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The first time she met Andromache in the flesh, Quỳnh slit her throat. Andromache died with a smile on her lips.
So you see, this has always been their story.
She doesn't remember the ocean. She doesn't remember the iron cage. She doesn't remember how she got there or how she got out.
She remembers cold, deep and painful, freezing the very marrow of her bones; and agony burning like fire through her lungs with every thwarted breath. Being unable to reconcile the two conflicting sensations.
She remembers the taste of salt, like tears. Like blood.
She remembers rage.
In Lykon's earliest years with them, Quỳnh likened him to a toddling child: wide-eyed with wonder, always asking why and easily frustrated when no answers were forthcoming.
"Are we gods, then?" he asked them once. Not out of arrogance; with a hint of fear, perhaps.
Andromache hummed. Their campfire caught out glints of burnished copper in her dark hair, flecks of gold in her eyes. "A priest in a land I've long since forgotten once believed I was the avatar of their goddess of death. I can't remember what they called her, or me. But they did worship me for a time."
Quỳnh had learned and forgotten the names of hundreds of gods already. Gods and their worshippers came and went, and most left no lasting mark upon the world. And yet she and Andromache endured, and remained.
Lykon considered this for a time. "Better that we are not," he finally decided. "Those touched by the gods are often said to go mad."
And Quỳnh did not say, what makes you think we are not?
Immortal memory feels to Quỳnh like a forest of brambles, dense and dark and occasionally strikingly beautiful. The thorns grow thicker with every passing day, year, century. The forest expands. One can so easily lose oneself in its depths.
If you're not careful, it draws blood.
Hungry ghost, the family of her birth called her, when she first returned to them. They screamed and swore and threatened, and she could not understand. She wept and pleaded in turn. What had she done to deserve such treatment at the hands of those she loved? When had she ever in her life brought them any harm?
But this was no longer her life. And when they killed her, and killed her, and killed her again, she found herself transformed into the vengeful spirit they had named her.
There is power in names. She hungered. She haunted. She hated.
She chose her own names after that.
The first time she met Andromache in the flesh, Quỳnh was already dying. The desert was endless and all the moisture had long since been parched from her skin. She fell and died and gasped and rose and walked and fell again. It seemed this was all she had ever known or would ever know again.
Sometimes she slept, and dreamed of a woman with eyes as green as ice, whose smile was as sharp as the curved blade of her curious axe. She danced with death and dealt it unflinchingly. She was too beautiful to be real.
Death was her gift, and when she stood before Quỳnh in all her impossible glory, death was the only gift Quỳnh could think to grant her in return.
It didn't take.
She was still smiling when she rose again. She extended her hand, and Quỳnh took it.
There are many sides to any story.
Modern humanity has an obsession with time that Quỳnh finds charmingly uncouth. Everything is so beholden to the specific passage of days and hours and minutes; schedules and clocks and calendars, as though by feverishly tracking every second of every day they might somehow buy themselves more of it.
Quỳnh knows better than anyone how malleable time can be; how subjective. A minute can feel like a decade, when you're gasping for your final breath and tasting only saltwater. Five hundred years can pass in an eyeblink that is also an eternity.
This is the truth that only Quỳnh possesses: she has all the time in the world. And these brute beasts that call themselves humanity have none at all.
The first time Quỳnh was tortured—
She doesn't remember. They all blur together. It doesn't matter; she has long since outlived every miserable wretch who ever caused her the slightest pain.
All save one.
She has loved Andromache since her very first death and awakening, her very first glimpse of the beautiful ice-eyed warrior goddess in her dreams.
Loved, and hated, too; sometimes in equal measure. The balance rests on the edge of a knife's blade. It always has. Quỳnh loves and loathes Andromache as she loves and loathes herself. They are inseparable. They are bound together. They are trapped.
For centuries, it was just the two of them, alone against the world. Andromache was Quỳnh's lone companion and eternal doom. Lykon came and then went, bafflingly; Andromache remained. Yusuf and Nicolò rose and fell together, locked in a perpetual dance that left little space for any other partners; Andromache extended her hand to Quỳnh, and Quỳnh took it.
They are the two faces of the same coin. Quỳnh will never be able to escape her.
Andromache will never escape her, either.
She first dreams of Booker in her state of perpetual drowning, and he chokes on the hangman's noose as she chokes on seawater; she understands him on a cellular level, in her blood and her lungs and her despair.
She first meets Booker in a rundown apartment, his face gaunt and haunted, the bitter tang of alcohol clinging to his breath and his clothing. He points a gun at her. It may or may not be the same weapon he used to shoot her Andromache in the gut. She did not dream of that, but she has seen the video footage. Technology is a marvelous thing.
She first kills Booker in that same rundown apartment: a slash of a knife, his blood welling up thick and salty, drowning him. She should have shot him in the gut, let him bleed out slow and painful, again and again and again, the way he bled her Andromache.
He seems to believe that Andromache is his; a warrior's bond, forged in snow and grief and booze. This feckless child, who so assiduously counts the years of his self-imposed misery, who thinks himself ancient with hardly two centuries to his name. This reluctant soldier, this deserter, this betrayer, who did not even have the courage to look his general in the eye as he twisted the metaphorical knife.
And he has the audacity to call her crazy.
Witchcraft, these priests of yet another miserable god screeched at her, at Andromache. Devils. Demons.
Madwomen.
She spat in their faces, and laughed when they recoiled.
She had been hanged more times than any of these vile men could possibly imagine. She had been stabbed and shot and gutted and drowned and poisoned and once, memorably, decapitated. But somehow, strangely, she had never been burned alive before.
Andromache smiled and told her it would be excruciating.
At least it would be something new. She was weary of death by strangulation.
The first time she dreamed of Andromache was in battle. She was riding horseback across an endless, grassy plain. Quỳnh could feel the wind in her hair, the warm strength of the horse's back between her thighs, the smooth leather grip of the axe hilt in one hand, the laughter in her throat. She dealt death with a smile.
The first time she dreamed of Lykon was in battle. He parried and jabbed with a long spear, dancing across the smooth stones of a city street, the scent of smoke and blood thick in the air. He died with an arrow in his throat, drowning in his own blood, and she tasted iron and salt.
The first time she dreamed of Yusuf and Nicolò was in battle. The sun baked down upon them, cruel and merciless, and their breaths came in heavy, rasping gasps. Swords clashed and clanged around them, men screamed, and the air smelled like smoke. Blades caught one in the gut, the other in the neck; they both died with the taste of blood in the backs of their throats.
The first time she dreamed of Booker was at the end of a hangman's noose. There were other corpses strewn across the frozen fields around him, remnants of a battle fought and lost. The bitter winter wind numbed his cheeks and his fingertips, and the air smelled like blood and snow. He died choking, the rough fibers of the rope cutting cruelly into his throat.
The first time she dreamed of Nile was in battle—no, not quite. There was a man dying before her, the scent of his blood thick in the air, people shouting nearby. She was trying to help, pressing her hands to his wound. His knife slashed across her throat. She died drowning in her own blood. Quỳnh tasted iron and salt.
She does not know how any of them first dreamed of her. She never asked. In battle, she supposes. Or dying. What else is there?
She has never been a jealous lover.
Many others have loved Andromache over the years (centuries, millennia)—Quỳnh has never begrudged them that. She herself has worshipped every inch of Andromache's body, with eyes and fingertips and lips and tongue; fallen to her knees prostrate before her, above her, beneath her. She could sculpt her lover out of clay, blindfolded, by feel alone; would recognize her in an instant by taste and scent, by the low murmur of her voice. Andromache is hers in heart and soul and eternal life; Quỳnh is as sure of that as she is of the sun and moon and tides of the sea.
They have both taken many, many other lovers. Sometimes together, sometimes separately. Sometimes for the space of only an hour or two, a night, a week; sometimes for years on end. Love is not a finite resource. Andromache has more than enough to share. They are each other's world and destiny and doom; no one else could ever come between them in any way that matters.
Lykon loved them both for centuries—sometimes together, sometimes separately. She was never jealous of that. She would not have been jealous of Yusuf or Nicolò, either, had that ever come to pass; it did not. They loved Andromache just as much as Lykon ever did, of course, but that love took a different form. No less real, no less important, and again, Quỳnh could never be jealous of that.
Booker loves Andromache in his own way, she supposes; how could he not? If he has ever shared Andromache's bed, in the past two centuries, Quỳnh would never begrudge him that.
She has never been a jealous lover.
Andromache's death, however, belongs to Quỳnh and Quỳnh alone. She is violently, jealously possessive of it. Anyone else who attempts to inflict death upon Andromache—however impermanently—therefore belongs to Quỳnh as well. She has claimed them. Their deaths are also now hers.
She slits Booker's throat in a rundown apartment in Paris, and he calls her crazy as he drowns in his own blood.
Just you and me, Andromache promised her once, when they lost Lykon. Until the end.
It was the first time either of them ever realized—ever believed—there might be an end, truly. Quỳnh was drowning in her grief. She could not breathe for it. It tasted of salt and iron. But when Andromache extended her hand, Quỳnh took it. She always would.
Just you and me, Quỳnh promised her in return once, twice, a thousand times.
Sometimes she longs for their ending.
She has seen so many civilizations rise and fall. Wars and famines, plagues and fires and floods and earthquakes and typhoons and every possible disaster one might imagine.
Nature is merciless, but impartial. She can mourn those lost to hurricanes at sea, dig through the rubble of a village flattened by mudslides, pity those afflicted by pestilence; these all grieve her, but do not enrage her.
Men, though. Men—and women—are often cruel. They are vicious and selfish and malicious. Armies raze and loot cities out of avarice; chieftains and kings and emperors hoard grain while their subjects starve. Men steal and murder and torture and rape—just because they can. Because it pleases them. Because there is no one to stop them.
And when she fights back—when she screams, when she rages, when she resists—they call her mad.
Perhaps she is. Perhaps that's the only way those touched by the gods can survive. And Quỳnh survives, and survives, and survives.
She rages.
There were periods in her long, long history when she lived in peace. Weeks, months, years. Decades, even, sometimes. She would learn to be domestic. She would weave and cook and hunt and clean and love. She would fold herself into a community and try to root herself there. Usually with Andromache at her side, but not always. She would craft herself a borrowed life, name herself anew, and pray that this time, it would last.
Those quiet lives always, always, always ended violently.
Hungry ghost, the family of her birth once named her, and she has never fully escaped it.
The first time she meets Nile in the flesh, Quỳnh has just been betrayed by the men she so handsomely paid. That disappoints her, but does not surprise her. All men are betrayers, after all. No, the only true surprise comes when Nile takes a bullet for her, and dies gasping.
Quỳnh did not expect that.
(Death, yes, that part was predictable. Their stories always revolve around death. Even when she does not intend it.)
There is shouting and gunfire and confusion, most of which Quỳnh set into motion herself. Nile grunts back to life and into action in hardly the space of two breaths. "It's a setup," she informs Quỳnh, raising her own weapon defensively. "Get out of here, go!"
Quỳnh raises an eyebrow in disbelief, unbothered by the sound and fury around them. "They cannot kill me any more than they can you, you know."
Nile gives her a grim, flat look. "They're not here to kill you, they're here to capture you. And I think you've already spent long enough in a cage."
"You don't think that's what I deserve? I thought Booker warned you that I was crazy."
"You may be crazy," Nile says. "But you're our crazy, not theirs. Now get the fuck moving."
The last thing she remembers, before being locked away in that iron coffin, is the sound of Andromache screaming her name. The abject panic in her ice-green eyes. Quỳnh can count on the fingers of her hands the number of times she has ever seen Andromache genuinely afraid. She thinks perhaps it was hearing the fear in Andromache's voice that truly struck terror in Quỳnh's own heart as well.
Fear is such a useless emotion. It drowned her as surely as the men aboard that ship.
It tastes of salt.
Just you and me, until the end. But Andromache never came. And Quỳnh is still drowning.
Once, when she was still very young, in the aftermath of yet another battle of some long-forgotten war, Quỳnh remembers watching Andromache bathe in a moonlit river. She scrubbed at her ivory skin, blood and grime washing away downstream, her hair tumbling in long, dark tresses to her hips.
Quỳnh felt sore in body and soul, aching and restless and angry and exhausted. The river was fed from mountain springs; its water was icy cold even in the summer heat. Quỳnh's bones ached as she tried and failed to wash away weeks worth of war.
"Do you ever long for death?" Quỳnh asked, bitterly. "To finally be able to rest?"
Andromache sighed, pushing forward through the waist-deep waters. "Sometimes," she admitted. "But it passes."
She extended her hand, and Quỳnh took it. She always had. She always would.
Quỳnh tugged at their interlaced fingers, pulling Andromache's lean body flush against her own. She rested her forehead against Andromache's and breathed in the familiar scent of her. She was so, so tired. "How?"
"Well," Andromache said, her lips curving into a private smile, "generally, I've found better ways to pass the time."
And her mouth felt so very, very warm against Quỳnh's cold lips.
She is just so very angry, all the time. It's exhilarating. It's exhausting.
She will never be able to rest.
The first time she met Andromache—
The last time she will ever meet Andromache—
Quỳnh will always have a knife in her hand. A bow, a spear, a sword, a gun. Andromache's lips will curve into a smile. Her ice-green eyes will say, Hello. There you are, at last.
This is the only gift Quỳnh has ever been able to offer her.
And Andromache extends her hand.