username ;; iBrevity
name ;; Xiomara
gender ;; female
what does she love the most?
There is an island country in the Pacific called Zenobia, and in Zenobia gods are born.
The politics of the country elude most folks, as they keep to themselves and are neatly divided from their neighbours by broad strips of sea. They have no apparent military, and have never shown any particular interest in worldwide affairs; but still they are a popular tourist destination, for their history is rich with myths and legends. While the country is recognized formally as Zenobia, the people who flock to their shores call it the Isle of Gods, and their queen they call Oracle. She is always a woman with four arms, as in the image of the deities who created them.
Their queen is kept segregated from the people, and no one knows her face. It is here Xiomara takes advantage, for the seclusion of her throne allows her the freedom to walk her kingdom. She carefully removes from her mess of hair any lingering remnants of royalty, jewels or trinkets or her crown; and then she steps outside, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, reduced to the same nobody as the crowds that mill around her.
Xiomara never leaves the palace for frivolities, and each time she sneaks out she has one destination in mind. When she was a child she was given to the last queen to become the woman's successor; and although she did not see her family for some time after, she did not forget them. When she could she visited, largely ignoring her parents' fretting over her sneaking out and veering instinctively instead for her little brother. Tiny, four-armed, lilac-eyed and giggly Vannamayil was Xiomara's little secret. Although all children born with four arms were legally bound to be brought to the palace Xiomara insisted her parents keep him hidden, and she supplied them with the gold she thieved and the gems she lifted from ignorant nobles.
As the old queen's power waned and Xiomara tightened her grip on the throne, Vannamayil grew up. She could not see him half as often as she wished, but nonetheless their relationship did not falter. Vannamayil, vain now and far too arrogant for his own good, softened only ever for his sister. It was by her entreaties only that he kept his extra arms hidden, tucked in along the sides of his body under bulky jackets and silly sweaters, and he complained about it endlessly. Xiomara promised that things would change when she was queen. She held his face between her palms and bestowed on him a kiss that he squirmed laughing from, and told him solemnly that when she was queen nothing would take him from her again.
Inevitably, Xiomara's future dreams crumbled. Her parents were struck down in a robbery gone sideways; Vannamayil, out with another boy, had been spared the carnage. But the house was not his, and just shy of 18 he had no legal right to demand it back. Unexpectedly homeless, Vannamayil turned to his sister.
Xiomara smuggled him into the palace. The old queen was nearly 80 now and entirely deaf in one ear, but Xiomara feared her nonetheless. The woman spoke sometimes to empty rooms, nodded to conversations that Xiomara could not hear. The court said she talked to the gods, but Xiomara knew only the queen's unyielding punishments. Still, it was her brother, and Xiomara would not leave him for anything.
It was never in her plans that she might kill the queen. Xiomara detested her but murder had not crossed her mind, for she was at her core unlikely to fight--and she may have avoided the decision altogether had Vannamayil not been foolish enough to be caught. Xiomara, torn between her duty to the throne and her love for her brother, chose violence. The queen passed unexpectedly one night, while Vannamayil was removed quietly from their prisons. There were a few who knew what Xiomara had done, or suspected; but she had become deceitful under the queen's tutelage, and she neatly turned aside those infrequent questions. Eventually, they simply stopped.
For lack of a better option, Xiomara bought and gifted her brother a house just outside the palace grounds, and moved him there. It would be safer while she rewrote the laws that decreed four-armed citizens as belongings to the throne, and she could not bear for him to be imprisoned with the rest of them. Xiomara had toured that facility once with the queen, when she was still young and not yet ashamed of her power and mutation. She had mistakenly thought the borrowed children were returned home, when the queen discarded them from her council or as an heir; but they were kept instead in the bowels of the castle, where the curious might not see them.
"It is important they think of us as godly," the old queen had told Xiomara mildly, turning from the children that had pressed themselves against the doors of their cells. "If they knew how many of us there really were, we would be mortal again. You see, dear?"
Xiomara had flexed her arms against her sides and jerkily nodded, and that night had gone to the parents and first made her mother swear they would keep Vannamayil secret. Now, years in the future, her parents and the queen all dead, Xiomara pulled her brother close. He was all she had left of who she might have been had her parents hidden her, had the queen sent her to the dungeon rather that choose her as successor.
Xiomara, demure in meetings with the council, quietly plotted a rebellion. She had been told all her life she was godtouched, for her arms and beauty and charms, and so she would be godly indeed. With Vannamayil tucked away in a distant house, Xiomara began planting the seeds of change. She would do as she had promised and let Vannamayil be free, and as sacrifice she would strip from herself her godhood.
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