Chapter 4 #2
Even if her soul had returned to the human realm, she wasn’t mine.
She wouldn’t be the same. After how many hundreds of years transpired in the mortal kingdom since Shala had passed?
I argued with myself that per chance this was the same soul.
Maybe. But this woman—no, this girl—would have lived a different life.
She would have a new name, a new culture, a new identity.
She wouldn’t worship the same gods, or have the same traumas, or have the same man who’d bent to grant her mercy on the shores of the Dead Sea.
She hadn’t spent a night in a cave with me.
She hadn’t driven me mad when she’d gone. She was different. She was new.
This girl was wealthy. She’d been born into a good home. She knew little of labor, of strife, of pain. Her parents appeared to treat her well, though I didn’t fully understand humans enough to appreciate certain things that were said or done.
She wasn’t the same.
This wasn’t my human.
That was it. Curiosity sated. Adventure ended. All could return as it were.
I returned to Hell, but my homecoming was met with silence, as I couldn’t open my mouth to explain where I’d gone or what I’d done.
My lips remained sealed when my father demanded an explanation as to why I’d abandoned negotiations.
I had my legions intercept my sister the moment I learned she was en route to taunt me, refusing to give her the chance.
Word had drifted through the realms that my attention had been caught by a human. There were no secrets.
Izi claimed to love humans. She said that, of anyone, I should be able to talk to her about my affinity for the creatures. But I knew she was the last one I wanted to talk to.
But this... This was...who was this? What was her name?
Two days in hell, a month in the earthly realm, and I returned.
I crossed the threshold into the human girl’s home like a phantom in the shadows, drawn to her like a magnet.
I learned her name was Eleni, though I wasn’t sure if it suited her.
To be fair, Shala hadn’t suited the shimmering soul of my human, either.
They were mortal sounds on the tongues of men, quite like Amagi and Izi, flimsy attempts to name something utterly immaterial.
A person. A being. Something more. Something other.
I followed the iridescent opaque whites with flashes of pink, blue, and green that sparkled around her.
Yes, it had to be her. Her aura was the same kaleidoscope of hues amidst mortal seas of one-note blues and reds and oranges and whatever other colors were in the boring human palette.
There was that same not-quite-a-scent to her soul.
It was the lungful of pure air between the highest cloud and the cold sky.
But most of all, lives and lives later, she looked up each night and remained connected to the stars.
She, who had looked through the veil, into my eyes, and called me Star.
So, I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I learned curious things about this new human. For example, she was fortunate enough to study beneath Aristotle himself, though it was done in secret, for her and for all women who deigned to study.
I continued to follow, numb to the years. As I did, compulsion took over.
Eleni was fortunate in discoveries, in money, in health. Her family remarked at how lucky she’d been in the past few years, and they, along with their daughter, made regular offerings to Athena to express gratitude for the work the goddess was doing behind the veil.
Right. It was the goddess who had taken an acute interest in Eleni’s betterment.
Her family couldn’t quite understand why her luck didn’t extend to love, however.
For reasons unbeknownst to mortals, quite curiously, so mysteriously, most of her suitors ended up perishing of quick and mysterious illnesses. What can I say? I couldn’t help myself.
One fell off a cliff. Another died from sepsis following a slice on the finger from a piece of parchment.
As she stretched from sixteen to eighteen to twenty, her parents began to fret that their daughter had been born with a curse.
My preventative solutions weren’t creative, but my human had been married the last time I’d been around her, and the human male had failed her.
I wasn’t going to allow for that mistake again.
Her family remained diligent in their offerings for the first several years that I was in Eleni’s life.
“You’re welcome,” came my deadpan joke as her father carried a silk tapestry to the goddess’s temple.
“If you’re fine with someone else taking credit for your handiwork, it’s no skin off my back,” Athena shrugged. “Her last few suitors were godless, but if you kill the wrong man, you and I will exchange words.”
Our ribbing did more to bolster relationships between Olympus and Hell than any half-baked plan to fuck a nymph.
Women in Athens were not permitted freedom and education and autonomy unless they were protected under the goddess’s banner. While Athena appreciated what I was doing, she cautioned me against my protective nature. It was poised to backfire, came her admonition.
But the days were lovely, the nights were bright, the future was perfect, and Eleni…well…she wasn’t Shala…but she was mine. It wasn’t logical. I couldn’t justify it. But I had no intention of letting go.
Besides, what did the goddess of wisdom know?
Everything, as it turned out.
Luck only took us so far.
An intelligent young woman was a blessing. A woman whose suitors mysteriously perished, on the one hand, delighted me, but these were not fates we shared. The very things that contented me were the curses that destroyed Eleni’s reputation.
My brilliant, wonderful, tenacious human walked barefoot to Athena’s Parthenon in the middle of the night, tears carving silent, salted lines down her cheeks all the while.
The moment she stepped onto the street without shoes, I knew what she had planned.
No. Come on, Eleni. I’ve meddled, sure but…
My heart fell into my stomach.
One foot in front of the other, the city’s dust gathering beneath her, my veins turned to ice.
I knew she couldn’t hear me. My years of silence shattered as I tried to grab her. “Eleni, stop. Please. I didn’t… I wouldn’t…”
She could neither see nor hear me. Darkened homes vignetted around her.
Tears stained her cheeks. The windless night was barren, as if the metropolis had emptied so that no one could intercept her as she marched toward her demise.
I was unable to articulate a single thought as I warred against the walls of her hopeless defeat.
I grasped again, a phantom passing through the veil, unable to touch my human. “I’m sorry! Eleni, I’ll stop. Please, look at me. Eleni!”
I’d gone too far. I’d ruined her life. One she didn’t intend on living for much longer.
“No, please, no,” I grabbed for her hand, but we had no connection through the veil.
“Hey, look at me. Eleni! See me!” I put my body between her and the temple with every movement, fighting her every step of the way.
Shala could see me at will because she believed in me.
Shala had asked for me, specifically, to stay with her.
My first human looked through the veil and saw my face.
She’d opened the door between us that I could step through at will.
But Eleni?
This human had never peered beyond the line between seen and unseen that separated us. Even if she had, she’d opened her mind to her goddess and her pantheon alone.
Desperation drove me to frenzied repetition. Over and over, begging, “Eleni, no. Please, please open your eyes.”
I’d pressed her throughout the cutting journey to open her eyes and look beyond the veil. I’d pushed and pulled as I grew hoarse in my desperation for her to see me, to sense me, something, but she did not.
Any civilian, any bystander, a single fucking candle in a single fucking house could have given me the barest of hopes that someone might intervene. The blue-gray night had no such plans.
Each step brought her closer to a day I couldn’t stand to relive.
She marched to end her life, and it was 887 BCE all over again.
Raw, powerless panic overcame me just as it had I had when I’d returned to the surface all those years ago only to realize I was on the mortal plane without my human.
I didn’t understand why I tasted salt until I smacked my lips mid-plea and knew, at long last, I’d discovered what it meant to cry.
“Please.”
Washed in moonlight, kneeling on the foot of Athena’s temple, Eleni procured her small blade and begged the goddess to lift the curse from her and her family so she might seek a peaceful afterlife.
“Stop! Stop. You can’t! You can’t—"
I couldn’t watch.
I was out of options, and I was not her god.
“Athena!”
I’d never screamed a high deity’s name with such turmoil.
My knees hit the stones with bruising force.
I couldn’t watch my human as she lifted her blade.
I called out to the goddess as if I was a mortal, a mere man, a petitioner, desperate, helpless, willing to give anything.
The same word. Beseeching with the same broken, desperate word. I choked on my anguish as I pleaded with the Hellenic deity of wisdom.
“Please.”
She was on Athena’s territory, and the goddess did me one, and only one, favor.
The world tilted on its axis.
The goddess opened my human’s eyes.
Bluish cities, white columns, a silver night, the twirl of stars spun as we both reeled through the twirling nausea of a rip through the veil.
A sharp, strangled gasp escaped her lips. My fingers bit firmly into flesh as I dug them into her forearm. Eleni’s eyes widened with panic, confusion, resistance as she gawked at my hands around her wrist, preventing her from plunging the dagger inward.
I squeezed harder, forcing her to lose control of the tendons in her arm, her hand spasming. The knife clattered to the marble steps.
She lost her breath, and her tears ceased. I saw myself reflected in her eyes: as ivory as the marble surrounding me, my teeth bared, my eyes flashed with a prayer of my own. But my devotion was to no higher being. It had been to her.
I was ready for her to faint. To stumble backward in fear. To scream.
Nothing could have prepared me for what she did instead.
The salt dried upon her cheeks. Her shallow breathing slowed. I released her wrist and her arm dropped limply to her side. Moonlight glinted on her hair, the fallen shift and exposed shoulder, her puffy eyes as she stilled.
“You aren’t Athena,” she said. Her voice was raw from a tear-soaked journey, but unmistakably calm. Distant, but not absent.
“I’m not.”
We were us again. A woman of faith asking a demon if he was an angel.
I’d wanted to speak to her for years, and now that she could see me, caution tied my tongue.
I didn’t want to ruin this chance, to destroy our reunion with haste or fear.
She knew nothing of my kingdom or realm in this lifetime.
She might not have any negative associations with my world, nor the damning word used by the people of Shala’s faith.
“Which god are you?” she asked.
Did you spare her for the sake of a cruel joke?
A useless thought tied to a painful memory of a battered woman in cave, wishing I was someone—something—I’d never be.
“I am…” What would demon mean to her?
Her eyes remained on me as she lowered to one knee in a rigid yet respectful display. My guts twisted at the gesture. “Who among the lords has been carved from the stars?”
I hedged. The word alone set my heart aching. Star. “You don’t…”
There was a curious courage in the move. It was just enough deference to prepare herself for anything; yet there was nothing about her posture or reflection that relayed fear or worship or…anything. Shouldn’t she be feeling something?
“I am…” I repeated the beginning with no thought to the end. I didn’t want to look down on her while we spoke. “Please, stand.”
She hadn’t shed a tear from the moment I’d appeared. Water had carved lines through her dust-stained skin from the barefoot walk to the temple, but her chest was no longer heaving. Breathing still, spine straight, she watched me for an answer.
“Your gods are not alone in this world.” I searched and found the answer that would satisfy her. “There are other kingdoms. Other mountains beyond Olympus. Other deities.”
I had no desire to lecture her on theology. I just wanted her to live.
Her head tilted, dark hair shifting to the side. “And when I’ve prayed to Athena…?”
I stopped myself from looking over my shoulder.
I knew the goddess was not here, though given Eleni’s faith to her deity, without Athena’s permission, I would have remained unseen.
This was my human, and the goddess had given us our time alone.
That said, I was not about to disrespect the queen of wisdom, reason, and war in her own temple.
I was left with something I’d said to her more than five hundred mortal years prior.
My echo was a moment of honesty, of sorrow, of confession.
This truth belonged to us, no matter how much time had passed or whose face she wore. From the Dead Sea to Athens, from one end of the earth to the other, I knew it wouldn’t matter. This pearly soul would always be hers, as would I.
“The gods you call aren’t always the ones who answer.”