SOME BREAKS CAN’T BE FIXED.
Endless Reaching
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Ahri Blue looked upon the Holy Garden — her garden — for the first time in millennia and laughed low in disbelief as tears pearled like dew in her dapple green eyes. “Â-dun,” she whispered, pressing her flattened hands to her lips. Exhaling something like a cross between a laugh and a sob, she reached for Yggdrasil’s endless-reaching roots with a trembling hand, but stopped herself short, shut her eyes, and closed her fist.
No.
There was something wrong here.
Forcing her eyes open, Ahri Blue uncurled her fingers and laid her palm flat on Yggdrasil. She waited, but nothing sparked between her earth-dark fingers and the sacred tree, though even an echo such as herself should still be able to feel something.
Anxiety, cold and skittering, climbed up her throat the longer she looked at her hand, lifeless on Yggdrasil’s root. She studied the looping vines and leaves and flowers painted white across her skin, searching for the reason, but the longer she stared, the more she felt that something was missing. Something important.
Ahri Blue closed her eyes again and carefully breathed out.
“Pharos.”
“I had hoped to see you smile just once before you realized.”
Though the voice, without a shadow of a doubt, belonged to her husband, Ahri Blue found herself face-to-face with a man she didn’t recognize upon opening her eyes. His alabaster skin was perhaps the only feature remotely similar to the faces he had adopted in the past. With a gangly frame, heavily freckled skin, and ginger afro, nothing about his appearance particularly screamed Pharos, High Star of the Metaphysical.
But perhaps that was precisely the point, she realized as he fixed her with a smile dimpled and disarming. After all, while she had all but dissolved her marriage to Pharos, he seemed to earnestly believe they would one day reach a resolution, as they always had. But their most recent schism was too great to be bridged by anything as superficial as illusion, her wounds too deep to yet be forgotten amidst the other, tiny parts of her that she seemed to be losing piece by wretched piece.
Once, a wealth of light and love had warmed the space between them. Now Ahri Blue saw only a chasm of cold, broken bodies and the condemnations carved on their vulture-picked bones.
And so she turned away from her husband’s searching, apologetic eyes and clasped her hand to her chest, folding her dark fingers over her bare wrist and rubbing her thumb, back and forth, over her tattooed skin.
“Why now?” she asked in the carefully bland tone she’d been perfecting over her sojourn on Earth, continuing to move her thumb, back and forth.
“Roedanya–” Pharos started, but his beseeching only prompted her to retreat into Â-dun, thorny brambles springing up in the space she yielded. But this was only an illusion of her garden, her command over it as flimsy as her sense of self, and it came as no surprise when her husband materialized before her, saying, “You refused to speak with me.”
Ahri Blue came up short, pressing her lips together. “No, Phae.”
She spoke softly, coming closer, until only a hand-span separated them.
“I still refuse to speak with you.”
Her lips forming an “o” shape, she blew a quick, short breath that shattered the ginger man before her, breaking him apart into a cloud of crimson butterflies that she strode through.
