HEARTJACKER
In the future, there was nothing but ash, and the past was a world of light and steel and smooth concrete slabs. Once a courtier for a rotten king, she had been born into servitude, dressed in finery, no doubt, yet a maid like any other who waited in attendance on the king in his palace of crystal and silver, its vast shape extending through time and space, the wilderness of the world he had fashioned around him.
It was easy, in that place, to let slip away the sense of her identity, to become as one with the furnishings of the throne room, on bowed knee before the demon king, genuflecting at the glistening gold and black boots of his armour. She did not question the world, did not question her status, did not consider herself as anything other than property—and then came Uhr, and with em, the whispers of resistance, not for a better cause but for power. And what must it be like to have power, she had thought at the time, what must it be like to be the possessor rather than the possessed, the power that crowns the monarch rather than the servant at his feet?
Like her, Uhr had been a courtier, and yet, unlike her, eir eyes had been filled with something more, glistening with the need to resist, to hate, resentful of every order, hateful of the decrees that came down from the king, through his scholar-mage, Woz.
Woz, she thought—was, past-tense; pitiful boot-licker, how we will make you history. The hunger grew in her with each whisper that reached her ears, Uhr's tongue close to the lobe, secrets on the tip of eir tongue as e told her of eir master, sour and swarthy, and of his plan to turn back the clock.
What must it be like to possess rather than be possessed, she thought again, and yet she did not understand the true hunger of this until her eyes fell upon the other girl, besmirched white satin, raven hair, a beauty spot beneath her left eye. Rebels, Uhr had advised; pay them no mind, e had remarked. Yet even as e had spoken this, e must have known that she could not, that she was unable to just ignore her, that she wanted to be amongst them, not that she wished to trade the silver and glass for the ash and the dirt, but she wanted ownership, she wanted that girl with the beauty spot beneath her left eye on her knees, at her feet as readily as she bowed before the rotten king.
In the past, Uhr whispered, in the past she could have these things. Into the palm of her hand, e pushed a jagged curve of metal, a gear, a clock, its face the shape of a power unknown to the king, the secret of an armour untapped.
The boy, Uhr advised, I have had him. If you must indulge your passions, go to them, take them this power, win them over with your gift, your knowledge of the king.
And so she had, a shawl of silk about her shoulders, covering her long hair with its adoration of feathers, and into the ash and the dirt, she had gone, travelling along the paths of the old world, past the statue of the king's coronation, the warriors whose powers had been bequeathed him, and she went to their camp, and, once there, she played Uhr's game, and in the dark, beneath Bedouin sheets, she had taken ownership of the other girl, flesh against flesh, lips pushed hard together, her tongue against the white of her teeth.
A bargain, she had called it; a gift of sorts, her lips curling in a wry smile—a present, present tense, between the past and the future.
What will it change, asked the girl in the warmth of her embrace, naked beneath the coarse sheets.
Everything, she had whispered, still playing Uhr's game, because, in that moment, it didn't matter what it changed, it didn't matter what happened in the past; the universe was finite yet infinite, she whispered softly, a loop, the same events occurring over and over again, and here, in the present, she already had what she wanted.
Possession.