Chapter Fifty-Five • Bargain • Lillith
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It feels a lot like coming out of a seizure, weirdly enough.
I always thought that dying would feel more final—more permanent. I thought waking up in whatever afterlife would have felt like waking up from a perfect nap. Acheless and energized and hopeful.
Instead, it’s disorienting and segmented.
Like usual, the sound returns first; echoing and bizarre. There’s the rush of water, loud enough to leave me irritated. The light is too bright, pouring into my eyes that I don’t even realize I’ve opened. My body aches. My head pounds.
This is some bullshit. You’re telling me I still have body aches in the afterlife?
I inhale through my nose as I sit up, squinting in the idyllic light, trying to take in the details around me.
Black spots pockmark my vision, but it slowly comes together.
Tall grasses that look straight out of a Studio Ghibli movie.
Golden sunlight coming through the trees sideways.
Right—trees. Willows and oaks and maples. Even the smell of honey greets me.
“Are you awake?” A familiar voice says. It takes a moment to parse where I’ve heard it.
“Uhm—” I blink toward the source of the voice, but the black spots still hinder my ability to see him. “I—think so?”
I focus, trying to force my eyes to see. My vision clears at the same time that the stranger wrings out a bloodied cloth and gently swipes it across—across Damien’s face. Damien’s face is almost clean of the sludge— his caretaker focused his efforts on the other parts of his body first.
“Wh—what are you doing?” I ask him.
“He has to be cleansed of these impurities,” he says. “You both do.”
I look at him again, and with my adjusted vision I’m finally able to absorb what’s happening before me.
It’s a man—or... It might be a man. His face is beautiful in an unearthly way—in a way that shouldn’t be possible. Huge antlers protrude from his brow and form a crown over the middle of his head, velveted in pristine, white fur.
What I’d assumed were clothes are actually more of this velvet, clinging to the musculature of his chest and torso before vanishing into flaxen pants. His cloven feet fold beneath him, elegant.
His golden eyes meet mine. They sparkle like glitter in the setting sun.
“How did you... get out?” I ask him. The Stag God. “He said—”
“I stayed with that wretch consensually. To protect My Lady. His arrogance convinced him otherwise, and I had no interest in correcting him. Not until now,” he clicks his tongue and shakes his head.
“You humans—always assuming that nature bends its will to you because you tell it to. It simply moves in the same direction as you because it wishes to.”
“C-Can you save him?” I blurt out. The hope of it is far too tempting to deny myself. “Can you bring him back?”
“Such impatience,” he tuts as he finishes cleaning Damien’s face. “I suppose you do have such little lives, though, don’t you? I suppose I would be in a hurry, too, if I only had the single life.”
I sit up a little straighter, still sticky and stinking of the void. I don’t say anything. I don’t really know what there is to say. Yes? I’m impatient? Please save the love of my life?
He sighs and lifts a hand, waving me over to him. “Come here, child.”
I get onto shaky feet and stumble over. He leaves his hand open, offered as a gesture, waiting for me to place mine into it.
When I do, energy floods into me. The sensation is like the current of a river as his magic tightens, mending some tapestry deep inside me. The raw edges of my soul where the Aberrant shredded my power away from me fill in again, and I feel more whole than I ever have before.
He drops his hand and pats the loam next to him.
“Sit,” he says. “A show of good faith, as the bargain I have for you may not be one that you like.”
I obey. What else is there to do when an actual god tells you to sit with him?
Once I settle, folding my legs under my knees the same way he’s done, I allow myself to look at Damien.
It appears even more like he’s sleeping now.
He would hate the clothes the Stag God put him in, and the thought of that makes me chuckle to myself.
He’s got him wearing a rough spun linen tunic and some loose, green pants.
It looks bizarre against his spooky tattoos and his piercings. So does the dusty blond of his natural hair color. I’m reminded of just how young he is—only in his twenties.
My throat tightens painfully, I swallow past it, blinking the tears from my eyes.
I feel the Stag God’s eyes on the side of my face, unnervingly steady even as I don’t meet his gaze. “This is a pain I understand,” he says.
Part of me thinks that can’t possibly be true. How could it be? He’s a god. He’s immortal. And so is his ancient love. But then again, he had said he’d consented to his imprisonment within The Aberrant.
“How did he manage to consume her?” I ask, trying to couch it in a tone that is equal parts timid and polite.
I look at him just as he shifts his gaze to Damien.
“It was a horrific act of injustice that he could only carry out because I’d grown complacent and overly trusting,” he says.
“Humanity is a confusing thing. The ability you all have to lie and deceive. The complicated workings of human emotion. How two conflicting feelings can exist in one heart at once.”
I huff a laugh. “Well, if we’re that way, you made us so, didn’t you?”
He looks at me again, golden eyes set like stones in his irises—pupilless—making him appear like a startled animal in some ways.
His pale brows climb up his forehead, the tufts of his blond hair shifting in some soft breeze.
“We are not the creators of humanity, child,” he says.
“We come from the very same source you do—just far, far older. We claimed our power before you were thought of.”
“Hm,” I say. “So then... Who made us?”
“It was a very long time ago now. And it’s difficult to remember,” he says. “My attention has been otherwise focused. As yours is now. Split between this banal conversation of philosophy and the body lying before us.”
I twist my fingers in the fabric of my dress. I only just realize that I’m wearing a linen chemise now, and not the plum-colored dress The Aberrant made me wear. He’s right, though; I’m not really invested at all in the story of the Moon goddess, and how her assault made her consumption possible.
What I care about is that he ritually cleaned Damien. And that I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding the bargain he’s mentioned.
The Stag God lets out a low breath and smiles softly. “I will bring him back,” he says.
I still, hearing the sound of my breath going into my lungs and sawing back out. My heart kicks into a gallop. “You can do that?”
He nods. “He’s not ready to go yet,” he says. “He lingers between the two veils. Awash in dreams of you. I can pull him back. But you must make a choice for him,” he says.
I don’t like the sinking feeling that comes with this revelation. “What choice?” I ask.
“I am weak, without my Lady Moon,” he says. “Part of the reason I followed her into the darkness of her torment was that, without her, I cannot carry out the cycle of death and rebirth. Without proximity to her, my death becomes final. And I rot in the earth like any other dead thing.
“But the season of her annual death nears. And with it, the dormancy of his powers. He’s already retreated to lick his wounds, of course, after I tore apart from him. But her death is also mine. And without a vessel, I vanish.”
A passable vessel approaches.
The familiarity of his voice clarifies in my recollection. And I realize that when I saw him in my mind’s eye, when he spoke to me about vessels, he was talking about Damien.
“You want to possess my boyfriend?” I ask.
I want the words to sound disgusted or horrified. But they don’t. They just sound confused. Or maybe weary.
“I need to possess him,” he says.
“And what if I say no?”
“Then I die. And you do, too. And his death is etched in stone,” he says, sounding weary himself.
“So, he’s just... what? A body you puppet around?”
“No,” he says. “I’ll pull him back, and settle into his subconscious, as I did with our common enemy. And we’ll work together to free my Lady Moon by this time next year.”
“And if we fail to do that?”
“Then I take his vessel as my own. And he dies his true death. He won’t be able to hold the power for much longer than that, anyway.
You saw it with your own eyes, how incompatible it is with humanity.
How it darkens and corrupts. It’s why that whoreson couldn’t leave his little labyrinth for long.
Outside of the confines of his own delusion, he starts to corrode, like iron pulled out of stale water centuries too late. ”
I look at Damien’s pale, peaceful face and go quiet. I go quiet for a very long time.
Is it really my right to decide this for him? If the power could corrupt him, one could assume that it won’t be all at once. It will be a slow process. And it might be painful or terrifying. And Damien would have to share his body, his mind, with another entity.
What if it’s unnerving? What if he despises me for it?
Is a year longer with him a suitable payment? Is that enough time for what The Stag God is asking me to consent to on Damien’s behalf?
No. A stupid question. Of course it’s not enough. Eternity with Damien wouldn’t be long enough.
But… Let me think about it from his point of view.
That’s a year to do all the travelling he wants to do.
A year to write and play more music. A year to spend with me, finally not confined to the prison of my home and the city I’ve lived in my whole life.
It’s a year to tie up loose ends, opportunities that he wasn’t afforded when he was ripped away from his life so unceremoniously.
A year of learning magic, if he gets to borrow any from The Stag God.
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t at least some selfish motivation to this. Of course, there is. I would take five days—five minutes more with him. But only if it won’t compromise our regard for each other.
But there’s no way to ask him.
I’m just going to have to make the choice and cross my fingers.
“Okay,” I finally say, almost choking on the words. “Bring him back. I accept your bargain.”
I meet the Stag God’s eyes the same time he meets mine. He rewards me with an enigmatic smile and even... a pat on the head? Like he’s some kind of father figure?
“An excellent decision, child,” he says. “I suggest you close your eyes. The next few minutes might be quite disorienting if you don’t.”
Tears well up, then spill over as I shut my eyes.
Somehow, I know when to open them. It’s just a gut feeling. A tickle of intuition.
When I do, we’re back in my house, lying in my bed.
I’m tucked against his chest, just like I was in the void. Only this time, I hear his heart beating. And I feel the rise and fall of his chest as he takes deep, restful breaths.
There are two little raised bumps on his brow—almost too shallow to notice. I only know because I spend every moment I have staring at his face. His beautiful, flushed face. His full lips pinkened with life. His eyes roving beneath his glossy eyelids, still in dreams.
Damien’s alive. And everything feels like it was just a silly, terrible nightmare now.
It wasn’t, of course. And there is an hourglass which has started to slowly bury us within its sand. It will start as an inconvenience, and then it will become an oppressive weight in our lives. The trials ahead of us are so fraught with danger.
But for now? For this moment in time, I can forget the timer counting down—I can forget The Aberrant, and the daunting task of pulling a goddess out of his gullet in the next three-hundred-sixty-five days.
And I can get some much-needed sleep. Tangled up in the arms of the man I love.