Page 38 of We Were Eternal Once

“At one time, yes,” you say, waving your hand to dismiss the conversation. “Others are dead.”

Dead. I know we can die—I felt like I was when I nearly starved, when the sun burned my flesh off. If my head is removed from my body, I will die. Certain woods through the heart can be fatal, if left for a long time. I know there are ways to die, I just did not know it could happen to us.

The silence of the room tells me I am not alone in these thoughts. If an Elder can die, so can we. I want so badly to ask the intricate details of an Elder, but what would that say about you? I would never let these strangers know that you held that information from me. It is your weakness as much as mine, and I do not intend to make another mistake because of my selfish wants.

“And their lines? Do they survive?” Dione asks. A few heads snap to her, their attention dragged from you at last.

“Their lines?” you ask.

“Yes. The others they made, those they birthed. Do they live after their maker dies?”

You tilt your head, your red eyes unblinking as you stare at Dione. What a silly question. A human does not die when their parents do, otherwise there would be no humans.

“Yes,” you reply at last.

“You know how many there were?” Essemteu asks. For the leader, he’s been silent most of this time, content to moderate I suppose.

“Five,” you answer. “You know my name, yet you don’t know how many of us there were?”

“Yours is the most…infamous,” Theon says.

“How so?” You pin him with your gaze and I thrill as he shrinks back. Will he say the words to your face he didn’t dare say to me?

“Your role…in…” Theon squirms. “Justice,” he says at last, settling on the word he suspects will offend you the least.

“Hmm,” you say, tapping a finger on your knee. “Have you seen the death of an offspring after the death of a maker?” You ask this question of Dione.

“I’ve never seen our kind die,” Dione says through clenched teeth.

“This harkens back to our discussion,” Ardashir says, glad to take up the mantle once more. “We are immune to illness and maladies of age. If you reject hierarchy by breeding, then accept it by strength.”

“A man of war proselytizing about strength, how inspiring,” says Kalon.

Those first few meetings were much like that—snippets of truth amongst the lore. Stories of our kind I’d never heard, myths unspooled and examined. I was right, some took your knowledge as gospel to worship. Others rejected anything that went against their core beliefs.

Every meeting I feared would be our last. You despised their prickling questions, the way they tore into the flesh of your past to devour it. Dione never spoke after that first meeting, Zahra speaking enough for the two of them. I thought them lovers at first, only to learn that they were both made by men who abandoned them when they grew bored of them. I did not understand how they could be so close without sex.

Yet every full moon, we hunted then went to the home with the handprint on the door.

A Goddess Once More

We always walk home in silence. I chew over the truths you gave and try to piece them together. You are an Elder, one of five. Mother of Silence comes from a sort of justice.

It’s fractured. I cannot place it all together, even as I try to write it out. I’ve started to do that—to keep a journal of the things I’ve learned of you and of us.

I want most desperately to ask about the venom. Do those we leave alive just die several days later? Or is it a venom we use to make another? I fear if I ask and it’s the latter, we will cease to attend the meetings. I toy with how to phrase the question to avoid this line of thinking when I decide on something else.

A test.

For centuries I have subdued my prey with words, using our coercion to make them pliable and silent. With just a few words, they follow me to their death with unfocused eyes. Zahra said the venom paralyzes. I will test this.

I wait in the shadows of the empty street. It is the type of street that if a human screamed, no one would come. The shops are closed tight for the night, the moon a mere sliver in the sky.

I grab the first solo human I find and pull them into an alley. My hand clamps over their mouth as they try to scream. Already a command blooms on my tongue, but I stop it short. Instead, I sink my teeth into the human’s neck, right over their throbbing, erratic pulse.

Within seconds they go limp and moan. I startle, nearly dropping my prey. The moan…It’s not the moan of the exsanguinated—they moan as their life drifts from them, as their body rejects the truth of their imminent end. This is the moan of a lover in the throes of passion. The memory of our first kill together, of the first man I failed to coerce, comes barreling back. He did the same, until you silenced him.

The human sways in my arms, his body shuddering. His lips move as though to speak but he cannot. He is not fully paralyzed, he can breathe. Humans need that to live, and if my bite rendered that useless, all humans would die before we are done feeding.