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you’ve already witnessed generations of cruelty and strife by the time you are placed on a chain around the neck of an infant. she is fussy and wild and nothing like the male heir that her parents would've scorched the earth for. still, she keeps you fastened around her neck like a promise—one that she only breaks sometimes, only when you hang too heavy and she begs her sister to take her place, just for a day, just so she can taste the freedom of running without anything knocking against her beating heart.
the girls are a pair, just like you. they joke about you—two rings, one future—and the wild one swears it's meant to be, because she cannot imagine shouldering her destiny alone. there is a reason the girls were born together, they decide. forged, like you, in the same flame. two rings, one future. two sisters, one life.
as they get older, they share your weight more evenly between them, the wild one increasingly shedding her lot in life like molted feathers. her sister steadfastly takes up the mantle—their future is a shared burden, after all—and you spend more and more of your days nestled against the quiet girl's collarbone. she traces your silver with anxious reverence—you are a promise, a promise to her. twin rings forever locked together. one life.
when the wild girl sloughs off her future for good, she takes you with her. you clang together against her pounding heart for the whole of her escape, and she doesn't slow down until she's gone. until she unstrings your twin halves from the chain and slides one onto her slender finger, one on his. she grins, tells her lover that you are a new promise. one that the wild girl has made to herself. the future is molten in her hands, it's whatever she wants it to be.
you travel with the hands of the wild girl and her lover as they stitch together a humble oasis, secluded from expectation. and when they grow bored of playing poverty, you graduate with them to stardom—with the lover's hand tracing grand outlines and cutting silken fabric and sewing neat seams. with the wild girl's manicured finger reflecting glistening gowns and camera flashes. still, no matter what he makes her, the wild girl's lover cannot make her happy. she buries her face in her hands and he holds her shaking frame. every part of you is wet with her tears. there is only one thing she wants, and it is something she cannot have.
but the future is molten, and desire burns hot. the hands that bear you now are used to fashioning life into something they want. so you join their grand search for satisfaction, tasting the salty air and thick dust of foreign lands. when doctors fail them, they seek mystics. and when mystics fail them, they seek the divine. you brush against the skin of a hunter, young and rough, who invests new blood into the search. the hands come up empty, always.
until, one day, they don't.
on the night you are changed forever, the air is charged with hope. your twin halves twinkle under candlelight. love and magic swirl together amidst sparkling laughter and bubbly champagne. lips press against you, folded into woven fingers, whispering words as fervent as a prayer.
and then—
and then everything is different. and then you are thrumming with life. and then there is a soul within you, wispy and delicate, just a flutter of consciousness. from your two halves are strung a lifeline, cords taut around the heart of a boy fashioned from magic and love.
the wild girl tugs your boy's lifeline like a puppet string, gentle enough to convince herself it's only a caress. it begins before he even tastes the air. kick for me, she whispers, twisting you with a careful thumb. I want to feel you. her prayer flows through you, strings tugging on your boy's fetal limbs until the wild girl grins at the life in her belly.
your boy, the coveted heir, is born far away from his grandparents' castle. far away from the humble oasis of his parents' youth. you brush against his lily-soft skin as he is brought into a world of harsh marble and bright lights. his squirming is calmed, his cries easily quieted. like everything else they touch, your boy is malleable in his parents' hands.
the lover—a father now, in technicality, but a lover before all else—carries you like a safeguard. he has fashioned finery with these fingers before, and now he'll wield you to fashion a son. he refines your boy like an offering, trimming the excess that hangs over the mold.
your boy grows taller and quieter, golden and careful. the molten star upon which the family hopes hang. not a prince, but an heir all the same, his inheritance is a heavy one. but all their tugging trains his muscles, and his smile stays intact. until it doesn't.
imbued with divinity as you have been lately, and witness to cruelty as you have been for much longer, you are familiar with the human impulse to play god. but no matter the lengths taken or the sacrifices made, you've learned that there is no one who can account for everything. and in the vein running through the wild girl's ring finger, you feel her pulse start to dip.
her decline is steady and wretched, a methodical deterioration of strength. you descend with her into baths of antiseptic and sweat. you rest with her brittle hand on the arm of a wheelchair. you tremble with her fingers against the wet cheek of your boy. when doctors fail her, the lover and the hunter do not bother with mystics. they barrel straight for the divine.
these years, you are split like never before. half of you waits, immobile, trapped with the wild girl—the stuck girl, dying girl, the mother—and your guilt-ridden boy within walls. and half of you leaves. over and over. you travel with the lover and the hunter everywhere, anywhere. wherever you go, desperation thickens the air. you are slick with sweat and blood. the hands come up empty, always.
when the wild girl's hand goes cold, you are laid with her to rest. artificial lights warm you both through glass, a flimsy approximation of life. but the only thing alive in your shared coffin is your boy's weary soul, heavy within you.
the half of you that remains upstairs with the living is clenched tight in the lover's fist. his grief is tactile, sharp. all-consuming. a heavy blanket that crushes the house, crushes the spirit of your boy until it's withered away to nearly nothing. when the lover pulls your boy's lifeline now, it's like the tightening of a noose. you rest hollow as a gravemarker, spanning the stories between life and death in this house.
when new magic thrums at the hollow of the lover's throat, you feel it resound in his bloodstream, humming beneath his skin. it feels like grief crystalized into something hungry and mean. it feels like hope.
the cruelty you witness in the next months is not shocking or special, not in the grand scheme of things. it is cruel nonetheless. you switch hands—from the lover to the trickster, your boy's soul twin. you brush once more against the skin of the quiet sister, louder now, having borne your promised future alone. eventually you are parted from the cold finger of that dead, wild girl, and for a time you find your halves spanned between the hands of the cruel lover and his hunter, who's resided with him all the while. you have held souls and futures and wedding vows in your bands, and now you hold something unspoken, volatile, crumbling.
at the end of it all, both of your twin halves are held victorious in the lover's fist. your boy's soul cries out, oceans away, tied up by more than just puppet strings. a knight clothed in magic puts up a valiant fight, but it is no matter.
the world is molten, and the lover shapes it into something he wants it to be.
in the aftermath, you lay cocooned in the palm of the young knight. terror rings out from her at the sight of you. the world, just reformed, hasn't cooled yet. in her hands, now.
on the day you first meet the finger of the boy whose soul your bands keep, the new world is in perfect bloom. roses sweeten the air and sunlight glints on your shiny silver. when you settle onto your boy's finger, it is the first exhale of a lifetime. his heartstrings rest, now, in his own hands, for himself alone to pull. this is the promise you hold now. but it is not the promise that the knight gives to your boy. her soft skin brushes lightly against you as she pulls your boy close and gives him a gentler promise, one that is easier to say.
you have been witness to cruelty and strife for generations by the time you are placed on the finger of a young boy made of magic and love. and you will be witness to more.