other characters, though no specific examples are named.

• The dialogue was stilted and over-written, reminiscent of an old movie.

The first two, in particular, are line-level reviews. A character says something he/she/they shouldn’t say. Why they said that, in those moments of chafing experienced by the reader, is a question the novel implicitly promises to answer. Whether one stops reading at page 22 or page 75 of a 400-page-book, both of which the critic expresses to have been the breaking point, the question is discarded and the check is shredded before it can be taken to the bank.

Should we wonder why, in the hypothetical posed by any novel, a person would call another person illegal? Perhaps it seems like a settled question: because they are brainwashed, cruel, and irredeemable. If the novel poses a scenario where this line of thinking could be challenged and reversed, one embraced by a presumably-politically-diverse group of US-American women, could that be a useful counter-response to the question of whether the sort of people who use derogatory language can be reached?

Perhaps the novel slips on a banana peel and proposes that only by marrying a Mexican undocumented immigrant who is the perfect wife and homemaker can the fear and hatred of immigrants be challenged. Perhaps its slow, formal, stilted prose, reminiscent of an old movie, allows the depiction of a gradual change-of-mind in a way that resonates with the means by which septuagenarians with loosely-held bigotries can learn to see the humanity in the other.

I don’t know! I couldn’t tell you which one! I haven’t read Theo of Golden. Neither has this reviewer, neither had this reviewer while confidently weighing in at the book club. That the other members of the book club articulated their thoughts less neatly and occasionally referred to people involved by the wrong name, while themselves responding to the book they actually read in a touchy-feely-type eat-cookies-and-talk-about-The Alchemist atmosphere, does not invalidate their objections or their reactions as readers, or even necessarily make them blithely racist in their enthusiasm.

This language is wrong, so I stopped is entirely the termination of thought, literalized, and denies the book club and the author of the criticism the means to actually connect about the text. Nowhere is this clearer than in the second objection - by page 75, only one character, who is Black, speaks in dialect.

That no white characters portrayed speak in dialect is never explored. The critic observes that they don’t without interest in the context. Is the eponymous Theo of Golden portrayed as a folksy Georgian southerner with a fourth grade education and street smarts learned from his working parents on the farm, dismissive of overprecision in spoken language as a frivolity… and yet he speaks in crisp language better imagined in an affected Transatlantic accent, while the Black character is scripted in a white man’s idea of ebonics? Does the Black woman’s ex-wife, a white woman who is her childhood sweetheart and still co-parents with her, show up and deliver monologues in the queen’s English? Does she just not sound like the woman in her own explicit cultural context because one is Black and one is white? Is the Black woman being caricatured as simple and insightful-in-her-simplicity, a magical wise guide, cementing a reductive and unflattering stereotype of Black people in general?

Any of these would be far more impugning than the statement of a Black woman speaking in dialect as egregious on its face, but none of this is explored or examined in an essay that reads as a proud dismissal of a popular novel and an equally-proud dismissal of women who enjoyed it, who were made marks enough to have read the whole thing for a book club.

There is often a contemptuous bent to these sorts of reviews, even when they delve deeper than an anecdote about the author’s inability to find kindred spirits who want to dissect a book they didn’t finish. The easiest way to dismiss something, whether in BookTok spaces or in advance of a book club meeting, is to find it unsuitable for a contemporary progressive sensibility by reflex, and to promptly stop reading, or stop reading with curiosity.

YOUTUBER HOLDING A COPY OF THE METAMORPHOSIS: I mean, I basically had to stop here, because Grete does this obvious Susan-leaving-Narnia thing where she suddenly stops caring about her brother because she’s grown up. It just smacks of sexism. She gave him his favorite scraps and took care of him for half the novel and now she just wants him killed? Because women are hysterical?

THEY SHAKE THEIR HEAD IN DISAPPOINTMENT AND SET THE BOOK DOWN.

YOUTUBER, SOLEMNLY: I don’t know how anyone can read Kafka and call themselves a feminist. I mean, when he bothers to include female characters at all, they make no sense and get basically zero development. But I guess I have to finish the book now. Let’s see how he butchers Grete next…

The answer to a word, a characterization choice, a scenario that does not immediately resolve with the worldview brought into the novel by the reader is not to investigate, but to find irredeemable fault in the premise and stop reading.

Teaching eleventh grade English, one of my students raised his hand and announced that he didn’t think we should have to read The Crucible, because real life Abigail was actually a little girl, which would make real life John Proctor an uncomplicated child molester, so why would we read a play that ages her up and makes it all ambiguous when it’s really about something different?

I chatted with him about his objections for a while, learning in the process that he just didn’t want to read another bound-book because his buddy’s class had stopped after Moby Dick and was just doing poems now. I asked him to try to read the text rather than his idea of it first, then put what he thought was going on into words in an essay at the end. He did not want to do the essay, but he did knuckle down and read.

Basically any cultural objection to offensive language, in particular, can be used to shut down the discussion of or curiosity about ideas. Because Orlando depicts sex-smearing perversion offensive to parents or The Satanic Verses is blasphemous and offensive to Christians because To Kill a Mockingbird includes racial slurs offensive to any reader aware of their history. Whether these books should be dismissed depends on more than their worst linguistic offense in the eyes of any given reader, no matter how much the Florida state government would like to conclude as much.

Is it wrong to criticize a book for containing the word dyke or depicting an act of violence against an immigrant in ICE custody? No, it’s no more wrong to criticize any element of a book than it was to write the book in the first place, which is to say: in both cases, it certainly depends on the rest of the words that follow and precede the objectionable event.

It isn’t wrong, but it is embarrassing, as a critic, to stop there. To do so is to take cheap and frequently self-aggrandizing shots - to claim that by not reading or not deeply reading the book, the critic has a moral-readership over that of the woman sitting across from them at the book club who excitedly recounts her favorite scene.

This is fun and indulgent over coffee with my friend who is mean in the exact same way I am. It would gut me, though, to be remembered for - to gain an audience for - the things I say of a book or a piece of art at my most amusingly harsh and thoughtless.

To publish this sort of criticism, to attract readers and watchers and listeners who reward this sort of criticism, is to make a habit of it, and eventually to make a career of the art and practice of reading books at the level of curiosity of a sixteen-year-old who leaves a dummy phone at the front of the room so he can Snapchat furtively under the desk rather than read The Crucible.

It is not a fundamentally serious way to write or to live.

What this boils down to is the difference between good-faith and bad-faith readings. Good-faith readings can be sharp-edged to the point of cruelty in their engagement with the text; bad-faith readings can be lofty and progressive and politely-worded in their disengagement. The core distinction is the difference between critiquing a brush-stroke under the left eye as too blue and critiquing a portrait as falsely representing its subject or aggrandizing them hollowly.

Poring over a text only to excise the most controversial or easily-criticized parts is the ethos of reading-to-review. It appears in all of these polished and often-monetized venues, as high as the New York Times and as low as the guy on QTCritique who writes “what is her name? it’s not clear from this what her name is” as a comment on the first sentence, when the protagonist’s name is in the second.

It is criticism-as-performance, and not even precisely as performance art in any sort of conflict, because there is no traction between the critic and the subject. The critic’s skin is spared near-entirely from entering the game through ironic distance or superiority! It’s just bad. How could you defend bad prose? Offensive writing? How could you suggest I give a close read to something written wrong before I criticize it?

If we want to find and enter or cultivate a community of eager and curious and insightful readers, we will need to accept that there is a certain precarity to sharing genuinely-held opinions in a sphere where others can criticize them. It is easier to pick out phrases and plot beats that we disagree with than it is to carry the check to the bank and genuinely see if the author can cash it.

“I didn’t read the book” or “the prose was so unbearable so I probably missed some of it” feels like the high ground, but the person who both reads and tries to read, who exposes what they value to criticism, is the one contributing and the one who is gaining standing as something other than an acerbic personality.

Audiences turn on personalities, but the quality and the gift of meaningful analysis and criticism is not one that can be taken away by an off-key aside or one bad article. It is safer, in this sense, to be vulnerable and to reach for something more than snark or smugness.

Snark and smugness are fun and all, but they disintegrate like cotton candy on a raccoon’s wet hands when there is insincere engagement with the subject at hand underneath. This approach is only fun so long as the game is fun, and the game can be lost or fumbled. Perhaps, for some critics, the game is truly all there is, but I do suspect that most of us would like to be something more - we criticize what we love because we love what it does brilliantly and ache at its flaws, and the greatest compliment to art is to be moved, whether by repulsion or fascination, to make something meaningful of our own.

We do ourselves a great disservice when we refuse to take seriously the things we love or the things we hate, and we do no one so much as ourselves a disservice when our criticism is leveraged to stop reading and stop caring.

At that point, why not post a get-ready-with-me video and build an audience of fickle acolytes that way? Why not let AI do the thinking that bores you, if the LLM is going to perform a deeper read than you intend? Why not finish the discussion at the coffeeshop about those unrealistic dragons and move on?

These are the checks written by critics who start and end with line-level reviews. I find that they tend to bounce.

I think Mishal is going to kill himself soon. He has intended to do it for several years, now, but the urgency is greater than usual. For weeks, he has formulated nothing new for me to make and offered me none of his notations at all. The graphite on his hands, shining-grey on sword-calluses that have been fading since our training ended, promises that he has been writing something, and vigorously.

Whatever it is, he is keeping it to himself. None of this is entirely inconsistent with his moods, but I know that he means it, this time, because he has asked me to teach him how to make incorporeal fire.

To do so is trivial for me. When we were taught together, in the caverns, we never shared a class of incorporeal practica. I never needed to be taught, and he never managed to learn; his brilliance is in numbers, first and greatest. I had not been bested in even one area of study before, so this sufficed to make him interesting before I knew more about him than his scowl and the unusual way he wore his hair, loose and waist-length.

He could never conjure incorporeal power. Could describe it, certainly, theorize about the indivisible particle and its ionization in long strings of symbols I need a reference text to interpret, could invent with it, even. He has never lowered himself to ask me for help with the magic, though I have offered frequently. I would have liked to explain it, under any other circumstances.

Mishal gave up his right to the furnace at twenty-one, when the opportunity to be sponsored came and passed, and I took it for a good sign, then. The Elevation is often fatal. Without a patriline, the going conviction is that the burning is more challenging to bear, and Mishal is outright human-born. To begin the process at all requires a spark he lacks the means to summon, a magic he can only describe.

Today he asks me how to light the furnace that will kill a man never able to make so much as a sparkle of light on his fingertips. Today I answer him, because there is something in his stone-black eyes that tells me that if I don’t, he will find a way to do it that I like less.

I have loved Mishal, at this point, for six years. What you are when you Elevate calcifies with you when your flesh burns, amidst the pain of the magic coursing through whatever pneuma remains. What survives the furnace will never die, unless something greater comes along to kill it.

I have loved Mishal past my own death, and I will keep loving him past his. I sit with him on the cold black stone of the under-layer floor, in the barren cell he calls his quarters, and I teach him how to burn.

The under-layer’s library is a dour place with minimal stock, all befitting a young scholar’s assigned purposes, nothing suited to a great one. I take some umbrage at this. We are done a disservice, trapped here until some instructor gives us license to surface and see the sun. Most unforgivably, we are caged in the caverns with nothing of much interest to read.

I have license to surface, if I beg father’s permission convincingly after the fact, and would hardly have reason to remain here were it not for the only young man of my cohort to treat the schematic texts as anything but a deep crack in the bedrock to be warily stepped around. It is very dark, so far from the Elevation chamber that the stone is only the black basalt of the Aroscan mountains.

We are seventeen, and I have only been in love with Mishal for perhaps a year.

He cannot make light of his own, but so long as I sit near the table he prefers, the light that spills from me is enough for him to read. The plausible deniability is the gift. I frown at a dull text on late-level practica and pretend that I am reading too, because I am nothing if not generous with my boredom.

I have never known the darkness, myself. The light is constitutional to me and has been since I was cut from my mother’s corpse on the birthing-bed. Father is careless with his women. This one had a twice-Elevated patriline - I have been told that my mother practically glowed herself - but I doubt that he intended her to live. Most of his earlier experiments killed the mother without a living child to justify it. I was, in the end, the justification for all those corpses, too, and he has not tried to make another since.

As I watch Mishal read and think, I idly doodle formulas for dynamic ionization to have something to do with my hands. He has been hunched over his work for the better part of four hours; it hurts my back to look at him. Evening’s fifth-bell will sound, soon, and with it, we will both be late for dinner.

There is no real consequence to it. The serving of food at all is a formality. Most boys with a patriline need little food, and once Elevated, even that necessity leaves the body with its flesh. I think that I will miss eating, though, and I stretch, the movement only somewhat exaggerated, to get Mishal’s attention.

“You must be doing something interesting,” I announce.

He looks up, a grimace crossing his face. It is more interesting than handsome. A patriline would have conferred some of the shape of the Elevated man, and he has little of the strong jaw that even a boy of his age ought to. His skin is a shade lighter than copper, a tone that ill-catches the silver light of both the citadel and its Selasair, and the shadows under his eyes are deep.

“I have not heard you turn a page in an hour,” he says, tone entirely flat. “Whatever you are rereading must be even more engrossing.”

He has a cautious Standard inflection. It is the language of the imperium, though there has been no great effort to enforce it as the only one. I imagine he must have learned it in Kichaan, before Councilmaster Brilen did whatever brought a shivering, furious human boy to join our cohort late, at nearly eleven years of age. I have heard that he was orphaned. More accurately, another boy speculated that he was orphaned, and Mishal broke his hand, so I’ve concluded that the wound was a true one.

“It’s funny,” I say, and conspicuously turn a page. “You speak like a councilmaster. One of the old ones.”

His eyes narrow, and he returns his focus to his reading.

“Will you have dinner?” I suggest. “I mean to finish by fifth-bell.”

The implication rests between us, in the wash of silver light. He will be finished reading, whether he means it or not, once I am gone.

“I have no appetite,” he says.

“Consider it, regardless,” I tell him, and close my book, leaving it out on the table for one of the women to put away once the stacks are dark again. “You’ll be a poor swordsman if your wrist snaps when you try to lift the thing.”

He exhales deeply. “You are playing a very odd game.”

“I am thinking mainly of dinner. It’s no subject for jest,” I reply, smiling, despite myself. It is more words than I have extracted from him in weeks.

Mishal waves a hand dismissively in my general direction. At the table, at the book. At the light, I think.

“Go have your meal,” he says. “This citadel is all yours. You can glow anywhere you like in it. Find another place to read and stare at one of the boys who moons over you. Choose any.”

I lean back in my seat, take my sheet of remembered equations in my tidy hand and pretend to inspect it.

“Does Genin moon?” I ask. “I haven’t noticed lately.”

“Why,” he says, no question in it, “are you always here.”

I sigh. “You assume ill intent no matter what I do.”

His forearm tenses. For all he seems inclined to deny himself, spending little time at meals and eating women’s food when he deigns to eat at all, he is well-shaped beneath his robes.

“You have use for the light,” I add. “There’s no point in claiming not to.”

“I have a lamp,” he says, and indicates a cheap construction of iron, cold and dark before him on the table.

He has no means to light it. I hadn’t noticed as much before, and now I can hardly suppress the smile I’ve been fighting back. He did not bring it lit. He knew that I would be here. He counted on it.

It is about as good as any dinner I’ve had, to know as much.

I stand, leaving behind my useless book, and pace over to where Mishal is so tense that I worry he might snap something in his jaw. He has resisted a year of kindnesses and compliments, repaid with dark rejoinders and dismissal and occasional bouts of barely-checked fury. What I have carved out for myself is a few hours of silent appraisal, during which he only sometimes addresses me. It is not enough. I want something from him that I can hardly get from a woman sent to my chambers by my father or a boy who thinks some something of mine will become his if he swallows enough of me. I would like to figure out what it is.

“Here,” I say, lean across his book, and light his lamp for him.

Mishal’s fist wavers, briefly, then releases. It has the feel of a surrender, which costs some of the thrill, but introduces a novel one. This is not quite it, but it is something.

“You are a monster,” he tells me, and takes his books and papers and lantern in an inelegant heap, crumples them against his chest before he stalks away to replace those he has borrowed on the shelves.

I wait until he is gone. Whatever sort of monster he thinks me, he is not entirely right. I have been certain that what I feel is love for quite some time. It was admiration for longer than that, but now it is undeniable. I love him. I have not loved him since he was a silent, drawn boy hovering near me in the classroom, where the light was strongest, but I do now, in retrospect.

I wait until fifth-bell tolls through the cavern walls, deep and resonant. Then I go to dinner, where Mishal does, to my relief, seem to be eating. Women’s food, again. Eggs and bread, dense enough for blood and children and work, bland enough for the weak constitution that he decidedly lacks.

He invites some of his own ostracism, I think. I will understand it all eventually. Until then, I nod politely at whatever conversation passes between the boys who sit near me, careful, dull-glowing and dull beneath it, until I am finished. I raise a hand at a young servingwoman with long hair that reminds me, glancingly, of his - she smiles and flushes pink - and ask for a slice of cake, as much as the kitchens will spare.

There has been a cake made from almond paste and sugar and candied slices of fruit, lately, but one has to ask for it. I think Mishal might enjoy it, if he would ask for anything. When I asked one woman or another of its origin, she said it was a Kichaani delicacy.

By the time this particular servingwoman returns, Mishal is gone, and I am left trying not to roll my eyes too obviously when the boy two seats to my left grasps for her apron when she passes.

Mishal would hit a boy for less, if he were in the right mood, so I remind the aspirant to mind his manners and return my attention to my dessert and to the more interesting problem of when I will see him next.

I have habits of my own, given space, and I take that space for several days. It is the reasonable thing to do when accused of monstrosity, however glibly-placed the barb. Mishal is not in my schematics class, where we are falsifying theories, dimension-by-dimension. I find it more invigorating than usual to excel, and am a little annoyed at him about it. He was not always two years ahead of my mathematics, the favorite of the docents charged with this aspect of our education. It was me before it was him. Quickness is not enough in the face of genuine brilliance, but it used to be.

In the interval during which most of the cohorts are at their incorporeal practica, I often pass my time in the swordwork cavern. I see father’s ordinate, Dhalis, several evenings each week for training of my own, but out of sequence with the rest. After afternoon’s twelfth-bell, the cavern ought to be empty, lit only by the luminous sand. To be alone at my work makes it easier not to frustrate myself when mastery does not come immediately.

Mishal is not, tonight, being instructed in practica. He is well off to the side of the cavern with a Selasair’s silver blade in hand, repeating the same lunge, as I watch, blade-tip trained through a dangling loop of ribbon he’s suspended from a rack of practice-swords. And again, and again.

Aspirants’ robes are not wholly unflattering. They are grey, unornamented, held in place with a band at the waist, tied in a knot that takes children many years to learn. One can make a good guess about what is underneath the heavy fabric from the way they fall.

Mishal is not wearing his. His hands and chest are bound in wrap-fabric, off-white and drenched in sweat, no less stark against the blood-darkened color of his skin for it. His hair is tied back, and I will admit that it gives his jaw a finer shape than I might otherwise have credited of it. He is lean as I might have thought, but broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist in a pleasant way. Sinuous, perhaps. It is easier to appraise than to watch. The long, silver swordtip slips through the loop of silk with barely a breath’s movement, then again.

When he sees me, he starts twice. Once for being witnessed at all. The second time, I think, for recognizing me.

“Get out,” he snarls, breathless.

“I’m not the one skipping practica,” I tell him.

He throws the blade down on the sand, and I wince. It is a fine-filigreed thing, someone’s valued weapon. As he stalks away, he tears off the strip of ribbon he has used to bind back his hair and digs through the neat pile of robes he’s left near the entrance. The ribbon, undone, flutters to the sand to join the sword.

“I am skipping nothing,” he insists. “I have given up. Brilen gave me license. I will die in the caverns decades after all of you forget me.”

“It seems a hasty decision,” I say, kick off my shoes, and step onto the luminous sand. I’ve always enjoyed the sense of my own resonance meeting a different one. What animates my heart is distinct from what gives the citadel its unending light. “And suppose someone doesn’t forget you? Then you’re doing math alone in the dark for a very long time.”

“What do you want, Jian.”

I shrug and take a practice-blade. There are posts set in the deep sand to the other side of the cavern. I meant to strike one repeatedly until either too displeased with my performance or too sore to continue.

“I’m only curious. I would think that if you were going to drop from the cohort, you might have done it earlier and spared yourself some suffering.”

“It is not - dropping,” he says haltingly, less furious now that he is clothed. “I will finish with the rest of you. But I recognize my limits. That is all. I will suffer through practica again tomorrow. Will you not let me have today to grieve it?”

“What is there to grieve?” I ask, after a moment’s thought, stretching idly. “If you want to Elevate, you would only need to commit to it. Perhaps wait to mourn the dying until it is dead.”

He kneels to pick up the fallen silver blade and maneuvers it to a scabbard replaced at his hip.

“I find it hard to believe that Brilen has agreed to your plan,” I add. I have no great love for Brilen, though I know of him well enough. The high council is a meddlesome group of old men, and he not the worst of them, but he has never taken a liking to me, and I find such people suspicious as a rule.

Among ancients like Irisim, whose eyes are filmed over with the calcifications that accumulate as a Selasair ages, he is practically a youth. Father calls him dangerous, which is unsurprising: Brilen is the councilmaster of the citadel’s wars. He is big, even for a Selasair, and he laughs very easily. Father also calls him a man who likes women, which is his antithesis to whatever danger he poses.

“He does not know that he has,” Mishal says shortly. “He has lent me his sword and told me to take a day to think, and I am doing as he bid. He should have specified the thoughts if he had a special design.”

I laugh aloud, which surprises him, or at least his mouth moves as though it does, an unbidden rightward-tug of the set of his lips.

“You are too easy to read,” I tell him. “It will get you in trouble someday.”

He sort-of-laughs in reply. “Why can I not get rid of you?”

“I haven’t seen you in a week!” I retort, feigning injury. “You’re the one half-naked, stabbing ribbons at the hour I prefer to train. Ordinarily no one exceeds me to an offensive extent at this time of day.”

“Is that it?” he asks. “I offend you?”

“In a sense,” I reply. I have nothing but the truth of it. It does offend me, to be in love with him.

“It would be a relief to know with certainty,” he tells me.

“Wouldn’t it,” I agree, more shortly than I mean to, and this, gratingly, makes him smile. “Well, consider yourself relieved. It’s aggravating that you are better than me at something. You can be certain of that.”

I take the practice-blade from where I’ve left it. It’s a blunt and heavy thing; we are meant to be learning gestural precision, stability and form along with violence. Then I toss it to Mishal, who catches it, frowning, without looking down.

“You will spar with me,” I announce. “And that will settle it for both of us.”

He laughs. It is a sound that suits the slim, dense shape of him, an atonal rasp, but distinctly laughter.

“I will not spar with you, Jian. It would not be fair.”

“Was it fair that a boy with no magic would compete with a born-Selasair at anything, ten years into the cohort’s training?” I argue, already trudging over to the rack of practice-blades to find another. “It is fairer, I think, to acknowledge that these are not just conditions. Spar with me.”

“You are ridiculous,” he says, and paces over. I hardly have my own sword in hand before he disarms me with a neat circular disengage. “There. It is done.”

“Again,” I say, and go to pick up my blade. “Teach me.”

“I would sooner teach you mathematics,” he counters. “It would put us all at less risk than Jian Knisad with a sword and some talent behind it.”

“Oh, as though you care for anyone in our cohort,” I argue, and, placing my feet carefully, I lunge to tap him in the center of his chest.

“You are more observant than you look,” he replies. Seemingly without effort, a jarring strike to my wrist and a twist of his own forearm, my weapon is in the sand, his own practice-blade neatly beneath my chin.

I kneel, briefly, to retrieve my sword, and he steps back, shoulders no longer hunched in apology. This is a good part of what troubles me so much about Mishal. There is excellence in the thing that he shrinks into, the body dissolving beneath robes when he writes furiously in the dark. There is a different excellence, however, in the body-in-motion, and this is the only version on which his long, satin-sheened hair makes any sense at all. He disarms me again, as easily as he slid Brilen’s rapier through the loop of ribbon.

My forearm is badly bruised by the time I yield, and I am almost familiar enough with his favorite lunging disarm-gesture to avoid it, but not quite there yet. He pauses when he sees that my breathing is labored. There is not so much as a sheen of sweat on his face.

“Something in the weight of it ill-suits you,” he observes, and takes my practice-blade to hang it with the rest. “I will think on the problem.”

I breathe carefully, trying to compose myself. There is a warmth at the core of me, more and lower than the typical sense I have learned to think of as love, which kindles when I am near him.

“Don’t quit,” I say, and he arches a brow at my delivery, perhaps, which is too fervent. I gulp a little more air and try again. “It would be such a waste to never have you as a Selasair. You would be magnificent.”

I have seen the boys who enter the chamber and emerge. They are different. Taller, yes, their faces shaped more to the standard and their new-made bodies strengthened, countenances white as the stone of the citadel above us, made luminous and whole. They are themselves, after they burn, if they survive it.

He is already settling back into his posture of self-obliteration. This is Mishal-the-mathematician, and he is no less fascinating than Mishal-the-person, but only one of them can be true.

I would like to know which one.

He shakes his head. I can see that the untidiness of his hair is bothering him in the way his body shifts as though to compensate for a wrong-weight, wrong-movement when he turns. “You must want me dead.”

Stepping forward, still spent and bruised and no more sated than I was before I stepped into the glowing sand of the training-cavern, I grasp him by the arm.

He freezes, but I hold his gaze as firmly as my grip. “I do not, Mishal. I prefer you alive.”

Peculiarly, the name itself has always seemed to trouble him. So close, the change to the set of his jaw is acutely visible. I have been watching him for so long. There is no one else in the world worth watching.

He breaks my grip without trouble and strides away. I let him go. In following, I could only make things worse, and I do not want worse, even if it might be interesting.

Until the next bell tolls, I lay back in the glowing sand, stare up at the distant cavern ceiling, and wait until the silken trousers beneath my robes no longer feel so present or so warm.

Love is a very interesting sensation, I decide. Better than most. I will need to find a way to keep him close, living, mine.

It does not sound difficult. He knew where I would be. There is no lantern for proof, but I know he knew.

Eighteen is a strange year in the under-layer. Expectations change. Fathers become interested in long-forgotten sons as the best among the cohort become eligible for the training, in the citadel above, which precedes Elevation. Others disown sons too inept to Elevate and too weak in math for the alternative of remaining in the caverns to design the schematics that other men will wield.

I find the pageantry of it irritating. Councilmaster Brilen visits more often to see Mishal, and Mishal broods over the visits for days afterwards. I imagine, at least, that the visits are the cause of the brooding. He does not tell me. True to his word, he returns to the classes in an art he cannot practice, and something is eased between us without satisfying anything at all.

There are horses in a great stable on the citadel’s grounds, though I have never troubled to meet one. I have read about them, though, the process of acclimating a mount’s nervous system to incorporeal power. Mishal is acclimating to something else, as simple as my presence in a room.

I decide to sit with him at dinner, some months into what is beginning to resemble an earnest detente. He looks at me like I have gone completely insane, both the first time and several times afterward. I am not certain that he believes me when I lean conspiratorially across the table and announce that the rest of our cohort leaves me unendurably bored; by his incredulous scoffing-sound, it is a partial thing at best.

“And I am to amuse you?”

“You are not to bore me. It is different,” I say, and he resumes ignoring me for his food. I consider his obligation already half-met. “Why do you eat like a woman?”

He looks up in alarm. Whole-met. I smile.

“It is denser fare than the rest of the cohort takes. I am born-human, and I need it. That is all.”

“Then why do you eat like an ascetic?” I continue, and his shoulders relax, increment-by-increment. “Even a woman butters her bread.”

“You eat like a gliding-squirrel,” he says drily, and nods at my plate of cut-fruit and pastries stuffed with jam and cheese and almond-paste, of which I am becoming very fond. “If we are making observations.”

There is no meat taken in the walls of the citadel, as a matter of some historical import. There were ancient covenants forged in its construction, in the vesting of its light in the stone. This was one of them. Selasair are bound by it, and cannot take the flesh of any living creature, once they leave the furnace. For aspirants, it is no law, but a simple matter of what is made available.

In the caverns, there are few enough pleasures already. I shrug.

“I don’t deny myself something I enjoy. What is a gliding-squirrel?”

A line forms between his brows. “It is a small animal that terrorizes citrus orchards. My sisters kept one as a pet.”

To indicate the size of such a thing, he holds up his hand, indicates his palm. I lean closer, fascinated.

“What use are they?”

“They are soft and small.” He shrugs. “We cared for it one winter, and it would not leave when the ground thawed. It ate only sweets. They spoiled the thing, I am certain.” He directs a meaningful look to my dinner. “It was a corpulent beast by the time a snake found it.”

I make a face at that. He almost laughs, though I still can’t manage to twist one out of him before the rest of our cohort. There are too many boys around us in the cavern where we meet to dine for an earnest one.

“I’ll mind my conditioning,” I say. “Though I imagine if I were going to become indolent, it would have happened by now.”

The citadel keeps only useful animals. Long-acclimated horses and women.

Mishal has already distracted himself with some scribblings, which I crane my neck to try to read. What I can decipher is in symbols I well know, configurations I do not.

“You’re designing something,” I observe. “What is it?”

There is a flash of irritation in his expression. The interruption, I suppose. I will try to remember that.

“You have mentioned, yesterday, a sense of your resonance meeting another. I am thinking about how frequencies interact, and how to spatially limit one without spatial parameters. With counterresonance.”

Some of it resolves, when I know what to look for. He has defined a resonance to cut flesh precisely, with cautery. It is a surgical technique. Rather than bounding it by traditional means, he has spatially organized three other frequencies to limit it.

“You don’t need all three of these bounds,” I tell him. “Probably only two, if the vector you apply is linear. If you mean this blade to move, it would be easier for most wielders to chain fewer equations.”

He looks up, no longer perturbed, no argument on his lips. So it is a blade.

“How many can you chain?”

“However many I need,” I laugh. “Once I’ve performed them, I remember. To make something practical, though, you must make it simple.”

“It is not finished,” he says, dismissing the counsel. “And it will require a great deal of incorporeal power either way.”

I have a great deal of incorporeal power. I frown at him and eat an orange-section before I continue.

“You know, Ali, I have about as much as any Selasair already.”

“Then perhaps you will test it for me. When it is finished. Which it is not,” he says, and tucks the paper in his robes, taking his half-cleaned plates and disappearing into the kitchen to return them.

He does not flinch at the nickname. He did, when I tried Misha, which does not quite suit him, anyway. I think that I have learned several useful things today.

Mishal could learn a few of his own. A boy may be tolerated by the servingwomen in the kitchens, but a man will not be long indulged. He is too much a man to be offering the kind of assistance that puts him where the women do not expect to see someone so tall and robed. Already, the servingwomen who smile at me balk when Mishal walks close.

I will warn him of the limit of his tolerance when the thought next occurs to me. I finish my dinner and think about the making of a shape without topology.

Tonight, I will ask father’s leave to visit the citadel’s great library. Tomorrow, I will be better-equipped to argue with him over his cautery-tool design for having studied - a novel thought, but an intriguing one.

My father is a Selasair, two fathers himself from the men who built the citadel a millennium past. He does not often trouble himself to visit the caverns, which I appreciate. When he wishes for me to attend to him, he calls me up, and it means that the under-layer stays, in a sense, more mine than his.

He is the high councilmaster. As close to a king as remains in an empire of scholars and learned magic. He would not suit the dark chambers beneath the citadel, anyway.

Today is my nineteenth birthday, and I am three years in love with Mishal, give or take a day. Father has heard about the refraction blade, and this is why he has called me to his tower. It is the citadel’s highest, save the central minaret that rises up from its core. I would prefer to see him in almost any other location, but I accept the written request for my presence and wait half an hour in his sitting room, while his consorts fuss and flutter at a pretty thing, as is their prerogative.

Father does not mind it. I think he hardly sees the women who bracket me on his couch, one with her hand half in my robes in assessing how I have grown since she last visited me. In returning from his practicum and announcing that he will see this feat that I have made, which so impressed Dhalis at our most recent meeting, he hardly looks at me at all, and if anything, he sees the women even less.

I extricate myself without much effort - these are soft creatures, and they mean nothing by almost anything they do - bow at his entrance, and follow him up to the chamber in which he tests his own magic, I assume, by the scorch marks on the polished white walls.

He is over two meters tall, my father, of stature even relative to most Selasair, and white throughout. His robes are heavy with silver embroidery, his head light with the simple silver circlet that marks his status, and his face, while his luminous features have the milk-white marks of age-fissure, is handsome in the way of a human man a tenth of his four-hundred-odd years.

“Dhalis thinks much of your refraction work,” he says, by way of greeting.

“It is a work of collaboration,” I say lightly, straightening my collar. “I have been applying myself to the problem of an incorporeal blade in motion with Mishal, of my cohort.”

“Brilen’s project,” my father observes.

“He has a good mind for schematics,” I tell him, though he will not care.

“Go on, then,” my father prompts, and stands back a pace. “Fold the light.”

That is what it amounts to. Not incorporeal power at odds with itself, but folded, amplified, then arrested before the energy can leave strict bounds, suggested rather than enforced by three distinct exertions of power. All must be produced simultaneously or the folded-light becomes unstable.

It is bright, extended from my hand, near-blinding, far more than the relatively pale glow that ambiently surrounds me. I can feel, when I focus, that this is where all the power that animates my heart has gone, save for the tiny discharge of energy that makes it beat.

To handle incorporeal power, in practice, is simple enough. It is not costly to the body in the way of corporeal magics, but it demands much from the mind. There is constant calibration to the media of the air, from which the photon originates at different valences, which changes as men - even Selasair - breathe. To focus energy is to disrupt an equilibrium, and to recalculate and enforce what is made. I draw power almost wholly from my internal locus, for ordinary incorporealism, but to make the blade I must siphon more than I have from the walls of the citadel themselves.

Most Selasair, especially the old ones, draw their power from the architecture. It takes twice the calculations, which is irritating, and a man with my locus hardly needs it, but in this way, I have the power to make the blade that glows, burns, folds from my hand.

My father watches in silence. Under his opaque white gaze, I slowly lift the blade, then lower it. I have managed not to burn myself this time. Finally, I change the resonance surrounding the blade to one that flattens the frequency. It collapses, in an instant, into nothing but the scent of ozone and the memory of blinding light. There is sweat beaded at my hairline from sheer concentration, but my work was perfect.

“It is an interesting premise,” my father says, after a long silence.

“The starting-resonance is that of the cautery-blade for mammalian flesh,” I say, eager to explain to someone who may follow. “But Irisim’s cautery-blade can only be made very small and precise before it becomes unstable in a dynamic atmosphere. This blade self-regulates through applied counterresonances. It is energy shaped by energy, itself a dynamic process. That, I would say, is the great improvement.”

“I will see the schematic,” he continues, and I take the paper from my robes and pass it to him. “Not in your hand?”

“Collaboration,” I say, fighting the petulance from my tone. “I am the only man in the under-layer who can make the blade, but the mathematics are at the limit of my abilities.”

“So they are.”

A twitch of his hand, and a blade of his own extends from father’s palm. He does not need the incorporeal energy of the walls, and makes no pretense at borrowing it. Father’s locus is why he is high councilmaster, and why his women and most of his children die. A human is not meant to sustain so much incorporeal power.

There is a wavering to the blade, as he negotiates with the counterresonances, and then it is whole. He regards it, then glances back at the schematic and collapses the construct accordingly.

“Valuable,” he judges. “How much of the work is yours?”

“Half,” I say, and cross my arms over my chest.

“Brilen is protective of your collaborator,” he observes. “Why is that?”

“Councilmaster Brilen is sentimental,” I reply. I know, both from experience and from the way father’s mouth moves, that this is the correct answer.

“He does not visit his born children so much.”

“Mishal hasn’t yet made incorporealism of his own,” I concede. “Without a protector, he would be long relegated to the schematics chambers. I am grateful, personally, to have such a prodigy kept close.”

“You will be made a docent, when you are Elevated,” my father judges, folding the schematic and passing it back to me. “Much of the work in my department is in identifying which men can be used to create things of value. Your selection has merit.”

“Thank you, father.” I dip my head, as the compliment demands.

“You may return to the caverns,” he says. “Mind yourself, Jian. I hear much of you, most of it flattering, but you are well past the age to spend such time in the company of a man who is beneath you. It would reassure me if you would take a woman. Think on it.”

With father, there is never any percentage to be gained in arguing. He turns to continue up the stairs, into some chamber of his tower that I have never seen, and that is how our conversation concludes.

By the time I return to the under-layer, I am in a dour mood with no real explanation for it. The example was well-shown and well-taken. He has not promised the position in his department explicitly before, and the method is provably replicable. All of this is useful information. Mishal will be curious to know how another man summoned it, and I know father’s power well enough, I think, to explain it to him.

The crux of it, I suppose, is that I do not like that father knows my movements in the under-layer. I do not appreciate to be surprised, and his attention was not what I expected, though his guidance is. To have an affinity for another boy is not uncommon in caverns populated with dull, frightened women and sparkling men, but father is right to say that the connotations are of youth. I am of an age for a man to want a consort in his quarters, and I have quarters enough to house one. Mishal still shares space in a dormitory, but I have a door that could keep a woman in and a bed wide enough for two.

Eventually, the wisdom holds, one must grow out of the effortful notion of loving an equal and accept what is soft and stupid and convenient. Perhaps men like Brilen even grow to enjoy such affections, as a girl-child might fuss over a Kichaani squirrel, though it hardly seems a desirable fate. To covet a fragile thing and kill her in having her is a pathology already. To call it love is grotesque.

I go to the training-cavern, which is empty, and strike a post with a practice-blade until my hands are sore, and at least the way my palms sting gives a rationale to the sense of not-rightness. Then I ignore a crowded bathing-chamber of my peers in washing a body that is smaller and slimmer and distinct from my father’s in every way, pale and luminous though I am. I still have color in my skin and my hair, and I remind myself of it, then retreat to my quarters again.

I do not sulk, because there is nothing to sulk about. Only the knowledge that I have no desire for a flaccid, perfumed weight across my body. I have gained my father’s word and his confidence, a bounty for which a thousand boys sleeping in far less comfortable accommodations would gladly kill.

All of this must be the truth, because I am recovered by the morning’s fifth-bell, and Mishal notices nothing abnormal of my affect over breakfast. It is a dynamic equilibrium, but the equilibrium holds.

We still share meals in the dining-chamber, though I am more cautious about it, in the months after my father accepts the refraction-blade and Dhalis helps me write its construction into a paper. I publish it - it is the first piece I have submitted for review - and list Mishal’s name first. The truth is a fair thing to put to paper, and my chest feels lighter for having done it.

I have a copy brought to the dormitory where he sleeps early in the day. A younger aspirant delivers it for me. Then I go about my schedule, eventually to dinner, and I wait.

Mishal never arrives.

Something is very wrong. Mishal is punctual as a rule. He is not in the dormitory, and I find the refraction-blade paper untouched on a neatly-made bed that cannot possibly accommodate his height. He has not seen it. If he had, there would be graphite smears from where he touched it, and he would have found me to demand my rationale for his name placed first.

I was looking forward to that demand. My anticipation curdles into panic.

When I go to ask Ellan, the professor of schematics who favors him best, I find that he, too, is missing. Ellan, another professor tells me, is in a student’s disciplinary hearing.

This is where all of my carefully-founded reputation can at last be utilized. I demand answers of the head docent and I get them. I have the paper in hand, published with my father’s seal, and I place it before the old man actively arguing with Ellan and three professors far less inclined to make a positive case for the student who ignores their lectures in favor of schematics in the margins. I tell them outright that Mishal is the research department’s man, the high councilmaster’s man, mine, and if there is to be discipline, it will not be without my license. This, at least, pauses their deliberations.

I expect it to be some political attack, an indictment of a man they think beneath their scholarship. I am almost relieved to find that it is nothing to do with the paper at all.

Mishal has tried to kill another student, and then attempted to declare a formal duel. It is not the right of aspirants to do either of those things. I insist to the head docent that I will work out the formalities, that my father’s men will surely be better for it than the bureaucratic pedagogues of Councilmaster Tiskin’s department, and go to the cell where they are keeping Mishal to determine what is actually going on.

It is not my fault. I did not do this to him. It truly ought to be relief, but I find that I am twice-annoyed, and dismiss it as a problem for when he no longer faces expulsion from the caverns.

He is behind a set of bars meant to cage a human, which is the greatest procedural insult I can imagine to an aspirant. That the means to police a woman’s movements will suffice for him, a lock and a grate of iron rather than incorporeal wards and silver netting. There is a pallet in the corner, smaller even than his bed. Mishal is seated on it, shoulders leaned back against the wall, cast aglow by the citadel’s stone. We are near enough to the Elevation chamber that the cell is bright as day.

“What did you do?” I demand, knowing no details at all. His hair is still in meticulous order, draped over one shoulder as though he has been straightening it with his fingertips. There is blood on his right hand.

Perhaps he feels my gaze. He presents his knuckles for further scrutiny. “You have not heard the story yet?”

“I have heard,” I say, unsuccessful in keeping my unease from my tone, “that another aspirant lives only thanks to timely care by Irisim in the infirmary, and that you have made matters worse, quite efficiently, in attempting to duel the man whose jaw you broke.”

“You have met Usna before,” he says, and inspects his bloodied knuckles with a slight wince. “She serves in the kitchens. She makes many of the pastries.”

“Do you mean anything of it but the non sequitur?” I ask frostily.

He looks up, a muscle in his face tensing before he forcibly relaxes it. Mishal has improved, of late, at keeping still when he does not wish to be read. That he should fail now is an indication of its own.

“She is Kichaani, Jian. She bakes for her tithed service. She knows your preference for sweets because she asked me. You do not know the name?”

“You are in jeopardy. Forgive me if I find the topic of dessert uninteresting,” I retort. “So this is a matter of a woman? You only have to wait, when you are Selasair you may have whichever woman you want - ”

“Will you listen to me?” he demands. “She is a tithe. Two years of her service have passed. Eight more and she will be free. Evit has decided that he wants her. She will never leave if he has her, she will die in childbed, and she is a child herself, and he cannot have her.”

I stop, briefly stymied by this. “She is not - your sister, or something?”

He exhales shortly. “Must she be my sister? She is fifteen.”

“They will exile you,” I say, dropping my voice. “You will be cast out without a horse to ride home, where no vassal state will care anything for your mathematics, to die in obscurity - ”

“She is fifteen!” he insists again.

“What is so special about being fifteen?” I retort. “Fifteen is of age enough for a man to be wanted by a woman. There is nothing sanctified about it.”

“Do you understand nothing of what your people are?” he snaps, standing to his full height, nearly striking his head. Another centimeter and this ceiling will not hold him. “Sometimes I think you almost understand, and then you say such awful things and I wonder if I misheard any decency in you at all!”

I could not say why my face feels so warm. Only that there is an unfairness he is not conceding, but I can’t name it to defend it. I say nothing. He shakes, breathing heavily.

“You are so kind to me,” he continues. “Why only to me?”

“I don’t know,” I say. It is the first time I have lied to him outright.

“My mother died for the work of keeping Kichaani girls from the citadel,” he says, bracing himself, his hand on the iron grate between us. “The only man who defends me held the sword that killed her. He took me in place of the eldest of my sisters because I had some skill at math. I think he must regret it. He cannot be persuaded to let me rot here. To stop stocking this place with the food of the village he razed.”

Whatever I meant to say does not suffice, and I close my mouth by instinct. He does not meet my eyes.

“I am lost. I will not stand by and let them have Usna, too.”

“Withdraw the duel, Ali,” I tell him. “Give an apology to the head docent. I will make it right.”

“There is nothing to make right,” he says softly, and rests his forehead against the iron grate. “I have nothing here. I am nothing here. I am nothing anywhere, but here - it is unendurable to pretend.”

It is a stupid thing to do, and it is all I can think of. I take the paper from my robes and pass it through the grate. His brows lower as he reads. He stops at the authorial credits, of course.

“Oh,” he says, and lets his hand fall. “Jian.”

“If you only try a little longer, I will fix it for you,” I tell him. “Don’t leave me here alone. Please.”

“I need none of your fixing,” he says, without venom, though it stings nonetheless. He does. From the sag of his shoulders, he knows as much.

“Usna. I will remember it,” I say, and he looks up, incredulous. “If she is so important. If they are all so important to you. I will have my father’s circlet someday, and you will have Brilen’s seat, and we will fix this place together. Whatever you wish. I folded the light for you, didn’t I?”

As though he no longer has whatever strength allowed him to stand, he slumps to the pallet. “Then it is fair exchange, but Jian - I cannot become one of them. The thought of you, even, changed to suit them - ”

“We will worry about it later,” I interrupt. I hope that he does not mean it. How could he mean it? I can hardly be changed more than I am. I was made to suit them.

I shake my head. There is a woman who needs saving. It is different for them, I suppose, at fifteen. Fine. He will owe me for it. It will be a life for a life, and I am choosing him, because I love him. I have loved him for so many years. I have been alone, with Mishal as the sole exception, for all of them.

He is not wrong, at any rate. There is much about this citadel that I will fix, when father is finally dead. I do not want to do it all alone, for an audience of love’s memory, but I will keep something.

When I leave, I meet Councilmaster Brilen in the narrow hall. The sword from that day in the training-cavern is on his hip. My eyes find it first, then rise to meet his. They are steel-grey, still the unclouded color of relative youth in Selasair. I do not like that he is seeing me with a face that might be blotchy, despite my restraint, but I force myself not to look away.

“There is a servingwoman,” I say simply. “Her name is Usna. We will need to see about returning her to Kichaan, if Mishal is to survive this.”

He nods, once. I have no means to read the face he makes in any specificity. Selasair so rarely strike me to be sad, and my light is still spilling from me, and my heart is still too quick, so I may not interpret him properly. He steps aside, though, and lets me pass.

What hurts worse than the rest is what the head servingwoman says when I call a meeting to see what can be done for Usna. She is not wholly cowed by the presence of the head docent at the table to which she has been called; this is an older woman, her hair white with age rather than the product of the furnace.

I have not been sleeping well. Usna is in my quarters, so I have been elsewhere. My grandfather, Councilmaster Faians, did not so much as ask for the excuse that I prepared. I have called in many favors that I never expected to, of late, and it does not put me in good spirits to begin with.

The head docent begins by asking after Usna’s duties, given the incident, and the head servingwoman looks between us both and asks whether that man who defiled her will be punished.

“He is recovering in the infirmary from the bleeding in his brain,” I tell her, very pleasantly, and she makes a sound with her tongue and shakes her head.

“Always lurking,” she mutters. “It’s for the best that the Kichaani stays there, if you must keep him in your order. He unsettles my girls, and bewitched Usna, and he will do it again.”

I know better than to argue with a woman, but something in me would like to, even though it will mean less than nothing. She has already decided what she thinks.

Mishal would not want me to have her punished for it, but I have already kept my promise to him. Brilen is sending a party back to Kichaan, after I told father that my collaborator revealed a story of some old and unstudied corporeal magic in a family he recalls from his home. Usna is to accompany them and act as a local guide. She will stay there when the work is done.

The pretext is thin. My father certainly knows, and I will pay for this request at some later date, though I refuse to dread it in the moment.

Within a day, the kitchen’s head servingwoman is reassigned to the shift of sanitary servingwomen that cleans the sand in the training-chamber and the bathing facilities at night. It is not much, but I think it a small work of justice. So little is fair beneath the citadel. Little enough is fair within it. Mishal, though, wants fairness, so I will give it to him.

There are two good years before I Elevate. He has never liked the dormitory, and he likes it less after he is released from the cell. When I offer him my quarters and my bed, he does not refuse it. He designs schematics that test my abilities, tactics to hold energy in silver and theories to transmute states of matter with the photon, and reminds me that I love to learn. Eventually, he lets me touch his hair.

He still has his moods, and will no longer eat in the dining-cavern, but I bring him food and make him more promises, all of which I intend to keep, if it means I can have him for even another day. They are good years, in part, because I know it will change when the furnace takes my body. I can feel it when his gaze goes to the flush coloring my chest, when he twists a strand of golden hair around his finger and stares at it for longer than one would expect, even of a lover.

My debt does not come due. Father sponsors my Elevation on the first auspicious date of my twenty-first year. Mishal is not permitted in the cavern when I enter the shining white crypt to burn and die and live again, though I doubt that he would want to be present. He does not believe me, I think, when I insist that nothing will have to change, that I will never change, though I have kept all my promises so far.

The night before I burn, he gives me a little piece of marzipan that he has carved, badly, into the shape of a squirrel. It melted in his hand as he worked it. Humans are warmer than Selasair. I ask if he would like me to keep it, or if I can eat it, and he kisses me and touches me, with the taste of it on my tongue, in a way that finally, briefly, sates a need for him that I can almost put to words.

The next day, I burn, and there are no more words for anything. Only the recalled equations as the furnace takes my flesh and tries to take my memory with it. Only pain, and the close-held recollection of the scent at the nape of his neck, the weight of his hair, silk-soft, wrapped around my fist as he fucked me.

Much of me is already Selasair. My lineage is thrice-Elevated, of three councilmasters and the great corporealist who left her daughter with Irisim in trade for her freedom, centuries ago. The color of my hair is changed from gold to silver-white; what remains of pink and color to my skin is dulled and polished to a marble-like sheen. It is not much difference, all things considered.

I am the same man, in the end, only taller, and able to feel every atom as its energy meets the effusion, now, that flows from me, the power I have not only inherited, but made. I can swing the blade Mishal and I refined, and without heft, I can wield it as I always meant to turn a sword of silver to my designs.

He never looks at me in quite the same way again.

When I am finished explaining the process to Mishal, he is quiet for so long that it borders on uncomfortable.

“It will hurt,” I tell him.

“I know.”

“The chamber itself does much of the changing. It is perfectly homeomorphic. You will only need to give it the original coordinates and exert them over the transformation. It is the same process as the spark.”

He says nothing. Only nods, raises his hand, concentrates, and summons a wan flare of silver.

“Ali,” I say urgently. “I have loved you all this time. Give me another week and I can teach you better.”

“A week will make no difference,” he tells me, and looks away.

He has been so tired lately. We no longer share quarters; I have a tower of my own, and duties to the citadel etched in my skin by a covenant made with the stone itself. I have made more of an effort, lately, but it seems to have had the wrong effect. He has stopped sleeping. When I stay with him, he does not linger long in bed, but finds his way quickly back to his desk, which is too short to fit him.

“I’ve brought you something,” I say, and take the waxcloth-wrapped parcel from my robes. I have not made any clever shape with the sugared almond paste, but I have a taste for marzipan, and this, too, persisted past the furnace.

It is not easy to come by in the citadel. He looks at it almost blankly in my palm; he has not been eating well, either. After a moment, he takes it with a strange hesitation, turns the candy between his fingertips.

“Do you understand why I have to do it?” he asks.

I don’t. I nod anyway.

“Forgive me,” he says, presses the marzipan back into my hand, stands from where we have been seated on the floor, and leaves me for a final time.

I take the long, many-staired path back to where the light pulsing from the citadel’s white towers turns even the night sky as bright as day. The hour-bell tolls when a man enters the furnace, and with it, makes his covenant in the fire. I am almost back to my tower when I hear it, and I know that Mishal is dead.

I do not weep. A Selasair hardly can, and what I feel, on the subject of the man I have loved, is not entirely the sort of thing one grieves. I do not eat the marzipan this time, and I do not forgive him, either.

For more in this vein, consider Unhorsed.

Enrit is not my mother-by-birth. She is a slight, hard woman, the sides of her head ever shaved high and bare, scrupulous with the cleanliness of her lamellar and her long blue-black braid. She’s been harder-eyed of late, her megha of a thousand horsewomen put to the stewardship of her first-daughter, Enrit herself put to the queen’s direct service.

It’s an honor that has aged her more than the preceding half-decade since she named me hers.

My mother-by-birth is a follower of Enrit’s megha, and neither her hands nor the gelding she rides were ever fit for war. I remember her as tall, tremulous, and resentful. I might be resentful too, bound to follow horsewoman camps on a nag’s back or sandaled feet, if I were not talented enough at aferan to have drawn the attention of Enrit’s khet-woman, and then, eventually, Enrit.

In the hoof-churned camps beyond the horsewomen’s tents, where I was delivered by a corporealist better-born for ungulates than for people, the game of aferan is played with the largest stone the leads of both teams can lift in turn, wrapped in any pelt that can be secured, contested between two teams of five horsed women. It does not require a bow; the stone passes by the horsewomanship necessary to draw up on a mare in full gallop and the strength to wrest thirty kilograms from her rider’s arms at speed.

The stones were smaller, then, but so were the girls on horseback, lathered as their mounts from the day’s work, determined to eke out another hour in their mothers’ oversized saddles. My mother was not a herder, but a leatherworker, and her gelding was fresher for it, though he was better for the sporadic work of dragging hides than marshalling sheep over the steppe.

That my hands smelled like sour curd-cheese mattered less than the strength learned from salting and soaking and dragging hides, a deep aspirational interest in the game itself, and a tolerance for pain, which my mother-by-birth also taught me. She did not much like that I borrowed her horse for aferan, which she meant to keep fresh and biddable for her first-daughter, four years my junior, to someday ride and prove her mettle, but adrenaline does a lot for bruises, and I was good at it. Mhinet, first-daughter to Enrit, agreed. She wished to see what I could do with a better horse and tack constructed by one of her men for battle.

Enrit likes made-women, she told me, once she was convinced that I might be one. To ride is a woman’s verb; to walk is a man’s. I left my sandals and the gelding with my birth-mother within the month. Enrit called me Diria, a diminutive for stone in the language of the horsewomen before the first queen standardized the Merethoran tongue.

I have been Diria ever since.

I don’t have to mind the fire or the stew. Enrit is clear on as much. It is not my sole work, though I was raised to tend smoke-fires as much as I was raised to scour the hair from skins, and few of my sisters in her erakt of a hundred girls in the vicinity of my age were taught as much by the women who first put them to the saddle.

I appreciate Enrit’s regard. What women make, stew or fire or child, men mind, and I am of the former. Fire-keeping is a duty that passes by rotation in her erakt; there will be no men with us when Enrit someday calls us to war, and there will still be stew. Better that my sisters learn, though I’m often compelled to teach them. It’s a fair exchange. When I first held a bow, I needed roughly as much indulging.

This evening, on the pink-faded edge of an interminable summer day, far from the Mereti in the seasonally-temperate southern steppe, I tell Resha that she ought to take my place as lead for warmup and field-marking. The formal games for the queen’s judgment have not yet started, and the offer both delights Resha and costs me little.

The seats beside the field, marked for the queen’s use, are empty. Enrit, seated with her milk-tea beside the cookfire, is more relaxed for it, though I see her golden-brown eyes move to the raised silken chairs more than once as I pretend not to watch her, assessing the sun-dried manure as it smokes in the buried brazier.

“They’ll miss their lead,” Enrit observes, when her drink is empty. “Teshirn’s women are good opponents. Call Resha back and make sure my girls do me justice in their preparations.”

“I’m tired from the journey,” I tell her. It’s true, though not the entirety of my reasoning. “I’d rather be fresh for when the queen watches.”

“Excuses,” she notes. Her gaze goes back to the empty seating.

The games are to be a ritual of sorts. We’re hardly a minute’s ride from the queen’s palace, a tall draped structure rippling elegantly in the slightest breeze. The hundred girls of Enrit’s erakt, all astride their mounts, could fit handily inside without crowding. When the wind passes the massive silken tent, it carries the scent of incense and beeswax, sweet and floral and rare.

I haven’t seen the queen yet. We’ve been stationed here for three days, much of it in making camp and tending to Enrit’s horses and the goods brought in tow along with our own mounts and needs. Resha, herself the daughter-by-birth of a horsewoman of Enrit’s standing, suggested that her lack of appearance was odd. I keep my own thoughts private.

There are new threads of silver at Enrit’s hairline, and my thinking concerns both the grey hair and the tension not wholly gone from the body of a woman I know to be consummately assured. She has been my mother for five years. It’s rare enough to speak to her alone that I hardly mind braving the coals for the privilege.

“What’s the matter?” Enrit asks, her focus now on me. She pauses, her brow furrowing shallowly. “You have something on your chin.”

It is blood. The blade I used to take the hair from my face was too dull for the task. Not too dull for function, but unfit for safety. These are the consequences of travel. My good blade was in another pack when the opportunity to clean my jaw was there.

I shrug at Enrit’s scrutiny, wet my thumb, and wipe the smear away.

“You’ve been rewarded,” I tell her. “And you’ll be rewarded more when we win at aferan before the queen. I don’t understand why a woman under consideration for the queen’s personal guard is acting like she’s cornered without her horse.”

Enrit snorts. “It’s a heavy reward to serve the queen,” she says. “You need a better blade? I’ll have one whet if you stop glowering at the coals and go attend to my team.”

What I need is for my face not to itch with the movement of a dozen prickling hairs beneath the skin, not to feel them there and not to see the shadow of their presence when Tirhan lends me the bronze hand-mirror her mother left her for shearing the sides of her scalp.

Seventeen is the age to change so. My sisters have softened over the past few years, then hardened in novel ways. To feel one wrongness invites the perception of the other sorts, the shape of an over-muscled child beneath my leathers.

“Diria,” she says, when I’ve been silent too long. “Resha loves her glory too much to lead.”

I could probably love glory. To win, though, would count for nothing. To win and have it mean something is where the glory lives, and that is well beyond even the finest silk-delineated aferan field.

Mhinet told me, when I refused her offer the first two times, that Enrit thinks my sort of woman more teachable, without so many poor habits as mothers-by-birth often give their daughters in the vocations of archery, horsewomanship, and war. I have never asked her about it outright. Among ninety-nine other daughters and a thousand horsewomen in sum, even the relatively favored among us spoke to her little while she oversaw our megha. I learned enough to address her without overformality, to model my braid and my care for both my leathers and my mares after hers.

Now she is in the palace for the better part of the day, in preparation to train the force that will next guard the queen, which will likely include me. It makes us closer, this narrowing of her responsibilities and mine. The outcome of this series of games, historically, has been the process of winnowing between erakt. Not all the girls of Enrit’s cohort remaining with the palace will be the daughters she has raised, and the queen will have her say.

I’m unconcerned about being chosen. I make a good lead, more than competent on the field, and I notice women. I know as well as she does that Resha loves glory and will follow orders eagerly for the chance to throw down the stone past the scoring-line for the team and just as eagerly take up the position of lead for the same reason, though it ill suits her. The trick is placing her to get precisely what she wants; to trust that I will give the stone to her once I have it and unhorse any woman who would take it from her. Tirhan, placed with Cenai, will excel the way she won’t alone, because Cenai’s regard matters more to her than any glory. She already has it, if the time Cenai spends sharing her bedroll is any evidence, but she overperforms to earn it twice more.

Resha forgets these things, in placing herself towards the scoring-line. Out on the field, she has put Tirhan at her side, in the starting configuration. It’s defensible, because Tirhan is better than I am at putting a woman off her horse with the sheer strength of her shoulders, but Tirhan will be craning her neck all the while to know if Cenai is watching, and her performance will be weaker for it.

I shrug again. “Resha will learn or she won’t.”

“Performing for the queen’s amusement is not the moment to learn,” Enrit counters.

“Will you be punished for it?” I ask outright. “If we lose.”

“It would be a thrilling prospect to have some way to anticipate who the queen will punish,” Enrit says drily, in the cadence of a woman who has been, I am beginning to realize, drinking something more than tea.

I wonder if she means it as a true confidence. She is making a kind of pained face, which gives me little more to go on. I grit my teeth and feel my skin sting at the nick for having done so.

“Resha!” I call. “Hold the team, I’ll dress my mare. Enrit wants you at the fire after all.”

She doesn’t resent me, though I expect it of everyone, in a way I haven’t successfully cast off. Mothers-by-birth have a way of sticking. I’ve heard it muttered more than once across bedrolls, and I believe it, deep as the marrow of my bones. As Meret gave Merethora her name, so too does any woman who names another take on a kind of lasting power over her. My name is Diria, but it isn’t the only one I’ve been given, and it is written over another.

Resha does as I bid with only mild complaint about her ineptness with fire-tending, and I change the configuration to favor Tirhan and Cenai, putting smaller-but-more-vicious Mireis as my fellow front-woman, and we win a first informal game before an empty stand of gold-silk seating, the drapery rippling in the soft summer wind all the while in miniature of the palace that looms over the grounds.

Three days pass, during which the formal matches begin. The queen does not appear. The clear spring water that supplies the summer grounds is different from the stream-fed lakes where we typically water our horses and ourselves, and the soaps from the camp followers around the palace camp are perfumed. It’s difficult to tell which is bothering my skin more. What began as a scrape stings unrelentingly.

We aren’t only in the shadow of the palace to play aferan. There are other games afoot and masses of unfamiliar girls to play them. Members of our erakt participate in evaluations of horse quality and speed, competitions of mounted archery and raw strength, the last of which suits a stocky woman’s-build like Tirhan’s far better than it suits mine. I can lift the aferan-stone precisely to the extent that I need to for our team’s advantage. It’s good for morale, though, for Tirhan to be impressive before a crowd. She is third of the thousand women of about our age massed around the palace at the lift-above-the-shoulder, second at to-the-knee.

I’m not the only made-woman of Enrit’s erakt. Renae and Meresi are both particularly skilled archers, of horsewoman mothers, raised practically with a bow in hand, though neither favors aferan. Not all made-women are so exceptional. I watch one girl, a shadow to her face that makes my own skin itch to see, fail to best not only Tirhan but small, compact Mireis at lift-above-the-shoulder, not least because her shoulder is higher, the bones of her legs unfavorably long for the structure of the lift.

Corporealists used to change the bodies of made-women. There are accounts of the magic being used in such a way, and some of the erakt offer them to me unprompted, passed from their mothers. Tirhan boasts of a made-woman sire, but it was once the case that being made included making, down to the configuration of the bones and organs, more than only shearing the face smooth and struggling around a voice that shifts to the wrong key without warning. Renae offers me soap brought from our last camp, and it helps a little. Her face is lighter-shadowed. She doesn’t really need it.

Her mother-by-birth had a little corporealism. Enough, she says, for nicks and scrapes, though it passes by the womb and Renae doesn’t have one of those in which to receive the gift. Her mother-by-birth, however, did some work on her face before she was given to Enrit, and it is slower and less.

Meresi takes first place in a round of unhorsed archery. There are murmurs about it from the girls of other erakts. A made-woman is better on her feet. Perhaps she ought to stay there and leave her horse for the born to ride.

I make sure, when we play against the team of the erakt that said as much, that we rout them. My chin almost heals, then cracks open when the air dries it. We are a strong erakt on all counts; Enrit chose her women carefully. In this way, we advance to the round of four in aferan, and this is when the fieldside seats are finally filled.

She is not the queen, the woman - more a girl - who takes the queen’s seat beside a man of light-brown complexion and wealthy coastal dress, who mutters at her until she sighs and moves to a different chair. Tirhan claims to have seen the queen before, and has offered lavish and often-inconsistent details as to her appearance.

This woman is too young. She has wide, expressive black eyes, dramatic brows, and long black hair that curls in a way that makes it catch the wind, worn loose. Her build is slim and spare, suited to a message-rider more than purely ornamental. She arrives as the other lead and I are choosing our stone.

At this level of play, it is no longer a rock pulled from a riverbank, wrapped in a sheep-pelt I’ve volunteered because my mother-by-birth meant it for discard. There are leather-bound weights of irregular sizes and masses, dyed black and polished to a shining finish. The opposing lead is a grim, focused girl, shorter but denser-built than I am, cordial as we make our selections but clearly disinterested in the companionable wordplay that sometimes precedes our games.

We both stop in our place when the young woman is escorted out.

“That isn’t the queen,” I say quietly.

Feine, her hand still on the stone she has been considering, makes a face. She has a look to her, the cut of her hair and her leathers, which have a few patches of lamellar overlay, that suggests a particularly high-regarded horsewoman’s daughter-by-birth. She, too, is watching the young woman closely.

“It’s the princess,” she replies. “Never trained near the palace before?”

Enrit didn’t mention a princess. She’s been hard-mouthed and quiet over the past few days, and it’s been near-impossible to speak to her between games and the jostling of the rest of the erakt between events and over meals.

“No,” I admit, and try to focus on choosing the stone. I find one that feels pleasant enough to heft and gesture for Feine to try it; she protests its lightness, I protest that her choice is beyond me to lift, and we settle on a third.

“She’s a corporealist,” Feine adds, unprompted, before she takes the stone back to her team to begin play. “It could be a fortunate thing. You’ll need one before the match is done.”

Before I can reply, she draws her thumb over her chin, where the scab has been lingering for days, and mounts her horse with the stone balanced on her shoulder.

We win by less than we ought to. I am not playing my best, and Resha carries us without being bidden as I relegate myself to defensive positioning on the field. Cenai takes an ugly fall, and Tirhan nearly kills the girl who shouldered her down after the drum’s beat, and I feel shining black eyes on me as I put my knees to my mare and ride in to defuse the situation.

After that, the princess watches me, and I play even more poorly for it. The scab on my chin has split again, and there is blood on my leather that has nothing to do with play when Feine dismounts to bow to me after our victory is called. She smirks when she lifts her head and gestures at her chin again, and I don’t linger on the field, despite the crowd of onlookers, finished with their day’s trials, gathered as we’ve played.

It’s unendurable to be seen wrong. Renae is out of her unscented soap, and I wonder, as I drag my blade too harshly over raw skin, whether I could settle this by cutting off the part that refuses to heal. Renae sees something of this in the way I grip the knife, I think, because she takes it from me and suggests that I see Enrit.

There is a second game of aferan in progress, the sun still high despite the late hour. I skirt around the field to find Enrit, who is where Renae suggested, seated before our erakt’s brazier. Nera, a delicate girl who spends most of her time with the horses, doesn’t protest when I offer to tend the fire. She ladles me a bowl of stew and follows the rest of the erakt to the sidelines to watch the game in progress. Its victors will be our next and final opponents; it would be wise to observe, but some part of me knows the princess will still be watching. It would be worse to see her focus on someone else.

“It was a poor showing,” Enrit says in greeting.

“We won,” I say.

“Not by any of your plays,” she observes, and I avert my gaze. “What did their lead say?”

“Nothing, really. I just asked about the princess. She told me.”

Enrit sighs. “Don’t envy the princess, Diria.”

“I don’t envy her!” I insist. “It’s just inconvenient that she would show up now.”

Resha would have known what to say to Feine. I cross my arms tightly over my chest. Sometimes I wish for a less-acute awareness of my deficits in the same space that I wish for a fraction of Resha’s ease with her body. I don’t think it’s the same as the mooning that passes between Tirhan and Cenai, but it might help if it was.

I take my stew in silence as Enrit nurses her cup of tea. By the scent, it really is tea, this time. There are shadows, darker and deeper than usual, beneath her eyes. In the distance, one team or the other passes the scoring-line.

The crowds have been larger for the games as the field is winnowed down. Perhaps that’s the source of my discomfort more than anything. The princess only has two eyes, and there were hundreds on us as we played. It would be fairer to assume fault in the conditions than to think of blaming her. Fairer still to blame Feine outright. We won’t be playing against her team again, so to do so would put an end to wondering.

My chin stings when I move my jaw to eat. Enrit notices.

“Let me see it,” she says, and puts out her hand.

Enrit, too, has some basic corporealism, though she mainly puts her gift to her horses. Most women of her responsibilities have some, though rarely the sort that would inspire stories like those of Meret, when she united the horsewomen and the coast and the mountain villages all beneath her name. Meret, who broke the legs of a hundred mounts at once, easily as snapping dry grass. Meret, who cured a thousand-woman megha of a plague in a morning after they drank of a river in which a sheep had died upstream.

She touches my chin, and some of the stinging pain is gone. The wound itself is not mended. Enrit can keep her mount running long past when any of the rest of her run would be lathered and dead, but she is not a healer. There are no healers of the sort that populated Meret’s time, though a better one might smooth an abrasion without trouble.

“I wish that I could do more,” Enrit says, and puts a hand with the texture of a falconer’s glove to my shoulder, her mouth tightening with regret. “It isn’t my gift.”

“It’s okay,” I say stiffly. “It’s not anything, really.”

“You’ve been a good daughter to me. When you’re appointed, you’ll guard the princess along with her mother,” she says, which seems to relate to almost nothing.

“We haven’t won yet,” I argue, and she gives me a sharp look in rejoinder.

“When you’re appointed here,” she repeats, “you may not like the post much.”

“Tell me to like it, then, and I will,” I offer, and Enrit laughs, shaking her head in a way that puts the firelight across her face, highlighting the creases of age between her brows and lined around her eyes.

“If I had a dozen more of you, it might be almost enough,” she sighs. “The queen is restless. I should see about her before the sun sets.”

“What should I do?” I ask, unsure of my meaning as it pertains to aferan or anything else that’s happened since we traveled here. I am asking about all of it.

Enrit sighs. “Don’t lose. And try not to stare. The queen is an observant woman.”

I don’t ask further questions. Enrit is an observant woman herself, and I’ve had enough of being flayed bare for the day. When I’ve finished my stew and put out the brazier, I thank her for her efforts; she’s blocked some of the feeling to my chin, and it’s a modest relief.

“You will win,” she reminds me, before I leave to see the rest of what, from the sound of it, has been an exciting game. “And you’ll have the appointment you want.”

“I don’t want the appointment,” I say. “Just to stay in your erakt. If winning is what I need to do, I’ll win.”

She makes a comment wondering aloud at my sire before I can leave earshot, and my face stays warm until I reach the aferan field.

Our team won its qualifying match by a solid, if lackluster, two points. To put Mireis and Resha in front, guarded at three points by the rest of us, is to ensure a quick but conservative victory, so long as I don’t embarrass myself in playing defense.

This game of aferan, to decide our final competition, is a bloodbath. Playtime has been extended twice for lack of a victor as the teams trade single points, play by play, tied and exceeded and tied again. Our match was more vicious than I expected, but was kept relatively in check.

Both teams are led by particularly strong players, the sort who’ve accumulated reputations in the past few days of competition, known to me by name. The version of play before us is often the way with aferan, likely the way Resha wishes we would play; the leads trade points, the other four mounted women on each time serving mainly to keep each other occupied and occasionally facilitate the movement of the stone from one lead’s hands to the other. After the stone reaches the scoring-line, it trades to the other lead’s hands to begin, and in some games it seems that scarcely any woman but two leads is on the field.

This is a reasonable tactic, executed well, under the right lead. The other four women effectively negate each other, leaving the two leads to decide the outcome on which of the two is a stronger gameswoman. I know Araht better, of the two on the field; she is a made-woman, the only other lead who is, playing for an erakt in copper-washed silk over their leathers. She has a year’s height and a year’s muscle on me in accordance with our age difference, but has struck me as a boisterous good sport on the few occasions we’ve spoken, trading compliments, for the most part. Less reserved than many, but in a way I find more admirable than unsettling. She’s pretty, which helps.

Sehna, of the team in unadorned leather, is tall, hard-bodied, and already battle-tested, or so the stories suggest. She was put into her erakt after her mother-by-birth schismed with the help of a coastal township, rumored to be the place of her siring. She’s lighter complected than most horsewomen, despite her sun-weathering, and she wears her hair short and unbraided. An ugly arrow-scar puckers one of her pale cheeks, and when her lips part to deliver some instruction to her team across the field, she’s missing three teeth just past the scar, visible only because the rest of her mouth is so neat and straight and shining.

It is a game of these two women, and a tense one.

Twilight has fallen over the field, pock-marked from hoof-falls and foot-falls alike. Torches are being lit and placed, though their orange light is more eerie than strictly necessary, yet; the sun here never fully sets. Araht has the stone, a remarkably heavy one, tucked over her hip, her horse wet-flanked, lips flecked with froth, as she deftly evades Sehna’s attempt to pull close. She’s riding her mount hard, and when she bowls the stone at the scoring-line, the momentum that pushes it across is more that of her speed on horseback than the remaining strength in her arms.

This brings them to a tie, and to a pause, as one of the judges must retrieve the massive stone and the two teams reform. In the rise of conversation that fills the moment before play will continue, though, with the torch-lit pink of sunset turning redder by the moment, the draped-silk walls of the palace finally part.

The unannounced arrival of the queen stalls the game far more thoroughly than the exchange of points. Enrit has gone to attend her; my mother rides beside the rare woman who needs no mount to be what she is. I had expected the queen to be of Enrit’s age, having ruled for the better part of two decades, but she looks hardly older than her daughter, who can have no more than my seventeen years. Where the princess’ hair is curled, the queen’s is straight, held up with a set of ornamental pins. The sharpness of her dark eyes is the same, though she is slightly shorter in stature, less long-limbed and perhaps more graceful when she moves.

Most notably, she has the same quality of focus. Her gaze roves over the crowd, the field, settles on the empty seat where the princess and her older male escort wait, but with the same lingering sense, core-deep, of having been witnessed.

I can feel something of her in me, lingering past sight. Queen Treis is the most powerful corporealist living - the queen must be, to hold the title and the allegiance of the horsewomen - but she is no healer. This is all Enrit has told any of us, and Tirhan had nothing to add, when I asked. Only that hers is a martial gift, and she took the throne and the name of Treis Meretha without a single horsewoman’s allegiance until the last queen was a stain in her sleeping-silks.

From my vantage point, I can’t hear her well when she speaks. I think she asks after the score, as though she hasn’t been sequestered in her palace for six days while uncountable other games have been played beneath her notice. The man beside the princess rises and bows; the players on the field, uneasy, make gestures at bowing from horseback.

She seats herself, and bids Enrit leave her mount and join her. I watch as a doll that resembles my mother does precisely as she is told, my stomach turning at the sight.

Sehna has the stone, now, pressed to her side beneath the hinge of her shoulder, her long arm tucked in a way that suggests a secure grip, though her gaze is on the watching queen. Araht, across from her, waits, too rattled to address Sehna with a taunt or to flirt with the crowd. I don’t eagerly anticipate facing either of them tomorrow, though my lackluster performance this afternoon may ultimately help me, as I’ll be undeniably fresher than either. Opposite Araht, though, I’m likely to look the more reserved, lesser version of what she is. Opposite Sehna, almost anyone but Araht would look trivial and beneath attention.

One of the judges signals for quiet before the game begins. Sehna is still looking at the queen, her forearm flexing visibly against the black leather casing of the stone. Then, the strike of a mallet against a great horse-skin drum, and Sehna and Araht charge at once, Araht wheeling her exhausted mount around to cut in front of Sehna’s advance towards the scoring-line.

If either of them scores, it will be the end of the match, and odds favor Sehna with her starting position. Araht’s mount, though, must trust her with every shred of its life, because it follows her through a daring maneuver to gain proximity, wheeling past Sehna before careening into her horse, flank-to-flank, pushing her mount off-balance from the side on which Sehna holds the stone.

Close enough. Araht grapples for it, releasing the reins completely and trusting her balance and her core.

Sehna is stronger. The horses clash and slow as flesh meets flesh, but Sehna urges her mount on towards the scoring line, Araht following doggedly, one arm looped over the stone. She doesn’t have the strength to entirely wrest the thing from Sehna’s grasp. Her horse is stronger and more desperate, though, and Sehna’s mount throws back its head and screams in pain at some barely-visible hoof-strike, blood now joining horse-sweat in the overchurned mud.

They advance, nonetheless. One of Araht’s teammates, in fluttering teal silk, muscles her way past the woman on her to come to Araht’s aid, and is unhorsed when Sehna’s mount tries to rear, bucks instead, and kicks the defender’s horse nearly out from under her. Bone splinters and both fall. Her horse, at least, is mortally injured.

Araht almost gets the stone as Sehna is forced to recover her balance on her mount. It would be easier to watch beside my own erakt, surely, trading grimaces and reassurances that our game will not be so bloody. Instead, I turn my gaze, teeth gritted, back to where the princess sits.

The queen leans forward, watching with interest. Her daughter flinches every time the downed horse cries out in pain.

Araht tries again. It’s a more risky endeavor this time, in changing motion, unsteady. She lets go of some of her grip on her mount to put all her weight behind the stone, pushing off with her thighs, turning the momentum as she moves to grip the stone to her chest and trusts that her horse will be there to catch her.

It works, for a moment. Sehna loses her iron-heavy grasp, and Araht almost has the stone in play. Sehna’s horse balks, and Araht has it, readies herself to turn and fall back to her saddle, to urge her exhausted mount back to the opposite scoring-line.

Sehna loops her arm over Araht’s throat in a lunge that has nothing to do with the motion of their horses, glances one final time to the queen, and throws not the stone, but Araht down, just short of Sehna’s team’s scoring line.

It is one thing to land badly on your back. I’ve done it before myself and woken up under the hands of a busy corporealist with a limited gift of bonesetting, fretting over her ability to address my lungs and whether I can move my feet. I’ve been lucky.

Araht lands on her back, and the stone lands on Araht. Every one of her ribs fractures inwards at once, such is the mass and momentum of the stone. I don’t hear it, but I swear, in a sense, that I do - if not as it happens, in the silence that follows.

Sehna’s horse rears away from the body and the riderless mount, itself near to collapsing. There are gasps, but no cheers. It is too dark to entirely see if the black stains on Araht’s silken uniform are blood.

One of the judges raises her hand, and the drum sounds, deep and resonant.

The princess stands, pulls up the skirt of her khitta, and begins to sprint for the body on the field. Enrit rises, nearly gets her by the collar before she shrugs away, one beat ahead, and bolts.

“She’s alive!” the princess cries. “She’s alive - no one move!”

She gets as far as the body before the stone stops her. She isn’t an unreasonably small woman, the princess, but it’s immediately clear that she can’t move the weight pinning Araht’s body in the mud. She tries, I can see her trying even from the corner of the field from which I watch, jostled, now, by the women of other erakts seeking a better view.

It takes me too long to react. I shove past the woman beside me and enter the field, familiar from the last match but alien beneath the torchlight, the mud sucking at my riding-boots as I run.

“Push it to the right,” she’s begging Sehna, still on horseback, the only woman near enough to help. “I can’t move it - please - ”

Araht certainly looks dead. So close, her eyes are glassy, her chest concave and unmoving. The princess has a slender shoulder to the stone, pressing fruitlessly, and one hand on Araht’s abdomen, shoved beneath her clothing to reach the skin beneath.

The princess registers my approach, looks up, her dark gaze catching the orange torchlight. “The right,” she says. “Free her heart. I can save her if you just - push it right.”

It is not the stone I would’ve chosen. The weight is too much for me to lift it outright. I try to grasp the surface, slick with blood and grime, and wish, more than anything, to have Tirhan at my side to help me budge the fucking thing. I put all my weight to the task, to slide instead of lift in earnest, and it almost works.

More bones break as it shifts. Araht’s body twitches weakly.

“Put your shoulder to it again,” I tell the princess, and she does so without question, pushes as I grip and pull with all my strength, and for a second, I have it crushed against my body by sheer muscle rather than the gravity killing Araht.

My back protests; I can feel the bruise blooming over my stomach. I drag the stone one, two paces, and let it fall. The princess says nothing immediately, only tears open Araht’s shirt to put her hands to where her chest is gaping, and I feel, peripherally this time, the same sense I noticed with her mother’s gaze on me. A power operating by a means beyond my body to understand, nauseating in its sensory inexplicability. I reel back and nearly collide with Sehna’s horse, the woman astride it watching, unreadable.

Araht’s lungs rise almost enough for breath. The deadly-concave shape begins to change beneath the power of a corporealist healer, a real one, the sort that were supposed to have been long-killed by one queen or another, seeking to ensure her post.

Then the princess’ neck snaps. She collapses onto Araht’s half-reconstructed chest. Each of her shoulders breaks in turn, her bones alive beneath her skin. The princess makes a terrible sound as Araht breathes once more, barely, visible beneath skin rent by fractured ribs, a body desperate to survive - and then dies. Something in her stills, and I know it more from sense than from any special quality of what is now a corpse.

Whatever healing corporealism could be performed is done. The nausea remains, and I turn quickly to the fieldside, where the queen stands beneath one of the torches, coolly unperturbed, Enrit three steps behind her.

“Enrit’s girl,” the queen announces. “Take my daughter to her quarters.”

I am frozen, both transfixed by the scene before me and utterly terrified. Araht is dead, and the princess, her body gone limp, is about as good as dead herself. My body does not immediately react, not least because I have no clear instructions for it. It’s all I can do to stand, knees locked, because to collapse would surely be worse.

Enrit steps forward. “I will take the princess.”

“Your girl is fond of her. She may do it,” the queen retorts. It should be impossible for such a woman to be threatening. She is not tall enough to reach my shoulder, thin in the same almost hollowed-out way as her daughter, who gurgles softly, draped over Araht’s corpse, broken by her mother’s power.

If I touch her, I will jar her, and there will be no hope of getting her to - I nearly laugh - a healer?

Before my eyes, though, her spine moves again, and the princess draws a deep, shuddering breath.

“It’s okay,” she says quietly. “You won’t hurt me.”

I take a few unsteady paces before I kneel to try to lift her, her shoulders still wrongly-oriented and visibly misshapen, my own back protesting. She is lighter than the stone.

“Don’t worry,” she says, and smiles thinly. “Thank you. For trying.”

“Don’t talk,” I tell her, and she laughs wetly but allows me to get my arm beneath her knees, and then to extricate her upper body from Araht’s, trying not to see the open flesh as a woman I briefly knew, who might have lived.

Once she’s satisfied that her daughter has been removed, the queen turns her attention back to the players. The night has gone dusk-purple. It will get no darker.

“I would like to see a game,” she tells the players, three-and-five still on their mounts in the mud, the silk-colors team barely enough for legal play. Sehna’s horse, pawing at the ground, looks like it, too, might prefer to be finished. There is nothing especially commanding about the queen’s voice, but the effect of her speech, in spite of it, is total. “The score was tied. She didn’t pass the line. Ready the field.”

There are more wet sounds as Araht’s body is removed by a judge, or perhaps by Enrit, her horse is led away, whinnying shrilly for its rider, and the teams retake their positions. I don’t look back to watch. The princess is breathing shallowly in my arms, a soft, pained moan catching on every exhale, and we will not be safe until we are out of view.

So I leave, though I don’t know where I’m going. The princess gives a few murmured instructions; the palace is well illuminated from within by a dozen carefully-tended braziers, but inside the massive structure is made up of an incomprehensible series of silk-draped chambers. She’s breathing normally, but still making the kind of sounds I would associate with broken bones, when she tells me I’ve found the right place.

The color of the sky filters in, purple meeting the gold of firelight; her chamber shares a surface with the outside of the tent. A few books are collected in a trunk beside a half-raised pallet of silks, and I nearly trip over an open chest of khittas, gowns that suit a rider not intending combat. I have never owned one, myself. These are much-embroidered silken things of great beauty.

I place her carefully on her pallet. When I squint at her, through the thin light, the deformities are gone from her shoulders, and her head sits properly atop her neck. Her face remains contorted.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice strained. “Dead is dead. I couldn’t do anything more. Were you close?”

“Not really,” I say. “We spoke twice since I came here with Enrit. Mostly about aferan.”

“You were the lead from before,” she recalls. “The terrible one. How does your team win?”

“Not usually because of me,” I say, and shrug, not entirely certain how to react to my own defensiveness or to this dreamlike haze of light and silk and scented oils. “We have a few good plays, and I only pick a stone I can pass. Depending on who we’re playing, I move the stone around the field to the woman who can score with it.”

“The lead is supposed to score,” she observes.

“It’s not a rule,” I say. “Enrit says the physicality of it is necessary, but it isn’t the point. You can judge a woman’s physicality from her lifts or her bow. You could - probably change her physicality, right? I like aferan because it measures something else.”

“Not that game of aferan,” she says, and lays back heavily on her pallet. “Will you let me fix it?”

“Pardon?” I say, caught up in my own imagining, trying to keep my thoughts from the blood drying on my hands and my leathers. They’ll need cleaning.

“Whatever is - ” she gestures illustratively at me. “I don’t know. It’s incredibly uncomfortable to be near you while you’re bleeding pain everywhere.”

“Oh. I scraped myself,” I tell her hastily, stepping back, recalibrating the nature of her grimaces. From the face she makes, she does not believe me, and I raise my hands, palms bared. “Really.”

“Obviously,” she says, rolling her eyes, and puts out her hand. “Let me.”

My knowledge of corporealism is limited. Enrit has a little, a few of the girls in my erakt have some, and all have constraints. Enrit carries dried curd-cheese at her hip when she rides, because in using her power, she loses her energy at a rate similar to that of the animal between her knees.

I have watched this small, graceless woman attempt to repair a cage of ribs and its contents, fail, and turn her power to her own spine when her mother snapped it through already tonight. There is something different at work, or - there are consequences, actually, a slur to her speech, which I haven’t noticed in the low light of her chamber and the distracting circumstances of trying not to look too long at her face. She lets her hand fall and rolls about in her pile of silks, obviously uncomfortable.

“Either let me fix it or leave,” she says, a little blearily. “It itches.”

My face is very warm. It’s one thing to allude to it, another to say as much outright. It’s ridiculous that this woman spends any time around people at all. I can’t imagine what it must be to sit at her side for hours like the stuffily-dressed man who accompanies her, feeling her fingers under his skin.

“Fix what?” I demand. The scrape will heal, once I stop touching it. I’ll just need to let the hair grow for a few days, until the wound heals, and then it’ll be a deeply embarrassing memory.

“Don’t leave because you don’t like to hear it,” she says warily, and I drag my hand down my face. “You’re a made-woman, but no one’s made you.”

My heart is suddenly very quick. “That isn’t true.”

“I mean, I can feel all of you - ”

I interrupt her. To hear more is untenable. “No, not the - I’ve been made. All it takes is to keep the face clean and to wear the hair correctly and to manage the voice. It makes a horsewoman.”

“For Araht. For many, I think. But you’re also a woman.” She laughs at nothing. “Just let me. I won’t ask again. I’ll fix your scrape and your skin and - that’s probably all I can do right now, but I’ll do the rest someday if you want, if mother doesn’t kill me before then. If she doesn’t kill me tonight. I don’t think she will. You have a few years.”

“My skin?” I say warily, ignoring the rest, and she lifts her face again.

So close, looking directly at her, there is something more compelling than her power in her dark eyes, the expressive tilt of her brows. “Yes. It’s wrong. Come here and let me show you.”

I give her my hand, and she inhales shortly. It’s strange; while the comparison that comes to mind is something in me, in this, the purest possible form, it’s more as though I’m diffusing into her. I feel nothing of what she is, none of her in me. I know nothing more about the princess for having stared directly into the experience of her corporeal power. I only know that she understands it, for a moment. That I am in her, and she knows me.

Enrit’s regional block of sensation is nothing to the sense of every layer of my skin, reworked. It burns, and then the sense abates entirely to a downy silence.

She releases my hand. Her breathing has shallowed again.

“Milk,” she says, and collapses into her silks.

No one in the palace is surprised when I come dashing through the walls of draped-silk, asking for a skin of milk for the princess. There are a few older horsewomen in decorated leathers present, drinking fermented milk and stronger coastal liquors of their own, and one has a skin ready with honey, as she says the princess prefers. I make my way back with some effort, put the skin to her lips, and she drinks the way I imagine a particularly altricial premature lamb might do so, unable to stay conscious or to exert much control over her mouth.

I don’t think much about the fact that my face is smooth, that my chin no longer stings. If the princess dies for having done it, I’ll probably learn to regret the near-total absence of nausea, even if it is the greatest relief I’ve felt in a very long time.

She doesn’t make sense when I try to speak to her again. I ask her if she wants to drink more and she equivocates, shoves aside the skin, and says milk again after a moment. I ask her how old she is, curious, given her ageless mother, and she pouts and says eighteen. She apologizes several more times for the death of Araht, which makes me feel ill; then she apologizes for what her mother is going to do to me, which is worse, but also a reassuring sign of lucidity.

“Mother wants to put a guard on me,” she says, turning the skin idly in her trembling hands, once I trust her to feed herself without choking. “Rinir is old, more of a caretaker. She meant to appoint Sehna, I’ve heard her say it. Enrit doesn’t want the task to fall to you. Diria. I know of you.”

My hand is on my face, moving slowly over the shape of it, trying to track what she changed. The absence of a thing is hard to account for. I look up to see her watching me, saying nothing.

“Do you want Sehna for a guard?” I ask, and she laughs.

“If I had you, you’d be dead in a week. Mother likes to take the things I value,” she says, without any particular inflection. “I liked Araht. I don’t like Sehna, so I can fuck her without much worry.”

Whatever expression or coloring changes my face makes her smile guilelessly before she finishes the skin of milk.

“She’ll try to name the role for you anyway, of course,” the princess adds. “She’ll enjoy watching Enrit squirm and argue-without-arguing. Your mother is a decent woman.”

I think so, anyway. I watch the flicker of brazier-light against the silk and say nothing.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” she continues. “I’ll try to get you and Enrit out. I think I’ll throw a tantrum and insist on Sehna. Mother will see it for what it is, but Sehna clearly wants the post. The head of her erakt can bear the honored role of mother’s personal guard for as long as any of them last.”

“What a miserable way to live,” I say, glancing around at the high expanses of gold silk, thinking more of her bulwarked machinations than the support poles hidden by swathes of fabric.

“I’m thinking about running away,” the princess agrees, and stretches. “I only have to decide where. Merethora is so big, but it’s all hers. I think I’d like to spend more time in the mining villages before I decide. Have you traveled much?”

“Not so far north as the Mereti,” I tell her, and at her gesturing, I take a seat at the edge of her bed. “To deal with mountains that steep, where you’d find the mining villages, you would ride a kembra. I’ve never done it. My mother-by-birth processed kembra pelts, sometimes. I can’t stand the texture of it. Getting the hair off was worse than sheep.”

I trail off, still watching the light glance dully off the fabric. It feels more intimate here than it is. Much of this feels more intimate than anything, really, because of the reprieve from awareness of my face and throat.

“More places,” she prompts. “Where has your erakt trained?”

These are less fraught stories, and I tell them without trouble, though also, I think, without much skill. She listens, curled tight in her silks, still soaked with Araht’s drying blood.

“How did you do it?” I ask her, when I’ve run dry of half a decade’s account of my movements.

“Corporealism? It’s a sensory gift. Mine is better for healing,” she says. “You’ve noticed, I think. There’s not a lot between me and anyone else, especially with touch. The trick is, in Meret’s accounts, at least, a lot of the making was done by destroying the structures that didn’t fit the body. I change them instead.”

She takes my hand, and I don’t resist it, even as she puts it to her face, which is almost unbearably soft and warm.

“See, the vellus hairs, that’s a known equilibrium I can remake for your skin, the same way it’s the equilibrium for mine. Kill the follicle and you can get weird infections or regrowth. Change it, make it right, and it self-regulates forever.”

“But there aren’t any corporealists who can do it,” I say. “The rest.”

She sits up abruptly, giving me a very serious look, my hand still on her cheek. “I could. There are probably a few in hiding, but mother’s hardly the first queen who decided she didn’t want successors marshalling support among her generals. She’d prefer it if I weren’t so inclined to have the women she wants guarding her bed keeping mine warm, since I suppose it’s a perfectly good way to ideate a coup, but I’m also not exactly a threat, and I mostly do as I’m told.”

“You do as you’re told?” I say, incredulous, and she swats my shoulder with the force to stun a gnat.

“I am gifted royalty, you know,” she complains. “For all it matters.”

It matters a lot. I move my thumb over the shape of her jaw, soft and clean, and know that this is how mine will feel, if I let a woman touch me. She smiles as she watches me. In putting my skin to hers, I feel some of that strange sense of overlap, though it’s less without her volition behind it.

She puts her hand on the shoulder she hit, and without further argument, she kisses me.

I have never kissed a woman before. It’s never seemed like something I ought to do. I’ve cast aspersions, even, on my sisters who distract themselves by fawning over shapely arms and a pleasant face to look at. I am made. It puts a different meaning to a shared bedroll.

The princess tastes of the dregs of honey at the bottom of the milk-skin. She smells of blood. Her mouth is soft and warm and curious, and her hand on me is less a stabilizing grip than a caress. I am frozen again, save for my lips, which part to her tongue. I feel her fingertips trace up to the nape of my neck, the edge of her nails biting at my skin without pain as she deepens the kiss.

It takes no effort at all to break away. She pauses, the picture of beauty and readiness, her lips dark and shining and her chest moving behind the layered-silk of her khitta, which is the green-brown color of autumn sweetgrass, shot with gold embroidery. Her legs are tucked beneath her in the expanse of silk, and her face is flushed, her black eyes bright, her focus absolute.

I want her, and I have no idea what to do about it.

She laughs before she kisses me again, with almost conspiratorial intimacy, her arm hinged over my neck in pulling me back down to her, in a gesture almost the same as the one by which Sehna unhorsed Araht, though the pressure is so light as to be hardly pressure at all. She is radiantly warm. Even the sense of slipping, the movement between our bodies before her chest so much as brushes my leathers, is more thrilling than nauseating.

“Wait,” I tell her lips, and she pauses, looks up without letting go, which is a relief. I don’t want her to let go. “You’re not yourself. Araht is dead, it’s all so - terrible, I don’t know your name.”

“You don’t know what myself is like,” she argues, and lays back without further comment. I would struggle not to protest if she didn’t gently tug me down to lay beside her, which I do.

“You knew Araht,” I say, and she sighs and covers her eyes.

“I liked her. That was it.” She puts her head on my chest, and I feel a strange stab of guilt for the condition of my clothing, then realize it to be a shadow of what I used to feel at the thought of a woman touching my face, and forcibly put it from my mind. “I’m sorry. It’s wildly selfish of me to keep you here at all. Mother will be back, and she’ll kill you if she finds you underneath me.”

“Why would I be underneath you?” I ask, my tongue only half in my cheek, and she cants her head up, the better to smile with the same glimmer of sharp teeth as before.

“You would be,” she says matter-of-factly, which jars something in my chest. When she kisses me again, it is brief, but no less warm for it. “Do you want to live?”

“Pardon?” I say, entirely off-balance.

“Simple question,” she advises me. “Do you like living? It bears asking.”

I can’t imagine a world in which it does, which I suppose to be my answer. In this silk-shrouded room, the rest of my life feels very far away, and my want to return to it is currently less acute than the desire for her hand to move at the nape of my neck again, but I want to live.

“Yes,” I say, then, sort of stupidly, “I have obligations. There’s the last game of aferan tomorrow.”

She laughs. “Then you can’t stay here. Go back to your erakt and tell them whatever story you like about me and win the game badly. I’ll hear about it after, but I’ll refuse to watch.” She hesitates. “Only be careful. With Sehna.”

I smile without meaning to. “She’ll need to be careful with my women. I wish you would watch. You might be impressed. With Cenai and Tirhan on me, she’ll hardly know who holds the stone.”

Her smile fades a little. “I’m sorry. If I’m there, she’ll know.”

I indulge myself, a little, and touch the loose, gleaming curls of her hair, splayed out around her in a dark halo, gratified when she closes her eyes and leans against my hand.

“How will you get Enrit out?” I ask, watching her bask in the contact as another woman might on the first warm day after a long, dark winter. “She’s to train up the new guard, here.”

“That’s the easy part,” the princess says, without opening her eyes. “I’ll only sound excited to have the group of you training, here, suggest that I might improve my healing by working among you, and she’ll send you all far away to supervise some purge of officials on the coast or harass a mining village that hasn’t produced much silver lately.”

It hardly sounds ideal. I think of Enrit’s caution about the post, and wonder if it might apply to any post, under such a woman as this queen.

The stories say a corporealist can live forever, though she rarely does. The title passes when another gifted woman kills the one who holds it, and even Meret, eventually, was killed in the two-sisters succession. I have seen our queen snap her daughter’s neck from fifty paces, though, and I think it’s probably better not to hold on too tightly to the hope that someone will do it.

We’re kept from combat, for the most part, until we’ve left our first erakt with the queen’s witness. I’ve hurt women on the field, and I’ve thought, before I had the muscle or the means for it, of killing my own mother-by-birth, but with distance comes perspective and healed bruises. I’ve never killed a woman. I wonder, having seen one die, if I’ll flinch when the task needs doing.

I hope I won’t.

“Someday,” I say carefully, “I would like to help you. As you’ve helped me.”

One of her eyes opens, a gleam of obsidian-black behind sparse lashes. “Would you kill her?”

If I could. Midway through the field at mounted archery, barely more than midway at feats of strength. Perhaps the least impressive lead in all of this year’s aferan teams, though the lead of the team that wins. To promise her a murder would be both unwise and unlikely. I’m not the woman for it.

“If you wanted to be queen,” I say, and she laughs a quiet, damp laugh, her eyes glossy-wet before she closes them again. “I would try.”

“Worry about your team,” she says, and drags the back of her hand over her face. “And your mother. I’ll manage mine.”

She doesn’t kiss me again. Only touches the bare skin of my upper arm and changes something further - I feel it, in the strangeness of her power in me, but even that oddity is becoming more familiar with exposure.

“A few old fractures,” she says, when I look at her, meaning to ask. “I don’t like to feel a body wrong. It might improve your draw, somewhat. Perhaps you’ll be a better archer for it.”

She pulls up the staked-down edge of the silken palace carefully; I would ordinarily protest the indignity of crawling out, but I recognize the gesture of protection in it. I do wish I could more easily look over my shoulder as I walk away. Her silhouette is cast against the beeswax-coated silk by the brazier in her room, but she puts it out before I’m finished watching.

I feel some of myself coming back to me, with the long trudge through the night-quieting camp. I’ll need to clean the blood from my leathers, even if we’re assigned the silk-color to be thrown over our shoulders tomorrow. I need to speak to my women, to reassure them of our tactics after they were likely shaken by the game tonight. If Enrit is still awake, I would like to see her, too.

Some of me is as it was before, but not all. An old ache in my back, aggravated when I lifted the stone, is gone. I breathe more easily, more deeply for it. I imagine it will hurt less to draw, as the princess said, and that I will lift tomorrow’s stone with less trouble.

Then there is the matter of my face. My throat, as well, when I put my hand to it. There is nothing in me that shouldn’t be, nothing burrowing in my skin or moving when I swallow like a pebble grafted to my larynx.

Resha mentions nothing of it when she launches herself at me, when I return to camp, holds me tightly and demands, in the same breath, to know where I have been and what the fuck I was doing. My team is awake, the atmosphere among our tents and bedrolls taut with worry.

I have not given nearly enough thought to the story, and I tell them, haltingly, that the princess offered to reward me for attempting to help her lover, and I refused it. This is some of the tension gone. From a distance, they could not have seen how thoroughly her neck was broken and displaced. They seem to hardly notice the blood on me until I ask Cenai for something to clean it with, before I sleep and the stains set.

The noise of my arrival rouses Enrit, whose look is haunted, surprised to see me back, or alive at all. I have no explanation for her.

“I need to clean my leathers,” I say, already shrugging off my shoulder-pieces to get a better look at them by torchlight. The chest-piece will be the worst of it; only one of my shoulders is sullied, and mostly with mud.

“Will you play tomorrow?” she asks, and I smile ruefully.

“Of course. It’s for your honor.”

“I could not have done more,” she tells me. “I may not be able to do more tomorrow, if the queen is witness again.”

“I understand,” I say, and shrug away from her attempt to touch me. I want to hold on to the scent of the princess’ silks and incense, the memory of her hands, for as long as I can.

“Diria,” she says, more urgently. “If there is something that I need to know.”

“There’s nothing,” I say. “Sehna means to be the princess’ guard, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s won the post tonight. Tomorrow, her team will lose the game, but the glory of it will stick to her. We just have to ensure she doesn’t kill Resha on the field, or I’ll have to kill her, and - it’ll be very confusing for everyone.”

Resha interrupts, here, that she is unkillable, and with a litany of ideas for what Araht might have done better in the clash with Sehna, all of which I promise to hear once my armor is clean. Enrit is turned away, by the end of it, not obviously relieved, but no longer inclined to fuss over me.

I wait as long as I can before I ask Tirhan for the lend of her mirror. Perhaps an hour. Long enough that my gear is clean, my face and hands and body scrubbed and rinsed, the memory all that lingers of the palace and its captive.

She changed the shape of my throat, but nothing of my face beneath the skin. I might have asked her to, if I’d voiced a preference aloud, but in the shining surface of the bronze, I think it wouldn’t have been right.

I am myself, as I ought to be. My jaw is smooth and straight, the skin satin-brown and luminous in the firelight, cast only slightly purple by the eternal sunset of the summer night. If I touch it, I will not be able to stop, so I don’t. I thank Tirhan for her mirror and announce that we all ought to sleep, now, and sleep late tomorrow after the excitement of the night.

We win, of course, come the final game of aferan at noon. Sehna never comes close enough to me, with the stone under my arm, to put so much as a hand to my mount. Resha has her glory, and Cenai moves with Tirhan in perfect coordination; Tirhan scores twice, as many times as I do, and Mireis is a terror put to the defense, though it is Resha, of course, who carries us to a three-point win.

There is no one woman among us to kill and end the game. I think this is the lesson Enrit has been trying to teach me, in her way - the difference between horsewomen and the monarchy we’ve served since Meret ended our divisions and made one people of us. There are many sets of arms and knees to guide a mount, as many of our horses as there are blades of sweetgrass in the northern steppe in summertime, with hooves to rival thunder and numbers to blot out the color of the mud beneath them.

Only one woman watches the proceedings, raises her hand when the drum finally sounds to license our victory, flanked in silence by Enrit, a dozen archers mounted at a slight distance, prepared to kill for a queen who hardly needs such assistance.

She is the one who needs killing. Aferan could continue with Araht’s body cooling in the mud. If anything is to change, the woman who has to die is named Treis Meretha.

I refuse Sehna’s offered handshake, a last gesture I allow myself on Araht’s behalf, joining Resha, instead, at our scoring-line to call her a genius, only somewhat surprised when she draws up her horse alongside mine to kiss me and call me the same. Something more than my body has changed. I feel only the utter thrill of adrenaline and proximity when I kiss her back.

Every so often I think something along the lines of “I should write a piece about how to help really complicated kids, like, particularly boys (and not always white boys!) on the precipice of the white-supremacy-misogynist-online-pipeline and how to ease them off the ledge as a teacher/young female-presenting authority figure in their life, I’ve had a lot of very good results with this.” Ultimately, however, I suspect it’s very personality and vibes-dependent on the part of the adult trying to help.

I don’t think my instincts would be entirely helpful for a more soft-spoken person of any gender, for instance, or for someone with a different general vibe - I run my classroom in a very specific way, with opportunities for digression and questions baked in despite a generally authoritative style. When I say it’s time to do something, we do it, and I put a lot of work into making that the only option in my classroom: we have a shared goal, I start the first two weeks with extremely high energy activities and a lot of time spent either moving or outside, my lectures are genuinely quite engaging, and if you’re not onboard after a correction or two designed to help you save face (“C’mon, man, notebook out. Pretend, alright?”, and I’ll take the eye-roll in stride, or “Look, I have to ask you to keep your head off the desk. If that’s impossible, it’s a pass to the clinic.” and I very much do follow up with a pass to the clinic on the reminder that follows.) I escalate very quickly to administrative and parental involvement.

Some kids, in the 2020s, very clearly have different struggles going on. They sit in the back, scoff at anything a woman says, try to talk over me or directly challenge me, and while they don’t make a real effort to pull other students along with them, as they are not typically socially inclined, their pushing on norms inspires other students to push on norms, detracting from our limited class time, in a way that necessitates addressing these behaviors at the root. These students are not all boys - only mostly. Many teachers become frustrated when told to “build a relationship” by administrators whose relationship with said boys includes like, candy, a brisk talking-to, and lowered expectations. Building a relationship with someone on a ledge overlooking the glut of radicalization taking place on TikTok and Snapchat is a tall order for almost anyone.

I have a method that works. For me. That is my caveat, here, and it is a significant one. I have unique struggles, certainly: I’m a young blonde evidently gender-odd lesbian operating in deep-red Florida territory. I have unique advantages as well: I teach science, which most kids are capable of finding interesting, and I teach it very well, I have specific experiences in managing hostile group dynamics in life-or-death situations that both serve me in a classroom and earn me credibility with students (I worked on fishing vessels and research vessels and on a farm), I speak Spanish, in my Mexican wife’s words, “as well as any second-language speaker (she’s) ever met”, I spent years in high school debate, coaching, and improv comedy and I have never experienced the sensation of “I should have said something more clever” in hindsight, ever, in my life. I am a pretty difficult person to offend or provoke, and my instinct in response to being challenged is to cool down rather than heating up.

Many of these more advantageous and method-specific qualities are learnable, but I also suspect that there are different methods that would work perfectly well for soft-voiced math teachers who are actively overcoming their horror at the prospect of public speaking with every lecture. I can only speak for myself, and so I will.

I spent a lot of time in college trying to solve the problem of incels by pretending to be a man on Reddit, to the point that I was actually appointed moderator of an incel sub. In this position, I got a lot of practice moving from group-consensus-crab-bucket to personally talking with young men and going “hey, I think you specifically are actually better than this, do you want to fix this situation you obviously hate being stuck in?” and one by one picking off members of the sub until it quieted down and I got bored. This was self-evidently a kind of insane thing to spend my time doing (I had a whole character who was me but a man, obviously, which indicated nothing about me as a person) but it cultivated a lot of skills, through trial and error, that have given me very precise instincts for engaging with young men in that headspace.

What works online: strike during a moment of conflict and provide solace. Infighting is rampant on these boards, and someone who has just been snapped-at is someone who is looking for social comfort. After an argument about whether the word “cope” is stupid or not, for instance, or any orthodoxy-breaking schism, I might identify someone who’d been hit particularly hard in the back and forth, say something public in their moderate defense, then reach out to them by DM and express a second time that I thought there was some merit to what they were saying, but… why were they on this board at all? These guys aren’t going to hear them out, and they’re obviously not stupid.

It would often go something like this.

ME: Hey man. I just wanted to say that I really do think you’re right about that cope shit, it just makes everyone involved look stupid.

INCEL: Lol yeah. Dumb as fuck.

ME: This is weird but why are you even arguing with that guy? He obviously doesn’t think enough to be convinced by anything you say.

INCEL: I guess. Idk. He’s a stupid fuck. Just bored I guess.

ME: I saw you post about math sometimes. I’m studying stats right now, it’s kind of kicking my ass, idk, are you studying too?

INCEL: Nah I’m NEET.

ME: Lol. You’re better than these guys though. You post real shit when they’re not trying to drag you to their level.

INCEL: Yeah but it doesn’t fucking matter if I’m NEET.

ME: All I mean is I think they’re harder on you because they know you have a chance.

INCEL: I guess. This place is a fucking shitshow.

ME: Tell me about it.

INCEL: You’re a mod lol.

ME: Yeah I’m fucked. At least I’m gonna be fucked with a degree. You should think about it, seriously. I think you could get out.

INCEL: What does that even mean

ME: Idk. Pass as normie. I don’t know you dude. But if I see you arguing with a fucking idiot like that again I’m banning you. You don’t belong here.

When I say trial and error, I mean genuine trial and error. Getting the tone right is a hard balance, and finding the perfect moment, where they’re already frustrated both with the orthodoxy and the other people on the sub, is more of an art than a science.

It’s different in a classroom, but the principles that guide the process are the same.

For example, I always start by finding something to agree about with the student in question, and this is challenging because you can never lie here. A kid in class interrupts me while I’m talking about T-tests and says ‘you don’t know about investing, though, you literally know all this math but you don’t know investing or you wouldn’t be a teacher’, which seems like an annoying non sequitur interruption, but is actually him testing the boundaries of my competence. I smile and say “you’re right, I put all my savings in an IRA and the rest in an indexed fund, I’m very cautious with that stuff, in part because I understand it’s not my strength. I’m pretty good at statistics, though, and that’s worth learning, so as for the Tukey HSD - ”

I’m a fairly chatty teacher; kids learn quickly that they can interrupt with a ‘good, semi-topical question’ and I’ll usually answer it as well as I can. This means that not-infrequently, while walking the class through a diagram of the phospholipid bilayer, I’ll have a kid raise her hand and say “do I have those in my knee?” to which I will say “yes, in every cell, prokaryotic or eukaryotic, you have a phospholipid bilayer in the semipermeable cell membrane, controlling what enters and exits your cells like a bouncer at a nightclub.” and she will keep her hand up and continue “my knee’s been hurting since Saturday when I had my soccer game. Why do you think my knee hurts?” and I will sigh and say “probably not because of the phospholipid bilayer, but I’d guess you hurt your knee playing soccer, based on the timing,” and she will keep her hand up again and I’ll say “whatever your question is, can you bring it back to the phospholipid bilayer?” and she’ll put her hand down with a sigh, then come to me after class to ask if I think she’s ever going to be able to win the women’s world cup given her knee is so busted.

I budget for this sort of exchange in my lectures because I strongly believe that this helps with buy-in and classroom culture. When I get a kid interrupting with challenges, though, I’ll gently defer the challenges and move on a few times, then later in the week swing by during independent work. I’ll leverage the fact that students are accustomed to my swinging by to puncture any this-assignment-is-impossible tension by chatting with them briefly about something they care about before reorienting them to the work, and use the moment to compliment something he’s doing (literally even handwriting or the fact that he’s gotten started on an assignment without handholding works), then pause and ask him if he’s into investment, because I notice he’s brought it up a few times. He’ll scoff and insist I wouldn’t get it, I’ll shrug and say I’m just curious, but it seems like he’s got the assignment under control, so I’ll be back in a few minutes to check.

The initial dialogue goes like this:

ME: Oh, hey, you’re already on three? Nice job, looks like you’ve got the hang of it.

CHILD: …Thanks.

ME: Three’s a little harder. You’ll need to rearrange the equation first. You feel alright on that?

CHILD: Yeah. I already passed algebra.

ME: Okay, great, I don’t want to interrupt your flow, but I was curious. You’ve mentioned investing a few times. Do you do trading or investment yourself?

CHILD: Like sort of. My dad does. It’s not like a thing, you wouldn’t understand any of that stuff.

ME: Oh, cool. I was just wondering. You can flag me down if you have any questions but I’ll be back around anyway in like ten minutes - try to get as far as you can on the sheet, maybe by then you’ll hit on a problem that stumps you.

Some forthcoming day, given time to marinate, the kid will bare some investing-related wound (his dad is into day trading but treats him like an idiot when he makes suggestions, even though he obviously knows more about stocks!) and I’ll nod through it and agree that it’s insanely frustrating when people assume they know better just because they’re older, then ask him what kind of background research he does and mention that I had an Economist subscription when I was in high school, complimenting basically any reading in particular that he mentions doing.

It’s a long game and it takes effort, but by the end of the semester the kid will be asking legitimate questions and paying attention in class, will have some confidence in me as an authority figure, and I’ll have, at a minimum, an open conduit for dialogue. Kids in this space, on the bleeding edge of radicalization, usually are desperate for a reaction of some sort; they notice when I’m kind of warm and enthusiastic when they talk about Nvidia but a little incredulous and disinterested when they mention, like, how all the girls in the class are stupid. They slowly course-correct or sometimes even ask me straight-up what I think, giving me the opportunity to shrug again and say “I don’t know, man, sometimes girls show it differently, but they seem about the same as boys to me, when you average everything out. I mean, have you heard some of the things boys say?”

The nature of the gentle prodding is to give him opportunities to “show off” by saying things that are appropriate and insightful rather than parroted from the internet. I’ll laugh off misogynist warning shots and say “yeah, heard that one on my for you page last week, you’re not like following that guy are you? I don’t know, I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.” and when he agrees I’ll add “no, I figured - that stuff is aimed for middle school boys with legitimate issues, it’s kind of weird to me that a guy like that is targeting kids, but I guess it’s not really my business.”

At some point in the process I’ll try to subtly involve the parents, like I’ll specifically send an email to his mom praising his involvement in class and some genuine skill I’ve observed, hoping to interrupt whatever parent-conflict might be worsening things at home and put a positive inflection point there, too. Once he’s more engaged in class, I’ll try to sit him next to other very engaged students to keep the momentum going, especially if this gives him a chance to show off academic skills and be a valuable team member. I’ll try to get a sense of some artistic or athletic interest and recommend that he pursue that interest, then get excited about the results (a few pencil drawings of Goku, he joined the baseball team) and do my teacher-diligence of showing up about it, asking consistently, making it to a game if I can. I’ll try to get him to join my debate team, so I can actually get to know his parents if they judge at competitions.

The goal here is not to fix anything, but to start building a framework in which he can have conversations with people who aren’t online, trying to sell him something. In a lot of cases, these boys end up in self-reinforcing cycles of escalating behaviors and beliefs, looking for traction or a response from adults, and finding this mainly on the internet. “Feminists getting mad at them” becomes the goal, because people yelling at them on the internet feels like something they say matters, and then they’re reinforced when the provocateurs close ranks, support him, and declare him “of their group”.

I want him to believe that he could be in my group instead: cool, untroubled, focused on making something interesting or doing something worthwhile, part of a team somewhere other than TikTok comments, rewarded in more satisfying ways like a high five from his teammates when he helps win a game or joining the art club and submitting his work to shows. The goal is always to make myself not the source of the validation, but the means by which he remembers that the validation exists in meatspace, a possibility to which a lot of these students have closed themselves off. I have succeeded first when he becomes willing to talk to me, but finally when he is much more interested in his peers or his studies or his job or his team.

As on the incel forums, the goal is not to make friends with him, but to be the inflection point that gets him out.

You might say here “what about troubled girls?” and in truth: troubled girls are way easier because I am role-model shaped and have been a troubled girl before myself. Compliments on academics and “you’re really good at math, actually” when they get something quickly or “you take some of the best notes in class” usually get me where I need to be very efficiently.

Where I need to be, in the case of most young women in the process of figuring themselves out and engaged in insane power struggles along the way, is situated so I can say, like, “you do so well in this class. What’s the deal in English? I keep getting looped in on worried emails, but I don’t get it, could you help me out so I know what to say in the meetings? I just keep getting blindsided because I can’t imagine you saying that sort of thing” and wind up like “that sounds like a really hard combination of personalities. I know I ran into that issue when I was in high school - I swear, Miss Morris hated me - but eventually I figured out this trick, maybe it’ll work for you - ”

When troubled girls are getting sucked into internet communities, it’s far more often a question of local social circles intensified through semi-anonymity online. They’re rarely - though not never! - on like gender-separatist white-supremacist Discord servers with Quebecois domestic terrorists and are far more likely, in my experience, to be bullying people viciously on Instagram. The absolute best thing I can do for someone, male or female, making a menace of themself in their local social milieu is to be a reliable authority figure and express mild scorn about the activity while gently nudging them in the direction of team sports/art/the debate team, while also making it clear that the people they would victimize are just as much students under my protection as they are, and I think less of anyone who acts to harm the other people in our community.

The best defense against these dynamics developing is a good offense. I try to find ways to make any kid being excluded into the hero of the day once or twice, whether through outdoor games or through my “if the student I randomly select has above an 80% on the quiz, I’ll open this box of Publix cookies and everyone can have one on the way out to lunch” gimmick, when I know said student scored well. It helps, again, that I am shaped like a role model. I go out of my way to show that I think any student who is struggling socially is worth engaging with, and after a week or so, when I make the first seating chart, I make an effort to put them with sympathetic, pleasant fellow students with whom they can be heroically high-achieving. The same tactic works across the board: find the kid’s passion or skill, and carefully offer both praise and guidance to get them into a space where they can cultivate it among like-minded peers.

That’s three categories of intervention, two kinds of actors and also kids who are vulnerable to being victimized. Running these social games while also teaching state-tested curriculum, while also trying to remedy math deficits and writing deficits and inspire scientific thinking, is hard. I put time into these tactics because the alternative is playing Whack-a-Mole with behaviors all year. It is exhausting, and it was worth it by my calculus.

It isn’t, certainly, a teacher’s job to save mean and radicalized and troubled kids. It is, however, our job to teach them, and it is very difficult to teach someone teetering on the blade of a knife.

I can’t reach every kid. I’ve run into probably two boys over the course of my half-decade in education who just genuinely had deep-scarred issues with being told what to do, in any tone, by anyone they considered a woman, especially a young one. Contrary to what some recent posts on teenage-boys-inherently-resisting-women-as-authorities suggest, my failure rate is higher with girls. I could point to four cases in which I truly could not crack the veneer and get them engaged in the classroom community. However, on a broad scale, in the context of my specific deal, these tactics helped make my classroom safer and more functional, and they really did work.

I can’t recommend them to everyone across the board, because an enormous part of it is a kind of brusque, businesslike sincerity that just isn’t the style of care everyone is comfortable with or feels they can truly ‘mean’. For me, this sort of approach takes relatively little energy from my baseline neuroses. Whether by socialization or by nature, I am the kind of person who is constantly managing situations around me, extremely interested in what people are thinking and doing, and I have a strong internal drive to make things work the way I think they ought to work. I’m young enough to still have the energy for this sort of thing. I have the kind of unquestionable subject knowledge that takes much of the burden off in actual lecturing.

Ultimately, finding a way to mean it, in whatever language you have, to really want the unpleasant, cruel person acting as an obstacle to your job to be able to be part of a community, safe, and accepted as they enjoy interests and passions other than social harm is the most important first step. It’s also one of the hardest. It is really difficult to see a boy trying his best to be your enemy and genuinely want to get him on your team. has written fairly extensively on his processes for this as a male teacher, but these are my own two cents, and I think they are worth spending for anyone who has the means.

I’ve worked in a lot of circumstances (especially on fishing vessels) in which receiving a nickname was the norm, but the funniest nicknaming I ever witnessed took place while I was working in fine dining, a context in which it was a fairly rare occurrence.

I worked for a museum’s restaurant, where you could get a sandwich at lunch for $30 in 2021, but it was a damn good sandwich for your money. Dinners had an involved dress code and a massive price tag just to reserve the space. I was still working on the mariculture farm at the time, so I would scrub down in lukewarm hose water, slap on some eyeliner, change in my car, and book it down to the restaurant to either bartend for events like Jazz Night at the museum or, if we were doing an event, be part of the bar/waitstaff team. You could make extra money by sticking around to do the dishes and event breakdown after, and I liked my coworkers, so I usually did.

For a very large or hard-to-staff events, our base staff was not enough - think four hundred of the wealthiest patrons of the arts in the area, all expecting Banquet French table service. When this happened, the manager would bring on extra workers through a temp service, which invariably made the night both more stressful and funnier. The base crew all liked each other and trusted each other (we pulled off some insane events, once the birthday party of a Food Network celebrity’s beloved niece, which required everyone including the owner to go through a crash course in white glove service because we were working out of a sister museum three hours north); some of the temps were great, and sometimes it was very clear that they had misrepresented their food service experience.

Some week nights, however, were particularly challenging to staff in their own right, so the manager would pull temps for even a fairly intimate gallery service. For these, we would set up a table in one of the exhibit halls and operate a miniature kitchen out of a closet to minimize walk time. I usually loved this sort of event, because being the charming blonde who is making fancy lavender martinis and walking apps and putting down beautiful plates of the chef’s famous beef tenderloin (we got the reserve plates at the end of the night if no one needed a replacement/had an extra guest, and you could eat it with a spoon, it was that tender) throughout the night gives you a lot of surface area for being delightful and earning insane tips. I’d often wind up with a few hundred dollars to toss to my boss, which we would divvy up with the back-of-house guys. I considered them fire-forged friends after we spent three hours in the dish pit together after a massive fundraiser, following which all the temps had clocked out and left rather than take the cleanup overtime.

This particular event was on a Monday, always a thin day for staff. It was a sixteen-person gallery service with a full bar setup, butlered apps, and a beautiful dinner prepared. It was past what I could handle solo, and my manager knew it and planned to take the bar after the arrival drinks service, but he really struggled to get most of the staff to come in on Monday nights and I wound up working with a temp I’d never met before, a young man named Ryan.

Arrival service went over easily. It was an anniversary dinner for two board members, and they’d invited effectively the entire board - basically everyone present was either a big ticket donor or married to one, several had Wikipedia pages when I did my background research - and the advantage, here, was that I had waited on all of these people before at past events. I have a good memory for people’s preferences, went over it with the manager, and we pulled wines and stocked the bar accordingly. Not a single missed note, everyone had their Château Margaux or diet-Coke-lime-syrup-Diplomatico Reserva, the manager was also our sommelier and this part was him talking about the wine and me smiling, mixing, pouring, and reassuring mildly abashed guests that if I wasn’t on the clock, I’d want the good stuff with my diet Coke too.

Next came walked apps. I abandoned the manager behind the bar for any stragglers and headed to the closet-kitchen, where Ryan had been helping the back-of-house staff, two guys I considered about as good as brothers, set up their equipment. Ben, who was in charge for the night, was already kind of pissed at Ryan. Ryan was a talker, Ben was not.

There were five different platters to run, and they had supplies prepped for up to four platters of each: beautiful lamb lollipops with a fig-balsamic glaze, for which we would need a separate platter for the bones; these charming skewered ratatouille mini-stacks that looked like they’d been pulled straight out of the actual movie Ratatouille; tiny French onion soup grilled cheese sandwiches, my absolute favorite; perfectly seared tuna in a spoon of dashi with pickled vegetables and a sliver of fried wonton wrap on top; and perhaps the best of them, slow cooked birria-style shortrib tostada-tacos about the size of a silver dollar, each resting inside of a cut lime, conferring just enough of its flavor without compromising the crunch.

The gist of this part of service is: Ryan and I would each take a plate of some app and do a few rounds with it. The goal was to get the apps out efficiently - they were all best while hot and not damp, the wonton wrapper on top of the tuna especially really needed to go quickly - and run the platter back to the closet-kitchen, where you would pick up a new one. The brief was like, total abundance mentality, no stop un-pulled, special attention to the happy anniversary’d couple. I loved these sorts of briefs, especially when I knew the people involved, which I did; they were all basically regulars, I knew precisely who needed vegetarian apps and reminded Ryan again every time he left carrying the grilled cheese or the ratatouille platters.

To his credit, Ryan did what he was told, though after about 15 minutes, he started to get competitive. I don’t blame the guy, he was young and I had really sold the crowd to him (you give good service to these people, you get crazy good tips, watch me like a hawk, do what you see me doing, and if I tell you to do something, please do it right away and to the letter. never say no to anything; if you aren’t sure you can say yes, the answer is ‘let me speak to my supervisor and see about that’ and then come straight to me or Jacob, the actual manager, if it seems like a complicated question or he’s not busy behind the bar, Ben if it’s a food question, etc.) so he was enthusiastic from the get-go.

Appetizers were rolling out, guests were a little tipsy and laughing riotously and offering me grilled cheeses off their plates (I always killed with “oh, no, I have to drive home tonight” when guests offered me things that were non-alcoholic), and the wife had arranged to play a trick on the husband. When everyone else got their beautiful plate of tenderloin or risotto, I would announce that his beloved had ordered something special for him, to celebrate the day, then bring him a white bread turkey sandwich with potato chips with immense gravitas - only to pull out a particularly large serving of the tenderloin after he had a moment to be confused. She had slipped both the manager and me a hundred each to pull this off (he had to run out and buy white bread and potato chips), so I was feeling very good about the night.

The problem was: Ryan really wanted to bring out the little birria tostada-tacos. The guests loved these, so they went quickly; one of the hard parts of the job was carrying a slab of actual marble around on one elevated wrist, so again, I couldn’t blame him for wanting the appetizer that moved effortlessly. I pulled him aside once to compliment his energy but also to remind him that some guests were vegetarian, and to ease off the throttle a little while trying to get apps in hands. He did not ease off the throttle. I was happy to keep taking the sandwiches and the tuna; Ryan was increasingly enthusiastic in dashing back and forth between the closet-kitchen and the gallery, announcing every time he passed me how many trays he had emptied. I reminded him again, this time more firmly, to slow down.

Ryan did not slow down.

Forty-five minutes into the service, I returned to the closet to grab whatever Ben wanted me to take next and found him fuming over a platter that should have held six little birria tostada-tacos. It held four, because there were only four lime wedges remaining on the plate. Ryan had been physically handing guests the entire lime wedge, Ben had been cutting new lime wedges every time, with increasingly disgruntled reminders that the lime was garnish, and now Ben was out of limes.

I offered to run back to the kitchen across the courtyard and grab whole limes, since everything at our bar was already cut. Ben grit his teeth and told me to tell that fucking guy to stop feeding guests the fucking garnish, and was about to send me out with the tostada-tacos when Ryan returned to the closet, dropped his mostly-empty tuna-spoons, and took the tostada-tacos from under my hand.

“These things are flying off the platter,” Ryan announced. “I’m a hell of a salesman. You should take the next tuna.”

“Don’t give the guests the garnish,” Ben told Ryan’s back, for what sounded like the eighth time or so. “Dude, we’re out of limes!”

I exhaled deeply and stopped to eat a few grilled cheese scraps that Ben had laying around and stretched my aching wrist. Restored, I fixed my hair and helped set up the gag meal, then made for the door with a platter of lamb. We had the materials for a few more tostada-tacos, which we’d anticipated would be popular, but we were close to out of almost everything else. The other back-of-house guy was headed to the kitchen to pull the prep for two more rounds of ratatouille, but Ben and I had discussed the vibes and had a sense that a few more veggies, a few more tostada-tacos, and one last round of tuna, and we’d probably be set at the rate that the guests were eating.

Ryan burst through, brimming with excitement, as Ben waited with tostada-tacos to be placed in the remaining limes. Ryan was down to three limes.

“They’re selling like hotcakes!” he announced, as Ben grimly plated the tostada-tacos and I held the door.

“We’re not selling anything,” I reminded him. “Try to chill a little, and hold onto the limes, they’re part of the plate. Don’t even touch the limes.”

“How am I supposed to chill? They love these things!” he said, and booked it out the door as Ben and I exchanged looks.

As I expected, the conversation hour was starting to wind down. It took me a fair while to trade the lamb lollipops for lamb bones, and my wrist was aching again, so I was relieved to see some of the guests beginning to move towards the table setup. Two more rounds of ratatouille, a few more tostada-tacos, and we’d be golden. I asked the vegetarians if I could bring them anything in particular from the kitchen, and as expected, they asked for more ratatouille. Score.

Ryan followed me back in, down to a single empty lime on his platter, craning his neck to see my well-cleaned bones.

“I guess they like the lamb too,” he said, as I kicked open the door to the closet. “But man, look, I’m killing it out here.”

He stepped in front of me and put the near-empty platter down in front of Ben.

“Wha’d’you say, chef, can I sell, or can I sell?”

“Hey, Wolf of fucking Wall Street,” Ben finally snapped. “Stop giving them the goddamn limes.”

I have thought of this specific phrasing and delivery on a weekly basis in the half-decade since it happened. I flatter myself to imagine that I didn’t laugh too loudly. Ben called him ‘Wolfie’ twice more before Ryan insisted he didn’t have to take this disrespect and quit on the spot, pulling the temp agency’s timecard out of his pocket and hightailing it over to Jacob at the bar for a signature. He was being paid about four dollars an hour more than I was - I made $15/hr plus tips - but I still felt a little bad for the guy. At small events like this, we always tipped out the temps who stuck around for cleanup as a gesture of goodwill.

Jacob came back and made an exasperated gesture at Ben, who shrugged and asked if Jacob wanted to run across the courtyard and cut fresh limes for the guests who still wanted tostada-tacos. For the rest of the night, Jacob was mildly-annoyed but no less brilliantly-smiling about it as he helped me out with service. Our joke for the couple of the hour garnered uproarious delight and laughter, and as we’d prepped extra plates in case of unexpected issues or last-minute guests, there was enough leftover tenderloin and risotto for both the back-of-house guys and me to have a seventy-dollar dinner.

I made a lot of money that night.

I also, however, nearly died laughing when, while I was moving the trash and getting everything out of the gallery and over to the kitchens, I noticed that the garbage by the bar was heavier than usual. Peeking inside to check, I found that it was cocktail napkins, yes - but also nearly ten pounds of cut limes.

Fuckin’ Wolfie.

Case in point: this excerpt, in which a UChicago-educated mechanical engineer performs expert calculations in order to establish the proof 92 square meters of space = 92 square meters of space.

I have actually worked in agricultural engineering, the kind of blue-collar science where you do your math on a wet notebook while drenched in scum and then lug, pour, and dose ten liters of phosphoric acid into a aerated tank from a step-stool to titrate your experimental fertilizer yourself. I was an algae scientist and the director of research and development at a small mariculture farm that produced several hundred million shellfish seed (mostly hardshell clams and oysters, but also a few smaller-numbers boutique species) per year. These are my credentials.

But let’s return to The Martian.

The crux of this passage is that our hero, Mark, is attempting to convert an indoor space to, effectively, usable farmland. He is confronting a logistical problem: Mark needs a lot of soil to cover a lot of space. He knows the space available. Mark offers us numbers to quantify what he needs, including his estimate of how much soil he can move at a time.

In facility-constrained ag science, these are some of the right instincts. Saturdays, when I was the only person working on the farm, were also the days that our largest tanks of larval clams needed the most feeding based on their growing schedule. I needed to carry roughly-35-pound buckets of algae from my bioreactors up a hand-built flight of stairs, one by one, feeding roughly 4-4.5 gallons of algae at a time, at a specific cell density.

I could not spill the algae or my calculations would be off; I could not rest the bucket on a surface or the bucket would be contaminated, or the bioreactor would be contaminated, and millions of larval clams entering the settling phased needed to be fattened up as much as possible. The stairs would be slick with humidity by about 2PM (this was in a greenhouse, in Florida) so it was in my best interests to move as quickly as possible.

The math that I did relied on my algal cell density counts, how many 4.5 gallon, 4 gallon, 3.5 gallon, etc buckets I could reliably carry, the larval density in the tanks and my size estimates from draining the tanks and evaluating a few dozen larvae under a microscope for their developmental stage, which I would report to the farm’s owner. Then I would calculate roughly how many cells the larvae would need (overfeeding is expensive and can make more work for my algae bioreactors, which are my babies, but underfeeding is deadly, so the margin of error favors overfeeding) and begin the arduous process of filling each sanitized painter’s bucket in turn with the developmentally-appropriate blend of different algal species from different bioreactors, having performed my cell counts that morning.

So when did I pause to do math? Exclusively when the challenge concerned

1. physical constraints (fuck, I need to re-evaluate how many buckets to fill, I can’t do another 4.5 gallon in this heat, I just can’t, but if I swap to 3.5 per bucket - )

2. task-specific parameters that I was specially equipped to determine (the larvae are a little larger than predicted and the survival rate is particularly high; it’s worth recalibrating their feed to their size and quantity)

Andy Weir gives us “I’m going to need to cover the entire floor to a depth of 10 cm.” He doesn’t give us why. I’m not a conventional ag scientist - I don’t know why 10 cm is the magic number, especially given that he establishes that this quantity is a significant physical constraint for Mark! A cursory Google tells us that 20 cm is closer to the viable baseline for plowed soil/bed depth, especially for potatoes, with improved yields associated with deeper ploughing/depth. Some sources recommend planting at four inches depth, or 10 cm, prior to hilling, a process in which the potato plant is reburied gradually in loose soil as the shoots system grows, but only ten centimeters of soil altogether give the root system nowhere to grow! Then consider the fact that he isn’t specifically planting potatoes, though their cultivation is a well-known aspect of the book. He mentions attempting to grow beans, which require a substantially greater bed depth.

Where did Mark get that 10 cm? Why not 9 cm, if the labor of dragging in soil is so substantial? The scientific decision-making process, whether in farming or in medicine, is the entire story. Not the simple math necessary to get from 92 square meters to 9.2 cubic meters. This is the kind of thing I’d write out, frown, and move to the next page, having realized that I started in an unhelpful place - these are priors, not calculations! I have two tanks, each need X billion cells, therefore I will need 2X billion cells. Slow down, Einstein, I’m hardly keeping up with this quick math.

I would not be critical of this if Weir were not writing what is billed as hard science and lauded as indulgent hypercompetence porn. This is the crux of the book: Mark is a mechanical engineer and a botanist! If you asked me, an algae scientist, which commercially farmed silica-dense species grows best from culture in a bioreactor, I would give you a list of Chaetoceros species and their constraints (high CO2 flow, extra silicates feed) and what day to add them to the clams’ feed (after day 10), then get very excited about what you’re trying to feed and its developmental stage.

Mark announces his intentions to drag 9.2 cubic meters of soil into the Hab-space, 0.1 cubic meters at a time, and announces

He has not calculated for the presence of his fertilizer, has not rationalized either stopping at 10 cm depth or progressing beyond 9 cm depth for any purpose other than neatness of math, and has not considered his crops’ specific needs or the chemistry of his poop-fertilizer scheme, particularly given his likely high-protein ration intake. High nitrogen waste burns crops; this is why dog and especially cat feces is not good for your lawn. Mark has no time to waste composting his poop-fertilizer and also no time to waste calculating how much of it he needs relative to his 9.2 cubic meters of soil, but by god, that 92 square meters figure needs repeating.

While I was working on the farm, it was quite a job to get me to shut up about the process of doing any of these things. Mark talks around these tasks and the decision-making behind them, but still throws math at the reader with a veneer of wry authority. I’m less chafed-at by the 10 cm foible than I am at the blitz of numbers. Again:

How would I rewrite this, given the rough constraints of the word count? To be frank, I would revise the entire second chapter’s assessments of crop viability and soil composting, having just read more about the soil microbiome and bed depth and human feces as fertilizer than I ever expected to in the process of reading Google Scholar’d PDFs for this article. That said, my stab at narrativizing scientific reasoning in this context, in Mark’s approximate voice, would look more like:

I plan to use the full 92 square meters of the Hab for this endeavor, and I’ll need as much soil as I can physically carry to do it. Ten centimeters might be almost enough, if I scrap the beans and hill the potatoes, assuming they grow at all. It’s almost more of an assumption than I can stomach, but the math is against my pole beans, which need twenty-four centimeters depth. I mean to bring 0.1 cubic meters of Martial soil in with every trip, but that amounts, it turns out, to about a hundred-twenty kilograms, even with the benefit of Martian gravity, or ‘a lot more than I’ve ever squatted past ten times in a row’.

Ninety-two trips at that mass would give me my ten centimeters bed depth. A little more with my fertilizer mixed in. I’m down to 0.05 cubic meters per excursion by the fourth load; revise to a hundred seventy-six trips to go. Easier on the back, harder on my timetable. I’d like to get the depth up further before I start planting, but time is potatoes and I won’t make it four years laid up with a herniated disc.

Okay. Twice as long, but this eliminates the need for the much longer next section, in which he struggles his way though moving minimum 5,500 kg of soil by earth-gravity terms, 2,090 by Martian-gravity in twelve hours and then takes a Vicodin. The term ‘gravity’ does not appear until chapter seven, though it is perhaps the most relevant one I can imagine at this specific juncture. Look, I love show-offy sequences in which characters do the thing they’re best at, confront an obstacle, and suffer cleverly about it! That’s what killed me about Project Hail Mary as well. I should’ve loved that book. I’m literally a microbiologist who got fed up with the field and became a high school science educator. My biology class gave me a hard time about it! They said they were going to call the government and get me sent to space with a stupid little rock when they were upset that I “kept teaching”, which is my job description, after the EOC was done!

If I had to name a take-away, it would not be that non-scientists shouldn’t write scientists. Instead, I would suggest, broadly, that in a sequence in which an expert, whether in mathematics or in magic, ‘shows off’ in your novel, you might consider:

• What are the extreme specifics that this person is aware of or able to leverage and quickly call to mind that a less-insightful expert could not?

• What are the constraints they are working around, and how does their prowess allow them to nimbly adjust to and navigate around those constraints?

I write about people who are experts in things that I am not an expert in all the time. When I do this, I try not to just have them say things that I find interesting in my research - “I’ll feed my horse twenty pounds of hay daily, roughly 2% of his body mass, avoiding excessive new grass because of the high sugar content at this time of year, which can cause metabolic issues” - and instead use those premises to solve a problem in a methodologically consistent but creative way.

A lot of us have probably read advice on ‘how to write smart characters’ in which the gist of the advice is, what a smart character could come up with on the spot, any author can surely write given twenty minutes of research and thought. I’m not sure that’s true without a structural logic to the research and writing! Just researching horse feed, on my end, is not necessarily going to make me able to use the best possible knowledge applied in the most useful way possible. If I’m writing from the perspective of a large animals veterinarian accustomed to working with equine metabolic disorders, it’s useful to read accounts of problem-solving by vets, but also to either try to think your way through the problem as a vet would, using a resource like this one -

The horse is an easily-kept breed, a thoroughbred in no obvious ill health, though her eyes are slightly swollen and a cursory hand over her withers reveals a strangely-textured fat pad. She may not be obese or deconditioned outright, but a glance at her mammary glands confirms it. The mare hasn’t been fed overnight, and her blood glucose is normal on first evaluation, but she may be reacting to overconsumption.

In the pasture beyond the stables, new sugar-rich spring growth covers what remains of the winter graze. Christine grimaces. The chestnut mare watching her placidly from the examination stocks is clearly a well-loved animal, and there’s no history of equine metabolic syndrome in her chart. She’s only five years old. She puts a clean hand to the horse’s muzzle and wishes she had better news for Alice.

- or, you can ‘write around the showing off entirely’, if the showing off of your vet character’s examination skills isn’t the point.

The new growth of spring in the pasture outside tells the same story as the horse’s examination. There’s no injury to her hooves. Only an early laminitis, and likely underlying metabolic syndrome, not yet diagnosed.

I don’t think either of those is a bad way to get to the point, depending on whether you want to spend time in Christine’s head, establishing her large animals veterinary competence, or to move on to the conversation with Alice, where she might show exceptional empathy or callousness to humans or whatever other trait you’re more interested in developing.

The trick to showing off here is not to have Christine give a lecture on equine metabolic syndrome so much as it is to have her constructively solving a problem with the diagnostic criteria for equine metabolic syndrome in ways that read ‘clever’ rather than ‘I’ll order an OST, a basal insulin, a leptin test, and perform a physical exam to check for fatty abnormalities”. Instead, Christine cleverly avoids the pitfall of assuming that a horse in relatively trim condition can’t have EMS and recognizes that the normal blood glucose could conceal a reactive problem; she effortlessly calls to mind the diagnostic criteria as she observes them, and she considers the environmental factors to assemble a clear diagnosis.

I don’t know if there are any equine vets following this newsletter, but I texted my two excerpts to my aunt Crissi, a large animals vet, and she said, “aw, is this about me?” and then, when questioned further, said she considered both versions totally inoffensive and would not be put off by reading either in a novel. Then she asked if I’d been reading the James Herriot books she gave me, which I have. Thanks, aunt Crissi, I love you.

The trick, then, is not just to think of something clever or expert-sounding, but to think of something usefully and efficiently applied to the situation at hand, and ideally to research-back your process so as not to miss something obvious, like the 10 cm depth that hung me up. I’m not even an expert in this area, but I know I held up my hand and went “…ten centimeters?”

Gut-checking your writing, doing enough research to feel confident as you put your character through their problem-solving paces, and consulting experts when you run up on issues can all help to avoid a one-sided blood feud with your readership like mine with Andy Weir.

Sorry Mr. Weir. I’m sure you’re lovely in person.

My pediatrician recommends inhalers, a rheumatologist, a better diet. My fever spikes to 107F and my father dunks me, frantic, fully-clothed, in an ice bath. I am too listless to protest. I have not been hungry in a long time. We see a new pediatrician who tells us that until we can get bloodwork while the fever is active, we may not have an answer. My inflammatory markers are elevated, in a general way. My father scours the early internet for some revelation, prints reams of paper worth of information on what a CRP is, how it is different from a sed rate, why hemoglobin and hematocrit could both be low without bleeding. Another doctor asks me if I see blood when I use the bathroom. I say no, for perhaps the seventh time.

It’s summer, at least, which means we have more time for appointments, to drive further. I remain, for the most part, in school, save for weeks of high fevers. The increasing weakness is an obvious function of the fact that I have stopped eating. My parents purchase Boost. My parents force-feed me the Boost, then cajole me, then beg, then cry. I would really like to be playing Neopets, but I’m too tired to leave my bed. My little brother was born recently. Maybe it’s the stress? It’s certainly stressful for my parents. They fight a lot at night, and sleeping has been getting less appealing, too, so I listen vaguely from my bed in a twilight of pain, malaise, and fever. My brother is born with jaundice, but he improves quickly in a glowing bassinet. I am getting sicker.

Eventually, my parents take me to the ED. I hadn’t managed to produce a stool sample on command before, for a long list of primary care providers and specialists, most more curious about the movement of my joints than about my bowels; now I do. It is coal-black.

The doctor, a young woman, asks if my parents have ever heard of Crohn’s disease.

Crohn’s disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease. VEO-IBD is the sort that is diagnosed before six years of age; my symptoms started at about that time. Since my diagnosis, I have tried virtually every first-line treatment for Crohn’s-colitis. I was one of the first children to be prescribed Remicade, in 2006. Nurses rolled up blankets to help me fit in the infusion chairs. I had been 99th percentile, the tallest person in my age group through to kindergarten; I had not grown since then.

Remicade was magic until it wasn’t. A pediatric gastroenterologist in New York City drew me diagrams of TNF-blockers and monoclonal antibodies as well as anti-drug antibodies and one very charming sketch of a mouse. She recommended the next biologic in the pipeline; my gastroenterologist at home was determined to increase my Remicade dosage until it worked again. I stopped growing for about a year, then lapsed into a protracted course of steroids, visible in my fourth-grade school photos, in both my ghostly pallor and my swollen cheeks.

Biologics were a leash on me for the better part of my young adulthood; medications to access, insurance to appease, vials to refrigerate in communal fridges with a pleasant little post-it note identifying them beside Thai take-out leftovers. Appointments to make, classes to miss.

Crohn’s disease takes on many forms. In sixth grade, mine began to fistulate; it has done so with great vigor, whenever ill-controlled, since then. It has developed into angular cheilitis (treated cleverly by an infectious disease specialist, who prescribed tacrolimus, a first for her, along with a total decontamination protocol including baths in bleach-water and Hibiclens; remarkably, in combination with the tacrolimus, the mouth ulcers vanished), into an intermittent but dogged arthritis of my right hip, into bowel obstructions requiring surgery and surgical failures requiring extended hospitalization, peritonitis, ileostomy, ileectomy, partial colectomy, weeks in the PICU, protracted vacuum-assisted closure of a large peritoneal wound, a year wet-dressing the same partially-closed wound. Years out of school, years of complete fentanyl dependency.

It is an ugly disease. It is very challenging to suffer Crohn’s gracefully under the best of circumstances. Its effluvia are not easily coughed into a napkin. Sometimes you shit yourself so badly, so dramatically, that you fill a leg of your work pants with diarrhea. Is it a small mercy or a terrifying vulnerability to do so on a day when you are the only person working on the farm? Crohn’s disease asks these sorts of questions of its afflicted with remarkable regularity. It is a colonoscopy scheduled during finals, shoehorned in because the bleeding has started again. It is a perirectal abscess oozing purulence, a year-long course of metronidazole and ciprofloxacin, the knowledge weighing on every tendon, as much as it is a hemoglobin of 3 and a fainting episode in sophomore year.

It is more grotesque than it is sympathetic. It is incurable.

For much of my life, I have been preoccupied with a kind of damage control. To be well-presented is to be taken seriously. To be known as hard-working is to be tolerated when circumstances make that impossible. To be beautiful is to be worth saving. That’s hardly unique to the disabled, but disability turns that nagging acknowledgement acute and pressing. It might be life-or-death. It might be tomorrow.

Do the people around you respect you enough to tolerate your weakness? Have you earned it yet? You will need to earn it quickly, because your weakness is nothing abstract; it is brewing in your gut, curdling under your skin, tunneling its way there from your rectum.

Are the people around you effective allies? Will they know how to speak for you when you can’t speak for yourself? Will they panic, all-too-human, at your bedside, raise their voice at the wrong all-too-human person in turn, who avoids your room until infection reopens your wounds and puts your intestines in your child’s-hands?

To be sick is to be eternally on the precipice of confrontation with the real. In most states of fear, we anticipate a precursor to death: social exclusion, loss of resources, loss of housing, the anticipation of sickness, abjectness, desperation, death. They follow a causal chain. Even the fear that your body will kill you is a fear.

When your body is killing you, in an immediate sense, there is no more fear to the state of registering as much than a small crab can be said to fear the grinding mouthplates of the stingray, mid-grind. It just grinds. You just die, or someone intervenes in a vanishingly improbable way and you don’t, this time.

To fear that state as a known reality, a known outcome without your ten thousand dollar pills and your industrialized healthcare system and your job and your income, and even, perhaps, with them, has a day-to-day weight to it. It places urgency in strange configurations, behind unlikely tasks. It makes noticing necessary; to know precisely when you have seven pills remaining, to observe the loss of weight, to be wholly and completely aware of the body and its twinges that might announce a fresh descent.

I find that it demands a lot in terms of agency. There is no putting off the next appointment, the acquisition of the medications. There can be no exhaustion or disinterest so great that it keeps the pills from your tongue. There is a predator scratching at the front door to your home. To fail to lock it, to fail to barricade it, is to let him in. I don’t consider myself an anxious person, but illness has made me into one. I wonder if I really do have OCD, or if I’m semi-rationally readying myself for the sound of nails on wood. It isn’t a disorder if it’s entirely rational, right? If to be twitchy and controlling to the point of panic about what is on my skin or on my body helps - if anything might help to stave off the next one -

I have been in remission for five years. My shortened gut is not something that remission can touch, neither are the arthritic changes to my right hip, or the scarring that lines my digestive tract. Each time the beast presses in and gets its teeth in me until someone else fights it off, I am left worse for the encounter.

It’s just this amount of functional body, getting smaller and smaller until I die.

…or I make a good deal with a gastroenterologist or research trial of some sort. Could it be you?

I started writing this because I saw a call for shortform essays from people with disabilities, asking for a description of their average day as a means of casting light on mobility differences, invisible illnesses, etc.

My disability is not particularly invisible. My abdomen is covered in long, deep purple scars. I am missing my belly button, which was part of the tissue lost to one debridement or another; I was pretty out of it at the time, at fourteen. I pull up my shirt and people get a lot more sympathetic to my need for a day off for a colonoscopy or my third round of severe infectious illness that year fairly quickly, though I consider it a nuclear option. For the most part, I try to ask as little as possible, given the eternal possibility that I might need to ask a great deal more on some forthcoming day with a beast at my door. I’ve tried to cultivate my own competence to a somewhat ridiculous extent. I am the person my friends ask first for counsel from the emergency room, or before they’ve decided to go, whether for a dislocation or exacerbation of their own Crohn’s.

On the median morning of my life, I wake up and check my email on my phone. A parent, overnight, has become displeased with their student’s last-quarter grades, which are already final and have been in the portal for the past two weeks. I fire off a quick email explaining this in professional terms, then haul myself out of bed, make myself a cup of coffee and force down a small amount of food - no dairy, it interferes with iron absorption. I favor heavily processed oatmeal or grits, cooked fruits or vegetables, leftovers on top. I take my morning medicines. I’ve been anemic since my last bout with pneumonia a few months ago, so I dutifully swallow an iron supplement with lemon water. I drive to work.

None of my jobs lend themselves well to regular bathroom breaks. I skip lunch, and don’t eat until the hour before I get off, whenever that might be. On Fridays, when I go directly from school to the emergency department, where I work, this is, in effect, employment-regulated intermittent fasting. If I pick up a last minute night shift, I might have already had food, and might either duck away to the bathroom every twenty minutes or so, or else cramp so badly that only the most rigid straight-backed posture spares me the worst of the pain. I know by now that I can do this for eighteen hours, if I have to. It is survivable, transient discomfort rather than claw-tracks in the front door.

Most days, my pattern holds. I work, I wrap up, come home and eat more cooked or processed-food leftovers. Sometimes I’m genuinely hungry, though usually not. My wife presses the issue if I prevaricate. I’ll do some writing or some reading before I drive my wife to the gym or to her dojo. I jog on the treadmill for half an hour and do a few chest presses and pull-ups for the same reason I muscle down cold tofu and green beans cooked to mush; it’s good for me. It will also make it easier to take a decently-proportioned dinner. I have a decaf coffee at the gym, though I would like a caffeinated one. My heartrate spikes when I do basically anything, and I try not to tempt my cardiovascular system into misbehavior.

At nine, I pick up my wife. At some point between these post-work activities, I’ve written a thousand words or so of my novel. If I have an uninterrupted hour and a half, I can definitely do a thousand. If I haven’t had one of those yet, it comes out of my sleep budget. If I don’t write, there is hardly any point to any of the preceding efforts to keep myself alive.

I take my nighttime medicines and my nighttime shower. My wife falls asleep before me. She is warm and soft and smells very nice. I stay awake on my computer for another hour or two, longer if I have something in particular I’m trying to exorcise through words.

Eventually I fall asleep and dream that my hospital’s EMR has added a new page to all charts, retroactively, and I have to go back and fill it out for every patient. My alarm goes off at 5:45AM. I check my email. The parent from yesterday morning CC’d the assistant principal somewhere around 2AM and wants a meeting during my lunchtime, which is when I use the bathroom; I haven’t had a planning period in years.

I sigh, roll out of bed, and go to make my coffee.

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Here is an example of a joke, in the medium.

A woman sits at a cluttered dining room table, eating sardines directly out of the tin. She dips each individual fish in a plate of rainbow sprinkles before she eats it. Her roommate enters.

ROOMMATE: Huh. Weird choice.
WOMAN: Yeah, I’m out of herring.
ROOMMATE: You? Out of herring?
WOMAN: I went on kind of a bender the other night. Three jars, just gone. We’re out of vodka, too.
ROOMMATE: My mom warned me about living with Scandinavians.

The woman nods sober agreement and pauses to dip another whole sardine in rainbow sprinkles, eating it head-first with a splintering sound. Her roommate boggles visibly.

WOMAN: It’s just not the same crunch. I should go shopping. You want me to pick anything up for you?
ROOMMATE: No, uh - no, I’m not really h - I’m good, thanks.

The woman offers the tin and the sprinkles, and the roommate carefully skirts the offer, visibly uncomfortable, edging towards the door.

ROOMMATE: Really, I just ate. I - used to work with Greenpeace, I don’t - fish. I can’t have red 40 or I start biting people. I’m - late, so late, sorry.

This is a perfectly serviceable sitcom-character-establishing bit, call it 2 Broke Girls style. We follow the roommate out, knowing as we do - she has terrible luck with roommates and she really needs to move, so when she meets Niceguy Sneakers at the coffee shop where she’s gone to avoid the smell and chewing noises, she has a pithy line to toss off about his dietary preferences when he mentions his roommate just got elected to the state senate and has to live in Albany now. The tension has risen, and risen, and broken with her escape, at which point the scene can be reintegrated and paid off:

NICEGUY: Just like that, I’m on the hook for $1,750. I mean, it’s not a great apartment, but -
ROOMMATE: How are you on herring?
NICEGUY: What? Neutral?
ROOMMATE (suspiciously): Cod?
NICEGUY: Where is this going -
ROOMATE: Sardines?

None of this is stepping on a joke. Stepping on a joke is, if we return to the intial scene:

WOMAN: I went on kind of a bender the other night. Three jars, just gone. We’re out of vodka, too.
ROOMMATE: So what, this is normal to you?
WOMAN: Well, no. I’d usually have herring, and baking sugar.
ROOMMATE: That’s just next-level nasty.
WOMAN: Herring is a completely normal meal. My grandma always said it puts hair on your chest and a twinkle in your eye.
ROOMMATE: Uh, okay… good luck with that.

It is borderline impossible for some writers to keep themselves from commenting on a joke, whether it’s a visual gag or clever wordplay. And it drives me insane. It diverts the force of the gag itself, it makes the stepping-on character look not only stupid but unfunny and vaguely obscene, and most importantly, it takes up time that could be used actually leveraging the joke.

You get more leverage for future scenes, and future humor, if the horrified roommate scrabbles for purchase, forcing the tension to rise as we, the audience, struggle to imagine any reasonable response, instead of defaulting to “well that just happened!” comedic stylings. Stepping on the joke is the essence of why “well that just happened” isn’t intrinsically, funny, despite ‘getting a laugh’, and has become a meme; observing that something funny just happened is certainly a thing people do, but there’s nothing funny about it, if the person observing it isn’t someone whose opinion you care about, surprising you by finding something amusing that you would have expected them to find banal.

What can be genuinely funny in a long-running show like Buffy, in which we ‘know’ the characters over an extended number of viewing-hours and have solid-feeling approximations of them does not invariably work so well in the 110-minute-feature-film, as Joss Whedon learned. It can be funny that someone is stepping on a joke, but only when this is either a leveraging or a subversion of something we already firmly understand of the character.

I generally really enjoy Peacemaker, but it has a tendency to step on its jokes, and thus makes a good example of ‘the phenomenon’ in a slightly lateral way. The other way our sitcom-style scenes could fail would be in wheel-spinning back-and-forths.

NICEGUY: Just like that, I’m on the hook for $1,750. I mean, it’s not a great apartment, but -
ROOMMATE: You never cook herring there, do you?
NICEGUY: No? I’m vegan?
ROOMMATE: Vegan. So like, no fish at all?
NICEGUY: I guess?
ROOMMATE: Because I’m at zero fish capacity.
NICEGUY: Zero fish.
ROOMMATE: Promise?
NICEGUY: You really have an issue with fish!
ROOMATE: Promise.
NICEGUY: I don’t even know you? But sure. I promise. Not a single fish.

Like, it gets us to the laugh, but the laugh is going to all be in the delivery. The lines themselves undercut the tension more than they build it, and drag out a scene that could be succinct. Looking back at the scene from Peacemaker, the ridiculous setup here is that blue uniform, Vigilante, is righteously but spinelessly upset with red uniform, Peacemaker, after he stood by and refused to intervene during his torture. The setup is strong: Vigilante expresses that he is totally not mad.

VIGILANTE: But it’s worth it, you know. For being a more evolved human being, so. Thank you. I’ve never had a friend quite like you.

A beat-long pause as the car radio plays diegetically (I wanna be with you!) and the two friends exchange looks.

VIGILANTE: What?
PEACEMAKER: It just seems like under the surface you’re kind of angry about it.
VIGILANTE: I’m not.
PEACEMAKER: Seems like you are.
VIGILANTE: Well, I’m not at all, dude.
PEACEMAKER: Okay, the way you said dude right there - ?
VIGILANTE: What.
PEACEMAKER: - seems miffed.
VIGILANTE: I said it like I always say it.
PEACEMAKER: You know what? You should feel grateful. Because you would feel really guilty if I gave that guy information because you were too much of a candy-ass to take a little torture.
VIGILANTE: Oh yeah. I would’ve been real guilty.
PEACEMAKER: You see that? That, right there, was angry.
VIGILANTE: No it wasn’t! It was normal! I was agreeing with you.

Obviously these are talented comedic actors who ham their way through these lines with expressions and physical language that keep the dead air from being wasted. There is, however, an editorial move that I would make here: everything between ‘what’ and ‘you know what’ is a back-and-forth of the sort that steps on the joke, or, in other forms, often steps on the drama, the tension, or the characterization.

Consider:

VIGILANTE: But it’s worth it, you know. For being a more evolved human being, so. Thank you. I’ve never had a friend quite like you.

A beat-long pause as the car radio plays diegetically (I wanna be with you!) and the two friends exchange looks for a second beat as their respective face-journies curdle.

PEACEMAKER: You know what? You should feel grateful. You would’ve felt really guilty if I gave that guy information because you were too much of a candy-ass to take a little torture, but now you’re mad -
VIGILANTE: I wasn’t mad! I said that normally. I agree with you.

We still get the tension, we still get the clumsy tension-break, but the scene has more space for expression and tension-building as opposed to the ‘are you mad at me’ release valve. It’s the difference between a balloon lowly leaking air and popping; the more slowly you drip the resolved tension, the more you expound and exposit, the more the audience is let off the hook.

Similarly, an amateur writing tell that shows up in a lot of fanfiction, a lot of self-published writing, and frankly a lot of AI writing in the latest permutations of the various LLMs is the “oh yeah?” “yeah!” style of wheel-spinning dialogue, which fills space at the expense of whatever tension was built by the preceding visual, interaction, beat.

“You’re ridiculous,” Rafael sighs, running his hand through his hair. I face the empty half-curtained stage and put my shoulder to him, for all that will help.

“I know.”

“You’re also the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, and the smartest,” he adds, and I turn back, caught entirely off guard.

“I… know?”

He laughs aloud. The air conditioning, as it always is in the early fall, hums too loud, chills the black-box space beyond a temperature habitable for humans. I feel ridiculous enough already in my would-be director turtleneck. I feel like a fraud, worse and redder for being known one, doubly so for - he can’t possibly mean it.

Rafael shakes his head, a grimace tightening the set of his jaw. “Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to watch you flounder around with this. You should be the most respected director this theater has ever seen.”

“I’m trying my best!” I insist.

“Are you?”

“I am!”

“Then why can’t you respect yourself enough to put your foot down when someone with a tenth of your talent makes a fool out of you in front of your crew?” he argues, and this is the crux of it, I know. Why I couldn’t let him watch rehearsal.

“It’s not so simple!”

“Are you sure about that? It seems simple to me.” His arms are crossed, now, over his broad chest, and my best attempts not to notice the shape of him, even as my heart races, are failing me. My tone ticks up towards hysteria.

“It isn’t!”

“Then why not? Why can’t you tell Clint to fuck off with his postmodernist approach to stagecraft and his John Proctor apologetics and his stupid singsong voice, act like a real director and direct him?”

He’s breathing as heavily as I am. Tears sting at the corners of my eyes. I’m as weak and stupid as I’ve ever been, stripped bare. It’s worse than Clint, to be seen failing to direct Clint. To be failing at the one thing I’m supposed to be good at. Worse, in front of Rafael. My face is hot, and my voice comes out strangled, with less conviction than I intend.

“I may not’ve gone to your fancy fucking college, but I know how this is supposed to work,” he adds.

“Fuck, you don’t get it!”

He doesn’t. He’s not the one who earned the scholarship to Pace, he’s not the one who got to leave this town, the one with a hundred-thousand in diverse theater directors scholarship money riding in shoulders too narrow to withstand the force of personality of a fucking tenor who moonlights in hospital IT.

“I do get it,” he says. “I completely get it. Do you?”

“Of course I do!”

“You’re not even listening to me.”

“Why should I? What would you know? You have your parents. The business. This is all I have. I can’t throw my weight around like the boss’s boy on a job site. That’s not how this works.”

This is a perfectly serviceable dramatic scene, in which Rafael confronts the protagonist, Janeli, with both his feelings about her and his frustrations about her directorial debut.

And: it could be stronger without the back-and-forths about who does and doesn’t ‘get it’, who is and isn’t ‘trying their best’, what is and isn’t simple. There is an emotional tension to the scene, just as humor builds tension towards a point of release. If you scatter small releases, you can either lose the big one (rarely intentional!) or simply distribute out the release without the explosion, which could be a deliberate choice, though it often reads as wheels-spinning to me.

I would rewrite that scene, on an editing pass, starting at the point of my first major tension-heightening change:

Rafael shakes his head, a grimace tightening the set of his jaw. “Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to watch you flounder around. You should be the most respected director this theater has ever seen.”

“I’m trying my best!” I insist.

“Then why can’t you put your foot down when someone with a tenth of your talent makes a fool out of you in front of your crew?” he argues.

This is the crux of it, I know. This is why I couldn’t let him watch rehearsal. His arms are crossed, now, over his broad chest, and my best attempts not to notice the shape of him, even as my heart races, are failing me.

“No, seriously, why can’t you tell Clint to fuck off with his postmodernist approach to stagecraft and his John Proctor apologetics and his stupid singsong voice, act like a real director and direct him?” he continues, breathing, now, as heavily as I am. “I may not’ve gone to your fancy fucking college, but I know how this is supposed to work.”

Tears sting at the corners of my eyes. I’m as weak and stupid as I’ve ever been, stripped bare. It’s worse than Clint, to be seen failing to direct Clint, when this is the one thing I’m supposed to be good at. Worse, in front of Rafael, who could never understand.

He’s not the one who earned the scholarship to Pace, he’s not the one who got to leave this town, the one with a hundred-thousand in diverse theater directors scholarship money and ten grand in debt riding on shoulders too narrow to withstand the force of personality of a fucking tenor who moonlights in hospital IT.

“You don’t get it,” I say. “You have your parents. The business. This is all I have. I can’t throw my weight around like the boss’s boy on a job site. That’s not how this works.”

The less back-and-forth, the more the scene dwells on the essential tension between Janeli and Rafael, who don’t entirely know how to talk to each other, who are trying to reconnect after years spent habituating themselves to radically different environments and nursing resentments both related to and unmoored from reality.

Obviously if I was writing this as a contemporary romance about a woman fleeing her cancellation in a big city in the northeast after a romantic entanglement with a fellow playwright went wrong, trying to direct a community theater version of The Crucible to suit the later 2020s audiences in her hometown while staying true to herself as a Mexican-American grappling with her complex feelings about the late-2010s, early 2020s era of online-social-justice after being burned by it, Rafael would end up re-cast as John Proctor after Clint quits in a huff, reigniting their relationship in all its complexity after their messy break-up in which Janeli unceremoniously dumped him after she got her college acceptance letter because he was going nowhere in life. But once, they were theater kids together, dreaming of escape through the arts…

“I’m trying my best!” I insist.

“Are you?”

“I am!”

Doesn’t serve that. It spins the conversational wheels, inches forward without entirely advancing, when the weight of the scene is in Rafael first confessing, then exploding and Janeli being unable to admit he’s right in any respect, lashing out accordingly at what she knows is a weak place in his armor.

So it’s not just humor, is what I’m saying. It’s most obvious in humor, because a stepped-on joke is less funny, measurable in did-or-didn’t-laugh. In drama, it’s the more diaphanous did-or-didn’t-care.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it in certain shows and movies, and if you’re writing that kind of media, it is in your interest to:

• Ensure the tension of the scene, the conflict, the ridiculous or dramatic point of it, is given enough breathing room to land, without being directly, assertively commented on or evaded through hedging.

• Be thoughtful about using characters in your work “thinking things aloud” to encourage your audience to think of those things; be less afraid of using visual and internal representations of what your characters are thinking to avoid wheels-spinning ‘maybe I am afraid’ ‘afraid?’ ‘yeah… afraid. afraid of…”

• Notice when characters tend to step on jokes or break tension ‘organically’ - this is potentially an interesting trait to leverage. Rather than necessarily eliminating it, be aware of tension-breaking that might emerge from their behavior in your more flow-state writing sessions.

As with all devices, when done intentionally joke-stepping can be delightful and impactful and funny and interesting. It can also be done unintentionally, to unintentional success; but it is easier to both control your writing and your level of bit-success if you make choices intentionally.

Rafael interrupting his own angry-monologue to tell Janeli that he thinks she’s beautiful, or that he never entirely got over her, then refusing to elaborate does take tension from the scene. Peacemaker verbally observing that Vigilante is mad at him, then arguing fruitlessly with him about it, does take tension from the scene. But perhaps it’s a productive loss of tension? Perhaps the joke is the loss of tension itself? It’s not the scene I would write and direct, but then again, I’m not James Gunn.

Only you, the writer, can decide, and for this, you need to be aware that it is happening.

You’ve recently been pushed from a parapet, cliff, or the edge of a pit by your scheming sister, who envies your apparent success in life.

The man you married is cheating on you while you suffer from cancer, a miscarriage, or ambiguous facial abrasions. There is no point in living any further.

When you are upset, you produce beams or auras of some sort, but so do most women.

After an agonizing existence of dutiful, long-concealed misery, you’ve been reborn at the crossroads that set you on your path of torment. This time, however, you’re going to do things a little differently.

It’s time to choose your mate. Hurry, get dressed - you’re so much uglier than your fraternal twin, if any of the wolf-CEOs is going to look twice at you, you’ll need a spectacular gown.

Unfortunately, your second cousin took the gown you meant to wear, leaving you only with a simple, form-fitting dress of pure white, practically vanishing at your tiny waist.

Your blood heals mortal wounds. Your hair reverts naturally to face-framingly layered beachy waves at ten-second intervals. Sometimes your ears are pointy; sometimes not. Everyone, especially your immediate family, hates you.

Perhaps you are a werepanther or beastkin, but the most persecuted kind: you have never successfully transformed into a snow leopard, and you’re lucky any man would look at you without crossing himself and spitting.

The people around you are playing it pretty fast and loose with the term “half breed”.

Wait. Your stepsister was reborn with you. In your past life, she married the prince and was mercilessly bullied in his palace, but in this life, she covetously chooses the poor scholar, elf king, or possibly tiger-shifter you elevated to fame and fortune.

Who would want you anyway, divorced, disconnected from your inner wolf, with only the much-denigrated ability of blood-healing to show for your noble lineage?

A force of similarly-dressed soldiers has shouted something in unison about your menacing new husband.

Not content with her own husband’s attentions, your stepsister’s half sister has pretended to faint, again.

Your new husband, the dragon prince, looks suspiciously like if Henry Cavill and Sam Claflin were also lovingly designed custom-content Sims that would cause your computer to crash every time you loaded the game. His eyes are golden.

A lavish meal and an equally lavish gown have been prepared for you in the hall of the lion clan’s alpha; you will dine with him tonight.

Despite his glowing eyes and fearsome reputation, you’re beginning to realize that your new husband, the king of the boars… may not be what you’ve been led to believe.

As he stands and turns away from you in anguish, certain he could never deserve a heart as pure as yours, you catch a glimpse of the amulet around his neck. But it can’t be. The God of the Underworld… is the man who tried to save your broken body before your last life faded to black? But how?

You look like if Dove Cameron and Elle Fanning reproduced via chimeric parthenogenesis then gifted their daughter a face lift at sixteen. So does your twin sister who hates you, if you were wondering.

You are probably brunette, though. So you have that going for you.

Meanwhile, your maternal second cousin, who thought she claimed the idealized marriage she imagined for you when she chose to take your former husband in this life, is miserable, as is the second prince of the rival kingdom she married. He’s obsessed with you, and will do anything to have you back.

It’s the midpoint of the 44-part drama, and your childhood best friend, the high lord of dolphins, rendered smitten with his new bride, has overheard your half-cousin admitting that she orchestrated your miscarriage, years ago - and the baby was his.

At some point you have been tied to a tree by a single extended length of rope, possibly flogged.

Every named character has now sworn some form of revenge.

The cold duke of the north is beginning to warm to you, sensing that you are the only woman not afraid of his wolf form, even intervening when the women of his household try to murder you repeatedly.

The male lead has been in love with you all along.

He is much richer and handsomer than you thought.

Your first husband interrupts what should have been your honeymoon, throwing a spear at your beloved’s chest and insisting that he, the king of the mermen, must have you. It’s no use. You’ve already thrown your tiny, slender, bird-boned girl’s body into the path of the projectile.

The mouthful of blood you’ve been holding behind your slightly pouted lips for twelve episodes escapes them. Your paternal niece laughs in victory.

But wait - hope! - your blood heals mortal wounds. Awash in gold light, you rise from the arms of the weeping grizzly-bear-kin you wedded and had just begun to love, not dead, but transforming.

Your hair is luminously golden-blonde now. Your ears are normal. With this, you can finally access your celestial magic, obliterating the eyes of your former husband as wings unfurl from your shoulders, and also possibly burning him to death. It’s somewhat unclear.

Weeping, aware, now, that the jig is up, your stepsister’s best friend’s roommate from magic college throws herself at your feet, pleading for you to spare her.

You certainly don’t mean her harm. But all the identically slavering wolves in your husband’s court? Those are probably going to advance before a hard cut.

Maybe at some point, your husband was ugly, a beast, a dragon, or a vampire of some sort. He isn’t anymore. He’s Timothy-Clavicular-Chalamet again.

You are pregnant with twins, who are also mermaids; your entire extended family, for having cherished you inadequately, is dead.

Your ears are pointy again. Don’t worry about it.

I believe, in my wide-eyed-liberal-arts-educated-scientist heart of hearts, in the power of a process of contradiction to resolve seemingly irreconcilable concepts along a linear pathway in which one is tested against another, both are changed or recontextualized by the interaction, and then they are tested again, achieving increasing sophistication and approaching resolution in the process. I believe, in short, in dialectics.

A dialectic system is generated by its thesis, the initial statement of identity or idea. An archer nocks and draws, aims and releases; the arrow flies. If we treat this thesis as absolute, occurring in a vacuum, every arrow aimed with intent by every archer strikes its target perfectly.

Not only is this boring, if we meant to watch an archer work, but in practice, we know that this is not invariably the case. Opposing forces affect the arrow’s destination. A cool breeze catches in its fletching, brushing it slightly towards the west. Air resistance itself, while calculable, changes depending on the temperature of the air, the elevation of the archery-grounds, the humidity of the afternoon. These factors, the antithesis, make for gentle opposition that the archer must take into account, with varying success; the status quo resists intrusion, but the force behind the arrow is a powerful one. If we assume a skilled archer draws the bowstring, the arrow will likely strike the target, regardless, though she may curse and shake her head when that unpredictable breeze diverts her a centimeter or two from the center and the arrow, reciprocally, diverts the breeze. Her arrow’s destination and its lesson to her as an archer, the product of both thesis and antithesis, set against each other, is the synthesis. At its most essential form, a force meets an opposing force, and the outcome resolves based on their interactions.

Importantly, the synthesis is then integrated to the next thesis. The archer finishes bemoaning her luck, reassesses the wind and the position of her first arrow, and draws again, generating an amended thesis. Whether she overcorrects or strikes the target cleanly, this next disruption to the inertia of the natural world is shaped by the product of the last one. Even if she doesn’t care to glance at where the arrow lodged and ignores the wind, her fingertips are chafed, the musculature of her back incrementally more taxed. Not only the obvious oppositional or synthetic forces are at work, and just as often, the interaction between one thesis and antithesis produces increasingly sophisticated antithetical forces to oppose the next thesis.

Our archer draws and aims and releases again and again. She learns the pattern of breezes of the day, the twinge in her rotator cuff, the consequences of humidity on her fletching. The effort wears on her and the weather changes as the sun dips lower in the sky. She retrieves her arrows and finds one shaft cracked, a fletching loose, curses several more times under her breath, and judges her practice finished.

The archer walks away, her arrows bounded in her quiver, and this particular dialectic ends. The interplay between inciting force and opposing force concludes; without an arrow’s flight, the wind opposes nothing, and is only the wind - perhaps part of some larger dialectic, but no longer this one. The synthesis, the products of her practice, are now preserved in memory to be leveraged when next she aims.

The intention of this essay is to lay out a path to develop antagonist characters as oppositional forces in a narrative rather than in isolation and to make the case for doing so. An antagonist, to oppose anything at all, relies on the vector and nature and sheer existence of the protagonist. The synthesis, the story and its conclusion, flows from their dialectic. The protagonist wants, acts, pursues. The antagonist opposes. Both are changed by this opposition; the synthesis, the product of their confrontations, is story itself.

The protagonist drives the plot. As long as we are writing from a perspective, at some point, we follow one agent, drawn into their desires and objectives, and what we recognize as a story arc traces their efforts to achieve them and concludes when they do or don’t, once the arrow has flown and we know its destination.

This can, of course, take many forms.

• A courageous dog, lost on a camping trip, seeks to find its way back home.

• A stubborn farmgirl seeks to protect her family’s harvest from encroaching locusts.

• A downtrodden political organizer placed in charge of a candidate seemingly born to lose decides that they will have her win at all costs.

• A wily shoe salesperson decides to use their skills to strike it rich when a new sneaker fad emerges.

At the basest level, a protagonist requires traits and a vector. This vector, like the archer’s aim, determines the ideal outcome in a vacuum devoid of wind and humidity and muscle spasms. A vector relies on a starting positionality, and these traits give us the rough starting point, the limits from which the bow can be aimed. If our archer is two meters tall, she must aim differently than she would at a meter and a half. A lackadaisical protagonist and a hardworking protagonist who both desire fame and fortune are taking vastly different paths to the same objective.

Before writing a novel, before writing an antagonist, before doing more than speculating on either of these things, I find it useful to meditate deeply on the protagonist. If we choose the simple farmgirl, we might develop her from three simultaneous perspectives: her drive, her resources, and her weaknesses.

Her drive: she is a dutiful eldest daughter with rare open-minded parents who intend for the farm and their home to pass to her when they die, in defiance of local laws concerning gendered succession. She loves the work of managing the farm; her attachment is as emotional as it is financial. She is certain that if she does an unimpeachable job at her vocation, other patriarchs will be more willing to take chances on their own daughters and fairly weight their abilities in matters of succession, increasing the village’s prosperity. For twenty-seven years she has thought of little but seasonal variations in rainfall, soil quality, seed, draft animal husbandry, and harvest storage. This is her passion, and her work has brought her family’s stewarded farm genuine gains in productivity.

Her resources: She has self-taught a limited amount of reading and writing that lets her correspond with other villages. She is interested in tactics being explored elsewhere and has some limited knowledge of intercultural farming techniques, though she has mostly honed more traditional methods. She is talented at pattern-recognition; her years of study, both of the weather patterns in the area and of texts and diary-entries she has stubbornly picked her way through with her limited literacy, have paid off. She is an exceptionally hard worker, diligent and committed and deeply stubborn once she believes she has the right of something. Her younger sisters mostly adore her, though they don’t entirely understand her and find her occasionally demanding and inflexible when it comes to the work of the household.

Her weaknesses: She is not well-liked in the village, and while she can read and write to an extent, she is oriented more to function than to persuasion. Her approach to communication is limited by her lack of regard to anything that is not her farm or directly involved in her farming practices. She is wary of untested methodology to something approaching an extreme. She is a homebody with terrible PR. She distrusts people beyond her own family. She is profoundly attached to her aging and sickly parents, who are themselves resented for both their growing prosperity and their unconventional inheritance plans.

We are left with an over-rigid and ill-liked homebody, talented in agriculture and capable of learning and observing with genuine skill but socially precarious and entirely vulnerable to the success or failure of any given year’s harvest. If we stop there, we still have a number of opposing forces in play, and some novels operate from a cavalcade of small antagonistic events and factors and scenarios: there is an encroaching horde of locusts, there are hostile people in the village, there are inherent struggles in farming even during the best year, there are small interpersonal conflicts between sisters, there is the illness affecting her beloved parents.

Turning back to our analogy with the archer, these are the changing wind speed, the sore place in her back, the half-torn callus on her finger, the unpredictable humidity, the loose fletching. These are, in some novels, enough. The weakness of the human body is an antagonistic force. The unpredictability of nature is an antagonistic force.

We, however, want an antagonist. A second woman standing beside the archer, beginning to chat with her about an upsetting topic the second she nocks her first arrow. A woman behind the target, dragging it left and right in an unpredictable oscillation. A woman observing from a distance whose regard is so heavy that it makes the archer’s hand slippery with fear-sweat.

So we have a protagonist. If we want a character-vs.-character story structure, we need an antagonist to sit in dialogue with her. One story-propulsive character is not enough! We need at least two of them.

So we’ve developed our protagonist, and in doing so, we’ve set some limits as to what the story can ‘be about’; we’ve placed her on a limiting path by her sheer nature. This will not be a courtly intrigue or a swept-away romance. Our farmgirl - let’s call her Enet - would be hard-pressed to engage at all with courtly affairs. It would be unrealistic to place her in a high court and expect her to do anything but attempt to get back to her farming. If a compelling stranger arrived to sweep her away, her befuddlement would quickly yield to annoyance; she has horse-mouths to feed and four times as many horse-hooves to mind and shoes to purchase from Tomis down the road. If we place Enet in a dark romance, she is quickly diverted from her resources and her drive, the qualities that make her charming and aspirational as well as a capable dialectical partner for an antagonist. If we place her in a quest structure, the objective had damn well better be to save her farm, or she’s already defected and heading home as quickly as her repurposed draft horse can carry her.

This is a tremendous asset for the novel-writer. Limits give us points of leverage, bumpers on the narrative bowling-alley. Enet is not interested in being swept away. She is not interested in the pursuit of adventure or the chance of sudden wealth and glory. What she is interested in doing is preserving her farm, staying precisely where she is, among the few people she already likes and trusts, and slowly changing inheritance norms in her village. Perhaps we give her a niece, from one of those married-off sisters, whom she means to take as an apprentice to inherit the farm someday, to give her even more to explicitly lose.

If we look back to our archer and the many possible antagonists who could challenge her ability to achieve her objective, these limitations are precisely what allows us to narrow our focus on which antagonist works best. If our archer is a hothead with an easily exploited temper, the antagonist moving the target forces her to address one of her greatest weaknesses: to reach anything resembling the target, she must focus past her anger. If our archer is a vindictive, malicious woman practicing at archery solely to harm those she hates, the antagonist standing in the path of her arrow in armor, waiting to deflect it should she fail to aim past him, forces her to either confront her desire for purposeless violence or abandon her project and target practice altogether.

The ideal antagonist will in some way force a confrontation with your character’s weaknesses or flaws; if there is no friction, if the wind sweeping through the valley is diverted by a rocky outcropping and doesn’t affect the arrow’s path, it is no oppositional force at all and thus no dialectic, no synthesis in their interactions. If the wind ruffles the archer’s hair but doesn’t change her arrow’s course, no antagonism, no antithesis, and thus no synthesis was present. The thesis was executed unchallenged, even if she is very upset about her mussed braid.

So let’s look back to Enet’s weaknesses and begin developing the kind of person with whom interaction would force her to confront them, not once, but over and over again throughout the story in an iterative process of transformation.

1. Enet is a homebody, and her objective is to stay close to her farm and effective in defense of her farm. An antagonist in some way should compel or force her away from her farm or distract her from her preparations for the locust horde.

2. Enet is socially inept. An antagonist should out-play her socially in some way; they might be overwhelmingly more charismatic, or might be so forceful and totally operating outside of the realm of charisma that her own limited skills become all she has to depend on.

3. Enet is over-cautious with new methodology. An antagonist should force her to gamble on something untested in ways that succeed, but in a way that introduces unplanned complications, or otherwise fail, but with a subtle positive outcome.

4. Enet cares about her vulnerable parents. An antagonist should either threaten them directly or in some way force her to make a difficult choice about them.

This is not to say that Enet should solely be pushed into facing these weaknesses by an antagonistic force - most characters are improved by having agency in addressing their weaknesses with some deliberateness - but left to her own devices, Enet’s in-story agency would direct her to do her research, fortify her farm by conventional means and solve the problem of the impending locust horde the way it has always been solved before, taking as few risks as possible. An antagonist, or a secondary antagonistic force (taxes, plague, social unrest in the village) is what repositions her so that her weaknesses are in the way of her strengths.

Now we have a sense of what our antagonist should accomplish. We are thus positioned to begin creating the character, if we mean to follow my method.

If we’re writing SFF, which I usually am, while these concepts are somewhat universal as storytelling goes, we can look to three principal models for an antagonist, each of which invite a different recursive dialectic throughout the narrative.

There is the villain, deliberately opposing, thwarting, punishing through malevolence or ill intent. They typically have fewer fetters than the protagonist in terms of both ethics and resources. Think of the villain as the ecosystem’s predator. The protagonist is the prey, even if they are not being deliberately targeted or hunted. She will need to evade, satiate, or kill this sort of antagonist. There is no living passively in harmony with the villain-played-straight for long.

There is the rival, also in deliberate opposition, occasionally malevolent, but often with virtues complementary to or in excess of those of the protagonist. Think of the rival as a competitive species in an ecological zero sum game; a manatee and a seahorse both rely on the same seagrass, and if one ‘gets it’, the other does not. The protagonist will need to defeat them, convert them to her cause, or change her focus (resource partitioning!) to ultimately resolve the contradiction between her aims and the rival’s aims.

Finally, there is the mentor, whose opposition may or may not be deliberate, but is always in some way restrictive of what the protagonist has to begin with - of ambition, of resources, of possibilities. Think of the mentor as the ecosystem’s limitations, the hard boundary set by primary production or available space. The protagonist will need to outgrow her mentor and leave the comfortable microcosm of their influence or her growth and ability to reach her objective will be stunted forever.

I’ve used all of these antagonist-types, sometimes in the same narrative at once. Let’s consider how to apply each of them in dialogue to Enet as a protagonist.

1. A villain could be the landowner who holds the title to her parents’ land, a regional low-noble who takes a portion of taxes from her village and controls her parents’ stewardship of the property and farm. They might force Enet away from the farm to defend her right to inherit it, outplay her bureaucratically, forcing her to marshal her few social abilities in her own defense, insist that she give up her draft horses for spurious back-taxes, forcing her to change her methods, and implicitly threaten her parents with state violence.

2. A rival could be the son of another, more historically prosperous family in the village, granted better land by the landowner, disgruntled by Enet’s increasing success and determined to either outdo her in preparation for the locust horde or to undermine her efforts to prepare. He might, through his interference, distract her from her work, present a drastically more charismatic figure in the village, make an accusation against her, forcing her to change her practices, and might threaten to supplant her in relation to her parents with a charm offensive, preparing to sweep in and operate their farm as well by marrying Enet once she is in a position of destitution after the locusts pass.

3. A mentor could be the village’s witch, who taught Enet how to read and write and has historically been somewhat overinvested in Enet’s life. She might insist that Enet follow her counsel or accomplish some task that Enet can’t easily refuse, be so disliked within the village that sheer association with her worsens Enet’s social straits every time they are seen together, press Enet into a less reliable, speculative set of practices to prepare for the horde, or alienate her from her beloved parents.

Keep in mind: while a villain must, by nature, be villainous and in some way ill-intentioned and immoral relative to the narrative’s values, a rival and a mentor can both be well-intentioned, yet potentially even more disruptive to Enet’s objectives for it; she can use all her agency in avoiding a villain, but a non-villainous mentor or rival could have attachments or genuine points of attachment and dependency that make fleeing them a nonstarter. Her rival could be her childhood friend who has always been in love with her and just really, really wants to marry her, thinking to rescue her from a life of back-breaking work. Her mentor could genuinely intend the best for her while tragically positioning her to be absent as her parents become more and more frustrated with her preoccupation with the woman.

In sketching out potential antagonists, you might find that more than one of them enriches the story you mean to tell. This is excellent news: more characters to populate your world and force the protagonist to confront their weaknesses in pursuing their objectives! A woman at your archer’s side and a woman frowning at her from across the training field! Keeping in mind that a dialectic involves mutual transformation through confrontation and resolution, an antagonist, changed by the protagonist in service of their mutual goals or otherwise turned to the protagonist’s purposes against a greater threat can be extremely satisfying, in addition to being useful in the unending narrative game of establishment, leverage, and subversion.

Each of these potential antagonists, though, creates a different sort of story. If the antagonist is the lovelorn rival, for instance, it more-or-less precludes a happy ending in which Enet is contentedly married to someone who shares her passion for farming; the trajectory of the story becomes about her resistance to exactly this outcome, and it will take a lot of careful positioning and hoop-jumping for the reader to be convinced first that marriage is the worst possible outcome for Enet, but later that she just had to meet the right spouse and then comes around to the idea.

An antagonist is a major component of your story, especially elevated to primary antagonist. This can, of course, still be a ‘force of nature’, internal, or abstracted antagonist - the ocean beneath the lifeboat, the protagonist’s acute personal foibles in opposition to their goals, the wrath of god, the horrors of war - but this is an essay about the antagonist-as-character.

One specific benefit to the antagonist-as-character, in achieving a productive dialectic, is that two people are often more alike than one person is to the wrath of god. An antagonist who is a person can be a mirror to the protagonist in the process of opposing her, and this is an efficient way to use the dialectic to transform your protagonist.

Looking back to Enet: how would we mirror her least flattering traits into an antagonist? Enet is self-isolating and closed off by nature. She doesn’t want to use new methods. She doesn’t want to meet new people. She doesn’t want to change her practices and she doesn’t want to leave her farm and she doesn’t want to make a fuss. In terms of moral orientation, she is an incrementalist, at best; she would like it if other girls were able to inherit land privileges as a result of her efforts, but her primary focus is her work. She would gladly share novel practices that worked to defend against the encroaching locust horde with the people around her, but wouldn’t do so proactively. It’s secondary to her goal of keeping her farm as close to hers as possible and avoiding the discomfort of change.

If we take these traits in Enet and amplify them in her rival/pursuer to explore overtly the ways in which her admirable qualities are not absolutely good, and can be profoundly inconvenient applied to other contexts, it forces a reckoning with these qualities in herself - if not for her, for the attentive reader.

You’ve probably read about the importance of ensuring that a character’s flaws actually affect them. That an alcoholic is drunk and misses a vital opportunity, an impatient character gets tired of waiting and misses their moment, a character prone to cruel and cutting remarks whips one out at the wrong occasion and loses an ally. A flaw is all aesthetic until it matters, and narratively, a flaw you count among your character’s flaws ought to be one you are comfortable writing into a story as pivotal and important. Magnifying a protagonist’s flaws into an antagonist is helpful only insofar as the protagonist also exhibits those flaws on the page, and only insofar as the dialogue between them extends beyond pithy retorts and into effect through synthesis, credibly changing the protagonist in her trajectory.

How do we do it, then? A thesis is not enough, and Enet has been thoroughly thesised. What about Tomis, her antagonist-admirer? What about Vhirta, her antagonist-mentor? Lord Kedren of Estvalle, the antagonist liege-lord?

Tomis is certainly the most obvious antagonist to Enet, so let’s workshop him, piece by piece. It’s always exciting to write out these sorts of examples as I write a ‘how I do it’ example; I like discovering characters! I love characters so much.

Suppose Tomis is a first son, as Enet is a first daughter (giving us traction for a mirror or an ironic discrepancy between them). He and Enet are about the same age, the same early-mid twenties that has village matriarchs frowning about the waste of it; he stands to inherit his parents’ land stewardship, and he wouldn’t mind having hers as well. Cold as it sounds, though, he likes Enet, liked her when they were children hauling water together, likes her pragmatism and unwillingness to yield to social pressure. He isn’t abhorrent. He’s just in the way.

He’s also better-liked than she is, better at playing the social game. While he, too, is unmarried, he’s better at managing that; he’s playing at waiting, romantically enough, for her to come around, and that he is perceived that way is not accidental. Enet is beginning to feel an occasional stab of guilt when she thinks of Tomis, who really ought to have a wife and children by now, who wants that, but who wants her more, for her land and out of some strange sense of fealty, some promise he thinks they made together as children sent to gather brush. She hasn’t done a very good job of dissuading him. She mostly avoids him, and looks increasingly cold to the rest of the village, whose opinions of her will come to matter.

A letter has come with a trade-wagon to the Millers’ farm - they buy professionally forged shoes for their horses and Tomis does the shoeing - intended for Enet. He finds her as she’s setting out for Vhirta’s cottage up the valley, ribs her for her correspondence and for her attachment to the old woman, and asks her, as he always does, if she’ll marry him. In this case, for the letter, since he’s walked it to her hand like an errand boy. He’s charming, she’s beet-red, she snatches the letter and stalks away. She can read, he can’t, so at least the contents of the letter are safe.

When she reads it, learning of the impending horde of locusts, a distant rumor raised by an almanac-writer a good few villages beyond her own, Vhirta convinces her to take it seriously, but Enet is shaken by the fact that Tomis would be useful at this, could convince the village on her behalf, as both she and Vhirta will be useless at persuading anyone to do anything. He used to talk them both out of trouble when they trampled a snare while gathering sticks at dusk or arrived late for a sermon.

He could help, but the cost would be too high. Enet resolves that she’ll need a plan before she begins to ask, anyway, and sets to work, stubbornly preparing to handle the impending disaster on her own, doubling down on her conviction that she can rely on no one but herself, her family, and Vhirta.

Tomis comes into existence specifically to oppose Enet in a constructive way. He’s still a fully formed character in his own right. I’m envisioning him as a physical not-quite-opposite to her, a lean but strapping farm lad with an easy smile but without her sureness. He’s accustomed to things proceeding in a certain way, skilled in ways that make him valuable, socially and financially well-resourced in comparison to the harried Enet. He has the power to make her feel guilty, the power to physically obstruct her path, if he wanted to, the power to take away the village’s social support or grant it to her, the power to take her farm and end her dream of independence, if she would only say yes. He has motives for this, real affection for Enet and real ambition when it comes to acquiring the farm. He is, in a sense, as rigid and stubborn as she is, but so tactful and pleasant that he doesn’t look it.

Between the two of them, we have a first dialectic generated through their literal dialogue. Enet emerges from the interaction with her resolve reinforced; the synthesis is in her returning home and doubling down on handling this alone. When next she meets Tomis, she’ll be meeting him as a more guarded version of herself, more put-upon by her plans and her fears.

Depending on the story we want to tell, we might have him relent, observe that Enet is suffering, and try to offer help without strings. This sets us up for a higher antagonist to take the role of primary; if Tomis is going to help her without a marriage and her land in the cards, he’s hardly an oppositional force anymore. Her stubbornness reminds him of his own and of the qualities he admires in her. His frustrated desire yields to reluctant respect; he cared for her when they were children, before there was any question of who had whom. He recognizes through her that his own unmarried status and his fixation on a woman who doesn’t want him are an indication that he doesn’t wholly want to marry someone himself. Perhaps we want to center the locusts as a destructive force of nature, making an ‘act of god’ the ultimate antagonist, telling a story about the capacity of bull-headed humans with disparate ambitions to come together in the face of random disaster.

Perhaps instead we want Tomis as our primary antagonist. If this is the case, he meets Enet at a low point and rephrases the offer; she’s been asking around for things, clearly needs more hands or more insight or something he can offer. He wants a marriage agreement for it, and he wants the land. Out of options, Enet accepts. Over the course of the story, each time Enet refuses, hedges, or attempts to use his help without surrendering to her agreement, Tomis’ smile thins and his support becomes more perfunctory and his care for Enet becomes more contract-shaped. The same trait of stubborn fixation on a goal that we admire in Enet curdles in Tomis.

This becomes a story about the horrific compromises a peasant woman might have to make, the impossibility of freedom in the face of random acts of god that render her beholden to her community’s regressive norms, and finally about the chafe between her unwanted husband-to-be and Enet as a bride-in-waiting, searching for a way out of her agreement. Enet’s stubbornness is placed in tension with her unwillingness to actually eschew freedom to accomplish this goal; in Tomis, the consequences of single-mindedness emerge on the page, perhaps in ways that resonate with Enet’s relationship with her increasingly frustrated sisters, who find her just as implacable and unwilling to compromise on the subject of the farm as Tomis is on the subject of the marriage. The question is no longer just if the farms will survive the horde. Now, at issue as well: can Enet outmaneuver her suitor-turned-husband? What will she lose in the process? What does she actually owe him, and what do her sisters owe her?

The power of this dialectic is a transformative one for storycraft, for the progression of character and of the narrative itself. Enet is pressed forward by every interaction with Tomis. He changes her vector and changes her; she changes him in turn. She exists, he exists, they clash in either text, and the story unfurls from there.

Despite their similarities, there is an essential contradiction in their objectives and their essence, and the story lives in that contradiction.

In my own writing, I find antagonists useful as agencied oppositional forces. I ran into a narrative awkwardness in my novel in the form of the protagonist facing twelve month deadline; twelve months wasn’t fast enough for this antagonistic force to really transform her through dialectic pressure. So in comes the antagonist on month two, having decided that whatever she’s doing, it isn’t working and someone ought to investigate, forcing her to change her tactics if she wants to avoid another such encounter and sending her stumbling into the next plot beat as she counter-schemes.

Notably: the antagonist does not need to siphon agency from the protagonist. To change or to motivate is not necessarily to take action on their behalf. Tomis limits Enet’s options, but Enet is the one who realizes that she can read a contract and he can’t, so perhaps there’s some leverage to be gained. She begins her research entirely of her own in-narrative volition, and yet: Enet-untouched-by-conflict-with-Tomis would have no reason at all to read up on marriage contracts!

This can be challenging to do if the antagonist and protagonist are not in some way power-balanced. Lord Kedren of Estvalle is not going to be an easy antagonist to counter; he requires a lot of massaging to be a usable principal antagonist. At face value, if Enet is forced to interact with him, she’ll likely be forced down whatever path follows because he sets her to a task or because he refuses her aid and tells her to return to her village and get back to her work, this time with a mandate to put a male inheritor’s name on the farming contract by next spring. That’s a perfectly viable antagonistic force, but it doesn’t give her a lot of traction to oppose in turn.

Tomis works particularly well because he can be bested, but he can also be lost to fairly. The dialectic between him and Enet is a dynamic one, not a heavy stone wall constructed in the path of the archer’s arrow. The locust horde, as well, works because, for all it sounds insurmountable, there are ways Enet could resist its encroaching threat, an interesting grey area between ‘inevitable devastation’ and ‘I will ride to Irvor and fetch the locust powder, be right back!’

A dialectic between a baseball and a pitcher’s glove is going to favor the glove. A dialectic between ball and bat is what ultimately makes the story dynamic. Balancing at least some of your antagonistic forces in scale with your protagonist ensures she never becomes entirely passive. The archer who always hits the target, unopposed, is as dull to watch as the one who surrenders to her loss and goes home without drawing once, as there is a high brick wall in her path. Give her fights she might win or lose to punctuate the easy victories and impossible odds alike.

There is a failure mode to the dialectical model. I find, most commonly, this occurs in either balancing the forces well (such that there are multiple surfaces for the protagonist and antagonist to chafe against each other - not only one kind of power, one kind of interaction) or in choosing the wrong antagonistic force for the story that actually appears on the page.

A good example of this is the Night King in the Game of Thrones televised series. He doesn’t appear in the same permutation in the show that he does in A Song of Ice and Fire because, frankly, he is a disruptive villain to a narrative in large part about human triumphs, human failings, and the corrosive, ultimately self-defeating nature of different forms of social and political power in the face of uncaring natural forces.

The Night’s King in the book series is a character in-universe, a man driven to mad subjugation of his brethren, during a long winter, by love for a living corpse. He is a cautionary tale about power, about the winter, about the Starks - and also about the unreliability of these old stories. Literally, he only exists as a story-within-a-story, told by Old Nan and debated by the archmaesters. There are three operative terms in A Song of Ice and Fire; the Night’s King is not ice, but song. These stories, their weight on the Starks, on the Targaryens, on everyone around and beneath them, are the horde of locusts, the ‘force of nature’ antagonist, just as much as the impending winter can be called the same thing. In the books, at least.

Game of Thrones literalizes the long winter, the ice, as the Night King, a different guy. Winter, to Game of Thrones, is not an uncaring natural force, not an act of god, but a villain who hates you. We can debate at some length whether this translates well to television or not; his presence changes the orientation of the story itself, as an active antagonist forcing an active response, requiring someone to kill him.

Winter can’t be killed. It might be staved off, it might be weakened, we might set the right oil well alight and fill the atmosphere with carbon and buy ourselves a few degrees of warmth, but winter, in the end, can only be survived. For a spectacular dramatization of winter-as-antagonist on film, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is, in my opinion, unbeatable. Almost everyone involved is smart and heroic, or trying to be, trying to work together, trying to make the right choices. Winter doesn’t give a shit! The right choice is a reprieve, the wrong choice is death, and sometimes there isn’t a right choice. You’re too far north, you waited too long to leave because someone needed the data, the generator is running out. No one is coming to help you. Have a last drink before you freeze.

The architecture of A Song of Ice and Fire in part relies on the ambiguity of the songs, of who exactly might be the fire or the ice or neither. Who is the last hero, Azor Ahai, Yin Tar, and a dozen other culture-specific epithets, finally reborn? Is it Stannis, Daenerys, Jon Snow? Was it Rhaegar, or Aegon, his son? Attempts to discern as much in the present, or to anoint any given candidate above another by design, have either preceded tragedy or seem liable to do so as the story plays out. We feel the sense of dread that rises when Salladhor speculates that Stannis’ sword is not the true Lightbringer, wince through a flicker of hopeful pattern-matching when Daenerys fails to burn beneath the red comet and hatches her dragons. The song is more dangerous than the ice or the fire.

Arya kills the Night King, the avatar of winter. Winter is, by all accounts, still coming, though the magical component of the season, the long night, proves to be the Night King’s doing and ends with his death. Normal winter, like all those other lean, deadly winters of which everyone has been warning for several seasons, is still on the menu! Extreme climate change, however, is defeated by killing one guy, so we can get back to the plot.

The fact that this worked so poorly in the context of the show-as-adaptation (and also as a work of media in its own right) is a product of the problem with an antagonist that doesn’t suit the story. Rather than emerging from a dialectic, the Night King emerges, fully-formed, from the show-writers’ imaginations and muscles his way into the story as a horrific anthropomorphization of the threat of winter, but also as a means of defeating it. The Night King is a guy you can stab and end climate change. That’s counter-thematic, for one; these threats are implacable and hang like the sword of Damocles over courts of bickering nobles as a representation of genuine human precarity beyond simple pursuit of power and stories. The Real, the ice and the fire, are waiting once the song ends.

Simultaneously, it’s poor villain-craft. The Night King has very little antagonistic interaction with… anyone. He appears in the fourth season, but doesn’t act until the fifth, when he watches a battle and raises an army of zombies in its aftermath. He interacts with Bran, first by way of Bran’s visions, then in flushing him and the Children of the Forest out of the cave system, cutting away Bran’s allies and connections to his childhood, in the sixth season. He is an immutable, hateful force of nature and heavy-hitting external threat that doesn’t come into much focus for anyone but Bran until the seventh season, at which point he becomes a quarry, kills and acquires a dragon, and cements himself as the central antagonist to the ensemble cast’s collective protagonistic desire to put an end to the encroaching winter.

The problem? The rest of the story isn’t about winter as a villainous man so much as winter as a threat, as a fairytale, as a looming consequence put off in favor of scrabbling around in the blood and the mud, singing old songs over and over again and grasping for power, love, and revenge.

Inserting a villain into that framework is jarring, first, and detracts, moreover, from the larger trajectory of the work. If Enet, rather than fighting the locusts with rudimentary pesticides or a prescribed burn, draws a sickle and fights the locust-lord in the third act, at a minimum it pulls pages and thematic weight away from her negotiating with social difficulties and struggling with her own aversion to innovative techniques, her suffocation beneath village tradition and social expectation. All along, she just had to stab one guy hard enough. It weakens the narrative because it dilutes the narrative.

The dialectic approach is the strongest possible foundation, in my view, because it will never dilute your narrative. Every interaction, recursively, advances towards the synthesis. Every arrow and its position on the target informs the next draw. Building a story on itself, with itself, ensures that, at a minimum, it remains itself. I may not agree with every piece of advice to come out of the commercial-fiction-writing-advice-industrial-complex, but the fact remains that an antagonist shoehorned in at the end of the second act is an uphill battle to fight rather than a functional craft decision.

We could work the Night King into a dialectic, if we knew we intended to use him as a human avatar of winter-as-malicious-conquering-force from the outset. We could anchor him to Arya Stark, the Night’s Watch, or Jon Snow, place him in opposition through thematic or outright interactions, and establish a narrative center of gravity and causal, developmental chain that might be paid off on when Arya’s blade sank into his eye. This is not what happened in execution. The story suffered for it.

This sort of antagonist failure mode is precisely what my method is designed to avoid.

At least so far as the commercially shaped novel-narrative goes, as a reader experiencing a text or an author creating one by this method, a good antagonist comes from a good protagonist, and a good story comes from both.

A lot of people think Hegel or Marx said that first, but it was actually Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Go forth and antagonize as you will.

The gist, if you don’t mean to click through, is that rite presents you with a complex paragraph, whether in Victorian English or legalese, and you, as quickly as you can, rewrite the excerpt for concision, clarity, and the preservation of ‘meaning’.

Example:

Once I’ve done about twenty of these, reading and writing as quickly as possible, I can feel the blood of the machine coursing through me. I become the soul of brevity. It’s exactly the sort of drill I tortured my students with, the year I taught a period of high school English after an unfortunate incident in which the previous teacher was jailed for hiding a wanted man in her walls.

The exercises I designed were what I called “caveman summaries”; I would hype up the class, put a complex paragraph from the reading we were going to do that day on the board, choral-read the paragraph, then everyone was given a minute to write “the shortest possible version without losing detail”, which they would then be prompted to read aloud in their best caveman voice.

Here is an example; Florida gives us Plato’s Apology as one of the covered texts in 11th grade English, and I could write an essay just on that quite easily, but we started one Monday, after bellwork and vocab-of-the-day, with this excerpt on the board:

That is the nature of the accusation, and that is what you have seen yourselves in the comedy of Aristophanes; who has introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he can walk in the air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of which I do not pretend to know either much or little—not that I mean to say anything disparaging of anyone who is wise about natural philosophy.

The students loved this part and by the end of the minute would be jostling with each other to shout

ARISTOPHANES SAYS SOCRATES LIAR BUT ARISTOPHANES GOOFY FOR THAT

to which I would say close, great start, ten words! Does anyone have a shorter one, or one that keeps more detail? How about that last part, where Socrates says what about natural philosophy? Remember the vocab, natural philosophy is kind of like science - and another shouts

SCIENTIST ARISTOPHANES SAYS I WALK ON AIR? POLITELY BULLSHIT!

as I replied awesome, nine words! I’m gonna give you a pass for bullshit this time, it was sort of the assignment, and I agree, he’s implying that. Does anyone have a shorter one? Anyone have a shorter way to say politely, or is that the best way to express Socrates’ caveat there about not disparaging scientists?

Inevitably we would get the piece boiled down to five words or so, at which point I would shift gears to okay, at five words, what are we missing? Later in the year, I developed a reverse game, where I would have a kid stand outside as we did the whole exercise, then let them back in and they would have to guess the “whole gist” of the paragraph from the caveman summary the class voted on as the “best”, which definitely improved the level of fidelity in the summaries. Though they particularly liked it when they could get away with a profanity in their summaries, for which I could hardly blame them. I was sixteen once, too.

Still, there was a downside to this practice: it was exhausting for me, running around like a sheepdog counting words, shouting encouragements, reminding kids in direct competition that no, his summary was not stupid, please ease off the throttle, it’s a game, while also keeping enthusiasm high. Caveman summaries were one of my favorite parts of teaching English, but if the class hadn’t been my last of the day, I would’ve been gassed for whatever followed. Luckily, the structure was such that after three to five caveman summaries and a planned “pre-discussion” I set my kids loose on the text and had them quiet-write a few “caveman summaries” at the end along with their analysis questions to keep the skill sharp.

Exhausting as it was, one student from the class wrote me a physical card two years later, having gone on to college, thanking me for caveman summaries by name and mentioning that he still stopped and made them in the margins when he was reading something confusing. It’s clearly a valuable skill, especially one to cultivate “at speed”.

I don’t necessarily agree with the wisdom that a good story is one that you can describe in very few words. High concept, sure, but reduction of a story to high-concept doesn’t necessarily make it good. Consult any of the hot Yesteryear takes accordingly! The summation of a story into a hooky line isn’t even necessarily the execution of a particularly good elevator pitch. The best way to get someone excited about your story, face-to-face, is to know your audience as much as it is to know your story.

The drills, however, are useful. Marc got his AA after telling me, in no uncertain terms, in my marine science class in his sophomore year, that his future plans mostly included vaping. Caveman summaries helped him enough to pick up a pencil and write to me at my school address to thank me. I probably would’ve structured the activity differently in a different class (this was a treacherously small 20-person, 17-boy class that had been expecting an easy ride with a teacher known to teach one book a semester, the entire semester, and very little else), but I knew my audience and had taught a lot of these kids before and knew that both ridiculous nonsense and the opportunity to win were powerful motivators for most of them; one girl was always absent, another could elbow in the ribs and caveman voice with the best of them, the third drew Hello Kitties on her caveman summaries and then cut the kitties out for me to hang up while everyone else was shouting.

It was a little sad to take her Hello Kitties off the wall when I moved out of my classroom a week and a half ago. Chips of paint came off with them. But I digress.

Did you know I wrote a romantasy novel? The characteristic thing to do at this point would be to tell you about it, so you can decide whether or not to get hyped up about what I am billing as The First Sapphic C4T Romantasy (forgive me, I have not read every indiepubbed FxF romantasy, though I have read a few. If you can find me a C4T sapphic romantasy novel though I will happily first buy it and then eat crow.)

Instead, I am going to perform a little exercise of summary, as QueryTracker is always inviting authors to do as a sort of humiliation ritual no doubt useful exercise to help agents become acquainted with the story, often prompting, one after another, for “a paragraph-long pitch” and then “a sentence-long pitch” outside of the “query-length pitch” immediately preceding these additional questions.

I already wrote the book. It is extremely good and makes me deliriously happy, both to reread and to share with my various writer-friends and wife for both recommendations and the sheer ability to talk about it. I love to talk about my book! The amount that I love talking about my book makes me nigh-unbearable to be around, because I will rewatch any piece of media and have to swallow my pure, untrammeled enthusiasm to tell my wife, in the midst of our post-movie talkback or while driving to the gym, the extent to which this makes me think of No Living Woman. I don’t have to tell her anymore that anything, from a butterfly to an Instagram Reel, makes me think about No Living Woman. I think she just correctly assumes that I am always running meditation on No Living Woman in the back of my mind like an unending laugh track in response to any visual or auditory stimulus I try to process. I fucking love my book, which I wrote.

Allow me to begin by summarizing it, not quite as a perspicacious caveman would, but in pure metadata.

No Living Woman, complete at 115,000 words, is…

Bam! One barren line. This summarizes a few key aspects of my writing, the first of which is, I am a fanfiction-progenited writer. The first thing I wrote and published was, at twelve years old, a 100,000-word alt-games Hunger Games fanfiction. What this means is I developed a cast of twenty-four characters, introduced each of them in their own “intro chapter”, and then placed all of them in an arena I designed, whereupon they slaughtered each other. I wrote this for two reasons:

1. I loved The Hunger Games when I received it as a gift in early 2009. I had loved Collins’ Underland Chronicles before it, and nothing but Redwall and the first few Artemis Fowl books had scratched the itch in my brain since then. Something about the specific claustrophobic quality of Katniss’ 1st-person perspective was borderline intoxicating for me. I loved it, I wanted more of it, and no one was writing more! Catching Fire was about adults, which was a total cop-out to my eleven-year-old self, who wanted to read about more Hunger Games. To have the thing I wanted, I would have to create it, so I set out to do so.

2. The one thing that bothered me about The Hunger Games was that, given Katniss’ limited perspective, we never learned much about the other characters. This particular style of worldbuilding, in occasional bursts, but also drips and drabs when the limits of Katniss’ worldview brush against something she doesn’t understand but thinks she does, were a kind of exquisite, fascinating agony. I wanted to know Foxface’s name! I wanted to know why Glimmer, clearly inept-but-pretty, was chosen from a district that could have had ept-but-pretty; why sacrifice your most beautiful but least bow-adept teen? Was the training process or the volunteering process different? So I set out to address this, to assign industries to districts in the vaguely-coherent way only an 11-then-12-year-old who thinks she is smarter than everyone ever born can: by writing my own version, where every character is myopic-but-aware-of-their-straits, and all the straits, in this way, are rendered visible.

This left me, in a very literal sense, obsessed with characters. My most common complaint about books that I otherwise like, as my sweet wife can attest, is that the characters are either rendered inconsistently/as pure devices or kept at arm’s length; the story is in some way not about them, or lapses into not being about them when someone has to be the straight man in a comedic scene. I love characters. I love to fall in love with them. Once a character has me, I am had. I will follow Baru Cormorant, for instance, fucking anywhere. Suzanne Collins has a particular gift for this, which I have enjoyed in effectively everything she has ever written, as do many other authors, sometimes incidentally, sometimes in everything they write; Nicci from Faith of the Fallen had me from first introduction, not because she spared a lice-ridden girl and set her commanding officer to be roasted on a spit alive for reasons even she couldn’t comprehend, but because of the particular meandering, limited-but-insightful way she thought, and thought about thinking, which was so undeniably distinctive that I fell head over heels in love. This is also my soft spot for Ayn Rand’s work; her characters are gripping, agencied, consistent, and uniquely fucking insane.

This is what is summarized in the word character-driven. I have written very popular works of fanfiction and original fiction in the years since 2009, many of them exceeding my then-extremely-popular series of AU alt-Games “played straight”. All of them are SFF character-studies-with-a-propulsive-plot:

• A prince from a matriarchal empire defects to piracy but discovers that he will need both his princely talents and his suppressed affinity for hyperviolence and subterfuge to prevent his newly-ascended sister from slaughtering the pirate gods he worships!

• The cast-off daughter of the immortal cannibal fish-monsters presiding over a planet slowly collapsing due to climate change grapples with both her prescribed destiny and her appetites as she attempts to save the world she planned to inherit!

• A clone in a society that regards her as grist for centralized reproduction rises through its ranks for her intellectual abilities and her Lovecraftian-god granted total tolerance for indignity, only to discover that the trench of hard-won legitimacy in which she has survived will also be her grave!

• Two lonely women nearly torture each other to death in the aftermath of the rebellion one of them quashed and the other led, learning to survive each other and expanding their notions of what transgressions can be tolerated if not forgiven!

If you reduce them to the sparest possible line, though, some fidelity will inevitably be lost. If you reduce a story to its situation in industry, a great deal of fidelity is forfeit. I wouldn’t say I’m bad at summaries (I think all those more-extended summaries above are quite hooky, to be frank) but I do think, in a sense, focus on concept costs something.

There’s a deeper phenomenon beneath it, one that I find myself curious about as a teacher as well, in which students who clearly know an answer struggle to articulate it under prescriptive paradigms. I ask, in an assignment, “explain what Plato’s Apology is about in a five-sentence paragraph” and Marc writes “idk”. I sit with him at his desk and ask him what the point of the piece was.

“Easy,” he says. “They killed Socrates because he was too honest about the stuff you’re not supposed to say, like how knowing a lot about something doesn’t make you smart, and how sometimes kids talk back because they’re learning, not because they’re assholes. Like, being annoying, like the gadfly thing, is something people would rather kill a guy over than admit he has a point. Socrates’ whole thing is that he can’t not be real and say the truth. He literally can’t stop. So up until they kill him, he’s still not willing to play along by their rules, except sort of as a game, and he basically wins, but they still kill him because there’s nothing a guy in charge hates more than losing face. Or just losing.”

I ask him if he could write that out, and he frowns at me and asks if I could just remember it, maybe. I suggest he tries three sentences instead, as this is not just an understanding class, but a writing class, and he clearly understands enough to write, and he says “fucking fiiiiine” under his breath, glances up to see if I’m going to do anything about that, rolls his eyes, and writes three sentences that more or less sum up what he said. He finishes the class with a 93%. It is his first A ever. I never stop trying to extract the 5-paragraph model, teaching and reteaching how to use it to unspool thoughts efficiently - it is an expectation of my department - but I recognize, as well, that there is something about the model that is costing fidelity-of-thought.

Marc, in discussion, brings up how his boss shuts him down whenever he recommends something different about staffing, even though he’s been a dishie longer than his boss has been managing this particular restaurant. Kallie twirls her hair and adds that teachers can be just as bad, and parents, and everything she says is apparently talking back. DJ says sometimes you should pay attention to what adults and like, your coach and whatever, what they say, but only if what they say makes sense.

I ask if English class and strategies can help make sense of things. Every eye in class rolls simultaneously. Sometimes, maybe. They get it, in part because I forced them to get it rather than to furtively play Clash of Clans directly over their crotches, but the second it needs to be applied in a framework, they believe they don’t get it.

Unfortunately, I know the feeling. I want to teach them not to feel helpless in front of the box on a job application, not to feel stupid when they see a comment on Instagram that bothers them but they don’t know why, to feel confident commenting on an NYT article or a PewdiePie video alike. There are structures to these things. There are structures and expectations to a query letter, to the Query Tracker boxes and the email prompts. How much can you press these structures until they break?

Some people use AI; AI is better at writing within a heavily prescriptive structure than a person. It can sum up more reliably than I can. It is better at Rite than I am. Claude Fable is certainly quicker than I am at turning a 40-word bureaucratic passage into a 10-word one, and it never gets 56% fidelity because it knew calendars was closer than plans to a faithful interpretation of schedules, in a machine’s oblique calculus. Even Claude Fable, in my professional opinion, as someone forced to have one as a function of teaching in a Florida public school and being part of the “mandatory AI rollout”, is not as good at writing a novel as I am. My novel is fucking amazing.

And yet: in a world of auto-rejections and thousand-query inboxes, concision is king, and Claude can certainly write queries faster than I can, with greater fidelity than I can. What keeps me from using it is my love of writing and the truth. The fact that my competition is using it is evident through a cursory glance at nearly any query letter on QTCritique.

The most concise possible summary is also the least-ensouled. It is character-driven. It is about people. It is a captivity romantasy; the lovers are trapped with and by each other, and there are towers and magic involved. It is about the fact that their womanhood is holding them captive, on a sociocultural level, what positions them as people who can be caged, and what frees them is their personal-level womanhood, their recognition of each other. It is the metadata.

AI is very good at working with metadata. I think the one-line metadata-style summary is accurate; I also think a machine, with enough prompting, could have written something like it. For all I bang on my drum and insist to students that AI is actually not a perfect summary-producing machine that replaces the need for reading a complex text (it anchors to less-relevant details that a human knows are aesthetic vs. substance, it discards important components in the name of brevity like a student trying to force a six-word caveman summary) it also just does it where a human often freezes or comes up with something nonsensical and gets attached to it or gets cute or over-vague.

But you’ve seen my true one-line summaries for my other novels. Now it’s time to go a little deeper. A one-liner in the conventional sense. The thirty-second elevator pitch.

No Living Woman, complete at 115,000 words, is a novel in which…

A little richer! This is a romantasy classique, that’s the goal. What drives me insane about this sort of summary, though, is how little it lends itself to the actual hook: I fucking love romantasy, I’ve deeply enjoyed the vast canon of trad-pub and a good few indie-pub romantasy novels, and this one is about womanhood, specifically the bond of womanhood that unites transgender and cisgender lesbians.

This is the first C4T romantasy novel, but it’s also a novel in its own right. To write the hook for the story itself is to forgo the metadata hook.

Iren is a princess pushing the title away with both hands, rejecting her mother and her upbringing and her station at every interval, in every way possible, culminating in a self-administered hysterectomy that is the only way to gain an ounce of bargaining power and free herself entirely from her mother’s posthumously lingering magic. She is also irreversibly shaped by her upbringing as a princess in what she fears, what she fails to fear, and the way she loves. She wants escape from the specific constraints of monarchy and to make a world silent to her senses, in which the bodies of the people around her don’t intrude on her consciousness with their agony. She hates pain, and yet her greatest talent is its tolerance.

Alisca is a woman whose power and certitude in her own identity both come from the same place: her will to understand the world so thoroughly that she could remake herself in the ritual that makes a Selasair, reinventing it as a means of transition. She has suffered for her success since the moment she emerged from the chamber, having lost her memory of her identity before, maintaining only the anger at her straits, the mathematics that enabled her transformation, and desire to be something else, now surviving in the aftermath of that decision without entirely living. When Iren meets her, Alisca is almost entirely without agency, having sublimated herself into an instrument of war because the alternative is to be regarded as an un-womaned woman, which is a violent horror in her cultural context. She hates and fears violence, but depends on it for a thin vestige of security.

Iren immediately begins treating her as a beautiful and fascinating love interest, and Alisca reshapes her existence itself a second time around protecting Iren from the consequences of her flight into the empire Alisca serves, in the process growing increasingly aware of the material conditions of the imperium and the specifics of the violences she has ignored, tolerated, and perpetuated to survive. Meanwhile, Iren struggles with her own legacy of violence - what her mother made her capable of, and the legacy of her country’s amalgamation through violent conquest by its first queen.

It sounds interesting to me, at least! It’s very challenging to communicate in one line, or in three, or in a query letter - those were made for machines to write, and frankly, I suspect, for machines to read. I also spend, for my work as a teacher (and particularly within the last year; you couldn’t pay me to teach English today!), a truly stupid amount of time reading what is obviously AI writing, and increasingly, to write anything formulaically at all feels like it adopts the AI accent. There is just… so much of this stuff out there. How can we evade the shortcut machine, and the specter of the shortcut machine, while attempting by the sheer design of querying to shortcut our way into the field of interest of an overworked literary editor or agent?

The shortcut-query has not ill-served me, to be sure. I have fulls out. This sort of thing takes time, etc. I’ve paused in querying actively, though, because it is exhausting, and in part because my time feels better used actually writing. Rite, after all, fun little game that it is, is not writing. It’s a useful but slightly strange effort to turn the machine to our purposes, to best it at its own game.

Debate class, and the debate team, are where I have dealt with the worst of the AI nonsense, to be clear. In order to highlight the foolishness of relying on AI for argumentation, in my debate classes, every year since the advent of mass-use ChatGPT, I have held a John Henry impromptu debate, in which I go up against a student armed with AI. The idea: if AI can actually, operated in real time for real use, outperform a multi-year state champion and national near-champion, then perhaps it’s time for me to stop failing them for using it.

Reader: they can not type fast enough to win, for one, and the voice-to-chat is still so unreliable that those who try to use it come to regret it. In some ways, I’m relieved to be finishing my teaching career and returning to school as a student this year, because I went out without ever being defeated by the machine, even before an audience of hostile cynics. AI may sometimes be able to do what I can do, but it can’t do it live, and it can’t do it sustained, and it strikes up against the limits of reality when it is not confined to a tidy box or a limiting format like a query letter or a fill-in-the-answer prompt.

I find it fun to have my little private attempts at coaching myself to be better at summaries, less afraid of the form, but at the end of the day, to summarize is not to create. Caveman summaries are learning tools. I gave Marc a good hammer, and he became adept enough at using it that when offered a nail gun that wants his job and his future, he has been willing to stick to the hammer, if his letter was any indication. It was better written than anything he produced in class; it was sincere, humble, information-dense and effective. He remembered our Socratic debates. Marc took every class I offered over the course of his education.

One thing I remember of him was a specific moment during our reading of Apology. Specifically, the moment in which Socrates is doomed.

Had I money I might have proposed to give you what I had, and have been none the worse. But you see that I have none, and can only ask you to proportion the fine to my means. However, I think that I could afford a coin, and therefore I propose that penalty; Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, my friends here, bid me say thirty coins, and they will be the sureties. Well then, say thirty coins, let that be the penalty; for that they will be ample security to you.

(The jury votes to condemn Socrates to death.)

He tossed his paper aside and announced “why the fuck are we - sorry, why are you having us read this? This is depressing!”

I paused the class and asked if anyone else felt that Apology was depressing. A few other hands went up. I asked why, and the hands went down. Marc crossed his arms over his chest and announced -

“He goes to all this trouble to defend himself and he just dies? This is stupid. What’s the point? I thought the point was supposed to be something about the power of language or whatever. He dies?”

“He does die,” I admitted. “Though you aren’t to that part yet.”

“Well, what’s the point of reading the rest? He was right, everyone knows he was right, and he still dies!”

“I know you’ve fought a losing battle before,” I reminded him. “I’ve seen you debate Rackel without any research.”

“I forgot what day the debate was due,” he complained. “You didn’t even answer the question. What’s the point of this? It’s just upsetting for no reason.”

At the time, at roughly 1:50PM after a long day without a planning period (my planning had been replaced, on an emergency basis, by this English class) I didn’t have a beautiful answer for him. I reminded him of the expectations that I follow the state of Florida’s curriculum, I observed that he was clearly affected by what he was reading, and I suggested that sometimes to be outraged, and to know what makes us outraged, is the point. I asked him if he would be like Plato and put up his pocket money for a fine if one of his teachers was facing death, and he rolled his eyes.

“Maybe for a few of them,” he said, and sighed in evident grievance. “Most of you don’t give a fuck.”

He refused to pick the paper back up and groaned at my reminder about language. The bell rang as I was helping another student who wanted to know how to pronounce Prytaneion and also what that meant, sparing us both any further argument as Marc pretended not to be on his phone.

I’m not certain I have a better answer now. The point of reading Apology, at least to me, was clearly the parallel with the present day; to be annoying, to seek wisdom and virtue and hold their lack in contempt, to test claims rather than accepting orthodoxy, to try to make your perspective known and face judgment rather than passively submitting to uncaring world, may not be the sort of thing that gets you put to death, but there is a cup of hemlock that looms every time I email a parent to inform them that a 2/5 is not a passing grade or that they signed a permission slip authorizing me to use the word uterus in class, actually, and they CC the school board and a state representative on our next exchange. It has never been easier to silence a teacher on the justification that we do harm to children. The boogeyman of harm to children by a stranger, a teacher, a writer in violation of the orthodoxy has hardly ever been so reified or so easily deployed, while simultaneously the right of the parent to do whatever they wish to and with that child has never been so ironclad. Put simply, I have never been so aware of the precarity of being a lesbian than I have been as a teacher in the state of Florida.

What is the point of trying anything when you know the consequences of failure are both devastating and likely? When to apply to medical schools costs thousands of dollars for a dice-throw’s odds? When to teach carries the burden of guaranteed exhaustion and likely litigation for the slim opportunity to make some ill-defined difference? When to query exposes the softest places in a writer for the thin chance that someone will read past 115,000 words or sapphic or the empty place at the end in which experts are always suggesting we ought to list our publication credentials?

The point is, of course, that a probability of 0.01 is meaningfully distinct from 0, and the act of doing matters, and that life will fuck you either way; might as well try. Might as well get fucked for trying.

“Do you need the twelve-year timeskip after Act One?” you ask me, looking up from my actual query letter, sagacious and concerned.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m comping Alchemised and my least favorite part of Alchemised, back when it was Manacled, was the extended flashbacks. A sympathetic captivity romance, basically any captivity romance more complex than reductio-ad-stockholm-syndrum, needs context, and in my view it needs that context established through chronological storytelling as opposed to flashback. If flashbacks have no haters I am dead.”

“Lots of people like flashbacks,” you argue. “Or, and here’s a suggestion, suppose you filtered in the context through interaction and prose contemporaneously with the captivity romance plot?”

“That sounds gay, a term I can reclaim, which here means maudlin and non-propulsive,” I retort, very stubbornly.

My wife is constantly making pained faces, muttering about how my students have rubbed off on me and she is incalculably relieved that this is my last year teaching. You are making a familiar face as you watch me double down. Or maybe you aren’t. I don’t know you.

“I don’t think that’s how reclamation of derogatory terms works,” you sigh.

“No, no, see, this is actually a selling point,” I explain. “I have a few thousand followers on X, the everything app, and the capacity to reach millions if I post cleavage. I’m actually pretty good at social media and driving engagement and whatever. You felt engaged there, right?”

You open your mouth as though to interrupt me. I gesture fervently, not done, for your patience.

“It’s a transgender-and-cisgender lesbian captivity romance,” I say, slowly and carefully. “It’s a good book. A character-driven and propulsive novel - wait until you see how I show off in Act Three, when they go back to Merethora and I get to write horse archer warfare! - written with all the potential of the proverbial gadfly to drive eyes and attention. People are going to love this book, and people are going to get mad about this book. They’re going to read it, the same way they read Alchemised, because they’ll be left out of the discourse if they don’t, and they’ll start reading to skim to the controversial parts and fall in love. I built a following on X by being both provocative yet unimpeachably pleasant on trans issues. I can build a readership for this, I’ve built massive readerships for my stupid original fiction before - the readership already exists! It’s called followers of HalimedeMF and HalimedeMF-curious posters!”

I exhale deeply and run my hand through my hair, deliberately making no eye contact.

“Fuck,” I continue, “I keep thinking about just self-publishing it, but I have fulls out with agents I really like, I mean, agents I think could do it justice, and I don’t want to pull it. It kills me how little tradpub fiction gives a shit about trans women. It kills me that the trans woman is barely ever even window dressing and never the love interest. There’s a space for this. I am crazy enough to want this. I can fight this battle and I can win. I am prepared to post more cleavage images. I love this book. My wife, my infamously stoic martial artist wife, wept reading this book. How can I say that in a paragraph? Tell me how and I’ll do it. I will sing any song and dance any dance. I will farm med school content to build hype. I will make a TikTok. Just say the word.”

You cough. It is evident that I am not often this effusive, and am moderately ridiculous, borderline manic with it. I have made a career as a teacher on wry, incisive commentary. I pride myself, typically, on my brevity.

“Most people feel this strongly about their novel, I think,” you venture, and I make one of my terrible screwed-up faces.

“Maybe they do,” I say, and shrug. “I don’t know. All my friends who write are, I think, rightfully averse to tradpub. It is a special kind of humiliation, you know? It’s worse than applying for colleges. God, it sucks to write a query letter, doesn’t it? It’s the worst possible length, the stupidest possible set of conventions. I’ll do it, I’ve done it, I mean, but I just want to write. Look at my Substack. This is clearly the work of a pathological writer.”

“The fact that it isn’t enough,” you observe, “isn’t necessarily a bug. The world is changing, you know? Writing as an art form has always had an extremely low barrier to entry. That barrier, such as it was, has effectively been demolished by LLMs. The gate needs keeping, right? Now that the private equity barbarians and the would-be artificial intelligences are at it?”

I scoff aloud, and now it’s your turn to make a gesture of stay with me. I close my mouth with a click of teeth-on-teeth.

“You’ve played the game before. Either play the game or refuse the game,” you suggest. “Self publish, then, if you have such a gift for audience-stoking. Maybe you’ll sell ten thousand copies. Maybe ten. Isn’t that the honesty you’re looking for? Maybe we should all be self-publishing. Maybe the invisible hand of the market is more reliable than the exquisitely visible hand of the literati. I don’t know.”

“I want the world to be just,” I groan, and put my head down on the coffee table beside my laptop.

“Yeah,” you agree, with a sigh of your own. “That would be nice.”

“It’s like gambling,” I mutter. “It’s like a gacha game. Publishing. Tradpub. Whatever.”

“Elaborate?”

“No,” I say and slump back in my seat.

“Some Socrates you are,” you say, and I, like Marc before me, roll my eyes exaggeratedly, then sit up when I catch myself.

“Sorry,” I say. “That was rude of me. But I’m not Socrates, you know? I’m just some guy. Maybe Marc would put up thirty coins or so to keep me off death row, but not all of my kids would. I don’t think any of them would immortalize me Plato-style. I was an average English teacher, dealt a kind of rough hand and trying my best, but I was a really good biology teacher. When the smoke clears, I’m a stemlord to my core. I haven’t taken an English class myself since I was seventeen. I was self-taught, even at debate. When I was standing in front of the room full of observers, waiting to find out my placing after TOC finals, my coach was the only one not in the audience because we weren’t that kind of team, she wasn’t that kind of coach, and I was never going to be that kind of competitor, you know, the kind who goes to law school and DC and becomes a state senator or Colin Jost or whatever. I’m more comfortable in the doc box of an emergency room than I am - basically anywhere else, because in that context I understand how results are measured on an absolute level. I feel so out of my league in literature. I worked like a dog, teaching that English class, I stayed hours late and came in hours early and I read studies and collected data and designed my curriculum off it and I really thought I was doing something, and - my pass rate on the state final wasn’t any higher than anyone else’s in the department. I love this shit so much. Passion, caring about it, being good at it has always been almost enough.”

“Kind of heavy,” you say, with a slight grimace. I am back to not making eye contact.

“It’s whatever,” I say, with a faux-casual affect belied by both the slight flush to my face and the everything I have just said.

“Do you want to - talk about it?” you offer, and I laugh.

“I want to write. I just want to write, so badly, all the time.”

“Well,” you sigh, “I’m the construct of your dialogic imagination that doesn’t, in a sense, so on that count you and I will have to go our separate ways. Can you imagine a version of yourself that puts this amount of pathological energy into studying anatomy? You would be so much more reliable about naming the vasculature of the hands and forearms if you did that.”

“I memorized all the bones,” I say defensively, “when I was super into the series Bones (2005-2017). I still know them. I’m going to be fine in anatomy.”

“You are insufferable,” you tell me, with a frankness that I deeply appreciate, though you might be hard-pressed to discern as much from my demeanor.

“Exactly,” I say. “Better to sequester me safely in the written word. Better to sequester both of us this way. I usually do my readers the courtesy of at least framing their interrogation from the relatively sympathetic perspective of my sweet and discerning wife, but she wouldn’t have tolerated this much navel gazing without grasping me by the shoulders and telling me firmly to get my shit together.”

You laugh a little at this, less because it is funny than because it releases some of the tension in the room.

“Good luck deciding what to do,” you add, when it becomes clear I lack much else to say. “I hope those agents like the full.”

“I hope so too,” I say. “What happens is what has to happen, right? The way through isn’t to blame anyone but myself for anything. What I can accept as my own deficiency is within my power to improve. I can keep writing, keep - summarizing, practicing the form. It’s really all I can do, you know? The day you really, truly blame the system or the students or the administrators, expecting them to change without changing yourself or your straits, is the day you start rotting in place. And posting very badly about wild conspiracies against your person.”

“And posting very badly,” you agree. “On a number of subjects.”

I laugh a little at this. “It’ll be easier to self-publish when I have doctor money and I’ve finished paying down the doctor debt. Then you’ll never be rid of me.”

Perhaps we clap each other on the shoulder, or perhaps we hug or something. I pay for your coffee, certainly, with an air of mild regret at having bared a tender place, though you were kind enough to keep your hands out of my opened guts. Eventually, this and all my novels will be available somewhere. Eventually, the question will be resolved. The pull’s animation will end and I’ll know which horse girl I got. The uncertain suspension ‘in between’ is one of the most challenging and intoxicating parts of any process of querying, gambling, applying, but it is not permanent. It will not be permanent.

I knew, applying for colleges over a decade ago, applying again this past year, that this uncertainty is part of the process of creativity-put-to-capital and that writing may be the thing I love to do more than anything in the world, but that love could probably not survive an MFA or the fragile dependency of a job a thousand-thousand people want badly enough to harm someone to take it from them. So I have been a bioengineer, and I have been a biology teacher, and I have worked on fishing vessels and on a mariculture farm and in laboratories and made a life and income and trajectory for myself that does not hang on publication. This was by design.

My choice will never be to publish or to perish. There will be other awful choices, surely, but I will probably never live or die by my writing. The premise of a career author, at least in my case, did not survive its imagination. I have been a teacher and a scientist. I will be a doctor, and my conception of myself as a writer will depend far more on what I do than what anyone in particular agrees that I am.

You might still be trying. I wonder, sometimes, whether it was a mistake to so thoroughly background something that I love so fervently, to dedicate so many hours of my life to something other than what I love best, but ultimately what can happen is what does happen, and it does us all very little good to speculate in retrospect. And Marc wrote me a very nice letter - and so did Anna, and Robbie, and Leah, and Enzo, and a few dozen other kids out of the hundreds I taught, over the years. I leave teaching, too, for yet another project of self-sublimation and exhaustion, but I leave it with clear eyes and intention: the only work I’ve ever enjoyed and looked forward to almost as much as writing is emergency medicine, goofy as it may be to admit. In a sense, I’ve already embraced a kind of death: one that would be a tremendous disappointment to my twelve-year-old self despite its unquestionable long-term benefits for my pocketbook and my marriage.

That’s my calculus, and it puts some pressure on this novel, as all my future works will be in competition with the rest of an increasingly occupying, busy life among people as insane as I am about medicine. I will keep writing. I may never be A Writer, save in the act itself.

Your calculus might be different; it probably will be. I can hardly do the math for you. While I tutored Algebra I and II, I never taught them.

But let me interrupt. You see, the hour of departure has already arrived. So, now, we all go our ways - I to die, and you to live. And the question is, which one of us on either side is going toward something that is better? It is not clear, except to the gods.

I don’t know which is right: the dreamer or the realist. I guess we’ll see.

Fidelity: 37% | Brevity: 80% | Clarity: 62% | Speed: 95%

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The best of his teaching stories is that of the afternoon he ran into a child and her father in Wal-Mart. The little girl ran up to him, delighted, and announced that this is the teacher who told her that ‘the dark’ isn’t a real thing!

Her father threatened to fight mine in the parking lot. My father came home genuinely rattled by the interaction. My mother told him, over a steadying glass of boxed wine, that this is what he gets for being an enormous pedant.

Characters that manipulate shadows or the more ambiguous “darkness” are nothing new in fantasy. Mainstream YA from Percy Jackson to the Grishaverse centers or slightly-to-the-left-of-centers charismatic fan-favorite men who manipulate shadows (associated with the underworld, death, and marginalization). Jack of Shadows literalizes this in an interesting way, as a shadow-wielder who requires partial light and partial darkness for his power to function. He is similarly persecuted, seeking vengeance; a common theme for the character type even when not presented as a love interest. A laundry list of comic book villains and heroes from the past half-century both manipulate or emerge from or travel through darkness. It’s certainly an easy power to draw in action-shorthand!

Shadows and ‘the dark’ both represent the unseeable and unknowable in a very literal way. When the earth is in its own shadow, it is “dark out”, the sky’s hue changes, and it becomes much harder to see without electrical sources of light energy. The darkness itself may not be a material thing, but in fiction, sinister characters, marginalized characters, internally conflicted characters, or those with obscured motives might travel in shadow, wield it as a weapon, or shroud themselves in not-light unknowability in their own defense.

As the title of this piece suggests, though, we are going a step further. Shadow wielders in romantasy specifically are hot. The Grishaverse’s Darkling is a shoe-in for its most memorable and still-discussed character, a miserable, violent, yearning master-manipulator who puts his lot in for the title of love interest and loses. In much contemporary romantasy, that the extremely-powerful sometimes-immortal brilliant obsessive shadow-manipulator would not be the endgame romance is unthinkable.

He is tall. He is handsome. He is explicitly rendered as racially ambiguous, and typically a member of a marginalized faction or group. He is darkness itself.

He looks something like this:

…and has launched a thousand AI-generated pictures in which five to seven men of identical hair color and complexion hang out shirtlessly with slightly different ear shapes and tattoos. Rhysand from A Court of Thorns and Roses and Xaden from Fourth Wing are the archetype in terms of literally wielding shadows, their respective books of origin amassing a passionate following; others of the type, typically with elemental powers or some form of supernatural identity for which they are invariably persecuted include Kingfisher from Quicksilver, Casteel from From Blood and Ash, Hades from A Touch of Darkness, and Damien from A Throne In The Dark.

The popular culture interpretation of Hades hasn’t always trended so romantic. Hercules (1997) makes no pretense at handsomewashing him or presenting him as anything but an over-powerful, bitter, aging gay man…

…but this carbon-copy love interest, brooding and maltreated for his prodigious gifts, is in some ways in the vein of a yass-ified Hades-from-Hercules, betrayed and cast out by his brethren, marginalized among the gods, beyond conventional morality, nursing a deep and well-concealed wound. See Lore Olympus (2021) for the logical reinterpretation of Disney’s charismatic villain as a fuckable straight man.

The shadow daddy is not usually blue, to be fair. His skin is tanned or golden brown. He is, with few exceptions, darker-complected than the heroine, though at least in the books that dominate the best-of Goodreads lists, he is never Black. He is a casualty of a political struggle (Xaden of Fourth Wing is the leader of the children of the slaughtered architects of a failed rebellion, having been whipped nearly to death to bear the consequences for his father’s foibles; we meet Rhysand of ACoTaR as the former sex slave of the woman who conquered his homeland) that sees his people subjugated, and he bears the heaviest possible burden on their behalf with a wry smirk.

To be clear: it is self-evidently hot to be

1. So powerful and fundamentally competent that you must be suppressed by an opposing force that would otherwise not be your equal

2. So dedicated to your role and the defense of your loved ones that you would endure disproportionate suffering to spare them

3. So committed to your role and your suffering that you refuse to articulate your straits as suffering at all, instead as something you gladly bear

4. So in love with the woman who has come to rescue you from this suffering, so grateful but conflicted, that you try, for the first time, to articulate your pain to her

5. So determined, now, to protect the woman who has met you on your terms and seen a sliver of your heart, that you would betray your burgeoning love in the hopes of protecting her, as you love her more than you want to keep her yours

It is hot to be competent under profound pressure, to be the underdog despite possessing awesome capabilities, to be loyal to a losing cause under profound pressure, to be startled and softened by kindness despite rejecting it at first, to be careful with hands you know could hurt the woman you love. It is hot to be the best at something. It is hot to refuse to stop being the best at something, even when your excellence is the means of your persecution; it is honest. And it is, of course, extremely hot to try to do what you believe is right for the person you love even if it means losing them, in a frustrating but sincere way.

Aesthetically, not to put too fine a point on it, but the shadow daddy is dark haired and tawny in complexion because this reflects the imagination of the Other from the perspective of the predominantly white, predominantly liberal audience and set of authors writing the most popular and genre-defining of these books. The shadow wielder or shadow daddy is oppressed by way of narratives we recognize from a host of contemporary prejudices:

• He is too powerful in insidious or stigmatized ways and requires unique levels of regulation to keep him contained

• He is from a culture that is regarded as dangerous, in some way, for how its narrative interacts with/erodes that of the dominant culture’s supremacy

• He is physically and athletically gifted in ways that make him interpreted as less human, less cerebral, less sensitive than members of the dominant culture

• He is, from his bearing or appearance or assumed cultural practices, assumed to be a hypersexual threat to women in particular

• He is from a culture or faction that is expected to take subservient roles, and his failure to do so is interpreted as a threat to the social order

To make him explicitly a representative of an existing marginalized group would be to eroticize that struggle in particular in a way that the average white liberal author is unwilling to broach. Romantasy is, after all, about the personal stakes more than the political ones. To bite off heavy political stakes moored to genuine social violence is to choose a tightrope that the average author, bound to nervous publishers and tight deadlines and thin margins of error in terms of sales and online cancellation, is rarely willing to attempt to chew.

Aesthetically, he cues marginalized without specificity. Rebecca Yarros has written fairly extensively about Xaden, the bronze-skinned love interest from Fourth Wing, being inspired by her husband, who is white. She has also confirmed in interviews, because his heritage and racial identity are unclear enough to require confirmation, that within the universe of Fourth Wing he is a person of color. Rhysand is a half-Illyrian half-fae, considered mixed race explicitly in-universe. Both of them are, in description, bronze, tan, tawny, or golden-brown; in both cases, while their coloring is commented on, they are ultimately oppressed for their political positioning, and outright/named racism is presented as a non-factor. Indeed, in much contemporary romantasy a post-racial society, in which race remains only as aesthetic rather than an organizing element of social and cultural life, is depicted. Everyone is racialized - the best friend is Black, the love interest brown - but no one has a race, and racism, if depicted at all, is the personal purview of a few stodgy or scheming villains as opposed to a set of socioeconomic paradigms.

This raises some problems for the discerning reader. For the same reason that the X-men are an imperfect civil rights allegory, the hyper-powerful and hypersexual shadow daddy is an imperfect analogy to the exoticized, othered, and hypersexualized man he implicitly represents. This is in part because he is actually a uniquely dangerous threat, as an individual, with ostensible in-universe material rationale, oppressed-by-implied-justification for his exceptional and disproportionate powers and abilities, barred from equality due to his assumed or actual superiority.

Simultaneously, a real part of his appeal is in the leveraging and codifying of contemporary global-Anglophone Orientalist fantasies. This specific mode of masculine hypersexualization and bio-superiority might seem, at first, at odds with Said’s accounts of the imperialist tradition of cultural Orientalism, in which the poet and the artist and the anthropologist don’t conspire so much as they agree through tropes and aesthetic and depiction and memetics to depict the exoticized and objectified eastern-other as an object source of beauty, a site of helpless tragedy, and in need of stewardship, ownership, enlightenment. The imagined Orient, however, is understood here to be a relative term; MENA to Said’s French contemporaries, east Asia to his American contemporaries, and describing more about the Orientalizing culture than its objects. Explicitly

…that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, “there” in discourse about it. And these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient. (30)

In the canon of romantasy, the Orientalized other, with skin of bronze and simultaneous tragic political past and hyperagencied and virile present-threat, exists in the shadow of the violent, the tyrannical, sexually-dangerous Sheik - while they are also framed as victims of their own cultural positioning. The other as victim - of his culture, of his politics, of his situation - despite his overwhelming power is what completes the Orientalist picture. Central to romantasy’s shadow daddy is his tragedy and his need for salvation through the heroine. To save him, this powerful man beset upon by both his own nature and societal reception of his nature, while also being desired and pursued by him in the more conventional hypersexualized framing of the Orientalized man, is the fetish. This consensus depiction of the nonspecifically brown male love interest, often explicitly based on a white man and emerging from an author’s love of a white man, has a tension inherent to it that reflects on the tension of white liberal regard for the exoticized other, the 2020s-era permutation of the Orientalist project, which is a polycultural project of both celebration/appropriation of otherness as aesthetic and the erasure of that otherness as otherness.

I am describing here, rather than condemning outright: when Rebecca Yarros designs an exotic but culturally nonspecific brown man inspired by her white husband, the character is rendered as brown skin over a white skull, and the artistic imagination of her audience has taken that depiction and run with it to the logical conclusion. Xaden of Fourth Wing fame is only one example of this phenomenon, which, while not a reason for white authors to avoid writing about romance with brown love interests, is a reminder that why the brownness is both part of the appeal and requires external authorial confirmation due to its textual ambiguity and nonspecificity is worth interrogating.

If you have to verbally confirm to the audience that a character, designed to be their perfect book boyfriend, really is a person of color, some element of Orientalized liberal pluralism, the brownness as aesthetic rather than part of a character immersed in his sociocultural context, is perhaps at play. Perhaps! Fantasy is fantasy, but Orientalist fantasy, the “alluring” portion of the “alluring threat” that has defined scholarly conceptions of Orientalism for a century, is not something easy to opt out of without understanding the canon with which you are in conversation.

The shadow daddy is, in part, hot because of his interaction with Orientalist tropes and conceptions of the world. Orientalism is evolving, and so is the Sheik romance.

To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by him, or as a kind of cultural and intellectual proletariat useful for the Orientalist’s grander interpretative activity, necessary for his performance as superior judge, learned man, powerful cultural will. I mean to say that in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence… (209)

The depiction of the ambiguously brown love interest is, in contemporary white liberal anglophone culture, in at least some part an act of benignant guilt-laundering. To desire a brown man is a form of cultural currency in some spaces, allowing one to precede takes and posts with “my husband is Indian, and” or “as the mother of two mixed-race children” instead of self-identifying as white, which the poster typically is. This gives credence as well, more obliquely, in the online arguments about the darker-complected male love interest in contrast with the blond male love interest; these two are a feature of the romantasy-love-triangle-industrialist complex, and the dark-haired tawny-skinned man is the morally superior option. (This is increasingly subverted in the rising tide of Dramione fanfiction-to-tradpub romance and romantasy, in which the heroine is ambiguously brown, talented but subordinated in some way, and morally superior and the male romantic lead is blond, white, aristocratic, and ultimately sorry about it - I’ll go into this in a future piece. Dracolikes are not shadow daddies, even when they do shadow related things. They represent the hot, decaying aristocratic institution turned to modern progressive purposes by liberal enlightenment and the power of love.)

It is notable, I think, that the shadow daddy is of a magical tradition unlike the heroine’s in some way, often associated with the fae; fae romantasy has become its own category in the past decade, and while the exoticization often follows more Irish/Scottish othering, by god, those fae are still ambiguously tan cultural-others with illicit, sinister, but incredibly potent magics, constantly at internal war, and the heroine with very few exceptions arrives as an outsider, whisked, kidnapped, mated, or married into this mysterious tradition that is visualized exclusively through the lens of the naive outsider come to end the usually-centuries-old conflict.

These tropes have appeal, to be fair, because while on a sociocultural level they are Orientalist, on a personal level they are hot. To be rendered powerless in a confusing situation but to become powerful through gaining knowledge and abilities that allow you to surmount your situation is hot. The reversal that comes from believing someone is a threat and learning that they are an ally is hot. The power-premise that you could genuinely solve the problems that dog the person and people you love through the power of love/incredible violence is hot. That a man determined to instrumentalize you in some way could be so taken with you that he falls in love and finds himself incapable of seeing you as anything but a person is hot! These are erotic power fantasies, and they are not new power fantasies. The granular and personal and material precedes the vast ideological power of imperialism and orientalism; the ideal grows from the material. Tensions are heightened by a racial component because cultural conversations about race, and personal beliefs about race, are held in profound tension. Dramatizing existing international conflicts, or the Occidental conception of these conflicts, is a very straightforward and comprehensible pathway to relevancy in worldbuilding and plot.

That said: what is hot, and what is an interpersonal power fantasy, does not have to be Orientalist even in these contexts. It is so hot to save the world, to dispel the tension of the impending or ongoing war, the apocalypse, the collapse and rediscover fraught love in a space no longer fraught with existential threat. It is so hot to work together with someone unlike you and find common ground in a shared objective. It is so hot to learn from someone and to teach them and to improve each other in the mutual teaching and learning. It is hot to be seen and loved as different and it is hot to see and love someone who is different from you, to discover and be discovered. It is hot to imagine that these divisions could be eroded, that the overwhelming feeling of love and desire could matter on a grand political scale, could redeem, could save. It is hot to die for a noble cause, and it is hot to live for one, too.

I don’t write this to malign the shadow daddy. He is trope-overdosed enough that he is maligned more than sufficiently on Reddit for his unoriginality and overfamiliarity when he appears; he doesn’t need me to pile on. His influence, his prominence, and his decline-to-meme has paved the way for the blond aristocrat representative-of-imperialism to gain ground in Alchemised, Rose In Chains, The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, and countless others in tradpub and indiepub alike. He represents something valuable about literary erotics in 2015-2025 or so; the Sheik is no longer just the Sheik, but has been completely unmoored from all but his brown skin, warlike background, simultaneous overarching political marginalization and personal dominance, and his mystery. He also wields shadows or fire sometimes. He is a reflection of desire in the anglophone literary world, an ice-core that lets us evaluate attitudes to race-as-aesthetic, race-and-gender-in-desire, conceptions of the underdog and the antihero ascendent, and particularly progressive USAmerican attitudes towards liberal pluralism in retrospective.

He is often genuinely quite hot.

A shadow does not ‘exist’ in any material sense. It is the product of light’s physics, its traveling in straight lines, interrupted by an opaque body. In Jungian psychology, however, the shadow is “all the things about ourselves that we repress, whether because they are evil, socially unacceptable, harmful to others, or detrimental to our own health”. It is the instinct that precedes the human, the shameful violences and tendencies that we conceal, though we suppress and deny this element of ourselves to our own peril. We are, if we are to reduce ourselves to anything fundamental, primates of remarkable genetic and biological similarity to each other, even across international and interracial lines that once seemed immutable to anthropological observers. We are more alike than we are different.

Historically, the shadowed-other has been the marginalized other, but this conceptualized man (and conceptualized culture) has always reflected more on the observer than on the object of their observation. The shadow worth integrating - the Jungian Shadow - is not the Other. Whoever the Other is to your sensibilities, he is your brother. He can share his blood with you. The Shadow, instead, is made where the light of your regard and judgement of person and character is obstructed by the weight of history and the weight of ideology, the dark spot, from which violence and manufactured consent for violence originate, cast by what we struggle to see from our positions of cultural myopia and reproduce without examination.

To deny the existence of the Shadow, the capacity to carelessly do violence, to misrepresent, misjudge, and act on animal conceptions of Otheredness as though they are ordained by God or biology or else impossible given our state of enlightenment, is the capacity we all possess and must embrace if we are to do anything but reproduce our history in slightly different permutations. The erotics of the Other are real. The violence of the anglophone Occident is also real. Guilt is not the answer; if guilt, particularly white guilt, affected change, then we would live in a postracial utopia downstream of the teachings of Robin DiAngelo.

The darkness of our desires is part of what we are, and the shadow daddy is the very literal instantiation of these desires as expressed and consumed en masse for the better part of a decade. To bury him will not set us free from having wanted him, having written him, having read him, nor should it.

As Jung writes in Aion:

If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. On this level of understanding, evil appears more as a distortion, a deformation, a misinterpretation and misapplication of facts that in themselves are natural. (266)

The more we resist the sheer existence of the Shadow, the more it festers and distorts, the more it demands that we justify it as reality and biology and programming and correctness, as anything but the blind-spot in our vision - at a minimum, for instance, if you are reading this, you are reading in English, which is worth examining for how it limits and facilitates ideology and beliefs - that it is. I argue not for guilt, but for the exhausting process of interrogation, understanding, and acceptance.

The light makes the shadow, and we, as agents, have the power to turn the light, if we are only curious what the darkness hides.

We know this to be what The Purge is about, as a horror film, because the horror comes from the well-fortified house, not so impregnable as it was meant to be, and the threat of the sinister masked men and women on the doorstep and equally sinister men and women in his house and on his cul-de-sac. Ethan Hawke’s daughter has smuggled in a much older boyfriend who means to kill him for refusing to accept their relationship. His son has disabled his security system, briefly, to protect an injured black man being chased by purging upper-class white youth. The house is no longer safe, with two intruders inside and a war party milling on the porch, wanting their quarry released into their violent care.

In a genuine twist for 2013-era horror, the wounded man is ultimately not the source of the horror, but the unlikely ally to the homeowners once their security is bypassed and the resentful HOA board members and wealthy white thrill-seekers are hunting our suburbanite family like dogs from room to room. The violence is not, in fact, being purged through the killings of the ‘criminal element’ - it is a phone call coming from inside of the law-abiding white upper class houses, stoked by legal license. Surprise: your unmasked enemy looks exactly like you, and you, the audience, fear him along with Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey as he and his laughing band of killers murder their way through their McMansion.

Literally, watch the scene in which the stranger enters the Sandin house. The initial fear is that of an intruder unlike us. Then the teen daughter’s boyfriend pulls his own gun, and the stranger is revealed to be the least of Ethan Hawke’s worries. The fear is that you are looking the wrong way, at the wrong person, and the killer is right behind you!

This scene is, in my view, the best evidence for The Purge’s self-awareness of its being a horror movie about fearing the wrong enemy, about the myopia of social focus on immigrants and the black and otherwise racialized other as the font of violence within the home, when, at least as of 2005’s Family Violence Statistics, most family violence victims were white (74%), and most family violence offenders were white (79%). As far as harm inside the house goes, if someone outside is going to intrude and harm you, statistically they are more likely to be someone you know as of 2010’s National Crime Victimization Survey (offenders were known to their victims in 65% of violent burglaries; offenders were strangers in 28%). Between 2003-2007, 430 burglary-related homicides occurred, for an average of 86 annually. Meanwhile, in 2007 alone, intimate partners committed 14% of all U.S. homicides, with a total estimated victims of 2,340: 1,640 women and 700 men. Over a five-year period tracked between 2020-2024, law enforcement reported over 11,000 domestic violence murder victims, aggregating familial and other forms of domestic violence and demonstrating that the proportion of violent crime occurring within the home is increasing.

The Purge is about the violent other outside the home being 1) not who a white upper class family expects it to be and 2) a distraction from violence and abuse within the home and the known community. It dramatizes this horror repeatedly. The horror is that the killer behind the scary mask looks exactly like you, at your potato salad at the latest HOA picnic, and he will kill you anyway. Your categories do not protect you. The person most likely to kill your children, statistically, is you.

Obviously, Obsession (2026) is about something different.

You may have read the pieces exploring how Obsession is about sexual assault, this essay series about the Nikki entity as a narcissistic abuser, and the banal interpersonal nice-guy evil of Bear’s coercion of Nikki. I went into the movie fully spoiled as to what it entailed, hand in hand with my beautiful movie-loving wife, entirely prepared to feel differently than the long list of reviewers on Substack I’ve read who adored this film.

I liked it! Let’s talk about why it was scary and what elements of relationships it dramatized for horror rather than comedy, because Obsession is transparently not about the horror of coerced sex. There is plenty of coerced sex in Obsession, just like there is a home-intruding ‘other’ in The Purge; Edwin Hodge, billed as Bloody Stranger, is certainly there, physically apt, and a complicated presence in the Sandin family home! He is not, however, what the film is about. The nonconsensual use of someone else’s body while not occupied by them certainly does take place, if that is a thing that troubles or intrigues you, but: what would we expect to see, if this was ‘what the movie is about’?

The horror would look more like:

• Nikki’s body is crying in obvious agony and despair as Bear partakes in a sex act with her; the Nikkentity smiles through a face full of tears and says she’s just sooooo happy, if he even notices at all; relieved, he continues.

  
  I read one essay that suggested this was what was happening in one of the very few, brief on-screen sex scenes; on my watch, it looked to me like the Nikkentity was poker-faced over Bear’s shoulder, boredly making encouraging noises, then relaxing into itself and complimenting him with its customary enthusiasm; it is explicitly humoring him with the body it possesses, not explicitly destroying her through the torment of her subordinated consciousness.
  

• The Nikkentity, rather than engaging in relationship-transgressive behaviors in front of Nikki and Bear’s friends, acts out physically-sexually violating behaviors that Bear feels helpless to/struggles to want to resist.
  
  In the scene in which the Nikkentity ‘acts out’ in front of the party, it is explicitly violating the social norms of ‘it is rude to talk about sex-writing, especially explicitly incestuous sex-writing, aloud in a space where that is not already happening or established as something that happens’ and ‘it is rude to be overly clingy and controlling of one’s partner’ as well as ‘it is rude to make a social scene and eschew the rules of the social games being played’. She violates social norms as would an overcontrolling girlfriend who can’t read the room. It is also obviously frowned upon to stab oneself in the eye with a bottle, but this kind of goes without saying and is Nikki rather than the Nikkentity. Bear is embarrassed by her, not violated by her.
  

• Sex itself is framed as Bear’s primary objective and dramatized accordingly; the Nikkentity successfully distracts him with sex, the montage of their ‘perfect relationship at first’ emphasizes all the totally wanted sex they are having, rather than themes of loss and comfort and consolation of closeness, perverted by horror, the ‘good plausibly wanted sex’ is perverted by horror.
  
  Instead, their ‘good relationship’ looks more or less exactly like a lonely twenty-two year old on Twitter would describe, if you asked him what he really wanted in a girlfriend. Someone who likes the same music, who wants to hang out in his bedroom, idly touching but mostly talking and laughing about shared interests, which are his interests, marveling at his instruments and his records, blissful just to be in his presence, without his life changing in any way. Her presence just brightens and adds, never transforms; he likes the life he has, but wishes there was a warm, beautiful, happy woman in it. Of course! This is a reasonable thing to desire, though in practice, warm, beautiful, happy women don’t teleport directly into one’s life; one opens and changes to accommodate the warm, beautiful, happy woman just as she changes her life when she tethers herself to you.

What struck me throughout Obsession was that Bear was, from the get-go, horrified by the prospect of being seen to sexually coerce Nikki. It was vital to his fantasy, the sun-drenched room and the smiling, happy girlfriend, that she want this authentically. When Ian raises the specter of ‘taking advantage’, he is not only gripped with social fear, but attempts repeatedly to distance himself from Nikki. The Nikkentity is the one that is ‘winning’ when they have sex; it has Bear physically, with no immediate threat of losing access to him.

One article argues that this is because Bear is the one being victimized by a controlling narcissist. I would argue that this stalls out on the sheer premise - of course, the Nikkentity fulfills an extensive checklist of ‘things controlling abusers do’. It is trying very hard to keep Bear close to it, and these things controlling abusers do are done, in part, because they work. This is what is happening, in pure choreography. Bear has wished himself into the role he previously held for Nikki - the woman being performed for but never known, only placated so she won’t leave. The first scene of the movie is Bear trying to ‘practice’ to convey his feelings to Nikki. We watch the Nikkentity trial-and-error its way to doing the same thing to Bear over the course of the runtime. You liked your cat, right? Not like that? How about like this? Okay, no cat, I get it, fine, wow, no cat then. You like Sarah, right? How about Sarah here in the sitting room? Naked and - no? You don’t like that? Okay, I painted on the tattoos, was it the tattoos - no, not the tattoos or the hair color, okay, was it the -

This is the area where Nikki being genuinely possessed rather than brainwashed does the most ‘work’ as far as the movie’s internal logic. The Nikkentity literally does not know how to act normal, for all Bear keeps begging it to just be regular, just be Nikki. A brainwashed Nikki would at least know the way her own body moves, have some continuity with her own father, her own cat or lack thereof. The Nikkentity is incapable of deliberate abuse. It is a nonhuman thing put in a human body, rendered addicted to a squishy human man, with a sole mission to stay near that man. It is best understood as either an animal or a child, and Bear understands it as neither. He tries to reason with it - it can’t be reasoned with! It tapes the door in case that works. It cooks his dead cat in case that works. It makes grand proclamations and reads terrifyingly relevant Hansel and Gretel incest porn after hearing that pre-possessed Nikki told Sarah she “views Bear as a brother” both to lampshade a point - the Nikkentity knows what it is and what made it - and as a kind of crude effort to convince Bear that it’s fine, silly, it’s aware and it doesn’t mind!, to see if that works.

The Nikkentity wants the sun-drenched room and the guitar and Bear’s head casually and unguardedly on its lap as much as Bear wants that room, those perfect days. This is the ‘be careful what you wish for’ curse: a girl who only wants to lean on your shoulder and watch you play Pokemon so much, so bad, forever, and nothing else, is going to be fucking pissed when your life involves other things. When your mom tells you to clean your room, so you can’t text her for half an hour. When you have to go to work, so she’s left alone with your DS or Switch. The fantasy is hollow, even for these earnest young men who truly think they just want a chill girl to watch Attack on Titan with them and suck them off. If you held their feet to the fire, they’d probably tell you:

• Okay, yeah, she should probably work the same hours as me, maybe the same place I work, so we can like, hang out and have inside jokes.

• And she should have her own place, so she can clear out when my guy friends come over, but close, so she can come over when I want to see her.

• I guess that means she either needs to live with her parents or maybe have a better paying job than mine.

• She shouldn’t get mad, though, when I have to go fix a fence with my dad or help my grandma get to her pulmonology appointment, so she should be able to keep herself occupied for a while with her own hobbies and stuff.

• It would get kind of boring if she only watched the things I like and only thought the things I think about them, so she should probably have some things she likes.

Many of these specifications bring them further and further from the girl who is actively suicidal the further she gets from “lounging in a day-bed watching them play a competitive FPS, mediocrely”. The true fantasy-woman is unemployed, addicted to their presence but neutral on their lack of a fitted sheet or orgiastically delighted to launder one for them, disappears when convenient and reappears when also convenient, sexually interested precisely when they are and never when they are tired or annoyed or preoccupied with something else, and totally dependent on them for a certitude about life trajectory they clearly can’t summon for themselves.

Bear doesn’t really know what his goal is! He doesn’t know how being a food critic works! He doesn’t entirely notice, either, that the Nikkentity becomes more and more like him as she spends time in proximity with him. The entity, as well, doesn’t know what it wants, other than the utter love of one person. It doesn’t want to leave town to become a famous novelist. It wants to stay right here, in Bear’s grandma’s house, with Bear, forever. Every complexity of life that arises to threaten that is the enemy. The Nikkentity is transformed into a particularly shortsighted version of Bear with agency; Bear is transformed into a version of Nikki without any personal agency to override.

This is most obvious in one of the funny-but-horrifying scenes, in which Bear, having fucked up his attempt to flirt with Nikki, is sitting in her driveway after making the wish, the broken chunks of the One Wish Willow in his hands. The newly-created Nikkentity suddenly takes on his uncertain cadence, returning to the window of his car, asking him to stay and making uneasy bids for his attention, precisely as he did to Nikki a few minutes before. The roles are already inverted, and Bear is as uncomfortable as Nikki was. The horror, for us watching, is that we know from the way Nikki is behaving that something is wrong, from the way she is framed that this is not right, and Bear knows it too. And he lets her into the car and seals his fate anyway, and the tension and the horror ratchet up just as they do when the final girl splits apart from her friends and runs into The Evil Chainsaw Forest.

I know a fair number of men who found Obsession both uncomfortable and fascinating. Verging into my personal opinion, what I found the most artistically interesting about the movie was how accurately it depicts the feeling of having a man obsessed with you - Bear is obsessed with Nikki the way immature men become fixated on women, yes, but the Nikkentity is also fixated on Bear by the same terms. It learns nothing about him of substance, collects what he touches (the room shrine in the final scene setpiece) rather than cultivating insight, makes superficial observations of him and attempts to leverage them for closeness (he loved that cat! he wants to be a food critic, sort of!), and makes embarrassing public displays in an effort to establish dominance over perceived rivals.

Men are fairly rarely regarded as victimizable in relationships, though they clearly are. Bear is exempt as a target of the Nikkentity’s violence, but not exempt from implicit threats. Where a man might simply leverage his size, the Nikkentity gets a knife. Even men sleep, and the moments where the Nikkentity is the most frightening, in my view, are the ones where Bear is half-asleep and she is on the move, physically erratic and a clear potential danger.

For all Bear may be understood as ‘the villain in his own story’, this is a movie shot from his perspectives, and his fear drives the horror of the movie. The same way I interpreted what The Purge is ‘about’ from the way it generated horror and tension, we can understand Obsession to be about:

• The horror of being the object of desire with no meaningful pathway to subjecthood. Bear is caged, in part, by the fact that if he concedes to his subjecthood, he is at fault for ‘making Nikki like this’ and for taking advantage of her. He insists more than once that no, no, she is all over me. He begs the entity to be normal; he can’t make it do anything, save manifesting in Nikki’s body.

• The horror of being vulnerable in a relationship despite not ‘looking vulnerable’. Bear is larger and stronger than the Nikkentity. It overwhelms him through the use of weapons and softer targets, his cat and his friends. His seeming invulnerability to this small, pretty woman does not make him safe in ways that are dramatized and leveraged for horror.

• The horror of being desired by someone pathetic, disgusting, and morally abhorrent to you. The Nikkentity actively grosses Bear out, both socially and in a body-fluids-drenched sense. It is unattractive to him, and it is attached to him in a way that makes it impossible to socialize or exist separate from it; the embarrassing gross fucked up things it does are irreversibly associated with him.

What we will notice, looking closely, is that all of Bear’s horror mirrors Nikki’s horror in a specific way. She can’t make Bear see her as a person or as the sister she views herself to be, relative to him; he has already decided what she is, as has Ian (both men are very bold in speaking of her as an object-acquisition!). She looks like the member of the group with the most agency and social mastery - she is beautiful, she is almost independent, almost out - and yet, she can be and is victimized. She is repulsed by Bear’s desire for her and can’t escape him.

Bear is experiencing everything he is/would be visiting on a conscious Nikki, multiplied tenfold. It is the horror of being a woman with a nice guy friend, rendered in a form that is near-impossible for men not to empathize with, because a man is experiencing it and the “nice guyism” is amplified and played for horror. She just! Wants! Reciprocation! She made you a nice lunch!! She remembered your stupid food critic dream! Why are you so mad? Why not eat the hot dog off the ground? What’s so wrong with it, huh?

What I am arguing, essentially, is that this is a horror movie in which a straight man experiences a straight woman’s relational horror. He wishes for, in effect, a nice guy who is obsessed with him, wearing the skin of a hot, interesting, desirable woman he knows fairly little about. He gets it, and learns that this kind of attachment is strange, off-putting, and relationally terrifying and dangerous; there is a reason, after all, that people tend to edge away when they sense that someone is way more into them than they can reciprocate. Trying and failing to reciprocate something so substantial and emotionally loaded is relationally dangerous. You need to trust someone very much if you mean to sleep beside them; even the biggest, strongest, grip-strengthest cis man needs to sleep.

Women can certainly hurt men, suffice to say. A woman can do anything a man or nonbinary can do. In this case, though, it is less “a woman does turnabout as fair play” and more “a wish-demon proves that the covert-covetous and solicitous way you are behaving, taken to its extreme, actually is grotesque and dehumanizing and horrifying even if you are a 10/10 chad or Inde Navarrette”.

I don’t think it’s about the horror of Bear-as-sexual-or-relational-coercer. I think it is much better understood to be about the fact that obsession is not appealing. One can imagine Bear pinching the bridge of his nose, three beers in with Ian, not knowing that Ian and Nikki have had ‘a thing’, insisting but I love her more than anyone else in the world. What he thinks he wants is precisely what he wishes for (this is why I find it so ridiculous to litigate ‘how he should have wished’. this is exactly what he thought he wanted!) and precisely what he finds as unsexy and horrifying and repelling as Nikki did, when she sensed even a shade of it from him.

He really, truly wanted, or believed that he wanted, the sort of woman who says “I don’t think I could live without you!”, as he felt something like that for her. The problem is, if you could leverage that earnest longing, by way of a wish or anything else, to actually force someone to give it a shot with you, desire alone is not enough to make a relationship that can survive employment and the strains of loss and social life. Fixation without substance underneath makes a time bomb.

What do you imagine doing in the moments when you aren’t in a golden-hour lit room, playing guitar as she lays her head on your shoulder and praises your songwriting? Can you imagine what happens next?

For many men in particular, I think this all is a message worth hearing and a horror that arrives, as did The Purge, because it tells the truth. For me, it was one of those psych-horror movies, like Smile 2, that hit me just slightly to the left of where I live, but close enough to have me gripping my wife’s arm a little.

What a great day to be a married lesbian. 4.5/5 movie.