death at your hands will be a mercy

She appears to me like a ghost.

She is immensely tall and slender and nearly blue-skinned with that strange grayish hue that distinguishes her from the rest of her kind, and her thin arms and legs ripple with muscle. Her long obsidian hair hangs low in curls to her waist, and her clothes are white and nearly translucent, hanging off her body like the wraps of a mummy. Her shimmering skin, glittering like fish scales, seems to blend into the gray fog of the air, casting her in and out of visibility as she moves towards me. The way she seems to slink up the hill without even touching it sends a shiver down my spine, her bare feet traversing across the air above the ground instead of sinking and squishing against the muddy ground as mine had.

She reaches the bench before I even realize it, staring down at me with contempt. If I had never seen her before, if I had not spent years at her side, I’d perhaps die of the terror that seizes me in this moment.

But with a sharp inhale of preparation, I cast all natural mortal fears aside. This, I know very well, is the presence of a god. The one god I may be able to reckon with before I die.

I wait for her to sit down before I say, “You know I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

A deep, heaving sigh reverberates from beside me, almost exasperated in nature, and it is perhaps the most human I’ve ever heard her. She won’t meet my eyes. She rarely meets the eyes of any human. Besides her husband, I was the exception. Once.

“Melo,” she says, cold and absolute, and I immediately understand that she wishes for my silence.

Still, I push forward. I didn’t come to be a man respected by the gods by obeying orders. “I never wanted to kill her.”

“Do you really believe,” she says, her voice a low, raspy timbre, “after all you have done, that I care about what you want?”

“Grimelda—”

“Do not use my name.” I flinch as her pale, sharp eyes cut through me like glass. The air seems to go cold around us, the rain-spattered grass withering below my feet. “You have long since lost that right.”

“She was in pain,” I say weakly. “She was dying.”

“She should have never been given the right to fight.”

“She wanted to fight,” I say, gripping the goddess’ arm in desperation, to make her understand. “She was strong. She helped us take back the land. She died a hero.”

“She died in vain,” Grimelda hisses. She rips herself out of my grasp and stands, lingering over me like a large, glittering shadow. “Just as you will now.”

She draws her weapon, her long, curved silver sword that has slit so many human throats before mine, carved from the sharpest of steel. The edge of the blade glints white and sharp.

The rain is coming down hard now, soaking my hair and clothes, seeping into my shoes, but I can barely feel it. It seems to refract off the goddess’ form, the linens of her dress perfectly dry before my eyes.

“She died a hero,” I repeat, brokenly. “She died a hero. She did.”

The goddess, ever so slightly, draws back her weapon. Her gaze burns into mine. In all these years, I’ve never seen her so hesitant to kill. It makes me irrationally angry that the capriciousness of a god’s wrath is being wasted on me after what I’ve done. The feeling then fades from me when dark conviction regains its dominance over her features, and it’s replaced with an immeasurable sadness.

“Grimelda,” I say quietly, and this time she is silent. Slowly, I reach out and wrap a hand around hers where it clutches the sword, and she lets me.

I want to absolve her of me. I want to absorb her anger, her disgust, her hatred for me through this touch. I want to take all her emotions into me, all the uselessness of them, and bury them below the both of us for good, leaving it to rot with my flesh and bones. “Make it fast.”

Her reptilian eyes seem to cloud over, a sheen of something unreadable flickering through them, before she gives a nearly imperceptible nod.

I close my eyes and wait to feel the warmth of Malia’s embrace.