Voron

A woman who has carried the secret of her destiny since birth. We join her as she is about to complete her task. As secret watchers, we see her life through her eyes.

Voron

By

Adele Marie Park

I remember my Grandmother's face obscured by the steam from the boiling kettle as she tore up leaves and chopped roots that would steep in the bowl and become the magical elixir that kept the nightmares and fevers from me.

“The world is changing Iskra Voron, our Mother will be bloodied and battered as the unknown rage across her lands.”

I kneel in the snow, her words ringing around me. I can no longer cry, but I can bleed. I cut my skin open and watch with a dark fascination as it drops onto the jewelled snow, it is partially absorbed but still stands out violent against assimilation. That is poignant, it is what I am. A stain on the otherwise pristine landscape, a relic of the past which will not lie down and die.

Born on the cusp of a planetary alignment my mother almost lost her life giving birth to me. So much blood poured from her body that I was born a red devil, screaming and kicking. Grandmother took charge and immediately banished the maidens and those who were not family. She washed me in holy water and recited the old prayers over me. Apparently I was appeased and fell asleep.

I have been on this earth for over a hundred years. I am tired and have wanted to die many times, but can not. My purpose makes a slave of me, chained to it and by it. Grandmother I need you, I am weak. Too much dust has stuck to my skin. Born in this human body, I am subject to a human's thoughts, desires and rages. I laugh out loud, they turn their heads then turn away again, such is the sickness they have inherited. Rages, What do they know of rages? Puny little creatures shown the open door yet, they cower in their familiar corner.

I get to my feet, walk on across the snow. I have always loved the snow. Blood on the snow, innocent blood that sealed my fate to this moment.

Grandmother and I were chopping dried herbs. The winter was deep, we had both felt the tremors shift in our hearts long before Mikhail burst through our door like the devil was after him. Grandmother put her knife down and sighed. That sound filled my head with the noise of a thousand ravens.

“The Tsar, his family, all murdered.” He had been running, the sweat had frozen on his beard. My mother screamed and nearly dropped my little sister. Their reactions were to be expected. Here in the country, we were a lifetime away from the sounds of the people's revolution. It changed everything, it changed us all and only Grandmother and I knew the truth. Those events had heralded in the beginning of the end.

“Is there no turning back?” My bed was high up in the attic rafters. Cosy and tucked in with blankets and love. Grandmother smiled and softly wiped a tear from my face. I knew the answer.

I wipe my own tears, mingling the blood from my cut on my finger. No one pays attention to the lone woman wearing black mourning clothes from the past, weeping quietly on her way somewhere, they do not care where. The glamorous, the sterile, the frightened, the poor, they have no sight left to them and little voice.

Memories of him come to tempt me. His eyes were so dark they were almost black. He saw deep

into me, he knew who I was. Destroyer, he called me his saviour. Yes, I loved him, his eyes

haunt me even now, the eyes of Christ. Understanding, affixing no blame. He was just a man, in the end, an empty shell with all that knowledge that had burned like a bright flame, extinguished by my blade.

“Go to the mother,” I whispered to him. A few tracked me down over the years but none was like him. He fell in love with me and my gift to him was an easy death, held in my arms till she came for him. Understanding shining in his eyes until they dulled.

“Will you still understand when I do what I must do?” I falter and go down in the snow again, my knees hit the pavement and I fall forward. Someone talks to me, I raise my head and they back away. I can not hide what I am, what I must do anymore.

“Bozye, pomogi mne”

I get to my feet, frown as I look down, blood on the snow, my blood. I mumble the prayer again and tumble on. My defences down I feel all your pain and I cry constantly, I who had no more tears left inside me. This terrible, terrible, hurt, the vacancy of love, the blindness. Oh, they have kept you well in the dark. Subtle like creeping darkness, they blinded you all with your own hope. Hands reach for me, I brush them away. You can not touch me, be wary, be awake for soon all will be quiet. Da, all quiet.

I look upward as I sense a holy presence. Priest. I am at the steps of the golden church. My eyes flow with tears of blood. He knows. God, you punish me. The priest has my lover's brown eyes, they are his eyes. Understanding and acceptance, he reaches out with his hand, my leather bound fingers take his and I am given strength. Destiny's peace flow through me, I am aware of time slowing down, people wondering briefly what is happening on the snow-covered steps of the church. I am at his side and he whispers love in my ear.

The doors swing open, the smell of piety and incense fills me. I stand for a moment like a black raven, widow of the world. My steps echo down the path towards the tortured son of God. His plaster eyes will not turn towards me, offering a last reprieve, I have none.

The breath leaves me in a rush as I am again on my knees. Sweet silence yet filled with the voices of the remembered. I begin what I have spent a hundred years or more practising. The words fill the space, the mantra in an ancient tongue that was my birth right. Power builds in me, words, I release them alike arrows.

Silence, pure across the world, perhaps lovers share a smile, a kiss in this perfect moment. My soul, my heart would crack asunder as a child when I heard the sweet, pitch-perfect hymns of the church. That time ended with the change but no one told the birds. Their hymns rang upward and around me every day. The ravens flew to my side. The guardians of all our final resting place. No stranger to bones or death, we shared a bond that went beyond the earth.

We stayed silent, they sang, as we dug the graves, one by one. Grandmother recited the ancient and we were left alone. We were no threat to the new order or even to the old. We grew in the shadows like mistletoe on an oak. Graveyard blossoms, white and bleached like the skull atop the old votive cross, no one disturbed it, so peacefully it remained part of the old world while heralding in the new each morning.

There are no ravens to comfort me in this moment, they like all the birds, have fled. The silence spreads, the hush of a vortex about to open. I feel the tremor begin, a lamp swings and it's creaking breaks the silence like a lightening bolt from a summer storm.

There is a sudden blast of heat, so intense that I know it will melt everything in it's path. Ancient cleansing rage and white heat that blasts me and everything into oblivion. I hear screams now and I turn sightless eyes high above.

“I have been your weapon, now bring me home.”

The light is like a feather tickling my eyelids, brushing me to watchfulness. I smile because such a welcome can only mean that I am home.

“Home, at last.” My lips feel wet, my tongue licks them, I can hear it rasp over skin. I can hear this but nothing else. I can feel a sadness, it causes me to choke then I am crying like a baby just born. Do I sit up? Can I? I do not know?

“I do not know. Someone? Mother help me.” My voice sounds harsh to my ears like the ravens sounded to the others. I must sit up, I must open my eyes. I do not want to. No, keep eyes shut. The light, the light is so strong. I open my eyes.

“No. Oh no, no, no.” I scramble, rubble breaks into powder under my fingers, my feet cause clouds of dust to rise. I am on my feet, boots, my boots. I turn around and there is nothing to see but miles and miles of dust, destruction.

“No. You cheated me. I was meant to die.” To my knees again, the pain is real, my bloodied hands are real.

“I am alive. Oh, God I am alive.” Frightened by the truth I can only whisper. Perhaps if I do not say it aloud it will not be so.

I am awake again. I do not know how long I slept, does it matter? No, nothing does now. To my feet then, walk. All around there is nothing left. No life but me. I laugh then I can not stop I look at the sky, it is yellow and very angry

“Ha sky, the weapon lives. Only the weapon.”

“You can not have a life like the others, Iskra.” My Grandmother's voice is gentle yet like a steel which I have come to know, will not break.

“Why? Why can I not love and feel love and break up on the passion of it all?”

“Oh, Iskra.” Her touch is the only comfort I can bare.

“You would break them, child.”

Am I crying? I do not know. My face is wet. Perhaps my feet bleed? More laughter. If there was anything left they would know I have gone mad.

“Am I? Of course, I am.” Stumble. Laugh. Fall. Get up. Walk on.

“I can not love you. You know what I am.” But his arms are still around me, his lips against my face.

“Tell them all to go to hell, just be with me.” But it was I who sent him to hell, the only man I had ever fallen for and felt him break my passion. I took my knife across his throat as he looked in my eyes. He still called me his saviour.

“No, this madness hurts. I do not like it.”

There is no night, no day, no divisions anymore, so I descend deeper into madness. And now, there are the bodies. Twisted and blackened they are strangely beautiful. Glistening sculptures which if touched cascade and remind me of ravens taking flight. Laughter and madness have now stopped instead I become clear headed. The destruction where I was is absolute. A blank canvas for Shiva to start painting on again. How many times has this happened? How many weapons have there

been? I start talking to Kali, praying, talking, shouting. It is as if the truth of what I have done has renewed the old faith inside me. Ironic now that they are all gone, ironic that I feel more human than I have ever done.

The storm comes from nowhere and yet the second it appeared I fell to my knees afraid that it was he, the destroyer of worlds, coming to take me. Before I longed for death, now? The wind is sharp enough to strip skin, I huddle in a ball afraid to look upward. I wake to peace, for a second. No, I am still on this blackened plain of nothingness. I wipe crusts of skin and dust off my face and carry on. Stumble, shuffle, think.

I am now delusional. I can see a black speck coming towards me. It is growing as it comes towards me or I to it. Closer, curious. Movement in the air. Ravens. My newly found sanity cracks and I am again a crying baby. They are flying, they are on the wing.

“I knew you would not abandon me.” Their answering cry builds inside me like a tidal wave of joy. Their wings spread outward and peel away like a cloak to reveal?

I stare into dark eyes. Kali, Mother, Grandmother? Grandmother. My hands reach out, the ravens envelop me, their softness, warmth, oh the warmth. The voice, of the nurturer, the mother, the giver, the forgiver.

“Iskra Voron we have a long way to travel come darling child.”

Warm blankets tucked in with love, sweet love. Falling into feathers, love in a shiny black button eye, a smooth strong beak.

“Babushka.”

Reviews

[Matthew Ian Herrawood W]

To be absolutely honest I don't understand most of this. In saying that I think I understand some of the general concept. To fully and properly understand this I need it either written differently or the story before this moment and some translations wouldn't go astray either. There are some good descriptions but in the end I don't know what's a description and what is actually there. Two of the biggest mistakes I see alot are writers that either under-describe as in they tell us what's happening but don't describe it, or over-describe, describe too much. There is never too much describing in poetry but this is a story. Am I missing something? Did I misread a word that will clear everything up?