8. Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
ASH
Isit before my flower, watching her struggle for air as panic crushes her chest. Her tears carve silver paths down flushed cheeks, mascara bleeding beneath eyes too wide with fear. Pulse drumming appears at her throat while a few fingernails dig crescents into her palms.
It takes everything in me not to reach out and ease her suffering.
The urge to intervene tightens my jaw until bone creaks.
To feed on the longing that radiates from her like heat would require the smallest effort.
A breath. A thought, at most. The barest extension of will.
I could drain the panic from her blood, pull it through the thinning veil between our worlds until nothing remains but calm and her lungs remember their purpose.
But I cannot. Will not.
Maven needs to feel this—all of it—tragic as it is.
She was not always like this: a fragile creature trembling on the floor of a cold apartment that holds nothing of her essence.
In her first life, she bloomed with laughter that rang like temple bells across meadows strewn with summer flowers.
Eyes that caught sunlight and held it. Hands that created beauty from nothing—weaving, painting, shaping clay with fingers nimble and sure.
That was before she knew me. Before she understood what waited beyond the veil of mortality.
With each cycle of death and rebirth, her light dims.
Fractures spread through her soul, hairline fissures that deepen with every life spent among those who cannot truly know her. Who cannot see what I see.
The mortals sense her otherness without understanding it—this fragment of divinity trapped in temporary flesh.
They pull away, leaving her adrift, alone, vulnerable to the darkness that consumes her from within.
Because in their soul, they understand that she is not one of them.
Her life force could steal theirs, if my flower tried hard enough.
Maven’s soul does not belong in the mortal realm.
It calls to me with a voice she cannot yet hear, pleading for release.
Begging for home. Even now, as her mortal shell battles itself, her soul reaches for mine across the divide between worlds.
A tendril of pure wanting so potent it singes the air between us.
But I cannot take her without consent. Cannot simply gather her essence and carry her home to my palace where she belongs.
The Bright Gods and their rules.
Their benevolent tyranny keeps the balance between realms, they say. Keeps mortals safe, they insist. But what of Maven? What of the souls promised to the Dark Gods who languish in cycle after cycle of mortal suffering?
What of my suffering?
I am Aakanksh, God of Longing. The ache that hollows bones when what is needed remains beyond reach.
I feed on the unfulfilled desire of mortals—the mother weeping over an empty cradle, or the lover watching another take what was promised to them.
An artist who glimpses perfection but cannot capture it.
I taste their yearning on my tongue. Sweet and sustaining.
But never Maven’s. Never hers.
Her longing—keener and purer than any mortal’s could be—remains untouched by my hunger.
I have forbidden myself from easing her pain even as it slices her apart from within.
Prohibited Nemoris, God of Forgetting, from dulling the edges of her memories.
Refused Acherin, God of Despair, from feeding on the darkness that grows inside her with each passing day.
She must feel everything. Must understand that her soul does not—cannot—find peace in this realm. Only then will she come willingly to where she belongs.
With me.
She gasps for breath, the sound wrenching me from thought. Her fingers claw at her throat as if to tear it open for air. Heavy emotion shudders through her slight frame while skin pales to the color of bone, lips tinging blue at the corners.
It pains me to watch her suffer, but this is necessary. This collapse began centuries ago.
Each lifetime, she fights me. Refuses my offer. Rejects what she cannot understand.
Perhaps I am cruel to deny her peace. To withhold the comfort I could so easily provide. But I have waited centuries for her return, and I will wait no more. Her soul—promised to me by the Bright Gods millennia ago—is the only thing that matters.
The Bright Gods offered a soul to each of the six Dark Gods after the Great War that nearly tore our realms apart. A peace offering, perhaps. Or a bribe to keep us content in our shadowlands.
I care not for their reasons.
What matters is that Maven’s soul is mine—bound to me by ancient promise. My perfect counterbalance. Where I am darkness, she is light. Where I am hunger, she is fulfillment.
But before we Dark Gods could claim our promised companions, something happened. The Bright Gods claim it was an accident. The souls meant for us were sent to mortal wombs instead, condemned to cycles of death and rebirth until they choose, of their own free will, to join us in the Otherworld.
Convenient, that mistake. Especially when the Bright Gods despise our very nature.
Of course Vorin, the God of Gluttony, has already reclaimed his promised one.
The bastard always did move faster than the rest of us, consuming everything in his path with insatiable hunger.
His counterbalance now sits beside him in his palace of excess as they gorge themselves on pleasures I cannot imagine.
I wonder if Vorin’s other half smiled as brightly in their first mortal life as Maven did in hers.
No matter.
I am done allowing her to run into the next life. I cannot bear to watch her suffer through another cycle of pain and rejection, or witness more slow decay of that brilliant spirit. I will do whatever necessary to claim her and bring her to our home.
To our palace in the Otherworld, where endless twilight soothes eyes too sensitive for the harsh mortal sun. Where she will have everything she desires and the longing that has defined her existence will finally, mercifully, end.
I ache to see her smile again. The real smile that transformed her face in the beginning, so many centuries past. Not these brittle approximations she attempts now, as she forces her lips to widen.
“Are you real?”
Her tattered voice snaps me from reflection. Tear-filled eyes meet the space where mine would be if she could see beyond the illusion that protects her mortal mind from my true form.
Even in her agony, she’s exquisite. Even broken, she’s mine.
I wish I could show her my face. Wish she could see my eyes and know the depth of devotion held within them.
But the forms of gods were not designed for mortal perception.
Our true visages would shatter fragile human minds, burn through delicate brain tissue and leave nothing but empty shells behind.
So, when we visit the mortal realm, protection manifests.
Coverings the mortals perceive while we see clearly.
Maven sees me draped in white silk that obscures my features, though I feel nothing on my face.
To me, everything appears normal. I see her perfectly—every pore and eyelash, every minute shift of expression.
At least my covering is a simple one. The Nameless God appears to mortals with a whirling darkness where his face should be; a void pulling at the edges of perception.
Light bends around him, distorting reality itself.
Even other gods find it difficult to look directly at him.
It suits his nature as the God of Potential.
He exists in the moment between heartbeats, within the tension felt in the silence of an argument.
I consider my response carefully. This version of Maven is what her therapist calls ‘a flight risk.’ She teeters constantly on the edge of running, of self-destruction, or the retreat into the protective numbness of self-inflicted pain.
If I show her too much at once, reveal too much of what waits beyond her understanding, she will flee. She will find a new city, new walls to hide behind. Perhaps even succeed in her attempts to end this life prematurely—something I cannot allow.
Not again.
So I respond with a simple nod, confirming my reality without overwhelming her with speech. Without explaining that I am as real as the blood in her veins, as the air in her desperate lungs. More real, perhaps, than this fleeting mortal existence she clings to despite its constant betrayal.
I will take my time with this Maven. Coax her toward understanding like one might approach a wounded animal—with patience and careful hands and offerings left where she can find them when she feels brave enough to venture forth.
I will not lose her again.
Not when I’ve watched her die a thousand different ways across the centuries. Not when I’ve collected her last breath from each life, cradling it like the precious thing it is before releasing it to find a new body.
I still remember the first time she died.
A simple fever that her village healers could not break.
I sat beside her bed for three days and nights, invisible to her family’s eyes, watching the flush of illness climb her cheeks.
Her parents prayed to gods who were not listening, while I—who would have given anything, everything—could only observe.
When death came for her, I almost broke the cosmic laws that bind even me. Nearly tore her soul from death’s grasp and carried it home, damn any consent. Only the knowledge that she would return stayed my hand.
I did not know then that I would wait through centuries of rejection.
Maven shifts against the wall, her breathing still labored but no longer the desperate gasping of moments before. She swipes at her tears with trembling fingers, smearing mascara across her cheekbones. The zipper of her dress remains half-down, exposing the knobs of her spine to the wall.
I want to re-fasten the dress before brushing the hair from her face with gentle fingers.
Instead, I remain motionless. Watching. Waiting.