Bones, part III
They called her Marceline but that wasn't her name. She didn't have a name. Shadows weren't given names. Only the Ròu Zhī were given names among the Nizh'dilt'é. The real Marceline was dead, though; she died before her shadow joined the Daughters of Hecate. So it was just as well that Marceline's Shadow was known as Marceline.
A name was not the only thing the Daughters gave Marceline. After her tribe was conquered she was lost. Adrift in an unforgiving world. Her skills served her well, but they didn't give her a purpose. Among the Nizh'dilt'é she was given a purpose, and trained in it since the day she was born. She was a Shadow, and without her people she was less than. As a way to survive she began stalking wastelanders, subsisting on their scraps like a radroach. It was all she knew how to do. The people she followed often died, either by the wasteland or by other wastelanders. It mattered little to her. If a wastelander killed her wastelander, she'd follow the survivor. For a month, she silently stalked a deathclaw after it eviscerated a young hunter from the White Legs. Unfortunately prey in the deathclaw's path grew sparse, and both of them grew desperate for meat. Its senses heightened by gnawing hunger, the deathclaw soon became aware at the presence of food somewhere in its vicinity, and it only took Marceline's Shadow a day to realize that food was her. The hard times were when there was no-one to follow, when she was lost and alone in the wasteland. Those were the nights when the ghost of the Nizh'dilt'é would visit her, their empty eyes asking questions their cut-out tongues could not. Eventually, a wastelander led her to Ouroboros. Among the Daughters, she found new purpose.
Among the Daughters Butterfly had purpose, too, but unlike Marceline's Shadow, Butterfly's purpose was never realized, and diminished with time. For years the life she lived for was dangled just out of reach, and only got farther and farther away as she grew older. Drowning her sorrows in alcohol and fine foods only tempered her malaise so much. She knew what she was. She knew what she had to do. Eventually, she couldn't wait for someone to tell her to do it.
Hecate's glorious war against Caesar and his slaves began with Butterfly and ten or so Harpies who likewise could no longer stand the ennui of Ouroboros. Not coincidentally, each one of them (like Butterfly) were denied some small part of Hecate's debauchee largesse, be it bufo or wine or dancing. Unbeknownst to those Daughters, their beloved Goddess had found flaw in their genetic code (which she compulsively collected and devoutly read), and thus sought to head off lung cancer or alcoholism or diabetes in those followers before it had a chance to metastasize. For instance, she not only knew exactly how Polish Butterfly was (more than half of her dominant genes were from eastern Europe somehow still, to the delight of two-hundred-years-dead racists) but also how likely it was that she would contract throat or lung cancer, the odds of which declined by more than half so long as she didn't smoke. The unfortunate side effect (at least for Hecate's designs) meant that there was a small but dedicated group of malcontents who still had some of their wits about them, ten of whom (plus Butterfly) raided Ouroboros' armory and set out to conquer the Legion.
The real tragedy of their doomed expedition was that their plan was so fucking good. First, they killed the Legion garrison at Lake Powell, a brief conflict decided through the generous application of 40mm grenades. Then, when half the cohort at Shonto left to reclaim Powell, they slipped right past them and conquered Fort Veritas at Shonto. In a week Caesar's road to Utah was cut off, and Colorado was only accessible by the long road through New Mexico. Butterfly and her team established themselves on the front lines by fortifying Fort Veritas, and if Hecate sent a garrison to Powell the war could begin in earnest. A full five years ahead of her plans, Hecate's army might have wiped out Caesar's Legion and conquered the southwest wasteland.
Fort Veritas was located at a major intersection in Caesar's roads, and as such was well-supplied and well-built, a testament to the hard work and ingenuity of all the slaves who died in its construction. It wasn't Hoover Dam, but staffed with just eleven of Hecate's combat-trained women it was a fortress. As overseen by the Diamond Woman, it was impregnable. No Centurion could crack its walls, built from scrap and clay and stone, and presided over by the invulnerable woman of legend. No Decanus would dare stand against the Diamond Woman, and for any such Decanus to order his legionaries to do so was unthinkable. A Decanus might as well order his men to charge the sun and the moon. As they took potshots at the cowards from Veritas' parapets, the Daughters of Hecate laughed.
Inside the fort the atmosphere was relaxed, celebratory, and deliberately feminine. Over the course of their military expedition, Butterfly's small army had "kidnapped" all the female slaves of Shonto and Lake Powell. They sheltered them in Veritas while they attempted to break their slave conditioning, to try and give them lives again. It was the second stage of Butterfly's redemption, her atonement for decades spent blithely ignoring the suffering women all across the wasteland experienced at the hands of the Legion.
It was difficult to convince the slaves they were freed. Some of them didn't want freedom, having heard stories for years about the hell that was life outside Legion control (not all of which were untrue). Many had come to identify with their captors, and hated their liberators for killing the men who abused them yet they loved all the same. A select few even genuinely believed in the Legion's cause- or at least what they perceived to be the Legion's cause- and thought there was no better way to unite the wasteland, even as the price of unification was taken from their own flesh. Well-trained in proselytizing for Hecate, the Daughters patiently explained that there was, in fact, a better world out there, that their only options weren't between the dangerous unknown and the miserable "safety" of Caesar's bondage. There was a better world, and it was coming for everyone, they insisted. Hecate would stride the wasteland and strike down all the rapists and thieves and murderers, and she would rise up the women and the wise and the just. Hecate would right wrongs, restore order, etcetera, et al, et cetera.
The women were rightly skeptical. If this Hecate was all-powerful, if she had the power to remake the blighted world, why hadn't she done so already? If Hecate truly was watching over every woman of the wasteland, then why had she not helped them? Many of the slaves had seen Caesar and his grand retinue. None of them had seen Hecate.
After a few days, it seemed all but hopeless that these women could be saved. Then, during a roundtable where the former slaves were encouraged to tell their stories, one woman stood up.
"I remember Hecate," she said. She was of a similar age to the Daughters, but years of bondage among the Legion had aged her horribly. In order to distinguish the converted, the Harpies had proffered face paint, and this woman was the first to take up the oils, smearing a large red streak across her forehead.
"Before the Legion came, my tribe worshipped Hecate," she said transfixed by memories that only a few days before were too painful to recall, "A woman came to us in Hecate's name. She brought us health, and good harvest. She saved my mother's life. She saved all of us."
Slowly, one by one, the other freed women began to recall their life before the Legion. All of them belonged to tribes that had once believed in Hecate, before they were overthrown. A wave had been building, and with one testimony it broke. They remembered a world they'd given up on. The world that had been beaten out of them came back.
For weeks afterwards, Veritas was jubilant. There was much celebration, much drinking and dancing and singing and relaxing. Pregnant women were given pre-natal care for the first time. Although they lacked combat training, the newly-liberated ladies of the Legion cooked meals, ran supplies to their defenders on the walls, decorated, and kept the fort clean and safe. Generally, they did as they had done before they were freed, but at least they were happier and had a better quality of life. Most importantly, there was no longer anything being done to them.
Meanwhile, outside Veritas' walls, the Legion's numbers grew. A trickle at first, but Legionaries soon pooled and pooled around Shonto, until from their vantage point on Veritas' parapets Hecate's rogue Daughters couldn't see the horizon for all the bodies clad in red-and-black leather. Most hadn't even been ordered to Shonto to reclaim Veritas, but were already traveling through on their way to Fortification Hill, part of a years-long pilgrimage to once again assault Hoover Dam. Some Centurions had marched their centuriae to Shonto simply to see proof of the Diamond Woman. Soon, the forces of the Legion outnumbered the women of Fort Veritas (including the freed slaves, who had no combat experience) one-hundred to one. Yet, save for a few small assaults made by lone contubernias, no charge was forthcoming. The Legionaries appeared content to sit and wait, setting up camps and mock-fighting among themselves. They were under no pressure, while for Butterfly and her Harpies, the pressure mounted.
Though Veritas was well-supplied, even with rationing (which its besieged occupants did, but only belatedly) there was only enough food for six months. At first, Butterfly was unconcerned. After all, it wouldn't be long before Hecate's golden army would join them. But days became weeks, and weeks became months, and the only army to arrive was Caesar's. Morale declined precipitously.
"All we have to do is wait," Butterfly told everyone when they first took Fort Veritas. It was a promise she made with conviction, one that was easy to believe, the statement being popular among all religions worldwide. All the women were happy to think if we just wait, God will sort this all out. It was certainly a lot easier than thinking about other, more pressing matters, like how their war was to be fought, by whom, and what to do afterwards.
"All we have to do is wait." As time went on Butterfly's words became less a promise and more an order. As time went on, the Daughters and the freedwomen grew more and more nervous, more and more desperate to find alternatives to the plan. The freedwomen especially, having only just rekindled their faith in Hecate while also being more intimately familiar with Legion tactics, grew antsier and antsier as time dragged on longer and longer without so much as a single message from Ouroboros and Hecate. Butterfly was a skilled tactician and an unrivaled warrior, but she was not a leader, and that shortcoming became more and more apparent as her time trapped in Fort Veritas dragged on.
"We need to do something," Six-Guns was the loudest dissenting voice among the Harpies who had left Ouroboros with Butterfly, proportional to her initial eagerness to start Hecate's war for Her. "We need to fight back."
"Yes, let's all walk out there and die, hmmm?" rebutted Xoa, whose fragile health had previously made her the soberest Harpy in Ouroboros. In their weeks trapped in Veritas, she had kept the faith the strongest out of all the Daughters, even more than Butterfly, who had begun to have doubts about her plan in private. "I'm sure the Legion loves that plan."
"Well, maybe not some suicidal charge, but something, dammit!" Six-Guns lacked the support of her fellow Harpies, but she was the most popular among the freedwomen, who grew more afraid by the day.
"We wait." Butterfly sneered, "If you've lost your faith in The Goddess, feel free to go out there and challenge the Legion one-by-one. But we will wait."
They fought for a solid week, Six-Guns slowly persuading more Daughters towards her cause the lamer Butterfly's excuses to delay became. Finally, the food ran out. There could be no more delaying. The rogue Daughters had to take action, or starve to death. Despite Xoa's suggestion, eating each other was out of the question.
"No more waiting," Six-Guns announced. Butterfly stoically agreed with her. They made plans to perform one final stand. Butterfly would march into the sea of Legionaries, powerfist at max charge, while the other Daughters provided cover from the ramparts. Once she fell, they'd let the Legion into the fort, where hopefully they'd be able to kill a centuriae or two before they were finally captured or killed. The freedwomen they'd lock in Veritas' cellar, in the hopes that they'd be treated as captives rather than collaborators. The plan was all set to go, the Daughters about to take their positions on the wall and Butterfly about to march out to her death when Marceline spoke up.
As part of her training among the Nizh'dilt'é and later the Daughters of Hecate, Marceline's Shadow had learned how to be unseen. That meant staying out of sight, but also how to remain unnoticed despite being visible. Among the Legion, serving as a slave was the perfect camouflage, and even when she was 'liberated' with the other slaves at Lake Powell, she remained unseen and unnoticed, even by her peers the Daughters. For weeks in Veritas she had blended in with the other women, going along with the crowd, even as she had secretly been in contact with Ouroboros the entire time. She knew there was no aid coming, no army of Hecate's Golden Children marching out of Utah and against the Legion.
"I've been ordered to kill you," she told the rogue Daughters. In a single sentence, she went from invisible to the focus of everyone's attention.
"I, I- uh," Butterfly stammered. She suddenly became acutely aware that she was in the presence of another Maenad.
"Ouroboros can't have you captured. Can't have any of you spilling secrets to Caesar," she ran her finger over long knife she'd been concealing until that very moment, "Besides, Hecate says it's undignified for any of her Daughters to be killed by any of the trash collecting outside."
She looked Butterfly directly in the eyes, "Especially a Maenad."
The other Daughters were stunned. For a long couple minutes no-one spoke. Marceline slowly rose from the wall she'd been slouched against, and walked over to the fort's gates, positioning herself between them and Butterfly.
"Really I should've killed you all weeks ago," she confessed, "But I figured eventually you'd come to the correct conclusion on your own."
"I guess I underestimated your will to fight," she shrugged.
Butterfly fell back into a chair, defeated. Her plan failed. It had failed for weeks. She'd known, somewhere inside, that the war she'd dreamed of for so long wasn't coming. That she'd failed. With Marceline's confirmation, she could finally admit it to herself.
"What if we don't let you kill us?" Six-Guns challenged Marceline churlishly. Marceline merely shrugged again.
"You're welcome to try," she answered and twirled her blade menacingly.
"Don't bother," Butterfly muttered. Her words were tinged with bile, "We were ready to die anyway, right? We're already dead. What difference does it make to us who performs the killing blow?"
Six-Guns wasn't convinced, and raised her rifle to shoot Marceline. It exploded when she pulled the trigger, blowing her arms and face off. Marceline had stoppered the barrel without anyone noticing, before she'd made her presence known. In the explosion-induced delirium that followed she executed four other Daughters she'd determined to be similarly unwilling to back down. Butterfly hadn't been disoriented by the backfire, but she did nothing. She watched her fellow Maenad kill her followers without expression.
"So it was all for nothing, huh?" she asked Marceline, eyes welling with tears. She drew her pistol, a .357 magnum that she very rarely used. Marceline shrugged for the third time.
"Who can say?" she said.
Butterfly carefully pointed the barrel of the gun at her soft palate and fired up into her brain. She slumped over dead, blood gushing out of her mouth, nose, and eyes. The bullet didn't break her diamond skin.
Once the rest of the rogue Daughters followed suit, Marceline went down to the cellar to inform the slaves that the Daughters were dead. The women, in their final act of freedom, secreted the bodies of their liberators within Veritas. Then they opened the door to the Legion, who massacred all of them without bothering to determine whether any of them had, in fact, collaborated with the Daughters. As far as the Legion was concerned, they were tainted goods either way. Marceline slipped away unnoticed.
Caesar didn't order any follow-up investigation on the eleven women who killed one-and-a-half garrisons and held Fort Veritas at Shonto for nearly six months. He was distracted with the effort of assembling his army on the banks of the Colorado River, gathering together the largest fighting force the wasteland had ever seen. As far as he was concerned it was an aberration, a freak occurrence that wouldn't be repeated and irritate his plans again. He'd never know to what extent how accurate he was.
The excursion was kept secret from most of Ouroboros, but the Daughters who rebelled were given full honors and traditional burials in absentia anyway. The Legion never recovered the body of the Diamond Woman, who the slaves had buried in the cellar. Years later she was exhumed by an elder Daughter named Avaela, who delivered her remains to White Sands out of guilt. Butterfly's bones were laid to rest, like the bones of her ancestors before her, joining the bones of all those who died in the southwest through time immemorial, and in joining them became the land itself. Most legionaries were unsure that she had actually been at Shonto, or even if she'd ever existed at all. The Diamond Woman faded into legend. Her war never materialized, but her rebellion finally inspired Julia to be a leader, to finally devise a plan and a future for the Daughters, lest more women died in more meaningless conflicts.