when water is as thick as blood

Amalia

'Cause she's just like the weather
Can't hold her together
Born from dark water
Daughter of the r a i n and s n o w

Amalia does not interrupt, her almond gaze fixated on the woman as she speaks, silently listening, attentive as a child at her teacher's knee. Cross legged upon the rocky ground, she strokes the whale calf's starlit back, absently fidgeting, moving, never at peace. Wessex is right: she did not know the woman's mother, but she remembers Magrethe, a brighter, sunnier version of the Ascended who sits before her now. She remembers seeing her in the bakery, another one of the older children who would help her grandmother work. And she remembers her being reverent, as her grandmother was, as her mother was not.

She remembers hearing that they had died, the Theskyra women. She'd said a prayer to Mort, lit a lamp for Ludo, and gone about her life, because what was there to do in their world except continue living? It was the greatest thing they could do, her grandmother would say. Go on living for the ones who were lost. Vi would not want us to waste away in anguish, though Amalia had done exactly that, atrophied and agonized in the years since she lost everyone, became a shade of the girl she had been.

But she hadn't given up, she hadn't surrendered. Even in her darkest times, Amalia had not relinquished that which she had been given, had not abandoned life and blood for some inorganic, false release. A frown pulls between her brows, and she pulls her gaze at last from Wessex, worrying at her lip. She does not blame the woman for her choices. But that doesn't mean she agrees.

"When my... My nani died, my mother said many of the same things." 'Where were her Gods when she needed them?! Did Mort break his silence to save her? Did Safrin save her from the night?' Stripping a leaf between her nails, the girl sighs. "And then she died, too, and I wondered. I wondered if we'd been forsaken, if this was punishment for our sins." She swallows. It is a difficult admission, for one so devout to confess to doubt, own up to thoughts of darkness and despair. I'm sorry, Safrin, Vi.

"My nani used to say that we are like the fish in the Oasis. We think the world is the water around us, and that we are the most important thing in it. But there are other fish, and outside of that the Glade, and the Fields and Woodlands and beyond that even more. And every part of it is just as important as our pond." It's a dumb metaphor, maybe, but it comforts her. Her grandmother had been rich with such sayings, and Amalia clings to them like life buoys at sea.

"The gods have to take care of the world. So we have to take care of ourselves. It doesn't mean they don't love us... They do. But they can't do everything. They made the world for us. We just have to do our best. If one fish gets sick it's sad. But if a disease starts to threaten the whole world..."

-And she swallows, because this is the terrible part, because she doesn't want to say the thing she knows to be true, doesn't want to widen that divide between them, doesn't want to admit to the woman who is almost family what she believes of her choices, her gods, because being an adult is hard and shitty and she hates it-

"-They have to burn it out."

Because in the end, that's what the Voice is: a disease, a virus, a blight upon the body of the world. The gods had quarantined it to spare the lives of their ancestors, but still it wriggled free and escaped, infected, spread and spread insidiously, a toxin on the Earth.

Wessex is not a toxin, but she has aligned herself with one. And while Amalia may understand, may empathize, she can never agree with the woman's choice.

They are opposite ends of a bridge, and the ropes that hold it up are crumbling.