persephone. [melantha moods]

[kai]

There are still places you can go in the United States where there are no roads. There are places that are too hard to get to when you rely on wheels to take you everywhere you want to go. There are places, though they are shrinking, where you cannot see wires overhead when you look up. Only stars.

In the southeastern corner of Oregon, the Great Basin is a little wetter than it is elsewhere. When the sun goes down, the temperature plummets. Even in summer, the nights are chilly. Rain falls from higher up and flows toward narrow stripes of green in the valleys. Snow stays on higher peaks well into the warmer months.

The sisters hunt antelope and other beasts in the refuges to the west and southwest. Their reach extends down into Reno and, occasionally, all the way over to Salt Lake City. They are allies to the wolves in central Montana as well as Mt. Rainier. Most of the women here, Garou or Kin, are used to this type of living. Some of them come from religious compounds. Some from hippie communes. There is a rhythm to life here. Sunrise means it's time to wake. Sunset means it's time to sleep. Sometimes those are reversed, particularly for the more nocturnal sisters. There is no electricity here. There is no plumbing. Everyone works. Everyone trains.

Shelter is always a problem. Those that can sleep in fur do so outside , usually without a fire, even in the coldest winter. Those that need it build what they can however they can, low-ceilinged shelters that they share with several others and camouflage carefully. They used to have shacks and the like, but there are satellites now. There's Google Earth. There used to be a time when no planes ever flew overhead. There used to be a time when you could climb high, look out, and not see the landscape lit up in orange and yellow and white and red in all directions, forever, forever, forever.

Every year they watch the lights come closer. Every year they watch their territory shrink, their safety tremble. After a year of this life, with its pain and beauty and loneliness and freedom, it is hard to judge the sisters who pray for the death of mankind, who sacrifice wine and love and songs to Gaia, pleading for strength to the Wyld, even if that strength means chaos and agony.

That rhythm, the daily life under the sun and under the moon, does falter and break. Sometimes it is discordant, and that is at times terrifying and joyful. These women still run in the hills, shrieking and cutting themselves, tearing apart anything they find. They pour wine onto stone and into the sky and let it rain back down on them. They harry any backpacking or traveling humans out of their land, sometimes with nothing but howls, sometimes with the Delirium itself. They are mad and holy, and for them, there is no difference between grief and glory.

Melantha came here when she was a little girl. And it's her home.

--

Out on the Great Plains, Erich and Charlotte make up stories of her super-spy escape from D.C. They eat small mammals that they harried and snapped, licking blood from their muzzles. They drive, and drive, and drive, asking each other: where do you think she is right now? what do you think she's doing?

The Saturday Night Live sketch with Cecily Strong playing the mysterious teenaged mistress Celia de Luca had the actress in pigtails and a schoolgirl outfit, just like in the photos. They got a huge laugh at her exaggerated tonguing of a lollipop while Jason Sudeikis, as Jack, tried to get his colleagues to believe she's his niece. Erich and Charlotte didn't see it. Neither did Melantha.

She would understand Charlotte better than Erich -- and Erich does understand her -- when they talk about debutante balls. She would understand Erich better than Charlotte -- and Charlotte does understand him -- when he shifts so quickly from talking about Nebraska to something else, anything else.

They are traveling by car from Washington to Oregon, but they are not taking a meandering path. The drivers trade off, including Melantha. She keeps thinking about Erich and Charlotte. This isn't the first time she's returned to the clefts and shadows of her home after one of these 'missions'. But it's the first time that she really feels like she's leaving something behind.

Something that matters, at least. The clothes and cards and the phone Jack got her don't matter. The phone with all those adorable text messages between her and Erich is gone, too. No more less-than-threes. The SIM card snapped, the phone crushed under Duck's expert heel and tossed into a dumpster in West Virginia. She has the bead, though. She sleeps with it around her neck instead of her wrist. Against her skin. Sometimes she holds it.

Her friends imagine her someplace lovely and wild while she sleeps in a snatches in the back seat of a car, earning cricks in her neck and shoulder, holding onto a little bright-eyed pigeon. She dreams of them. One at a time. Then together. All three dreams are different. They all comfort her, and they all break her heart when she wakes.

--

They get to Oregon in four days. There's a stop in Chicago to drop off Veronica, who has other work to do for the tribe in one more sinful city. But then Melantha and Duck and Damaris get back on I-80 and drive west, and west, and west. They opt for speed over almost every other concern. No one is exactly starting a nationwide hunt for some slut just to ask her what sort of underwear the Senator wears. They do not stop for sight-seeing. They hardly even stop for meals. They certainly don't stop for sleep, not with three drivers and an ample backseat. They just want to get her home. Get her clean. Wash the city off, wash the mission off.

No one complains. No one whines. The back seat of that car is a more comfortable bed than most of them are used to. Even Melantha, who spent the last several months in one of the finest hotels in the country, finds a strange comfort in hardships.

They pass through Nebraska and Melantha stares out the window, thinking of Erich. His sister. His family threatening to kill him. She closes her eyes, forehead to glass, because thinking of Erich makes her heart hurt. She thinks of Charlotte and wonders how it all went over: her leaving. Was she able to leave? If she wasn't, if something stopped her, Erich had better still be there with her. She'll murder him if he left her back there with that weird, stifling brother. If she sees him again and she doesn't see Charlotte and she can't hold her and smell her and feel those fragile bones, that delicate skin, she will hit him until her arm falls off.

From the driver's seat, Duck hears Melantha sniff moisture from her sinus cavities. He glances sidelong at her as she flicks her fingertips under her lower lashes, wiping away tears. He has seen her cry before. Just not when they're taking her home, usually. He doesn't say anything.

--

Her first night back in the commune, it's just her and Damaris now. They left him to the towns and the lowlands and went off with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the talen around Melantha's neck. They hike for hours. It's a warm day and the sun darkens their olive-toned skin that much more as the climb and weave their way through the trees. They have no water with them and Melantha feels dizzy, but she's felt this before and she knows how far they are from succor. She does not complain. She never complains.

When the sisters welcome them back, it is the first time in the past few days that she has not felt the grief of leaving Erich and Charlotte. She knows that reprieve won't last very long, but it lasts as long as it lasts, and she is grateful to Luna for the mercy. They are given clear water from raincatchers. It isn't very cold but it doesn't need to be to cool them. A smiling sister rubs salve on Melantha's burnt nose, and kisses her in amusement when she wrinkles her nose at the smell of it. Night is falling, and it's time for another hike, this time to a reservoir.

The water is deep. The water is cold. But in most other ways it's nearly indistinguishable from a lake. The sides are not made from steep, un-climbable concrete. They strip. All of them. Damaris, Melantha, every sister who was awake and not engaged otherwise and several who were. They hike together in the dark and they take off all their clothes and they go into that icy water. Some of them run. Some slowly ease into it. Some shapeshift and tread water in four paws. Competitions stir up almost instantly: who can go the deepest, who can hold their breath the longest, who goes out the farthest. Some stand closer to 'shore' and hold others by the ankles and armpits, swinging them out to fall splashing and shrieking into the night-dark water.

For her part, Melantha doesn't play. She washes, scrubbing her scalp and her skin and keeping herself warm merely by the eagerness with which she gets clean. She doesn't play partly because she isn't in the mood, partly because she doesn't want to lose the tightly-tied bird bead. It won't be much help if it drops however-far to the bottom of a reservoir. It would be disastrous if someone accidentally broke it. Especially for Erich. There's no amount of vouching for him that will make him welcome here. Even Charlotte would be a stretch.

They bathe and they swim and they nearly freeze to death and leave the water shivering, laughing, embracing. Almost everyone who comes near her hugs Melantha, some of them tighter than others. She is kissed and she is blessed and even those who hate what she does, who think it undermines the purpose of the tribe, they all welcome her back. She is their sister. And you don't always have to like what your sister does to love her. You don't have to agree with her to respect her.

They trudge back, in varying degrees of nudity, some of them on four legs, several of them in fur. Some of them are dry by the time they get back, and others have not shaved their head or don't wear it short, so they're still quite wet. Melantha goes to Damaris's shelter, which is one of the more permanent ones and roomier ones, as it is often shared with girls like Melantha. The ground is covered with woven mats and the ground is hard and unforgiving and Melantha falls asleep before her eyes are fully closed.

In her dream, Charlotte is laughing, and rubbing aloe -- just normal aloe -- on her nose and shoulders. And Charlotte kisses her, lays her head on Melantha's shoulder, and talks to her in what Melantha's dreaming mind decides is French. And then Erich is there, and Erich kisses her and it is an entirely different kind of kiss, and then he lays his head on her other shoulder. They are both wolves. They keep her in the middle and they keep her very warm with their thick fur,

snow-white and iron-grey.

[kai]

They sleep in packs, warm fur against warm flesh. They come and embrace her, those that return from their own journeys or hunting trips. She whispers in the firelight-flickering dark to a pair of glittering eyes and calloused, gentle hands that she doesn't want to, and the hands instantly still where they are, at the moment, caressing her waist. Less instantly, they draw back into the darkness, slowly as one backs away from a tensed animal. There's not a question of why, there's no need to be told okay as though there's a chance it wouldn't be okay, no intimation of obligation to an explanation. The only question is a soft request to hold her, and to this Melantha smiles in the dark and tells the eyes and the hands and the familiar scent yes.

And she is held. And she thinks of how different these arms are from Charlotte's delicate, thin, pale ones. She thinks of how absurd it is that when she curls up in pajamas next to Charlotte she feels like the one who needs to protect, the one who should embrace and keep warm, keep safe. She thinks of how absurd it is, and more than a little heartbreaking, that she has known some of these women for her entire life, but it's Charlotte with whom she can really be herself.

Her eyes close. She hugs her arms to her chest where she curls up, forearms in front of her face, comforted by the leather and the clay bead where they touch her cheek.

--

Like all people who live primitively, they fill their days with work. Hunting is not a sport here. Offal and organs are not treats to be thrown to greedy wolves. Everything and everyone finds a use. Everything that is done is done out of necessity. There is no luxury. There is no ease, and in a strange way, it's therapeutic.

Melantha, thinking now that she will no longer go seduce the sorts of men she used to seduce, allows callouses to grow on her palms. She winces more than the other women and sometimes they smirk and sometimes they just watch, mindful, because they are curious to see if she will work til she blisters, til she bleeds, or if she will take breaks. Some judge. Some do not.

There is no one single mentality here. There is strength, and there is respect, and there is dedication here; there is endurance. Life is full of pains great and small, and harsh winds and sharp rocks. What good is there to be done by weeping? What good is it to waste pity on yourself when you are so strong, and so blessed, that you can survive these things so easily? Better to spend your compassion on others, not as strong, not as blessed, not as aware.

The ends of her hair split. Her nails chip and she cuts them low. There is no wax; you shave with knives or not at all. Some scrape their scalps free of hair; few bother with anything else. Her skin's warm tones darken to burnished gold. Her lips are dry, her eyes see better in the dark, she gets used to feeling some trace of hunger in her belly most of the time. Sometimes at night, wolves come and lay beside her, in one form or another, as though the smell of her and the feel of her by their side or in their arms is comforting after whatever rite they have undergone, whatever hunt or battle that nearly took their lives. It has been so for generations: the garou come to the kin for succor. Melantha thinks of tribes where it is not so, where seeking succor is damned or kin are taught to be weak, and she pities them.

She thinks of Erich and Charlotte, who -- if they are on the road -- have no kin to care for them, and comfort them, and sleep beside them. She thinks of Erich, forbidden from taking that succor from his own blood kin. She thinks of Charlotte, and of Fangs, and of all the highborn rules that prevent such blatant want, such obvious need. She does not pity them. But she thinks of them, and worries a little for them, and

misses them, mostly.

--

Time goes by. A full moon swells and recedes. Celia de Luca is forgotten by the world and remembered only by the people whose lives she ruined. He resigned. She wonders if there are still Furies there, and kin of Furies, as tabloid reporters and photographers and so on, driving him slowly to the brink. She wonders when the last time was that any of their number thought of trying to heal these people, influence them for good, change their minds. She wonders if it would be a whole new order, not unlike the sort she has belonged to since she was a true maiden. The hand that heals and the hand that wounds.

Melantha cuts some of the rare thread brought up from the general store half a day's trip away from here with a sharp snap and tug of her teeth. The sleeves of the shirt are set aside for later; when the weather grows cool again she'll sew them back onto the tunic.

After all, she thinks, if Fenrir-born, Shadow Lord Erich could learn to think twice about some of his own sexist assumptions, couldn't some other men be taught similarly? Not the ones who are too far gone. They need to be punished. They need to be ruined. Some of them need to die.

But, Melantha considers, putting her needle away in a small box of precious things that shouldn't be lost, it's worth a try.

--

"Have you thought about what you want to do?" Damaris asks, crouching by the fire outside of her shelter, stirring the pot of stew that rests on it. Like Melantha, she wears her hair long. They have tied that long dark hair of theirs up on their heads in knots, keep it off their faces and out of the fire with strips of cloth over their brows, tied at the napes of their necks. They are messy and their feet dirty, but their hands are clean.

"Some," Melantha answers, eating flat bread made in a clay oven. It is still hot. She talks with her mouth full, and no one looks at her askance. She looks at her hands, tearing the bread, and not at her mentor, her mother-figure, her trainer, who was once also a whore like Melantha, and for similar reasons. There's a young girl sharing that tiny shelter with them now. She's started to bleed and she has that anger in her, that punishing sword. It remains to be seen if that anger is something that will last long enough to be tempered into a weapon. The girl isn't here right now, though. She's been sent to gather firewood for her mentor.

"You know, you could help me with her," and she means the girl, untested and untaught so far. "The world changes, even if men don't. You could teach her a great deal."

Melantha glances the way that the girl walked some time ago, tears another strip of bread and devours it. She shrugs. "It hasn't changed so much."

Damaris scoffs. "How would you know? You weren't even born when I finished my work."

Her mouth twists into a fond smirk. She chews her bread and there is silence between them for a while. They hear a clatter of wood being dropped and glance up, listening for a scream or wail of pain or terror in the dark. There's only some soft sobbing, defeated-sounding, frustrated. Damaris and Melantha both return their attention to their work and their conversation.

"Everyone here has a purpose," Damaris tells her, quiet but not soft.

Melantha does not say I know. Of course she knows. She watches the fire, and chews her bread.

[kai]

No one has to ask her how she will serve the tribe with her plans. No one, in fact, asks her to serve the tribe any longer at all. They all know what she has given, and what it has meant to her. It is in her own prayers: she has offered their goddesses a maiden, untouched and consecrated. She has given Gaia the taste of sweet, long vengeance instead of a quick, bloody execution, and she has done it again and again. The tribe gave her a home, and she gave them her life, and together they offered up her heart to Gaia, Luna, Hera, Demeter, Athena, Artemis.

Now they stand, prepared to let her go, to smooth her way, to let her belong once again to herself, and

it breaks her heart.

There's paperwork to sort out, and favors to ask and others to call in and exchanges that must be paid for one way or another, but through it all, Melantha keeps wanting to ask: what was it all for?

and

why is it so easy for you to let go of me?

--

Of course she doesn't complain. Complaints, tears, begging for succor -- these are the things one leaves behind in childhood. They are initiated into womanhood by blood, every last one of them. Pain is heritage. Strength, too.

There are, however, embraces. Tight ones, close and firm and warm and lingering. Damaris holds her for a long time, but not at the sept. Not until they are at the airport, two olive-skinned women with dark hair and very different eyes. But they know the myths and the truths of those myths: when mother holds maiden too jealousy, death steals the maiden. The seasons stop. Time ceases. An endless summer is as dangerous as an endless winter.

Still. She holds her a long time, before she lets her go.

Melantha wishes, for a moment, that she wouldn't.

--

The conspiracy theorists claim that DIA has lizard-people living underground, that the demonic-looking bronco sculpture guarding the road in and out of the airport really is possessed, that artwork inside is Masonic, Illumnati, what-have-you, but really, Melantha is just disturbed by the volunteer ambassadors in their cowboy hats and vests. She worries that she's just left the middle of nowhere to come to a cowtown that hasn't changed in forty years. Still: she can find her way around well enough without asking them for help. It's larger than the small airport she just came from, but it's not too confusing.

No one is there to pick her up. She has no one waiting for her as she makes her way out, dragging her carry-on wheeled suitcase with her. It doesn't have much in it. Most of it is new; they bought her some changes of clothes and luxuries that most of the country considers necessities before going to the airport. She opts for a cab; the buses from here into town don't take cards, and that's all she has so far.

The entire way into Denver, she rolls the pigeon-shaped bead tied to her wrist between her fingers. Sometimes she gets the urge to exert pressure, to crush it, but she wants help. She has a message to send with its spirit.

--

At the Sept of the Cold Crescent, they're surprised to see her. Not many Black Furies opt to stay in the city. There are apparently several of her kind at the actual caern. They ask her a few questions. They ask her for a phone number, an address, contact information, none of which she has yet. They ask her where she's going to stay, then. And her crest falls a bit, her eyes and her voice wavering. It isn't false. Not this time.

That is how she ends up on the floor that has been converted into living spaces. And on that floor is where she meets the Theurge cub. And that is where she asks that cub to help her send a message.

--

It is the middle of June, trending towards the solstice. The days are growing so long the sun seems to ache in the sky. Melantha feels alone, even though she knows the Theurge is just on the other side of the gauntlet, waiting for the little pigeon-spirit that has been kept against Melantha's skin all this time. She unwinds the leather from her wrist and leans over, setting the bright-eyed clay bead on the ground. She realizes she'll be sad to see it gone.

All the same, or perhaps with that sadness, she brings her heel down quickly, sharply, and crushes it to powder against the hard floor.

--

Charlotte feels its cooing, more than hears it. It remembers her, and it remembers its promises. But it remembers this, too: months spent held against Melantha's skin, months of dreams of closeness, months of her heart, her spirit, the spirits of her ancestors all wrapping around this fragile bound spirit. The pigeon perches on Erich's shoulder, nuzzling a transparent, very soft feathered head against him, cooing all the while in words only the Theurge understands.

The message is muddled, more the fault of the cub wrestling with spirit speech than anything else, but a few pieces are clear enough: moonbridge. fast. come. longing.

Wherever she is, there's a moonbridge there, too. And as it turns out, it's a moonbridge that reaches very, very far. Erich's own pigeon will have no trouble finding it, following the spirit-trail back the way its twin came, leading them to back to her.