Incubated Love

Incubated Love

By Becca Cross

    Writer’s note: If needed, see page 10 for a diagram of the social hierarchy in this piece, based on 

    abrahamic religions.

There was a certain silence in The Ether’s planetarium that Talitha had grown used to. To her it was a comfort. That silence filled her with an emotion she couldn’t quite describe– perhaps nostalgia for a time she didn’t remember. A time before her ivory wings and The Ether, memories that remain dull of images or narration. She simply felt them.

Within the planetarium, she does not roam beneath the countless natural stars in space. She is within them, she walks among them. She waits for their hatching. 

Talitha, under the orders of the angels above her, executes the careful selection of souls and places them within their new wombs. There, within their chambers of incubation constructed of the burning gas, fueled by their human bodies, they are reborn. These stars purify the worthy of their human sins, ripping their mortal flesh and replacing them with wings. 

Talitha’s incubation is beyond her memory. And perhaps that’s how The Seraphim wanted it. She does, however, remember the warmth within her star and the pressing of her knees against her neck– fetal, nurtured, and alone in space.

The warm darkness of the planetarium, slowly being pulled towards and away from a nearby blackhole, was a comfort to Talitha. It was the one comfort she had left.

Before The Ether, there was Heaven. In that time, The Seraphim were subordinate. Treated like archangels, practically their monarch’s serf. He dared to force them to bow to Him. To call Him their god.

Adira could not stand Him. She despised His audacity, His assumption that simply because He created her and the rest of The Seraphim, He had the right to tyrannize them.

There were not many angels in Heaven, not compared to the amount in The Ether. There was no society, no hierarchy aside from their lord. This disorganization led to chaos. It made Thrones assume they deserved just as much as a Cherubim, and even Principalities placed themselves adjacent to The Seraphim themselves. 

They dared to talk back to those clearly above them. The Lord had made them forget their place.

No angels could outmatch their Lord’s power. Six seraphims, however, each with six wings unstretched thus uncovering their faces, was practically beyond His comprehension.

The Seraphim were not content with the dozens of angels who roamed Heaven. They now had to rule over Elynid’s mortals, and had to incite the same fear and respect into their souls that their late god once did. To preserve the mortal plane’s, Elynid, Kedists, those who worshipped the once one-and-only god, they needed to expand The Ether’s population. 

They chose Kedist souls, those with the least imperfections. Adira led this search, fixated on Kedist vowesses– or rather, a specific vowess.

Adira’s eye is how Talitha came to be. She gave Talitha her wings, her angelicism, and her obedience. In her incubation, she lost who she was. She lost her name, her appearance, and her identity. Still, she was impure.

The Seraphim had not yet adjusted to their newfound worshippers. The entanglement of mortal worshippers was not enough for their thirst. They- Adira wanted to feel their worship. She wanted her vowess to herself, her own personal worshipper. 

So she expedited her vowess’ incubation. She did not care for this girl’s, this archangel, purity. Talitha was not meant to serve a purpose in new Heaven, The Ether, she was meant to be a helot for the Seraphim. For Adira.

Talitha’s impurities were primarily within her brain. Her rushed recreation did not let her fully break down before building her back up. Although she had no concrete memories left, she did have the feelings associated with them. She remembered faint callings of a name she could not remember, the feeling of air taunting the hair on her arms, the sounds of whispers she wasn’t included in, and one final release of hope.

Talitha remembered very little from her mortal life. But she remembered isolation. But Adira, her sweet savior Adira, wouldn’t dare to leave her alone! She wouldn’t want to– nobody loved her the way Talitha could. Adira knew that Talitha’s one purpose was to support her, to love her, it was why she recreated Talitha in the first place.

Talitha had been wandering around The Ether’s marble halls as per usual, searching for Adira. She had left Talitha in her quarters, instructing her to not move. Talitha listened, for as long as she could, before growing restless and starting her search.

Then she heard their whispered discussions within the planetarium. Every angel, besides The Seraphim, had been instructed to not enter. And Talitha did truly want to listen to what Adira told her to do. She didn’t want to upset her.

“If we move even closer to the black hole, then the incubation process would be faster than our first round–” a familiar voice said under her breath in the locked planetarium. For any other conversation, she wouldn’t have stayed. But something about incubation caught her attention. She flew up, so that her shadow couldn’t be seen from beneath the door, and pressed her ear against the ivory door to listen in.

“And if we lose all we’ve built? One wrong incubation- one implosion could power the vortex to be stronger than any one of us-” a deeper voice said.

“Is our greatness not worth the risk?” Their fight, though still whispered, was slowly escalating and echoing throughout the empty space in the planetarium.

“We would need constant surveillance, and no angel of ours doesn’t already serve a purpose, we are in no rush to create our guard!”
“If we want to incubate angels stronger than the incubated we have now, we need that vortex in order to do it. That’s final-” Adira spoke up, her voice firm and assertive. She sounded somewhere else entirely, her mind not with her fellow leaders. And yet, they listened.

Then, The Seraphim all turned towards the door, creaking open, to reveal an eavesdropping archangel. There, Talitha’s new purpose was assigned.

Talitha couldn’t count days the same way mortals could. After all, the sun never set on The Ether. Regardless, she tried to track the time wasted in the planetarium. She tried to go to Adira, in order to speak to her, her real purpose, but Adira was too busy for her now. She had new angels kneeling on the ground she walked on– Talitha wasn’t special anymore.

She spent her time watching stars and imagining Adira’s wings finally uncovering her face, showing Talitha her true self, letting Talitha be worthy.

“You’re all I could ever want” Talitha would imagine Adira saying, and she tried to believe her imagination. It was all she had left.

There was a certain silence in The Ether’s planetarium that Talitha despised. She was not used to the lack of praise, the hatred that she convinced herself Adira must have felt. It was torture. That silence filled her with an emotion she couldn’t quite describe– perhaps despair– for a time she was forced to remember time and time again. 

Mortal years must have passed before she stopped wanting something Adira did not want from her. She never accepted this position, nor the fact that Adira seemed to have outgrown her love. She probably reminded Adira of her immaturity, of a time where she did not pretend to be noble. But Talitha knew that deep down, Adira was the same.

Talitha lost her spirit. She lost her hope, her joy, and her purpose in this immortal life. She simply stared out into space, watching those that were once in the same position she was in. Curled, fetal, and comforted. Oh how she missed that comfort.

Slowly she grew used to the silence. She tried to ruminate in it, to associate it with something, and eventually, it began to remind her of a warmth from a time she had long forgotten.

A new soul entered the night sky– a warrior hanged for combatting the Tarenian government. But her motives and person could be restructured; her purity and strength were why Talitha had selected her. She was the perfect candidate for the new guard. Her star shone brighter than most others, despite her early incubation, and she soon grew to be Talitha’s favorite to admire in her countless spare time.

Any other angel would have marked this soul as impure. She may not have had any strong physical ties to She had Elynid, but her soul had one tie that was practically impossible to break: her soul was tied to another’s, one who did not belong within The Ether. And her ascension to her incubation was not a severance to their tie; instead, fragments of her soul were left with him, and fragments of his followed her, orbiting her in her incubation.

Talitha couldn’t help but admire them. She could feel their tragedy, regardless of where she was in the planetarium. She could finally feel something aside from her forced faux apathy towards Adira. Their grief radiated throughout the room. A shared grief that transcended this mortal’s melting into her shell and the distance between Elynid and space. Her brightness outshined the darkness imposed by the ever-approaching black hole; the fragmented soul matter that orbited her shone in tandem with her. Her grief and constant yearning was what kept her burning bright.

Talitha wished for that shared love, the equal worshipping between a pair. She tried to stop these wishes, biologically no archangel would ever feel these things on her own. But enough time left by oneself will create an evolution, apparently. 

Soon after this soul’s hanging, her lover drowned. And admittedly Talitha wasn’t observing Elynid, but she liked to believe that he died to be with his soul’s tie. So when she had the opportunity to reunite these souls– to make their fragmented selves whole again– against her better judgement, she figured that she could entertain that. She had remained perfect and pure in her planetarium until then, so surely no one would truly notice one impure soul.

She needed to feel again. Good lord how she missed feeling anything. She reached out to them, reaching out for help from herself, from her lover. Talitha was weak. An undercooked archangel, she was forced to listen– she didn’t have a choice, she couldn’t fight back.

She didn’t expect one touch to send the binary star crashing into the mortals’ planet.

The stars’ strength pulled them away from the black hole, away from The Ether, and back from whence they came. 

Talitha was helpless.

For the first time in mortal decades, she left the planetarium unattended. She ran between those marble pillars from years ago, to where she knew Adira would be. In a room full of her worshippers, in her quarters.

“Adira- my liege- I-” Talitha burst into the room, and everyone’s eyes shifted on her.

Adira looked at her with a hatred she had only ever imagined. She ignored it. Talitha descended to the floor, and got onto one knee.

“I must talk to you about something– urgently,” Talitha said underneath her breath. Adira excused herself, and followed her outside.

“Talitha, I have told you before you are not to leave the planetarium– if a star were to explo-”

“A binary star is crashing into the mortal plane,” Talitha quickly and idiotically interrupted The Seraphim in front of her. She braced for impact, but instead felt a gentle wing upon her shoulder. Adira, perhaps absent mindedly, removed a wing which covered her face.

“Calm down, tell me what happened,” Adira said while quickly ushering them back to the planetarium.

Despite the chaos at hand, Talitha felt warmth again. Adira hadn’t left her, not yet.

“I- Adira, I’ve messed everything up, I was inspecting the binary star, expecting impurities– I don’t know what happened–” Adira stopped Talitha, and cupped her face with her wing.

“We will fix this, Talitha. No other Seraphim will need to know. I will make it okay,” she assured Talitha. Talitha was still naive enough to believe her. She ignored the anger behind her facade of love. She wanted to feel worthy again. 

Maybe the anger behind Adira’s eyes should have been a sign that her comforts were lies slipping through the cracks of her gritted teeth. And maybe Talitha, deep down, knew that. But maybe she wanted to feel the comfort of Adira’s light, her attention, more than she cared about the consequences of her actions.

“I’ll meet you in the planetarium after Elynid’s next cycle. Go there alone, okay?” Adira’s voice was firm and assertive, almost cold. But to Talitha, it still tasted like honey comforting the back of her throat.

The pair stood in silence for a moment, Adira’s four out of six wings covering her body, Talitha’s two wings lowered behind her back, exhausted. Talitha was frozen, whether it from shock, reverence or fear, staring at her goddess. 

She wanted to be held by her. To be comforted and told that she had been missed, and that after all this time she was still loved. But of course she remained reverent– remained silent.

“Get some rest, Talitha,” Adira said, letting one of her back wings trace Talitha’s hair as she walked towards her door. Talitha resisted any urge to lean into her wing. Before she left, Adira paused at the door, saying “you’ve done well,” and lifting one of the wings covering her face. And though she revealed nothing, it still meant something to Talitha. It was a strand of hope that maybe, this indescribable act done out of loneliness would bring the two back together. 

Before she could utter a thanks, Adira was gone, leaving Talitha alone in her quarters.  Climbing into this bed, different and larger than the bed that Talitha had grown used to, she let herself feel the exhaustion from her eternal life that she had kept hidden within her wings. And though this bed was different and clearly made for a Seraphim and her harem, it still smelled like Adira. Her wings still carried that sweet green tea smell, the same smell that had rubbed onto her maroon colored duvet. 

Talitha let it consume her, just for the night, until she had to be the archangel she was designed to be. For now, she would just be Talitha, held by the goddess that had brought her into eternity.

Becca Cross ‘26

Codependency is a theme I like to explore within lots of my art. This piece serves as an exposition for a longer story of mine, where one subordinate character, Talitha, changes the landscape of her universe through an impulsive act in the name of love. Incubated Love was inspired by my own personal experiences with others, who have enforced the idea that I must behave for their conditional love. I wanted to explore that theme within this piece about Talitha and Adira’s incubated love, while also incorporating many world building elements inspired by Abraham religions, primarily Christianity.