The Timeless Sin

Radha Kandola

There’s a forest where the universe bleeds through the skyline. Where Venus, Mars and the rings belonging to Neptune make the ground constantly iridescent. The sky scattered with stars, day, and night. The sun, warm against their skin in both winter and summer, their skin is easily covered in glitter that drifts along with the wind and falls onto the surface of the neverending river. The river that, quite impossibly, flows off their world and into deep, well, space.

Except, today, those trees have never seemed duller.

Andra has been waiting forever for today. In her hundreds of years of life - not of living, she can’t say with confidence that she’s ever lived - she’s always been waiting for today. Today could have been any day. It could have been yesterday, or tomorrow, or the second day of the third month next year. Oddly specific, she knows, but it’s comforting to create an illusion of knowledge when all she knows is uncertainty. Today could have been a split second, or a tortuous twenty-four hours. Instead, today is the agonising ache that comes with the collapse of her home.

Children have spent all morning running, fleeing from the forests that have been their haven. Andra herself has guided them onto countless ships, running her hands through her children’s hair and whispering assurances that she can’t - and really shouldn’tpromise their parents. She’s spent hundreds of years nurturing this community as if they were her own babies. Caring for families of strangers and growing flowers in the garden’s outside of the palace she and they had been abandoned in.

Now, she stands, her heart heavy on the fields she’d sworn to herself she would never breach. Coming here has always meant that she knows it’s over. Her eyes scarcely water and, when they do, she brushes the tears away with the back of her golden jewelled hand. The ring belonging to Meditrina winds itself around her middle finger like a golden vein from Aphrodite’s own heart. There’s a bow in her other hand and a sheath full of arrows on her back. For someone who cannot stand to see bodies fall by her own hand, Andra has always been a perfect shot. But, she guesses, that is part of the curse.

The children of the seven original sins stand together, eyes youthful, hearts exhausted. Their faces glowing with children’s button noses and snowflake glow, their skin flawless, their bodies barely having left puberty. For hundreds of years, they have lived in bodies that should be beaten with age and sickness. Yet their faces are still the same as those teenagers who had woken up in the dirt, staring at the planets above their heads, skin scratched raw from how much they ached to be held by the creators who had abandoned them. Abandoned them with no recollection of their past, but the shattering knowledge that the world was their responsibility. It was on them to nurture the babies dropped in the dirt around them like seeds. On them to protect humanity from falling apart. As long as they existed in perfect harmony and protected their world, no harm could come. They were only left with this instruction and one more fact: the world that they will dedicate centuries to will fall. Life as they know it is not timeless, in fact, it will be the thing to destroy them.

Unlike Theodore, Andra refuses to accept their defeat. Her brother’s heart lives in isolation - he has never allowed himself to love the angels they swore to protect. With a heart of stone, he barely allowed himself the nature of loving his siblings. Andra sees his heartache every time she meets his eyes and, as she looks to where he is sat beneath a crying willow, running his bleeding finger down the blade of his sword, she knows he has no fight in him. Nor does Chyler, who has tears running down her cheeks as she shakes her hands at her sides. She had fallen too much in love with their world and cannot bear to see it burn. And then there is Mattheo - she can scarcely remember his name, given how silent he has become in these last hundred years. Today may be their last day, and he still hasn’t said a word.

Holding up a universe is one thing - accepting its destruction is another.

Andra acknowledges that they have been hunted their whole lives. She, the warrior child, has spent countless nights sleeping on Jupiter’s rings, her bow and arrow clutched in her hands as she watched the bridge between realms shake, the planets in their sky glitching for split seconds at a time and the sky freezing. She’s watched and waited for the moment where someone breaks through, tearing apart the only beauty left in this universe. In recent years it had trembled more violently than she’d ever allow herself to admit and when Meditrina had traced her thumb under her eyes and whispered, “It’s time, my love, isn’t it?” she had only smiled and kissed her in a way that could only say goodnight.

Goodnight, not goodbye.

It’s Theodore’s mutter that distracts her from her pounding heart. “What are we waiting for? I don’t see why we’re here. I’ve never understood why we have to be here, today.”

Andra wishes nothing more than to be quiet, but it seems her siblings are all looking her way with hopeless and desperate eyes. “You could leave.” They still at her words, she stares longingly at the last phoenix leaving the forest. The one that Meditrina had surely left on. She hadn’t said goodbye and the ring on her finger feels heavy, burdened. “No one is making you stay.”

“Why would we leave?” Chyler’s voice is quiet, broken, and Andra can’t let herself feel pity for the girl who had gotten too attached. Not when her own heart belongs to the constellation obsessed girl who had fled under Andra’s very own orders. Orders her siblings couldn’t ever bring themselves to make. “Why would we leave our home? Are you sick enough with love to abandon what we’re meant for?”

“Like they abandoned us?”

“Theodore!” Snaps Chyler. Her tears fall down her cheeks loudly. She has always been too vulnerable. “That was so long ago that you can hardly remember it, surely!”

Andra’s eyes fall on Mattheo, who’s silence speaks volumes more than the vines wrapped around his feet, rooting him steadily to the ground. They belong more to this forest than they ever had to each other. And, as much as Chyler tries to wish upon a star, they all know forgetting the morning they had woken up in their own dirt and blood and instructed to protect a world they knew nothing of is impossible. That morning is all that has ever defined them.

“I am far from sick with love.” Andra absently twirls the ring on her finger. “I was merely suggesting that you could leave if you wanted. I spent nights alone watching over these forests. I didn’t expect you three to stay until today.”

“You expected us to leave you?”

His voice is hoarse, and only then does Andra notice the tears on his cheeks and the tremble in his shoulders. She’s stunned into silence, watching him with wide eyes. Chyler sobs, wrapping her arms around herself – she doesn’t know if she’s capable of hugging him, but she would if only she’d been taught to. Theodore tosses his sword at the dirt, impaling their home with the poisoned curse that runs through his blood. The ground shakes, but neither of his siblings are phased.

Andra hesitates, the ring on her finger suddenly ice cold. “I expected you to leave after you found out what we were protecting.”

Mattheo snorts, a cruel sound from a person so silent. “Don’t worry, Andra, none of us were ever planning on sticking a dagger through Meditrina’s heart. Your precious little diamond. The purpose of this planet – and the monster you fell in love with. Does she even know? Have you even accepted what you have to do? It has to be you. It can’t be one of us.”

She feels herself still, her heart plummeting to her stomach. “It isn’t her that’s coming for us. This planet will tear itself apart vine after vine and it still won’t be her that stands on those blasted rings and throws a dagger straight for our hearts.”

“How sure are you?” Whispers Chyler, her stunned eyes looking tearily at her. She coughs, standing straighter and lifting her head to make herself heard. “How sure are you that it isn’t her? We’ve all seen you. She has you wrapped around her finger. You love her more than you’ve ever loved any of us.”

Theodore whistles, mocking, loathing, as always. Her stomach drops, sickened with guilt.

“Don’t for a second think that!” Andra snaps, then takes a breath. She stretches her finger, wincing as the ring suddenly feels heavy. A frown makes its way to her face, but she shakes it off and draws an arrow from her back. Something feels unnerving and uneasy and she doesn’t particularly want to wait and find out what. “Look, I’m sure-“

“You’re sure?” The voice makes her still. “It’s time, my love, isn’t it?”

Andra falls. She folds in on herself, heart pounding. In a split second her bow and arrow are discarded to the floor with an echoing clatter and the gold veins of her ring are piercing through her skin, working towards her arteries. A searing pain causes her to cry out. Her siblings stand, stunned for a moment to silence. She sees Theodore running toward her and scooping her into his laps before her head hits the floor. She sees Chyler pull herself into the trees, grabbing her sister’s discarded bow, knowing she has a better shot from up there. Not that she’s ever been a good shot – but what other choice does she have? She sees Mattheo heading straight for the heart of the girl she loves. The monster that she’d been warned about hundreds of years ago. Blood spills down her wrist, her arm shaking numbly, the gold metal reaching her heart and squeezing, cutting off circulation. The veins from what she had thought to be a ring carved with Aphrodite’s love pleading for her to sleep hellishly. Air seems awfully hard to grasp and she can barely hear Theodore swearing at her that he can’t get the fucking ring off of her finger.

And so she’s left to wonder how ironic it is that she, the warrior, had fallen first.

But not in death. No, she fell last after watching them all bleed out around her, their last breaths shaking the grounds of the broken home they’d tried so desperately to love despite how far from peace it was. They were children of sin, after all.

No. She fell first. In love.

Quite possibly the most dangerous thing in her broken world.