The Ash Girl

by A’Lis Bly

For my daughter Claire

Hun Vedverte

Novel, Chapter, Blog, Serial, Tarot, Goddesses, Mythology 9insights Novel, Chapter, Blog, Serial, Tarot, Goddesses, Mythology 9insights

Chapter 2

Chaos

Men name wars to pin them to paper, fold them up, tuck madness and destruction into a pocket. Forget. Never forget. Gain distance. Relive it. Blame. Ask forgiveness. Tidy up chaos into sentences and chapters. A title. A timeline. Statistics.

True chaos, khaos, cannot be scribed into dots and lines. No. Your people have forgotten that khaos is the void, the abyss.

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Chapter 6

9 July, 1960 CE

Tree, on the Red Sea

Once a year she startled awake, gasping for breath. Reached for him as he slipped away. Wait! Wait.

When she was younger, Asmeret could still see his blue-black-blue face, the color of the ancient kings and queens of their tribe. Smell the blood of their mother on him. Hear his breath. Feel his heartbeat next to hers as it had been for the time in their mother’s womb and the no-time in the no-place before that.

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Chapter 8

NEXT

What came next is this.

Asmeret stared at the card in her hand; curls of blonde hair escaping the helmet, intelligent blue-gray eyes full of questions. Eyes, she realized, that couldn’t see her, though they seemed to try. Asmeret looked from Athena to Hestia. Then to the wisp she understood was her grandmother, now an ancestor.

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Chapter XII

1953-1960 CE

The City of Clouds-The Village of Ash

Asmeret wandered between tents; her head hurt again, yet she could think. Remember. The cavern of gold, the river, the singing of the ghost animals falling, falling, arrrrraaaaaaaaa, the ravens pulling them from the river where they bumped up against her, the zebra, the rhino—bloody stump where they’d hacked off the tip of its horn—climbing the staircase behind the boar. Her.

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