Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Idrowned in an ocean of tedious exhaustion.
Every available resource went to the endless labor of my search.
My legion wasn’t alone in the hunt to find my human.
My father’s seventy-two legions— one hundred and forty thousand entities—set a precedent.
Duchesses, counts, presidents, and marquises donated portions of their legion as we scoured every inch of the humans’ insufferable ball of water and dirt. So, so, so much water.
A sickly-sweet self-loathing rolled on the back of my tongue when I’d heard of her death—healthy, loved, and surrounded by a family who prayed she’d make it safely to Heaven upon her passing, even if she hadn’t lived to see her fifth decade.
Part of me feared that she’d done exactly that.
We dove through caves, we overturned boulders, we burst through the doors of every home from pole to pole.
We scoured pastoral nomads, warring Visigoths, the frost-bitten Samoyedic peoples, the mountains and plains and rolling hills of the scattered Rouran Khaganate.
In our desperation, we were on the precipice of coming to the most reluctant of terms that she’d transitioned into Heaven’s kingdom after her death, relinquishing her soul to the enemy.
As the mortal years of our search stretched onward, the legions and our allies were crestfallen at having lost a spark of hope.
As each year chipped away at our fragile optimism, so too did it chisel through whatever it was I had that passed for a soul.
The thought of her loss shattered me. Day after day, my legion watched as I became unmade.
Thirty mortal years into tearing the earth upside down, news came of a speck of sand in the center of a deep blue nothing.
Green trees, fresh coconut water, nutrient-rich fish, vitamin-dense fruits, and thousands of leagues away from the marching horde of Heaven’s reach, a soul was found.
A woman, fist-size circlets of black curls for hair, hourglass shaped, and a month before her thirty-third birthday, contained the only pearly shimmer in the world.
Intrepid mortals, with their insatiable thirst to know, to do, to move, had little regard for their fragility when they launched from the tip of mapped civilization into the blue horizon.
Hell was fully aware of the divine ancestors and principal gods of Tangaloa at the time of our summit—Havea Hikule’o, Tangaloa ‘Eiki, and Maui Motu’a—all notably absent from our assembly.
My father had made a comment at the time about the hope we should glean from those who had chosen not to come: perhaps they’d seen the future spread, and their kingdoms remained unthreatened.
We didn’t find her among the first peoples who’d found island homes. Or in the second. Or in the sixth.
Her nearest populace clan, the Teva’i Tai, was two islands away.
My human, for the graces and blessings of every deity from every pantheon, had been born into a village that believed.
There were gods for peace, for rain, for fertility.
War, lava, the sky. The ocean, of course, and the regional storm deity, reigned supreme, but belief in the spirit of the trees, of the rocks, of the creatures that roamed the earth, was my first exposure to animism.
The belief that supernatural powers organized both inanimate objects and natural phenome alike shook them from the inhibitions I’d found in every other culture.
They told me what they’d uncovered.
They repeated the information.
They watched as I processed a dream too good to be true.
There was no veil when we landed on her shores.
Even my legion, all fizzle and froth, had been spotted when scouring her village. Her pot had shattered as she’d yelped at the jumping shadow, more startled than frightened, as she saw the creature for what it was.
In some ways, this knowledge rose the stakes to unspeakable heights.
Unlike my struggle with Yuka on the ice, my legion was now deeply integrated into my pursuit of my human. As they lingered in the shadows, absorbing her language, so did I.
I lurked offshore, learning of her culture, understanding her words, practicing the new way vowels and consonants rolled together, for the better part of a mortal week, gazing at the light of her soul.
I could see her, yes, but what would it mean to be seen by her?
There’d be no gradual introduction. I couldn’t be the hero. I would just be…me.
On the eighth day, I watched the pearly shimmer of her soul separate from her tribe.
It wasn’t unusual for all genders to take walks, to fetch fruit, to spend time communing with nature, and this was the first time I could catch her alone.
The bright orange sun turned red as it dipped toward the horizon.
She lit a torch as she padded down a well-worn trail.
I stopped breathing as I stepped through the space between things. I shifted from a league offshore to the brush only a few arms’ length from my human, lungs burning against the lingering fear that a single inhale might shatter the dream.
She snapped to attention the moment I arrived, though I’d been silent.
“Hello?” she said.
My head spun, lungs laboring against the spike in my pulse.
Had I already fucked it up? Was she afraid? Was she—
She stuck the torch carefully in the soil, then slowly lowered to the ground, one leg folded over another. Tall, unruly grasses obscured the lower half of her body. We were in a cave of inward-bending branches, of obfuscating bushes, of walls of vines behind which I could hide.
She spoke first.
“My village has been haunted by spirits. Are you one of them?”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
I opened my mouth to answer, but only dust came out.
“Are we being visited by spirits of our ancestors? A god who seeks our attention? A—”
“No,” I said, perhaps too hastily. I remained tucked behind the slits of a broad, green leaf as I softened my tone. “I’m no god, and I’m not of your people. I’m only here for you.”
She went perfectly still. “Have I brought a curse upon us?”
I stopped short of smacking my forehead, only because I knew she was astute enough to hear the sound. I thanked the stars I had no prophets scribbling down my clumsy legacy, as I wasn’t sure I could relive this encounter.
“You have not,” I said. I didn’t have to feel calm to play the part, and I couldn’t risk scaring her.
“Are you here to claim my soul?”
Great. I was the fucking Grim Reaper.
I realized I’d overlooked an important detail in my days of hovering. I’d learned about her people, her village, her culture, her language, but I had not asked my legion of her name. After all, in many lifetimes, she’d asked me not to use it.
In this one, however…we needed a balance. She needed to see me as curious, not all-knowing, nor all-powerful.
“What do they call you in this life?” I asked. I cleared my throat. “Your name, I mean. What name did your parents give you?”
She brushed a circlet of dark curls from her face. “Rauana. It means—”
Those sounds had been strung together by pale people from mountaintop regions and grassland shepherds, each forming their own names. But among this branch or offshoot of Tahitians, I recognized the combination of words and their meanings.
“Many stars and caves.”
Her star in the cave. My human on the earth, no matter how far, no matter how hard, she was mine, and I was hers. As much as I wanted to fight the horrors the world wrought upon us, we were destined.
Gods and their tales of omnipotence had nothing on the power she held over me.
I was immobilized, mind, body, and soul.
How could she know?
And what was more: what would it take for me to trust in our connection and believe in my human, if not this?
Leaves scraped against bark, wind masking the unnamable thread that tied us.
Speak, for fuck’s sake. Say something.
“Rauana. I am not a god. I’m not here to hurt you.
I’m not here for your people. But…you are not beholden to me.
” I battled against the power imbalance inherent to the implicit bias of animism.
A godhood granted to everything would place me above her.
It was an inequity with which I was unwilling to contend.
“You owe me nothing. Think of me as a man who would like to speak to you as an equal. And when we do…you have the power to send me away, if you do not wish to see me.”
She wrapped her fingers around the torch’s shaft. “If you’re a man, you should know: I’m unmarriageable.”
I swallowed. “Oh?”
“I was born under the lonely star. I am not to bear children.”
Gods, I could cry. I wished she could reincarnate here forever.
It was I, not she, who needed time.
In my panicked years of fearing she’d left her cycles for Heaven, I’d nearly abandoned hope. In my time studying her island, I hadn’t dared to truly believe she’d hear me on the first try, despite animism and its evidence.
I was overcome.
Another first.
Tears in my eyes, I kept my composure as I said, “In three weeks, I’ll meet you here. If it rains that day, as is common in your village, I will be at that cave just atop the cliff. And until then, I will appear to you three times.”
Her eyes sparkled at the challenge. “And how will I know you?”
“I will be a white turtle on your shores at sunrise. I will be a white bird on the thatched roof of your hut. I will be the white shark whose fin you see just beyond the safety of your reef. And then, I’ll return.”
As the storm gods of the Great Sea would have it, the winds howled that night.
Rain doused Rauana’s torch before she made it five steps beyond the village.
Her friends, her advisors, her relatives begged her to take shelter, to stay home, but she’d seen the turtle, the bird, the shark fin, and had come at last to meet the man.
I didn’t wait in the cave.