Maybe it was a good life. Maybe it was a just life. Maybe it’s okay to just call it a life.
Shella’s never felt panic like this before.
She strokes her last follower’s–her last love’s–hair and looks up at the moon. Ashley’s sleeping for once, breath rattling in diseased lungs, and it’s only in moments like this that Shella lets herself look within. She can’t hide from Ashley–they’ve known each other too deeply for that–but even Ashley can’t see what Shella keeps locked, locked, locked away.
And isn’t it worse that she’s panicking over her own life and not Ashley’s? What sort of god is she that she can’t cry for her follower’s suffering? Can’t mourn? Can’t grieve?
Shella–when she was not always Shella–has had many followers. She’s seen humans born in her temples and die in them. She’s seen so many humans die that Ashley’s descent into Death’s embrace is natural. Expected.
(Why oh why did Ashley not worship a healing god? Why her? Why Shella?)
Ashley stirs in her sleep, her wrinkles deepening and darkening in pain. This, at least, Shella can soothe. She invites the aches into her own body, placing her hand on Ashley’s forehead and dragging it lightly down the bridge of her nose. Ashley’s pain flows into the joints of Shella’s hands, gnarling her fingers with age, arthritis, and unending sickness. It takes longer for Shella to heal from this than it used to–she’s dying too.
The gods are dying like this. With human weakness sneaking through their divinity and into their lungs.
Shella should have left weeks ago when Ashley asked her to. She should have resumed her young form–twenty-something and free–and found new followers to sustain her. She should have turned her eyes from her fading love and looked to the future like she had so many times before.
(Without Ashley? Without her?)
Shella’s afraid to die. Thousands of years are etched into her bones and she craves a thousand more. How can history end? How can her history just stop? It doesn’t seem possible, but there’s some greater force at play here because she didn’t do what she needed to to avoid this–she didn’t leave Ashley behind.
And now she’s counting Ashley’s breaths like prayer, waiting for a final amen.
When it comes, Shella isn’t ready. She’s not prepared. She doesn’t know. She thinks the spasm in Ashley’s chest is just more pain. She tries to take that too and invites Death into her own lungs unwittingly.
She closes her eyes a heartbeat after Ashley does and does not feel it when the earth reclaims its divinity.
In another world, Ashley wakes up. She can breathe the fresh air without pain. The back of her hands are smooth, free of age spots, and her eyes can see across the field she’s in, all the way to the green forest at the foot of the hills.
Under her hands is soft, wheat-colored hair. Ashley knows who it is by the way her breath freezes in her lungs. there’s only one person–one god–who’s ever been able to do that, to make her willingly stop breathing from awe.
Her god followed her to this place. She can remember pleading with Shella to leave, to find whole followers and not broken ones like her. But her god didn’t. Her god never left her, hands in her hair like her hands are in Shella’s hair now. And now–the first of their new age of miracles.
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