The figure silhouetted in heaven’s radiance is new, cadaverous, unmistakably male, arms bent in the manner of a mantis. “It is time, Goddess.”

Flinch. Snarl. She provides no rebuke, chooses instead to spin a fantasy where she devours him, a piece at a time, mandibles cracking bone. She thinks of brain matter, of how it must taste, jewelled softness glimmering pink in the bowl of his skull.

A deep breath. Drawn, held, surrendered.

“I am ready.”

Three truths:

One: A promise is not absolute, a singular object without nuance or end, to be consummated without question. Sometimes, it is nothing but desperation reworded into a mistake; a girl’s fear for her father, entrusted and betrayed. Sometimes, it is rewritten with an alphabet of bruises and cut lips and when that happens, how could anything be expected to stay the same?

Two: A person is not one thing, is not defined by memory or obedient to tragedy, is not a story to be folded into paragraphs, edges blurred, inconvenient truths cut out. A person can be a victim, and they can also stop being a victim, just like a woman can cease being a goddess, can start instead becoming something entirely new.

Three: This was not your fault, was not your wrong, was not your error of dressing, or glibness of speech, not your lack of foreknowledge.

All of Heaven is in attendance. The Jade Emperor, larger than life, presides on a throne carved into a nest of dragons, armrests scaled and iridescent with gems. At his side, gods without number, resplendent in martial attire, filigreed bronze and enameled plate, weapons tasseled with ribbons of red.

The goddesses sit opposite, gowned in white, faces impassive. Around them, all the rest: celestial maidens and demigods; cats that would be men and men condemned to being cats; dragons halfway into transcendence, still finned and wet from the ocean; fox-women, insolently splendid; thousand-year pottery, freshly incarnated as nubile girls with countenances of clay.

She walks into the divine milieu and breathes, inhales the peach-stink that eddies from their pores, a sweetness to sicken. She will be glad when this is gone, when it is clean earth again and warm rain in her palms, and sunlight beating hot against her sweat-drenched brow. Will there be descendants for her to find in the land below? Great-grandnieces, ten times removed, birthed by sisters she has never met. Her father. Will she discover traces of him in them? A certain bend of the mouth, a knowingness in the gaze. It doesn’t have to be much. Just a glimmer. That is all she wants and needs.

“—you will give up all this up for what really was a minor offense?”

Startled, she looks up, tongue thick in her mouth.

“Goddess.” The magistrate at her side. She wrestles the compulsion to snarl. “His Magnificence is speaking to you.”