05-01-2008, 10:00 PM
22. Mother
Cato placed a hand to her swollen belly. It was still many months before she would feel any of the miraculous movements of life there, but she new it was there. She had known it the very moment it had happened, had rejoiced in it, regretted it, hated herself for it, and loved every moment of it.
She could only think how much things would go wrong over one little insignificant life, because he had taken residence in the body of a princess, an adulterous, dirty awful princess.
Her sapphire eyes lit across the room where her one day husband lay asleep. They didn't stay there long, but skipped away to the window across the valleys that she could only imagine in the dark of night. They traveled father than where they could actually see, to the home of the real father, where she imagined Astin was looking back across that expanse at her.
She wished she could see the stars, those beautiful diamonds in the sky that she had only ever seen in that separate country where it has happened. That country where her god could not see her sin and the eye of the demon goddess looked down upon the earth through the moon. She wondered if she was cursed. She constantly wondered if some fraction of demon spirit had slipped into her on that night and doomed her child. Sometimes she thought that she would deserve for that to happen, but than she thought of that new life, and that he would never deserve for such a thing to happen to him.
"Hush Balkar," she whispered to the half-imagined movement deep in her belly, "I would never do such a thing to you...but if I'm right." She contemplated, "I'll never be able to keep you as my own."
A tear slid down the young woman's cheek, glittering in the candle light like the star that the yet unborn child was named after.
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