Ohmigodohmigodohmigod
Will the third immortal supermax riding?!
You know, now that you said that... Maybe, yeah. I'm still mulling this over.
Anyway, the rest of you will get your wish. Yes, you'll ALL get your wishes! *cackling*
...Ok, enough messing around. Time for the chapter.
Part 8: Venus de MiloFrom the Personal Journal of Ferrus AlchimiaYou’d think a pregnant woman would stick close to home, even on Love Day…
But Diane’s not that sort of person. She couldn’t take a festival day lying down, rain or no rain, baby or no baby. I’m worried about her getting sick, but… It was a fun chance to just relax together again, like we always used to.
”Besides,” She said, laughing as we danced,
”You’d go nuts if you just sat at home fretting, so I had to go – you need to get pulled up to speed every now and again.”Well, I can’t deny that. I suppose you could say, though, that the weekends she spends at home…Are her being slowed to my pace. And I don’t think that’s something she could go for too long without.
But I do wish she’d take it easy, just this once.
Later, they’d be declared king and queen of the spring dance, because the local boy with the “skin condition” – the town officials still weren’t entirely sure how to approach the Alchimias – dancing with his very pregnant local girl wife was too cute for the judgment committee.
My little brother had a date, too – with Kris, that boy from his prom. They both liked music, and Kris was apparently quite the charmer. Good for Stan – I think he’s lonely sometimes, you know? I’m too much older than him to have really made a good playmate growing up, and so on…
”You know, all the bathroom walls say ‘for a good time, call Kris’… But I’m thinking we should take it slow. At least while we’re minors,” he says, laughing. Hearing your little brother say this thing, even if you are eavesdropping due to your pointy ears, is somewhat disconcerting.
But, eh, whatever makes them happy.
And we’re not the only lovers about, either: No, everyone’s taking to bask in the warmth of love day… Though, to be honest, that sort of thing makes up the majority of our parents’ days.
It’ll be into this world of love that my child is born.
But Darren dreamer was worried about something. Darren Dreamer was Darren Dreamer Darr
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Darren Dreamer was worried about something because he knew – he knew – he’d been seeing the dreams again, fevering away in the back of his soul. He knew, he’d always known – this was just a pale dream, just an empty, hollow world that history had abandoned. Oh, he could wish, history had abandoned it.
This world was broken – history was broken. In another world, a son. In another world, a fire. In another world, no odd golden woman, descending to the town like an alien goddess. In another world, he never challenged fate. Never escaped it. That was the world that demanded its existence – and now, so close to the end, he felt it creeping up on him at night. In that other world, Diane Dreamer could not exist – perhaps, too, Ferrus Alchimia could not exist; what was the existence of someone, with gold like blood, who could with casual ferocity challenge fate… But itself, a violation of nature: a violation of fate?
History corrects itself sometimes, like an overzealous spellcheck. History will find a way – Darren Dreamer did not know that.
But when his daughter went into labor, he panicked from the weight of it clinging to his ankles. He knew, without knowing, he knew. History was tilting back, swinging, like a pendulum.
Correcting.
The world became a series of impossible things: it had been a series of impossible things, for years and years now. Now, though, it had come. It began collapsing, history devouring the false.
This is why Diane rode her motorcycle to the hospital, still in labor – perhaps, but perhaps it was just Diane, impossible thing even when the world was allowed to continue.
In the hospital, she was born: Venus Alchimia. Friendly and Excitable. A fan of Spice Brown, and frog’s legs. History’s great correction, Fate’s reasserting itself, making everything closer to right, closer to whole, the family’s effects closer to insignificant.
A child who did not exist.
No one knew what to do with her.
It was clear – she existed. Everyone felt she did, in the core of theirs guts.
They wanted to touch Venus, know her, care for her, as family ought. They wanted to study and understand her.
But they couldn’t find her, couldn’t touch her but through proxy. Couldn’t care for her, couldn’t love her. She was born to die, starving, crying, her voice an empty ghost, nothing more than a chill up the spine.
Born to vanish as if she had never been, born to die and never have her body buried – who could find it, or place it in a grave or urn? Would Grim know, even, that she had ever been?
A child that was herself an act of madness. Venus Alchimia. Weeping in her invisible world, which history forgot.
And the world felt itself a little righter, because there was no way such a person could have existed.
It was only fortune – and a story for another day, I will get it to you, one day, I promise, do you hear me – that someone was watching. The only salvation – For Venus, for the family, all of it. A man who had begun all of this, who started with one great breaking of history, spending the rest spiraling out of control. And so he had to watch: he had the knowledge and magic to repair this, to break history one last time: the child did exist, and could.
Because he had that power: to rewind the course of history, to have a small redo. A tiny chance to try again, to have another child who could be Venus Alchimia, who could slip by Fate, and laugh in the sunlight.
It’s not enough to save this Venus, who now did not exist by the course of Fate, who now did not exist by the course of Events:
Events rewound around her, pulling back to before she was born. Her life, which never quite happened, only lasted a few hours, at most. The timeline in which her nonexistence occurred was wiped from reality, and a new timeline found.
It was the evening of Love Day again, a few hours before the Third Alchimia Heir would be born. A child who now had a chance to exist.
But that Venus would not be forgotten – History had forgotten her, but the man remembered. He had a plan. Be sure of it.
Be sure of Be sure Be –
Ah, your faithful editor here. I’m sorry, I don’t know what just happened. I think I was automatic writing, or in some sort of…fugue state. What was I writing?
What is this? All this babble about history, and fate, and invisible children?
Let me be clear with all of you readers: this never happened, understand? Nothing I’ve been writing since I had that, well, I suppose you’d call it some sort of seizure up there, is what happened. I don’t even remember writing it.
But I think I will keep it, anyway. Something in me wants to keep it. Because I think I’ve heard someone – someone important to these events – who believed something like this. Who would swear ardently that something like this nonsense story had occurred. I’m sure it’d make her happy, to know I’d written down something like it, even if I thought it was silly. I’ll keep it in, an odd start to the next phase of a family history – and so fitting.
But next time, dear readers, I’ll tell you what really happened, and what manner of birth Venus Alchimia had.
