No comment (Reflections of Bathsheba)

The rooftop tiles stayed warm long after sunset. They reminded her of her home in the desert…her feet buried in the sand waiting for Father to come home with the sheep…her mother by the fire, pressing the dough against the hot stone. She would listen to them talking softly as the stars slowly overcame the night sky until nothing was felt except their brilliance.

She wondered…why had she left? The answer came back…everyone did. The city’s gravity was too great.

The rooftop became her escape after the streets had wound her heart too tight.

She used to sit there with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the steam from the bath drift over the ledge. Lights from the palace reflected in the water, red and gold. A drone passed once. She thought it was a bird. That was before.

The photo came two days later. Someone else’s angle, taken from above. Her hand resting on the stone rail. A twist of steam. The soft curl of her neck. 

My good side, she thought later.

Winced.

She didn’t read the first headlines. The phone buzzed until the battery died. When she finally turned it on again, the word trending blinked in the corner. Her name, everywhere, spelled wrong and shouted loud. Bad AI made her eyes move in unnaturally. Looking where she wouldn’t have looked.

He posted a video: soft lighting, piano music, tear at the corner of his eye. He used the word mistake like a lifeline, tossed it into a crowd and waited for applause. They gave it to him.

The messages kept coming:
Witch.
Whore.
Queen.

A lawyer asked if she had known he was married.
A reporter asked what she had been wearing.
Someone else asked if she would “share her side.”

She closed the door softly after that. Curtains drawn. Phone face-down.

Later, someone knocked to tell her about Uriah. Sand, shrapnel, friendly fire. A rearrangement of words that meant the same thing: gone.

She remembered how he used to hum when he shaved. Always the same song, just the melody. The sink would be wet when he finished. She would wipe it dry with the edge of her sleeve.

His toothbrush was still in the cup by the sink. She threw it out. Then took it back out. Rinsed it. Left it on the counter.

The palace moved on. The man who had wept on camera returned to the pulpit, then to the boardroom. Then to the throne.

She moved into a smaller place with peeling paint in the stairwell. No one recognized her there. She bought a new phone and didn’t log in. The bath in this apartment was deeper. The water sounded different. More distant, somehow.

Sometimes, when the light caught the tile just right, she could see her own reflection. Not her face…just the outline. A shimmer. A body interrupted.

One night, she poured salt into the bath. Not much. Just enough to feel the difference. The water held her more gently that way. Her eyes stung. She didn’t mind.

She stopped watching the news. She stopped explaining.

Online, her page still exists. The last post remains:
Her hand, a white robe, her neck just so.

Her good side.

The comments are off.

The archivist

Cork, Present Day.

The rain turned the city to shadowed glass. Clíodhna Feldman sat in the archives, watching mist creep across the River Lee. The air felt wrong, too still, too thick, like paper soaked in old breath. Each keystroke echoed louder than it should, as if tapping the lid of a coffin.

The obituary blinked onto the screen. Harold Simms, 47, sudden exsanguination in Toronto. No evidence of foul play.

Simms. A name she had flagged years ago in a Hampshire record from the 1500s. She had dismissed it as coincidence. But then came the others: Vermont, Dakar, Tasmania. All descended from a militia that razed an Irish village in 1494. All deaths by blood loss. All called natural.

She opened her private logbook and wrote beneath the red heading: Lineage 12C – Mallow Incident.

Later, at dinner, an elderly woman leaned close, her eyes flickering like moths against flame.

 “You’ve seen the pattern,” she said.

Clíodhna nodded.

“Archivists call it the Red Thread. It moves through bloodlines like a needle through flesh, sealing wounds not to heal but to hush. Those who see it are marked. Those who feel it are already sewn in.”

Clíodhna swallowed. “Who is he?”

“He was fae once. Then something older bound him. Now he walks among us with purpose. He is the blade of a promise kept to gods no longer worshipped.”

Clíodhna thought of her dream: a man in a black suit, cane tapping, fog swallowing him whole.

“He doesn’t kill innocents,” the woman added. “Only the blood‑guilty. Only those who carry the line of the massacre.”

“And me?”

“Because you remember. Because your people kept the Book when others forgot.”

When Clíodhna finally saw him, the rain bent around his body. His hat cast no shadow. A busker’s saxophone spat a discordant note as he passed, and a dog blocks away began to howl.

Black linen suit. Ivory shirt. Panama hat. The cane shimmered briefly, eagle‑headed, then plain again. Its rhythm matched her heartbeat. He turned, nodded once, and kept walking.

The nod echoed down her spine. Recognition, not of her name, but of her role.

That night she logged another death. Bridget McHale, 38, Durban. Hampshire blood. No family. The body collapsed inward, veins shriveled to black threads, mouth open in silence, eyes peeled wide as if they had seen something vast before the blood turned to vapor.

Clíodhna whispered a prayer, then closed the file.

Her dreams were not quiet but silent, as if the world itself had stopped listening. No wind, no voices, no cane tapping. Only the sensation of something stitching beneath her skin.

When she woke, red pinpricks marked her wrists, constellations she did not recognize.