Page 61 of Between Soul and Vessel
I clenched my fists. “Then you will make her an immortal so she can live.”
She scoffed. “I am one of the most powerful goddesses, but I cannot just grant immortality.”
“I’m sure you know a workaround or two,” I stated.
She studied me for a moment, debating her answer. “You’ve got fire. I’ll give you that.” She rolled her wrist and bolts of electric light began to spark from her palm, forming a giant cerulean egg. She swished her hand, and the egg floated to my sister, who was kneeling on the floor, still trying to catch her breath.
“What is it?” I asked.
The empress answered, “It is an immortal creaturecalled a gryphon. When it hatches, your sister will be able to bind her lifespan to the creature’s, thus granting her immortality. Only when the gryphon dies will your sister die, but considering some are even older than me, I imagine she will now live a very, very long life.”
Sage
“You remembered something, didn’t you?” Artemesia asked, her hand reaching across the table, falling on top of my wrist. Her touch was warm, comforting. Instinctually, my hand fell over hers. How incredible it was that her existence had been exempt from my memories, but the moment she stepped back into my life, that same love I’d held for her in the past had returned immediately, untarnished and unwavering.
Slowly, I nodded. “I did. It was of when the empress came to our family home.”
“That was a very dark day,” she stated, her solemn expression emphasizing the weight behind her words.
“Please, don’t take her!” Artemesia’s young voice called out as she tried to keep up with the carriage, her hand reaching for mine.
“Artemesia!” I cried out, wedging myself through the window, my fingers reaching forhers. We were so close.
But the coachman cracked his whip, and the carriage picked up speed.
“Sage!” she cried, tears racing down her rosy cheeks as she tried to keep up.
“Artemesia!” I bellowed her name as my heart was cleaved apart.
Pulling back from the memory, I looked to my sister, and with a lump forming in my throat, I asked, “What happened after that?”
“You went with her,” she said somberly, her gaze falling to the table, “and I never saw you again.”
For a time, we sat there, silently grieving the past. The sadness that we felt for being pried from one another’s lives. And although neither of us shed a single tear, because we had given enough, someone else cried for us—
The wind. Outside, it began to pick up, and now it howledforus.
For the loss of two close sisters who had been torn apart.
I gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I am glad that we have found each other once more.”
“As am I, dear sister,” she said.
We remained like that for a while.
I think she knew that I needed the quiet, so I could come to terms with everything I had just learned. In my last lifetime, I had been forged from the womb of the moon and given a goddess’s title, but in the lifetime I had just recalled, I had been a mortal. I’d had parents—a mother and a father. I looked across the table—a sister.
Merging from the depths of my thoughts, I asked, “Whathappened to them? Our parents?”
“They lived, and eventually, they passed from old age, their deaths occurring three days apart,” she answered. “I buried them at our family’s summer home, although there wasn’t much left of it. Mother always loved it there so much.” She smiled warmly. “She always said she loved—"
“The long summer nights where the moon was close enough to touch,” I said along with her, my mother’s favorite words returning to me.
“Yeah.” Artemesia smiled, and we both chuckled.
After, I asked, “Before, you mentioned something called the Great Divide. What was that?”
“Right, okay, I’ll get to that. First, I need to finish what I was telling you before,” she said, shifting back in her chair. “After you left, the realm fell quiet for a few years, to the point we wondered if the empress had called off whatever she had been planning. Then, one day, word reached us that the creators were at war. Father desperately wanted to travel to Avolonia to see if he could find you, but Mother didn’t seem to think that was a good idea. I remember being so mad at her. We argued and fought, until she took me to the kitchen and told me that the safest place for you to be was with the emperor. I knew Mother was religious and she strongly believed in him, but I couldn’t understand why she thought you would be with the emperor when it was the empress who had taken you. Mother refused to tell me any more and told me not to speak a word of what she had said to Father.” Artemesia paused. She gave a gentle shake of her head and an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I got a little off track there. Anyway, the empressended up beating the emperor in the final battle. With his dying breath, he drove his mighty sword into the land and fractured it apart, thus ending the old realm and creating hundreds of others. Then, with a mighty roar, he used the last remnants of his powers to cast the realms out into the universe thus creating the Great Divide.”
