by Daryl Banner
“Is it?”
“You ought to live each day of your life as if you’ve already lived forever.” Aardgar looked up into the stars obscured by tree branches. He still saw no Goddess or Three Sister. “Unhurried. Unworried. Unafraid. And not scrambling about insisting to do each and every thing you can with your time. When you race around grasping at everything around you, you find in the end that you hold nothing.”
Charma listened to his words. He wasn’t sure if she could fathom the full weight of them, but she listened anyway. Sometimes, he had to remind himself he was still human; he was not immortal anymore. Despite feeling alone with his unique experiences, he felt less alone when she shared the bench with him.
“I dare my people to sit where they sit and do nothing. Enjoy the air. Think on their day or think not at all. Study the stars.” Aardgar smiled. It was his first smile in ages.
“Or embrace the moment,” Charma softly said.
Aardgar turned to her. “Or …?”
And then she kissed him. It was so sudden that Aardgar sucked in air before falling into the kiss. Her lips were warm and sweet. They tasted so different than Evanesce’s, whose lips he knew so intimately over the countless decades. This young woman’s mouth was softer somehow, wetter, and strange, and earthy, and …
Human.
She pulled away, as if the kiss surprised her, even though she was the one to initiate it. Her bright, frightened eyes met his. He said nothing in return. His mouth hung open after the kiss, limp and uncertain. He still tasted her upon his tongue.
“I am sorry,” she murmured quietly.
Aardgar was lost for words until, at last, he felt a pinch of pride. “I’m not.”
She lifted her eyebrows.
Aardgar felt himself smile. Kissing Charma might have been a brief rest from the torment that losing Evanesce had done to his soul, but it was strangely welcomed.
He leaned toward her and invited himself into another kiss. It was a warmer kiss than the first, and before he knew what his hands were doing, they put themselves on her body. Her arms went about his neck, and the bench fast became a nest upon which their bodies united under the stars and woods and wind.
Breath after breath, Aardgar’s humanity was saved all over again, this time by a human. A real human. A woman with warmth, with breath, with curiosity, with gentleness, with fervor, with a heart that thrashed with his own.
The tryst on the bench was their first, but far from their last. Many times, Aardgar called Charma to his chambers where they did more—and much needed—exploration of one another’s bodies.
Had it been twenty years since he felt the embrace of another woman? Thirty? Evanesce was a faraway memory that, at times, Aardgar doubted even existed.
Maybe he dreamed her up somehow, just as her sisters dreamed, just as the Sleepers of yore dreamed.
Charma filled his heart now. Charma was the woman who filled his bed, too—the one he called “my love”.
A part of Aardgar knew Evanesce would be happy for him that he had found another human to spend the remainder of his measly mortal life with. Evanesce … who was likely dreaming the futures to come with her two sisters at long last at her side. Three Sister, guide me, Aardgar had thought many times.
“Aardgar,” murmured Charma one morning at the large stone doorway to his chambers. The sun bathed her like a golden dagger through the windows.
He let the list of new Kingly and Queenly candidates drop to the table before him, then rushed to meet his love at the door. The concern on her face sobered him. “What is it?”
She brought a hand to her belly. “I’ve not made blood in two months,” she whispered, like it was a frightening thing.
Aardgar’s eyes drifted down, astonished. After so long with Evanesce who refused to allow herself a child with him, Aardgar had nearly forgotten the possibility of this very thing happening.
But Charma was human. She could not control her body in the way that Evanesce’s kind could. Charma’s biology was unstoppable, and apparently so was Aardgar’s, if what his love confessed was true.
Son or daughter …
“Are you certain?” he asked in a hush.
Charma nodded. “I … I’m sorry. I … I should have been more responsible. I should … I should have—”
“No.” Aardgar was overcome. He had given up this very possibility decades ago. Now, the reality sat before him, and he felt a rush of emotion fill his lungs just as his breath did. “No. This is … This is a gift.”
“A gift?”
“Yes. From Three Goddess herself.” Aardgar could not contain his glee. He brought his eyes up to meet Charma’s. “Our son or daughter.”
She at last knew relief. “You are not upset. You … Y-You are happy.”
“In love.” Aardgar brought his lips to hers, embracing her gently. “I am in love.”
In love. Aardgar, you fool …
Every night from then on was spent in each other’s arms. Aardgar, yet again, could not let go the hand of a woman he loved. It was as if now Charma was the one who held the power to keep him alive and young forever, and every minute spent away from her made him inch closer to his imminent death.
At times when he held Charma close, he wondered if a deep part of him simply saw her as Evanesce in another form. Except Charma’s lips tasted human. Charma’s body felt softer, more fragile than Evanesce’s did. There were imperfections on her skin. Blemishes. She did not have the otherworldly perfect body that Evanesce had.
And those imperfections made Charma all the more beautiful to Aardgar.
It was the night before the council would choose a successor that Aardgar’s life changed forever. He held Charma in his arms. The lamps of his chambers glowed with dancing firelight, and a cool wind blew in from the opened doors that led to the gardens.
Aardgar felt the presence before he saw it. His heart sped up, and the flames of the sconces stilled, as if the wind had died. He lifted up from the bed to find a figure by the opened doors.
It was her.
“Evanesce,” he hissed, struck and pained and awed by the sight.
Evanesce was completely naked and as young and perfect as he remembered her, but something about her eyes was different. They didn’t look human. They were faraway and full of curiosity, as if she didn’t even recognize him. Maybe she didn’t. She did not speak or return his greeting; she only stared at the pair of them across the room, her golden hair dancing around her, despite no more garden breeze coming in. Her full breasts rose and fell with her every slow, steady breath, and her eyes never blinked.
Aardgar rose off of the bed. “Evanesce,” he tried again. “You … You have returned.”
The Goddess continued to stare at him, her eyes unmoving. Aardgar did not like the look in them. There was no golden light. No empathy. No love. It was as if a great and glorious insect had come to their door to study them, readying its invisible stinger at its back. There was only the cold air of night and the flicker of firelight in the room.
Evanesce at last spoke. “She carries your child.”
Aardgar glanced back at Charma, who had drawn the sheets to her naked chest protectively as she watched, scared of the Goddess.
“Yes,” Aardgar then confessed, returning his gaze to Evanesce. Why was he so afraid of her? Evanesce was the one he once loved, the one who saved him, the one to whom he belonged.
Evanesce’s face was frozen, making her whole shape appear to be carved from golden ice. She said nothing at all.
Aardgar took another step toward her. “I … I thought you were never coming back.”
“I said I would be back. I said the words. I had made a human’s promise.” Her eyes never left Aardgar. He could not tell if it was hurt he saw in them, or anger, or nothing at all. “And I am back. As I said.”
She must have found her sisters, surely. She must have spent the last thirty years with her own kind. I don’t see her humanness anymore, he thought to himself as he stared cautiou
sly at the strange golden being in his room. It was so like the first day they met and a stranger had a sharp to his father’s throat, and he saw a beautiful girl made of light and wondered who she was.
What she was.
“Thirty years.” His words came out through a choked throat. “I have aged thirty years. I … am an older man now, Evanesce. You had me live the rest of my life thinking my only end was in a human death. Evanesce … you left me.”
A flicker of fury crossed the Goddess’s face at once. In over a hundred years of watching the world turn, of cities burning, of horror, of war and blood … the maddened look in Evanesce’s molten gold eyes terrified him the worst.
Charma rose from the bed suddenly. The sheets came with her, dragging along the ground like a great Queenly robe. “A-Are you the Goddess?” she asked quietly.
Evanesce did not regard Charma at all.
Yet Charma kept speaking, bold and foolish as she was. “You are magnificent. I … I did not think you were real. I thought you were—”
“You are the only thing I have ever learned to love,” Evanesce stated suddenly to Aardgar, ignoring Charma’s words utterly. “You are the only thing that I could.”
At once, a great and terrible light flashed through the room. Everything was gold in one instant, and then dark. The firelight was put out and a deep, resonating hum filled the space from wall to wall, door to window.
“Evanesce!” Aardgar cried out in terror, blinded.
Then the room was lit once more, but the light came from Evanesce’s body, which glowed like molten metal—a sickly golden, alien glow that made her look more like a creature from another world than Aardgar had ever seen in all the time he’d known her. Her hair lifted around her head like a crown, and her eyes and teeth blazed a magnificent and terrifying white.
Aardgar stepped forth. “Evanesce. Listen to me. Listen to the human part of you—the part that walked this world with me. I was lost without you. I was abandoned. I was—”
“What is this … that I am feeling?” asked the Goddess, whose body smoldered worse by the second, growing so hot that Aardgar began to sweat. The room reddened at once. “I don’t understand, Aardgar. I am angry. I could obliterate in the blink of an eye everything we have carefully built together. But that isn’t logical. Why would I do that? I … I don’t understand why I would want to do that.” She flinched. “I said I would return. I made a human’s promise. Isn’t that what a promise is? What is this that I am feeling?”
Before his own eyes, a long, golden sword grew in the air, forged from nothing. Evanesce took it.
Aardgar didn’t know what she intended to do with the menacing weapon. Slay Charma. Murder their unborn baby. Take off Aardgar’s head. It did not matter to him. He just needed Evanesce to remember the humanity she once had—and quickly. Only thirty years had passed. Why did it feel like thirty lifetimes?
How did Evanesce remember who I was, yet forget all the humanity she had learned?
He stood before the great Goddess, appealing to her as directly as he could. It was like standing before a terrible fire. His face burned. “Please, my Evanesce, my golden Goddess. Listen. Remember what we had. Look at me. Look at me.”
She looked at him, just as he requested. He regretted it right away. The power in her furious glare was enough to bring a score of Kings and Queens to their knees.
Yet Aardgar remained standing. “Speak your mind as you always have—to me. I am the same Aardgar you knew. Don’t let this outward appearance deceive you. It is merely a product of your absence. I am a man now.”
“And I am a woman,” answered Evanesce, and her voice seemed to fill the room as if she was shouting, yet she spoke calmly. “I crossed a universe for you. I welcomed all of the weakness and the greed and the power of humans into my soul … so that I could know what it is to love. I have created a world for you, have I not?”
“I still love you,” he said at once, as if a woman was not cowering nearby in sheets, as if his unborn son or daughter was not growing within that woman’s belly. “I still love you with all my heart, my Evanesce. Please. Look into my—”
“And you repay me by replacing my love with another.” The Goddess’s eyes flickered. Was that anger? Was that sadness? “What is this that I am feeling? It is like fire … so like fire …”
Aardgar would say anything to calm the divine creature that was Evanesce. “I do not love her in the way that I love you. She is just a weak human woman, nothing more. I have always loved you. Nothing compares to your magnificence. Please. I am just a human. I am weak.”
“I AM SO ANGRY, AARDGAR.”
Her voice was not lifting, yet it threatened to split his skull with its potency. He had to calm her quickly. The fate of his world might literally depend on it. She could obliterate their meager existences with a flutter of eyelashes. “I have replaced nothing. It is still there … what we built.” Aardgar was willing to throw away his love for Charma if need be. He’d do anything to calm the fury of Evanesce and draw some human sense into her. “You are and have always been my love. Look into my heart and you will see the truth of it.”
“I CREATED YOU.”
Her voice shook the very walls. The golden glow that filled the room pulsed and pulsed, growing more intense the louder the Goddess spoke. Aardgar knew he was losing her.
“I CREATED A WORLD FOR US … A WORLD FOR HUMANKIND … A WORLD OF BALANCE … AND YOU WILL DESTROY IT FOR A FLICKER OF WARMTH FROM THIS WORTHLESS HUMAN WOMAN. A FLICKER OF WARMTH. A FLICKER OF NOTHING.”
He never knew such anger existed within Evanesce. But he knew in this moment that he had ignored, for too long, a simple fact he was too afraid to face all of these years: Evanesce was not a human, and Aardgar was too much of one, regardless of whether or not the cursed gift of immortality was granted to him.
What was a blink of an eye to Evanesce was half a lifetime to Aardgar.
Quite suddenly, he resented Evanesce. As if all of the decades were erased at once and he was just a boy on the riverbank once again, he hated her for saving him from the zealots that fateful day when she appeared in a flash of light. He hated her for the death of his father, for his mother’s loss of sanity, and for stealing his chance at living a normal human’s life.
“You should have let me die that day,” he suddenly hissed at her, tears coming to his eyes.
The coldness in the Goddess’s stony, alien gaze told Aardgar everything. Evanesce had lost the humanity that brought them so close together. He was merely property to her, a tool of entertainment, a toy … a human. There was no love there, not anymore.
Aardgar lifted his chin to Evanesce. “If you are so angry with me, Sister of Light, Goddess, then make an end of my miserably long life at last. Leave the Last City of Atlas to the humans. Take my twisted life and be done with it.”
Evanesce’s stare was ice to his chest. “I will make an end of it, certainly,” she promised. Her promise was as cold as her stare … which then moved to Charma across the room.
Aardgar realized her intentions too late.
“Don’t! NO!”
In the space of a second, Evanesce’s great, golden sword flung across the room and pierced Charma through the belly, pinning her to the stone wall.
Charma gasped once, clutched the blade in horror, then stared down at it, her eyes widened. Uncaring of the blade cutting her hands, she made a desperate grab at it, urgently trying to free herself from its hold, but the golden weapon had her skewered from belly to back. The red drew down the blade, down her hands, down her legs, and it was while still staring at the sword that the life left Charma’s eyes and she slumped forward.
Aardgar’s screams filled the room as he raced to save his love. He could not pull the sword from Charma. It was as if the weapon had become one with the wall, with Charma’s belly, with their unborn son or daughter. Aardgar’s screams were replaced quickly with wails of despair, incoherent babbling, and then nothing at all as he sank to his knees and clutched
the bloodied legs of his Charma, still pinned to the wall by the Goddess’s blade.
“Y-You didn’t h-have to …” He couldn’t finish his words. “You could have s-s-spared her. She w-was innocent …”
“Innocent.” The golden light of Evanesce drew closer as she took a step toward him. “Innocent.” When Aardgar lifted his teary gaze, he found Evanesce knelt before him, her furious dark yellow eyes falling on his anguished face. “Explain to me what you think that means. Innocent. I once thought I knew what such a word means. But I have since seen that no one is innocent. Not even an unborn child. My sisters dream. My sisters—”
“F-F-Fuck your sisters. F-Fuck Three Sister. F-Fuck you.” He could barely see the Goddess through his blurry screen of tears. He clenched his teeth as he continued to grip his love—his human love. From a touch of the blade, his Legacy felt an infinity of nothing. It was as if the golden blade had no history to tell, no origin, no space in which it existed before the moment it was created from nothing to take the life of his love.
“My sisters dream … They know of a child’s destiny. They know what will come of a boy or a girl before they spill from between their mother’s legs. No one is innocent, Aardgar, not even a boy or girl unborn. I have seen it.”
“You see nothing,” Aardgar hissed, furious. “You aren’t even human. You don’t feel. You think it’s love, but it’s just greed and dominance, the very same evils you tried for centuries to rid us humans of.”
“I know what I feel now.” Her voice was calmer, yet her tone was too even. Did she even feel pain after what she’d done? Did she feel regret? What had happened to the Evanesce he once knew? “I know what you feel, my love.”
“I AM NOT YOUR LOVE!”
“But it will mean nothing to you in time,” she went on. “You will see. This woman and your child, they would have ruined you.”
“YOU HAVE RUINED ME!” Aardgar’s fury seemed to split open his throat with the harsh intensity in which he spit out the words.
“And I will still love you, my Aardgar. And I will save you from your own humanness.” She reached toward him. “Take my hand.”