Our Protagonist Is All Wrong!

In Catholicism waters of the Holy variety wash away sin, cleansing by Baptism. Free.

The Greeks believed souls bathed in the River Lethe would be non grata. Non-existent and of no identity.

Egypt held up their River Nile as a spiritual river. A road to the next phase of life.

Water. Is the lifeblood. The cascade of rebirth, transition, transformation, new life, new time. It flows forever and never stops, never thinks. Water is as insatiably cruel as it is merciful.

It can be considered, quite the whimsical way to die.

I didn’t know about all that.

What I did know, is of the seductress that had found me first. And the lake water vast and cool becoming unnatural, oily sludge.

I remember a fanged mouth as that awful mer-person a vulture at the guise of a siren wished to feast on me too. Deprived me of all life and beauty, a vampire she was!

What I remember was fleeing through a sordid marsh until I reached an all too organized congregation of stones and slick ground festooned in runes.

I knew enough, about the fae who ended up finding me.

I knew enough to suspect, my presence may very well be a sickness upon this land. And my fairy companions, my only benevolent aid are hiding their cough so dutifully.

I could almost pretend…

To be with the true protagonist of this story.

My younger brother who had meant to fall in that lake. And whose touch and each step he'd have taken not bring tenders of ash and shrill agony to the land.

And with such business the proper beginning then is this.

An orphanage overlooking a lovely parish village, in the year 1924