Inbetween - Book 1 of the Guardian series

Chapter 4- Regrets and love

Apollo had left the girl for a while, needing to get back to his own space, his own simple home. Once it had been larger, once he'd wanted everything, but now he was content. He rarely practised 'sleeping'. He sat there and stared at the rough stone wall, watching a spider gently weave a curtain across the window, as his desire for alone time caused his world to again alter somewhat.

Once, when his wife had been here, the building had been larger. Truthfully, he'd had many lovers in this place, and many more lovers amongst the living. Women but also men. There had also been men, beautiful men, who'd use his name to gain lovers and leave them. But there had only been one wife that'd he'd truly loved.

Leucothea had been a little different. Apollo had fallen in love with her, this woman amongst the living, as he tried to do his work as a Guardian. He had broken rules by sleeping with her, loving her, even desiring to marry her. A 'god' visiting a mortal Princess. Then she'd died a death no man or woman should have ever suffered, a death that still chilled him to the bone, buried alive when her jealous sister told their father. Her own father. Apollo never understood it. 

Apollo's wraith had been deadly.

But then she'd found him here. The two of them together, finally, and for a while things were beautiful. They'd built a building, ignoring the Inbetween's 'instant' creations, carving and building a home stone by stone. He didn't know how long they'd worked side by side here. Their worlds so close that they almost merged. 

"Is it their creation or a real child?" Amelia's question, although he'd kept his face netural, had dug at him deeply. It had been a question he'd asked himself.

Had it been their creation, this son they'd raised in the building, or had it been a real child? Apollo didn't know. It was all dust now, all those memories faded away, and his head felt heavy with memory and sorrows that had piled up as the years had faded past without them.

Leucothea's home was hidden, a pile of rubble that was now hidden by flower and thorn, it had crumbled when she'd left the Inbetween. Apollo's home had been built out of some of those stones to keep her around him. But without her, he suddenly didn't care for sleep, for food, for drink, the rituals pointless.

It was all pointless. He slept with women and men. He enjoyed drink, beauty, the pleasures of the flesh, and he spent far too much time in the more beautiful areas of the City of the Dead. Pondered God. Pondered the loss of his wife, who was now worshipped along side him in the Temple, and whether his child had really been real. Broken his heart over it.

He shook it free of his head now, standing up, brushing the branch of heliotrope out of the window. He didn't even bother exiting his home for the gate between his world and hers. One quick step and he was through.

One step and he knew that his attempts had failed to cheer Amelia up had failed.

The rain, which had not touched a thing in the land, now soaked everything. The thirsty ground was drinking up the water, dirt turning to mud, and water ran down the ruins, down the slope, and the bed was soaking wet. It looked like it had rained for days. How much time had passed in her world?

Apollo sighed. He'd hoped that the trip to the more beautiful part of the City of the Dead would help ease Amelia's transition into her new existence. That was one of the more cheerful and beautiful areas of the world, where people lived, loved, worshipped and still had hope. Not all the areas of the City of the Dead was like that, not all people transitioned the same way, there were dead places. Dark places. Some people would come here with so much regret from their life that they would expect punishment upon death and so their would would reflect this. They never seemed to believe or accept that the hell or Hades, or whatever they saw as punishment, was something of their own creation. That they were punishing themselves.