Moonshine

Chapter 11- Aprósklitos

απρόσκλητος: aprósklitos
Greek
unbidden
-

With a grunt, Sanya carefully sliced off the lizard's head. She had never had a problem with blood or gore, but her stomach turned as she carved the rest of the carcass into parts. She hadn't killed it- she had seen one of the ebony owls attack and kill the lizard, and then she had shooed away the bird by flinging her sword at it.
For an inanimate object, Pax certainly was quite a threat.
"I'm sorry." Sanya murmured, holding up the leg. The turns of her stomach turned into full-blown revolt, as they always did nowadays when she sat down to eat.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
She had tried to make fire several times- but she had succeeded only once, though that fire had died out minutes later. All the sticks and leaves she had found were strangely moist- not with water, but some faerie fluid- and they'd been quite difficult to light.

And so she had resigned herself to more uncooked, raw flesh. It disgusted her taste buds and stomach so much that she was genuinely starting to consider a vegetarian diet.
But that was only in her most delirious moments. She had forsaken everything else, but she was not forsaking meat.

This wasn't the first time she had had to eat a lizard in this horrible Garden, but it was the largest one she had ever seen. Its body had been thick, and as long as her arm.
Closing her eyes, she bit into the leg- she tasted its scaly skin first, and then the softer flesh inside- and she felt bile instantly rise up to her mouth, her sense of taste recoiling at what it had to endure.

It's this or slow starvation, Sanya told herself, swallowing down both the bile and the meat.

Maybe she should have let the Sphinx kill her, died of a fate similar to those the heroes in myth suffered.
But that would've been too easy. That would've been far too easy, too kind, for what she had done. She had killed a weapon-less creature, and she had done it while the creature had their eyes closed.

The Sphinx had been talking of how she had been wronged so many times- and Sanya had murdered her.
What heinous being could do something like that?

Of course it was she who could. She had let circumstance envelop her and take her away from her home. She had been too pathetic to kill the man who'd assaulted her. She had lied about her feelings for so many years she had had two children by the time she had accepted them. She had let so many Rihaayans die, just because of whose Consort she was. She had run back to Rihaaya after the Giant War, instead of going back to the children and husband who needed her. She had hidden the ultimate truth from her child, her Jem, and it had torn at her heart for years. She had desecrated her marriage vows, over and over again, because she had been so lonely. She hadn't been able to save her parents' lives. She had driven her youngest child to another country. She had abandoned her children, her family, her people, her duty.

She- she was a blight on the name of whatever she was told she was.

A Queen.
A Consort- wife.
A sister.
A daughter.
A mother.
A human.

The only thing she had not failed was friendship, but that was because Lucy had been her only friend- and even that could not count, truly, since she was her sister-in-law just as much as she was her friend.

She had to just ignore it, she decided for the hundredth time. She would pretend she wasn't eating such a thing, that she wasn't deserving of the worst fates the Furies could imagine, and she would force her mind to focus on something else.
But focus was always so very, very difficult. It always had been. In Princess lessons, in her short-lived dancing classes- even during sparring sessions with General Ainaah, she'd been walloped more than once because her attention had strayed far away while he'd been explaining something.
She'd really only been able to focus when- well.