Chapter 36: Remembering Auntie LauraTalisa blinked, the sudden shift in topic throwing her off bance. She furrowed her brow, reaching back through the haze of years, past the rigor of the Ministry and the anxiety of her engagement, to the golden-hued summers of her early childhood. "Auntie Laura?" she repeated slowly, testing the name. "I... I think so? She used to come to the house when I was very little. Maybe four or five?"

  A memory surfaced—a fsh of a woman with hair like spilled ink and a ugh that sounded like a dare. "She brought me marzipan," Talisa smiled faintly, the scent of almond paste and old paper ghosting through her mind. "She smelled like the library after a storm. Like rain and old books. She used to show me tricks with her dagger when you weren't looking. She could make a coin disappear and reappear behind my ear."

  Talisa’s smile faltered. "But she stopped coming. When I was six? Seven? I asked you where she went, and you told me she moved away to the coast. To be near the sea."

  Marissa closed her eyes. Her hands, usually so composed, were trembling in her p, smoothing the purple silk of her robes over and over again.

  "She didn't move to the coast, Talisa," Marissa said, her voice cracking like dry parchment. "She died."

  Miz’ri watched the Matriarch carefully. She saw the way Marissa’s posture slumped, the way the perfect, aristocratic mask fractured to reveal a raw, festering wound beneath. "I know she wasn’t really my aunt, like a family friend.” Talisa whispered, a cold knot forming in her stomach. “Who was she?”

  "No," Marissa confirmed. She opened her eyes, and they were wet, shining with thirty years of unshed tears. "Laura was my neighbor growing up…and we spent our whole childhood together, so of course we agreed to be companions on pilgrimage. Just as this one is yours." She gestured to Miz’ri, but the movement cked the judgment of the previous day.

  "Three decades ago," Marissa continued, staring at the cobblestones as if she could see the past written there. "I was just like you, Talisa. Pious. Terrified. Walking a path that had been id out for me since birth. And she... she was a storm."

  Marissa’s voice softened, taking on a dreamy, distant quality. "She was tall, almost as tall as your elf, but built like a longbow, wiry and trim, with a kind of restless energy that made the air around her crackle. She had short, curly red hair that she kept shorn close to her scalp because she said vanity was for people who didn't fight. It was only ter, when we were both married to our partners that I found out she dyed it bck because the man her father arranged for her to marry hated redheads. Underneath the ink, she was pure fire. We Mableby women are all curves but she was carved from stone in a way that belonged in a museum. I loved that she refused to wear anything but trousers so all the men could see the test knife she added to her collection hanging from her hip."

  Marissa looked up at Miz’ri then, her gaze intense and searching. "You remind me of her, Miss Niranath. Not in looks of course, she had pale white skin and a fiery mess of curly red hair that she loved to keep short. But in spirit, you two share that same wild, untamable independence. That same refusal to be small."

  "We traveled together for months," Marissa said, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. "We fought for our lives. We slept in the mud under the stars. And somewhere between the fear and the freedom...somewhere in that moment of looking into her eyes in the starlight…it’s like I woke up." She looked at her daughter. "I realized I didn't just admire her strength. I wanted it. I wanted her. I realized that the life I had been promised, the husband, the house, the duty, felt like a coffin compared to a single day on the road with her."

  Talisa gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. "Mom? You... and her?"

  "We loved each other," Marissa confessed, the words tumbling out in a rush, desperate to finally be spoken. "More than I have ever loved anything, save for you children. We pnned to run away. When we reached Vigil, we weren't going to turn back. We were going to go to the coast, live as schors, maybe open up a cute little book store together. Just…forget the Ministry, forget the duty...forget everything…." She looked at the two women sitting opposite her living the reality she had only dared to dream of.

  "She was my magnetic north," Marissa whispered. "And I was hers. Or so I thought."

  "So what happened?" Miz’ri asked, her voice unusually soft. She recognized the look in Marissa’s eyes—it was the look of someone who had survived their own execution.

  "We reached Vigil," Marissa said, her voice turning hollow. "And I saw the faces of the Priests. I saw the weight of the Magleby name waiting for me…” Her eyes cast to the floor. “Please…dont hate me for what I’m about to say…I looked at the uncertainty of a life with her,the danger, the rejection, the constant running…and I broke. I was a coward, Talisa. I chose the life that was written for me because I was too terrified to write my own."

  She twisted her hands in her p, her knuckles white. "But Laura... she couldn't stop. She couldn't shove her feelings back into a box. She would write me the sweetest love notes, the most romantic poetry, and try to hold my hand when she thought no one was looking…ocassionally she would win me over.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Talisa asked with a pensive look on her face.

  Marissa let out a little ugh, “Do you remember my old ‘book club’ that I used to go to when you were a little girl? The one night out of the month I’d get home te without your father interrogating me?.”

  “I think so, wasn’t that Auntie Laura’s book club…oh.” The realization hit Talisa like a ton of bricks. “I’m going to guess…that wasn’t really a book club…”

  Marissa closed her eyes, a flush rising on her cheeks that had nothing to do with the morning chill. "We spent nights there, tangled in her sheets. She would ravage me, Talisa. She would take me apart and put me back together, desperate to make me feel something other than duty. We kept having sex until a year before she died. It was the only time I felt alive. But every morning, I would put my clothes back on, kiss her goodbye, and go back to my husband."

  “Why did you keep her a secret when you told her you didn’t want to be with her?” Talisa stared at her mother, seeing the cracks in the Matriarch’s armor for the first time. "How did you live like that?"

  "I don’t think I could call it living…I thought I was keeping her close as a lifeline," Marissa corrected, tears spilling over. "But a lifeline can turn into a noose if you don't climb it. Eventually, I stopped going to our little book club. I told myself it was for her own good, that she needed to move on. I buried my feelings under yers of duty and prayer. I forced myself to become this... thing you see before you. A mother-shaped object."

  "And Dad?" Talisa asked, her voice small. "Does he know?"

  "He suspects," Marissa said. "But we don't talk about it. I love your father, Talisa. I do. But it is a quiet, dutiful love. It is a love built on contracts and shared history, not fire. And ever since he refused to help me with the Heresy marks... ever since he quoted the Ministry at me while I was terrified for my life... I feel a cold, vast distance from him. If it isn't written in a litany or an academic paper, he won't believe it. He won't fight for me. Not like she would have."

  Marissa pressed a hand to her chest, right over her heart. "There is a permanent hole here where Laura was supposed to be. I have been performing my life for thirty years, pying the role of the perfect wife and mother, while the memory of her ugh haunted my hallways. You remember the crying you heard at night when you were little? The sounds I told you were 'hormones' or 'a touch of sadness'?"

  Talisa nodded, tears streaming down her face.

  "That was me," Marissa whispered. "Mourning the woman I killed by refusing to be brave."

  “Why do you feel responsible for her Death?” Talisa asked, saying the big question out loud, fully crying alongside her weeping mother.

  “Because when I walked away, when I closed my heart to her, I took away the st support she had to feel grounded….she was lost…aimless…careless and Her husband caught her," Marissa continued. "Not with me, thank the Saints, but with another woman. Some traveler. He beat her within and inch of her life, called for the Ministry and said his wife’s soul was ‘drifting’. That she needed to be cleansed. I don’t know where they took her but it was for her…'re-education.'"

  "Mother, I don't understand," Talisa said, her voice small and trembling. "People go to the abbeys for retreat all the time. It's just prayer and—"

  "It’s my fault Talisa!" Marissa’s voice snapped like a whip, startling even Herkel. She leaned forward, her face inches from her daughter’s. "A year after they took her, her husband received a crate. A small, heavy box of polished cedar. They told him her mind had been 'beyond saving,' and so they had recimed her essence for the Ministry’s use. They sent back her bones…nothing else…”

  Marissa reached out and gripped Talisa’s wrists. "I saw them. I stole into the celr where he kept that box because I had to know.” A tear tracked through the soot on Marissa’s cheek. "There were marks, Talisa. Not breaks. Not the messy work of a blunt instrument. They were precise, etched patterns of torture—runes of 'correction' carved directly into the living bone while she was still breathing. They tortured her to death…"

  Marissa looked at Miz’ri then, and the expression was one of pure, unadulterated terror.

  "I looked for her spirit," Marissa rasped. "You know how the bones of the faithful hum? How Pappy’s bones still feel like Pappy? Laura’s bones were... silent. Cold. They had decimated her soul. They had reached into the center of her being and eradicated every spark of the woman I loved, erasing her memory from existence."

  The silence that followed was absolute, save for the soft patter of drizzle on the awning. Miz’ri felt a cold sweat break out across her neck. She understood now.

  Marissa turned her gaze back to Miz’ri, her eyes searching the drow’s face with a desperate, haunted recognition. "I am not judging you," Marissa whispered to Miz’ri. "I am not angry that you love my daughter. I am terrified every time I look at you holding her hand. Because every time I see that tiny cedar box. I see the Ministry’s knives reaching for my daughter’s bones because she chose a path their world won't allow."

  Marissa’s grip on Talisa tightened. "I spent thirty years becoming a 'mother-shaped object' because I was too afraid to be anything else. I killed the brave part of me to stay alive. And now... now I see you two, walking toward the same cliff, and I don't know how to stop you from falling."

  Talisa sat in a stunned, horrified silence. The world she had grown up in, the safe, structured world of Julsian propriety, had just been peeled back to reveal a charnel house. "What are we supposed to do?" Talisa asked, her voice broken. "If going back is certain death, and we can't stay here... Mother, where is left?"

  Marissa wiped a stray tear from her cheek, her resolve hardening into something cold and tactical. "Your grandmother Miriam... She knew this day was coming. Long before she died, she told me she had left a record of the Magleby truth. A diary. She didn't keep it at the estate; it was too dangerous. I found out that she hid it here, during her journey in Rurokitarin. I don't know exactly where, but I have the cipher clues she wrote down."

  She looked at Herkel, who nodded his skeletal head in a slow, mournful arc.

  "Find that book," Marissa commanded, her voice dropping to a low, urgent whisper. "Once you have it, you do not go to Vigil. You do not return to our nds. You take Herkel and you head west. Toward Marienna."

  "The Republic?" Miz’ri asked, “Why there?” her ears perking up.

  "Our side of the family hails from the Mariennian Republic. They accept refugees of all kinds," Marissa said. "Even those the Word have turned their backs on. Once we are safe there, we can send word. We can find a way to help my husband, your father, and the rest of my children to safety. But we cannot do it from within a cell in the Ministry's abbey. If we are caught, it proves they are right…that the date etched into our skin is a cage we cannot escape, but I don’t believe it.”

  Marissa stood up, the movement stiff and heavy. She looked at Talisa one st time, "I’m sorry so my precious daughter…I’m so sorry to tell you that we’ve become exiles ourselves…all I know to do from here is run. Find that book and then do not come home, because it is no home to us anymore Talisa. As far as the Ministry is concerned we vanished somewhere between here and there.”

  Talisa let out a choked sob, but she stood, reaching out to take Miz’ri’s hand. Miz’ri gripped it back, her knuckles white. Marissa reached out and took the elf’s other hand, forming a little triangle of connection. For a moment they stood in weeping harmony, feeling the weight of the world and it’s many fangs bearing down upon them.

  “We find the book, and then we vanish.” Miz said as she tightened her grip. A slight smile crossed Marissa’s eyes as she saw the determination written across Miz’ri’s face. “I will not fail you, or your daughter, Matriarch.”