Everything, as it turned out.
Luck only took us so far.
An intelligent young woman was a blessing. A woman whose suitors mysteriously perished, on the one hand, delighted me, but these were not fates we shared. The very things that contented me were the curses that destroyed Eleni’s reputation.
My brilliant, wonderful, tenacious human walked barefoot to Athena’s Parthenon in the middle of the night, tears carving silent, salted lines down her cheeks all the while.
The moment she stepped onto the street without shoes, I knew what she had planned.
No. Come on, Eleni. I’ve meddled, sure but…
My heart fell into my stomach.
One foot in front of the other, the city’s dust gathering beneath her, my veins turned to ice.
I knew she couldn’t hear me. My years of silence shattered as I tried to grab her. “Eleni, stop. Please. I didn’t… I wouldn’t…”
She could neither see nor hear me. Darkened homes vignetted around her. Tears stained her cheeks. The windless night was barren, as if the metropolis had emptied so that no one could intercept her as she marched toward her demise. I was unable to articulate a single thought as I warred against the walls of her hopeless defeat.
I grasped again, a phantom passing through the veil, unable to touch my human. “I’m sorry! Eleni, I’ll stop. Please, look at me. Eleni!”
I’d gone too far. I’d ruined her life. One she didn’t intend on living for much longer.
“No, please, no,” I grabbed for her hand, but we had no connection through the veil.
“Hey, look at me. Eleni! See me!” I put my body between her and the temple with every movement, fighting her every step of the way. Shala could see me at will because she believed in me. Shala had asked for me, specifically, to stay with her. My first human looked through the veil and saw my face. She’d opened the door between us that I could step through at will.
But Eleni?
This human had never peered beyond the line between seen and unseen that separated us. Even if she had, she’d opened her mind to her goddess and her pantheon alone.
Desperation drove me to frenzied repetition. Over and over, begging, “Eleni, no. Please,pleaseopen your eyes.”
I’d pressed her throughout the cutting journey to open her eyes and look beyond the veil. I’d pushed and pulled as Igrew hoarse in my desperation for her to see me, to sense me,something, but she did not.
Any civilian, any bystander, a single fucking candle in a single fucking house could have given me the barest of hopes that someone might intervene. The blue-gray night had no such plans.
Each step brought her closer to a day I couldn’t stand to relive.
She marched to end her life, and it was 887 BCE all over again.
Raw, powerless panic overcame me just as it had I had when I’d returned to the surface all those years ago only to realize I was on the mortal plane without my human.
I didn’t understand why I tasted salt until I smacked my lips mid-plea and knew, at long last, I’d discovered what it meant to cry.
“Please.”
Washed in moonlight, kneeling on the foot of Athena’s temple, Eleni procured her small blade and begged the goddess to lift the curse from her and her family so she might seek a peaceful afterlife.
“Stop! Stop. You can’t! You can’t?—"
I couldn’t watch.
I was out of options, and I was not her god.
“Athena!”
I’d never screamed a high deity’s name with such turmoil.
