Page 16 of Venom Sweeter than Honey
Eternity? I wouldn’t wish an eternity of this on even my cruellest adversary. I envy my mother’s corpse floating out to sea. My body trembles from the effort to restrain the emotion coursing through me. Mother Jamila’s heavy hand rests on my shoulder as the high priest—a fae male I’ve never seen in my life—proceeds to sing a prayer to Akash in a language I don’t understand.
The scent of rose, benzoin, and myrrh muddies the ocean air as the priest’s swinging thurible sends smoke rising like prayers to the heavens as he blesses my mother’s corpse, and the sea to which it will return.
She was a syrith. Her body should be returning to the soil, to the forest with the sentient trees—the aersyans.
Not to him.
There are only a handful of people here. My mother had no known family. None that I knew of. The only people attending herascensionceremony—the term that syrith-kind, my mother’s kind, uses to refer to a funeral—are the kind guardians from the orphanage in which I will spend the next few years, until I’m an adult and have procured my own means to survive.
There is only one person I had secretly, foolishly hoped would be here.
My father.
To honor her, his ownsoulbound.
And to rescue me.
Though I cannot say with any modicum of certainty that he even knows about her death. I have no idea to what degree they communicated, outside of his coming to visit briefly whenever he was in Narudi, the capital city of Selcarim, with his army.
No one knows who my father is—The Nameless King and god who rules his city beneath the sea—and my mother always impressed upon me the importance of keeping his identity secret.
For my safety.
Something about kings having too many enemies.
The coroner said she died of a broken heart. I was the one who found her, unmoving and cold, in bed—a memory that will surely haunt me for the rest of my days. Clasped tightly in her hand was the conch shell necklace he gave me when I was little.
It is now draped around my neck. I know it’s enchanted, but I don’t know for what purpose. I’ve tried every which way to discern it; I hoped that perhaps my father would somehow hear my cries through it.
If he can, they remain unanswered.
My mother’s body is carried out on a small driftwood raft over placid water that is a mirror to the numbness spreading through me. The only movement upon the water is the raft on which she lies, cutting across like a knife through flesh, parting the deathly, motionless tide that will soon welcome her into its slumbering depths—and take a part of my soul, my heart with it.
I can’t help but wonder ifhefeels her returning to him. I have no idea why she chose for her Ascension to take place here, and not in the mountains where we belong. Maybe she’d hoped that if she returned to the sea, he would know, and return for me.
I utter a desperate, silent plea.
Please, Father. Please find me.
Show me you love me.
With each passing, unanswered moment, numbness bleeds away to despair.
As if in tune with my emotion, the wind picks up, as if attempting to stir the Nemuru Qizhì Sea from its slumber.
Where are you?
Bitterness and disappointment coil around me, tightening like a hungry vine sinking its thorns into my bleeding heart.
The waves and the wind increase, whipping my hair around my face as the now bobbing wooden raft disappears on the horizon. Something inside me snaps, and I find myself rushing towards the shore, ripping off this blasted fucking conch shell that hangs from my throat like a noose.
An ever-enduring reminder that my mother was not enough.
ThatIwas not enough.
Arching my arm backwards and pouring all my heartbreak into the action, I launch the necklace into the sea as far as I can.
“I hate you!”
