Forgive Me, Heavenly Mother

Heavenly Mother,

Forgive me for the sins I must commit. Forgive me for the scars I cannot leave behind. Forgive me for the rage that burns in my heart, for I do not have the strength to quell it. The wraith of vengeance begs me, forces my hand. For if I can live only one day longer than her, I can find my last semblance of peace.

Forgive me, Great Mother. Forgive me.

The whispers of Signý’s prayer drifted up into the early morning rays of light. Dissipating into loose swirls of warm breath in the cool air.

Hidden in the crook of the lush forest was a simple cottage with sunshine-yellow shutters and a sprinkling of wildflowers all over the property. Birdsong swept through the clearing like hymns gliding through the pews of a church. The ivy embracing the cottage danced in the soft breeze. Sweet, gentle quietness whistled all around Signý.

Years of blood, innocent blood, had led to this discovery. Years of shrieking confessions from the mouths of strangers, those who had seen her. Years of living in the city’s sewers and abandoned underground vaults. Years of eating rats. Years of night terrors echoing across damp, molding walls. Years of remembering, remembering the day that she left Signý. Left Signý in that hell, left running and never looked back as the chains dug into Signý’s skin, luring her back into the Tartarus that was that place. Years of hopeless prayers, prayers that were only answered when blood was shed in abundance.

Signý had dreamt about this moment. Day and night. With her reddened eyes snapped wide open and squeezed so tightly closed.

She had never imagined it would happen in a place as beautiful as this. In a place more beautiful than any she had ever been in.

When she first saw the cottage, its elegant natural beauty abruptly halted her in her tracks. Its brightness and vibrancy reminded Signý of the great stained glass windows from her childhood. The glass that she would stare at for hours, slowly etching the blood-soaked images of saints and demons into her mind—the same bloody visages that consumed her wrathful brain at every waking moment.

It almost felt wrong for Signý to be there, with the ugly hate in her heart, with the demons that plagued her violent mind.

Signý belonged to the dungeon. She belonged to suffering. She belonged to that world of cold iron and chains. Not the open-air meadows.

A pit of feeling, an unrecognizable feeling, stirred in Signý’s stomach.

In the beauty of the clearing, a small voice in Signý’s mind murmured to turn back. To go back to the dirt road and lose herself upon the path. To lose her past. To forget about her.

There was a moment in that still morning air where Signý unconsciously stepped back, her leather boot digging into the moist earth. A moment when all the weight fell from Signý’s shoulders, where the coolness sank into her skin and dulled that pit.

“Ryka!”

Signý jolted to attention, crouching low into the grass. Her knife inched out of its strap.

“Ryka, stop bringing rabbits inside the house!”

The cottage door swung open. A small girl with a mass of chestnut curls stood at the threshold. In her arms was a comically large rabbit, kicking its fur-covered, dirty feet into the white linen dress of the little girl, who couldn’t have been older than eleven winters. Up to her scabby knees, mud coated the girl’s legs.

A stocky figure emerged behind her from the darkness of the cottage.

The feeling in Signý’s stomach sank deeper.

Thaïs had been a malnourished teenager when Signý first met her. Skeletally thin, mousy-haired, with a fierce look of anger and rebelliousness that crinkled her face. Signý had idolized her relentlessly fiery nature from the moment she had seen Thaïs bite the nose off of Erkin, a looming beast of a prisoner, during a particularly violent prison riot. Erkin had beaten Thaïs to near death after that, but all the while, Thaïs was still laughing, chewing on that piece of flesh.

That was long before the soldiers took control of the prison.

Signý would have barely recognized her if it weren’t for that scar around her neck.

Now, Thaïs was muscular with sun-bronzed skin and a healthy redness in her cheeks. Her light, mousy locks were held back in a neat braid, like Thaïs would always do on Signý’s unruly hair.

That voracious pit opened up in Signý’s stomach again as she watched her from the grass.

Thaïs plucked the antsy rabbit from the arms of the little girl. The little girl wailed, wet tears running down her face.

“No! He’s my friend!”

Thaïs’ feet touched down in the dense grass as she walked from the cottage.

“Oh, I’m sure there will be many other friends, Ryka,” Thaïs chuckled, setting the rabbit down just a dozen feet from Signý. “Be patient and—“

In a fateful moment, two very different pairs of dark brown eyes met each other for the first time in nearly two decades.

Absolute horror melted into Thaïs’ expression.

Signý could only imagine what she looked like to Thaïs in that moment. Her face hardened from a decade of imprisonment, eyes bloodshot and impossibly wide. Disheveled hair and ragged clothes from the few years she spent searching for Thaïs, through all the sickness-ridden city streets.

Signý’s mind was blank as she stood from the grass. The coolness brushed through the mangled nest of her hair. She gripped the knife in her callused palm.

The rabbit scurried off into the distance.

Silence devoured the space between them.

“Who are you?” the little girl called out, her tears stopping in confusion, “Mama, who is that?”

Signý looked up at the little girl and back at Thaïs.

Thaïs bolted to the right, her feet thudding through the dirt. Her arm extended to reach toward an axe stuck into a nearby stump.

Signý launched forward, tackling Thaïs to the ground.

The little girl screamed.

Thaïs had a stronger frame now, but so did Signý. Years of hard labor and dirty street crime had given Signý an athletic strength that matched the rugged strength of Thaïs.

Signý pushed her knees into Thaïs’ arms, pinning them into the dirt.

“Sig, please, you don’t want to do this,” Thaïs choked out. “Please, my daughter.”

Signý held her jagged knife to Thaïs’ throat.

“I don’t want to do this? I don’t want to do THIS?” Signý spat out, involuntary tears streaming down her face. “Do you know what they did to me when you ran? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID ALL THOSE YEARS?”

“Fifteen years that I have been praying for you, Thaïs. And the Heavenly Mother has finally guided my righteous hand towards you.” Signý’s voice cracked with pure hissing hatred.

Thaïs’ wrinkles deepened. Her eyes brimmed with water.

“I’m so sorry, Sig. I’m so sorry. I was just a child. All these years, I’ve thought of you. I’ve cried for you.”

Thaïs’ words felt like poison on Signý’s skin. The thought of Thaïs crying over her all those years—it kindled the dark pit in her stomach, in her mind.

“You’ve gotten soft, Thaïs,” Signý said bitterly. “Hardly like you to cry over lost causes. Hardly like you to aim for redemption.”

Thaïs gritted her teeth. “Would you have wanted me to stay there? To rot there with you? Wouldn’t you have wanted your friend to escape that hell?”

“You were supposed to rot with me! You were supposed to suffer with me! You promised never to leave me alone there! You promised!” Signý screamed.

“And now you have all of this.” Signý gestured to the thick nature that surrounded. “Heavenly Mother gave you all this beauty, all while I lived in the darkest cellars of hell. You, your beautiful cottage, and your beautiful daughter and her stupid rabbits. You stole my salvation.”

Signý grasped Thaïs’ head by her hair and slammed it into the ground. Thaïs’ eyes glazed over with a daze, her body struggling less against Signý than before.

Wetness spilled from Signý’s eyes. “I wanted that life, that salvation. I wanted that so terribly. I told you my prayers and you stole them from me and lived them.”

She pressed the knife deeper. Dark crimson trickled down Thaïs’ chest onto her grey linen dress.

Signý ripped open her own ratty shirt.

“Look at what they did to me when you left, how they punished me for years longer than my sentence. What you did to me when you abandoned me in the moat.”

Thaïs' eyes bulged at the sight.

Lining Signý’s body was the lingerings of hell. Scars, red and white, covering Signý’s body, everlasting reminders of ten years of torturers’ work in the dungeons. So long Signý had spent there, she hardly remembered those jewels she had stolen as a child. So long down there that Signý’s body no longer had any smoothness.

“And this,” Signý said, running her fingers over the raised flesh on her chest. “Is my own work.”

Carved deep into her chest, her prayer lay.

Forgive me for the sins I must commit. Forgive me for the scars I cannot leave behind. Forgive me for the rage that burns in my heart, for I do not have the strength to quell it.

Forgive me, Great Mother.

Signý coughed up a sad cackle. Tears ran into her open mouth. “A reminder of a promise I made to myself when I escaped. One that I know won’t be broken. A prayer that I know will be answered.”

“Oh, Sig,” Thaïs sobbed. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

“But, you did, Thaïs,” Signý muttered bitterly. “You knew it the moment you ran. The moment you chose yourself over us.”

Thaïs shook her head. “Please, Sig. Please, forgive me. Please.”

Signý stared down at Thaïs. Behind the wrinkles and sun-aged skin, she saw that skinny girl who had made promises to her in the shadows of a quiet stone cell. The face of a girl that had made her smile and giggle even in the dirtiest labor and the gloomiest moments of pain and fear. The girl who had given her the small signs of hope that kept Signý alive in the beginning.

But it was the same face that had imprinted itself into Signý’s mind. The same face that looked back at her with sheer terror as the guards dragged Signý through the moat.

So many memories swirling in the misty morning air made Signý sick.

A snap brought Signý back to the present. She glanced up at the little girl grasping the end of the axe in her hand and trying with all her might to pull it from the stump.

“Ryka, no, my baby, please.” Thaïs gasped out.

Signý looked between the mother and daughter. She swore she could feel the love and desperation vibrating off them as they stared at each other.

A love Signý should have had.

That feeling in the pit of Signý’s stomach blossomed into an agonizing pain.

“I keep my promises,” Signý said, and plunged the knife into Thaïs’ face.

Ryka screamed as blood spurted all over Signý. The knife slid into the flesh like butter. The tension left Thaïs’ body, leaving her limp on the dewy grass.

Signý stood on her wobbly feet. Ryka was still screaming as she yanked at the heavy axe, pulling it from the stump and falling backwards onto her back.

In Ryka’s eyes, Signý saw her own rage reflected back at her. Her own sadness and desperation. One that had become so familiar to her, she could not imagine how she would live without it.

Signý put her heavy hand on the axe and bent beside the girl.

“You look so much like your mother, Ryka. ”

Ryka tearfully spat in Signý’s face.

Signý barely felt the spit slide down her face with all the blood on her. She wiped it with her sleeve and nodded solemnly before shakily standing again.

“I know your suffering. I have lived it, prayed through it for nearly all my life,” Signý said softly. “I would like to say it improves, but I have never experienced any sweet salvation from my sorrowful rage. It only worsens with time, with the more pain you accrue.”

“I will kill you!” Ryka wailed, banging her small fists against the ground. “I will kill you! I will kill you!”

A twitching smile surfaced on Signý’s bloodied and chapped lips. An involuntary dampness streamed down Signý’s hollow cheeks.

“In the coming years, prayer will strengthen that determination. The Heavenly Mother will answer you, I have no doubt. When the time comes, I will wait for your divinely made vengeance. I shall pray for it until my days near their end.”

Signý reached forth, wiping a tear from Ryka’s rosy face. Ryka jerked back.

“But for now, you should mourn your mother. Don’t let your anger sour your sorrow just yet. You have many years of life for that.”

Signý kicked the axe away from Ryka, watching the young girl crawl over to her mother’s body.

“I’ll be waiting, Ryka.”

With an unknown sense of will, Signý pushed herself forth into the dense thicket of the forest. The late morning rays of light spread an odd sense of warmth through her body as she walked.

Signý did not get far before her legs collapsed underneath her.

She stared at her bloodied hands into the dirt, in the rays of light. Mousy brown strands stuck to the crevices between her fingers.

Thaïs’ young, mischievous grin flashed through her blinking.

Hot tears and blood burned her eyes.

It was then that she began to pray again.

Forgive me, Heavenly Mother, please forgive me.