Description

MOTHLILY is about Amadeus and Severin learning what it means to be in love with someone whose heart is so much unlike their own, but whose hearts they both mutually desire, and whose company they are both terrified of leaving. But though Amadeus might be terrified of it, Severin knows she is not above ruining her own happiness for some greater outcome no one else will ever see. Sometimes, Severin thinks it would've been easier if they'd both died with no feeling more complex than the tenderness of a waltz into a glowing river. But now, the fear of Amadeus leaving Severin makes her want to corner Amadeus until she speaks the truth and nothing but the truth. God knows she's lied enough, though Severin no longer knows what god she's even referring to, since she and Amadeus are the higher beings, now. But even so, Severin knows she's human.

On the other hand, Amadeus is playing a much more intricate game, one that, at times, she does not even know she is playing, or that she is playing against herself. Amadeus knows only how to play games with her silver tongue or her silver scalpel. She has been alone so long, she doesn't know what it's like to have someone on her side, and she's not sure she likes it. But that uncertainty is outweighed by the calm, simple, domestic delight she's never known before, that feeling of home, of someone to wake up beside, and someone to go to sleep beside, and someone to eat what she cooks. The simple knowledge that Severin will eat whatever Amadeus makes, that Amadeus now has an equal to share with all her Vietnamese culinary secrets, this makes her feel more like she's leaving a legacy than any tableau of murder she's made before. But inside her is this knowledge that her human mimicry has one fatal flaw: intimacy. And what she is beyond that mimicry, what she is beyond a deft hand in the kitchen and a skilled knife outside of it, it is the divine. Amadeus is divine, and she knows there is no divine that is not a monster.

The core conflict of MOTHLILY is that Severin has a human heart while Amadeus has a divine and monstrous one. They both knew that they'd die for each other, but now that they are alive, and they are more than godlike, they are gods—they have to learn what it means to be together, and how to stay together.

[From itch.io]