and let me kick you off a bungee

I don't feel envious of perfect families with neurotypical parents who love and care for their child, who nurture them and adore them and treat them like they scattered the glittering stars against the night sky. I don't wish that I had that, that Momma was a presence in my life that I could put trust in and was so sure she was there for me, that she wasn't almost psychotic as she tripped and stumbled, mumbling to someone who wasn't there. I wish I could live without the pain of emotions, the physical ache of being so frighteningly alone (I had Apa, but his time was dedicated to the herd now more than ever and I couldn't take him away from his responsibilities). And so I felt despairingly alone, a distant face nearly entirely erased solely by lack of affection and adoration. No one pays attention to the broken child hiding away within herself.

But these are not burns marring my face, wild flames did not eat away at the young eyes, did not fry them from their sockets and leave me charred and writhing in pain. The fire that burned me was the uncontrollable, unpredictable fire that Momma embodies, the manic depression and false wellness that consumed her and fractured me. It stole my happiness just as it did hers, it left us a tragedy, an unsteady pair that could not function the way we were expected to (the way I was expected to, as a young child). "I think I would've rather burned than be painstakingly taken apart." And it's true, for flames must hurt far less than watching my own mother destroy me bit by bit until I'm left squirming in pure nothingness, thrown aside and left to wither like an uprooted flower drying up in the sun.

"I mean, maybe? I really don't have any experience on this topic so I certainly wouldn't know." Tormented ligaments stretch in an effort to shrug my shoulders, crumpled wings sagging as I raise them slightly to accentuate my point of carelessness.

His screaming does nothing to make me appreciate his company, ears flattening and face twitching as his cry goes unheard, ignored, shrugged off by the healers who reside within the Throat's borders. Perhaps they have better things to attend to, have something more worth their time than a couple of screaming children who just want attention and guidance, thinking that such a grossly deformed child was a hopeless project to idly push aside, because I was not bleeding out on the burning sands or wracked with an ugly disease that might just kill me slowly (I think of Gaucho, ready to sickly laugh at the idea of the fallen leader whose death drove some into a frenzy, as if they could not handle the loss of just another sun bleached, sand soaked body from the Throat). Wasn't one of his many children a healer now, the one who shouted at me for being an ignorant, distant child? Maybe she knows she's being summoned by me, and cannot help but stifle a laugh at the idea of helping such a piece of shit, wishing upon me a plague to knock me down, but she does not know that that is just what I want, something to wipe me clean from this fucked up world.

I stiffen at the mention of the name, spine tingling and mind buzzing because the colt mentioned the Marsh. My ears threaten to jerk back, to show the displeasure of the newly recovered Helovian territory, before I open my mouth and swallow the curling hatred that lurks in the back of my throat for the marshlands. "The Spectral Marsh? Kérem! And why not? Nothing there's gonna hurt you, unless you're too much of a punci?" I snort at the idea of traveling to the Marsh with the boy, listening to him fret over the cool carcasses bubbling up to the surface after years of being consumed by a blackness that was only recently wiped away, or perhaps they were far more recent than thought. "Are you afraid of the bodies? Or monsters?" The noise that escapes my throat is some sort of taunting coo, a hollow moan as I lean towards the boy, grinning maliciously as I tease him for his hesitance over wandering into the Marsh.

"A bőgőmasina, crybaby. Stop laughing, I don't like it." The last sentence is a hiss, suddenly realizing just how unappealing it was to listen to someone else's empty laughter mock me, leaving such a bitter taste on my tongue as my scarred brows twitch in disapproval. "Saoirse? I think I like Bőgőmasina far better than Saoirse.." And as was to be expected, he asked my name as well. I let the idea of giving him something fake roll around in my head before letting it slip away and offering very blatantly my branding. "Valdís. I think it's some sort of a sick joke, because it comes from valr, the dead and dís, goddess."

I remember very clearly, Momma whispering the story of how she came up with it, how it came to her when she looked down upon my bloodied face, how the red stains on my cheeks and pouring down the grooves of my features wrote out the name before her. She says that she did not know the meaning until she looked further, until the hushed voices murmured out the history behind it in the dead of night, while she ventured out into the Marsh to hold gatherings with ghastly presences.

And so she named me the dead goddess, an other worldly being adorned in thorns and the stench of rotting corpses, wearing a tattered veil and dull jewels as she moves through black fog and swallows up the fleeing souls that fear her.