Into this picture came his loudmouthed, intractable sibling, who even as a toddler proved difficult to handle. Cremoline Nomaki was a child, trying to raise a child, and clashing with the bullishness of his own mother in the process. He considered the two—mother and younger sprout—a ruinous pair, each feeding and deepening the other’s delusions into irreparability. When his mother died, a fate she could not escape, his efforts turned to his younger sibling. Perhaps the march of voidsickness could be beat back in them. So he spent years beating them, hoping that at some point practicality and obedience would stick. Delusional? Perhaps. Desperate? For sure.

But docility was never in Misery Nomaki’s nature, as it never was in their mother’s. Instead they got craftier and better at pretense, and their desire to escape Rootsdown for the open stars became stoneclad. But the child also reached an age where they understood their mother’s erratic behavior and rambling monologues to be signs of a disturbed mind, and the realization that they could not trust what Amaranth said mineralized in their bones in increments. It broke them by degrees. If their early self-conception was based on lies, what else couldn’t they believe? The foundations of their world shown to be a fraud, they learned to trust no one and rely on nobody but themself. Any hope for growing a healthy relationship with their brother faded with the passing years. He ascended to pastorship, they became a inveterate grifter and thief. His reputation as a pillar of community grew and solidified, while theirs—well. Misery also gained a formidable reputation, but among a very different set of people. The siblings’ paths seemed doomed to irrevocable divergence.

And then Misery’s revelation came, and the lives they thought they knew were uprooted and upended with no warning. Except, ironically, the warnings that their voidmad mother had been repeating for twenty years. I do wonder how Cremoline Nomaki is taking all this, back at his perch in Rootsdown. Does he regret, perhaps, the choices he made as his younger sibling was growing up?

Only time will tell. Let us continue.

CHAPTER 5

Church Scripture praises early risers and doers, blessed are those who wake before suns, and Misery is crisply reminded of this homily when light punches into the cell at six thirty and a pair of altar pages clatters inside, expectant. Misery blinks unhappily at their silent, patient forms as they wait on her, picking scattered expletives from the sleep-dep bramble of her thoughts. Too early by half. She got to lie in all she liked on the Duke’s ship, but the light-bearers on the Capital clearly run a different schedule. Void take them.