Callista matched his steps as they explored what The Sample had to offer, their fingers sometimes brushing against each other. He had promised to tell her everything, but after ten minutes of wandering they were still encased in silence. The muggy air threatened to drown her and she continued to swallow more and more of it until finally she turned to him and framed his face with her hands. ‘Just tell me. Whatever you’re hiding, it’s torturing you.’
‘I can’t…’ he whispered.
Callista held his eyes. ‘Sandsa. I feel like you’ve done something pretty huge to be with me. But I can’t say that magic word back to you if I don’t know who you are.’
‘Perhaps you should sit down,’ he suggested and she did, on a bench that was so weathered and chipped it was a miracle she didn’t fall through the rotted wood.
Sandsa knelt before her, trembling. His fear was so palpable that Callista felt her eyes sting with tears.
‘There are many sub-level gods,’ he began. ‘The desert god is one, the water god is another…these gods exist beneath the Creator God. But you know all this.’
‘Are you giving me a lesson on how the universe works?’ she asked wryly.
Sandsa stared down at her knees. She could feel him withdrawing into his mind so she cupped his chin with one hand and guided him into the chair with the other. He smiled gratefully and leaned into her touch. ‘Callista. I am very powerful. No one in the deserts could match me. My…chipless powers are part of that, not separate from it.’
‘I suspected as much.’
‘This is because…I am the desert god.’ He paused, then rushed on when she said nothing, ‘I am the Desine made flesh and blood. I command the deserts and Kuja commands the rainforests — that’s why he vanished so quickly, if you were wondering. And our father…’
‘Stop talking,’ Callista said.
He did.
She drew a breath. ‘You’re a god?’
‘Yes.’
Callista closed her eyes for a moment. He was telling the truth. And he was deeply afraid that she would reject him because of it.
‘This doesn’t change anything,’ she told him. ‘I still love you.’
His smile threatened to become infectious. ‘You love me?’
‘Sandsa!’ she cried, her thumbs dipping into the corners of his lips and setting them at a flat line. ‘With this lack of focus, how am I supposed to believe you’re a god capable of omniscience?’
‘Perhaps it is difficult to focus when you are so close to me?’ he mused.
The laugh burst free from Callista before she could stop it. ‘Sandsa. Get on with it.’
Sandsa pursed his lips. ‘What do you know about desert powers and their limitations?’
‘Only what Vom has told me,’ she answered. ‘I know they have to ask for permission to use the Magic and then they’re restricted to minor displays of power. You don’t have that problem.’
‘No. I don’t.’
Callista opened her mouth but her next words were lost in the ensuing scream of tortured wind. A tornado made of sand tore up around their feet, encasing them, tugging them away from the seat. She clung to Sandsa’s shoulders as they hurtled into the sky and buried her face into his chest, reaching into his core to feel the immense power he was wielding.
He was a chasm; she fell into him.
When the wind stilled, Callista pushed him away to stare around at the endless desert and its seamless horizon. Her eyes ached from the glare and her tongue withered inside her mouth as the dry air began to rob her of precious moisture. Odd that she would feel moist in another place right now, but he was a god and he desired her.
She turned back and kissed him, then pulled him down to the sand with her. His mouth moved, drawing a hot, wet line from her lips to her earlobe. He’d barely grazed it before she gasped and leaned into him, inviting the kisses that spilled down her throat. Callista gazed up at the sky until spots danced in front of her eyes then dove into the shelter his neck provided, puckering his skin between her teeth. Moans escaped the lips travelling onto her shoulder, where he could proceed no further because of her jacket. He removed and discarded the item then slid the strap of her shirt down her arm.
Callista hesitated for a moment, then tossed her anxiety down the nearest dune, enjoying the unfettered slide of lips from shoulder to bicep. She offered no resistance when he pulled the shirt over her head, nor when he began tugging at her bra band so that he could expose her. His eyes darkened as she retreated to lie down in front of him. The sand was surprisingly soft against her back — she realised she could feel it moving beneath her, delivering a gentle massage that set the nerves of her skin on fire. It should have felt unusual. It didn’t.
Sandsa came to her and kissed one pert breast, sending shivers cascading throughout her entire body. She watched as he swirled his tongue around her nipple, avoiding it, teasing her, never quite giving her what she wanted. He started to detach his lips from her skin but Callista slid her hand to the back of his head, threading fingers through his hair, guiding him lower, closer, closer. His mouth sealed over her breast and she arched her back, moaning as he obeyed her mental wish and moved over the sweat-slicked crevice between her mounds of flesh to find purchase on the other breast. She fed his mind with the intense bursts of warmth emanating from within her.
Sandsa…let me explore you, she said.
Please do, he responded.
Callista sat up and reefed his shirt up off his chest. She trapped his arms above his head in the tangles of the fabric, snickering until something audibly tore. Throwing the offending item away, Callista devoured his skin, trailing her taste buds over each and every micrometre of his chest. She drank in the groans that reverberated low on his body and followed them to the source, kissing his hair-dusted abdomen.
She lost herself in inflicting pleasure on him and in the pleasure he gave her, though they made the unspoken agreement to go no further than the edges of their pants. It was a tantalising barrier to dance across, for fingers to tease along — the boundary made the sensations even more intense. At last she lay beside him, her cheek against his chest. She did not question the shade at first, lulled into a doze by the beat of his heart and the fingertips etching heated lines over her back. But when Callista finally turned her head she stared up in amazement at the wave of sand cresting above them, the countless grains restless as they maintained the shape.
‘Desert god, huh,’ she said drowsily. ‘You could destroy the Alcazaar in a heartbeat.’
Sandsa abruptly stiffened. The wave disintegrated, showering Callista with grit. She spluttered for a long minute, then wheezed, ‘Sandsa, what’s wrong?’
‘Can’t you hear them?’ he asked, sitting upright and flinging his wild gaze around the dunes.
‘I…I can’t hear anything.’
‘Listen,’ he insisted, grabbing her hand, pulling her into chest —
— and then she listened.
There were thousands, millions, of them begging, demanding, pleading for their god. Their words were like claws, digging into him, tearing his very being, hurting him in ways a lasgun never could. He had abandoned them. And now they had come to claim him.
You must not keep him from us! the voices cried.
Callista looked up at Sandsa. His blue eyes were vacant.
She was losing him.
‘Sandsa!’ Her hands found his shoulders and shook him. ‘We need to get out of here! Take us back to Atsa!’
I can’t… he said weakly.
‘Take us back to Atsa now!’
Another wave of sand rose, then fell. Callista closed her eyes as it smothered her, then opened them again to see buildings she had known all her life. They were just inside Atsa City, right on the edge of it, where the ruined roads had not seen maintenance in centuries. She spun around and saw Sandsa flat on his back, gasping. She scuttled over to him and pillowed a hand beneath his head.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘I used too much of my powers and they found me,’ he said softly. ‘It was hard enough to ignore them after a handful of weeks. How will I cope after months, years, decades?’
Callista pressed her lips against his forehead. No one can force you to abandon me, Sandsa. No one. I can feel how powerful you are.
‘Powerful,’ he repeated scornfully. ‘I can’t call upon the sands, even to destroy the Alcazaar, because the deserts and my people will feel me and demand my presence, and they might win. So now I am restricted to the sandless, chipless powers that we share.’
Callista helped him sit up. She hated to say it, but she had to. ‘If you stop letting Vom and the others source their powers from you, they’ll be helpless. I had a look at their weapons and, I’ll be honest, they haven’t got the firepower to defend themselves.’
Sandsa grimaced. ‘They must learn to live without me. Without the powers. Because I am never going back. I can’t. I can’t be the god anymore.’
‘Why?’ she asked, brushing sand off his shirt.
Sandsa reached for her hand. She gave it. Together they descended into his mind, into the memories strewn with the cobwebs of time and buried beneath layers of hurt.
***
A boy in his mother’s arms, laughing as sand skids over his fingers. A single clap of his hands smashes the small eddies and he turns a grin up at her, a beautiful woman with stunning aquiline features. Her eyes hold warmth in their hazel depths.
She loves him. His mother loves him. And that’s all that matters.
He grows and grows until his cheeks are lined with a gentle blond fuzz that irritates him so much that he forbids any hair to breach his face. Soon he becomes old enough to do his father’s bidding. He must become the deserts so he does — and he forgets what he is, what he was, and he roams the sands endlessly. He looks after those who have left the cities behind, gifting them with abilities, guiding them. He loses himself and becomes the god.
It takes years, but his mother finds him and pulls him back. The light hurts his eyes when he retakes human form and he’s confused by the starkness of the deserts. They were beautiful before. Now he can’t trust them. How did they make him forget who he was? How did he forget her?
He pummels the sand beneath his fists. She lets him. And then she hugs him like he’s a little boy again. But his father — the Creator God, that spiteful Ine — has no mercy to give. Sandsa is not allowed to know the happiness the mortals enjoy. And he must not see his mother so often. He must stay in the deserts and return only to discuss important matters with the Ine.
The affection he sees between lovers makes no sense to him. He never sees it between his own parents. He never feels it himself. He even fears he does not love his mother — is he merely attached to her because she is the first face he saw?
Sometimes he takes a human form that lasts for several minutes so he can stand atop the dunes, staring down at the campsites belonging to this or that tribe. He could be among them. He could be one of them.
But he’s not. He has to guide them. It is a hopeless existence but he accepts it. Century in and century out, he does what he is created to do. Eventually brothers and sisters arrive. Some of them he gets along with. But he has little time for them, besieged as he is by his duties in the desert.
He can’t be sure, but he thinks more than three millennia might have passed since his creation. Does time pass when you go nowhere? He feels nothing. And his existence has no meaning.
Until…Kuja. When Sandsa visits home — or the white expanse that everyone else calls home — he sees his mother holding the baby and his life changes. He loves this boy, this rainforest god. He later takes him on adventures; a man and his kid brother, running wild over planets, dodging through whirling portals made of turbulent sand or fluttering leaves. They chase each other like mortal children do and steal a ball from one family, bouncing the rubbery toy between them, laughing and playing and using their powers for themselves, not just others.
Kuja grows up and the Ine can’t make him to go to his rainforests. Kuja wants to stay with his brother so it’s Sandsa who is sternly told by the Creator God that he must cut off ties with his favourite sibling for the good of the galaxy.
Sandsa refuses. His mother backs him up. But the Ine will not have it.
She has the binding scars that the Ine gave her, and the immortality that came with them. But now she has caused two sons to reject their destinies and their duties.
And she will not apologise.
Sandsa witnesses the stripping of her scars. He is confused — why is she not angry? Why is she not screaming, hitting, spitting? So he does those things for her. But she tells him not to, it’s okay, she’s a human, she never belonged here.
‘But you made me feel!’ he shouts.
‘Be there for Kuja,’ is all she says before she leaves, condemned to her short mortal life.
Sandsa knows he cannot fight his father. The Ine is the greatest, oldest power in the universe. Losing is a certainty and so hot, human anger rages inside the desert god. He finds that it causes wild sandstorms that threaten his people. It will be his fault if they suffer.
So Sandsa goes back to them and saves them. He casts away his anger but with it goes the joy he knew so briefly.
Over the decades, such terrifyingly short decades, he visits Kuja in secret — but are his activities really shielded from the Ine? How can he know? Soon he stops seeing his brother because he fears that the Ine will punish them both. Sandsa’s life fades to nothing for a third time. He no longer cares about his own people. He doesn’t even care if his guidance hinders more than it helps. He knows he should feel guilty about that. But he doesn’t.
And then the woman comes to him in his dreams, far more beautiful than anyone he’s ever seen, including his mother. He belongs with the dream woman. He is meant to be like her, made of flesh and blood and desires.
She is his lifeline. And he must leave this numb existence to find her.
The price he pays is worth it.
His powers, though useful, would only pull him away from her, back to the deserts and the people there. The god could overthrow the Alcazaar in a heartbeat, but the god is not allowed to feel, to love.
He just wants to be a man.
A man in love with a woman.
***
When Sandsa came to himself, he saw the tears glistening in Callista’s brown eyes and felt the warmth of her palm against his cheek. He kissed the pads of her fingers, one by one, then clasped her hand to his chest. Her gaze held his for a long time, her eyelashes flickering beneath the star’s fading light. Releasing a breath that felt as though it had been trapped inside his lungs forever, Sandsa said, ‘I aspire to be as human as you, Callista.’
‘You would give up being a god for me?’ she asked, her voice shaking.
Sandsa smiled. ‘I already did.’
‘It’s a good thing that no one could match the powerful chipless man you make anyway,’ she said, a grin now curling her lips.
Her mind was brimming with images of his past and he could not recoil from his memories now that she had them. But Callista embraced it, all of it, and then she skidded towards the future her visions were showing her — countless days fighting beside him, risking her life with him —
‘You’re immortal,’ she murmured.
Sandsa nodded. ‘Yes, but I am not invulnerable. A stray lasgun bolt could very well kill me.’ Before she could voice her next thought, he powered on, ‘Do not worry. Our binding scars will ensure your immortality. I do not intend to lose you.’
‘Easy there, you,’ Callista said, lightly tapping his cheek. ‘I might be entertaining the love notion but I won’t be…binding myself to you until I’m ready. If I ever am,’ she added.
‘If?’ Sandsa repeated, smirking.
‘If I did not love you, I would slap that look off your face.’
‘I love you too, Callista.’
Then he kissed her. And time vanished.