Aren’t I Old Enough? [LoE]

CW: This is a fantasy story that includes some light religious themes. These are not meant to follow holy texts accurately. This story also contains several dark themes and light profanity (wow, big surprise). Viewer discretion is advised. 

“‘Tis nothing but a twisted cycle.”

These words, recited by my sister behind her closed bedroom door, were some part of an essay she’d written for a class. Perhaps I’d missed the context of the line— I found that odd since I’d been listening from the other side of the door for some minutes— but it floated around my mind, and the quote would not find a place to land. I suppose it’s also because I expected the phrase to be a “virtuous cycle,” maybe even a “vicious cycle.” Why a twisted one? I called through the door to ask.

“When you’re older,” she replied sharply. She was thirteen.

“How much older?” I inquired. I was ten.

“Older,” she reiterated flatly. I didn’t push it.

I scribbled the odd quote into a notebook that night, one that was a comprehensive list of everything that would be explained when I was older. I marked it with the date—February 12, 2015–and waited.

When she was fourteen, and I was eleven, I ran through the list and scribbled down the answers I got. The February quote remained unanswered. 

“I said I’d explain that to you when you’re older.” At the time, she seemed annoyed, though she hadn’t been so before.

“But I am older!” I argued—something wasn’t adding up. 

“Not old enough,” she retorted. “You have to wait.”

“How long?”

“I’ll tell you when.”

She vanished in November of that year. I never got my answer.

Whenever I thought I forgot about the quote, it shoved its way to the forefront of my consciousness again. When it did, I kept looking for its meaning, though what threw me for a loop was the use of “twisted” instead of any other word. Twisted meant warped and unhealthily abnormal—one could call a serial killer twisted, for instance. If something is twisted, it must be fairly severe, even more so if it’s something that repeats in a loop (a cycle). 

Hell’s full of twisted things by nature, though I didn’t know how many qualified as cycles, and there were trickles of venom in my sister’s voice when she read that line, venom that wouldn’t be there if it had anything to do with Hell. Perhaps it was Heaven? My knowledge of that realm was—and still is—limited. Earth? Well, that’s plausible, for as far as I’m aware, Earth’s pretty fucked up, but that’s a risk to put into a school essay. Residents of Hell only gain permission to travel to Earth at seventeen, not that my sister listened. She snuck there twice with a friend (I’m impressed they never got caught) and confirmed how irritating and mean humans could be. Putting that in an essay risks someone reporting those endeavors to the guards, which would only devolve into disaster. How many options did that leave? Very few, that’s how many. I wished she could’ve told me. I wished she hadn’t vanished.

The line faded again. I let myself forget it. 

—

When I was eighteen, I snagged a day somewhere within the rollercoaster of day-to-day busyness of being the monarch's right-hand* to see Earth. The sidewalks were darkened with the steady rainfall and the air was cool. The city’s buildings were impressively done, some reaching well past the dark clouds. The place was a mishmash of noises that didn’t go together but somehow worked in one strange symphony. It was louder than I expected but, then again, everything is louder than you expect with enhanced hearing. Marrin, one of the monarch’s guards, shouted to remind me to watch my step. Her twin brother, Marvyn, who’s also a guard, popped another bubblegum bubble. They’re there because the monarch wanted them to be, though I didn’t complain— they’d become my friends. I knew they wouldn't be too strict, so I raced ahead of them both. 

“Take a look at this,” Marvyn’s saying to Marrin as we stroll through a park half an hour later. They were some ways behind me. I’d slowed my pace since we got off the sidewalks and the rain had settled into a steady drizzle, the raindrops tapping melodically on leaves and branches. 

“Why do we give a shit about human news?” Marrin scoffed, but she grabbed the newspaper her brother was holding with a soft crunch. Moments later, she uttered a noise of anger that finally made me stop walking and turn around. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked. Marvyn pulled the newspaper back and tossed it to me with instructions to read the cover story. 

“Man Accused of Murdering Devil Found Dead in his Home,” I read. 

“Read the rest,” Marrin spat. I skimmed through the story and gathered this: a human man was accused of murdering a young resident of Hell, pleaded not guilty, somehow didn’t get the consequences, and was found dead in his home with traces of dark magic lingering in the room.  

“I can’t stand this fucking system,” Marrin growled. “That human was never going to get punished!”

“It was a supernatural’s word against his,” I sighed, nodding my head. “He was going to win the moment the court learned the victim was a resident of Hell. They hardly even say their name,” I added, “let alone show any respect to the fact they’re dead.”

“Seems Nemesis came through though,” Marvin remarked, smirking at the mention of the goddess of revenge. “That man was probably killed by another resident of Hell. That’s what I call karma!”

“It’s not going to fix anything,” Marrin argued. “It’s great he’s dead, but it’s just going to push the belief that all supernaturals are violent and like to attack people. It doesn’t matter if it was in retaliation for what happened to another one.” 

“Hey, I still consider it karma, being killed by someone from the same realm you killed someone from. Plus, it may have the opposite effect and show humans that we’re not going to take their bullshit,” Marvyn objected. 

“There’s a chance, but it’s always going to be a risk fighting fire with fire, and a dangerous one at that! Plus, every new bit of information we drop to the humans, no matter how small, is going to give them more ways to effectively harm us further. We don’t need to be giving them any ideas.”

“You’re correct on that part,” Marvyn reasoned, “but humans aren’t the brightest. If they were going to cause us significant harm, we’d have to throw it right in their faces.”

I didn’t speak— not initially, at least. My eyes flicked through the article again; the story started with violence and ended with violence in an attempt to take revenge, the same revenge that could end up being detrimental to supernaturals. On one hand, I could see the logic—don’t take one wolf if you’re not ready to take the pack—and it was an unsurprising move. Species defend each other; it’s an unspoken code. However, with that logic, would the next move for humans be to track down this next supernatural and kill them, too? Perhaps they’d even find any resident of Hell and kill them in an act of retaliation. After that? A supernatural would kill to make it even. It’d repeat—no, it would be a cycle—until someone chose to break it. Cruelty would fight cruelty until the appetite for revenge was satisfied…or we destroyed ourselves in the process. I could’ve kicked myself; it was so simple!

“Jacob,” Marvyn called, snapping me out of my thoughts. “You look like you’ve got something going on up there.” He smiled and gestured to my head. 

“You want to break this?” He asked, switching to gesturing between Marrin and himself. Without thinking, I jumped to respond and my sister’s voice filtered through mine.

“‘Tis nothing but a twisted cycle.”

*I don’t think I need to clarify, but by “right hand” I just mean the same thing as “right hand man,” just without the gender determiner haha