He cupped my cheek, brushing away the falling onyx tears with the back of his hand.
“Odessa,” he whispered, leaning in until his forehead rested softly against mine. “You are powerful.”
He kissed a black tear from my left cheek.
“You are fierce.”
His lips brushed the other.
“You are limitless.”
When he pulled back, his eyes were molten gold, burning with something sacred.
“You are everything.”
Then he took my hands in his, sank to his knees, and pressed his lips to each palm. When he looked up at me, it was as though he was looking at his salvation.
“Odessa,” he said reverently, “you are a god.”
I was a god.
What would I do with my immortality? What could I become over eternity?
The only other divine being I truly knew was Raithe, and he had made it clear he would remain by my side through it all. Yet even now, I was uncertain how to feel about him.
Our connection had always been forged in fire. With passion, intensity, and primality. We only seemed to draw close when our divinity surged, when our godhood and bloodthirst reached its height. Two emotions, bound and tangled. Vengeance and Wrath. Raithe once claimed we were two halves of the same twisted whole, and when I look back at our history, it was hard to deny it.
I could never have done what I did without his power. Without him, offering pieces of himself, letting me channel my divinity through the well of his strength. Together, our powers weren’t just combined, they were magnified. Our bond wasn’t born of affection, it was born of purpose.
Perhaps there was no world where Raithe and I could exist apart.
But that didn’t mean my feelings for him would change.
His obsession, his fixation of us, still unsettled me. I didn’t love him. The gods only know how he came to believe he loved me. If he even understood what love truly was.
I did. I had it with Caz.
I knew what it meant to fall into that rhythm, that sacred dance of devotion. But I also knew what it felt like when the music stopped. I had kept twirling, falling deeper, giving more, only to find him gone. He fled to the sway of another song.
And my heart couldn’t survive that kind of ending again.
If Raithe was right, and gods did feel emotion with a ferocity that surpassed all else, then there would be no world in which my heart would open to another. The pain I endured with Caz shattered me. Broke me in ways I would never fully understand.
He was my first love. My only love. My future, my sun and my stars. And then he left.
In the years after him, even sleep offered no rest. My dreams were haunted by what we had planned together. The life we were supposed to build. I saw us tracing the world’s edges with ink-stained fingers, waking up side by side, me joining the Academy, earning my robes. We would have had the kind of love others envied. I would have been his wife. I would have borne his children. We would have shared a life full of joy, purpose, and belonging.
But to understand why Caz left me, I had to face the ache that maybe I was never enough for him. That the story I believed in, our story, was not the same one he was living. I had to ask myself if the words he once spoke were ever true. I had to wonder if something in me was broken. Something unworthy. Something unlovable.
Because in the end, he didn’t just leave me. He abandoned us.
Then came Gadriel.
He tore me from my home and dropped me into the unknown. In Brier Len, I had finally learned to breathe again. I tried to soothe the aching void Caz left behind with the stillness of the forest. Because before there was Caz, there were the woods, and they had always been mine. They still were. No man, no love, could have ever severed me from them. The forest held me in its quiet embrace. It sheltered me, steadied me. And even then, Gadriel tried to take that from me.
He ripped me from the only place where I still believed I could rebuild myself. Locked me away in his tower of stone. Used me until I was hollow. Until there was nothing left but emptiness inside me.
But I escaped.
