A Lady Scorned

She clapped her leathery wings in rage, her eyes glowing like hot coals. Her champion had not only let her down, he’d flat-out betrayed her. As usual, only her favorite brother was here to comfort her.

“Relax, sister.” Pride placed his arm and one wing around her. “You knew there was a chance to lose, and you took it.”

“Yeah, sure. You can puff yourself up with ‘at least I tried’ but that doesn’t cut it for me; I have to win.”

Pride stood, holding his sister close. “There will be others,” he said.

“He was to be my champion. I thought he was steadfast in his devotion to me.”

“You’re my favorite sister, but I never understood why you chose him in the first place. Born to an addicted mother living in a hovel, with an alcoholic father serving a life sentence.”

“Exactly. And on his first birthday?” She looked at her brother and saw no response. “Do you remember what happened on his first birthday?”

“His mother ODed in her car in the convenience store parking lot, he was in the back seat.”

“Right, but an off-duty police officer happened to be there. One whose brother and sister-in-law were in a uniquely perfect position to take in a child.”

“Because they’d just found out she was barren, right?” Pride raised an eyebrow and pulled her close. “I try to tell people, of all my siblings, Luck is the coldest, but they never believe me. Anyhow, carry on.”

“Right. Well, they were ready to take in and care for a special-needs child; child of a junkie mother and father in jail and all. He was undersize and underweight, but that’s because I was slowing his brain development.”

“What? Why?” Pride released his sister and stepped back.

“He was genetically gifted, but without the proper environment, he’d never reach his full potential. I held him back until he had that environment.”

Luck took a deep breath and let the fire in her eyes calm. “I made sure he had everything he needed: good schools, healthy food, loving parents. I even helped his adoptive father get elected to congress in order to get him to an even better school and ensure his acceptance to MIT at fifteen.”

“And all that time he remained your champion?”

“Always. He attributed his situation and success to me. ‘Luck has been kind to me,’ he’d say.”

“What changed?”

“Dear brother, I don’t know how, but your influence found him. I know you kept your part of the deal and never touched him directly, but….” She let out a heavy sigh and settled into a squat position, elbows on her knees, face on her hands, wings behind her like a gargoyle on a parapet.

“What is it?” Pride asked.

“Why is it easier for the brothers than the sisters? You, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Lust, all of you. You influence someone a certain way and you gain power. It’s not the same for me and my sisters.”

“Except Love,” he said.

“It seems that way, but she is outright worshipped by millions. No, we need belief…not just influence. Me, Chaos, Order, Fate, Wisdom…well, she does a little better than the rest of us, but of the sisters, only Love truly prospers.”

“Tell me what happened with your champion?” Pride asked. “The one you bet Sloth a hundred years servitude would acknowledge you in an influential speech.”

“He finished out his PhD in Neuroscience, with his thesis, The Role of Ventromedial Pre-Frontal Cortex Excitation in Unconscious Bias and Apophenia. The more he researched, the more he became convinced that his luck was a story he told himself to make sense of accomplishments he didn’t feel deserving of.

“After everything I did for him, everything for which he thanked me and praised me for years, he had the gall to denounce me in the footnotes of his paper. ‘Despite the lies I told myself, there is no such thing as luck. Every accomplishment I’ve made is a combination of my own efforts and my environment. There is no luck, just random, sometimes cruel, chance, as seen through the lens of our own biases. Our own actions determine our luck.’”

Pride crouched down next to his sister. “Oof. He gave the credit to himself and Chaos.”

Hot tears streamed down her face. “He did, but he’s about to find out that I’m a lot crueler than my sister. She plays fair; everyone is treated the same and the outcome is equally unsure. Not me.” Luck took a deep breath and rose to her feet, spreading her wings, electricity building in arcs around her.

Pride stood and stepped away from her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m giving every bit of energy he gave me back.” Her eyes were black pits and lightning arced between her teeth as she let out a pained scream.

The mass expulsion of power brought all the siblings to her side. The lives of individual mortals were rarely of any consideration, but this one had to be special to elicit such a response from their usually cold sister.

“What now?” Pride asked.

“We watch and wait…see if he ever comes back to my side.” Luck smiled but it was a mirthless, icy thing. “Even believing in bad luck is believing in me.”

The siblings watched as the man who had lived a charmed life faced a change in circumstance. His fiancé left him stranded at the altar, leading him to drinks with his closest friend.

It was the first time he’d ever gotten drunk, and as gifted as he was genetically, he was just as cursed with a proclivity to addiction. It took months, but he entered a downward spiral. Alcohol took his job, then his possessions, then his home.

Even as he ended up sleeping under a bridge because he couldn’t be bothered to stay sober long enough to sleep in the shelter, he continued to attribute everything to himself. He knew that he had a high likelihood of addictive tendencies, yet he allowed himself to repeatedly drink until he was drunk to dull the pain of rejection.

His clothes wore thin, and he warmed himself by a barrel of burning garbage. An early winter storm had come in mid-autumn and marked the beginning of a brutal winter. There were no warm places left to sleep.

The people he considered his “friends,” the ones that helped keep him drunk, had sobered enough to get into the shelter, filling it to capacity. There were a few people still sleeping in tents with warm sleeping bags, but they wouldn’t allow him anywhere near them. He didn’t blame them. He clung to the belief that everything that happened to him, good and bad, was a direct result of his own choices.

The winter remained harsh, and his body began to show signs of failing. Thanks to not having anywhere left to panhandle, he had been sober for nearly a week when he built himself a nest under a bridge.

As he lay there shivering, he came to the realization that he had wasted his life. He hadn’t published anything since his doctoral thesis. He’d barely begun working in his field when he let himself be taken down by one negative event.

“It’s not all my fault,” he said to the bridge above him. “Sure, the drinking, or at least the starting drinking. I need to get help. But what started it all?”

He curled into a ball, still shivering. “She got cold feet at the worst possible time, but I didn’t do that. Now I’m shivering, probably hypothermia, I’ll be dead by morning. I used to have such good luck, right up until I decided there was no such thing. I guess my luck now is to freeze to death. You’re a bitch, Lady Luck, even if I deserve it.”

She folded her wings, the electrical crackling around her fading to nothing. Her eyes brightened and her stance relaxed. She looked around to see that only Pride remained by her side, her other siblings having grown weary of her tantrum. “He’s back,” she said.

“Not for long,” Pride said.

Luck twitched a finger, and a patrol officer turned on her search light and pointed it under the bridge on a whim, illuminating his huddled form. “Fate says as long as I intervene, he’s got years,” she said, “but he has no more chances with me. Any day he doesn’t acknowledge my presence, I won’t be there. If he ever betrays me again, I’ll end him then and there.”

“You’re my favorite sibling,” Pride said, “I just hope that I remain yours.”