I remember waking. It was either that night after seeing the Angel or shortly after. In those days, I slept in the arms of my mother, and it was to wetness that I woke. Young as I was, I assumed it was my own piss. But then I heard the moan of my mother and felt the shuffling of bodies. My mother moving rapidly, cursing beneath her breath, my LoPa and HoPa asking what was wrong.

  My mother pushed us all away. My fathers, unwanted. Me, forgotten. When I’m feeling generous, I tell myself she was saving me from the gruesomeness of the event. At least that’s what would come to my mind until I had my own miscarriages and understood that all your thoughts are for that little dying baby slipping out of you in floods of blood.

  I remember my naked mother bathed in the light of seven moons covered from the waist down in blood. Wailing into the night, her hands that tried to hold my unborn sister inside covered with the blood that would have been theirs had they been born. I watched my mother collapse to her knees and cover her face in her bloody hands, her screams echoing in my head and through my life as the howls of some creature not quite god but no longer human. A sound I would come to know so well. A sound I dreaded for so long but now find myself missing.

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  It was HoPa, finally, who went to her and wrapped his big arms around her. LoPa pulled my fingers from my mouth. The tips were gnarled and raw from me chewing on them. He scooped me up and sighed heavily.

  My brothers did not ask what was happening. I think they had seen this before. My mother bleeding away the life of a sought after child.

  “The fucking Angel,” I heard my mother’s voice bite off the words. “That godfucking Angel.”

  Perhaps it was a curse she brought down upon herself, that brutal mutilation that would come. The one that would define her life and my own, and my daughters and this whole fucking crumbling empire.

  In the morning First Mother arrived to speak with my mother but my mother refused to see her. My brothers and I watched her from the garden atop our home. She was so small and seemed so frail, wrapped in the skin of a wolfgod.

  She raised her face and saw us. Akmuo and Medis slipped away down the backside of our home but I stood tall, looking down on First Mother. I knew nothing of her or the culture of my own people, but I knew she was an enemy of my mother, and that was enough. Staring down petulantly at the leader of my people, I felt nothing but anger. In that moment, it seemed her fault that my mother should suffer so. And so I blamed her because I could not blame a god.

  Even then, I knew the Angel cared nothing for us. Didn’t even know we existed.

  But First Mother was here, real, right before my eyes. And if not her to blame, then who?

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