Page 21 of Laced in Longing

ASH

Isit before my flower, watching her struggle for air as panic crushes her chest. Her tears carve silver paths down flushed cheeks, mascara bleeding beneath eyes too wide with fear. Pulse drumming appears at her throat while a few fingernails dig crescents into her palms.

It takes everything in me not to reach out and ease her suffering.

The urge to intervene tightens my jaw until bone creaks. To feed on the longing that radiates from her like heat would require the smallest effort. A breath. A thought, at most. The barest extension of will. I could drain the panic from her blood, pull it through the thinning veil between our worlds until nothing remains but calm and her lungs remember their purpose.

But I cannot. Will not.

Maven needs to feel this—all of it—tragic as it is.

She was not always like this: a fragile creature trembling on the floor of a cold apartment that holds nothing of her essence. In her first life, she bloomed with laughter that rang like temple bells across meadows strewn with summer flowers. Eyes that caught sunlight and held it. Hands that created beauty from nothing—weaving, painting, shaping clay with fingers nimble and sure.

That was before she knew me. Before she understood what waited beyond the veil of mortality.

With each cycle of death and rebirth, her light dims.

Fractures spread through her soul, hairline fissures that deepen with every life spent among those who cannot truly know her. Who cannot see what I see.

The mortals sense her otherness without understanding it—this fragment of divinity trapped in temporary flesh. They pull away, leaving her adrift, alone, vulnerable to the darkness that consumes her from within. Because in their soul, they understand that she is not one of them. Her life force could steal theirs, if my flower tried hard enough.

Maven’s soul does not belong in the mortal realm. It calls to me with a voice she cannot yet hear, pleading for release. Begging for home. Even now, as her mortal shell battles itself, her soul reaches for mine across the divide between worlds. A tendril of pure wanting so potent it singes the air between us.

But I cannot take her without consent. Cannot simply gather her essence and carry her home to my palace where she belongs.

The Bright Gods and their rules.

Their benevolent tyranny keeps the balance between realms, they say. Keeps mortals safe, they insist. But what of Maven? What of the souls promised to the Dark Gods who languish in cycle after cycle of mortal suffering?

What of my suffering?

I am Aakanksh, God of Longing. The ache that hollows bones when what is needed remains beyond reach. I feed on the unfulfilled desire of mortals—the mother weeping over an empty cradle, or the lover watching another take what was promised to them. An artist who glimpses perfection but cannot capture it.

I taste their yearning on my tongue. Sweet and sustaining.

But never Maven’s. Never hers.

Her longing—keener and purer than any mortal’s could be—remains untouched by my hunger. I have forbidden myself from easing her pain even as it slices her apart from within. Prohibited Nemoris, God of Forgetting, from dulling the edges of her memories. Refused Acherin, God of Despair, from feeding on the darkness that grows inside her with each passing day.

She must feel everything. Must understand that her soul does not—cannot—find peace in this realm. Only then will she come willingly to where she belongs.

With me.

She gasps for breath, the sound wrenching me from thought. Her fingers claw at her throat as if to tear it open for air. Heavy emotion shudders through her slight frame while skin pales to the color of bone, lips tinging blue at the corners.

It pains me to watch her suffer, but this is necessary. This collapse began centuries ago.

Each lifetime, she fights me. Refuses my offer. Rejects what she cannot understand.

Perhaps I am cruel to deny her peace. To withhold the comfort I could so easily provide. But I have waited centuries for her return, and I will wait no more. Her soul—promised to me by the Bright Gods millennia ago—is the only thing that matters.

The Bright Gods offered a soul to each of the six Dark Gods after the Great War that nearly tore our realms apart. A peace offering, perhaps. Or a bribe to keep us content in our shadowlands.

I care not for their reasons.

What matters is that Maven’s soul is mine—bound to me by ancient promise. My perfect counterbalance. Where I am darkness, she is light. Where I am hunger, she is fulfillment.

But before we Dark Gods could claim our promised companions, something happened. The Bright Gods claim it was an accident. The souls meant for us were sent to mortal wombs instead, condemned to cycles of death and rebirth until they choose, of their own free will, to join us in the Otherworld.