"I would rather you hate and fear me than fear everyone and everything around you. I've seen that future. I don’t ever want to see it again."

That’s what they said.

But I’m just not sure how to feel anymore, other than betrayed. I don’t think I asked much… it was so simple.

Don’t change others without their consent. Don’t repeat what you did to Pearl.

…Who was very happy to see me, although the madness in her eyes far exceeds what I see in my wife’s.

I disappeared for hundreds of years, and for hundreds of years she slowly broke.

Much like I did, apparently. Not that I remember it…

I guess I’ll offer Nemesis this much… whenever I touch that orb, the one containing the memories they isolated and removed, I’m bombarded with indescribable emotional pain... damage done that can’t be taken back, lives destroyed for no reason.

I’m not sure how I lived with myself like that… but I guess in a sense I didn’t.

Instead, I mostly ceased to be. Some god called ‘Ceto’ apparently wanted to break me, and he succeeded. I’d heard that gods themselves can be captured, but I didn’t think it would have happened to me so easily.

Not like that, anyway.

I’m in the garden behind my wife’s castle with Pearl now, trying desperately to relax despite the ridiculousness of the situation. How do I even process this?

It doesn’t help that I can feel Nemesis watching me from a distance, even if I can’t see where they are. It would seem they’re about as obsessed with me as my old best friend and party member.

The dungeon… I haven’t been there in a long, long time apparently. A great many things have changed there… or rather, in all of them. There are a lot of them here now, varying in difficulty and even theme.

One of the gorgon maids stands by against the edge of the hedge wall nearby. She’d been specifically assigned to do absolutely anything I needed or asked for.

Which I can’t help but feel implies my wife thinks I’m helpless or something, and I’m absolutely not.

I can take care of myself. I did before I met them, and I can despite them.

…

“You don’t need to watch me like that, you know,” I say with at least a hint of hostility. “I’m not going to suddenly vanish.”

You did before, they answer in my mind.

“That doesn’t mean I will again.”

I don’t know that. I… I wanted to destroy everything. Everyone. Because I lost you. I don’t understand it, and I want to. Astraea’s… my older memories tell me of feelings I don’t understand, but the closest I have to feeling them myself are toward you. Learning has always been a slow process for me, but I find myself fixating.

…

…And I’m a better person when I’m with you. I’m less of a monster and more of a person.

“You say that, but you still haven’t told me what ‘monstrous things’ you’ve referred to a few times now.”

…

Hesitation. They’re radiating hesitation.

Their emotions are far more clear to me now than they ever were… possibly because we’re equals in a sense. It’s a strange feeling having two parallel bonds, although they’re definitely not related to any kind of blood bond anymore. I’m not their Agent anymore either, for obvious reason.

Gods can’t be that for each other.

Although…

The body I now inhabit is actually a small piece of them apparently.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

One of their ‘kin’.

I was worried how you’d take it, they finally answer. You’re already afraid of me. Everyone is afraid of me. I don’t want you to fear me like that, but you deserve to know. Would you… rather I tell you, or show you?

“What does showing me involve?”

I’d simply show you my own memories of it. Livvie has done this numerous times for me… mostly because it’s easier for her to communicate things with images than with words.

“Why do you call her that?” I say with a hint of irritation. I never did like sharing my relationship with her. She’s nothing to me but a nuisance.

After a brief moment of ignoring her hurt, I continue. “Just show me I guess. You’re terrible with words, you always have been. I’m sure you’ll leave out important information.”

Not even a split second later, I’m bombarded with information. Thoughts. Images. Hurt, betrayal.

Loneliness and pain.

…But not nearly as much as they inflicted on others.

They’ve… they’ve killed so many.

So many more than I apparently did. Countless lives. Countless souls.

…

They’re truly a monster.

And then without warning, an all-encompassing static buries me in noise and confusion, leaving me reeling. Colors… light, expansive thought of the kind even my divine mind can’t fully handle.

Confusion follows. An enormous mass of it, an entire horizon of the past sprawling out like an ocean in my mind, something that was clearly a threat to sanity and identity… and then suddenly, seamlessly there. Simply a part of her. Who she is and was… who she always was, despite overlaps and conflicts lasting hundreds of years.

That fox woman features heavily in the older memories well. So much of her… my wife’s purpose. Her reason for being, and for doing anything at all. And with the other goddess, a collection of other interesting faces and names… if I wasn’t already aware simply from listening to their conversations, I certainly am now – Astraea had a harem of sorts. A collection of wives, her family. The only thing that truly mattered to her, with ‘Olive’ at the top of the pecking order.

A name springs forth as well… ‘Ravona’, apparently. A very familiar name, at least to them… or to her.

Finally… despair and desperation.

Me. It’s me. Or rather, memories of me. A me distinctly not like me, and a deep-seated fear that I’m gone forever, never to recover.

I know why they did this to me now. I understand.

But that doesn’t make any of it right.

None of it is right.

…

I sigh and lean back to lay across the earthen footpath between the carefully-groomed hedges, drawing my sitting companion’s attention.

“I-is all well? Master?”

I glance toward Pearl. She’s been acting like this since I… returned, I suppose.

And I don’t know how to make her stop.

“Before you even consider it, don’t you dare change her again,” I say quietly, drawing a head tilt…

Although Nemesis can tell I’m talking to them.

I won’t. I promised you I wouldn’t, never again.

“And yet you changed me.”

Silence and frustration are my answer. And that same hopeless desperation.

They genuinely don’t know what else they could have done. I know that.

“What happens now?”

Pips seems to have picked up my melancholic distress and promptly moves to press herself against me on the cold ground, wrapping her arms around me as I gaze upward toward the sucking hole in the sky that devours any wildlife that wanders too close in addition to the light of the night sky itself.

I’ve long since noticed that the stars don’t seem to hold a constant pattern, as if they change every time I look away. I suppose that would render the old saying of following the stars if you’re lost useless…

I don’t know. Whatever you want. I’ll do anything you want, even leave you alone. But please don’t make me look away. I’ve waited so long. So, so long. Long enough that I think I finally understand Livvie a little more, she lost me much like I lost you. Please don’t make me lose you again. Please?

I sigh again, closing my eyes.

“Well, I’m still here. Take that… however you want, I guess. I don’t know where else I would go. …Maybe my parents’, I guess.”

…

…

…

“You’re being too quiet.”

…

I know.

…

…

“What happened to them?”

Time. They’re gone, Izzy. I’m sorry. We visited your old home once… when you were missing from yourself. You still have family… just not your parents. Your grandniece has inherited and continues to operate their old workshop, if you’d like to visit her. She was not happy to see us, and did not believe who we were.

The empathy they express is clearly fake, choreographed. As if it’s simply rehearsed. But I can tell they’re trying. They genuinely want to feel it, even if they’re incapable of it.

I’d never expected that from them.

“Just how much emotion did you inherit from that soul you ate?”

“All of it,” my wife quietly says from the other side of the hedge. When she got there, I have no idea. She didn’t teleport… there’s a distinct sound of static and a pop when she does, so she must have moved there directly. Silently as always. “Everything she felt, and wanted to feel. It’s… overwhelming, to be honest. But I think I want to feel it too.”

…

“I think it will help me understand humans a bit more if nothing else. And maybe, just maybe, it will help me understand you as well.”

…

…

I don’t answer. How should I answer? I don’t know. I’ve already forgiven them for so many horrible things… but this is still so much worse than anything before.

Does it feel worse because they did it to me directly?

…

I don’t know how to feel about that either, simply the thought that I’m more concerned with my own well-being than anyone else’s. Or maybe that’s normal.

Maybe it should be normal.

…

I’m not sure why I feel like I should be with them, but I definitely do. It makes no sense after everything.

“Devotion.”

“Devotion?” I echo back. “What about it?”

I hear them sigh. “You haven’t looked at your Status since you woke up, have you? Not closely, anyway.”

…

…They’re right.

So I look, and suddenly a number of things make a bit more sense.