“But if you have such vast magic,” Iris began, “then shouldn’t you be able to conquer him? If you are illusions and nightmares and—”
“Oh, but that is the cost of it,” the woman gently interrupted, a wistful expression on her face. “I took the other three’s powers not because I was hungry for them, but because I didn’t want him to harvest such magic when he woke. But little did I know that doing so would weaken what was mine to begin with.” She lifted one of her hands, and Iris could see her swollen knuckles. “I can still play my harp, but not without agony.”
The sky overhead had turned overcast and dour. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the wind howled with a hint of rain.
“Please help us defeat him,” Iris whispered.
A look of compassion stole over the woman’s face. She reached out to trace Iris’s cheek, her fingertips cold as river water in winter.
“I have given you all the pieces that you need to vanquish him,” she said. “I confess that if I am the one to face him, my hand will be stayed. I won’t be able to plunge the sword into his neck, even after all the enmity that has grown between us. He will tear me to pieces and glean my powers. Then he will be the only divine remaining in the realm and, at some point in time, whether it is within your generation or another, a mortal will be brave enough to end him, burying him headless in a grave. When that happens, magic will also die, because there will be no more gods walking among you or sleeping beneath the loam. Once we are dead, it will all fade away.”
A knot pulled tight in Iris’s chest. It almost hurt to draw air, to think of what the woman described. A world in a cage. A world culled of freedom and magic, a memory of what had been.
It made her think of her typewriter. The enchantment in small, ordinary things. She thought of the letters she had passed beneath her wardrobe door to Roman. Words that had spanned kilometers and distance, grief and joy, pain and love. Words that had made her drop her armor after years of clutching it close.
Kitt.
Iris gasped. Her mind was sharpening as she remembered who she was, and the world around her started to melt. The mountains and the sky, the valleys and the wildflowers. Stars she had not even known existed. All of it was draining away like water in a bathtub, but the woman held firm before her, flowers blooming in her dark hair.
Not a woman, but a goddess.
“I don’t want you to die. I don’t want magic to fade, but I am not as strong as you,” Iris said. “He will surely defeat me.”
“You are capable of far more than you know. Why do you think I look at you now and marvel? Why do you think I draw close to your kind? I have sung many of you to eternal rest after death, and I have found that the music of a mortal life burns brighter than any magic my songs could stoke.”
She leaned forward to kiss Iris’s brow. For a split second, she looked like Aster—long chestnut hair, a quirk to her lips, a dusting of freckles on her nose. Tears burned Iris’s eyes when she realized that all this time, she hadn’t been dreaming of her mother but of this goddess.
Before she was ready for the dream to break, Iris startled awake.
She was sitting in a leather chair, the museum office limned in predawn light. A cup of cold tea was beside her, a warm blanket draped over her legs. Her right foot was bandaged, and she took a moment to catch her breath, still tender from the dream.
She noticed there was a set of boots on the ground before her, unlaced and polished. A clean outfit, of a knee-length skirt and a forest green blouse with pearl buttons, folded on the chair beside her. A pot of tea, steaming in wait for her to pour.
Iris threw off the blanket and rose, minding her foot although there was only a whisper of pain when she stood on it.
“Enva?” she called.
There was no answer. The air was heavy and quiet.
“Enva!”
She was wondering if it had all been a fever-struck imagining, a way for her mind to make sense of the world after surviving the bomb, when a flash of gold caught her eye. Iris turned to see a sword with a jeweled hilt leaning against the wall, its steel hidden within a scabbard. It was the very blade Enva had shown to her in the dream. Draven’s sword. The one that had killed many divines in the past.
Iris walked to it. She hesitated, replaying everything Enva had said and shown her. The sword, the door, the words.
Why didn’t I realize who you were you the moment I saw you? Iris wondered, aching at the thought of a goddess kneeling before her, drawing glass from her foot. Wrapping her wounds. A goddess making her tea and walking a dream with her.