The Veiled One

Chapter Twenty-One: I become a relationship consultant

I didn't mean to beg, but I guess survival skills take over in moments like these.

Agramina looks amused at my distress, smiling up at me even through her tears. "I will not smite my champion, the boy who brings honor to my line."

I dare to look up again. "I bring you honor?"

The High Goddess shrugs, as if this was obvious. "You are the only mortal who has ever dared to comfort me before. And you are also the only mortal willing to fight a god when even other deities are afraid. How are you so disbelieving?"

"I've spent a long time not believing in anything, really," I confess, looking at the ground once more. "I guess it's hard for me to start now."

Agramina lowers herself from her throne and stands before me. Now that we're face-to-face, I realize that she's actually shorter than me. It makes her seem vulnerable in a way I didn't know such a temperamental goddess could be.

"Do you know the reason for my sorrow today, Sylas of my line?"

I shake my head. "I guess it had something to do with your argument with Fulmenarius."

At the mention of Fulmenarius, Agramina's face sours. "Indeed. I spoke to Fulmenarius today because I could not bear the thought of dying without telling him how I feel. When Lisentia came to us the first time, after the battle with the giants, I remember how she offered us our choice of her children to be our spouses. Mor chose Pandeia, and he stole her away to the Otherworld. Fulmenarius chose Sibyl, the most beautiful of them all. So I chose Argus. Handsome, young, the kind of boy whom I thought would make Fulmenarius jealous. I missed him, you see; I missed us. But then your wife disgraced him, and he and Lisentia cast their curse upon her, and I thought that now his attentions would return to me."

"But they didn't," I blurt, and Agramina turns to stare at me with a heavy gaze.

"Yes, I was wrong. He ignored me for centuries. And when Mor and Pandeia had a child, he took that girl to his bed after she came to The Summit and he had a child by her. I was disgusted with him, unable to believe that even after I'd pined after him for all this time, he would still leave me for a half-mortal."

"I don't understand. The ancient stories make it seem like you and he were as good as married. Why did you fall apart?"

Agramina's face creases as she thinks back on the memory, one I suspect that's as bitter as it is tragic.

"Allow me to ask you a simple question: how do you know that you and Sibyl are in love?"

Simple? That's her idea of a simple question? I try to think of a way to explain it, to put whatever it is that exists between us into words, but I can't. I can only shrug my shoulders as Agramina nods.

"Exactly. You can't voice it. That's how you know that it's real. What Fulmenarius and I share is easily expressed verbally. We're like two magnets with opposite poles, snapping together until someone pulls us apart. We can only refute the attraction for so long before it becomes impossible to fight. Such a relationship... It's convoluted and twisted, but it's the way we have to learn to live."

"Then why not marry him? Why not permanently align your poles, so to speak?"

Agramina arches an eyebrow. "The thunder god and I are a poor combination that never should have been. We love each other with a force so passionate that when it turns to hate—and it does always turn to hate—the fallout is all-encompassing. If we were to wed and then fall out of love, our children would fight each other on our various behalves. There would be a war. So even if it's wrong of us to go on this way, we have to. There is no way that either of us can win in this situation."