The lights are back on, at least, and when I pass by the dining hall, a work crew is already installing a new pane of glass. I suppose it’s a bonus that the school is owned by a glassblower wielding powerful fire magic.
I skirt past, tamping down my guilt, and head farther up the hill to the girl’s dormitory nestled in the trees on the other side of the rise facing the eastern shore. A warm glow emanates from within and I head up the stairs, looking forward to a hot shower and my own bed.
Audra’s bed is vacant, which is no surprise, but Rachel’s sitting up with her reading light on, paging through a notebook. The other three girls who share this floor are occupied with their own activities and barely acknowledge my arrival, but Rachel looks up and gives me a concerned smile.
“Hey girl. Are you okay? You ran off so fast after that crazy power outage and the bird flying into the window.”
“Bird?” I ask, tossing my bag onto my bed. The contents clank and rattle, and my bed creaks.
“What else could have done that much damage? They think it must’ve been an eagle or a pelican. Something that could’ve survived, anyway, because whatever did it flew off.”
I sit and unbuckle my boots. “That’s crazy,” I say, hoping it sounds genuine. “At least they got the lights back on.”
“Some weird shit’s been happening the last couple days, though—the electrical stuff, and now that bird, and I heard from one of the kitchen guys that when he went to the root cellar to get the potatoes for the fries tonight, it was like a fucking jungle down there. Every last spud had sprouted and grown into a plant. They had to order more potatoes from the mainland.”
I stare at my bare feet and shake my head. There’s no way that was my fault, if any of it was. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect of earth magic, not—
Chaos.
—whatever I’m afflicted with. The kind of thing a fertility god might be responsible for, perhaps.
I shake off the sense that I’m right, no matter how crazy it sounds, and reach for my shower kit in the cubby at the foot of my bed.
“As long as we have hot water, I’m good,” I say, and pad to the bathroom.
I crank the water as hot as it’ll go and stand beneath the spray for several minutes before reaching for my soap. When I get to my nethers, I have the smallest, most incongruous sense of regret at washing away the mess.
It occurs to me that maybe I got roofied and assaulted, in which case I should probably not bathe, but that isn’t the root of the regret. Despite my confusion and uncertainty since awakening in a ruined cabin, I feel pretty good. Better than good. I’m not tired, and I don’t hurt aside from the faintest pleasant soreness between my legs. I’m still fucking hungry, but otherwise, I feel like a million bucks. My creativity is off the charts, the ideas coming so fast I’m forcing myself to resist running for my sketchbook every time some new idea strikes.
Still, while washing my hair, I give my scalp a good once-over, checking for any sign of head injury. I did wake up amid the ruins of a building—maybe something hit me on the noggin? But I find no soreness or contusions whatsoever. And after a perusal of my body in the mirror, I find not even so much as a hickey unless it’s hidden somewhere under my tattoo.
The big purple octopus that clings to my side peers back at me, inert and silent. I tilt my head to get a closer look, scanning the lines and shading that stretch all the way from the side of my neck down to the top of my hip. Then I turn, craning my head to examine the part of the design that extends to part of my back. I’m interrupted by one of my dorm-mates popping in and hurriedly wrap my towel back around me. She just eyes me curiously before slipping into a stall to pee.
When I get back to my bed and slip into boxer shorts and a tank top, I throw a sweater on top and grab my sketchbook out of my bag along with a pencil.
“I’m going to go scrounge for a snack. Want anything?” I ask Rachel.
She looks up and cocks her head. “Actually, do you want some company? I could use a snack too.”
The first floor of our dormitory includes a small kitchen and a great room that doubles as a library and cafe during the day. Behind the counter is a fancy cappuccino maker and a full-sized fridge, along with a cabinet filled with assorted boxes of cereal—hot and cold—several loaves of sliced bread, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a cookie jar that never runs out.
I grab a box of granola and a banana from the fruit bowl on the counter. Rachel retrieves two clean bowls, and we tag-team making granola with sliced banana on top. We settle at one of the small cafe tables beneath a light and dig in.
“Fuck, this is good.” I stare into my bowl in wonderment, because it’s the same experience I had when I took my first bite of burger earlier tonight. Is it just because I’m starving?
“Eh, it’s passable,” Rachel says. “The banana helps.”
But it’s more than passable to me. It’s like I can taste every molecule of life that went into the grains and fruit. Flavor explodes across my tongue with every bite.
I slow my eating and stare into my bowl. “Something weird is happening to me, Rache.”
She nods. “It seems that way. Your aura said as much. It’s changed over the last few days.”
I stare at her. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“You seemed spooked the first time I mentioned it, so I wasn’t sure how much detail I should give you. I didn’t even know what it meant. Just that things were different today.”
“Different how?”
“Just-got-laid different, for one thing, which I told you. But aside from the glow everyone’s aura has when they’ve just boned—something I see a lot at St. George—the colors were all brighter. You’re the only person whose aura is like a crazy rainbow kaleidoscope, but tonight all the colors looked like the saturation was set to max.”
I crunch on my cereal for a few and shake my head. “That’s the weird thing. I feel like I got laid too. Except I didn’t. Or if I did, I don’t remember it.”
She stops eating and stares at me. “Did you lose time?”
“About eighteen hours.”
My friends all knew about the dildo part of my project, but Audra’s the only one who saw the whole finished assignment, since it was for a class we share. I explain to Rachel about the jewelry portion of the assignment, and our instructor’s suggestion of summoning a god to tell me what I am. Then actually attempting to do it.
Her eyes widen to saucers and her half-eaten bowl of granola goes soggy by the time I finish.
“Holy shit, Nem. What if you succeeded? What if some uber-powerful god answered your ritual, fucked you silly, then made you forget?”
“Well, they did a shit job if they left all that mess. I had cum dripping down my thighs when I woke up, Rache. That’s what it tasted like, anyway.”
Her mouth drops open and she lets out a stuttering cough. “Wait, you tasted it? As in put some in your mouth and swallowed?”
I frown. “That’s the literal definition of tasting. It tasted like semen. Better, actually.”
She shoves her bowl aside and takes a breath, spreading her hands out on the tabletop. “Okay, there’s something you need to know that I don’t think you do yet... and the reason they really need to have a higher races sex-ed class at this place, for fuck’s sake. For most of the higher races, bodily fluids carry serious magic. The significance of the magic depends on which race the fluid belongs to. But for nymphaea it’s especially sacred, because it’s how they form a mate bond.”
Something flutters in my belly and I tamp it down. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know if it means anything in your case, but it’s something to consider. If you were with a nymphaea—a satyr—and you tasted each other’s essence, that’s a big fucking deal.”
Ever the skeptic, I narrow my eyes at her. “Are you saying I inadvertently bound myself to a god?”
“Not necessarily. It takes three exchanges for it to be official, but all it takes is one taste for a nymphaea to know you. Not to mention there’s a whole deal with the barrier protecting the island. For someone to come through, they have to be fated to be here—to be with someone who is already here.”
This is all good info that I wish I’d known, aside from the fate part, which was a rumor Rachel just confirmed. But I don’t see how it changes anything. I still don’t remember any of what happened.
Rachel sees my dissatisfaction and reaches out to grab my hand. “Sweetie, it’s messed up if you summoned a god and he smashed and dashed, even if you were willing. Especially if he gave you amnesia before he disappeared. You don’t seem to think you were raped, and your aura doesn’t look like you were traumatized... quite the opposite, in fact. If it was good, I’d think you would want to remember it.”
“I wish I fucking did, because whatever happened to me, it changed me. The world feels different. Food tastes different. I have all these ideas.” I hold up the sketchpad I’ve been steadily doodling on and flip back through the several pages I’ve filled. Her eyebrows shoot up.
“Nice! I’m seeing a theme, though: gods and monsters. Do you think it means something?”
I frown at the sketchpad, because I haven’t even really thought about what I was sketching. But there is a distinct theme. Besides the satyr I modeled my dildo after—the sketch still gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling when I look at it—I’ve sketched another hoofed creature: a minotaur. Along with him is a dragon, another dragon—except this one has dozens of heads—a three-headed wolf-dog, a swirling mass of misty darkness with the vague shape of a man, a flying warthog creature, a muscle-bound hunk with a lion pelt over his shoulders, and the last and most riveting, a man with eyes like deep voids and angular features more beautiful and severe than anything I’ve ever laid eyes on. The final figure is depicted standing in an architectural archway with an expanse of stark, black and gray landscape behind him that looks familiar, but I can’t remember why.
“It’s got to be a clue,” she says. She hops up and heads to one of the bookshelves, dragging her finger along the spines until she finds the right section, pulls several books out, and heads back, already flipping through the pages of one.
“Good old Edith Hamilton,” she says, spreading the first book open between us. “We’ve got a practical pantheon of ne’er do wells here. This guy....” She points at the multi-headed dragon. “…he must be Typhon, the son of Chaos and Gaia. And this guy is Chrysaor.” She flips to the winged warthog. “He’s the brother of Pegasus. And this one is Cerberus, obviously.”
She flips through the book some more, staring at each of my sketches, then steals my pencil and starts writing names under each of the pictures.
We skip back and forth, comparing my drawings to different illustrations from the books, and have all but the last one named before too long. Then we stop and stare at the final sketch, and an anxious flutter fills my belly.
“He’s kind of beautiful in a terrifying way,” she says.
But I can’t stop fixating on his mouth, which is a perfect shape. Everything about him is perfect. God-like. Except for his eyes, which look.... fractured.
“But who is he? Does anything in there help figure that out?”
“Well, some were obvious. Herakles with the Nemean lion he killed. That feels like a clear sign this is about you, by the way. But this guy... Maybe he is Tartarus?”
“I thought Tartarus was a mythological prison.”
“It is. And it’s also a god. At least at one time it was a god, see?” She flips through one of the books we’ve been scouring and turns it around, showing me a section that describes Tartarus as a primordial god, whereas all the others seemed to claim it’s a part of the underworld where the criminal element of the divine were sent as punishment for their wrongdoings. Or basically anyone who ever wronged a god.
“This guy is his brother, Erebus, who’s also conflated with a different section of the underworld.” She points at the darker image I sketched just before the last guy, a figure that looks like no more than a shadow. “He’s the god of darkness.”
I page slowly through each of the sketches again, staring at the names Rachel jotted beneath each one. My insides are tangled, because I feel like I need to know more.
“Anything coming back to you?”
“No. But thanks for trying to help.”
She stands and grabs our dishes, laying a hand on my shoulder as she passes by to the kitchen. “Maybe you just need to sleep on it. If you want to talk again tomorrow, let me know.”