Page 130 of Aïdes the Unseen
He took my hand now. No hesitation.
“So tell me, my love…” A breath. A vow. “Where to next?”
Chapter
Twenty-Five
GRAVEN
THE SEA-SWEPT CHAMBER
The salt hung in the air like a prophecy. Irina stood knee-deep in black water, the hem of her robe floating like fog, hair tangled from wind that wasn’t real but remembered.
A lighthouse pulsed in the distance. A memory—hers, or someone else’s. Another lifetime lost to waves and longing. She whispered the name of a drowned brother. A son she had once had. Her mouth trembled, and still, she spoke it.
The dog howled once, low and solemn, and the memory sealed itself inside her chest like a stone. She collapsed against me afterward, breath ragged. But she stood again.
She always did.
THE EMBER GARDEN
Ashes rained like snow in the field where a temple once stood. The ground was scorched. Olive trees burned to the root. AndIrina stepped barefoot into flame. No fear. No cry.
Just memory.
She knelt where her altar had been. Kissed the charred soil and named her fire.Phôs.Her light. When she stood, her skin smoked. I pressed cool cloth to her wrists, and she let her head rest on my shoulder for five slow heartbeats. Her voice was smaller after that. Not broken. Distant. Like it was echoing through too many walls.
But she moved forward.
THE VAULT OF MIRRORS
She screamed in this one, only once. Her reflection fractured a hundred times over, showing every incarnation of herself: old, young, broken, cruel, divine.
One reached through the mirror and touched her cheek. The mirror shattered. Irina bled.
But sheremembered.
And I wanted, truly for the first time in this journey, to destroy the world that had demanded she suffer for truth. The dog curled around her as she slept in my lap after, too exhausted to walk. I didn’t sleep.
I memorized the shape of her hands instead, in case she forgot how to hold mine.
THE HALL OF ECHOES
The sound shook the bones of the earth.
Ereshkigal.
She was older than time, older than death. Still shaped from obsidian will and endless sky, from void-light and unmakinghunger. Beside her stoodInanna, the goddess, embodying love, fertility, and war. Less merciful.
We stepped into that sanctum like breath into the mouth of a sleeping god. I did not let go of her hand.
“I know what I am,” Irina said, her voice steady in the presence of their silence. “I know who I am.”
Ereshkigal’s eyes, black and shoreless, shifted. Inanna only smiled, a crack forming in the veil of reality. “This should be a fool’s path,” she said, voice like a kiss of spring, bells cheerfully ringing.
“Should?” I asked, stepping forward, feeling some of the dread fall away.
“Yes,” Ereshkigal answered in a voice like a grinding mountain, ancient and fresh all at once. “But it’s merely the end of a journey—and the beginning of another.”
