All Our Sea-Faiths

“It is not so unusual for the Gods to go quiet,” the Priestess says. 

She presses a gloved hand against the window. Reluctantly, Palasha follows the gesture. 

Bright droplets scatter on the glass. Outside, mist bathes the tangled hills. Above these knots of heather and gorse, clouds stir the sky, and above even these, Palasha pictures her unanswered prayers, supplications, curses, and taunts; she imagines them freezing in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and falling, unheard, as pinprick rain.

“The rain still falls, and the tides come and go at the predicted times. Ranomas and Thalassa have not abandoned us,” the Priestess continues. She means to be reassuring, but there is little she can say. 

Palasha herself says nothing. She merely folds her arms and focuses her gaze on the tendril of iron-gray hair escaping the Priestess’s wrap.

“It is not so unusual,” the Priestess repeats. This time, Palasha hears the unsaid.

It is not unusual, but it is unlucky.

It is unlucky for an acolyte to devote herself to a God who has decided to take a break from mortals.

Palasha shifts her gaze to the Priestess’s. She wants to make sure the Priestess sees her hands and mouth form the practiced shapes of invocation. Palasha sends one last venomous prayer that, wherever Ranomas finds himself in the wild cosmos, he is miserable.

Palasha isn’t sure where to go. She takes the spiral steps two at a time. She passes by the dining hall with only a minor hesitation. Comfort food will be the next stage of her grieving process, but for now, she still needs to flee. She lets her feet take her past the classrooms and altars, all obsolete to her now, and out into the rain. She doesn’t notice the other acolyte trailing her steps until he speaks.

“From the look on your face, I’m guessing you heard.”

Palasha startles. “What?”

“That they’ve gone silent.” The boy shrugs. “That we’re out of luck and options and, quite possibly, our room and board. I haven’t checked the rule book. I didn’t want to think it was true.”

Palasha shakes her head and keeps walking. She wants to process this news alone, or, better yet, not process it at all.

But the boy follows.

“You are one of his, aren’t you? Ranomas.”

She blinks at him in surprise. “Do we know each other?”

He smiles, and it’s sheepish and endearing. “We study in the same wing of the library, and, well, there’s a change in the air just before you enter a room. It’s subtle. Noise dampens and the everything smells sharp and fresh and a little bitter, like a storm about to break. I kept looking up from my tomes, half expecting a lightning strike. It took me so long to figure it out — I thought I was going mad. But it’s you. It has to be you.”

Palasha looks at him properly then. It is unusual for young acolytes to sense these things, and by the look of him, he is no further along than her. And yet, as she listens to him speak, she hears some current in his words — something both quiet and urgent, like the rush and murmur of the surf. Awareness dawns, and Palasha softens.

“And you’re one of hers. Thalassa.”

The boy nods. Palasha finds herself looking at the rain catching in the boy’s eyelashes and hoping it will not fall when he blinks.

“Ah,” she says. “Then we’re both doomed.”

At this, they both smile.

As it turns out, they keep their room and board. The Temple hopes that the Gods will return within their lifetimes, though past absences have been, in a word, erratic. Sometimes less than ten years, sometimes nearly a century. And so Palasha studies texts in the library and reads tomorrow’s weather in the patchwork of clouds and palettes of sunrise. Because she has been abandoned by her God, Palasha does not learn the nuanced language of the devoted. But she does learn that the boy’s name is Niall. She learns that he loves blackberries and hates green beans and swims like a seal, slicing through the water like a dark tooth. 

In the mornings, they walk down to the beach. He slips into the surf and she settles into the sand, watching the clouds form and fall away. She sits on a thin blanket with green tassels, though her feet hang off and her toes play with the grit and shells and time-worn stones. She gets to work. 

Between observations, predictions, and calculations, she glances up from her notebook and watches his arm split the surface of the water, curve, and vanish. She tries to hold her breath for as long as he does, but a fuzziness creeps into her chest, tender and delicate as a stretch of cirrus cloud. Long before he surfaces, she breathes.

In the nights, they drift into one of the close, candlelit corner pubs smelling of pipe smoke and risk. They guess each other’s drinks and strangers’ names and keep the guessing going.

Tonight, Niall asks, “Why?”

Palasha does not have to ask what he means. It is a question she still whispers into the blank sky each day and into her pillow most nights. She feels the absence like a knife’s edge, pressed keenly to her neck. 

Of course, there are never any answers. She likes this game of inventing their own. She plants her elbows on the sticky table.

“Maybe they grew tired of our petty mortal affairs.”

Niall shakes his head. “We’ve been petty for millennia. Maybe they fell asleep.”

Palasha leans forward. “Maybe they quarreled with Eluned and a war is brewing in the sky.”

He looks at her, wild as a riptide, and raises his glass.

“Maybe they’re in love.”

He downs the dregs, and so does she. Somewhere, music is playing. The rest of the night blurs into amber-soaked years.

Today, rain blurs the window. Palasha wakes to Niall’s whisper in her ear.

“Can you smell it?”

Palasha blinks the sleep from her eyes and pushes herself up. A smile draws across her face because it’s their anniversary and because yes, she can smell it, and taste it too. Fresh and sharp and just a little bitter. Just how she likes her coffee. Just how Niall likes her. 

A storm is coming. They could not have asked for a better gift. 

Palasha reaches for her walking stick and follows Niall outside. The weak sunlight plays with the grey in his hair, spinning it into white gold. Salt crystallizes in the furrowed wrinkles of his cheeks — those laughter lines she prides herself on making. He has already gone swimming this morning, and she hopes he will go again. After all these years, the sea still moves as if it was made to hold him.

She winces as she walks. She used to think that her bones begrudged the rain as much as she loved it. Whenever the sky greys over, air dampens, and atmospheric pressure lifts its heavy hand, hips and shins and arms become ley lines of pain. But she has come to know the ache not as a curse, but a longing. A remembering. It is the language of the marrow and star-stuff enmeshed in her bones, calling out to the storm.

Niall leads her to the beach, and she sees the thin blanket with the green tassels. It is sun-bleached and weighted with piles of stones at each corner, so that the wind does not take it. As she sits, her hands find one of the many patches on the worn fabric. Niall sits beside her. They wait, with quiet comfort, for the moment the wind sharpens and the ocean turns.

Neither can pinpoint exactly when the first memory returned. Only that it did. From there, they trickled in at strange, unpredictable times. They took to telling them as bedtime stories as they remember them. 

One night, over the banked coals of a driftwood fire, Palasha leans on Niall’s shoulder and whispers, “In one life, she is an aspiring painter.” 

Niall tilts his head to rest on hers, smiling. His voice is rough from smoke and years, but it still sounds like the softest surf.

“He models for her class.”

She traces shapes in the thick knit of his sweater.

“The swirls of paint on her canvas mold themselves into tides and storms.”

“Each night, he molds himself to her shape.”

In this life, they are each other’s acolytes. Did they choose this, or was it chance? That memory has not returned. She thinks this life is her favorite, if only because of the irony. But she has had favorites before.

Sometimes they find each other when they are old and grey, much as they are now. There is not always time for all of the memories to return, but they don’t need them. They will make new ones.

Of course, they do not always find each other. There are shipwrecks and sweeping sicknesses and other lovers. They lose each other in a multitude of ways. Human hearts are scared, scarred things, liable to think they must forget in order to survive. When they must leave, exchanging mortal memory for the loneliness of divine domains, these are the lives they regret.

Now, there are no regrets. 

They lean against each other as the first drops of rain fall. The sea churns grey. Wind lashes the waves and cuts through their layered scarves and sweaters, sending shivers down their spines. 

“Should we tell them, do you think? Why the Gods leave?”

Palasha follows Niall’s gaze. After they graduated from their studies, they did not move far. On clear days, the Temple is clearly visible across the water. Now, Palasha can only make out the faint shapes of its spires. Slowly, she shakes her head.

“No. If they are very lucky, they will figure it out.”

At this, he smiles. “We did.”

“We did,” she agrees.

From their little cottage perched on a sea cliff, they have seen countless days of sun and rain, and they have long stopped wishing for it to be easy. Palasha has learned how to walk back through the door, even arguments still ring in her ear and her feet long to flee. Niall has learned to listen when it would be easier to speak, and to speak when sullen silence seems the path of least resistance. Easy is not peace. Peace is out there, amid the wash and ruin, in that center of calm where the wind and waves carve out space to be alone, at rest, and in love. 

They have learned much, and know they are running out of time. Niall watches grey smears of rain on the horizon line. Memory tugs at him, as it often does now, and he turns to Palasha.

“Do you miss making our own storms?”

She smiles. “These lives are always hurricanes.”

They meet each other’s gaze. Niall lightly traces a wrinkle on her cheek.

“And always, you are the eye.”