Page 32 of We Were Eternal Once

“I suppose you should ask her.”

“Because you do not know?”

“Yes. Because I do not know.” He drums his fingers on the table once more, his jaw working.

I am done with my questions. Theon’s answers breed more questions, because he knows nothing. He acts like a scholar, like a learned man that can hold his knowledge over me like an axe waiting to drop. In truth, he knows nothing more than what someone else has written.

The answers of our kind predate the written word. He cannot help me, neither can this library.

But I am not ready to leave Alexandria.

“I’ve one last question,” he says, sitting up in his chair. “What is it like to be so close to a goddess?”

Your new truth sits heavy on my chest.

I don’t return to you until the sun has almost risen. I walk the streets of our Royal Quarter, listening through the walls as the humans breathe and sleep. They don’t know our kind exists, that a predator lurks just outside their gates.

Is that how you feel? About me?

Ancient, elder creature…and me. A temple rat, saved by you, drowned by my own impulsiveness.

Why do you tolerate me? Love me, even?

If my heart still beat, it would ache with this knowledge. I did not imagine that you were a goddess in the temple, it is a truth I knew the moment I saw you. Such a divine, exquisite thing could not be of this world.

Such a divine, exquisite thing gave me new life.

Am I your first, your only? Why me? What drew you to someone as inconsequential as I?

We do not befriend humans, and yet you visited me. Loved me. Turned me. And now, two hundred years later, you allow me at your side still.

I am once more unworthy of you. More so than when I drowned us. A thousand years of worship would not be enough to make me worthy of you.

So I hold your secret close to my dead heart. An Elder. One of the first of our kind. I will tuck this away and take it out when I need to remind myself of your splendor. When I think we need to leave again, or when comfort becomes tedium—I will remember this truth about you.

I settle into our grave and press a kiss to your collarbone.

I think it will be left at that, but…I am a creature of flaws. For those first few weeks, I am content with these bits of facts. I don’t visit the library anymore, what is the use? There is nothing in there for me, and I don’t wish to see that ridiculous Theon again. You are all I need.

But when we walk the streets, my ears strain for others hunting. When the moon dips in the sky, I follow the shadows in the street. There are at least ten others like us in Alexandria.

You should be enough—you are enough—but somehow, I want more.

Elder itches under my skin. It crawls along my tongue when we lounge in the garden, or when we fall into our grave in the morning. Elder Elder Elder. Every time there is a lull in conversation or we speak of the past, it hangs there.

This is why I thought I don’t deserve you. You should be enough for me. You are celestial, and I am ordinary. To want for more was hubris. We Greeks have so many stories about the price of hubris. I did not want to be one of them.

But your truth grew thorns and dug into my sternum. It rotted away at me, baring my imperfections to myself. All I had to do was look down and see the aching want for companionship, for answers, for more.

And I hate myself for it.

You knew something was wrong. How couldn’t you? I was never good at hiding how I felt from you. You were the first and only to listen to me. The fact I couldn’t talk to you about this drove cracks through my foundation.

“Stop asking questions, Melinoë. I won’t warn you a second time.”

Is it a question if I already know the answer?

I am dangerously close to cracking when one of the others finds us.