Veronica Knox

ANCESTRAL WATERS RUN DEEP

Violet Seaborn’s Unfinished Soul is a mythical fantasy about an extraordinary young girl who perishes in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 who must travel back to the prehistoric goddess culture of her ancestors to restore the mystical powers of the water spirit Epona, a horse named after the Celtic goddess protector of horses, ponies, and donkeys.

Epona drowned as one of a cargo of horses dumped overboard in an area of the Atlantic now known as the Horse Latitudes, to save a ship that failed to carry sufficient water for both horses and crew.

The sacrificed horses were rescued by Poseidon who granted them immortality and assigned each of them territorial waters as their sanctioned domain.

But Vikings desecrated the goddess’s shrines, and her culture was subsequently eclipsed by the patriarchal gods of Rome, Greece, and Christianity determined to stamp out goddess worship declaring it a blasphemy.

Although a pocket of goddess worship dedicated to serving Epona survived in secret, the 1918 epidemic annihilated her clanswomen, and the land was ravaged by drought and pestilence, enough to exile an ailing Epona underwater.

But before Violet can restore Epona, she must save the lost souls of the traumatized Clanswomen of the Horse who were killed during a reign of terror that spread across Europe and Britain by witch hunters.

CHAPTER ONE – GOING SOULO

“I can’t go back to yesterday

Because I was a different person then.”

LEWIS CARROLL

– VIOLET –

It was, on board a sinking ship in the North Sea off the eastern coast of Scotland that I gasped my first breath, bleating softly under a bloodied sheet, and promptly fell asleep, exhausted, chilled to the bone, and utterly soulless.

In hindsight it was several months after my traumatic birth that my true soul came into being. Slowly my image developed as a thought of life exposed on light sensitive paper – a formless haze and then, as a ghost surely accumulates color and substance, it formed a complete portrait of a child with silver hair and violet eyes.

Watching my past as an objective spectator, I sense a slight thinning of the air around me from time to time, where my soul generates enough electrons to manifest like a shimmering heat wave. It was like having an invisible friend moving closer, whispering in my ear that all was well.   

There was a divine reason why Lila’s dream of the Elysian fields decreed I could only meet my mother a thousand years after her untimely death. But then, no death was ever ill-timed in those enchanted goddess-spun days when Epona’s clan of wisewomen served her in peace.

We were going home, my mother and me. And since there was a likelihood that I could be born enroute every contingency was considered.

All but one.

In hindsight, Mother’s astrologer could have read the stars one last time, but later, as I came to fully appreciate the perverse intelligence of the universe, that ship had sailed.

But just then, I felt Mother’s happiness as my own. Dorota was always happy. I like to think she had an amazing smile.

Our last morning broke under a blood red sky.

     Mother went into labor just after dawn.

At midday, our ship grazed a submerged mountaintop with a sickening jolt. It convulsed like a wounded animal, let out a howl of pain and kept moving to outrun its surprise attacker.

The first signs something was amiss in my little world was the sound of frantic drumbeats pounding in my ears and being squeezed awake. I experienced an involuntary quickening of panic as the calm warmth of my internal sea swirled red and I tasted bitterness, both physical and emotional.

I had nowhere to hide, so I flailed for an eternity in the clutches of an invisible snake intent on choking me. After the relentless bully proved impossible to evade, I gave up and let it coil about my neck.

As the creature claimed me, my fears floated away on a wave of surrender. But no sooner had I entered a peaceful dream, than a new assault from aggressive contractions pitched me senseless, headfirst towards the world.

I strained to hear Dorota’s soothing words of comfort but a terrified voice I didn’t recognize called out for a lady I know now as the Green Goddess, Lady Flora.

The worst of it was my head being gripped by an icy hand that pulled me towards the light against my will. It retreated only to return with more force. But although I fought valiantly to escape, the hand eventually won, and I was born drained of willpower into the sharp lingering scent of antiseptic and carbolic soap. 

My initial expectations of maternal tenderness were replaced by a foreign presence of deep loathing and a haunting echo of spiteful laughter followed by terrifying silence.

And as Dorota succumbed to our enemies, I swooned lifeless into the fusty stink of mildew that has never entirely left me.

In some ways, I’m always there on the ship, newborn and helpless.

As always, an eerie silence evokes the aftermath of a deserted battlefield. Ghosts tickle my skin, and the supernatural stench of fetid air brings back my fight for a place on earth.

I am compelled to remember and so I continually return, and search, and leave exhausted.

The hastily abandoned sick bay glows sickly green from a suspended oil lamp swaying above a sink of soiled towels, evil sponges, and miles of sodden bandages.

A terrifying bowl holds the silenced body of a grey snake weighted down by an instrument of torture covered in gore that I recognize at once as the disembodied hand that had attacked me. 

With every heave of the dying ship, the burning oil sputters erratically, and the ship lists. I watch the birthing room fall apart, strangely removed from the horror of it, floating with my back against the ceiling. I look like a cherub from an old master’s painting.

A white enamel operating table displaying the corpse of a woman loosely wrapped in gauze, careens across the undulating floor, and slams into the opposite wall.

The impact exposes the patient’s foot from under its makeshift shroud. Its toe points accusingly at my basket in the shadows.

Each spasm of light reveals a new detail.

Finally, the moment I’m here to discover is at hand. The stink of charred flesh and woodsmoke herald the arrival of the stillborn child’s attending soul. It emerges as a swirl of soot, accompanied by the heat and crackle of flames.

It approaches the infant, surveys it dismissively, and takes a turn about the room to hover over the dead mother.

The weak light emanating from the woman’s corpse flares into white fire at the entity’s approach and flickers out.

Finally, the hostile entity turns away and slowly melts through the ship’s hull, without looking back. The layer of grey ash that settled on the infant’s winding sheet blows into an opaque cloud that obscures my view. For years the nightmare stench of betrayal haunts me.

It’s not lost on me that both Mother and child, officially beyond saving, will be consigned to the scrap heap we souls call the ‘Void of No Return’ behind the universe’s back.

The saving grace for such an indisputable act of malice is that babies without souls tend to look identical to ones who do… slightly distant and disoriented… bored and sleepy. But I was no ordinary child; destiny had a mission planned for me, so secret the universe had yet to be informed.

The child’s dispirited nemesis may have failed to complete its mission, but it left me ‘unfinished’ with an extraordinary mystery to resolve.

A kidney dish vibrates across a steel countertop sloshing a trail of red water towards the edge of the world. The metallic crash as it hits the floor revives the woman’s spirit. She leaves her body to shiver helplessly beside her lifeless infant.

Without hesitation, she touches its foot poking from a bloodied sheet in the basket, and for a heartbeat her spirit burns aflame once more.

The woman is Dorota, my mother. The child is me. My skin is translucent, bloodless as white paper tinged blue, but still warm.

Fate, in a morbidly theatrical mood, has duplicated Mother’s exposed foot precisely in the same position as mine, except hers features a gold anklet against bronze skin, and an exotic purple silk hem embroidered with green dragons that reveal the red pedicured toenails she adored. I am heartbroken. I will never see my mother’s smile.

A sudden lurch of the ship quickens a spark in the dead child. I inhale my first breath. My foot twitches. I am alive and very much alone.

On the table’s last foray, it smashes the lock on a warped door that bursts open revealing a corridor of rushing water.

The walls of the room buckle. But before its contents are crushed to atoms, the rising floodwater gently lifts my basket and carries it downstream on a raging river winding through the ship.

It’s deposited in one seamless motion on the open sea.

Mother’s vigil continues to hover over me until the disembodied voice of a boy calls out: “Row harder. There’s a good lass. I’m here, waiting.”

“I’m pushing the basket towards the sound of your voice,” Mother calls out. “Do you have her?”

“She’s almost here,” the boy replies. “I can feel her, My Lady. Everything is ready. I’ll take good care of her.”

My wicker cradle rocks madly on a froth of whitecaps until a memory in the water bumps hard against the bottom of the basket. Its spirit comforts me.

I fall asleep, safe at last. All smiles.

Seagulls cry “there’s land and love ahead.”  The boy will find me. The loving presence releases my ‘boat’ and dives deep. My basket floats free, and I dream I’m a bobbing champagne cork from my seventieth birthday party.

Mother called to me from far away as I slept: “If at first you don’t succeed just breathe little one. Just breathe.” And so, I did.

My wicker cradle rocks madly on a froth of whitecaps until a memory in the water bumps hard against the bottom of the basket. Its spirit comforts me.

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