Page 2 of We Were Eternal Once

“What shall I call you, then? My Giltine? Ankou? Are you a coming of Thanatos? Or are you Hel? A grim reaper?” You say the last of it with a petulant curl of your lip. “No—I think you are Melinoë, climbing out of the river Cocytus.”

“Shut up!” A gust of wind steals my words, carrying them down the cathedral and into the streets of Cologne. No one looks up, unaware of the scene above them. They will go home to their human problems with their human families and never know, never understand, what they walked under.

You push off the wall and take a step toward me.

It takes all my power not to step toward you, not to step away from you. To go to you is to surrender, to step away is to be weak. You’ve never accepted weakness, especially not from me.

“O khara,” you breathe, and I flinch.

“Don’t,” I say, but it’s a whisper. You’ve taken another step, then another, and now you are before me.

“I have missed you,” you whisper. You reach out as though to touch me, fingers ghosting the air around my face. I want to close my eyes and lean into it, to forget the last few centuries, to go back to a place where this was possible.

But my traitorous mind will never let me rest.

The temple floor. Rome. Alexandria. Paris.

I opened my eyes to your lies, I do not intend to close them again, no matter how sweet the sleep would be. You’ll fill my head with dreams once more, and I cannot forgive you for what you’ve done.

I am not her, I am what is left when gods forget their creations.

The stake presses against your sternum. I whittled it myself, the final product of years of practice. The only stake I didn’t sharpen to a nub. All I need to do is push and you’re dead.

You don’t look down at the stake, you look at my face. You try to meet my eyes. “Look at me,” you say.

I study your pointed jaw, the freckle along your lip, the pale iridescence of your stolen blood in your veins. I cannot stare at your lips without remembering where they’ve been, how they made me scream and cry and rage.

“Look at me,” you demand, and I snap my gaze to yours. Your red eyes search mine as if you can find me. I am not there, I am drowning in the red of your irises. I am at the temple, I am on the balcony, I am in the theatre. I am everywhere with you, passing through time in an unhurried arc.

“Goodbye,” I whisper.

The stake trembles in my hand.

PART ONE

Denial – Delphi, Before Christ

A Goddess in the Sewer

There were whispers of a goddess that visits the temple.

Not the goddess the temple was built for—that’s why they whisper. To speak of another, especially one unseen, is to invite wrath. It mattered not that no one saw our patron goddess for which the temple was built, or that I cannot remember who she was. A minor deity, but one that demanded piety, nonetheless.

Our goddess watched over us, her serene face belying the ever-watching eyes. They tracked movement without turning, the illusion of constant surveillance. She would know if we stole or ran or erred, even if the priests did not. Our gods were never known for their kindness.

I was a mouse, a common orphan that busied herself at the altar in exchange for a place to sleep.

I think I was an orphan, why else would I be there?

My memory is the worst here, because they are the oldest ones I have. They are fragmented, disjointed recollections of a useless life. If not for you I would have died in that temple. Perhaps I would have come down with phthisis, or the flu, or malaria. Maybe I would have married and left the temple.

Maybe maybe maybe.

I don’t remember longing for a life outside the temple. Sometimes I want to dig my fingers into my brain and pull out this chunk of my life, turn it over in my hands. If only I could string them through those machines in the theatre, playing back memories untouched by your rot. I want to know what I was thinking when I went with you. I want to remember who I was.

But there is only your face, and my emotions dissolved in you like salt in spring water.

There was a goddess that visited the temple, but only at night. Did I seek you out? Or was it some divine accident? Did you draw me to you, take away my choice before I knew better?