“We have been remiss in making the dangers plain to you. Your relationships with your consorts were shaky. You seemed quite overwhelmed. We were trying to make things easier for you, Kira. Allow you to ease into things. This must seem like we are consciously hiding things from you, and in some respects, we are, but we do have reasons for this.”
I listened to her even, reasonable tone, but not so much the words. I’d heard this all before, in different ways. What’s best for you, Kira. You’re not well, Kira.
“You’re the mother,” I blurted out.
“Well, yes, that’s my title.”
“No, I mean the role. The mother, the one who makes decisions for her child. Who tells her what’s best. Keeps her from inappropriate or harmful things.” Something in her smile changed. Somehow, I and my insights pleased her. “I don’t want to be your child.”
There was something more to those words, something that twisted in the back of my mind, but resettled when Ashanti got to her feet, placing her hands on my shoulders.
“Then you will not be. You are about to attempt something world changing, to take responsibility for every living thing in the world. I will not stand in your way.”
We walked into a huge room with a massive circular table, and all I could see were women. Women of every colour, height, shape, and ethnicity clustered around the table, some sitting, some standing, but all talking. I paused in the doorway, the noise, the sheer number of people stopping me in my tracks.
“Through here,” Duke said, gesturing for me to go left. “It’s OK, y’know.”
“What?” I asked.
“There’s a lotta people here.” His eyes slid to mine. “About to be a lotta attention. We get used to it, being on stage, but I remember.”
The pounding heartbeat? The feeling of too many eyes on my skin? The overwhelming sensation of being in the wrong place?
Hush, Lilith said. You’ve as much a right as any to be here. Time to find out what these witches want from you.
I took the seat offered to me, focussing on the tabletop, the wood grain, the smooth polish, the pieces of paper stacked neatly in a pile.
“I want to thank you all for coming.”
My eyes jerked up to see Ashanti had taken her place in the centre of the circle, the surrounding women all falling quiet.
“Many of you have been very keen to meet our new avatar. May I introduce you to Kira.”
Keep your back straight and don’t show weakness, Lilith hissed when I jerked back in my seat under the weight of the collective gaze. I forced myself to obey her commands, staring back as they stared at me.
“Past time we got a look at her,” an Australian voice said. The woman had close buzzed hair, a few piercings, and wore heavy black glasses. “She should be with us, back on her native soil. I’ve said that more than once, Ashanti.”
“So you have, Soraya.”
“Is she ready?” An elderly black woman with her hands wrapped around a cane peered at me with eyes that didn’t seem to miss a thing. “The Rutherglen and the rest of the sky father’s people, their violence only increases. I’ve had children go missing and women coming to me battered and bruised.”
“We’re noticing a massive uptick in domestic violence,” said a very well-dressed woman with a posh British accent. “It’s being explained away as somehow related to the COVID lockdown, but I don’t believe it for a second.”
“Same here,” another woman said, shaking her head. “I’ve seen…” She swallowed, visibly paling. “Our people have been called to deal with incidents of family violence of a magnitude I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been doing this for thirty years. A new kind of drug is being pumped into our communities, and the resulting acts… Murders, rapes, sexual abuse of the like I’ve never seen.”
“In our community, a man killed his wife, his two children, their grandparents, and their dogs. Claimed he didn’t know what came over him. One minute, he was arguing with his wife, and then…” another woman said.
“We’ve just been hit with a new date rape drug. As if the old ones weren’t bad enough, this one somehow paralyses the victim, so she knows and feels exactly what’s happening to her but can’t do a thing.” The woman telling the story paled, pushing her hair back from her face with a shaking hand. “The men, the perpetrators, they know. When the drug wears off and the victims come to us, they tell us what was said during the ordeal.” Her eyes flicked around the room. “I don’t know which is worse—the actual rape, or the psychological damage these men wreak.”
“Harm is on the rise across the world,” Ashanti agreed. She waved her hand, and a map appeared, hovering in the centre of the circle. The countries were outlined in white on a black background. “Domestic violence.” Red pin pricks spread across the surface, a sea of violence. “Rapes.” Murmurs went up across the room as even more dots materialised, this time in yellow. “Child abuse. Sexual assault.” After each word, more and more dots popped up in different colours. “Stalking. Hate crimes committed against women of colour and those of the LGBTQI+ community. Murders.”
For a moment, she paused, everyone paused as they looked at the map. It was a sea of incidents, of pain, of violation, of death. I didn’t know what it used to look like, but this, this was enough for me.
Because it didn’t take much to turn the dots into something else. Each represented a person, someone who thought they could leave their home or stay within it and expect to be safe. Someone who loved someone, trusted someone and had that betrayed. Someone who assumed the society around her would not turn on her purely due to her gender. Someone who didn’t want to see the world as full of predators, willing to violate her simply because he could.
“Because of me,” I said. The room was quiet and so was my voice, so I cleared my throat and said it again. “This, it’s because of me.”
“No, Kira,” Ashanti said. “Every time an avatar rises, we see a corresponding rise in female focussed violence. The sky father’s people do not wish to see a return of the way things were. It was them that locked away the goddess’ power in the first place.”
“Though the actions of a reckless avatar do not help things.”
My eyes jerked up to see a woman with her hair pulled back into a severe bun looking over at me. She was older and impeccably dressed, but her scarlet lipstick bled into the wrinkles around her mouth. Those lips pursed as she watched me.
“You taunted the Rutherglen not once, but twice, retrieving a consort and his heir?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Then you obviously did not consider the consequences or are so completely bereft of empathy that you did not care. Stupid or a monster, which is it?”
My eyes darted around the room, looking for some sort of clue as to how to get through this, but everyone just stared. One of the things being a customary introvert ‘gifts’ you is the ability to notice all those micro expressions—the slight tightening or thinning of lips, miniature frowns, the clamping of jaws. These women had brought their communities’ injuries and injustices to this meeting, and I had…? Each dot on the map was like a gut punch, over and over and over.