Chapter Eleven

The ice builds thick walls behind her, walls she knows will be shattered in moments by the Goddess who is coming for yet one more thing Elena dared call her own.

She looks at Damon who's looking at her like he can't understand her at all, like she is a baffling creature that has somehow crossed his path.

But she doesn't have time to tell him her sordid history, or give him words of comfort. The only thing that she can do now is to slow the Goddess down while he makes his escape, and if the mistress of luck up above is anywhere but near her spindle that spins golden threads of fate, he will make it out of her prison in nick of time to disappear among his kind.

She cups his cheek, a show of sentimentality, of weakness, something inside her snarls, and can't help but let her fingers linger on his pale skin, trace the edge of his lips.

She remembers thinking about the shocking blue of his eyes when they first met, of the uncomfortable memories his eyes had evoked.

There is fear in them, and desperation, something she is intimately familiar with.

"I am sorry," She says. "I will try my best to save yo-"

The warm press of his mouth cuts her off. His lips rub against hers and she is stone even as warmth beseeches her mouth.

He is kissing her.

And she doesn't know what to do.

She hasn't kissed anyone before.

He starts to back away and she gives chase, for this warmth, it's spreading inside her from her mouth to her face to the tip of toes of her feet. She has been cold for so long that she has forgotten what it means to not shiver in her skin, and so, she is greedy for this press of his lips against her own.

She cups his face, letting her sword fall.

The warmth on her lips feels like fire in her heart and it takes her a moment to realize that he is not kissing her anymore.

One of his hands is around her, palm probably curled around the hilt of a sword, the blade of which has pierced her from her back and come clean through her heart, the tip breaking the bones and sinew of muscles to jut like an icicle from beneath her skin.

Oh.

Oh.

She pushes against him and he lets go of his hold on the hilt, his eyes downcast. She falls to her knees.

Isn't she the fool?

Oh.

She had been bitching about that bastard Immortal General...and he had been by her side.

Posing as a human.

Gaining her trust.

Making her feel things.

Oh.

"They'll give you a promotion for hunting down the ice goddess, won't they?" She smiles through her pain, even as his fire battles her ice inside her.

The Immortal General. A fire wielding fae. A man whose eyes resemble the sky of her home.

He doesn't look at her.

He is perhaps waiting for her to die.

How will they believe him if he doesn't take back proof?

Will he cut off her head once she is no longer breathing?

Will he set her woodland on fire?

Well, she did whip him once. He is just balancing the scales.

"For what it's worth, I am sorry I didn't give a proper funeral to your brother."

He doesn't say anything.

He hasn't even raised his head to look at his handy work.

She feels funny. Even as she is dying, she just wants him to look at her and she wants to look at him in turn.

"Damon?" She calls.

Is his name even Damon? Or was it something he made up?

She bites her lips to stop the gasp of pain from escaping her mouth when the fire burns away a part of her rib inside her body.

And that makes him look up.

She should rejoice in the horror she sees in his eyes. She should feel elated when he closes his overbright eyes.

But she feels hollow.

She is tired.

"Elena," Comes the bellow from beyond her walls and she stills.

The Goddess is here.

She can feel the roots of peach trees piercing her ice. It's moments before the Goddess takes out the entire front section they're standing behind.

"Where is that runt of a God?" Mad Goddess screams as branches tear apart the pillars that support a section of the roof.

It takes her a split second to push against the floor to stand on her unsteady legs and hold out her hand.

Tendrils of ice race like young snakes to fashion her sword and pull Damon behind her by his shins.

~TX~

Mad Goddess still looks the same.

Elena has forgotten the life she had before she was Ice Goddess, has forgotten her father's face, is barely holding on to the scant memories of Elijah, but Mad Goddess… Elena hasn't forgotten a thing about her.

On her cheeks, stars still shine. The ashen white tendrils are still swaying in a nonexistent breeze, the red of her mouth is twisted in a snarl, but her eyes…there is no cosmos in her eyes.

Her eyes are brown.

Brown eyes…

She doesn't know why the sight of human looking eyes on Mad Goddess' face makes her want to scream.

Her pain forgotten, she raises her blade.

"You can't have him."

The smell of peaches is curiously absent, or maybe the fire has burned away her sensory receptor of smell.

"Oh, Elena! My poor, poor, Ta'al," Mad Goddess croons and Elena flinches back.

"Don't call me that," She roars. "You can't call me that."

Only her father called her that…

At her back, Damon has broken free from her icy restraints and the cackle of flames alert her that he has summoned his sword.

Is he going to run her from behind again?

While she stands in front of the Mad Goddess to save him?

Her eyes sting. She feels warm.

His fire is eating away her brain one dendrite at a time.

A vine cracks open the ice near her feet, but before it can move, Damon is setting it on fire with one quick move of his blade.

The Mad Goddess grows furious as Damon starts burning the saplings breaking out from beneath the frost.

"What more do you want from me, you imbeciles?" Mad Goddess screams in fury. "I gave my all to save your skin and you return my kindness by trying to take her from me?"

Elena closes her eyes at that. The realization that she is some treasured object that Mad Goddess has come to defend is sickening.

The idea that she is nothing but an extension of what amuses the Mad Goddess is… nothing new.

Maybe, dying is better, she thinks in haze. She will be free from this cold, from living in perpetual fear of the Goddess who poured all her yearning and longing, all her grief in a seven year old to punish her.

She might even see Jeremie.

She doesn't know what happens to a God when they die. She doesn't know where they go, but if there is an afterlife for divine deities, she would like to meet her father again, and introduce her son to him.

She might get to see Elijah. Again.

"He was right," Mad Goddess mutters to herself. "Vulcas was right. I should have let you all perish after Ithiran's demise… "

Elena watches Damon freeze momentarily before raising his sword to cut down a branch trying to wind its way around his throat.

He is trying to save his skin.

She deflects an arrow coming for his shoulder while he battles the foliage trying to strangle him. Curiously, none of the vines move to harm her.

She wonders why Mad Goddess hasn't trussed her up like a turkey and torn apart Damon.

Yes, she's covering for him.

She is aware that she is about to die and yet she's wasting what energy she has to defend the man responsible for her injuries.

She can't let him die.

He is Damon.

He is the boy who couldn't meet her eyes when he first came to her. He who sat on his knees on her icy floor near her head for an entire night.

He… who brought her flowers.

He who took her lashes without a single protest.

He… who made her let go of the grief she had kept safe in her heart after Jeremie's death…

It was all a show, something whispers in her head, perhaps the last ember of self preservation, of survival. He played you because it hurts more this way. The mighty Ice Goddess who slayed the Wolf Goddess brought down by sentimentality. She who froze the High God dying by a blade to her back because she wanted to feel warm…

She shakes her head.

She can't be like those Gods up above.

She isn't them.

She isn't her creator.

She is Elena. She is… just Elena.

And if this is the last thing she does, she is going to make sure he survives the Mad Goddess.

And with that thought, she raises her blade and thrusts it in her heart…

~TX~

The story starts like all the stories do, with a man and a woman.

But here the woman was Aether.

And the man, Void.

She was tasked to save the creation.

And he was duty bound to end it.

She picked up Ithiran's sword when he fell and met her lover at the edge of the universe.

He let himself fall at her feet.

And she let her hand swing that sword in an arc to take his head off.

She was Mad Goddess.

And he was Vulcas.

She was Aether.

And he was Void.

She was the beginning of it all.

And he, the end of all of it.

She sat at the edge of the universe and cried for what she had to do. For seven days her tears fell in the void, her hands still red with his blood.

On the eighth day he walked out from the void, but he wasn't Vulcas anymore.

He was a godling.

She was overjoyed.

She didn't care that he wasn't the same man. She didn't care that he felt different.

That he didn't feel like Vulcas.

He wore her lover's face, and so, the Mad Goddess forgot that what once dies doesn't come back the same.

They ran away to hide in the corner of the universe she called her own, far away from the Court of the Gods, far away from the talks of crowing her the Queen.

There she gave birth to a brown eyed girl.

And knew… that the father of her child wasn't the man whom she had loved and killed.

And so, Mad Goddess ran away to the edge of Universe once again to wait for someone who would never come back.

The God she had mistaken for Vulcas took the child and went to live on the outskirts of Heaven…

Then one day, the Mad Goddess caught the daughter she had run away from stealing her prized peaches, peaches upon the trees she had planted with Vulcas.

She did what Gods often do.

She poured her maddening grief into her child and turned the child into something she wasn't supposed to be…

~TX~

Hundreds and thousands of years later, humans talk of a Goddess who sacrificed herself to spare her enemy.

They talk about a God who disappeared after being granted mercy at the hands of his nemesis.

They talk of ice that almost became the tomb of the Mad Goddess and about fire that almost burned her to crisp.

They tell stories about two Gods who weren't supposed to fall, but did…

Some say the Mad Goddess still walks the length of the universe, dragging her sword behind her, singing the same song of mourning a young girl heard all those years ago. But now, they say, she looks for a long dead girl instead of a long dead primordial…

~TX~

In a busy class, a girl looks up and finds a boy staring at her. She frowns and ignores him.

His gaze feels familiar and invasive. It makes hair rise on her skin. When the class ends, he walks over, looks at her as if she's someone he knows.

His blue eyes, they remind her of frozen lakes and glaciers, of skies reflected in them.

"I am Damon," He says, "Wanna ditch the next class and have coffee with me?"

A sharp retort is on her lips, but she hears herself say, "Sure."

Why does he feel so familiar?

Who is he?

How does she know him?

In distance, beyond the skin of this young world, the Mad Goddess sits at the edge of the void and sings about a long dead girl…

fin.