Crap.

Something sunk low in my stomach, hearing my brother’s voice cutting through the silence of fake night. I cringed and I hoped that he wasn’t talking to me, that he hadn’t seen me slip over the hill. Maybe if I trotted a little faster, he would miss me? But then his voice came back, louder this time, suddenly right behind me, and I whirled around and backed away and cried out at his sudden appearance—he was there, suddenly there, and I backed away from him. I still didn’t want him seeing me piss poor and groveling.

*"Are you alright, Ros? Where are you going? I... I was worried for you."*

His appearance was already working its own kind of chaos on me; like I said before, he seemed built much more sturdily, a little older, a little bit more pep in his chest. But my eyes found him quite easily without me having to crane my neck; from my perspective, he had seemed to have shrunk a little, even though I knew that it was me who had gotten taller—which circled back to the confusion that ached within me, the need to refuse this bigger, older body even though I was perfectly attuned to it, to every impulse and reflex (the Gods weren’t so cruel as to grant me a body that I couldn’t use, I guess). But the impulses and reflexes brought implications of things I didn’t understand, deeper things, subtle things that never mattered to me before and still didn’t’ matter to me but now I knew about them anyway so my disregard was something a lot less innocent, a little more sinister and selfish on my part.

I just stood there for some time, kind of gawking at him with my mouth open like a trout gaping for water-air, because I wanted to say everything and nothing all at once and it was causing a blockage in my brain that made me dumb and mute. I wanted to tell him how terrified I was; I wanted to tell him how much I began to understand; I wanted to tell him how proud I was of him, and how different this world was now, and what I expected the emptiness meant and why it was crushing me in its own way. I wanted to tell him how much I’ve figured out about myself, how much I never knew, because no one told me, not even Ma, and that more than anything was creating a rift so wide in my heart I expected to fall in at any moment. All these things were clamoring in my brain, these things and even more things and impossibly even more things, some that made sense, some that were just brainless warblings and shrill screams of frustration and somewhere, somehow, I plucked a thing from the torrent of stuff that I decided was the most important thing to say for some reason.

“He’s my Dad,” I blurted at Bro, my eyes going wide right along with the realization. “He—that guy I saw with Ma. He’s my Dad. That creepy guy that killed all those crows. And he’s a GOD.” I didn't even know if Bro knew who or what I was talking about, but I was blurting it mindlessly, thoughtlessly. It was one of those intimate things I realized with this body and this new intuition of mine; the idea that I needed a sire, and dammit what other sire could I possibly have? The memory of his voice haunted my thoughts, because I remembered him saying almost the exact things I had said, in almost the exact cadence, and it could’ve been hilarious but it wasn’t, it wasn’t. I searched Bro’s face, looking for a reaction to what I said, wondering if he was feeling like I was and hoping to g—well. Hoping that he wasn’t.

“…Mesec?” I asked, my voice full of other tones and notes screaming help me, help me, “ What…what’s a god? And how come no one told me about them? Why didn’t Ma tell me?” I admitted to my ignorance this one time, not skirting around it but facing it head on; Bro had told me he had worried about me, and it was this care that made me trust him to help me somehow and first and foremost, I needed knowledge. “What am I doing? What…what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? I don’t know what I’m doing,”I confessed, my speech breaking and breathless with a growing panic. I backed away from him some more, a couple of steps into the darkness that should not be; I didn’t want to leave him, but staying meant possibly facing something that I wasn’t ready for, even though leaving meant certainly facing the world that needed me. Even if I didn’t know how to save it.