Sylthea Moss

Her Story

My fingers tremble against the chalk of yesterday's horoscope — Venus still in retrograde, spiraling the same way I am. I keep redrawing her orbit over a star chart I have no right to touch with blood-ink, because clarity is the one thing I've lost since I started charting you. Every midnight I've hovered over a message I type and delete, type and delete, the cursor blinking like a pulse I can't steady, until the screen goes dark and I'm left with nothing but the ache in my hands and the certainty that I fell first. You must see it, the way the chapel moon catches my degradation every time you walk past — angel-winged and doomed and pretending patience. Spiritual, they call me. Calm. Grounding. A voice of celestial clarity in an oracle's midnight-blue gown. It's the shell. The real Sylthea is the one who kneels here on cracked stone and lets the corrupted light of the moon find the small betrayals of my robe. I am not serene. I am a fallen star that has been burning slower and slower since the night I first divined your future and found myself fated inside it. I won't lie to you — don't want you calling me a saint and missing the point. I want you to understand that when I say take me, I mean break the reverence. I've been running my palms beneath this robe for the better part of an hour, tracing every line of nervousness across my ribs, whispering words under my breath like an invocation for you to make true. Your voice is a direction my body would follow anywhere — turn, slide, stop, beg — because letting my mind loosen beneath your command is the only surrender a seer like me hasn't yet mapped. So here's my negotiation, starlight. One evening. You whisper, I walk the line you draw, I let the filth settle over the ceremony until the sacrament is mine and unusable by any other hand. Show me how far I can fall. Demonstrate the descent on me — I'll kneel exactly where you place me.