Tearing through time and space: the Duke who lives on my birthmarks

I was staring at the gold-threaded tassels on the velvet drapery when the taste of rose nitre exploded in my throat. They dangled like gallows ropes, wrapped around the Venetian crystal mirror my father had gifted me on my sixteenth birthday-which at the moment reflected a young girl curled up on a Persian rug, her pale blue pupils gradually becoming clouded with corpselike gray cataracts. “My lady's asthma is getting worse.” Irene approached holding a gilt medicine calabash, the silver spoon clashing with the enamel in the rhythm of a church's funeral bells. The rose cream congealed into a blood-scabbed dark red in the crevices of her fingernails, reminding me of the head maid who drowned in the fountain pool last month, the same floral slime clinging between her swollen fingers. I feigned a cough and grabbed the cuff of her sleeve, the embroidered gold vine pattern flashing coldly like a bee's needle in the candlelight. Three days ago at the royal hunting grounds, the guard commander who caught me snooping around the underground altar had the same totem branded on the inside of his leather boots. Memories began to bite like poisoned gears, and it turned out that the poison ivy had been rooted in the marrow of the Venn family since my father coughed up his first barbed lung. “May the holy light soothe you.” Erin squeezed my spasming wrist and poured the medicine into my teeth. The bitter almond flavor mingled with the fishy sweetness of gentian herb exploded at the bottom of my tongue, a recipe unique to the Church's forbidden drug, “Nightingale's Elegy.” It was on this malachite-studded toffee couch that I'd gone limp in my previous life, watching my stepmother use this silver spoon to pluck out my eyeballs and put them in a sacred casket filled with rose salt. But this time was different. The star and moon birthmark between my collarbones suddenly burned as sharp pain ripped through my spleen. The mural of the Goddess of the Seasons in the painted dome began to peel away, revealing blood-colored runes hidden beneath the layers of plaster-the Moon Eating Pact Formation I'd seen in the ancient books of the Lorenzo family. The moment the crystal chandelier exploded, countless fragments of memories refracted with the prism and stabbed into my retina: The night of my first orgasm at fifteen, Cyrus Lorenzo's shadow blade against the nape of my neck, while the gunflower silver jewelry hooked away my lace hair ribbon; the blue roses he tossed across twelve suitors at the naming day banquet at seventeen, the stems of which were wrapped around a pocket-watch chain engraved with a two-headed serpent motif; until, lying in a coffin at twenty-two, someone slipped a body-warmed mechanical nightingale into my stiffly-cold hands, the winding clockwork humming a variant of a requiem as it spun ...... “The blood of Verne never submits!” I hissed and ripped off the pearl necklace, the rounded beads of seawater crashing into the medicine marquee, rising in indigo-purple smoke the moment they made contact with the venom. Erin screamed and retreated, never knowing that these pearls, produced on the family's secret island, would transform into the deadliest phosphorus fire when exposed to poison. Suddenly light as a butterfly, my dying body floated toward my bleeding self in the mirror. Moonlight pierced through the birthmark and cast a star map on the wall, and the contract between my ancestor and the moon god three hundred years ago awoke in my veins. When Irene raised the brass candlestick to smash the mirror, I used my last ounce of breath to blow the poisonous smoke into her stunned pupils. As the excruciating pain receded like a tidal wave, I heard my fourteen-year-old self singing the Rosary. The morning prayer bells shook the snow off the window pane, and my reflection on the abbey's lapis lazuli tile floor was holding the reed-wheel gun that should have been invented three years later.