“Like what you see?” he chuckled. A blush suffused her cheeks as swirling tingles of need began to course through her once again.
“I don’t hate it,” she said with a smirk, bringing a hand up to tangle in the dark hair dusted upon his muscled chest.
They were silent for a long while, indulging in the tender moment between them. It felt so final to Oriana. She knew that this is where she would say goodbye.
“How much time do you have?” Garren finally asked, pulling her closer so that their naked bodies were flush against one another.
“Until the thirty-first day of this moon cycle, when the tenth blood moon rises,” a single tear rolled down the side of her face, swallowed by the ground beneath them. “That is why this is the last time we can meet. The bloodlust has grown stronger. You saw it just this morning. I could have killed Haldis. I would have,” Oriana shivered at the very thought. “It isn’t even near a full moon. It’s gaining full control over me, and I cannot risk being in Sardorf and changing again. This is our final goodbye.”
Garren cupped a hand behind the back of her head, rubbing a thumb along her jawline, and pulling her forehead to rest against his. “I will not give up on you. Anthes will not win.”
She brought a hand up to hold onto his wrist, breathing him in–breathing the moment in–as she knew it would be their last together. “Don’t you see, Garren? He has already won. He won when he cursed me all those centuries ago.”
“No,” Garren placed a gentle kiss upon her forehead, letting his lips linger before saying, “He has not won until the final crimson moon ascends.”
22
Garren
31st day of the Twelfth Month, 1774
Garren had granted Oriana her wish by not meeting with her again. In fact, he hadn’t once seen her since the night she said goodbye. That night she had made it very clear that she was done, that she had accepted her fate and that there was no way to break her curse, but Garren could not accept it. He would not. He had not said goodbye because he refused to believe it was the last time he would see her. This was the beginning for him, not the end. He would go to the far reaches of the universe to save her, his goddess.
It had been an arduous and exhausting few weeks of combing through text after text to find anything that might spark something brilliant, that might answer everything. Haldis had helped him analyze each piece of the curse, inspecting it like a pair of scholars learning, poking, and prodding at a new species, attempting to understand its anatomy. She wished to save Oriana just as much as he did.
But it was all entirely pointless. Trying to learn about the Gods and their work was like learning how to sprout wings and fly. There were no records of anything of note, only scant suspicion and assumptions, tall tales of what the Gods were thought to be like. There was no concrete proof of anything, no knowledge of the Gods at all.
“I don’t think our answer will be hidden within these old books, no matter how many times we read through them,” Haldis finally said as Garren collapsed into a chair beside her, weariness gripping him from all sides.
He only grunted in response. They were fully out of options. Garren had suffered a headache for days now as the aching anticipation and realization of what was swiftly descending upon them–upon Oriana–came into focus.
The blood moon was only a day away. He would lose the one person who had set his heart aflame, who had completely stolen it, and refused to relinquish the grasp she held around it. His one true, unadulterated love.
Garren slammed a hand down hard onto the armrest of his chair. “There has to be a way!”
“The Gods leave little room for error in such things. They are not ones to be foiled, they don’t take kindly to losing.”
Haldis’s words reminded him of an ancient tale he had read in the text written by her own family, Gods and Curses.
It was a particularly horrifying story of an entire civilization Anthes had cursed thousands of years ago. It hadn’t helped in their search for answers, but had stuck out to him as he had heard it before when he was young. But the tale he’d been told was very different, a fantastical and upbeat rendering of the story, which certainly made no mention of a curse.
If Haldis’s ancestors' tight looping scrawl depicting the story was to be believed, there had supposedly once been an island off the northeast coast of Svakland called Barinsia. It was surrounded by an ocean that the storyteller had called the Golden Sea.
The Barinsian people played with forces and power they had no right to, angering the god of war. The story went on to say that they had somehow found Anthes’s battle axe and used its power to vanquish their enemies and gain full control over the mainland of Svakland. They sought to rule the world, and during the short time in which they held possession over the battle axe, they did just that, amounting to great power and wealth.
Haldis’s ancestor wrote of a curse that Anthes had set upon the entire island and its people, effectively extinguishing their very existence. only to be replaced by swirling seas and endless storms, which was now known as the Storm Sea. According to rumor, the people were trapped beneath it, forever lost within the raging storms and churning sea. Many had died trying to navigate through the treacherous waters to find the great wealth the Barinsians had stolen, but the seas were unpassable. The island–and its people–became mere myth.
Garren couldn’t help but think it a somewhat similar story to Sardorf, a town forgotten–hidden for centuries–due to a god’s curse. He only hoped if the story were true and if the Barinsian people were still somehow surviving, that they had fared as well as Sardorf.
Oriana told Garren that Anthes had used her to wipe out entire nations and even worlds, but it seemed Anthes was fully capable of doing it on his own as well. These Barinsian people, Garren assumed, were just one of many Anthes had cursed in his eternal existence.
Garren clenched his jaw as ire rose to the surface, teeth aching from the pressure.
The only thing missing from the texts were the words of the curses themselves. Haldis's ancestors' book spoke of the Gods in great detail, describing their afflictions, but there was nothing about the exact words of the curse or any information on how to break them.
Oriana had spewed off word for word and her entire riddled curse. If Haldis and Garren could find others, they might have been able to analyze them and discover something, anything of use. But they were only left with the words of Oriana's curse.
Those words sat at the forefront of Garren’s mind. He had recanted them forward and backward, left and right, and every which way he could, trying to distinguish something that would reveal the key to ridding Oriana of it.
