i am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
Once, these were the charges brought against her people: one, the use of midnight orgies like the Ansyri of Syria; two, dalliance with the Queen Semiramis, leading to excess of debauchery and lust; three, the worship of evil, otherwise known in myriad religions as 'the devil'.
They've never managed to escape the last claim. It's not worship, though. It's acceptance; the devil is in everything, and she will never go away.
The streets of her city are plagued with unrest, but Fatima Soltanzadeh walks home alone after midnight, a young woman with her hair neatly tied back and no scarf, her chin lifted, expression a delicately sculpted mask of calm, finely hewn with high cheekbones and large, expressive eyes. In the old buildings around her, men make plans over tables and hoard silver pistols underneath their clothes, waiting for any excuse to let the red glint of their passion and their frustrated rage jump out of their flesh in physical form, and she doesn't even think it's about justice, but rather that they are exactly the same as the universe that bore them: always expanding, and so whatever is in their hearts grows deeper and larger with the years. If it's stillness and entropy, that is what builds; if it's love and kindness, that, too, is what builds, though while she appreciates these things she also feels they do not lend themselves to dynamic truth.
And that is the difficulty with the quest of truth-seekers, she decides, watching dispassionately as two men stumble out of a bar and blearily look around in the dimly lit night, the moon shining three-quarters full and serene up above them, patient and persistent in her folding-unfolding-folding eternal dance. The stars are not really visible, but she knows their presence just the same as these men sense hers immediately, like pheremones catching in the air. Fatima has always been beautiful, dark-haired and dark-eyed, full-lipped and so tall that even men who are made uncomfortably threatened by a woman just slightly over six feet in her woven sandals, one who rises above even them--well, they look, too, if only because she stands out so much.
"Are you lost?" They speak in Turkish, and come loping over slowly, half-intent, half-languid. "You must be lost to be out so late by yourself."
She doesn't respond verbally, not at first, but rather observes placidly for a few moments--and then something clicks into place before they can jeer at her again.
"Grey Wolves," she says out loud, her voice curling like white smoke into the cool night air. "Will you walk home with me?"
It's funny, really. Often she must draw the members of their organization (young ultra-nationalist proponents of European purity in a country where everyone is so mixed that is genuinely impossible) to her in groups with the power of her mind and the glint of brown skin in the sunlight, but at night--at night they are all looking for something, and her persistently polite approach can often at least temporarily confuse even the most determined proponent of sexual harassment. She is never angry, and she sweetly inquires as to their names, their ages, their families; she makes peaceful conversation and offers anecdotes pertaining to her profession and her dancing, at which she says, with perfect certainty, she is the best. All the women in her family are, and they have no real competition.
"Prove it," one of them says, and she inclines her head, demure and acquiescing, her lashes casting shadows over her cheeks in the yellowing streetlamp near her small home, shared with her husband (presently out, which is probably convenient). For the first time, she smiles, if not quite at them, and she opens the door to let them in. They look at each other, wide-eyed, and laugh like schoolboys before they follow her down the steps.
From there she finds them each neatly handled, though less effectively than if she'd been able to poison them as she prefers to do with groups. The second is half-asleep, too drunk to even properly enjoy whatever he believed she was promising, and she punctures the throat of the first while in the kitchen with a thought and no knife necessary. He is so startled and horrified that he only has time to wheeze witch before he crumples to the floor, and it's only the vitaekinetic prowess inside her that keeps crimson from spilling onto wood. These are the practicalities she must consider, although probably she could have just stopped his heart and cut off the electricity sending synapses snapping through his brain, he would not have had time to consider himself before he died that way.
He should make his peace. It is her right to execute him for what he has done and the organization with which he has allied himself, but she wouldn't deny him his moment of truth with God's Angel. She hopes he found it, and she kneels, tucking her long, plain brown skirts around her legs, modest even around a dying man, rolling him gently onto his back. His eyes stare up at her, seeing her face mirrored and wrapped in white glow emitted from common, inexpensive kitchen lamps. The fear and the terror and the awe in them is how men looked at her ancestors, and she is briefly, quietly satisfied in this.
It's selfish, but it passes.
"Witches," she tells him, softly, "are common, if you knew where to look. They're also human. They need weapons. I need nothing but myself."
It's bold, as she often is, but is said with no arrogance.
He dies after a few minutes, and a sound of demands made ("what's taking you so long?") from the other young soldier in the parlor distracts her. Fatima cocks her head to one side, blandly attentive, and rises to wash her hands in the sink, staining the water inside pinkish-red before she returns to see to her guest.
"Your friend is on the kitchen floor," Fatima informs him, a little dryly.
"He should drink less. But it's his loss, isn't it?" His hands find her hips very quickly, despite his inebriated state, as she stands in front of him, and her heart, which very much belongs to her husband and herself, does not approve, crying out in her chest, but her mind is aware that some small moment of concession is necessary. So she permits him to touch her, pressing one unpainted fingertip underneath his chin to tip his face up. "You're such a pretty thing--not ungainly at all, you wear your height well. But why are you so solemn? Don't you laugh?"
She considers the question.
"Not really," Fatima says, with a glimmer of a smile, and when she passes her hand over the side of his face, his head lolls to one side, eyes closing.
He's not dead, though. She thinks she would like this one to be awake for a little bit longer. Vice is an acceptable pursuit if one wears it well, as she does her height, but he seems to have let it carry him away, and therefore she would like to permit him more time in which to consider his lifestyle before it ends permanently.
So: when he wakes, he is bound to a table in her basement. It is two hours later, and the pretty young woman he met on the street is wearing a blood-splattered apron, her dark hair tied back from her face, her expression carefully intent as she purposefully applies a large saw to flesh and bone, removing the arm of the man she killed earlier from his torso. One quick look around the room reveals that the dark, sparsely lit basement is entirely insulated, and, he recognizes, with a sinking sense, like his stomach has dropped through the floor, this is not the first time this has happened here. Her lure was so harmless that he should have mistrusted it from the start. A large bath sits in the center of the room, the sort a well-off lady might use, the plumbing around it exposed, the porcelain chipped, though notably it is not in any way stained. She's much too meticulous about her household for that, he knows already.
He is tied down by the arms and legs, the knots thick and done up tight enough to verge on cutting off his circulation, and his voice, when he attempts to cry out, is little more than a hoarse rasp. Fatima lifts her head, and when she looks at him it's as though he does not exist, or as though he is as perfunctory to the environment as the table he's upon. She heaves a sigh, and the look in her eyes changes to something kinder as she sets the saw down, wiping her hands off on her old apron when she goes to regard him from a closer angle, measuring the span of his bones with her hands, methodical and practiced.
"You think I'm a monster," she notes, matter-of-factly, not bothering to meet his eyes, "but it's only practicality. I must hide your bodies. The basement contains the smell of death, and the acid melts your flesh. I will not do this to you while you are alive, please understand that, I don't torture."
Dozens of the men in the Wolves go missing every year, which is the risk they run for their lifestyles and extremist political views. Some of them run away, or some of them are captured by their political enemies and are never found again--and it's a pained rush when he recognizes this is exactly what is happening to him, only it's at the hands of a woman. A Kurd, at that, but now he notices how she is so tall and how she moves with such unthinking precision, as though her feet don't quite touch the ground but rather she is guided to some greater purpose by the currents of the air.
"Are you a Muslim?"
He nods, uncertain.
"Good. Carry your faith with you wherever you go. Take it seriously. Religion may be politically used to enslave, but it is the rock that will see you through to the other side." The pause is weighty, and he has the sense that she is picking through him now, as though his mind is a book for her to read, this girl whose name he doesn't even know. "My faith was the first, you know. Zoroaster was inspired by us; Judaism and Christianity and Islam took their doctrines from us on judgment, resurrection, monotheism, many things. But we permitted it. There is flattery in being imitated, and those of us who know the truth--"
He cringes away when she touches his face again, smoothing her long nimble fingers over the side, so gentle, and it's not even a farce. "We will live forever. And so will you, one way or another. God is in you, but in your mortal flesh and innocent guise, he's an echo; a voice you sometimes hear. The pious may hear a choir, and the damned may hear the whisper of condemnation. But I don't hear it like that, because I am one facet of that voice. Do you understand?"
The blood in his veins runs heated, hotter, burning, and the sound he makes is animal red and half-frenzied, a flash of nothing like bones or bodies behind his eyes because the sound of her voice, her careful phrasing in their common language, it strikes him like an iron: the visions that coalesce are unnameable and colorless, but his heart--his heart is made of amber, it is dissolved, melted, malleable, God's clay. Hers. He doesn't realize he's been sobbing until he comes to a second time, still uncomfortably strapped to that table, the ropes rubbing his wrists raw. His eyes loll in their sockets, following invisible monsters, flickers of smoke and spirit, half-ensconsced in the second sight with which Fatima was born and with which she will die, if she does, if she's capable, he doesn't know if he believes she's even a little human right now because when he looks down at himself instead of his trousers and uniform shirt, all he sees is contamination. Rot, like half-melted black meat and sinew, is smeared from ankle to groin, and welts have sprung up over his suddenly bared chest, oozing something wet and clear and sick with filth.
This is the look of sin in a simple language he can understand: sight.
This is how she sees mankind, magic, hope, faith, prayer, all earthly things manifest, the spirit melded with the matter, the truth revealed and the body roughly pulled inside-out. The air in the basement is thickly electric, like the queen of all storms is just on the horizon.
"Yes," she murmurs, as he stares at the sight of his soul bared, "yes, I think you understand now. I could do this in groups, you know; it would take very little from me to destroy your organization in full, but you're all individuals. I may be the butcher of the Angels, but I must consider your potential. That's my duty."
She leans over him, carefully refraining from touching any of the stains she has exposed. "Do you want to be cleansed?"
There are tears in his eyes when he nods again, more anxiously this time, the undercurrent of please unspoken (he simply can't speak, she's done something to him), please I can't look at this anymore, I can't be this. So she takes another deep breath and unstraps him, and where before he would have run or fought her, now he can only tremble, so wrecked as he is by a glimpse of the divine. God is terrible; he can ravage and ruin as much as he can devise unthinkable beauty. 'Good' is a concept too simple for him and his peacock angel, but she doesn't think any of these new faiths have followers that comprehend as much.
They all just want to feel safe, confined as they are to five senses; men have the most in common with rabbits, she thinks, clever and quick but trembling. It takes so little to extinguish that fragile light inside them, even in the more vivacious ones who burn just a bit brighter. Monsters are foxes, and most warriors are wolves, and it is in honor of his station in life that she offers him the opportunity to die as purely as he was born, this Grey Wolf, this white-skinned son of Adam. So she lifts him like he weighs nothing, carrying him to the chipped porcelain bath, and his filth, it cannot touch her; of all things, she is pure. Fatima kneels by the side, a few errant strands of her long dark hair falling loose just so from her carefully situated bun, and she covers his eyes with her elegant brown hand.
"Talk to God," she tells him, and there is the scent of ash in the air, "talk to his Angel. I will carry your words."
She runs the tap, and the water runs clear and cold, straining through his clothes and over his gore-smudged face. He moans, as though it stings him, and writhes in the enormous bath, curling in on himself the way a child would. The things he says are hissed in between gritted teeth and half-keening, wind whipping through the shallow water, a dozen tiny tornados thrashing over its surface and rending his flesh. He bleeds in spasms and then a slow building drip, as though a stoppage in his veins has been erased, and she takes earth from a glass jar situated on the edge of one available table. His mouth is open, so she carefully cups her palm over it and forces the dirt inside, holding it there with great force until his eyes, wide and teary, shut in resignation, and he swallows.
"Almost there," she promises, compassion rising in her voice like a tide, "almost."
Fatima steps away only because her clothing is flammable even though she is not, and the fire that sparks red at first (red not like autumn leaves or poppies or perfume bottles or sweets or anything else comprehensible to a mortal mind, but something holy when holy meant awesome and awesome meant eternal, burning up the messy intricate brush of flesh and cellular disarray; this particular brand of hers would not touch trees, but it takes out a man in minutes) and then reaches a crescendo of cascading white, his body immolated in her forgiveness, in God's expression of self through the Bene Elohim.
She watches the bone as it melts into ash, and she closes her eyes against the heat of the flames inside her. Nothing is as satisfying as this; not the love of her husband, not the act of sex within her marriage, not even enthralling the masses while she takes the stage. Sometimes she wonders if she's missing what humanity struggles through every day, because as far removed as she is, she understands the beauty of what it makes them create, building so enthusiastically and unthinkingly and sometimes catastrophically on the world they were given--poetry and magic and mathematics and music and monsters (and almost all of those certainly wouldn't exist if men did not, drawn as they often are from the nightmares and brutal, shadowy desires of humanity's hidden demons). Their struggle toward understanding is one of the most enchanting and honest things she thinks she's ever seen, and by now she has seen most of creation, one way or another.
Still. She can have it, love it, crave it, but it can never satisfy her.
Fatima knows the truth, and it is that her crimes, her original sins, extend far beyond something so simple and paltry as mortal flesh with which she costumes herself, and sometimes she regrets her lack of innocence, hoping her children can taste it if she never will. The acid she uses to destroy most of the bodies and her holy fire for a contrite few seeking sanctuary are only symptoms of her strangeness; one day she'd like to believe none of this will be necessary, and that God's rabbits will have no need of anyone or anything like her. These people believe that the worst thing that could happen to them is a loss of love, or of death, because the scale in which they exist corresponds to these things, and for that she admires them, because in her heart she is not so sure. The storm on the horizon is not just of her own making, anymore, and she wonders for her descendants, for the daughter she'll bear after this war is over.
Hidden from mundane view or publicly bloody, she, with unquestionable foresight, knows there will be one more to top all of the ones that have come before, and it will decide everything. Lucky little wolves to know they'll never see it, to die believing at least their efforts were for the greater good.
Lucky her, to be of that lineage destined to play its part. Fatima turns back to her table, and picks up her blade. She doesn't need weapons, that wasn't a lie, but she'll use them when it suits her, because while she may never be part of humanity, this is the only way she knows how to understand them without cracking them open like fruit and taking away what's inside, which would only teach her hunger and them nothing but animal pleasure, at which they already excel--and to which she is no stranger, if she's truthful. She imagines there are others like her, strange, inhuman daughters of lust, but she can only consider her own task at hand.
The devil and goodness, she thinks, sawing into bone a second time, the sound dry and scraping; she is so used to it by now that she doesn't even flinch, shaking her head with a rueful, exhausted little smile, only mankind would think of a dichotomy so simple.
Bless them.
And, with a sigh, she does.