Part Four - The Summoning
You believe that magnetism between hearts is a simple mortal chemistry.
Longing—the ache of loneliness dressed up as fate.
But I know better.
Poets write about the current of divinity that drags them toward another as if they were chosen by the tide itself. You believe it is love.
You are wrong.
What you call desire existed longer than any god who has claimed dominion over it. It is a summons older than the first dream ever shaped; a command whispered from a place higher than Olympus.
Even I am not immune to it.
It coiled around my ribs, dragging me toward another as if the universe itself reached down and hooked a finger into my sternum.
I felt it long before your histories began; when the world was young and the stars still learned their names. Rushing like a river, she carved me open, reshaping the bedrock of whom I was. She was sacrifice and rectification, devotion and death, taking as much as she gave. I mistook it for destiny.
But that is simply the shadow cast by something far greater.
Now, I watch others answer the same summons, two souls circling each other like twin currents, each convinced the other is salvation, temptation, or both. They believe they are choosing each other.
They do not see how fragile the thread is, but I do. Bright, taut, and trembling, it frays easily. Tugging at them without a care for their fear. It is not love. It is the command to approach and collide, then change.
Even gods bow to that call. I did.
The divine beckoning is powerful, but the relationship it births is delicate. It can be shattered by silence, or fear, perhaps a single misstep, dissolving faster than bone in acid.
That is its tragedy.