Sympathy for the Devil

36

The meadow didn't seem real. 

Not because it was strange- it was too perfect. Unrealistically so. Wildflowers swayed in slow rhythmical patterns. Even the wind moved gently, like it had been told not to disturb anything.

A preservation of beauty that should not be reserved for a cruel intentioned God. 

Ever since my mom left, when everything started to scrape at my mind in ways I couldn't explain, he had been there—threading himself through my thoughts, bending what I saw, distorting what I felt until I couldn't tell where I ended and he began. All those lash outs didn't feel earned anymore. They felt predicted. This meadow wasn't just a memory or a vision.

It was proof.

I wasn't broken.

I was made this way.

"Sit." Arawn commanded.

I refused as he let go of a long sigh. It was low and almost... disappointed.

He didn't rush towards anger so hastily this time. Not like before when he took his brutalities out on Li. He tore her apart like she was a passing irritation. Her life meant absolutely nothing to him. He knew she meant everything to me and that's why he took her away. My heart squirmed like it was trapped under a glass jar. Watched and contained. Desperate for air that would never come. 

Li's voice, her laughter, the way it all just stopped. Bottled thoughts pressed into me until I felt hollowed out from the inside out.

I looked down at my hands in mild disappointment, expecting something—anything—to anchor me back into reality. Burns. Cuts. Tremors. Proof that I was still in the thicket of Hell. 

No blood.

No fire.

No pain.

I looked down at my hands.

Clean.

No burns. No cuts. No trembling fear. 

My mind is a prison. 

I wasn't losing my mind. I was being kept in it. 

My Banshee powers were being used against me. My visions were not showing the perceptions of death, they were trapping me in a labyrinth where escape is not possible.  

"Don't you know that you can't hurt a God." Arawn spoke almost absently as he set his eyes on the view where the horizon burst into orange and red shades. "Not when they have already lost everything." He regarded me with his eyes as he grimaced. It was a human reaction. Arawn sat a few feet away. Not the Arawn I have grown to hate. Not the jagged, cruel thing that fed on suffering. One who seems docile and subdued by things beyond my very own comprehension. 

"We all have our meadows of loss. Places we long for." His features shaped with hurt. They weren't sharp and calculating. They were guards crashing down intentionally. 

It unsettled me more than anything else he had done.

Because I knew the stories. I grew up with the stories. My parents used to read them with me to teach me about my Irish Celtic roots. 

Even before all of this, I knew them.

Arawn, ruler of Annwn—not a tyrant, not a devil, not some twisted embodiment of evil. He wasn't meant to be this.

Celtic mythology is all about restorative balances. Everything is cyclical. Arawn was one of the few Gods who sought to protect harmony of the world. He was supposed to be good. There isn't a trace of good left within his blood. That, I am certain.