There is no answer to why we are the way we are. We eat dinner with swords for knives and we sing laments for brothers that we drown out with blood like wine. ‘It’s nature’, he says, telling me that I was a warrior from the day I was born, that I was brought forth from my mother screaming my cries of war and my father named me something gentle in hopes of deterring that blood-bath. ‘It’s nurture’, she says, shaking in her skin as she looks at me and wonders if war makes monsters or if monsters make the war.
‘It’s fate’, they tell me. That it was determined long ago in the stars set high above us and that neither nature nor nurture could have stopped me from baring my teeth and bruising my knuckles. ‘It’s your choice,’ I hear that whisper in my ear. ‘You took the stars in your own hands and molded them into a blade of iron. No one decided this except for you, and you love to lick the blood from the steel’.
Hail, Queen!
O, Varda
O, Varda
O, Varda
‘Tell me,’ I cry out, dirtying my knees in the soil as I collapse on this not-so-holy ground. ‘Am I all that I have made myself to be? Am I weapon, or woman? O, Varda! Did I take your divine light and mar it in the tides of war? O, Queen! Or was I an omen in your night sky all along?’
O, Varda
I look up to her sky, my face bathed in tears salted like the ocean, better suited for burial on the battlefield than begging answers from the gods in a home I had long since acknowledged. The stars continue to shine in an unabashed recklessness; they are light but they are silent; they are so very far and they are so very cold.
They are silent. They are silent. They are silent.
