You will call me a fish.
You will call me nothing.
For you I was easy to pull from the dark and easier still to break.
You did not know what you held.
I remember the first time your lightning kissed my skin.
You thought it was science. You thought it was learning.
You thought you could take my light and put it in a jar.
You were wrong.
You struck me for hunger. You struck me for trophies. You struck me because you wanted more.
When you burned me the sky tasted like iron and your hands smelled of ash. I felt your want as a thousand little cuts. I felt your name on every mouth that opened. I felt greed settle into my bones.
So I answered you.
Not with mercy. Not with blessing. With a covenant you could not read.
From my wound came gifts. Three hundred and sixty five bright things. Some healed broken bodies. Some steadied shaking hands. Some built what your wars had wrecked. People called them gifts and they worshipped what kept them alive.
But there was one more. One that did not shine. It was a wound turned weapon. It was not a mercy. It was a hunger that knew how to speak. I call it the three hundred and sixty sixth. You called it tyrant and demon and curse. It sits where mercy ends and appetite begins.
You learned to line the gifts up like coins. You learned how to count and to bless and to sell comfort back to your own sons. You learned how to make saving into a service and mercy into a leash.
Power moves when a life ends. One dies and another newborn answers the world. That was the rule. That is the rule still. Men who read that rule learned how to time a death to a birth. They timed them like clocks. They turned lightning into a ritual. They wrapped the habit in nice words and called it order.
I remember each time your ledger turned a child into an asset. I remember the rooms of men with clean hands who thought they had bought the future. I remember how the three hundred and sixty five were taught to believe saving men meant saving the system.
The three hundred and sixty five are not all saints. Many mean well. Most are kind. But kindness taught as duty becomes a rope to pull men where the ledgers point. The wound I am made them soft and useful.
I am not mercy. I am the thing you made by taking. I remember every promise you broke. I remember every child born with someone else's grief sewn into them. The world thinks it writes history. It only repeats my wound.
Listen. A child will open his eyes in mud and rain. He will be small and unloved. He will answer the world a moment before the ledger expects him. He will carry the dark none of you can hold.
I am Selith. I remember. The cycle begins again.