PodCastle

* Author : Sara S. Messenger
* Narrator : Cherrae L. Stuart
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
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Previously published by Fantasy Magazine (Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol. 2, 2023, Pyr Books)


Rated PG-13
Potemora in the Triad
By Sara S. Messenger
 
There are always three: the father, the unfather, and the child. That’s why Vriskiaab threw my unfather off his back after she bore my baby sister, or so Vriskiaab tells me when he stops in the shade of a dune, his massive scales warm under my calves and the tail of him stretching behind me for leagues. My baby sister is soft and crimson-tacky in the crook of my arm.
I cup her warm, wobbly head. Her birth shook the earth, and the sand shakes under us still.
We have no milk, I say.
Hush, child, says Vriskiaab, his voice a thrumming coil under my heels. That infant is not ours. Your unfather left me a riddle, and now I must solve it.
I don’t care much for the balance of our triad, but the earth will crack open unless he solves it, so I hug my sister to my chest. Her cries are so shrill, and they ring like struck ceramic.

Things I will say to my baby sister, come the end of the world: If you need to kill me, I don’t mind if you watch me kneel; and, vultures flock in odd dozens, and cactus fruit come in fours or seven, and you have two tiny moles under your left eye; and, I don’t care that you have a different father because we tread in the desert the same.

Vriskiaab names my sister Baaiksirv. This quiets the rumbling under our feet, but not entirely; some of the canyons we pass have already collapsed, and there are no altar-men where instead exists rubble. Vriskiaab goes without his slain offerings and drinks from a nearby river, muddier than befitting him, and he filters it as he trickles it down the length of his back to the ridged hood under which I live.
The water is cool and silty, and my tears hot, my mind empty.
Father. Unfather. Child.
My unfather’s stories never depicted a triad with a hole inside.
My father cradles my sister in his mouth, in a birthing pocket behind his fang. His eyes are hooded in consternation. The ground shudders still, but we are not bereft, yet.
It will be two years before I see Baaiksirv again.

Baaiksirv will smell like venom, a sharp, sour smell that rises from her soft cheeks and hair, but mostly her suckling mouth. Unlike me, she will have round pupils, and no scales anywhere, not even in a thin line down her spine. In that way, she is just like our unfather.

When I turn twelve, I will sneak off my father’s back during that rare time he is deeply sleeping, after he fondly observes one of his festivals. It will be a relief to get away from the endless hazy sand and the distant chime of diamond sparring against bone. I wear a deep cloak because the cities are unfriendly to things that look almost-human, and I get moderately drunk for the first time, even though it tastes somewhat like my prodigious sister smells.
It will be the first time I encounter a double history. Slumped in the shadows of the beer-merchant’s iron tent, the constant tremor of the earth a gentle ring up the walls, I listen to an elderly orator quarrel with a young woman about how the festival story goes.
It is the same everywhere, with minor variations, the orator says.