On Mercy and Art

The study smells of old resin and tonight's incense--the last faint coil of sandalwood unwinding like a dying serpent.

I sit at the writing desk. The one I had imported from Lisbon--the drawers lacquered black, the handles bone-white crescents like moons tipped on their sides. Paper waits, bright and bloodless. A Montblanc pen rests in my fingers.

The house is silent except for rain stitching silver slants against the windows. Far below, the atrium sleeps--red carpets cooling under candle ash, mirrors slick with the ghosts of knees and breath.

I should feel--what? Victory?

Instead, there's only this clawing itch to **name the law again.**

When order threatens to curdle, I write. Doctrine stabilises the tide.

I dip the nib. The ink runs like wet obsidian. I write this way because it makes me think more about what I write.

**Doctrine IX: On Mercy and Art**

Mercy and art cannot coexist.

One demands the knife stay. The other asks for the cut.

To sculpt is to break, but the break must look inevitable, like a river learning marble.

If she bleeds in silence, it is elegance. If she cries, it is theatre. Both are permitted.

*(I pause. Draw a line through permitted. Replace with ordained.)*

Ownership is a cathedral: ribs of obedience, glass of shame soldered with worship.

And I--God forgive me--I love the architecture more than the architect in me.

*(Here I stop again. The sentence glints too honest. I let it glint.)*

When she whispered Willow tonight--No.

Not whispered. Spilled it like teeth cracking on pearl---I thought: Here is the sound I've waited for. A newborn word, raw as milk veined with blood.

And yet--

*(I blot the page. The ink pools like a bruise. Something shifts in my throat.)*

I put the pen down. Press fingers to eyelids until constellations burst behind them like shattered glass planets.

Because it's happening again--the fracture in the mask. My nose begins to run which means it will be my sinus next

I reach for the crystal decanter. Pour two fingers of Armagnac. It burns like memory softened to liquor.

The rain keeps writing its own doctrine on the glass.

And somewhere under the ribs of this house, a leash glows white against a throat that should never have learned to kneel.

---

Jana's face finds me then.

God. Not now.

But here she comes--cheekbones like crescent blades, hair spilling black avalanches, voice still warm as smoke: **"You're not in love with me. You're in love with the control. And one day, Elisabet, it will carve you out like ivory."**

I told her no.

I told her art requires hunger and that mercy was a hobby for small women.

And then I watched her leave, and the door closed soft as a tomb-lid.

*(The memory stings so hard I press the pen to paper like a knife to a throat.)*

**AM I HAPPY NOW?**

The letters tear the page in their urgency. Ink feathers into fibres like veins on a drowned leaf.

I write again, slower:

I hate this.

God--I hate this mechanism I built and climbed inside like a coffin lined with silk.

How did I get here?

I wanted to **make** things. Bodies as bronze. Will as glass. I told myself it was sculpture. That every scream I muted was a mallet tapping form from formlessness.

But tonight--

*(A sob cracks. A small, stunned animal-sound. The first in... years? Decades?)*

Tonight when she knelt with the leash bright as frost and her voice broken open, spilling French like milk teeth--Something in me--Shattered, yes, but not from triumph. From grief.

Because she looked--Christ--she looked like Jana in that moment after I first cut her name into velvet law. Eyes drowned in worship and shame-light, mouth slack with surrender she thought was choice.

And now Lina--no, Willow--

Is just another stanza in this sonnet of ruin I keep writing in other people's throats.

---

*(The tears fall before I can stop them. Hot. Acidic. They blur Doctrine IX until it looks like drowned wings. I let them. Let them bleed the script into smoke.)*

---

I sniff.

Pick the pen back up.

My hand shakes like a wire pulled between two storms.

I write, small this time. Small enough to feel like hiding in the letters:

I do not want this.

I do not want to be God of this glass, leather and steel cathedral.

But if I walk out, who am I?

Who is Elisabet without the leash?

Just a tall, strange girl with knives for hands and no altar to sharpen them on.

*(The sob returns, quieter now. A mouse dying in a wall.)*

---

The clock scythes midnight. The Armagnac gleams in its glass throat.

I sign the page. Not Betty.

**E.**

Fold the sheet. Slip it in the drawer lined with velvet and moth-dust.

Lock it.

Because dawn will come, and with it--the need to look like marble again. To become "the Cold Bitch" of repute.

But tonight, in the marrow-dark hush of this house, I let my throat ache. I let the tears dry crooked on my jaw.

And when I whisper her name--it's not Willow I mean.

It's Jana.