Never did I love myself
until your kiss, your love—
now I sit hour after hour
making myself as flower and necklace and garden,
yours to keep forever…
—lyrics from UUU’s pop song, Love Manifested
I believe you’re more than this.
Elīya shakes her head. There’s already dust in her hair, and the air’s so dry, and the sun’s pressing against her skin almost as much as Tamar’s words. Flame and fire, she normally likes hikes, especially the feel of exertion in her legs that comes from walking fast.
But not today. Not now. Not when it’s already hard enough just to not cry.
At least they’ve already made it pretty far up. No one’s stopped at any point on the hike, they hadn’t seemed to care to, though for once Elīya would have appreciated it. Her breaths are coming harshly now.
She can see all of Ēnnuh from here: the tall buildings of downtown, the university across the river. It’s a good view, and she’d care a lot more if her mind was actually working right now.
Lucifer’s strolling ahead of her, hands behind their head. They look over their shoulder at her—again. They keep doing that today, for some reason.
But they haven’t started a conversation with her, and it’s not like she knows what to say to them either. She hasn’t talked to anyone on this entire hike, and she’s barely thought either. All she can feel is her mind throbbing and wandering, but not to anywhere, just drifting, not even enjoying the plants or rocks or color of the sky.
Maybe Tamar’s right about that, too. About her not thinking about anything other than ethics, not even knowing how to.
Maybe Tamar’s been right every single time. Maybe even when she left.
No, Elīya thinks. Even if Tamar had been partially right, she couldn’t have been entirely so. It doesn’t take much to see the damage in her wake, so even if she should have suddenly become a Holy, she should have handled what came after differently. Even sending a letter explaining what she did would have been better than saying nothing at all. Tamar handled things wrong. That’s plain enough.
But then again, here Elīya is, still thinking about ethics and only ethics. She sighs. It is strange, she thinks, that she can work from so many angles when there’s an ethical problem in front of her, but then, when the problem is her, she just—
Isn’t paying attention to her steps. Isn’t paying attention to the sky. Isn’t thinking anything. Her mind goes blank and shuts down.
It feels like there’s nowhere to go, no way out of this, like she’s a wind trapped in absolute nothingness—a wind with no sky, no ground, no starting point, nothing to move her.
Flame it, she can’t think, and of course the path of least resistance is just going back to thinking about ethics, or maybe walking up to Lucifer and trying to make them fix things, then going back to living her life, her oh-so-obvious life as a philosophy student, always doing what she needs to do, but learning nothing at all. Which is exactly what she’s always done. Since even before Tamar left.
Her hands are twitching, shaking. She has to do something, but there’s nothing to do, nothing to think.
She doesn’t even notice walking faster, her strides becoming longer, quicker. She passes right over every rock and patch of rough ground without difficulty, just moving forward, forward, forward.
When she passes Yenatru, she wonders at first if he’s fallen back. But even when she realizes it’s her who’s sped up, she doesn’t care, she doesn’t want to stop.
She just wants to move, even if she can’t make herself think at all, even if she can hardly manage to notice the sky.
The shadows are getting longer now, the sun lower in the sky. Though the conversation’s quieted, Yenatru can’t stop glancing to Tamar, at least when he’s not taking in the view.
There’s something of her, something important to her and probably incredible and so much, and he has no idea what it is. He might never know. And though he understands exactly why—he knows what it means for something to be important, knows that if it beats your heart to think about and makes you cry to feel, it’s hard to say aloud—it still makes him sad to know that she is so very something, the nature of which he might never know.
Not that he cares about her, specifically. Unless he does.
He touches his hand to his lips, lets softness fill his skin as he looks to the shadows, the city beneath him becoming darker and shaded. He breathes deep, almost shakily, because there’s something else that hurts: the way it might be the same the other way around, the way he might not be able to speak himself to her either.
Not that it matters. But it could.
Flames, he doesn’t understand, he can’t classify this—he only barely cares about Elīya, but yet he’s known her forever, but yet he was so happy for her to see him. And he’s hardly known Lucifer any time at all, but she—she’s seen him, and his eyes water just at the thought. She’s seen him and he wants to hold her, he wants to make her safe from whatever it is that crosses her face sometimes. And then there’s Tamar, right here next to him, still walking impressively easily with that cane, and he’s known her forever too, but he hasn’t seen her in another forever, and he knows maybe nothing of her at all.
But he wants to.
And all the while, what he really wants most is to kiss some boy in a meadow of his own making. Not that he could make an entire meadow with Theurgy, that might take longer than a lifetime—but he still wants to, he wants a full and beautiful safe place, with winds soft and cool and warm all at once, with grass swirling around him, with light glowing gentle and everywhere.
But he hasn’t met that boy.
Instead, he’s met Lucifer.
He glances back to her; she doesn’t notice or meet his eyes, so he has a long moment to see what she looks like to Elīya. She’s wearing a dress, again black, the show-off. Her hair’s fluffy, almost spiky, about an inch or two off her head. She’s got light skin, and isn’t very feminine. Strolling around, smiling, not rushing at all.
She’s so unlike Elīya, who only a few minutes ago barreled ahead of him and Tamar, and is still up ahead of them, hair swishing with her quick movements, movements so precise they could probably poke a hole in something.
These are a strange three to be surrounded by, and yet he smiles.
And the path takes a sharp turn, and more suddenly than Lucifer appeared in Yenatru’s life it opens up onto a plateau, a valley almost, or maybe some strange combination of the two. It’s wide, but it slopes down gently in the middle, and is surrounded by higher ground, including a couple of jagged peaks perhaps five hundred feet higher.
The ground here is still largely dust and rock, but it’s scattered with grass and sagebrush, and is that a dragonfly? No, it’s three dragonflies, wait, four, oh flames of God.
Yenatru’s been up the Ehinots before, but never here.
Lucifer walks up to him, which is easy since he’s stopped in his tracks. She shares a glance with him and grins. “See, most people take one of the paths that lead to a peak.”
“Or a path that’s not so steep at all,” Yenatru says, understanding. This is neither easy enough to appeal to a tourist or challenging enough to appeal to the usual hikers in Ēnnuh, and so it probably gets few visitors.
Lucifer laughs, grinning even more. “Glad you haven’t been here before. Since you live here, I was a little worried you might have.”
Yenatru nods fervently, still finding himself gaping at the view, dragonflies flitting around him. “Tamar might not be able to appreciate it, though.”
Lucifer gives him a surprisingly sharp look. “I think she appreciates the situation, the fact that I’m here and how odd it is. And Elīya appreciates that Tamar’s managed to be forced here. So they’re getting things out of this, but I’m not really doing it for either of them.” She tilts her head in Yenatru’s direction. “The reason I came up with this specific plan is that I wanted to show this place to you.”
Yenatru can’t meet Lucifer’s eyes after that, so instead he looks at all these patches of sagebrush in the shadows of the mountains, and his breath almost leaves him again.
“I’m really glad you like it.”
“But you,” he starts, “you, um. Hadn’t you just met me, when you decided—”
“I had,” she says, a strange regret in her tone. “It’s an issue of mine, trying to get to know people too quick.”
“Because I’m going to die,” he says quietly.”
“Yeah,” Lucifer responds in a low voice of her own. “Yeah.”
There’s a long pause, each of them breathing deep, the air smelling like sage.
“And it gets worse,” Lucifer continues. “I want to be—I want to do right by everyone, after the Resurrection. So…”
It’s hard to look at anyone when their voice is so filled with emotion, but Yenatru does so anyway, in case it helps somehow.
“I’m… I’m honestly worried… that the eighty-nine friends I have are going to be too many.”
There’s only one thing to do at this point: hug her.
Oh God, he’d actually somehow forgotten again how warm it is to wrap his arms around her, to feel her relax beneath him, and oh flames, he’s helping. He’s actually helping. He’s definitely going to cry.
“Heh,” Lucifer says—Yenatru doesn’t know why—and she puts her arms around the one of his that’s at her front.
It’s so warm.
And Yenatru thinks, in the way he’s heard that some people pray: please be safe.
But it’s a slightly strange, uncomfortable position they’re standing in, so Yenatru removes his arms, still standing close to her, hoping so much that he indeed has helped.
“By the way,” she says, looking gently into his eyes. “Something tells me you won’t ask, so I’ll just say. You are the eighty-ninth. If you still want to be.”
Yenatru smiles widely, way too widely; he turns away in an attempt to hide it. “Y-yeah. I would like to be.”
“Alright, then. I will keep checking, though.”
And he’ll keep answering the same way, he thinks.
But while they’ve been talking, Tamar’s passed right by them, standing now at the edge of the valley. “We should probably head forward,” Yenatru says.
“And I should start preparing food,” Lucifer adds.
“Yup. I don’t need to, but I do.” She smiles again. “See you at dinner, friend.”
Then she walks off into the valley, or plateau, or whatever one calls this particular landscape, and Yenatru does much the same—just in time to see Tamar jump a little, as Elīya collapses off a rock she was apparently sitting on.
Oh, flames.
Well, Elīya’s on the ground again. That seems to be happening a lot lately.
Thankfully, she’s hit a part of the ground that has real soil, not just rock. So she’s not really hurt, just dazed. Then again, she came into this whole falling-off-a-rock thing pre-dazed. That was basically why she fell.
Because see, she’s maybe a something, a more than ethics person, a who knows what, and she’s trying to work that out. So far, she’s losing to the forces of gravity.
She blinks. Yup, that sure is some grass near her. It even has some colors: a vague washed-out yellow that kind of looks green when she squints. And that’s just the part of it that’s in the shade; there’s a bit that’s almost orange in the late-afternoon sunlight. Exciting, really.
There are some footsteps. “Are you alright?” That’s Tamar’s voice.
But Elīya doesn’t like lying, so she actually has to figure out the answer to that before responding. Which sounds kind of hard. Just lying here seems much nicer.
But responsibility demands that she say something, so she manages, “I didn’t hurt anything.” That seems pretty accurate.
“Okay,” Tamar says.
And she leaves. So that’s probably a success. Meanwhile, the sky is very blue. That’s actually pretty nice. Elīya’s okay with that.
Yeah, she thinks she’ll just lie here for a while. The ground may be kind of hard, but that works in its own way. The most important thing about it is that she can’t fall further. She’s just here now, and nothing much can change that. The ground’s quite safe, really.
What was she even thinking about, before…?
Probably who she really is, or something. Wow, that does not sound fun to think about. The ground’s much better.
And there’s more footsteps, huh, that keeps happening. This time it’s Yenatru, and he’s kind of bending down into her range of vision. “A-are you okay, are you hurt? Did something happen? Or were you thinking about something and then getting distressed or something, and is that why you fell, and do you want help with whatever that is, or?” His words are tripping over each other.
Does she want help? Well, maybe, since it does seem like she’s trying to figure out her entire soul or whatever. But maybe no one can really help with that. Although maybe Lucifer can. So then maybe Yenatru could, also?
But that sounds like it would require thinking, so she says, “Maybe, but I don’t think my mind is available for that helping thing right now, sorry.”
“Oh. Okay. Should I come back later, then? Unless helping with dinner would make you feel better?”
“Nah, I’m busy. I have an ethical responsibility to give the ground my full attention for a while, you see. It’s often ignored, and all. Very sad. So I need to just lie here for a while to make it feel better. It’s the only proper course of action, really.”
“I… see.”
“Yes, it’s very visible, you can often see the ground when you look down.”
Yenatru nods, but he looks hesitant. He probably just doesn’t appreciate the ground enough. “I… do you maybe, um, want me to stay here with you, in that case?”
Elīya considers this. On one hand, company would be fine. On the other hand, it might require talking. “Maybe later? The ground’s really quite needy.”
“Okay, uh, I guess I’ll head over to where Lucifer is, then. Or maybe Tamar. One of those. Or both.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“I’ll… see you when you’ve comforted the ground long enough?”
“Count on it.”
Then Yenatru’s not in the way of the sky anymore and the footsteps go away and Elīya feels pretty okay, or something like it, just lying here. Probably.
She sighs and watches the sky slowly change color.
And she doesn’t think, she doesn’t think, she doesn’t think. She doesn’t think of herself doesn’t think of is that what you want is that who you are doesn’t think of you’re more than this doesn’t think of nothing’s stopping you nothing’s stopping you nothing’s stopping you—
The sky just changes color. Slowly. Over time.
And Elīya’s definitely not clenching a fist or fighting back tears. Definitely not. Or maybe the first step of figuring any of this out is to admit that she is?
But she’s not figuring it out yet, she’s lying on the ground—
nothing’s stopping you—
Elīya sits up, fist still clenched. Trying to control her breathing. The sky’s a lot darker than when she fell. She should head to where the others are. Yenatru said something about dinner, after all. Food first, she decides.
Then she’ll deal with this.