Once, this was an important place. Once, this was a place that the universe pivoted around. Once, this was a place touched by the gods.

Only, isn’t every place like that, given enough time?

Sunshards glitter like diamonds in the sky, like the stars scattered deliberately across the wine-dark void. Below, the waves crash together against the shore, a mirror. The breeze is cool and brings with it the rustle of cypress branches, the songs of morning birds, the prickle of goosebumps on skin. There will never be another breeze that is exactly the same. A butterfly, shockingly blue, rests with its wings spread on her knee.

She expands. She lets the experience of the butterfly pass through her, the shape of it, the meaning of it, the birth in pain and the death in chill and the beauty in between. The soft cypress needles rest on her tongue. The sunshards pass through her heart with a song. A string unspools and she hooks it with her little finger.

She sits down grinning next to herself, and when the butterfly shoots up, she breathes out and it finds a place to land in Dolce’s kitchen, resting on the back of his hand, where it will receive a plate of sugar water and sun to bask in, and when Vasilia comes in for breakfast, she’ll see it and, knowing Vasilly, knowing their love, she’ll find a way to describe its shade of blue that he’s never heard before.

“Here?”
“Here, in just a moment.” She beams. They’re wearing the same practical outfit, the kind of clothes that you don’t mind getting grass stains on when you’re chasing after sheep. She has a rod in her lap which looked at one way is a crook and another is a wand.
“Do I need to…?”
“I don’t think so? Sorry, I’m still, we’re still— we’ll figure it out as we go, I think. I’ve got a lot to do backwards, because…”
“Because this is impossible.” She lets it hang in the air like a shard. She nods in agreement. “We couldn’t have gotten here. We should have failed so many times. [i]I[/i] should have failed.”
“But it’s right that we got here. Like a eur… a… um. Like the happy ending that you don’t see coming? Like the end of [i]Batrachomyomachia VII.[/i]”
“Would the Nemean have gotten us here?”
“Why are you asking me? I haven’t figured it out in the past five minutes!”
“It’s five minutes from now?”
“I wasn’t counting…”
The urge to pout is strong. Instead, Redana closes her mismatched eyes and reaches out more until she can almost feel the strings vibrating.
“I think, with my wisdom of approximately five minutes and divine ascension, that she would have gotten here alone and then been crushed by Aphrodite like a bug. And then he would have tied her up as a trophy and dangled her from a comet to watch entropy.”
“And the only reason I beat her is because you were there.”
“I hope I’m ready for it by then.”
“You will be. Otherwise there’s no happily ever after, and that’s the world which has to exist: one where Bella is waiting for me with her sisters, where Dolce has his izakaya, where Dyssia and Alexa and everyone get to live in a universe which will never be perfect and blue and— [i]oh.[/i]”

Dawn breaks. She reaches out and wraps her heart around it.

She gets up and spins and laughs and dances, and everything, every wonderful little mystery, every desire not to be alone, every wishing heart turns with her.

She sits down, beaming.

“Here?”
“Here, in just a moment.”