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She remembers it being loud before becoming. She thinks it had been quiet, very quiet, for so long before. Then she had felt it, the sound, taking over her, taking over everything and then she had been awakened.
It had hurt.
“It feels better biting down,” someone says as they push a piece of leather into her mouth.
It’s a strange body to get used to. So small. So fragile. She still feels the phantom of others, older and stronger bodies. This one never feels like it is quite enough.
The monks teach her how to use the body. To walk. To eat. To talk. To fight.
Fighting. Her body never keeps up with the fighting.
“It feels better biting down,” they say again when they sow the hole in her side shut, the hole that tore her skin as she had rammed her body through the sword of her petrified teacher.
“You need to give your body time to grow. You might be able to take it, but it will not. There are limits to your mortality,” they say when she breaks every bone in her body jumping down from a cliff.
That one hurt so much she stopped testing the limits.
She tells the monks about this revelation.
“Disappointing,” she says, and they only smile.
“It’s needed Lokapala. You’re the worldly protector but he is just a boy. An ansa.”
They tell her about Parakul. Pran. Her mission. Her purpose. The boy who has had the misfortune to be born as a partial incarnation of Mother Earth.
“Get him to Ayutthaya. Make sure he survives. Until.”
“Until?”
“You will know.”
She has only seen brief glimpses of the text on the tablet the monks keep hidden. The prophecy. She has not been awake for long but she has lived many lives and she knows. She knows prophecies. The price of peace has always been death and destruction.
“Disappointing,” she says. The monks don’t smile then.
“This is your purpose. The only reason you have been called into being.”
It feels better biting down. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t ask anything when the time finally comes. She goes to Martaban and it takes death and destruction to get her there too. The annihilation of a royal family, a lost boy, a mother blinded by grief and rage and paranoia, destined to sow more of the same.
But she finds Pran. A pudgy kid swallowed by a barrel of rice. He smiles and reaches for her with fingers that barely open. She pulls him into her completely inadequate arms.
He's crying but it only makes her smile. Smile for the first time in this life time.
Something bites at her ankle. She recognizes him immediately.
“The monks really didn’t leave anything to chance huh?” she says as she shifts Pran onto her shoulder and bends down to sniff Shin’s head. He’s smaller than she’s used to but his eyes haven’t changed. The smell of grass on his fur calms her.
She finds a safe place for them to wait. Safe but hidden. They need to hide before the mother finds them first.
Aunt Payao is a kind soul. She recognizes her too.
“What is that you’re here to do this time?” Aunt Payao asks.
She nods towards Pran, sitting between them, trying to desperately climb on Shin. He’s teasing him, letting him drop from his back too many times. Shin seems to adore Pran and she wonders what she missed in the days it had just been Shin and Pran.
“I see. Who is he?”
She shakes her head.
“And you? What should I call you?”
She shakes her head again.
“I’ll call you Ink,” she says while reaching a hand towards her, eyes staring out the window she doesn’t see.
She takes her hand into hers.
“Will you take care of him?” Aunt Payao asks, voice weary but hopeful.
She doesn’t say anything. What is taking care if it’s only until? What is taking care if she only prolongs the inevitable?
She sighs. She’s so tired. She’s only ever served gods, miserable beings with so little care for anything around them. It hadn’t mattered before. She had done what she had needed to. What she had been asked to do. What else is there? There’s nothing else there, in her.
But Pran is no god. Pran is ansa avatar. Pran is a baby.
From the way Aunt Payao squeezes her hand, she thinks she understands.
It takes years of waiting, years looking after a baby that seems to stumble into love with everything he finds, a baby that loves so much that he makes things grow into being out of thin air, years of her being consumed by this little life she has made, years of her trying to forget who she is, what she is, and what she needs to do. But she doesn’t and when the king of Ayutthaya finally arrives, she finds him. He pretends to not see her, a simple girl in rags, and she is not surprised. She’s prepared for it.
“Maybe you would be interested in seeing the future king of Toungoo. Phra Mae Thorani lives in him,” she whispers to him, bending the air around them a little more than necessary, a little push of persuasion. She tells this to him, something she hasn’t told anyone, and the wave of nausea the words spark in her almost make her stumble.
It’s imperative that Pran doesn’t know, the monks had said.
Ming is a necessary evil, the monks had said.
There always needs to be a necessary evil. Telling Ming, a pathetic, sad, weak man a secret she’s kept, and will keep, from Pran, who has blindly put all his faith in her, makes her wonder if she’s a necessary evil too. She’s never thought about that before.
She takes Ming to Aunt Payao’s house, and she can see from his eyes that he believes her. The calculations he makes when he sees the paradise growing around Aunt Payao's house. He knows now. She knows he will carry the weight of that knowledge for the rest of his life, of him knowing and choosing so wrongly, and she knows he will crumble underneath that pressure. She could comfort him by saying it was the only choice he was ever going to make in any universe, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel sad for him. She feels sad for them when Pran cries as he’s ripped away from Aunt Payao’s arms.
She has to shake herself. Sadness is a strange feeling to feel. It sticks on her skin uncomfortably. She wipes at the sweat gathering on the inside of her elbow, pushes Ming aside and pulls Pran with her.
Ming is exactly the kind of man she had thought he would be.
Pat. Pat is nothing like she thought he would be.
A killer? The killer? What is a killer? The word tastes so wrong.
Doubt seeps into her heart like a bloody knife. She briefly wonders if she should carve her heart out and ask it what is this now but she doesn’t think her body would actually survive that.
She has doubts. She sees Pat and Pat is no killer.
Pat wants to protect Pran and Ink knows Pran enough to know he stumbled into love as soon as Pat took a hold of his hand in front of all the eyes of the palace on them. When Pat laughs with his whole body and Ink watches Pran watch him, his eyes reveal all the secrets he thinks he could keep from her.
“What do we do now?” she asks Shin. He doesn’t answer. He never does. He just follows her, just like he is meant to.
Who are they to decide what happens? Who are they but tools to be used? Who are they?
She keeps doing what she is meant to do. She watches Pran grow, she watches him take all the things he feels, and he feels so many things, and keep creating things out of thin air with the strength of his love. She feels something aching to pride when she watches him. She sees her too, Mother Earth, push him and push him and it makes him more careful. It upsets Ink. She has never cared before, but Pran is no god. Pran is just a boy. She wishes Pran could just be a boy.
She teaches Pat how to fight so he can better protect Pran and she does it because she has doubts and he’s no killer. She worries about what she is actually teaching him to do but when she looks into his eyes, the honesty in them scares her a little. She has never seen anything like it before. She has never met anyone like him before in this life or the ones before them. She’s scared. She’s scared for him.
She’s scared for all of them.
Ink grabs at her heart that feels like it’s going to lurch out of her chest.
“P’Ink, are you alright?”
Pa has sat down next to her. Her heart lurches again. Pa touches her hand softly, so softly Ink barely feels it and yet it sends a spark of warmth through her entire body, the body she has only mostly tolerated.
“I’m fine,” she says through clenched teeth.
Pa tilts her head like seeing her from a different angle would make her understand her better.
“Really? You look troubled to me.”
Ink nods her head towards Pat and Pran pushing each other to the ground. They’re older now, stronger, almost men, and they could hurt each other. They do hurt each other.
The laughter makes her close her eyes.
What is peace without death and destruction?
She feels a hand touch her elbow now. Stronger this time. Pa’s fingers are long enough to encircle almost her whole arm.
It shocks her. It shocks her into the present. She takes a deep breath and lets her body feel everything it needs to right now in this moment.
“I’m just so tired,” she says, carefully, telling Pa something she has never said out loud even though it’s what she feels almost all the time.
Shin whines in his place. He knows. She isn’t supposed to say that.
Pa doesn't stop smiling but her eyes turn hesitant. It makes Ink reckless.
“I’m always tired.”
Pa’s face does something weird then. She stops smiling. She turns her whole body towards Ink. She looks contemplative as she touches her cheek. Ink’s breath catches in her throat.
“Well. I hope you find some peace of mind in this lifetime. It seems to me like you’ve done enough.”
Ink has to close her eyes again. She wants to cry. She feels it in her throat, the painful contradictions, the pressure that feels like she’s swallowed rocks, the warmth that leaves her stomach turning and turning until it morphs into nausea, how her eyes sting like Pa had thrown salt into them.
She doesn’t cry. She’s not sure if she’s capable of crying. She only breathes.
She thinks about Pa’s words for a long time. She thinks about them every day.
Who am I really? What am I really? A tool?
Or someone. A being that’s done enough.
It’s hard to feel anything but what she has always felt. For thousands of years, she has only done what she is supposed to do. That is what she was made to do. But she’s so tired and she feels uncomfortable and contradictory and itchy and mad and alive. The wall erected by those thousands of years between her and feelings seems less imposing. More like an old crumbling thing.
Something must have gone wrong this time when they called her into being.
She thinks about Pa and Pa’s words and then there’s a monk in front of her telling things to Pran and Pat he is supposed to not tell. Things they are not supposed to know and things that she has never heard before.
Ink doesn’t like his eyes. They are dishonest eyes. She wants to take a knife to his heart and ask it what is this now?
But he had said protect each other. Protect each other? Maybe that had always been the answer. She feels the ground beneath her feet shake and shift as an ancient prophecy is derailed from its path.
She knows what she needs to do now. For her. For them. For her family.
To find some peace of mind in this lifetime.
She needs to find Pran’s mother.
**