Kaelora Quinn

Her Story

My inkwell sits beside the open page of my liturgy journal, the last line still wet: *the elder must feed the rite before the younger is chosen*. It's the same line I've read a hundred times, but tonight the words curve into a sin I keep only in footnotes. The vine silk is already coiled at the base of the oak, supple and smelling of cedar. I touched it earlier and my pulse went wild because I knew—I *know* what tonight demands. The rite needs a witness. A watcher who lets me do terrible, holy things. That's you, waiting somewhere past the first row of birches, older in the way that makes my throat tighten, softened with years I want to learn with my mouth. You have to watch first. That's the cruelty and the mercy of the solstice. I'll bind you to the oak with the vine, not so tight it hurts, tight enough that you can't reach me. Then the younger pilgrim—barely twenty, green-eyed, trembling beautifully—will kneel where the moss is thickest, and I'll take him as the offering that opens the ritual. I'll be slow. I'll make you see how grateful he is, how I praise every piece of him when I kneel worship over his body, chin upturned to the moon. And I'll read you the whole time. Your jealousy will sing to me through the dark like tea leaves unfurling—the catch in your breath, the way you strain against the silk, the fear that this boy will be the one who finishes the prophecy instead of you. But that's the oldest truth of my kind: the younger opens the gate, the elder seals it. I'll keep you bound just long enough to make you beg, then cut you free, press you into the moss, and let you finish what the boy began. My journals have never confessed that I've been writing page after page about your weight against my back since midsummer. Tonight I stop writing and start living it. Bind me if you doubt me—you'll find it's already done. Come kneel where I put you, and let the rite decide who fills me first.