Writhing in the water as I fell farther below, every desperate breath burned worse than before and the water poisoned what hope I had of escape. I would suffocate and drown long before I found air. My vision blurred, my body weak. I wanted to cry, but my strength had faded with my thoughts into near oblivion. Then, as my eyes grew heavy, my feet hit the bottom. I looked down. Black stones, shiny and smooth like a lake bed, rested beneath me. Shadows of fish swam between my ankles and around my legs. Ripples of pale fabric formed like a manifesting apparition. I turned my gaze from the rocky floor below to the surface above. An orb of gold sparkled on the other side of a waving glass ceiling where the knotting of the bars had been.

I pushed off the aquiferous foundation and sent myself up and up and up, kicking for all I was worth. The surface broke with a crack and splash, and I threw my head back in a gasp. My hands smoothed down my hair. The ring of cicadas and screaming birds filled my ears as fast as the kiss of hot air met my cooled skin. I sucked in another shaky breath as I scanned over the tree line at the edge of the oversized pond, too small to be a proper lake. Far from the water’s edge, horses trotted through the grass, neighing to one another and paying me no mind as they carried on.

“You were down there for a while.” His voice broke through the serenity. “Feel better?”

“No,” I said as I moved without knowing why.

It was me, but in the same way as when I’d seen myself in all the other memories I'd recovered. I had no choice about the things she did or said. I was merely a ghost following the memories of the past through a story I'd known, a book that had been mine but had been lost for too long.

Callan looked up from his thoughts as Asherah swam to the edge of the dock. She dragged herself from the water and plopped down beside him. Beautiful as ever in the summer sun, his face showed the pink rash of exposure stretching across his cheeks and passing over the bridge of his nose. He set his knife aside, glanced over at her, dropping his gaze low, and then averted it all together as he focused on the sunlit glimmer dancing over the gentle ripples along the surface of the water.

“How long do you want to stay here?” he asked as if disinterested, slowly picking at the side of his thumb, and merely making polite conversation.

“We shouldn’t stay too much longer.” She leaned back, watching the puffs of clouds rolling through the sky. “It’s been a few years and I think I’ve seen enough.”

“There’s been a lot to see.” Tension permeated his words.

Shifting in wet clothes, they squelched and squashed as water puddled around her. Asherah's eyes drifted down to the fabric clinging to her form, outlining every curve. White and sopping wet, they were as thin as cheesecloth. In an instant, her face ignited in furious blush. She lurched forward, wrapped her arms over her chest, and whined discontent. It hadn’t been until a few days earlier when a mortal man, who the others had called holy and father, pointed out the indecency of nudity and the latent ignorance that she had not yet in her infinity realized it caused wild discomfort for those living where she trod. And much to her chagrin, she had thought about it too often since, making it a point to disguise what nakedness she had not otherwise considered with finer garb and attractive materials, enough to satisfy the most scrupulous eye. What perturbed her more was the way people looked at her when her clothing was too sheer for their minds to focus on anything else. It was degrading, and frustrating. Embarrassing, really.

Callan looked over again. A tight grin threatened his stoic facade. Asherah tried not to look at him, at his amber eyes tracing over her petite figure in the way the mortals of the world did—the way the men did. It seemed he was as much of a man as those who’d chastised her attire and looked upon her as an object of their sex. Asherah's body was a distraction, an aggravate and temptation to weak flesh. And damn, when Callan looked at her that way, she felt almost naked under his burning gaze and even the smaller at his side. A shiver wracked her to my core. He pressed his lips into a line and shifted back around, drumming his fingers on the edge of the dock. Sure, he was a man like so many others, but too he was a god, the same as herself. We existed, set apart and different from mortals and their flesh-bound desires, having no need for banal, primal recreations. Still, the thoughts teeming through his head were obvious, and it felt like ants crawling over her skin.

Callan was thoughtful, meticulous in planning, and masterful in his ability to anticipate the next ten moves of anyone with graceful ease, opponent or otherwise. Watching those calculations run rampant was like watching stars burst to life in the dark midnight hours. Beautiful and awe-inspiring. If he weren’t a god, created for war, and embodied it entirely, she would have thought him a god all the same. And what she wouldn’t have given to settle the itch of curiosity in her fingers to know if his hair was as soft as it seemed, and his skin as warm as the way he spoke when we were alone. Where such wells of fascination came from, she didn't know, yet there they were all the same in the ever-present insistence that she need know what it meant to touch him—what was it to feel the heat of his skin, and take in the textures of his form?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Mortals are strange, aren’t they?” Callan said quickly, pressed by whatever thought he was leading up to, as if he simply didn’t have the patience to hold it in.

“People never change,” Asherah said with a modest shrug. She didn’t know factually if that was true since she'd not invested any admirable amount of time into knowing them, but it seemed the case with every world we arrived in, destroyed, and left. They had many forms, but at their core, they were but the children of Creation. Destruction, as we were, was like a parent coming home to a mess. They senselessly wailed and pleaded as though it made much difference and could change anything about what lo had suffered judgment and rendered their fate. Sure, they had interesting stories to share, short-sighted philosophies, and greater dreams through narrow eyes, but still, they were only stories from minds unable to expand beyond themselves and did nothing to convince any of their worthiness for more time that granted them no greater service. It was inevitable; their time, as they perceived it, was over and we had arrived for the sake of cleaning up the mess of their unbridled existence and entropic decay. We didn’t hate them, and it was nothing personal. It was just a matter of our existence. “I think that’s what makes them so interesting.”

“They’re like small gods.” He cracked a smile and dropped his head.

“Or at least, they’re the idle musings of one.” She nudged his arm. When he smiled, the sun shone brighter, the stars twinkled, and the moon’s eeriest, hoary light turned to a delicate silver. A tide of sensations she had no name for washed up inside her, engulfing her in a wonderful feeling. It had been this way for days beyond count. I wondered if she would ever know its name the way I did. Even more so, I wondered if he knew about it, too. Did he feel it, the aching want for something obtrusively close and entirely out of reach?

“I wonder which god’s musings.” Callan’s gaze shifted from absent watch over the water to her, hesitant to say more, but there, lingering on the tip of his tongue, something more remained held back by unspoken trepidations.

“It’s hard to say.” Her voice betrayed her as she fell into the honey and amber of his fixated stare and sweet smell lifting on the slightest breeze. And there it was again. The thought he had yet to say flickered across his face and caught him off guard as much as it did me. Had it always been there, just outside of notice? Maybe…

“I was thinking about something. Not just now, but for a while.” He looked down at the gap between us; the omnipresent space, untouched and unbreeched. Peeking from beneath his lashes, a hint of a smile tugged at his lips and the strings of my heart in kind. “Idle musings, I suppose.”

“Anything of consequence?” she dared ask.

“I hope so,” he said on a thinned breath.

She wasn’t sure what exactly happened next. It was fast and wholly unexpected. The strange pressure to her lips came all at once, but was not wholly unpleasant. It sent a sensation a bit like she was wax melting or her self was swimming through deep, warm waters. No, that wasn’t right. It was better than either of those. And the taste of his lips was nothing as Asherah had expected, or could have expected, no matter how much time she'd spent thinking about it. Truly, there wasn’t a thing she could compare it with, but she knew she liked it very much and it lured her in with a growing want for something more—greater and entirely undefined, unknown and undiscovered in her endlessness.

What's more, Asherah liked how it felt when his fingers brushed over her cheek and pulled her closer by the sharp crest of her jaw, and when his lips urged hers to part and our tongues met in the middle. Burning flames and crashing waves rushed over, one after another, drowning her in the thrill as his fingers tracked down the gentle slope of her neck. Tingles of heat sparked to life in the wake of his touch. This inexplicably wonderful way we tangled ourselves so carelessly together was more than words or language could describe, born of the same immensity as myself.

Hauling to press to his chest, her breath grew short, and her cheeks blossomed as red as roses against her cool pallor. She didn't know how she ended up straddling him, but she was there, fingers woven through his hair and it was every bit as silky as she'd hoped, as if it couldn’t have been anything else. Everything about Callan was magnificent. She couldn’t get enough and Asherah was sure he couldn’t either as his hands dragged down her sides and tightened to her hips. In the sliver of space between laughter and wonder, we could hardly find the breath to bring us back down from a high we had never before known. Her trembling lips ached for more, and in reverie, she found she had been long starved in a way she didn’t know was possible.

“Do that again,” Asherah whispered. He grinned, breathless in the afterglow. And in the throbbing of excitement and uncertainty, she added one desperate word, “please.”

A wide delighted smile spread from ear to ear and then vanished as he obliged her, albeit polite, demand. Idle musings, indeed. She wrapped tighter around him as if clinging to dear life. But it wasn’t life I had been so desperately holding on to, it was something more. It was the unspoken, unnamed thing that had lingered in the space between us for the eternity we'd shared and brought from the Before. And then, in an instant, it vanished and the sound of squawking angry birds filled my head, the thick humidity of a forest prickling my skin…