EREBUS
Night is beautiful when it is fleeting. I knew that once, with an intimacy total and molecular.
Mortals have always been baffled by the way night bleeds from the world, how it surrenders at the sharp edge of morning.
They never understood that the most exquisite aspect of darkness is that it is never absolute.
The night I tried to hold for Calliope was not poetry.
It was a room with no door.
Now, as I walk across the roof of her building, black wind knotting my hair and the horizon erased, I see what I have done.
Above me, the clouds have organized themselves into a permanent bruise, while the moon, wan and overexposed, refuses to leave the sky.
After a week of perpetual darkness, the world is beginning to unravel at the seams. Plants on balconies have curled in upon themselves.
Pigeons fight for old sandwich crusts beneath the ceaseless dark, and the humans have become pale, exhausted versions of themselves, unsure whether it is morning or midnight and remaining awake until their bodies collapse beneath the weight of shattered circadian rhythms.
I set foot on Calliope’s balcony.
Inside, she sleeps.
For once, this is not a metaphor. She is curled beneath hospital-green sheets, wound tightly around herself, her face resting on a pillow the shade of graveyard lilies. I watch her through the glass, and something claws through my chest—a pain I did not know existed before her.
Love, it turns out, is not the answer to loneliness. It is the expansion of that ache to catastrophic scale.
I wait for her to wake.
I will not enter without her consent. She trusts me less now, and she is right to do so. Even as I stand there, the hours pile one upon another until finally she stirs and her eyes open.
She sees me immediately.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
Then she pushes back the covers and comes toward me.
Calliope steps onto the balcony barefoot. The air is cold enough to bite at her skin, but she barely seems to notice. She stands before me with her chin lifted, anger and exhaustion warring with something softer that I no longer deserve to expect.
“You know what you did,” she says.
I nod.
“I did it for you.”
She folds her arms. “You could have just asked me to stay.”
“You would have left.”
“And I would have come back.”
I look away.
“That,” I admit, “is the part I did not know how to trust.”
Her expression softens, but she looks past me toward the smothered city.
“So you took the sun away.”
There is no defense left to offer her.
“I was wrong.”
I have spoken to Calliope as an immortal from the moment we met, as something for whom consequence has always been theoretical. Now I understand what mortals have always known: power has a cost, and too often the currency is someone else’s suffering.
She studies me for a moment before opening the balcony door wider.
“You should come inside.”
I follow.
Calliope crosses the small kitchen and leans against the counter. The edges of her mouth seem to want to be kind, but fatigue has flattened nearly everything else.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a teensy bit flattered by all this,” she says. “At first.”
“At first.”
“Forty-three minutes? Weirdly romantic. Three hours? Starting to get concerning. A week?” She gestures toward the window. “That’s where we crossed into supervillain territory.”
“I understand.”
“I know you do now.”
That is somehow worse.
I want to explain myself to her. I want to reach backward through eternity and show her every beautiful thing I have watched disappear, every person who existed for what seemed like an instant before time carried them beyond my reach.
Instead, the truth comes simply.
“I have always been the last to go.”
Calliope becomes still.
“Everyone I have ever cared about has vanished, and I am left to remember them. Civilizations disappear. People disappear. Even the stars eventually die, but I remain.” I look at her. “When I realized I loved you, I understood that one day you would disappear, too.”
Her eyes shine.
“I thought if I could stop morning, I could stop losing you.”
“Oh, Erebus.”
“I know now that it was foolish.”
“It was more than foolish.”
“Yes.”
“And incredibly controlling.”
“Yes.”
“Also a little insane.”
“I accept that.”
That almost gets a smile.
Almost.
She comes closer.
“You don’t keep people by locking them up. You keep them by letting them leave and trusting they’ll come back.”
“Not in my experience.”
“No.” Her voice softens. “Probably not.”
I look at her.
“But this is new,” she continues. “You’ve never had this before. Neither have we. You don’t know how our story ends because we haven’t lived it yet.”
The uncertainty of that frightens me more than I want to admit.
“So now what?” she asks. “You keep this up forever?”
“No.”
It is the first answer I have given her without hesitation.
Calliope searches my face. “Then you know what you have to do.”
“Yes.”
“Can you?”
That is the question.
I have surrendered Night more times than there are numbers to count them. I have never feared Dawn. I have never resented her arrival or considered the act of stepping aside to be a sacrifice.
But I have never relinquished the sky while believing something of mine might disappear with it.
“I do not know,” I admit.
Calliope crosses the remaining space between us.
“I’m not going to disappear when the sun comes up.”
“You will someday.”
“Yes.”
The word hurts.
She does not soften it for me.
“I’m mortal. You knew that when you met me.”
“I did not love you when I met you.”
Her breath catches.
“I did not understand what loving you would make mortality mean.”
For several seconds, she says nothing.
Then she reaches up and takes my face between her hands. Her palms are warm, her fingers trembling slightly against my skin.
“Listen to me. I will stay tonight if you swear to give the world tomorrow.”
I close my eyes.
It would be simpler to refuse. Simpler to freeze us here in the shelter of unending night, where morning can never take her from me and I never have to discover whether she will return.
But that is not love.
I know that now.
At her touch, I see not one endless midnight but thousands of ordinary nights. Calliope leaving in the morning and returning after sunset. Arguments and reconciliations. Coffee and scones. Walks home beneath changing skies. Days I cannot share with her and nights I can.
And somewhere, eventually, an ending.
I cannot prevent it without destroying everything that comes before.
My hands settle around her wrists.
“I swear it.”
Calliope studies me as though testing the promise for weakness.
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“And when I fall asleep?”
“I will let you sleep.”
“When morning comes?”
“I will let it come.”
“And when I leave?”
The hardest one.
I open my eyes.
“I will trust you to return.”
Something breaks open in her expression.
Then—because she has always been braver than I am—Calliope pulls my face down to hers and kisses me.
There is nothing tentative about it this time. She kisses me with all the anger and relief and fear we have accumulated between us, and when my arms close around her, she comes willingly.
That matters more than I ever understood it could.
The sky is thick with night, but the world inside her apartment is the inverse of darkness: urgent, raw, lit with a star’s worth of hunger.
She tears open the buttons of my shirt with vengeful precision, and I respond in kind, cupping her in my arms, flaring at every place our skin blazes together.
The table shudders under us, our hands moving faster than intention.
She laughs into my neck as I sweep her up and pin her against the cool plaster.
My palms cup the dizzy curve of her waist, aligning every axis of us.
We tumble to the floor, still fused, limbs a slipknot of shadow and corporeal heat.
I have studied the geography of her, reverently and ruthlessly, but tonight is new: her bitterness is sweet, her rage is silk, and the old rules no longer hold.
When I move inside her, it is not possession—it is surrender, total and atomic.
The stars outside, invisible to mortals, bank and flare violet and blue.
I pull the night into the room, and it noiselessly surrounds us, a second skin, turning us invisible to anyone else but not to each other.
Every place she touches me becomes a new kind of dark: warmer, denser, alive.
She gasps—a sound so mortal and so necessary that the darkness shudders at its edges.
I press my mouth to the hollow of her throat and feel her pulse hammering there, wild and insistent, the most ancient rhythm I have ever heard.
I want to consume her slowly, reverently, the way night takes a city: block by block, light by light, until nothing remains but the soft animal dark of us.
She arches into me and I answer, pulling her deeper into the gravity of it, her breath ragged and bright against my ear.
I want to consume every version of her: the soft animal of her breath, the sharp salt of her skin, the way she says my name like a question she already knows the answer to.
I pull her closer, deeper, until there is no grammar left for where I end and she begins.
She cries out, and the sound is a small, bright detonation—mortal and catastrophic, the kind of thing that makes gods forget their names.
I answer her with everything I have withheld across eternity, and the night outside presses in, dense and warm, as if the universe itself is leaning close to watch.
At the edge of the universe, we collapse together, both ruined and remade. The darkness around us rings like a struck bell.
Afterward, we burrow into the nest of her bed, limbs tangled while the seconds gather quietly around us. Calliope curls against my chest, and I hold her without wondering how long I am permitted to keep her there.
As sleep begins to claim her, she asks, “Do you remember the first night?”
“Every moment.”
“The coffee?”
“Violent.”
Her sleepy laugh warms my chest. “The scone?”
“Life-changing.”
“Me?”
I look down at her.
“You changed everything.”
Her eyes drift closed, and the last of her anger seems to leave with the breath she releases against my skin. Within minutes, she is asleep.
I remain beside her.
For a while, I allow myself to imagine staying.
This is everything I wanted: Calliope safe in my arms, the world held beneath my darkness, morning unable to reach through the windows and take this moment from me.
Then I remember my promise.
When I fall asleep?
I will let you sleep.
When morning comes?
I will let it come.
And when I leave?
I will trust you to return.
Carefully, I slip from beneath her.
Calliope makes a small sound and turns toward the warmth I leave behind. The sight nearly undoeses me, but I pull the blanket over her shoulder and press my mouth to her temple.
“I will see you tonight,” I whisper.
It is not a plea.
It is trust.
I leave her apartment and step into the darkness I once believed I could make eternal.
At the edge of the world, Dawn is waiting.
She does not scold me. Perhaps she sees there is nothing she could say that I do not already know.
For the first time in a week, I step aside willingly.
The locked machinery of the world shudders, catches, and begins to move. Somewhere below, birds stir in confused trees. Flowers turn toward a light they cannot yet see. The tide shifts beneath the moon, and across Blackthorn Bay, the black horizon softens.
Then comes the first thin seam of pink.
It hurts.
Of course it does.
Love has not cured me of the fear of losing her. I suspect nothing ever will.
But I finally understand that loving Calliope does not mean preventing her from leaving.
It means believing she will come back.
I relinquish the sky.
And Dawn returns.