Once…

Once you could taste the air. Once you could smell the rain. Once pain was real and the marks we made on the earth were all permanent, even the ones that seemed to fade. Once Earth meant more than clay and sand and soil. That was before Agora.

Now only the Gods remember.

It has driven them mad.

Agora is old, it was designed that way. Designed to age and patina and grow in its beauty. But a thousand years after its creation, the natural and aged character that was supposed to be born from their gathered wisdom was halted, and magic faded from the world. It was a place for wisdom, where all could grow and age and learn and live out their days in a long and lingering farewell.

Unfortunately, in this land wisdom brought magic and magic brought power. The worn edges of the world peeled back and revealed ways it could be manipulated that the Gods did not intend, at least not those among them that had imagined this place to be their dominion.

So they intervened. Agora remained, the buildings, the haunted forests, the great sea and the good sea, the city states and empires, the desert to the south and the western mountains and their deep and secret places. But the people were forever changed. Their wisdom erased, their stories unwritten. They started life anew and the world felt wrong and empty in all the places it should not. So the Gods erased the wrongness as well. Their immortality was masked and their power buried and so the age of mortals began.

There are many stories from that time. Many lives lived and more lives lost. Histories written and rewritten and forgotten and only now beginning to be uncovered. This is not one of those stories. This is a story about how the age of mortals came to an end.

That end started as all unmakings do, with a broken heart.

“Good evening.” Prosimo’s face shifted, cheekbones sharpening, eyes turning the same green as Ru’s first love.

“Is it?” Ru asked. And it was. The clouds raced across the perfect starlit sky, radiating in the purple glow of the just set sun. Ru looked around, confused, he could have sworn it had just been raining.

This was not the first time Prosimo had courted Ru. Though Ru had not been his name in the times before. He’d courted him when he was a strongbacked vandal from Re’laeah, a poet from Iridia, several times when he was a woman and once, briefly, when he had been a goat. He had not felt proud of the latter, though in his defense, he had also made himself a goat in the attempt. Of all his courtships, of each pained attempt, he had only been successful once.

And what a once it had been. They had loved for the better part of a century. Lived through the fall of the Gold Remnant, through the rise of a Republic and its turn to corruption and ruin, and they had barely noticed. Prosimo had allowed himself to age alongside of him. To feel the aches and pains of life eroding, the forced slowness, the grim clarity and the appreciation for small things that it brought with it. His name had been Sef… or was it Sif? It had been so long now and he’d since had so many. Ru’s name had been Eredo. That, he remembered. It flowed off his tongue, sounding like a beating drum in his chest.

Prosimo longed to feel that longing again, but since that first life, his love had remained unrequited.

“Why did you change your face?” Ru asked, “I saw you over there and you looked different.” Ru smiled at him playfully. This felt different, it felt hopeful. Prosimo felt his cheeks redden of their own accord. For the first time in a long time, he felt flustered.

“I- I thought it would be to your liking.”

“A God, trying to impress me? I’m flattered. How would you know what I like? Can you read my thoughts?”

He couldn’t, not exactly. Even the Gods had limits. He could read faces well, he’d learned that quickly enough. He could see a person’s entire story laid out before him in an instant, he could even, if he were so inclined, rewrite parts of that story on a whim. But a person’s thoughts were their own.

“I’m a God, I can do anything.” Prosimo said.

“Then why not just make me like you?” Ru asked, “Wouldn’t that be easier than guessing that I like green eyes?”

“Why are you not afraid of me?” Promiso asked.

“I don’t know.” Ru said, eyes glinting playfully, “But you didn’t answer my question.”

“Why not just make you like me?”

“If you can do anything.” Ru said, shifting his body closer. Nothing changed, but the crowd on the street seemed to disappear. It was just the two of them, alone in a crowded market under the perfect glow of the evening sky.

“Because it wouldn’t be real.” Prosimo said. He stepped closer to Ru, close enough to feel his breath against the skin on his neck. This felt real. This felt like it was happening.

“But it’s real when you change your eyes and put on a pretty mask?” Ru asked. He pressed his hands against Prosimo’s chest and pushed him back. Not far enough to end the game, but far enough to sting a little.

“This?” Prosimo asked, “This is just makeup. It’s not the same.”

“I know it’s not the same. But I want to see your real face.”

Prosimo hesitated. He frowned and felt his skin cool. He had worn so many faces across the years. Masks over masks over masks. All he remembered of his true face were the things he found loathsome about it. The imperfections magnified until they were all that was left. But it had been hundreds of years and this was the closest he’d come to feeling it again. This love was eternal, and he knew that eternal love deserved that sort of honesty. It just wasn’t something he was prepared to give.

He gave it anyway. The masks slid off, cheekbones softening, muscles fading. His eyes turned brown, then blue, then finally back to green. Had they always been green? He had forgotten that.

Ru looked at him. He smiled and in it Prosimo saw Eredo and felt the drumbreat of his name echo in his heart. “That’s better.” He said.

“Is it?” Prosimo asked.

“I can’t see a thing worth hiding from.” Ru said, and took another step closer, closing the gap he’d created.

Ru’s head arced back like he’d been struck through. His eyes went white. His body rigid. Ice spread across his skin, starting from his fingertips and closing in around his gasping mouth.

No, thought Prosimo.

“Peter, darling, what have you been up to?” Erlea asked, as Ru’s lifeless body fell, “I was willing to forgive that first hundred years. We all deserve our playthings after all, but if I didn’t know better I’d say you have feelings for this -” She waved her hand dismissively at the corpse.

“Why would you do that?” Prosimo asked, staring down at the body.

Erlea dragged her top teeth over her bottom lip. “Because for whatever fucking reason, I’m not done loving you yet. And just remember Petey…” she brushed his nose with her finger, “You wouldn’t be a God if it wasn’t for me.” Then she vanished.

Prosimo found Ru again, years later. This time as an old woman, living another life with another man, denied a birth and an aging, a victim to one of the other God’s little projects. He sighed and flicked his fingers, shifting the runes hidden beneath reality and she was Ru again. He could have made her Eredo, a part of him wanted to, but Eredo had lived a life, full and rich. That story had been told and told well. He didn’t want to risk tainting it.

“What’s happening?” Asked the old woman in Ru’s body. There was a part of Prosimo that dreaded what he was about to do. It was forbidden, and for good reason, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to wait another thousand years to feel it again. He pressed his fingertips into Ru’s forehead, found the ancient command that had locked him and the rest of humanity away, trapped them in this endless cycle of death and rebirth and with a flick of his wrist he destroyed it.

“Oh,” Ru said, as memories flooded his mind. He remembered Prosimo and the market. He realized that Prosimo was still wearing his true face. He remembered dying, and dying before, and before that. He remembered untold lives and tragedies and saw how Prosimo had loved him through all of them. He saw the times that Prosimo had tried to force his love and how hollow it had felt. He remembered each of the lies and the manipulations and hated and loved him for all of them. Then he remembered Eredo and their life together and all of Prosimo’s betrayals vanished. “Oh.” he said again, and looked into Prosimo’s perfect green eyes, loving him more deeply and purely than he had thought his heart would be able to contain.

Then he remembered the older betrayals. The ones before he and Prosimo had met. The first betrayal. The ancient wisdom.

“Do you see it?” Prosimo asked, “Do you feel it?”

Ru kissed him, their lips pressed hard enough together that their teeth brushed. He felt Prosimo melt into him. A God, diminished in his arms, laid bare and helpless. A room wrapped up around them, silk sheets and draped curtains and the smell of lavender and honey.

It was later, when Prosimo was asleep that Ru made his way out to the street he’d known as the old woman. He found a boy, homeless and starving, that he’d seen on the streets and pitied. He pressed his fingers delicately into the boy’s forehead.

“Oh,” the boy said.