Page 7 of Aïdes the Unseen
There was no grandeur to it.
No throne. No crown. No fire.
Just a garden.
Underground.
It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was. Pale blossoms, white as bone, bloomed from black soil. Vines curled up stone pillars. Water, dark and clear, dripped from stalactites into a small, moonlit pool.
“I made this,” he said simply.
I turned to him, breath caught somewhere in my throat. “For yourself?”
A slow nod. “Even death needs beauty.”
I knelt beside a flower and let it brush my fingertips. It didn't bloom brighter in my presence. It didn't need to. It was already whole.
“I think I understand now,” I said.
He knelt beside me. “Do you?”
I turned to him. The space between us was no longer an emptiness. It was an invitation.
“I thought I was the goddess of beginnings,” I said. “But beginnings mean nothing without endings. We’re… halves, aren’t we?”
His gaze darkened, not with anger, but something almost too tender to look at directly.
“Not halves,” he said, his voice low. “Mirrors.”
The word settled in my chest like a seed.
I don’t know how long we stayed in that garden. Long enough that even the silence seemed to grow petals. And when we finally rose, he led me gently, quietly, back toward the world above.
At the threshold, where twilight once again bled into spring, he paused.
“This is where I leave you.”
I turned, startled. “You’re not coming with me?”
“I don’t belong there.”
“What if I want you to?”
He looked at me then like I was the last secret left in the world.
“I would come,” he said, simply. “But not as a god. As a guest.”
I hesitated.
He saw it. He felt it.
“You don’t have to decide now,” he said. “You can go. You can grow. This doesn’t have to be a beginning.”
“But it already is,” I whispered.
He smiled.
Not the ghost of one.
