anneandrogen

  General fantasy Violence. Sexism. Transphobia: interpersonal, systemic, and internalized. Transmedicalist adjacent ideas and institutions. Abusive Parents and Guardians. Homophobia: interpersonal, systemic, and internalized. Oppressive Religions. Dysphoria, lots of it.

  [colpse]

  Part One: Maidens

  Her feet hurt, and her calves burned, and her new boots were ruined. How had she done this so easily eight years ago? Covered in mud and filth from countless months spent alone in the mountains. Barely able to see a thing through the long scarf she'd kept wrapped tight around her head, the only ward to hide early pubescent hairs. Fishing with patience and a long stick. Stealing whatever clothes she needed, loathing the way that dresses caught and tore so easily on brambles. She'd passed whole seasons that way, feral. Gone up and down the mountains a dozen times. Maybe it was a good thing, not being able to do it easily. Her life was so much softer now, it wasn't even a hard thing, to ruin new boots. She could buy another pair.

  Finding the Goddess in her quiet grove had changed everything. She had set Kate on the path that made her the woman she was today. Given her her first glimpses of the magic that saved her life, that she eventually used to transition under her own power. An education in magic hadn't been Kate's intended purpose in the hidden grove, but she had taken what she learned there through into her adult life, and her roots were inextricably tied with it. Whenever she did something big, something beyond her own body, she felt her strength bolstered by the grove. A thread leading all the way back to when she lived among its boughs, where Kate had been guardian first, and student second. When hunters were turned away, pointed to less rich grounds, or when storms broke themselves into light rain, Kate was there, directing the energy. Every time she did so, she was graced with the Goddess's presence. Her slender hands to guide Kate's own during harvesting, or her words when the night grew so dark and thoughts of the home Kate had fled were threatening to bring comfort. Her smile was in the springs and dimples in the clouds. If there had been nothing else, no other task Kate had to attend to, then she might have stayed there forever.

  And then, other girls had come. Ones who the Goddess did not turn away, though they were often indistinguishable from the hunters. They hid behind terrified faces and rough voices. Men, to Kate's eyes, but not the Goddess's. The first time one had come, Kate had been terrified. In that man's eyes were her own fears come true. If Kate had never found the grove, never been accepted into the Goddess's arms and given the Goddess's gifts, then she would have grown to be this man. She had been spared that fate, but in payment, the Goddess sent Kate as her icon. When the men who would be women arrived, the Goddess directed Kate to them, and they would fall before her, begging on their knees, and Kate knew that it wasn't her they were seeing. Kate spoke to them. She held them while they cried, but they did not see her, hidden behind an illusion. They saw the Goddess. Her hands when she cupped their faces and her joy when they proved worthy were all subsumed by the image of the Goddess. At first it had been a glory. These eyes who looked at her and saw the feminine divine were the first to look at her that way. She thrilled at the chance to be seen not just as a woman, but as a Goddess. She was helping the Goddess, who cked so corporeal a form, to give the blessings she received to others, as long as they passed the Goddess's judgement. Kate, as the Goddess, would walk with the girl, asking the questions she heard echoed in her mind, testing and probing at the girl's mind to satisfy the Goddess's desire to only give her gift to those who truly had women's souls underneath their earthly disguises.

  When had they first felt the longing to change? In their dreams, how did they see their bodies? What did they want most, if they were blessed with womanhood?

  The questioning sometimes took days to finish, the Goddess growing more restless with each passing hour. Some girls were quick to be chosen, others were totally unable to satisfy her. The most insistent, most revealing questions were asked only when the girl was feeling properly desperate. Kate had known how hard the journey to the grove could be on those unaccustomed to travel, that when they found her each one was tired, hungry, and dizzy from the altitude. How most spent years building up the resolve to hike into the unknown on the promise of a rumor, half remembered stories about a pce of magic that turned men into women. She had asked, nearly begged, the Goddess for their sakes, if she would allow them to rest before the questions. Let Kate prepare them a meal and comfort them with soft words. The forest ceded no ground. Their paths were ones of trial, their lives would not be kind, and so the Goddess, Kate, could be no kinder in their assessment. To give a gift that the recipient could only squander was to give a curse. Besides, most girls were blessed.

  When they were chosen, and the Goddess was satisfied with their answers, Kate led them deep into the grove, where the ground grew spongy with thick bulbous moss and the air thickened with humidity, and sat them down at the edge of the spring.

  A single old tree, different than the others that grew on this mountain, sat twisted and gnarled with age. Its roots spread in coils woven in and out of the moss bnket, encircling the spring, the source, the Goddess. Silence reigned near the waters, all birdsong and breeze fell away. They knelt and pressed parched lips to the threshold. Drink and be free of your old life. Drink and shed your skin. Drink and take the first steps as your true self. The process was not instant, it took time. As much time as life. Still, there was no feeling like the first moments afterward, a euphoria that settled in the mind and body with a round satisfaction.

  Kate's first real acts of magic— ones she did without the direct aid of the Goddess— were fashioning the vials that she gave to the newly christened girls as they left the grove. Woven tightly from strips of the ancient tree's bark and lined with its never decaying leaves, once filled with the springwater it would never run dry, replenishing in the night, ready to be drunk again in the morning. Just leave a single drop, and the vial would refill. Never take the st drops. Do this every night, and your body would transform, ever so slowly, into a woman's. It was the reversal of one puberty, and the beginning of another. Kate gave each new girl their vials, told them of the rules, and sent them on their way, into new lives. This was the only time the girls saw her, and not her acting as the Goddess. They always thanked her, some even called her beautiful, and then they left. Gone back to the lives they had now changed. Alone, she wove new vials, saw the Goddess in glimpses, and walked the grove. It seemed to bend back in on itself, no straight sight lines or paths through that didn't twist with every other step. She walked and in agonizingly slow detail, watched as her body slowed its natural puberty and took up the one she had chosen for herself. If she hadn't taken so much vanity in the quality of her weaving, she might have believed herself more affected by the waters than the girls who she helped, having access to the source each morning and the ability to drink her fill. It was simple and so easy to hide herself away there. Years passed for other people, but her time was measured in hair and hips, the bare suggestion of breasts and the rounding of her cheeks.

  Of course, she was assured by the wind, the girls who the Goddess rejected were better for their having done so. They were nothing like Kate, her beautiful girl of the grove, they desired the perversity of Kate’s form. Svered over its most prurient natures. To allow them the blessings was to pervert the very idea of womanhood. The Goddess was kind, she had been generous, and had asked them questions for so long, trying to find that kernel of goodness deep within. Only when she could find nothing, just the love of flesh, the cry for difference, the inarticute moaning of the perverse, did she turn them away. They marched or ran or wept their way home, unchanged. Screams and cries of anguish often filled those te afternoons and early mornings when they denied another soul. For years Kate was haunted by them, saw them in her dreams as jackals circling her with those miserable men's eyes, jaws dripping slick fluids.

  Journeying back up the mountains had resurrected the dream again, but the eyes no longer circled her in hunger, they sat still and glowing in the night. Sadness leaking out of them and into her skin, thick and viscous. She thought of them often, whispered the names she'd taken from them, and hoped that they had found another path to life.

  Terms and nguage had had no pce in the grove. She'd learned the words ter. Transsexual, hormones, transition, these things weren't to be spoken in front of the Goddess. She liked a more primal, intrinsic version of gender. One that was specific and measured, that saw all experience as the same. It had a certain appeal, almost a prestige, that Kate had been seduced by. She was a desperate child looking for station as much as safety, and the Goddess had given her both. Just exist how she was told to, and there would always be a pce for her. Never fall below an invisible standard and stay in paradise.

  When she fell from those graces, as she always would have— who can stay perfect when observed by unblinking eyes?— it had been the end of the world. Another rebirth, thrown like refuse to the rest of the failed women. It had taken years to rebuild any sembnce of a life. A life she had taken so much care to keep far away from the grove.

  Only, in recent months, she had felt it wavering in her memory and in her dreams. It was back in the forefront of her mind. The smell of it interrupted her at random times. Earth, greener and more teeming with life than anywhere else in the world. Her past was at st a true revenant, she was haunted by it. Years afterwards, and it had resurrected itself in her mind. So Kate tried to banish it away. She tried everything, Wellosian talk therapy, then artistic catharsis, throwing paint at a canvas to banish her demons. When the “practical and scientific approaches” failed, Kate went regurly to a friend and had her cards drawn. The scientific methods told her to confront her past through discussion and recollection. The spiritual told her to make pilgrimage. Vedish tarokk, tea leaves, Smoke forms, all of them were clear. Kate drew the saints of the ke, the mountains, and the Goddess. The traveler's path was clear in the leaves. The smoke clung to her ring finger, the daughter's finger, and traced lines to the west. To the grove.

  She woke to whispering on the wind and packed her bags. Even if the Goddess didn’t want her there, if she still clung to Kate's banishment, something was calling her home. She had to go. Fate was calling her, and Kate chose to heed that call. After all, there was still a chance that she would be welcomed with open arms. It had been years after all.