Eventually she returned to the city, ready to get back to the life she had made for herself among the ruins, her mother garnering assurances that she would visit more frequently before allowing her to set off, her starry friends returning to the night skies. When she arrived back to her bird skull home her cat came bounding up to her, his tail straight up in the air and ears attentively forward, meowing for attention. ‘Did you miss me?’ She asked him coyly, as he rubbed his arched back against her leg. It was nice to be missed, like he was her family too. And while he did seem to have some sort of inner knowledge of her life before, as Una, and some rich inner he had only given her a glimpse into, he felt more hers than her mother or her friends had been.
It was seeming more and more likely that the skull she had made her home was her own corpse. Her mother hadn’t seemed aware of her demise and couldn’t authenticate her remains, unable or unwilling to leave her island home. But the remains of a giant bird, larger than any living, seemed very probably hers. Did gods even have ghosts, she wondered, frustrated. Did the eversleeping gods walk on the earth as shades? If not, then what sort of unfinished, lingering attachment could a god possibly have that would leave her trapped here, unaware and amnesiac. And what could kill a god? Another immortal, according to Ceit. She eyed her cat. He wasn’t a normal cat, a cat god even, if her instincts were accurate, but could he have killed her? Was that another of his mysterious powers? He nuzzled her, nosing her fingers aggressively for more pets. It seemed unlikely.
It gave her a strange, slightly grotesque feeling, to be living in her own corpse, assuming it was. But it was also comforting. Here was her body. It was alive once, and she was in it, inhabiting it as she once had. It belonged to her then, and it belonged to her now, albeit in a weird, twisted sort of way. It made her feel a little more connected to being alive, to Una.
Despite the comfort of knowing her origins, nothing was revealed about the past of the city. Her mother responded to her inquiries with a vague reference to some god-calamity which was about as specific as she was inclined to get, and it seemed unclear whether the incident had been a year, a century, or half a millenia ago, as she was terribly imprecise when it came to anything outside her domain. The issue was further confused by the fact that the city seemed the site for multiple calamities through its existence. Her mother had very little interest in the human’s world, and after a while Alene stopped asking.
She wondered if this calamity would be the one to end the city permanently. There were no more people to rebuild, no more people at all, ghost or otherwise. Would it all just be taken over by vegetation until it was indiscernible from the forest? What would happen to her as the city shrunk? Would her range of motion be impeded until she had no room to move, would she then disappear entirely? The sudden fear terrified her when it first occurred to her. She had to sit down and breathe through the panic for several long breaths, holding onto her stuffed doll tightly while her cat watched with some trepidation, his eyes wide and unblinking, a bewildered expression on his face at her unexpected and abrupt panic attack.
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It seemed like a concern a god shouldn’t have, something too stifling for beings with presumably inconceivable power. Her mother did seem tied to her island, but not in the same way. She seemed there more by indifferent to the outside lands rather than having an inability to leave, as far as Alene could tell. It had been a bit surprising to Alene that she wasn’t restricted from going to her mother’s island. She had tried swimming past it some ways but had run into the same problem as she had when she was with Ceit, an immense force stopping her suddenly and absolutely. The rules governing the impediment were unclear to her, but as far as she could tell so far the space she was allowed didn’t seem to be growing or shrinking, just restrictive.
She resumed her walks with her cat, wandering the ruins again, hoping once again to trigger something, the potentials of their relationship lingering in the back of her mind. She resumed her visits with the naiad Sym as well, who was similarly disappointed by the reticence of her memories, slapping her tail irritably when Alene broke the news, though she played it off as a trivial, slip of the tail movement. She had been shocked when Alene had revealed Una to be a god, and Alene wondered at first if she even believed her. She had laughed afterwards, the sharp, harsh laughter from when they had first met, a hint of self mocking undercurrent. ‘Of course you’d be a god, when have gods ever been good to me?’ Alene had been sent home early that day, Sym’s bitter, derisive laughter replaying in her mind.
Sym had taken to telling her stories of the city, everything from days in her life, to nursery rhymes, anything to have someone to talk with, her anger dwindling over time. Alene felt guilty about how relieved she was over the change. Despite having no memory of it, she still felt greatly responsible for Sym’s unwanted condition. Mother, of course, had been unabashed about the undesired change her waters had wrought on Sym, so Alene had resolved to take on her portion of the guilt as well.
She and Sym speculated sometimes, over what might have happened, to the destruction in the city and disappearance of the people, the massive skeleton, and to the bizarre presence of a swamp in the center of the city. ‘Perhaps an explosion from the catacombs?’ Sym speculated aloud, speaking about the swamp. Apparently after one catastrophe the city had been rebuilt upon its own destroyed foundations, leaving tunnels and chambers deep beneath the surface. Intrigued, Alene asked ‘How far down does your swamp go? Can you get into the catacombs?’ Sym looked contemplative, ‘it’s pretty murky, I haven’t actually explored it all, but it goes down pretty deep and gets kind of twisted the deeper you go. I have gills, but my body can’t rely on them exclusively, I still need air to breathe after a while.’ Unwilling to encourage Sym towards more harm, Alene dropped that line of inquiry.
Privately, she was convinced the giant bird, her past self, Una, was the one that had caused the city’s destruction, no matter how disconcerting the thought. Her readings in the Avis bible had made the relationship between the people and their god something of an intertwined existence, though it had hinted at a superseding, more ancient religion, so perhaps a requisite symbiotic relationship was out. But Sym wasn’t able to see the extensivity of the damage, nor the skeleton itself from her pool, and remained convinced that her swamp was somehow the crux of it.
She wondered if there were some sort of godly ritual that caused an entire population to simply cease to exist. In many of the houses she’d been in, it looked like the occupants had just vanished, food still on their tables, if grossly decayed. It was a disquieting thought. Would she have been the one to use such a thing? Gods were all about reciprocity, despite how unbalanced humans might perceive it to be, perhaps could her death have been some sort of catalyst to destroy the city, or a failed attempt to save it? Was she the hero or the villain of this story?