44-Zach
Fruity jasmine seeps from the damp earth, made nauseating by a trace of decay.
The familiar willow tree’s wisps hang like curtains of emerald silk, swaying in a driftless wind. Moonlight filters through the leaves in silver ribbons, dappling the mossy ground as golden-skinned apples twinkle along the tree’s too-thin branches.
A tall man stands beneath it with his back to me, half silhouetted by the pale glow.
His blond hair is luminescent, like strands of sun braided together.
A deep blue cloak covers him, silver-embroidered with what seem to be constellations, but I’d know that slope of shoulders and tilt of head anywhere.
“Kit?”
He turns on a worn heel, the leather boot centuries old in style. Queasiness creeps low and thick through my insides. It’s Kit’s face; his jaw, cheeks, and mouth, but the eyes are wrong. A cold prickle crawls up my spine, instinct screaming before thought catches up.
Kit’s eyes hold a placidness through their icy storms. This stare is cold and empty, a void pretending to be blue. A god wearing a man like a costume.
“Your face.” Bile creeps up in an acidic corrosion, the bitter sour clinging to the back of my tongue. “Change it. I know you can.”
“Hm,” Endymion murmurs through Kit’s lips, his mouth curving into a smirk that isn’t right. It’s crueler—a blade disguised as a snappy smile. “I thought you’ve grown rather fond of this face.”
His nose crinkles, but not in that cute, reluctant way Kit’s does when he’s trying not to laugh.
This is disdainful, a twitch of superiority rather than amusement.
Kit squints when he’s confused or trying to focus, lids lowering just a little, lashes dipping, but this is a narrowing; a predator’s calibration.
Even the way he tilts his head is off; with precision, chin lifting a fraction too high, exposing his throat like a dare rather than a vulnerability.
“You are displeased.” Endymion rolls his posture, straightening Kit’s spine as he squares the frame. Features become unfamiliar, distorting every humane habit. The same body, held like a weapon instead of a person. “Perhaps this shall do you better.”
His golden hair darkens, curling tight to his skull. Slender shoulders widen as his clothes melt into something modern; a smoky-gray and berry-blue checkered flannel I know too well. Holey, acid-wash jeans blanket a pair of stalky legs I’d recognize anywhere. It’s the last outfit I ever saw him in.
The transformation keeps going, Kit’s face morphing into Carter’s like some cheesy eighties sci-fi until his hooded lids stare over at me. My stomach drops, the world tilting like I’ve stepped off a cliff. My feet advance without permission as I stalk toward him.
The slap cracks through the grove as my hand whips across his cheek. My blood runs cold, slicing through my veins like the serrated knife responsible for the scars that mar my arm.
“What would you have me look like?” he asks in Carter’s voice, his chewed nails and dirty fingers rubbing the reddening skin. “This is your dream, after all.”
“Fine,” I snap, grasping for anything, anyone, that isn’t Kit or Carter.
An image forms of a harmless, boy-next-door type. Shorter, with choppy sandy brown hair and sour-apple eyes. Someone who’d apologize for bumping into a chair.
Endymion’s form shimmers, and his black hair shifts, Carter’s bulky build shrinking. His wide jaw rounds as dark irises brighten into a gentle olive. The god peers down at the knee-high socks, slack shorts and a matching black blazer, then back up at me, round cheeks flaming.
“I certainly was never this puny,” he mutters in a boyish East London accent, prepubescent cracks in the tenor as he leans against the willow’s massive trunk.
“Then give yourself whatever face and body you want.” I cross my arms, shrugging as I regard our separated inches. “As long as it’s not them.”
His adolescent expression shifts, a quiver in his dimpled chin as he dips it, kicking the mossy dirt with a polished loafer. “Sadly, I do not remember my original face.”
I scoff, before spitting at his feet. “I’m not going to feel bad for you anymore.”
“Ah yes,” he drawls, straining to pluck one of the apple-shaped fruits from the mystical tree. “Because you’re clever now. Enlightened. Is that right?”
With a satisfied smirk that’s too depraved to belong to such an innocent face, Endymion rips the fruit free.
“I believe our last conversation ended with you vowing to, what was it? Ah, yes— ‘Rip the balls from between my god-damned legs. Pun intended.’” Taking a loud, crunchy bite, he continues with a mouthful, “Funny how quickly you go from praising me as the solver of all your problems to condemning me as the creator.”
“You’re nothing,” I seethe, swatting the apple from his hand as he lifts it to take another bite. “If you truly have power, then why—”
A tear slips down my cheek, falling silently onto a blade of tall grass. The dam inside me fractures with a soundless crack.
“Why did you let her die?” I whisper down to an ant as it creeps over my pinky toe. “How can you let that monster get away with killing someone? Why didn’t you stop it? My mom’s cancer! My dad’s addiction—if you’re so powerful then why did we suffer so fucking much?”
“My sweet,” he says, thin lips frowning with a wearying pity, “I did not let anything happen. I have power, yes. Dreams are very powerful; they can shape the future.” His voice carries the weight of something rehearsed across centuries. “But they cannot prevent it.”
He leans closer, the needle-thin willow tips bowing around him as though he holds a magnetic charge.
“I cannot predict a future set in stone, only see potential possibilities. There was no way for me to foresee that accident, and no way for me to stop it. Believe me, I would have spared you any sorrow or loss if I could. The only person who could have prevented that accident was the driver, and now he must live with the influence of those choices, as do you.”
The truth of that hits me with a tidal wave of grief.
My knees give way, and I collapse onto the ground.
A barrier constructed over years breaks open, and it can never be rebuilt or replicated.
Sobs tear out of me, raw and unrestrained.
The willow branches tremble overhead, as if the dream shares my sorrow.
Endymion squats before me. He doesn’t try to soothe me with false comfort and warm touches. A presence and witness, hairless legs crossed, the boy-god simply sits.
“Why?” My sobs finally quiet, and I wipe my eyes with shaking hands. “Out of all the people in the world, why me? Why us?”
“Do you truly believe it is just you?” Endymion tilts his head, studying me with that borrowed verdant glare.
“I assist countless souls. Many gather in those very arenas alongside you. You are not some lone, broken person, Zachary, nor the only one who needs me. Which is why I cannot allow you to consume him. He is not yet ready. He must discover it himself, as you do.”
“More like you need him,” I retort, pushing myself to my feet. “How much power do you get from their worshipping energy? You feed off him. Off the crowd’s devotion to him—"
“Their devotion to me,” he snaps, the facade cracking the chubby, youthful features like overbaked clay as the god rises to a stand.
“Do not forget, it is my story he tells. My teachings and guidance that brought him success. I could simply kill him.” Endymion’s expression snakes into a plunderer’s sneer. “His life is nothing without me.”
The charming preteen clears the space between us, eyes blazing like green toxic ooze.
“I would end you if you tried,” I counter, and he throws his head back, booming laughter drifting over the hillside.
“You cannot kill me.” He wipes a fallen tear from his round cheek before flicking it away like a nuisance. “I exist in the place between life and death.”
Rounding my shoulders though my confidence falters, I plant my bare feet onto the wet, spongy earth. “Then I’ll teach him how to throw you out of his dreams like I did.”
“Is that what you think you were doing?” He grabs a branch and plucks another apple.
His laughter is resolved; a sympathizing chuckle that further fuels my rage.
“You never blocked me out. It was not a conscious act on your part; I simply chose not to interfere with this leg of your journey, just as you must choose not to interfere with his.”
“Do you really expect me to believe you have benevolent intentions?” I glare at the little boy, wanting to punch his jawline as it grinds around another obnoxious bite of fruit.
“Two things can be true at once, and you would do well to remember that.” Holding the apple, he points at me, chastising before chomping away again. “I have not been in your dreams these past months because I have been steering you toward your understanding.”
A crack of fear fissures the god’s glower. His jaw clenches as he swallows. “I have a proposition for you, Zachary.”
I dip my chin. “What proposition?”
“Help me,” he whispers, a Cheshire smile spreading across his face. “Help me, and I will set you free, for real this time.”
A chill ripples through the grove, as if the dream itself recoils.
“Help you with what?” I ask, my pulse thundering.
His smile widens to something inhumanely savage, knowing I won’t like the answer. “You must let him go.”
“What? No. You—" My breath stutters. “You’ve thrusted me toward Kit for years. You can’t just—”
“Enough,” he interrupts, adolescent voice slicing cleanly through mine.
“I have shown you glimpses. Possibilities. Threads of what could be. But you and he have made choices I could not have predicted.” The apple in his hand collapses inward, browning as it rots in an instant.
“And now, there will be irreparable consequences.”
A gust rises from the ground, cold enough to sting. The boy-god’s silhouette flickers, older for a heartbeat before snapping back into the shape of a child.
“Consequences for what? For caring about him? For—"
“For crossing a line neither of you are ready to.” He comes closer, steps silent.
“You two may help one another heal, yes, but neither of your broken hearts are yet strong enough to carry the weight of the other. You think love is a salve for trauma. It is not. With the wounds you both bear, you shall bleed into each other until there is nothing left.”
“Then why bring me to him? Why—”
“Because you need to see that you are still capable of feeling.” He tilts his head, studying me with something like pity as my eyes burn. “And he needed to see that he still possesses something worth losing. That is my proposition.”
My heart cracks. “And if I say no?”
“Then you will watch him break,” he snaps, the god beneath the boy cracking through. “And you shall break with him.”
He isn’t asking me to choose Kit, he’s asking me to choose which version of him survives.