Mirth 1, chapter 1, part 2

How is it Tuesday again already??!! I’m still so behind! But, thankfully, not so behind that I’ve forgotten #TeaserTuesday!

Caveats: this is an unedited, unproofed second draft. For further context, all of my books usually get five drafts, including two rounds of editing and one round of proofing before publishing.

The Mirth duology is set in the Conduit World (See Awry), a secondary world that shares many common traits with our own. The divergences in language, governing bodies and countries, technology, and geography are all intentional choices by the author.

Content warnings: language, death of a family member/grief, and sexually suggestive conversation or situations (eventually). Eventual why choose/polyamory.

Anything in [brackets] is still being developed/decided/not quite the right word, etc.

Start here:

Mirth 1, Chapter 1, Part 1

When the time comes.

To hold the intersection point.

I’d put the pieces together in my head. I just hadn’t taken a good look at the picture.

The fissure of grief that had cracked open in my chest five months, seventeen days, eight hours, and three minutes ago yawns wide in my chest.

Eleanor’s hand tightens on my father’s shoulder, and she squares her shoulders, letting me know that I’m projecting. Projecting all the stupid, fundamentally useless, energy — unless I want to just go around subverting or even slaughtering all the people I’m supposed to represent, even leading — that comes with the purple eyes that match Armin’s, only a shade darker than my father’s orbs.

No. My eyes had matched Armin’s eyes.

He’d dead.

Just a pile of ash in an ornate urn on my father’s mantel.

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to reign it all in.

How Eleanor fucks my father but can’t stand to be in the same room as me … I shove the thought away, understanding without it being articulated by anyone else that it’s my lack of discipline that makes my energy so off-putting.

Though it’s currently … twisted tenor is new —

I find a rational thought within my overwhelmed mind and shove it like a possible lifeline into the stilted conversation. “But Tinsel and Twinkle …”

Eleanor sighs affectedly over my use of the three-year-old twins’ nicknames.

I ignore her, grabbing hold of the spark of relief that blooms at the idea and barreling forward. “They could manifest. So, father, unless you plan on dying at least half a century before —”

“Anyone can die,” he chides.

He chides me. As if I wasn’t the one to identify Armin as he lay cold and stiff on that metal gurney. Surrounded by his useless guards, my own detail, and all the hospital staff. So that I couldn’t react. Other than to nod, then stand as witness to his cremation. Just to protect the family. Standing there and watching my brother burn down to nothing but ash even while finally understanding the utter, abrupt despair that had brought me to my knees earlier that morning.

Anne and Eleanor shift uncomfortably. Anne actually slaps a hand over her mouth as if to stop herself from laughing.

My essence is leaking. Again.

And the most cruel thing about it? Other than the fact that my father is immune and I cannot hurt him the way he sits across his desk hurting me.

I make people happy.

Happier and happier until their brains melt.

“Anyone can die,” my father snaps, testily. Not only does he hate repeating himself but he doesn’t like my affecting Anne and Eleanor. “I’m not an immortal being, Euphrosyne.”

 He hits every syllable of my given name, Yoo-FRO-si-nee, pointedly. Not Mirth. Because I flinched earlier. And the less upset, or easily triggered I am, the easier he can guide me through this conversation until it reaches a point of satisfaction. For him, at least. Since that satisfaction demands my acquiescence.

Euphrosyne isn’t an odd nickname, nor a term of endearment. Mirth is actually my more commonly, among family and friends, used name. A name bequeathed to me by my brother because even to another a toddler Euphrosyne is a stupid name for a baby.

Ironically, not even my father is arrogant enough to have named his daughter after one of the Ancient Greek Charities, or one of the so-called Ancient Roman Graces. Euphrosyne is courtesy of my absentee birth mother and a clause she insisted on adding to her own breeding contract. My breeding contract?

Before I can sarcastically snark back at my father about him acting like a god when it suits him to do so, because he is actually as near immortal as a human can be, he repeats, “the twins will not manifest,” then gently pats Eleanor’s hand.

Eleanor doesn’t take her gaze off me, but she does remove her hand from my father’s shoulder. Eleanor is the twins’ biological mother. She’s also my father’s chosen mate, one of three. The twins were a surprise. A so-called late-in-life pregnancy. An utterly joyful addition to the family that has now been overshadowed by my brother’s death.

I choke on another of those extreme wells of grief. They still hit me regularly, if randomly. It’s worse here. In this castle. In this company. With the land, the mountainside, literally seething energy under every one of my steps. Literally reminding me that I will never be enough with every footfall.

I felt that way even when I had Armin.

Now he’s left me.

And he chose … ultimately, he chose to leave me. Though I know anyone, everyone, would think me a terrible person if I ever uttered that thought out loud. The fundamental belief that has grown alongside all the grief and despair. Armin chose to ski alone. He chose a [unplowed, unmarked back mountain? route]. He chose to sneak off without his guard. He chose to leave me.

We’d been inseparable for most of our childhood, through adulthood. Excepting for those six months after my awry nature asserted itself and I failed … I tried and failed … failed to be what I should have been.

I meet my father’s eyes.

Purple-hued eyes.

Slightly brighter than my own.

Brighter than my brother’s had been.

I never met my deceased eldest half-sibling. My father, who is now in his late nineties, lost his first child and his only soul bound mate years before I was born. Not that I ever heard a word about either of them directly from him.

That’s what grandmothers are for — purveyors of family gossip. Were for, at least. My father’s mother passed seven years ago.

My brother’s mother, Julianna, left him and my father after an attempted kidnapping. They both survived, but Julianna was badly hurt protecting Armin. She tried to take Armin back to her own family in France. But no one said no to my father. I attended Julianna’s funeral three years ago, just to hold Armin’s hand. He hadn’t cried. But he didn’t know her very well.

Maybe it would have been better if he cried? 

Maybe it would have been better if he had more than just me to hold his hand?

Maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to fling himself — alone — off the side of a mountain in unstable snow conditions?

My birth mother, Daphne, had been little more than a surrogate. She’d known she would eventually leave me and had been paid well for it. Not that she needs the cash. Her family is as almost as filthy rich as mine.

The difference between those women — the mothers of my father’s first three children — and my father’s actual chosen Eleanor and Anne?

The purple eyes.

Or, at least, an ancestral history of having true-blooded awry manifest in their progeny. As with my mother, whose eyes are dark blue without even a hint of purple.

“The intersection point,” I mumble, surfacing above the grief just long enough to articulate what all my random thoughts have been circling. When Armin was alive there’d been two of us, him the elder and the more powerful.

Now there was only me.

I couldn’t hold all the power of the intersection point on my own.

Not even my father could, really. He needed chosen, whether or not they were also sexual partners — I don’t think he and Raoul are lovers, though they share Eleanor and Anne. But even with their essence only entwined by intent, they share the responsibility of holding the intersection point currently seething away under my bare feet.

One of seven intersection points through which the essence that fuels the world radiates. There were nine points centuries ago, but two fell. Those collapses created massive upheavals in the world. Some historians say that there was an entire civilization with technology to rival our own that was wiped out when the first of the nine intersections was compromised. With humanity driven back into the dark ages.

The entire political and demographical landscape of North America fractured and still hasn’t completely recovered — according to my father — due to what he called ‘an attempt at a hostile takeover’ of their intersection point over a century ago.

If my father died — taking his own chosen with him — with only me as his essence heir an untended, untethered intersection point would draw those of power. World wars have been fought over less.

But there is more than one problem with me being the only heir.

“I’m a dud,” I say hollowly.

My father huffs. But he doesn’t refute my disparaging assessment of my abilities.

“You’re not a dud!” Anne exclaims, glancing between me and my father then dropping his hand. “And I don’t want to hear you say anything of the sort again.”

Anne raised Armin and me. As much as she was allowed to do so, at least. Mostly for about a year — if I’m remembering correctly — before we were shipped off to school, then during any breaks we spent with our father. Or rather, in proximity of our father.

I don’t drop my father’s gaze. Absolute derision — for myself — drips from my next words. “A dud but at least I blooded true, right?”

He nods stiffly.

The argument about my supposed unwillingness to embrace the truth of my twisted essence, of my manipulative, destructive abilities, and how that holds me back from fully Becoming hovers between us for a breath.

Even though he was the one to walk away from my training. He was the one who — once I had it all stoppered up and refused to unstopper it again — just sent me back to school.

I stand, stiffly, head held high even in my borrowed sweats and tangled hair. “Good for breeding if nothing else,” I say pertly, flippantly.

I’m almost out of the door before my father calls to me.

“When you are capable of being more rational,” he says, all cool-toned and arrogantly detached. “We’ll discuss this and your new role further. I won’t wait for those names.”

I keep walking, out the door and into the stonewalled corridor.

Names.

Of those few I would, that I even could, consider as chosen mates. Even better if they come with their own ancestral history of purple eyes, but not the eyes themselves, because that would mark them as potentially dangerous, even volatile. In all the same ways I internally balked at any destruction I might potentially wrought if I allowed myself to just admit I am more, more than a few empathic tricks and … simple mirth.

But I’m not more.

I’m so much less. So much less that even mirth and joy have abandoned me.

Those names … those few that my father will ask me to whittle down into an acceptable number, or even more likely, he’ll do it himself, will be plucked from those in the best political and financial positions. And all with robust essence-wielding abilities. Their strength is needed to balance my inherent weakness.

 My life partners will be chosen, not soul bound, not fated nor destined. Even if such bonds exist for me, my freedom to find them ran out the moment my brother shed his mortal coil.

My chest constricts so tightly that I’m forced to dart into a niche off the hall. I squeeze my eyes shut against the pointed overhead lighting and press myself against a fucking marble statue as I struggle to breathe. I might not have the practical, useful power that typically comes with these purple eyes but I got all the light sensitivity. And the collection of vintage designer sunglasses, of course.

My father frowns upon both admitting the sensitivity and shielding others from the sight of purple orbs.

I manage to keep breathing even as I allow myself to cry. Quiet, stifled sobs threaded with all my thwarted love and fortified with all my ever-growing anger.

Maybe this is what it feels like to lose one of your soul bound? Armin and I might not have been brought into this world together but we never liked being apart. Maybe my brother belonged to me through more than just blood? Maybe our souls were pulled into these mortal coils from the same [fabric of the universe].

And he still chose to leave me. Armin’s need to feel, to thwart danger, to be … thrilled? All of those needs were stronger than his love for me.

I know … I know it was just a terrible, senseless accident, but I can’t, I can’t … so so selfishly … I’m so so morally weak that I can’t … I can’t forgive him.

And now this … this utter ridiculous chosen mate matching event.

Armin is dead.

He’s taken my life as I’d known it with him.

That bright, hot anger finally wins over the disabling despair.

I straighten, pushing away from the marble statue that’s been the only thing holding me on my feet. I manage a few deep, full breaths.

The castle guard left after escorting me at my father’s behest, but the few staff still traversing the halls even this deep into the evening ignore me, my reddened eyes, and tear-stained cheeks as I slink back to my rooms.

I distract my churning mind with a hot shower, then settle behind my desk to deal with some of the paperwork for my next charity event. Invitations mostly, to the celebrity guests, painstakingly handwritten in an ornate script that I’ve practiced to perfection for over half of my twenty-six years.

One of the rarest of rare purple-eyed awry or not. One of the most favored by the old gods, or one of the essence twisted, according to some of the factions that actively hunt the purple-orbed in other parts of the world, this is all a princess is good for anyway, right?

Good for breeding. Good for giving away money to more worthy people, more worthy causes … more.

A face, a practiced smile, to represent the so-called royal family, to mitigate the fear my father’s power evokes.

So … fuck soul bound mates.

Fuck loving anyone at all.

Not ever again.

– Mirth 1, Chapter 1, Part 2