“It is a beautiful day, gentlemen.” Mimir tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and soaked up the warmth of the sky. “Were our roles reversed, I would stop moping and enjoy it. It’s not as if it will last forever, you know.”
Kazuaki huffed. It was all the effort he’d exert on replying to Mimir. Maintaining his body’s limited energy remained at the top of his priority. He did not know what Mimir’s plans were for him as soon as his earthly life faded away, and the supernatural being bottled his soul like a beloved trinket ... but he intended to wait as long as possible to find out.
“What day is it?” Jernal asked aloud, sliding an arm over his eyes to shield his face.
Perking at the commander’s voice, Mimir leaned forward on his seat. “It is the twenty-first day in August, Commander.”
Half of a smile crawled onto Jernal’s sunken face, the only part of his expression visible from underneath his arm. “I thought so. My wife turns forty this year.”
“You’re awfully concerned with specific days as of late.” Kazuaki’s words were low, rough, lacking in vitality. Conversing with Jernal became his only outlet for human contact; whether the man wanted to admit it or not, the commander kept him sane. If left to his thoughts, Kazuaki figured he surely would have gone mad.
Sometimes, he thought he still was.
Voices crept into his thoughts that did not belong to him. They were quiet, and he could never make out what they were saying, but the captain thought, perhaps, it was better that way. The last thing he wanted was to end up as daft as Mimir.
“Days seem more important now than they did before,” Jernal replied, readjusting his dehydrated body over the unforgiving floorboards. “We don’t have many of them left.”
True words. The captain laid still, staring at the sky.
“She was really on edge about it,” Jernal continued, releasing a raspy chuckle. “She thought the second she left her thirties behind her, she’d leave her beauty behind, as well.”
Kazuaki felt his body rock with an unexpectedly large wave. “She sounds insecure.”
Ignoring the unflattering comment about his wife, Jernal took a deep breath and held it before he permitted it to exit his lungs. “I wish I could have told her how beautiful she was to me. One last time.”
The captain would have spat, had he any saliva left. “Regrets are a waste of energy.”
“Do not patronize me, Kazuaki.” Jernal slid his arm off his face, turning his neck to face the man as both laid on the cockboat’s floor. “You can cower under the guise of detachment you made for yourself, but every man has regrets.”
Kazuaki said nothing. Mostly because he knew Jernal was right.
“Mimir,” Jernal forced himself to sit up, casting dark-ringed eyes over to the lesser god. “Can you tell me what she’s doing right now?”
The being arched a brow. Jernal asked Mimir frequently about the status of his wife. In the beginning, the lesser god was hesitant to give in to such requests, but the more time he’d spent with the captain and commander, the more he found his attachment to them grew. He hated them. And he adored them. He wanted them to perish, that he could keep them forever. Yet, every time he delivered a piece of news to Jernal that made the man smile, Mimir felt a flutter inside his chest that he, himself, did not understand. But it felt good. “Of course, Commander. So long as you know her exact location.”
It was the same line Mimir always delivered when Jernal asked him to visit his wife. Though omnipotent, no lesser god could find a person without the beacon of a prayer, or without having an exact location to transport themselves to.
Jernal always gave the same answer. “Our house, in Southern.”
“Come here, come here,” Mimir replied, crawling over Kazuaki to reach the commander. “You know the rules.”
Jernal extended his arm. It wobbled from hunger.
Mimir grasped it, finding the exact location of Jernal’s Southern home once again after he plucked it from the commander’s memories.
“Will you tell her I love her?” Jernal asked for the three hundred and twenty-second time.
Mimir’s expression became unreadable. “You know I never let her see me,” he said. “And I never will.”
A long pause followed. Jernal kept his eyes on Mimir, unwavering. The lesser god’s answer never changed. Jernal knew that. He also knew that so long as he lived, he would never stop asking. “Thank you.”
Mimir disappeared from the boat without another word. It rocked in silence, jostled from his departure. The two men sat, the sounds of the waves lapping up against the boat’s sides the only noise surrounding them.
Jernal closed his eyes. The moments between Mimir’s absence and his return were the only instances where he felt the thrill of living anymore. The way his heart beat in his chest, wild and rapid, anxiously awaiting word about his beloved, and their children, if Mimir was feeling particularly generous. It wasn’t always that the lesser god honored his requests. Mimir’s favor wavered with the wind. But whenever the being pitied him enough to respond to his appeal, Jernal felt the light of the world shine down upon him.
The commander dipped his head in Kazuaki’s direction, looking the haggard mortal over. “How come you never ask him to check on your loved ones?” he asked.
A slow scowl found its way to the captain’s face. “Because,” he muttered, “he’s the one who took me from them.”
Another rough crash from a heavy wave bucked Jernal’s withered body away from the boat’s side. When he readjusted himself, he shrugged, apathetic. “Regardless ... I’ll take what I can get.”
“He is your captor, Jernal. Every time you allow him to do you a favor, you grant him a reason to ease his guilt.”
In spite of everything, Jernal smirked. He turned away from Kazuaki, staring out at the endless sea on the horizon. “Maybe. But it’s nice to know for just one moment, exactly what she’s doing. It’s easier to pretend I’m there that way.”
Kazuaki closed his eye. The months were not kind to Jernal. Seclusion and shock ravaged his body, but the captain thought, perhaps, it was his mind that suffered the most. Forced to face the reality of his impending death, the commander shifted from a hardened individual into a man grasping at spiritual straws. Kazuaki had witnessed the same transformation in others before. Jernal was trying to make peace with himself, with whatever gods he did or did not believe in, and with whatever cosmic debt he incurred for himself. A normal, human response to impending doom.
He couldn’t blame him entirely. Kazuaki felt the same feelings nipping at the edges of his newly mortal brain too. He just hadn’t resigned himself to them yet.
As he often did, Mimir returned in an unexpected surge. The boat lowered with the sudden addition of weight, and the lesser god scooted himself back into a comfortable position. “She was exactly where you guessed she’d be,” Mimir announced, glancing over at Jernal as he used all his energy to sit upright in the cockboat.
“And how is she?” he asked, his dull eyes finding a brightness Kazuaki hadn’t seen since the last time Mimir delivered news about his family.
Mimir shrugged. “She is as she was the last times I’ve seen her. Carrying on. Hanging laundry on the line to dry.”
The simple description relaxed Jernal back into the hard edges of the boat. He wore a smile on his face Kazuaki knew would remain until the reality of his oblivion wiped it away again.
Mimir studied the smile, fixating on it. Watching Jernal’s happiness consume his face granted Mimir a grin of his own. His shoulders eased and he sank into the spot where he perched, pleased with the results of his departure.
The subtleties of their interactions with one another became one of the few scraps of entertainment Kazuaki had left. Though he’d been active in his psychological dissection of Mimir since the lesser god doomed them all to the boat countless months ago, he still couldn’t put a finger on who Mimir was, or what to expect of him.
The captain closed his eye, reverting to t
he only other form of entertainment he had left: his memories. The best ones were always at the forefront. Days at sea with the crew, drudging up old myths and splitting the rewards amongst themselves. Finding out Nicholai wasn’t as big an asshole like all the other Time Fathers that ruled their divisions for the sole purpose of feeling superior to others. Finding Umbriel. Feeling a sense of accomplishment at returning her to Panagea. Disemboweling all those gods at Seacaster.
Meeting Bermuda.
His eye flicked open when she entered his thoughts. He tried not to think of her too often, fearful he might end up in the same despairing mental state as Jernal. It was easier to think of the others. They left a small hole in the place where he thought his heart might be.
But Bermuda ... she left a crater.
For the longest time, Kazuaki thought it was a curse of an entirely different kind that the last look he saw on her face, was one of untouched dread. The alarm in her eyes as she ran toward him in Seacaster ... he’d never forget it. He preferred to remember the look of ecstasy on her face when they had shared one another’s company in the airship for the first time. Or any of the other times that followed that. For months on end, it taunted him that her trepidation was the last piece of her he saw. But as time went on, he found gratitude in it.
If, aside from those who accompanied him in the boat, he got to see one last face before he departed the earthly world and entered his afterlife of torment as one of Mimir’s venerated objects ... he was glad it was hers.
Kazuaki frowned, lifting an arm to rub at his eardrums with his finger. The voices were back again. Damnable, inaudible whispers. He wondered if this was the same experience Mimir went through before he lost his sanity. He narrowed his eye. At least if Kazuaki were to lose himself to senselessness, he wouldn’t be alive long enough to allow others to watch his descent.
Something wet hit his nose. The captain looked up. At first believing it to be spray cast off from a rouge ocean wave, he noticed a sudden graying in the sky above. Another bead of rain fell from the heavens. It landed on his shin.
Before long, water poured down from above without mercy. Kazuaki grinned. He reached over and seized the purification system as well as an available bucket. “Look at that, Jernal.” He set it up to collect the rain, catching an unreadable look from Mimir as he did. “Looks like we won’t be dying today.”
“Good,” the commander replied, not lifting his head as rain coated the dry skin of his face. “Then I can enjoy this feeling a little bit longer.”
Mimir smirked. He folded his legs underneath himself, propping his head up with his hands. Though he seemed pleased to observe both Jernal’s and Kazuaki’s excitement at the rain’s arrival, he said, “Enjoy it while it lasts, gentlemen. It’s only delaying the inevitable.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The surreal beauty of the forest no longer tempered Avigail’s thirst for human interaction. For answers. She laid on the rust-colored leaves that coated the ground, her hands behind her head as she stared at the sky. Some surprise existed that the brightness of the blues did not accost her eyes.
She heard them at night, though she thought they had wandered far from them. The people. Their songs and laughter traveled on the evening winds and found her ears, no matter how far she and Itreus walked. They beckoned her in a way.
Rayen had not surfaced since his last departure. She looked for him now and then, hoping to catch glimpses of movement hiding in the trees. Each time she had, they stemmed from the creatures of the forest.
The young woman rolled to her side, propping her head up with her palm as she dug her elbow into the dirt. Her gaze landed on Itreus, sitting cross-legged several paces from her. His eyes were closed. He appeared to be meditating. He had to be. Those were the only instances she ever saw his lids fall on his face. The god never slept.
Avigail bit the inside of her cheek. Though they had yet to achieve any success in locating Revi, Itreus had done a lot for her. She wanted to abide by his request to leave the humans to themselves, but their proximity gnawed at her. Companionship with the god carried her through countless trials. But if the residents on that parcel of land had any insights into where Revi and the others may have gone ... she should ask, shouldn’t she?
Sitting up from the chatty pile of rustling leaves, Avigail cleared her throat. Loitering in uncertainty was torture. She didn’t want to wait any longer for results. “I’m ... going to go to the bathroom,” she announced, unsure if Itreus heard her.
Seconds passed before the god made any acknowledgment at all. Without opening his eyes, he lifted his chin. “If you must.”
Pushing herself up to stand, Avigail took several steps into the vertical arms of the woodlands. She paused only once, glancing over her shoulder, to be sure Itreus remained where he sat.
He did.
Growing more confident by the moment that he wouldn’t follow, Avigail trekked further into the forest. Her instinct guided her much of the way. A connection existed with those ghostly voices that the breezes brought to her at night. Almost an unseen path, a proverbial trail of breadcrumbs that remained, even after the words of the people fell away.
They sounded different in the day time but brought the same level of comfort. Avigail tilted her head, taking refuge behind thick, flowering bushes as she knelt in the dirt outside the peoples’ encampment. As close as she was, she couldn’t make out what they said. She didn’t need to. Just seeing them eased her strange loneliness. It was a hole that Itreus, as a god, could not fill.
Avigail dug her teeth into her bottom lip. They were so close. If she summoned the courage to approach, she could ask her questions. It wasn’t entirely unbelievable to think they might have seen Revi. Or, at the very least, the airship. For a moment, Avigail thought that she might simply burst out of the shrubs and get on with it. Dive in, head first.
She did not.
Her loyalty to Itreus weighed her ankles down, chaining her to the leaves and dirt. From her position, she spied the people, outside their simple homes. Some cooked what appeared to be a skinned animal over an open fire. Children foraged for nuts and berries. A woman seemed to be fashioning apparel out of the wings of a dead bird.
Though they only acknowledged one another in intervals, Avigail detected a distinct aura of contentment emanating from the group. She remembered feeling it around Umbriel, but it seemed an unattainable goal for all the other humans she’d met in her life.
A father knelt beside his young son, showing him how to string a bow. The visual pulled a smile out of Avigail. Connections unfolded before her. It put her in mind of the time Revi taught her how to knock empty cans off a fence post with nothing more than a rock and a slingshot fashioned from a thin strip of cloth.
She must have been six. Seven. Avigail remembered the dark circles under her father’s eyes, but she did not make the connection as to why they were there. Every member of the Houton household wore them. Most from malnutrition. At that moment, she realized his stemmed from sleepless nights too.
Revi was an absent figure for much of her waking days, sucked into the needy hands of the workforce well into the evening. What little she saw of him, though, she remembered delighting in.
With the squeal of laughter pulling her from her recollection, Avigail peered out from behind her shrub once more. Children skittered every which way. Laughing. Playing. Consumed, perhaps, a little too far by their game, one stuck his foot out, tripping another. Avigail winced when the poor juvenile fell face-first into the dirt.
Tears followed. A woman, assumingly the mother, abandoned her post at the fire to tend to the wailing youngster. Though she found no amusement in the adolescent’s pain, both to his shin and to his pride, Avigail found herself smiling.
A boy tripped her once. It was the first and the last time. Another memory of playing well into the evening hours outside her home, Avigail remembered racing around with her brothers, Amadeu and Jacob. She had competed with them often. Their presence summoned
several of the other neighborhood boys into their area. While they extended kindness to Amadeu and Jacob, the local boys had no interest in sharing their adventures with a wily, young Avigail.
Girls had cooties at that age and all that.
Revi was on his way home from a sixteen-hour shift. Avigail recalled hearing him leave that morning. Though he had tried to be quiet on his departures from the home at 2:00 a.m., his tired body often failed to act with poise. He had knocked over a pile of dirty plates on his way out that day. It was that noise that woke her. She remembered it vividly.
Her father had rounded the bend to their homestead when he saw one of Amadeu’s friends trip his daughter. Avigail frowned, recalling just how unpleasant it was to have that boy loom over her and pull her braided hair.
It didn’t matter that Revi was tired. That every muscle in his body ached from the toils of endless labor. He ran to Avigail. Her father towered over that boy. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Even though the child looked up at Revi with the fear of a sinner in his eyes, her father gripped him by the shirt and lifted him completely from the ground. She remembered his legs flailing wildly above her as she removed herself from the place he’d shoved her.
She didn’t recall exactly what Revi said to that boy. It was a long time ago. All Avigail remembered, was when her father finished whispering his heated tangent, the boy’s feet touched the earth again, and he ran. She’d never seen a kid bolt so fast in her life. To this day, she still hadn’t. Revi implanted a terror in that child. He never touched her again.
The memory brought an unexpected smile with it. The smile brought a more unexpected tear. Avigail felt her throat tighten, and she wiped all evidence of sadness from her eyes quickly. It didn’t belong there.
‘You just need to go out there’, she thought to herself, balling her fingers into fists. ‘If they know something about your father ... if they can lead you in the right direction ... Itreus will forgive you.’
The Panagea Tales Box Set Page 113