Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
“Please. I beg of you.”
Bright red mud washed into the murky river that separated us. Mami Wata perched on the far shore, her bright red cloth stark against the rolling green of the countryside behind her.
I had never met a member of the Orisha. Not formally. They’d sent a loyal ambassador to our summit many years prior, but the gods themselves had no need to set foot in Hell. Nor, would it seem, would I be allowed to set foot in Orisha territory.
“We’re a closed pantheon,” she said. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t apathetic. It was simply a fact.
Given my years of passion, of intimacy, of devotion beyond the veil with Love, my grief at her death, and then joy at the knowledge that she’d been reborn in a land beyond the reach of Heaven’s conquest, were short-lived.
I hoped she valued honesty, for I knew how desperate I sounded.
“You sent an ambassador to Hell’s meeting.
You have a seer, yes? Orisha Orula? Surely, he saw what the future holds as the war deity from the Dead Sea spreads his rule.
He infiltrated the Roman Empire, and their mission is one of colonization.
You see it coming to your soils, yes? You see the threat he poses? ”
The river was too large to babble. It moved noiselessly between us, the occasional tuft of green floating by as a fallen tree made its way between us.
“Is he here today?” She asked.
I hedged. “Well, no, but my human—”
“Is with us. He is not welcome here. Nor are you.”
My frustration boiled. “But I pose no threat to you! I won’t infringe on your gods, on your people—”
“We are a closed pantheon. It is true today. It will be true tomorrow. It will be true in two thousand years, no matter what colonizers trod upon our soil. I’m speaking to you now as a kindness. I advise you to see it for what it is, and leave.”
A broken body in a cave who asked me not to leave.
A wealthy Grecian who loved me, heart, body, and soul.
A spiritual advisor on the ice.
A superstitious mother among the misty, emerald hills.
A believer behind an impenetrable wall.
A seer on an island who enveloped me in her passion, her insight, her clairvoyance, her power, and made me certain of our fate.
“But I belong to her as much as she does to me.” It sounded pathetic even as I said it. “She should be the one who gets to reject me. It’s her right.”
“Are you not used to being told ‘no,’ Prince of Hell?”
I let the stare last a lifetime, for I knew that when this conversation ended, so would my time near my human.
“But…I love her.”
“Love is water. Yours and mine, everyone’s and no one’s. Nothing worth loving can belong to you,” she said. “Possession is not love. And obsession, wearing love’s mask, is no different.”
Love was within Orisha territory, and it was vaster and more thorough than any electric angelic cage I’d experienced in Constantinople.
If ever I was to return to Hell, it was now.