Page 56 of We Were Eternal Once

You kneel and take some in your hand, letting it fall between your fingers. When your gaze meets mine, I know the truth of it. Your gaze is flat, knowing. You are hiding your hurt from me, to shield me from it even as you confirm what I already know. We circle the room, cataloguing the belongings that remain.

Essemteu’s sandals and clothing.

Zahra’s hair pin, landed atop her dress.

Dione’s dress and the earrings she always wore.

Menodotus’s broach and clothing.

I move through the temple to the cell where Theon was kept. The chains hang slack, a pile of ash where he once remained restrained.

“Was he so close to starving?” you ask me.

“I do not know,” I reply.

You linger over the ashes of the fallen, your gaze surveying each and every one of them. I wait for your command on what to do next. Did the ceiling collapse from age, or was it something else?

I want to climb on the roof and look it over. I want to smell the ground for the scent of another—human or like us. I want to study the edges of the hole from above, to see what made it fail.

To see if it was intentional.

I am about to voice this to you when you speak.

“I think it is time we leave Alexandria,” you say.

Leave? And go where?

“Who did this?” I ask.

“Time, I suppose. The elements,” you say, your shoulder rising in the barest of shrugs.

“An accident?” I ask. “An accident that the roof should collapse on the very day all the acolytes remained in the temple? That Theon would die the same morning?” My voice rises in pitch and tone. I am hysterical. I want to curse the sky, the ground, and I want you to do it with me.

But you stand so still, the blaze gone out of your eyes.

Resigned, even.

Why are you not angry? This was your temple. This was a devotional to you, a love letter I could never pen myself. At last, others saw you for what you were—beautiful, intelligent, flawless. Ancient, yes, but that was the bait needed for them to see the rest of you.

And now they are gone, and before you finished your punishment.

What an easy way out. Instead of dealing with the consequences of their betrayal, they get to die. In their sleep, of all things! Why else would they have turned to ash like that?

It’s unfair. They were due for much more suffering, and you for many more decades of devotion.

I had wanted them to fail loudly. To kneel. To beg you and, through you, beg me. I wanted them to know I was first—not by birth, but by devotion.

Now there was no proof. Only ash. Only silence. They had escaped knowing that they were beneath me.

Your head snaps toward me, your red eyes blazing. “Do not bring your failures into this. Theon was supposed to live so you might practice.”

I flinch, because you are right. I ignored the signs of his imminent end, thinking he’d just given up in soul. It wasn’t just his soul, but his body that failed.

“The other faction,” I say. “It must have been them.”

You’ve already turned for the exit, leaving the temple.

You do not linger any longer. You don’t collect their belongings, you don’t say anything over their ashes.