Page 92 of Love and Death

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I glance from him to the two gods, pale in the early morning light, and then slowly back to Hypnos.

“What is the cost?”

“A choice. One that will change fate, once and for all,” he answers. “But to make it, first, you must dream. Are you ready?”

I nod, and a wind stirs up around me, stray hairs tickling my skin.

“You must speak. Are you ready to dream?”

“I’m ready.”

Hypnos steps forward and places his hand on my head. The next thing I know, the sky, the summit, the altar, everything is gone in a blur of swirling colors, and I am falling.

Not down, butin.

27

EROS

The dark is endless.

I start, the thought rippling through my consciousness. I do not remember the last time I was present. Something is calling me out, waking me from a slumber I did not know I was in.

My mind bends, pulling me inward and yet, out … as I suddenly find myself in a crumbling moonlit garden, overgrown with white roses long past their bloom and scattered with half-naked statues of memories long forgotten.

It feelswrong.

It is wrong.

This is not a place carved from stone and tree, but from heartache and longing.

I do not know why I am here, and then … I feelher.

She does not step into the garden so much as she awakens it. The moonlight sparkles over fresh dew on roses risen to bloom again, the air filling with the sweetscent of night as even the statues return to their former glory.

Hazel.

My darling mortal.

My little spark.

She is here.

I turn to find her before she even calls my name. A silver thread and a thousand lifetimes between us since I last heard her voice … and yet, it still breaks me.

“Eros?” she breathes, and I know I cannot be saved.

She will always break me, and I would not have it any other way.

I want to stay in this moment forever, to tell her everything I could not bear to before.

I want to be selfish, to let the world burn so that she might be mine …

But then, that would break her, and prove my nature right.

That I, the God of Lust and Desire, was not born to love; only to break.

And I refuse to be proven right.

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