Author's Preface
For a moment, Aspen waited for the disagreement. But her wings knew.
One flex against her shoulder. A tiny movement, almost nothing, except it had come from the wrong place in the chain. Word, body, then Aspen.
High Priestess’s hand remained in the air between them. Eye to title. Title to Aspen. The gesture had made a clean path, and the room seemed to understand the shape of it.
Aspen stared at her own lap. The hands looked ready to be Lyra again the moment Aspen loosened her grip. Every knuckle, every extra bend, every blue-green pulse under the thin wrist had a place here.
She tried to keep one piece of herself small and sealed. The part that remembered yesterday. The part that knew desks, showers, her phone, the dumb safety of being bored in a body that had belonged to her since birth.
The skull around those memories felt very quiet.
The wet lines on High Priestess’s cheeks made no softness in her gaze. Her eyes moved over Aspen’s parted lips, the empty stare, the hands resting too calmly in her lap after answering a word Aspen had not accepted.
A decision settled behind the green. High Priestess’s hand rose to Aspen’s mouth with the same cleanliness as the hand of someone reaching for a bandage already folded to the right size.
This time her fingers rotated the old shape. Two fingers set themselves right below Aspen’s mouth, with a middle finger rising above her lips, forming a plain upright triangle.
Aspen understood that difference only after her jaw had already begun to obey the geometry.
Her jaw loosened under the hand. Her lips parted. Her teeth clicked once before High Priestess’s fingers corrected them. Aspen tried to bite down again and found her jaw answering late, like the order had to travel through water.
“▵Á Carthanna, hidden bearer, stand where the eye cannot enter.”
High Priestess spoke as she worked, the words low and even, and there was no anger in the sound to push against. Anger would have given Aspen a wall. This gave her a pressure in the bones. The woman’s thumb lifted, the fingers guided, and Aspen’s mouth opened wider.
She tried to make her throat close. She tried to make her tongue huge, tried to fill the whole mouth with it, tried to turn her face far enough that the finger would meet cheek instead of entry. Her neck strained until a hot line opened under the jaw.
“í speak as witness, not thief. í come as you know me best, High Priestess.”
Something small entered on the wet pad of High Priestess’s finger.
Aspen’s whole body refused. Her feet scraped against the wood, looking for floor enough to push from. Her wings knocked once, twice, too many limbs answering in panic. She grabbed High Priestess’s hand with both of hers and tried to peel the fingers off her face.
The shell touched the back of her mouth.
Her tongue rammed forward and struck skin, finger, shell, everything at once. Saliva pooled fast enough to make the back of her mouth slick, and the soft-shelled thing pressed past the part of the mouth that knew food. Into the far tenderness near the wisdom-tooth root, where the gum had a deep, private ache under the surface.
“Let this work have no face. Let this work have no hunger for witness. Let her keep her shape.”
The shell gave against her flesh. Aspen felt the tiny yield of it and then the steady insistence underneath, a pressure with direction, choosing sideways and upward instead of down. Her body waited to swallow. Her throat kept making the first motion of it, again and again, and nothing traveled.
Aspen tried to cough it loose. The cough hit the held-open shape of her jaw and came apart, thin and humiliating, more spit than sound. She dragged her tongue along the gum, searching for an edge, anything to hook and fling out.
The shell tucked itself higher, away from her reach, with a terrible patience.
“If it holds, let none see the holding. If it opens, let none steal the eye. If it mends, let none call the scar obedience.”
High Priestess’s face remained close. A tear had dried in a pale line near her mouth; another shone lower, caught at the jaw. Her eyes did not ask Aspen to understand. They watched the placement, the gag, the tightening of the wings, and confirmed whatever diagnosis had brought her hand here.
“▵Á Carthanna, carry what must not be displayed. Make it known by its weight.”
The finger withdrew slowly.
Aspen lunged after it with her teeth, too late. Her jaw snapped shut on nothing, then opened again on a gag she could not complete. She jammed her tongue back into the corner of her mouth, scraping for the thing, trying to worry it loose like food stuck between teeth.
“What did you fucking—” she started, already leaning forward, and then her tongue pressed into the back corner of her mouth and found the wrong softness under the gum.
The room lost its edges. The gray wood, the mushroom glow, the damp gleam on High Priestess’s cheeks all stayed exactly where they were, but Aspen’s memory moved as if a hook had caught it by the root. In her mind, she could see the act from above and beside herself.
High Priestess opened the girl’s mouth. High Priestess placed the small thing near the gum. The girl gagged. The girl’s wings tightened. The girl’s hands gripped silk. The report held together until Aspen tried to put herself inside the girl, and then the disgust surged up to block the door.
High Priestess’s words resounded in her head. Let her keep her shape.
Her tongue pressed again. Saliva flooded around it. The soft weight stayed high near the hinge of the jaw, and every attempt to think this is inside me turned into the same clean voice speaking over a body that had already been handled.
The shell fed her an older poison instead. Her mind returned to a white sleeve, paper sheet, and a palm held out with a stethoscope in it, careful and dry.
Dr. Halloran.
High Priestess’s invocation had used the same shape. She had spoken while she entered Aspen’s mouth. She had named witness, named theft, named holding, named scar, and every word had arrived after her fingers had already decided where Aspen’s jaw belonged.
“You explain while you do it.”
The sentence came out flat enough to sound practiced. Aspen looked at the woman in black and found the doctor in the posture, in the calm, in the terrible belief that a soft voice made the hand less absolute.
High Priestess’s tears sat in their tracks like part of the ceremony. Aspen’s own eyes burned, then spilled, and the tears came hot and disorderly down her face, cutting through the spit at her lips while her tongue kept worrying the back gum and finding the shell still there.
“You sound just like him.” The shell did not explain. It guided.
Her hands rose and caught High Priestess’s robe. The cloth was black. Aspen knew it was black. It bunched dark between her fingers, heavy and strange, but the fold nearest the wrist flashed white in the wet blur of her eyes and her body accepted the wrong color with sick relief.
White coat. Clean room. Adult voice. Procedure. She yanked the fabric toward her and hit at it with the heel of her other hand, a short useless blow that landed on cloth and bone and then cloth again.
“Do you think you’re special?” The flatness in her voice tore loose all at once.
“Do you think you’re safe because you sound like that? Because you stand there with your—your face like you’re sorry and your hand still does it?”
She shook the robe until High Priestess’s sleeve snapped in her fist. “I’m going to college, Dr. Halloran. I’m going to be in your chair. I’ll get a job. I’ll know all the words, and you won’t get to—”
Aspen saw the fist before she understood the sentence.
It was hers, or it belonged to the body that was answering for her again, bunched in High Priestess’s robe with a twist of black fabric caught between the long fingers. The sleeve looked black when she looked directly at it. It kept trying to go white at the edge of sight.
He’s not here.
The thought was small and exact, and because it was exact, it slipped past the bigger panic. Dr. Halloran had never heard those threats. He had never seen her like this. She had never grabbed his coat, never shaken him, never told him she would go to college and stand above him one day with the words on her side.
That had been a private revenge, the kind she made later when the appointment was over, when the paper sheet was gone, when she had enough language to imagine a version of herself who could have used it.
High Priestess’s face steadied in front of her through the tears in Aspen’s eyes. Aspen looked at the green eyes, the black gown, the mouth that had spoken Carthanna’s name. She looked until the white coat weakened and the black sleeve stayed black, though some part of the doctor still clung under the woman’s calm.
Her tongue moved before she meant to move it, pressing back to the hidden place near the rear gum.
The shell answered by being there. The touch of it did not stay itself. Each time her tongue found the hidden softness, the room searched for an older room to become. Wood became painted wall. Black cloth tried for white. High Priestess’s voice kept its accent, its foreign vowels, its prayer-shape, and still Aspen’s mind kept pressing another mouth over it until the fit almost held.
A fresh wave of disgust went through her, and this time it brought a line of sense with it. She realized the fury had turned, found an old hallway in her head, and started using furniture from another life.
She loosened the robe and made herself look straight at High Priestess, using the woman’s eyes as a nail to pin the room in place.
It worked. Partly.
“Are the meds making me do this?”