Stalking and the Glory of God
A downloadable short story
Tamar has never functioned in her life.
She's constantly getting into accidents. Her friend Eliya keeps trying to make her develop some ethics. She certainly doesn’t get good grades.
And now, when she sees one of the Holy, someone irreversibly burned by speaking God's name, in a department store, she decides to up her game even more—and consider stalking.
Who needs ethical considerations when you have a sudden fascination, right?
STALKING AND THE GLORY OF GOD is a prequel short story to Ivana Skye’s Šehhinah trilogy, an Abrahamic fantasy series where everyone’s personal life is of cosmic importance.
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have read this story multiple times previously, but i'm constantly impressed by the surprising but fitting choice for tamar at this point in time to NOT yet be mega-hot and harsh and metal and radioactively blazing the way she is later, in The Stars That Rise At Dawn. even contrasted to her in the prologue of Stars, before she actually gets burned – it’s not (just) the burning itself that made her as Herself as she became in the main series its like, the reverse? being able to see another person (the nameless tongue-price, but mostly safirah! who IS so hot and incredible and intense at this point), created the contingencies of tamar apprehending an awakening desire, knowing so intense a Want making tamar become Herself enough to act on it (and then seeing allowed her to become even more herself, in a constant feeding-itself process lol), and curdled similar reactions in eliya......it's cool lol. the way safirah here bears so much more resemblance, not exactly in content of personality but in form of diamond-hard power and presence, to Stars-era tamar, than tamar here bears to her Stars-era self.
i'm also impressed with how insufferable and suffocating Eliya manages to be in her brief phone-call appearance, giving some further hints to exactly what Tamar ran away from and had no idea how to explain herself to in Stars.
Most of all I'm impressed with Safirah. Here, as in Stars and Lives, very casually, unselfconsciously, and self-assuredly packing way more background assumptions that turn things on its head into a brief sentence than basically anyone else.