I opened my mouth to answer, but only dust came out.
“Are we being visited by spirits of our ancestors? A god who seeks our attention? A?—”
“No,” I said, perhaps too hastily. I remained tucked behind the slits of a broad, green leaf as I softened my tone. “I’m no god, and I’m not of your people. I’m only here for you.”
She went perfectly still. “Have I brought a curse upon us?”
I stopped short of smacking my forehead, only because I knew she was astute enough to hear the sound. I thanked the stars I had no prophets scribbling down my clumsy legacy, as I wasn’t sure I could relive this encounter.
“You have not,” I said. I didn’t have to feel calm to play the part, and I couldn’t risk scaring her.
“Are you here to claim my soul?”
Great. I was the fucking Grim Reaper.
I realized I’d overlooked an important detail in my days of hovering. I’d learned about her people, her village, her culture, her language, but I had not asked my legion of her name. After all, in many lifetimes, she’d asked me not to use it.
In this one, however…we needed a balance. She needed to see me as curious, not all-knowing, nor all-powerful.
“What do they call you in this life?” I asked. I cleared my throat. “Your name, I mean. What name did your parents give you?”
She brushed a circlet of dark curls from her face. “Rauana. It means?—”
Those sounds had been strung together by pale people from mountaintop regions and grassland shepherds, each forming their own names. But among this branch or offshoot of Tahitians, I recognized the combination of words and their meanings.
“Many stars and caves.”
Her star in the cave. My human on the earth, no matter how far, no matter how hard, she was mine, and I was hers. As much as I wanted to fight the horrors the world wrought upon us, we were destined.
Gods and their tales of omnipotence had nothing on the power she held over me.
I was immobilized, mind, body, and soul.
How could she know?
And what was more: what would it take for me to trust in our connection and believe in my human, if not this?
Leaves scraped against bark, wind masking the unnamable thread that tied us.
Speak, for fuck’s sake. Say something.
“Rauana. I am not a god. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not here for your people. But…you are not beholden to me.” I battled against the power imbalance inherent to the implicit bias of animism. A godhood granted to everything would place me above her. It was an inequity with which I was unwilling to contend. “You owe me nothing. Think of me as a man who would like to speak to you as an equal. And when we do…you have the power to send me away, if you do not wish to see me.”
She wrapped her fingers around the torch’s shaft. “If you’re a man, you should know: I’m unmarriageable.”
I swallowed. “Oh?”
“I was born under the lonely star. I am not to bear children.”
Gods, I could cry. I wished she could reincarnate here forever.
It was I, not she, who needed time.
In my panicked years of fearing she’d left her cycles for Heaven, I’d nearly abandoned hope. In my time studying her island, I hadn’t dared totrulybelieve she’d hear me on the first try, despite animism and its evidence.
I was overcome.
Another first.
