Prologue
The battered violets of Sua’s eyes had scarcely seen the light of day before she was damned to a reclusive eternity, the frigid sin of indifference settling over her like snow on a frostbitten corpse. A cage, formless yet inflexible and punishing in its austere cruelty, befitting the crime of insouciant aberrance. Everchanging, it enveloped her, constant and firm. A partition between her world and the rest. A wall. Then it weighed on her, damp and heavy with the soggy remains of half-baked attempts to thaw her from her ashen limbo. Acidic now, failed, those melted “hellos” and “how are yous” bubbled harmlessly just a hairsbreadth above that half empty, slow beating cavity in her chest.
Only after having watched them dissolve under her gaze, the telltale popping of their death so faint she was almost certain they’d never existed at all, had she realised she’d wanted to touch them. To know them, to document their warmth. For though she was certain it would mar her liquid skin with tender burns, man was nothing but a race of inquisitors and historians. And she supposed, human as she looked, spoke, breathed, that she, too, was an inquisitor, even as her lungs filled with the solitary air of an observer. A non-participant. Briefly, she had wondered how she would look, adorned by the humanity of their scars.
So, her icy fingers had reached out, tentative and shaking, afraid of the heated blaze beyond, the acidic ichor that fuelled her classmates. Fear, she recalled, had then all but taken her hostage. Cradled her head in its serrated claws, gentle as a wet nurse. Bellicose in the way only the gentle could be. Strike-ready. Violent.
But the violence never came, replaced instead with the quiet thud of her cell door as it fell shut with all the fanfare of a singular raindrop in an ocean storm. For the hands she had so courageously braved to take were cold to the touch, almost hiemal. Sua had realised then that warmth could not touch her. It could not dance upon her smooth skin nor in her wide violet eyes nor over the rare curve of her frozen lips. As if she could not feel it at all.
(As if humanity lived and died kissed by the bonfire of their first gift, while she alone walked untouched amongst the charred futures of her peers with the crestfallen immunity of a foxen mountebank* who had long since forgotten its inhumanity. An angel lost amongst earthling sinners. Sacrosanct. Demonic. Unloving.)
Even years after, she could still vaguely recall the sound of fear’s mocking laughter as it faded, abandoning her to that fallacious human husk. That arctic emptiness etched within the walled confines of the unfeeling cavity in her chest.
Sometimes, her chest felt as if it ached with cold sores, begging for the warm reprieve of the faraway sun. But Sua knew better. Because only those who had felt its heated caress on living skin and in that beating chamber called the heart could yearn, and by that extension beg. Because the practice of begging was limited to those who danced hand in hand with warmth and light and gold. Because Sua’s so-called heart was a terrible thing which had spent a lifetime incased in the glacial embrace of indifference. Near frozen, now. Half-dead.
So it did not ache, and she did not yearn, and that was the fact of it.