Goddess by Liv Savell (autobiographies to read txt) 📕

One large room housed a wood-burning stove and hearth, a worn table with squat stools placed around its edge.There were two rooms with beds, one for her parents and one that Alphonse shared with her siblings. 

Alphonse’s expression turned thoughtful, and she gestured toward a quilt laid across the lumpy, hay-stuffed mattress. “That’s the first quilt I made on my own.” The stitches were not precisely even, the pattern simple. A child had made that quilt. Alphonse turned to look at the room, the walls unadorned asides from a small carving of Mother Agathi, veil over her hair, eyes lowered in demure adoration. “It seems like a small life now… Compared to Moxous or Thloegr.” 

It was certainly a simple life. Simpler than life at the temple, with its training and rules, morning prayers, and different paths of service. Alphonse had been raised by a family, not a congregation, and yet, there was even less space here. “It seems honest, though. I would like to have a small life. With you.” 

Suddenly hungry for touch, for comfort, Delyth pulled Alphonse into her chest. The warrior knew she was interrupting the tour, but there was an ache behind her ribs, an emptiness that only the warmth of Alphonse’s arms seemed to soothe. She let go after a moment to let Alphonse continue. Though she didn’t want to.

The healer hummed and tucked her hand into the crook of Delyth’s elbow. “You’d want to live here, with me?” Alphonse gestured to the ill-shapen bed and stark walls, painted white.  “Wouldn’t it be more fun if we lived in a cave somewhere?” She snuggled closer to Delyth, bumping her hip against the warrior’s. “Only a fire and each other to stay warm?” 

“I’d live here with you. Or in a cave. Or on an island smaller than this room with a single fruit tree I could tend for your meals. We could teach the birds to carry messages and the fish to dive for pearls so that I could drape your neck in stones half as precious as you are.”

Alphonse’s blush faded, her amber eyes widening as she took in the sincerity of Delyth’s words. “I don’t want pearls or fruit. Just you. Always you.” 

“Always you,” Delyth echoed and pulled the little healer into the bed draped with a quilt she’d made when her hands had been small and clumsy. “Lie with me awhile.”

She wanted to bathe in the warmth of Alphonses’s body, to savor a few moments of closeness. She would polish the memory of it in her mind, like a token, until it became as hard and clear as glass—a gem of comfort to carry into the cold and fear of morning.

The two settled onto the bed, fitting together as they had all those moons ago in their shared tent. Alphonse’s cheek nestled against Delyth’s shoulder, the healer’s arm draped across Delyth’s chest so that her fingers could trace the lines of one wing. It was familiar and easy. Their breaths synced into one rhythm, and Alphonse sighed. Content. 

The sun didn’t move in the sky outside their window. No animals lowed. No breeze stirred the trees into shushing whispers. All around them, time seemed frozen, immaterial. They might have lain there for a thousand years or a heartbeat when an invisible hand shook Delyth’s shoulder. The warrior squeezed her eyes shut, and a few desperate tears wetted her lashes. Not yet. This couldn’t end yet.

She took Alphonse’s jaw in the curve of one hand, tilting her face up for a kiss. She needed to memorize the feel of the healer’s lips, the fullness of them, their dips and curves. Later, she would have to remember their taste.

The shake came again, more urgently this time. Delyth could feel the press of thin fingers through her jerkin, half in that world, half in the world of dreams. Somewhere far off, a cock crowed.

“Alphonse, I love you.” She breathed the words into the other woman’s cheek.

“I love you too, Del—” 

Etienne’s face was a moon against the darkness of her tent, his pale skin catching threads of light from the night outside. It was cold, but the memory of warmth still lingered in Delyth’s body where Alphonse had lain. “Damn you,” she croaked, and her voice was made of nails. She shoved him away. “I was with her. Couldn’t you have given me another breath? Another heartbeat?”

Etienne sprawled backward, but the only expression on his face was one of fear. “Delyth, we’ve got to run! She’s here.”

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Sniffing the air again, Enyo frowned. It was difficult to make out the scent of her blood amidst the mixture of smoke, burnt flesh, and raw land. Mascen’s work lay all around them. Cuts of land were utterly barren of life, burnt and torn apart. Settlements had been erased from being. Lava spewed from the earth where it had no right to be.

The scars on the land reminded her of a time forgotten. A place without color, where the air always smelled of sulfur and blood. Where she had no voice and no strength. Mascen, without ever knowing of the Cursed Realms, had recreated its destruction perfectly. Old fears surged with new fury, turning her stomach to maggots and her blood to steam.  Mascen had done this to Rhosan. To the plants and the animals and, yes, even the humans.

How could her own child have been so reckless with nature? How could he care more for spite than the plains and valleys? Was there nothing decent within him? Did he not hear the screams of pain and despair from the trees? Did he not feel the sky shudder? She could find no reasonable answer. Mascen had always been ambitious, bold, cunning… He had been willing to stand up to the Gods when he was only a young one himself, and now that he had sat and stewed on his unnamed island, he