El and Onine (15 page)

From that moment, she thought of our encounter every
time she looked at me. I could see it in her eyes whenever I passed her in the
Temple. That simple moment of ecstasy made me greedy for more and I returned
again and again to be with her, even as she slept. I braved the coldness of an
eyeless sky to sit and watch the peaceful beauty, as she traveled the dreamy realm
of sapient rest. I recalled how I felt when I first saw my goddess bathing with
the sisters of the Astros in the lava temple on the shadowed side of Granite
Peak. Every night I spent at El’s shanty felt like that first time.

As if driven by some inexplicable force, my attempts
to be alone with the sapient grew bolder and bolder. When the fire starter caught
me in her garden and stopped me from touching her beneath Terra’s cold satellite,
I dropped my pursuit. He was right to chastise me for putting her at risk. I
had abjured all sense of decorum and was lost to desire.

“You have to wait until it’s done and we’re ready.”
The fire starter was jealous, the emotion showed on his cheeks. He had come
around, which made me happy, protecting her fiercely even from me. He had doubted
my plan at the start. “I don’t understand how it’ll work,” he had said. “How
you can become me?”

“I will not become you,” I had said. “I will no
longer be as I am now, but I will only become a part of you.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.” Confusion was
written on his face. We were alone in the silo and I had asked him to remove
his covering so I could see his expression at hearing my scheme. The sapient
was skeptical, as expected, though Mara had prepared him for some of it before
she left.

“I know what El means to you,” I said. “I know the
feelings you have for her and I envy the world you may build together but her future
is complicated, as is her past, and she will need both of us despite the change
to come.”

“What change?”

The fire starter held his position, prepared to
battle the metaphysical space he would never understand. He was wary of the
Kyprian world into which he had been born. He, like El, had never known another
life and instinct led him to believe freedom was possible. He was different
because of his selection and sensed that distinction from inception.

“El is special,” I said. “She possesses the power for
change within her and she must be free to use her gift when the time is right. For
this, we must protect her.”

“I still don’t understand what change you
mean—she’s going to change?”

“You will know everything soon.” I knew how
unsatisfying that sounded. He kicked the dust from his boots, trying to prove
he was built for such candid speech. He was incapable of knowing how worthy he
was.

“What does this—this fusion thing involve?”

He wanted to know if he would feel our union. “You
will not suffer any pain if that is what you are wondering.”

“What about you? Do you feel pain?”

I kept him from knowing the agony I would undergo, and
that which I had already endured. “You need not worry yourself about my
sacrifice. I am built for this.”

He studied me for a moment and I tried to read his
mind but could not. As I lifted my hand to place on his shoulder, he backed
away.

“What are you doing?”

“Trust me.” I wanted to evince the transformation
that had already taken place. “It is safe.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Do you know El loves you?” It pained me to say it
but I thought it would help persuade him. I could only accept the fact by
reminding myself it was the sapient part of her that had fallen in love.

“How do you know?” His voice rang with excitement.

“The council of three discusses such matters and I
am privy to them.”

“But they broke us up.” He looked down at his hands
and picked at the dirt beneath his nails.

“Not forever.”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you trust me—for El?”

“For El?”

“Yes, everything is for El.”

He nodded, giving in despite his desire to hold out.
I smiled at what I considered his admission. Though he was silent, I could see
it on his face –
I’ll do anything
for El.
Until then I had only suspected he loved her, but now saw the proof.
I felt a tinge of excitement when I imagined the two together and the sapient
passion they would share, things my goddess and I would enjoy too.

“I have prepared myself for our union and am almost
ready to experience complete fusion.”

“Don’t I need to prepare too?”

“You are perfect as you are.”

“What’ll it feel like?”

“The change for you should be gradual. Perhaps a slight
shift in your manner, or your desires and tastes, but then it will be as if
nothing has changed and your life will be as though it were always shared with
mine.”

He shook his head. “I don’t get it. Will I still be
me?”

“Yes.” I refrained from telling him he would also be
me. I reached for him again. “May I?”

He nodded and took a step forward. With little
ceremony, I placed the palm of my hand on his shoulder and held it there. He
tensed at first but soon relaxed when he felt little, if nothing, on contact. The
touch rocked through my terrestrial core, as his coldness shot up my arm, making
my head spin. Despite the pain, I held on to him.

“Can all of us touch?” He asked.

I assured him this was special. “Do you feel
anything?”

“Maybe a tingle,” he said. “But nothing like a
burn.”

“This is—is as bad as it will get for you.” It
was difficult to speak with my head pounding as it was. I was only at the
beginning, I reminded myself. It will get better. That is what Saturnia’s
sister told me when she described how I would force my flame into the sapient,
letting it live forever bound in his core.

“The coldness will outmatch everything you have ever
known,” she had said. “Even worse than the gelid blue nivis on Gelu. But you
are prepared for this. Your rebirth into darkness and cold has made it so.”

“Will I still need the eye?” The thought of breaking
free from my reliance on the molten fire had warmed me.

“Not as you do now,” she had said. “It will regulate
you as it does the sapient, but your reliance on it will lessen, as it will no
longer be the only source of your existence. You and the fire starter will be
the second of a new breed, just like El.”

“And their offspring?”

Saturnia’s sister had nodded. “It is unfolding as it
should.”

She had no guarantees. We all walked blindly toward
the new world. My goddess, her retinue, the fire starter and Mara’s offspring,
our fates were intertwined and could no longer be severed.

***

I will keep you safe,
goddess. I will make you whole again, but you must go through it. You must
experience the truth of your beings. You must know the lechery they are capable
of. You must know that we are creatures of desire, of yearning, of lust, of fire.
You made us so, in your image, goddess, and we worship you because of it. If
they find you, I cannot stop them from ravishing you. They will fight for their
existence, for the Venusian species. They are afraid to perish and will take
you so their flames stay lit when you choose.

But unlike them I go willingly
to my end. I will give up my existence to save yours. I belong to you, Kypria,
and you are mine. I will do anything for you, I will suffer everything for you,
I will experience all for you. Know that my admiration is infinite, goddess. You
will live in me always.

***

I woke with the memory of a dream, the greatest
evidence my fusion with the fire starter had taken hold. Soon we would be one
and the same. I went with him to the wheat field to meet her, to see her through
his eyes, to touch her with his hands for the first time. The field was dark with
Terra’s satellite barely visible in a starless sky, so when he called to her, I
remained unseen.

“El,” he said. “Are you here?”

Her small voice was like a whisper in the breeze, a
welcomed change to the hum of the fire starter. She came out from the stalks of
wheat and greeted Tal with a smile. Unveiled and free, she looked as I had
dreamed.

“I’m glad we met out here,” he said.

I refrained from joining their meeting at first, waiting
in the shadows for the right moment to enter the fire starter. I envied his ability
to touch her when he reached for her hand and held it in his. He led her deeper
into the darkness and away from the glow of her shanty. I skulked behind them,
floating above the soil and carried on the breeze. When they stopped at a
tarnished plot of gold, I made my entry. I reached for him in the darkness and
slipped beneath his skin with barely a disturbance. He was used to our
synthesis and evinced my arrival with only the slightest change in breath.

“Sit with me,” we said as one.

Since Tal’s eyes were duller than mine, the field
sank into darkness and it took me some time to see her as more than a blurry
halo. Until then, I let the fire starter tell her what he had come to say. He
and I had rehearsed this part, my telling him only what Saturnia’s sister
wanted El to know.

“He can tell her about the experiment,” Saturnia’s
sister had said. “He can speak of the past, but only in shades of gray. He must
refrain from speaking about Mara and you, and he is forbidden from mentioning
the youngling.”

“I understand,” I had said. “But can we reassure her
somehow? Tell her something that will keep her from fearing Tiro?”

“He may speak about the preparation, though in vague
detail.”

“Can she know my goddess chose the two of us, Mara
and I?”

“Yes,” she had said. “She cannot know it was you
though.” My Kyprian sibling knew I was anxious to share everything with my youngling.
“That will alter things and her choice will be enchained.”

“And if she asks the fire starter how he knows,” I
had said. “How does he explain his part in all of it?”

“He should deny any part,” she had said. “He must
use the water reader as his source of knowledge.” I understood what she wanted
and explained it to Tal.

As I burned within him, listening to the exchange I
thought he handled El’s questions well, but she wavered, unwilling to trust his
commitment to her.

“Why would Minosh tell you this?” She asked him in
the darkness. The halo was getting clearer and I could see the lines of her
face but when the fire starter finally brushed the hair from his eyes, my sight
sharpened. I saw her as she was—fire and clay.

“She wanted me to protect you,” we said as one.

“From what?”

“Minosh knew—”

“I’d be selected.”

“Yes.” Until then we stuck to the rehearsed script
but when I felt the urge to speak on my own, I changed the course of his
speech. “She came to see me before she left and begged me to watch over you, to
keep you from them. She told me to take you away if I had to. That’s when she
told me everything.” El was skeptical and questioned her creator’s intentions.
“She thought you’d be frightened by the prospect of being with a Kyprian and
she was worried it would delay your—well, she said it was important for
you to reach full sapience before taking you away.” I improvised as I went
along, the fire starter at the mercy of my mind now.

“I’m staying,” she said.

“I assume you’ve had the change—”

“I won’t discuss this with you.”

Tal kicked the dirt at his feet, trying to release
the hold I had on his mind. I continued to plead with her to accept my help
until the fire starter reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. I lost
control then, no longer capable of driving his speech. The pleasure of feeling
her sapient skin numbed me and I reveled in the bliss of our first touch.

“Terra belongs to no creature.” The mention of my goddess’s
name for their planet pulled me from the rapture and I was with him again. He
had slipped into a shade of gray he was supposed to avoid. I could see her processing the name, as though
she recognized it.

When Tal touched her again, this time wrapping his
arms about her, I became drunk with pleasure. When he threaded his fingers with
hers, I was lost, and when he held her soft cheeks in his hands, I thought I
could live there forever. It was only when she spoke my name that I returned to
their sphere.

“It can’t be Tiro—no, it’s Onine.”

My sweet youngling had believed she was mine all
along.
And so you shall be clay-born
goddess, so you shall be.

“Onine is gone,” we said into the darkness together.

When El returned to her shanty, I released the fire
starter.

“Will it always be like this?” He was able to feel
me in him, if only the slightest bit.

“The discomfort will fade with time,” I said. “I
cannot tell you what it is like for me.”

“Painful?”

“Yes, but when you touch my goddess, I am reborn
into fire and driven to bouts of euphoria.”