Last Daughter of the Gods - 5

Some nights I awaken with my arms tightly embracing my body, the taste of your remembered kisses still fresh upon my lips, the silkiness of your remembered caresses returning in the aftermath of the dream. Unable to sleep, the memory’s potency revives the cruel ache of renewed longing. Do you yet live, my love? Do you still hunger for me as I do for you?

Where did you journey when our story ended, to what new lands ventured and to what strange people bourn greetings? When the memory of your gentle touch and tender kisses begin to fade and crack with time who will carry word of your travails and travels back to the one who still loves you? Who might I send to navigate the bright and terrible roads of this cruel world and not be lost to me as well?

If I have gained any wisdom since my arrest, it is this: I should never have let you go. If only I had rebelled against Father and fled with you then we might have at least died together. Wherever you have gone, I swear I will follow, even if it leads only to your bones.

Memory is but a shadow of the real, like a map leading to an esoteric facsimile of the past. My remembrance of you is keen when sitting in the darkened cell at night, meditation reviving brief visions of childhood play or our lips the first time we pressed them together. But in the long and dull days waiting for something to happen, the ache of your absence returns and with it the desire to put it out of my mind.

Sitting up in irritation, the memory unexpectedly returns of the first game my mother ever taught me. Waving my hand in a circle above the cell floor as I sat at my bunk’s edge, I whispered, “Wishing well, oh wishing well, here is my silver, here is my gold, I make this as payment and will do as I’m told.”

Whenever I played it with mother, we would tightly close our eyes and count to five. Once we opened them the well would appear before us and I would giggle and clap my hands happily.

Remembering her example, after whispering the chant, I closed my eyes and counted quietly. But before I got to five a cell mate suddenly spoke.

“How did you do that?” she asked in an agitated voice.

Opening my eyes, I stared blankly at the mouth of well that had suddenly appeared in the cell floor with my mouth opened in awe. How many fruitless times had I attempted and failed to conjure the well as I grew older? I was an imp, a demon, a beast. But never a God. Father derisively referred to me as the goat girl.

In my girlish way, I had believed that once I aged into my Godhead that my powers would begin to manifest. But twenty came and went and I was still just a powerless freak. It had never occurred to me that I would have to leave the underworld before I could exercise my own gifts.

“Am I dreaming?” my cell mate asked me.

“We both are.” Opening my mouth, I pulled a silver and a gold coin from my tongue just like mother had when I was a little girl. “Make a wish,” I whispered and tossed the coins into the well, one for each of us. But the well that I conjured was deep and I never heard the coins hit the water.

My cell mate shrieked in alarm after a woman’s voice called and echoed from within the well, “Follow the coins.”

“Wishing well, oh wishing well, here is my silver, here is my gold, I make this as payment and will do as I’m told.” Straddling the well, I began to lower myself in as I whispered to my terrified cell mate, “You might want to wake up now.”