Kaier Bride four

The click of his cane on the marble floors echoed through the cavernous empty halls with nothing to stop it. The Heirlooms were mostly gone. The furniture was mostly sold, and multi-generational family servants had left to find work elsewhere. Still he was determined to meet his new Son-in-law on his own feet. His twin daughters that cared for him had been sent away. Their once numerous suitors had stopped calling. No one wanted to be tied to a cursed house deeply in debt. The daughter had sponged up all the sadness, and it had given their beauty a touch of deep melancholy, like that part of a dog that allows you to domesticate it. 
    One would think that all this would make me profoundly sad, but the truth is I am largely beyond the grip of any single emotion now. People may use the expression “ She has her head in the clouds”, but nothing could be further from the truth, and frankly... insulting. My “head” was firmly in the Ground, not in a fantastical stupor or ideological caprice. It traveled widely and tasted the soils of many different lands. I could feel the heat from the burning heart of the world. I could taste and smell the sweat of the multitudes falling into the soil in futile and transitory attempts to shape and dominate something they had fundamentally no understanding of. Alternately my mind would slither amongst ancient corpses and hear their secrets. The world most people lived in was a formulamatic play I had already seen numerous permutations of , and memorized all the endings. This began when I transformed from double jointed to quadruple jointed before we left home. 
    Counting ..1..2...3. Now father holds his heart when he sees his pregnant daughters and his new son in law. Next he will start to fall, then catch himself on the door frame.
 We can skip the awkward and mostly silent dinner where my husband looks at the twins with enough of his uniquely potent lust to burn a whole into the center of a star. Twins are significant to the Panchayyah, and two comely young ones with dusky red hair would be a prestigious rarity.
    Later that night the two brothers and the shaman went to the place where we hid things, a room underneath the depleted wine cellar with an comfortable earthen floor, and strong stone foundation walls. A large throne like jade altar with a basin is in the middle of the room. The maiden blood of my youngest sisters swirls and pools in the center of it. They sit beside bare and glistening with sweat as the still tremble. They hold my arms and the blood form the ritual bites and puncture wounds rolls down and warms my swelling belly. Ultimately there is nothing they can do to deny the supernatural power flowing through them and the room. The Savage primal truth of things is washing over them. They will come to understand and embrace it like I did. There is no denying it, that would be like an ant trying to push back the waves of the deep and passionate ocean
 “It is Time to discharge your blessing, brother.” My husband said standing in the candle light as dark painted magnificence. 
    The cape of Brightly dyed finger bones rattles as it hit the ground. The hunch revealed on his back is a wonderful terrible hive of blood flesh and wax. The insect that had been alternately resting and feeding in it since we boarded the ship began to chew their way out throwing Him into an state of trance like Extasy and he laughs deeply as the swirling sentient swarm of insects cut through the air and form complicated and beautiful patterns. 
    Cacamao cuts him self and bleeds on to the altar Before speaking the words from before the time of man, and smashes the altar with His fists send large and colorful seeds flying all across the room. Instantly small lichen began to sprout and beetles began to come up form holes in the ground and carry seeds away. Next vines began to sprout and punch through the stone walls like they were wet clay. He stands in his bare flesh and whirls around the room speaking in tongues and swinging his whistling warclub. Directing or conducting the rapid growth much less then it is directing him. In the end he lays back like glistening obsidian and tenderly kisses my sisters and I as the growth continues.
    This is what my father saw when he broke. We found him In A small closet of the room before supper the following day. He is unable to move or speak except the right parts of his mouth in furious spastic twitches and his left eye. His grey hair has turned totally white. 
    This is the part that makes me smile. My husband cares for him tenderly, and bathes and feeds him as per the customs of the Panchayyah with genuine kindness and infinite patience. This day he speaks to him. “Father, I know this is much change for an old man, But change had to come. We are going to send you to the falling waters to get well, Then you can come back and see a healthy house with many grandchildren. What we have done will make your crops grow strong then anyone to spite your neighbors cutting off your water supply. We will name a boy for you.”  
    He smiled sweetly down on him as he nailed down the comfortable padded wooden box with airholes I had made for him before we left, Having already seen what would and must have come.