I was merely a star.
She was the universe.
Chapter Six
326 BCE
I’d been gone for a wink. A breath. A sleep.
Incredulity was a shallow, icy coating in my throat.
A stickwork of smoke, a member of my legion, slipped between the cracks of her home to deliver an urgent message. I didn’t like seeing any being from my side of the veil here in the mortal realm when I was with her but, given that my legion were fragments of myself sent into the world to represent my interests, its news bared listening. The misty filament insisted upon my return to Hell for a meeting. The faceless sketch of a body didn’t deserve the wrath it received in response.
Smokey lines gripped the edge of the bed, unwilling to leave. Its relentlessness despite my ire convinced me that I was truly needed.
Eleni yawned, still half asleep as the earliest rays of dawn peeked above the horizon. “Come back to bed.”
“I promise I’ll be back before you wake,” I’d said. “I have to return to my realm for the barest of moments. Close your eyes,and when you open them, it will be to your head on my chest. Sleep, Eleni.”
Her eyes fluttered shut. “Not Eleni,” she said, voice drifting as slumber called to her. “Not to you. Not to the one I love.”
Love.
It was with angst and fury that I was torn from her side after the most important night of my existence, and the most magical word ever spoken by god or man.
I’d learned my lesson with Shala. Time passed differently. I wouldn’t be away for more than a minute, that much I knew. I’d see what was required, then return. Though there was no consistency to time and its flow between the realms, sometimes gaining time, often losing it, I knew every moment counted.
I kept my word.
I was in Hell for less than a minute. I loved my realm, my people, my father, but they’d never pulled me in two like the ripcord my human had on me. I alarmed half of the royal kingdom and cut my father’s decree woefully short as I counted the seconds before saying I’d heard enough. I was needed elsewhere.
The shock on his face at my dismissal was one that no entity living or smote had seen before, which was all he needed to know of my urgency.
But the sun’s rays were no longer a fresh shade of orange when I returned to the surface.
I knew what had changed the moment I materialized in the room, but shock overtook me. I approached the mattress, fingers reaching tentatively for the neck where a pulse should be. I lowered my cheek to her lips, knowing I’d feel no hot puff of breath against my skin.
Eleni’s body was still in her bed.
Her soul, however, was nowhere to be found.
“This can’t…” I looked to the window, to the gauzy curtains, to the mid-morning light. I argued with the walls. “She can’t have…”
Her long-cold corpse contained no shimmer.
“No. No! Wake up. Eleni, wake up! Eleni…Love…Love, please.Please!”
By noon, the servants would find it. Mortal ears couldn’t hear the way my thunderous cries tore through the house, though they felt the earthquake as Athens broke and shattered. I would have raked it to the ground if Athena herself hadn’t torn me out of her territory, revoking the kinship we’d shared.
Because we existed in the realms behind the veil, humans thought us omniscient.
None of us were.
If I were omniscient, I would have known who, and what, was responsible for this affront, this pain, this grievance worthy of every death, every plague, every disaster man or monster could fathom.
“You can’t be gone. You can’t.”
Frigid tears lined my eyes. I clutched her lifeless body against mine. What deity could I call upon for necromancy? Athena had allowed her to see me once. Would the Hellenic pantheon allow me to chase her across the River Styx? What did Orpheus know of love if he turned back to damn Eurydice? If given the chance, I’d lay waste to the Charon, I’d slay Cerberus, I’d yank her spirit from Hades himself and give the gods a new story, atruestory of what it meant to love beyond the limits of death.
