Older Gods 8

Our thoughts were bound more closely at the times our bodies wound around. The idea that started in your mind traversed through our skin ending and reflecting in mine. We saw shared memories from the perspective of each other’s eyes.

Feet buried in the foreshore, head to head and hand in hand, we saw each other as seen in the lens of our own eyes. My reckless exuberance, your cautious contemplation. My doubt once off the precipice, your soaring certainty. How I urged in stolen moments our only course was that we flee, how long you pondered, read and planned, and then when I thought that we would die apart upon the sands that spawned us, you said “the time has come, we shall be wed under the aegis of our lost deity.”

But now, joined, so much more than married, it is my headstrong rush that pushes your foot into the yawning void, your need for evidence and analysis that holds me at the door. The sudden flush of joy in remembering what we have overcome brightened our glowing skin, parted the darkness, we stepped within, as one.

Stairs wound into the mountain, a throat which swallowed light and us, spiralling down through air unmoved for eons, smooth walled and dry, without a trace of dust. There was no fear, not trepidation in our long traverse, but sorrow sweet and bitter hanging heavy, absorbing sound.

We grew dizzy through the long descent, surely far beneath the surface of the earth, and though ice locked the world above a dense and humid warmth enveloped us. Darkness sapped our strength, we could not fly, and in case of falling stepped resisting the steady pull of the unknown lying in wait.

And then it ended, a sudden flatness over which we stumbled, muscles still accustomed to the twisting of the stairs. A tomb, chapel, sacristy, broad pillared hall, a central pool and as if responding to our presence torches flared and filled the scene with dancing shadows imitating life.

The surface of the pool throbbed and rippled with our hearts. Here was at last our destination, the place our God had re-formed us both to find. From one corner of the world and to the other we had come, a journey long, marked with a moment of the deepest sorrow and mile upon smiling mile of happiness.

We gave no thought to what might lie ahead, what our God had brought together, nothing could tear asunder. We lit the chamber with our own unearthly light. Our hearts which had so long beat to the time set by this hidden sacred pool now set the pace of hammering until the waters rose to our accord. Our celebration of a life now lived within two lives awoke the spirit slumbering beneath the mountain’s weight. We heard the voice, bone deep and echoing as our own God’s voice had done.

I have been waiting centuries; at long last you have come.

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End

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