Page 3 of Aïdes the Unseen
“I’m not used to being seen,” he added, voice quieter now. Moreintimate. “Most mortals only sense me when they’re dying. Or mourning. And gods... well, most avoid me entirely. Unless they want something.”
I turned to face him, walking backwards with a smile that curled like a vine around a fencepost. “Well, I don’t want anything.”
“Don’t you?” he asked.
I stopped.
There was no accusation in his tone. Just a careful curiosity. A question asked by someone who’d spent eternity offering silence instead of demand.
“I came because I felt something,” I admitted. “Something strange. Like a thread pulled tight through the roots.”
“That was me,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Or part of me. I wasn’t trying to call you.”
“Maybe not,” I said softly, “but something called.”
He paused, then gestured toward a fallen tree near the water’s edge. We sat, and the moment he settled beside me, the grass stopped growing. I noticed the stillness around himimmediately, the absence of life, not destructive but...final. Like a book gently closed.
“You’re quiet for someone so full of noise,” he murmured after a long while.
“Noise?” I laughed. “You mean joy?”
“I meanlight.It dances off you.”
I flushed. Gods didn’t usually blush. But it wasn’t his words so much as it was the way he said them. As if he didn’t know how to make things beautiful, but couldn’t help noticing when they were.
I shifted closer. “Is it hard?” I asked. “Being the place everything ends?”
He didn’t answer immediately. The creek babbled nearby, catching the light like it wanted to show off for me.
“It’s lonely,” he said. “But not because it’s dark. Because it’s… misread. Misnamed.”
“What would you name yourself, if you could choose?”
He turned his head, eyes meeting mine under the breathless hush of dusk. “Keeper. Not taker. Guardian. Not god.”
A silence stretched between us. This time, I didn’t fill it with laughter.
“I don’t think I’m what they say I am, either,” I whispered. “They think I’m just the bloom. The newness. But no one asks what I become after the flowers wilt.”
He looked at me for a long time, really looked.
“You keep growing,” he said. “That’s what you do.”
“I wither too,” I replied. “Everything that grows must. Even joy.”
He didn’t flinch. “Then maybe we’re not so different.”
Our hands rested beside each other on the fallen tree. Not touching. But close enough that I could feel the pull, thetensionbetween warmth and cool, bloom and stone.
“I should go,” I said, though I didn’t stand.
“I won’t stop you.”
But he didn’t want me to go. I could feel that truth, low and quiet in the earth between us.
“I’ll come back,” I said.
“You shouldn’t promise gods things,” he warned, but there was no real threat in it. Just a sadness that felt older than temples.
