The threat of litigation was supposed to unnerve me into silence, but to the contrary, I was looking forward to it.
cult
“Yeah! He thought I was a girl! Didn’t you hear it?” It’s hard to describe the look in their eyes, this sort of unhinged desperation. Almost as if my hearing this myself would make me go, ‘Oh my gods, AJ, you’re right, you’re the most tragically estrogen-laden person on the planet, clearly the only solution is to starve yourself and take chainsaw to your hip line, I can’t believe I’ve been so blind.’
“Oh, I’m sorry, AJ.” I said, muttering through an entirely hypothetical conversation as I hauled my things off the porch of a residence I no longer lived in. “I can’t afford to give you gas money to your job interview. As it turns out, the fucking UNSEELIE FAE KING was too busy cementing their ass indent in Arkady’s couch to drop off MY PROPERTY THEY TOOK to the middle of downtown so I had to pay for a BLOODY Saturday night Uber.”
I remember this starkly because when I first laid eyes on them in person, it was in that very room. The walls were painted startlingly crimson, there were Asian antiques all around. It reminded me a lot of– it reminded me a lot of–
I wasn’t well-versed in Tarot at the time, but we had fun chatting with the bartender. We told them we were a polycule out for Valentine’s Day, who was dating whom. I wish I could tell you what the other three drew. But goddamn if my ass didn’t draw the fucking Tower.
“When I end up being proven right about this, you owe me three crates of champagne!” I called down the stairs. I felt comforted by that. Finally, something coming out of my mouth that was more believably me.
Arkady was not amused. “That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” I heard him snap back from the kitchen.
It’s the same shit as Ash pretending they could channel Arannan, Rebecca, Elisabeth, and Isola just to force more bonds with me. They’ve been doing the same fucking thing. And as my tagline suggests, I fell for it!
T w i c e.
Ash is a predator.
They go after systems and traumatized, mentally ill persons without a solid sense of self. They seek the under-aged or monster-like alters or “past-lives” for their own sexual gratification. They will synthesize a sense of belonging using religion and magic, and then turn the tides against you once you either learn to say ‘no’ or you start questioning too much.
“Xanthe, what infuriates me the most about what happened is that [Arkady] only seemed to want you once he and [Ash] convinced themselves you were magic. That you could validate and cheer on everything they would say to raise themselves above the human race. And why? Because anything they do to you once you’re convicted of ‘being human’, doesn’t count. They condemned you for showing signs of mental illness because if your world was a result of mental illness, it meant that theirs is too.”
Living Fiction 