It was a soft thing, crying. A needful thing, like pulling fluid from an abscess. Her soul had to be drained of grief. The sorrow came thick to throat and eye, dripped out like treacle. The veneer of shock kept most of it bottled up. And she didn’t dare let the big things come up. No thinking of Alex. None. Otherwise she would collapse here and be completely worthless. But the tears came up anyway, burbling like some sort of poison-fed spring. Water fell from her eyes and she didn’t bother to touch them, barely responded to their presence at all. The point of this exercise, she realized, wasn’t to weep. It was to avoid sleep.

She’d been sitting, quiet, for so long that nature forgot she was there. As she watched, small lights, like the twinkle of dew, began to open up in the moss. Flowers, she realized. Tiny flowers with blooms like starlight. And there, the black-barked trees with the pale leaves—those leaves suddenly began to glow. It was dim, not even ember-ish in brilliance, but it was there. She could make out shadows beneath it, and a blue glitter of lichen in the bark. And there, a flower blooming red in the dark, dull, with hot streaks of white like landing platforms. A small creature, rat-like but winged and the size of a bee, crawled into the heart of this flower and wallowed; when it came up, its head glowed orange with pollen.

“Oh!” she whispered, and then “Oh!” again, as all the lights went out.

“Well,” Breathed a voice behind her. “Even sound’s enough to chase it all away.”

She didn’t turn. Shadowmaster was there. She heard his steps behind her, boots oddly gentle against the moss. His armor clinked, and he got near enough for her to catch the scent of man, and of steel, and of herbs. But he never broke into her line of sight. Not even as he crouched behind her.

“They’re shy, you see. All the plants and animals. They know better than to come to a person’s hand. You’ll just bring up a sword against them. But if you’re quiet, and still…”

As his voice fell, the lights rose. The starlight points on the carpet of moss, the glowing lichen between the dark tree bark. The whisper of small feet as animals lept from hiding spot to hiding spot. The trees came in tones of white, yes, but also in blues and violets and golds, and these colors shifted through the canopy, oceanic in pattern and tone. And the birds came out—real, true, feathered birds. They were crane-like, and their feathers billowed, and a band of light glowed on each wing.

He was close enough to touch. She could lean back, lean into him. He smelled like Alex, too. Alex, after he’d worked out in the yard for a few hours, and was sweaty in a t-shirt, but that was also the scent on his pillow, that graced his side of a bed back in Sedona, Arizona, a scent grown already cold and stale. It was fresh, here. She could lean back and close her eyes, and be safe.

“They just make noise,” he whispered, so silently the plants’ glow didn’t even ripple. “Mankind and their Gods. They just make noise, and slam their hands together, and light fires, and shout, and make war, and worship it, and draw blood and worship that…but all you need do is be silent, and the world will open to you.”

Finally, she turned around. Her movement was enough to put out the lights for a few feet; her voice dampened them a few more. “Why are you here?” She said, to the man with Alex’s face.

He was quiet, studying her. Quiet so long that the lights returned, and grew brighter with each passing moment, until both their faces were bathed in the low radiance. It caught in the shimmering gold of his alien eyes, making them seem brighter and hungrier than ever before. He was quiet for so long, she assumed he wasn’t going to answer.

And then, sudden and swift, he leaned in and kissed her, full and hungry, on the mouth.

***

She expected something rash, rushing, and hot. A taking, a harshness, as if she were being claimed with or without her say-so. Another part of her expected Alex’s brazen confidence, even as he respected her consent. That was the fear life kneaded into women, pressed into their shape like thumbprints. But Shadow’s touch was trembling, even as it came wire-tight. Sweet as dew caught on a spider’s web, and that soft hush of blue across morning grass. Cold because it fears warmth’s abandonment. Already withdrawn, even as the invitation is felt across the lips.

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They parted. She started forward, wanting to continue, only to be stopped by his inhuman, violet hands.

“There’s no hope for it,” Shadow whispered. “I know it. But there’s that part that always hopes, yes?” A breath, a whisper of chain mail. The scent of Alex spiraling between them, wafting off his every breath and movement. “That part won’t stop dreaming, even when you know hope was…not even lost, because it was never there.”

His eyes, so strange and alien, were also so incredibly sad.

“You should have asked me first,” She said.

“Yes. And then you’d say no and be horrified. Or you would say yes, and mean it out of pity. But now you can say you’ve been kissed by whatever it is I am and you’ve survived.” He had a bit of an accent. Odd complexities on vowels and consonants. “It’s quite a thing to boast about, here. I imagine it would be such in the God-world, too.”

“It wouldn’t be. We don’t have Gods there.” She paused as several thousand years of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hindu, Pagan revivals and utterances she’d never encountered all rose up to throttle her subconsious. “I mean, we have gods—we have Religion—but we…we don’t have things…” she stopped herself. Hard. “We don’t have people like you up there, much.”

“Things is a better term, isn’t it? I’m singular and regarded as a commodity. I’m a fifth of what I ought to be, and I feel it.” A pause. “People don’t get carved down to little more than rind in the hands of ambition alone…and regardless of the carver, those memories don’t fade. Would you not agree?”

“I don’t know. You might want to ask Kaiser Willheim how his warehouse workers feel.” She sighed and forced herself to turn away. She didn’t want to. She wanted to take his hands in hers and start talking. Tell him everything. About home, about their home, their pedestrian normal lives, a tale of a couch that had seen better days, of mismatched kitchen utensils and streaming Netflix while someone else burns the popcorn. Normal drawn so thick with words that it bleeds, and she could give it to him. His kiss…oh, god, she was craving it. And she didn’t think it’d be hard to bring him in for another one.

And what would happen if she gave in? Where would her satisfaction end? With Kaiser Willheim and a gun. Maybe a nice, dark Sig-Saur .45, maybe a Glock. Maybe he was fancy and had a six-shooter to go with his cowboy act. Or he’d dress the gun up to look like a grant, like a job, like a dream. It would still end up against Hawk’s head, as Kaiser ordered this man to do whatever he wanted. If you love her, you’ll do this...

If. Always, always, the spartan If.

And she’d thought she’d be working with an adamant wall. When she realized he wasn’t overwhelmingly happy to see her, she’d assumed that he’d hate her the way Nasheth hated her, the way the Earth Archon hated everything that wasn’t the goddess that maimed her. But Shadow was raw with wanting. A longing for friends, for love, or maybe more, a blanket desire for a life that was not what he had down here in the hole. He said he was a fifth of what he ought to be, and it was this place that had done it.

What would be left, if she let him love her? If she loved him openly as desperately as she did, right now? A sixth? A seventh? Less than that? How many pounds of god-flesh could Kaiser cleave away if she left him any opening. And there came a horrifying vision of the Apes’ orb, beautiful save for the bullet wound in it, divided into a thousand small pieces. Little bites, like she’d get from a Pez dispenser. God as a lemon drop that you’d sell for a hundred bucks a nibble.

The wind down here was dank; she longed for fresh breezes off the top of a hill, for things that didn’t smell quite so much of damp. Maybe there was a similar urge inside of Shadow, because he stood up and tilted his head into the wind. “I long, sometimes, for a clean run. A field that does not end. It seems, at times, I can almost envision this, an endless spread of green beneath a sky made of nothing but the color blue.” A pause. “Is that nonsense? Or do I somehow remember the God-World?”

She wanted to say “Yes!” and everything inside her screamed “No!”, so she kept silent.

He looked away from her, sighed again, and sat down once more in the grass. The whole movement was strange, alien, like a great cat simply dropping into space. She’d seen traces of one of those Shadowbeast cat-things every time he left. Maybe he had another form he liked to use. Maybe he just liked cats. “Hawk Rayne, I must bid you goodbye. I thought, perhaps…but it ‘s foolishness. I am a fool, whatever else I may be, and I act—”

“I’m afraid,” she blurted out. It was words like hemorrhage. Bleeding thought. “But I’m not afraid of you.”

Here was what she wanted to say: I love you. I know most of you. That movement of your head, the narrowing of your eyes. I know what it means that you’re trying to play with your own hair, and what expression you’d have if you had a pair of Jacks during a poker game. I’m not afraid of you because I can’t be. It’d be like being afraid of my own skin. Maybe it was even what he wanted her to say. That hunger in his eyes was different from the avarice of the other Gods. It starved for one whisper, one touch. And if she said it…she had no doubt now, he’d kill for her. He’d devour universes for her. Anything she wanted, anything, anywhere, ever, he’d lay it at her feet. If she wanted to be a Queen, he’d find a throne, or make one, and lavish her with crowns. If she asked for immortality, maybe he’d give it over. Maybe he’d stop. Maybe.

You don’t save worlds with Maybe.