Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

“I’m a country lad, Lora. I’m happy like this.”

I shook my head, exasperated. I was a city girl and had lived poor for as long as I could remember. Lived poor and hated it. It never would have occurred to me—or to anyone else from St. Giles, I’d wager—that someone with the means to escape the grind of poverty would simply choose not to do so.

A forest of gold. In my mind’s eye, it was glimmering and endless, a shimmery warm paradise. Like a scrap of proof of what could be, the oval leaf gleamed next to my thigh, shiny as a newly minted coin.

I picked it up. Nothing warm there: It had taken on the chill of the grotto already, cold against my fingers. Even its tiny treble song felt cold.

And then all the exasperation in me began to fade. I looked down at the leaf. I felt its firm chill and recalled its green spring softness from moments before. Its life.

A thought scratched at me, elusive. Jesse had shown me something and it had slipped by me; I had missed a message tucked between words and actions. I had missed a lesson. What was it?

I said, very slow, “Alchemy is surely a great gift, one of the greatest. What sacrifice do you make for it?”

For a long minute, he was quiet. Finally he said, “I’ll strike you a deal, dragon-girl. You listen to my story now, and I’ll tell you of the sacrifice later.”

“Later? When?”

“When you truly need to know.”

“I think I bloody need to know right now.”

“I’ll tell you later, I promise. But now—we’ve only an hour or so before the maids are up. So, please.” He leaned forward, pressed his lips swift and cool against mine, and, even though I didn’t mean to, I stiffened, surprised. “Just listen. And relax.”

I nodded and Jesse drew away, almost smiling. I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes, clutching the leaf. Between the sting of pleasure that lingered on my mouth and the tinkling leaf song in my hand, I felt anything but relaxed.

Once more, his low, measured voice filled the cavern.

“Once upon an age, there were no humans on the earth, only Elementals, beings of pure form and intent, very powerful. We would call them spirits today, I suppose, or gods, except there were no people around to worship them. Yet the humans did come eventually, and the Elementals discovered they could not compete against pragmatic mankind. One by one they ceased to exist, until finally there was but one left. A goddess.”

“What did she look like?” I wondered aloud, not opening my eyes.

“She was too compelling to look at directly. Bright like the sun, bright and terrible. Only one other being could look upon her, and that was Death. And so … they became lovers.”

He said the word like a caress, like velvet again, and my face began to heat.

“Together they forged great and hellish things,” Jesse murmured. “Lightning and waterfalls that churned into clouds off the tip of the world. Chasms so winding deep that daylight never traced their endings. They dreamed through golden days and silvered nights. All the other creatures envied or adored them, because Death and the Elemental were destruction and creation joined as One. In the natural order of things, they should not have been stronger joined. And yet they were.”

He shifted, coming closer to me. A hand settled lightly atop my chest, directly over my heart. At our feet the seawater splashed a little, as if disturbed by something rolling over in the dark, distant deep.

“Centuries passed, and mankind began to devour the earth, even the wildest places. They had tools to invent and wars to fight and grubby, short lives. Nothing about them dwelled in the magic of the ancient spirits. So although Death, the Great Hunter, prospered as he sieved through their villages, the Elemental, strong as she once was, thinned into a web of gossamer. Human lives simply tore her apart.”

His hand was so warm. Warmer than I, warmer than the air, and still just barely touching me. The light behind my lids never lifted, so I knew he wasn’t glowing, but it felt as if he held a tame coal to my skin. It felt like something painless and ablaze, drawing my heart upward into it.

“The time had come for them to divide. Like all the rest of her kind, the goddess would cease to exist; she had no other course. So Death and the Elemental severed their joined hearts. For a few generations more, she drifted alone through the last of the sacred places, deserts and fjords, lands so savage no human had yet desecrated them.”

Jesse’s voice dropped to a whisper. Without moving his hand, he bent down, his breath in my ear. “And Death, who had tasted her brightness, who would never cease to crave it—who knew her better than all the collected souls of all mankind’s weeping dead—became her Hunter.”

I was hot and strange. I was light and lighter, and curiously my breath came so slow.

“Until at last, one starry night beneath the desert moon, she surrendered to him. She allowed him to come to her, to make love to her. To unravel her …”

...

It was happening. He sat next to her and bore witness to her change, her pulse slowing, her skin blanching, the fans of her lashes stark against the contours of her face. He kept his palm there against her chest, up and down with her respiration, and watched the smoke begin to curl around his fingers.

“And by his hand, in the bliss of her unraveling, she touched the stars… .”

Lora’s breath hitched. Her heart skipped—then stopped.

If I could take this from you, Jesse thought fiercely. If I could take this one moment away from you and keep the agony for myself—

Her eyes opened, went instantly to his. Panic lit her gaze.

Then she was gone.

His fingers sank to the floor through her empty blouse, and the blue dragon smoke that was all of Eleanore Jones rose into strands above him.

It did not hurt.

It took me a while to comprehend that. I think mostly what I felt in those first few seconds, beyond astonishment, was an extreme sense of loss: loss of gravity, loss of orientation, loss of Jesse’s touch. Yet, by some means, I could still see. I could hear. I was still myself, with my own thoughts but none of my own body.

I was lighter than the air. I was diaphanous, bobbing and floating and unable to control it, and the dripping-wet stalactites poked down around me, and Jesse was a boy on his feet below me, his face tipped up, gilded hair and eyes glinting like emeralds.

He mouthed my name. It came to me distant and smothered, but, weirdly, it didn’t seem to matter. The boy down there didn’t matter nearly as much as these fascinating rock formations that combed through me now with their solid teeth, because I knew that they were only the lid on a ceiling, and beyond the ceiling was freedom.

And, oh, how I yearned for it. I twined and spiraled and searched for a way out, and the waiting stars sang hallelujahs to me and pulled and pulled—yes, this way—

“Lora. Lora!”

I bubbled against the ceiling. The smoky fragments of me stretched longer and longer; I realized I could become less than smoke. I could flatten myself, sheer as a sheet of molecules, a shimmering whisper of next-to-nothing. Even thinner.

And it felt … good.

That was when I knew that, if I wanted, I could just keep thinning. Let myself unravel. Final freedom. No weight, no pain, no worries. Not ever again.

“Come back to me, Eleanore. Listen to me. You have to come back now.”

The boy spoke sternly, and I paused. A fire burned within him. How peculiar that I could see it now, in this form, when he could do me no harm. It burned inside him without even a flicker, just this strong, steady light that illuminated him in flame and gold, every cell. Every beautiful bit.

“Dragon,” snapped the boy. “I command you to come back.”

I wanted to laugh at that. Command. Indeed.

But … he’d done something to me. I couldn’t maintain my lovely thin stretch. I was changing, thickening, even as I fought it. I was pouring back down to the floor of the cavern in a darker mass, coils of smoke that tightened into the shape of the girl I’d once been, a girl with feet and tucked legs and a body hunched over them, her head hanging and her long hair sweeping the stone.

My fingers curled against damp rock. I sucked in air.

Then Jesse was crouched beside me, an arm tight around my back, his head bent over mine. He might have been breathing harder than I was.

“You—” I gulped some more air. “You can command me?”

“I didn’t want to have to.”

“That is completely unfair!”

“Aye.”

He pulled me to my feet and embraced me fully, something he’d never done before. I allowed myself to sink into the heat of his body for a minute, then lifted my head from his chest, blinking. The cavern seemed more sparkly. Everything looked sparklier and brighter. Colder. On the ground a few feet away lay a familiar pile of clothing in a very familiar layout, and I was wearing none of it.

Perhaps he noticed, too. Perhaps he just read the subtle signals of my body, the sudden rigidity of my spine, because he stepped back and began to shrug out of his peacoat.

“Here.” He draped it over me. “How are you? How do you feel?”

“Naked,” I grumbled. “You can command me?”

His hands tightened upon my shoulders. “Eleanore.” When my eyes lifted to his, Jesse broke into a grin. And right then I glimpsed again the ineffably divine fire that burned within this child of the stars; it was there, right there behind the summer beauty of his gaze. All the brightness around me, all the sparkles, the heat and cold and the rising joy that welled through me so sharply it almost hurt: all reflections of him.