Chapter 1
Please, Ajak doesn’t mean it. She just doesn’t understand. Please don’t go, Makkari begged.
Druig stopped, and she heaved a sigh of relief, but it was not over.
Makkari, I stay for you, because I love you. His eyes were sober but clear. But there will come a day when I will not bear it any longer, when the pain of inaction will outweigh the love I feel for you. It will take time, for my love for you is great, but it will come. And when it does, I beg of you, let me go.
Tears welled in her eyes, for she heard the echos of truth in his words. She’d been doing everything she could to ease his worries, but how he had spoken of her just now… she was his jailer, penning him in, not with bars and chains but with pretty promises she had extracted against his better judgement.
He would walk through fire for her, she knew. He would face any fear, weather any storm if she asked it of him. But she was asking too much, because she couldn’t bear to think of the choice before her.
To be torn between Druig and the other Eternals, between love and duty… making such a decision was unimaginable. And so she kept asking the impossible from him, to stave off her own impossible choice.
Druig, kind, steady Druig, allowed her to push the weight of this burden off onto him. He bore it so well, carried it with nary a complaint, such that she could almost forget what she had done to him. Except at moments like these, when she could begin to see the cracks appearing, see him fracturing under the stress.
She didn't like it, of course she didn't, but she couldn't see any other way. Not without ripping asunder their entire family, the way he was champing at the bit to do. Not without causing so much anger and suffering.
Maybe a solution could be found, Makkari told herself. Maybe it wouldn't have to end in heartbreak. Small lies, to comfort herself, like a mother hiding death from her child. It was easier than facing the truth.
Only a short time later, the precarious balance she'd built came toppling down. Gunshots cracked and Druig’s face turned gray, watching the fragile human lives he'd cultivated being ripped away in a spatter of blood.
Even as the conquerors entered the city, massacring all in their path, Ajak merely watched. The humans spared no discernment or mercy for even the youngest child, the oldest infirm grandmother, focused on nothing less than complete slaughter, and Ajak merely watched. Centuries of culture, decimated in a single night.
Ajak merely watched.
It wasn't right, Makkari knew. These were people they'd lived among for so many years, teaching and being taught. It wasn't right to stand by and witness this annihilation with nary a word.
And yet… and yet. Ajak had forbidden them to act, her word passed on as the word of Arishem himself. To disobey would be to forsake all bonds to their God, their mission, their very purpose of existence in this universe. There would be no coming back from such a betrayal; it would be the end.
But for Druig, it already was. Makkari could see the wildness in his eyes, in the shaky, too-fast breaths that moved his chest, the pain he'd been holding onto for so long at last erupting to the surface.
He could wait no longer.
And so, that fateful night, under the impassive stars, when all the world was alight with fire and bloodshed, she did the hardest thing she could ever imagine.
She stood still.
Druig turned his back on her, on all of them, walking away at a slow, steady pace. He didn’t look back, only forwards, to the host of humans he had saved from slaughter. And Makkari let him go.
Just like he wanted.
Her heart was being torn in two, half of it being carried inexorably on by him, leaving a bloody, gaping hole in her chest, and she didn’t know how she’d ever feel whole again.
Seven thousand years she'd spent with Druig, until he occupied as much of a place within her as she did herself, putting down thin roots and tendrils that wound through her entire being. Not a single molecule of her was untouched by his presence.
And now, by his absence.
She missed him already, desperately so.
But it didn't matter. She had made her choice, and he had made his. There would be no turning back.
When she closed her eyes, Makkari found herself staring into her future, seeing nothing but long days of yearning stretching out in front of her to the end of their mission, to their return to Olympia, to infinity.
She was an Eternal, and there would be no end.
And so the years passed by, with ever a flickering emptiness behind them, as of a hollowness that could not be filled. Never was he far from her mind, though she made no attempt to find him. Druig had asked her to let him go, and she would. For centuries he had borne her pain, and now she would faithfully bear his.
She wrote to him sometimes, scribbles on parchment that she'd never share. You are the breath that fills my lungs, she told him, the earth beneath my feet.
It was nothing she hadn't said to him before, not at its core, not really. Only now, faced with the sharp black ink, Makkari wondered if she'd ever said any of it to him. If she'd ever truly told him how she felt, or if she herself had ever truly known.
You are the light of all the stars, the leaves on every tree.
Sometimes, she liked to pretend that he knew, that he could feel all the words she penned just as she could feel the faintest tremors of his footsteps, ten thousand miles distant. They were bound together, she'd always believed, no matter how far from each other they were. He had to know.
I feel your heartbeat on a whisper of wind, and taste you in the morning breeze.
The scraps of paper collected on her desk, fragments of feeling she couldn't bear to throw away. He'd never see them, but there was not room enough inside her to keep all her regret, and so she had to write it down. The words were her only respite, besides the desperate belief that any of it mattered.
You are the hum of every song, my sun, my soul, my sea.
It didn't help. Her sundered heart beat anyway, pouring out into the empty cavity of her chest, a hollow ache that sat within her always. And still she wrote to him, because she couldn't imagine anything else.
You're everything that can't be true,
And when I dream, I dream of you.