Midsommar.

1500 AD.

The first time they meet is in the middle of the village, under the stars of a midsummer night. She was spinning wildly around the flames. Hair flying around and dress sweeping along the ground. Yellow and white flowers that her sisters had delicately woven into her braids lay strewn around her feet.

Her world tilts as she stops before him. She knew him for what he was, the moment her eyes meet his. Traveler. One of the men who came with the ships twice a year, bringing wonders from the worlds she has never known. He kneels at her feet, plucking one of the yellow flowers from the ground. Gently brushing the dirt off the petals as he tucks it back into her hair.

“Beautiful,” he whispers.

Before anything else, she notices his eyes. Like the sea after a storm. When everything is cleared away, leaving nothing but the pale blues and greens swirling together.

People danced around them, not noticing the two standing frozen by the fire. She bunches her white dress in one hand and with the other reaches towards him. Moon high in the sky above them casting everything it touches in a soothing glow. They spin madly together, cheeks flushed from the heat and the dancing and their closeness.

Later when they both run through the tall grass, laughter trailing behind them, they collapse in the clearing where the trees end and the sea begins. Holding onto each other, memorizing all the lines and the details.

“Are the seas a dangerous place?” she asks him, admiring the blue markings on his arms.

He pauses, taking time to run his thumb over the edge of her cheek. “Isn’t everywhere? Men are always searching for the war–eager for they do not understand. Wanting to conquer everything…” His eyes close for a moment and she wonders what all this traveler has seen. She maps the veins under his eyes with the tip of her finger, the color of the lavender fields in spring. His hand reaches for hers, turning her palms up, tracing the lines.

“You haven’t asked me my name yet.”

“And you haven’t asked me mine,” she counters. “But tell me, what is your name, traveler?”

“They call me Harry.”

“And what land do you come from Harry?”

“A place very, very, far away,” he says against her lips. They stay like that, his lips hovering over hers and her ghosting her hand over some of the markings along his collar. He catches her hand once more as she dips down to the hollow of his throat. “And what is your name, beautiful girl?”

“Athena, but everyone calls me Thena.”

“Like the goddess…Athena,” Harry allows her name to roll off his tongue, saying it over and over. Whispering the name into her skin until she can feel it everywhere.

The clearing by the sea becomes the place they always meet. Lazy, slow summer nights when heat is unbearable, Harry still builds a fire. After many such nights Thena realizes it is so that they are not swallowed by the darkness.

Thena takes to swimming in the cool salty waters. Floating on top of the waves as they roll under her body. Harry joins her. Moonlight shining down on both of them. Sometimes Thena forgets to pay attention and floats so far, Harry always grabbing a hold of her hand.

He shakes his head at her. “One day you will float away with the tide and never be found again.”

“Then I will become a siren,” Thena laughs splashing water towards him. “Waiting on the rocks and singing my songs until one day your ship passes and I am found once again.”

“And what a siren you would make.”

Thena swims closer to Harry, arms wrapping around his neck, she whispers in his ear. “But none of that will ever happen, because you would never let me just drift away with the waves.”

Harry says nothing, only moving them back closer to the shore.

Soon the day comes and Harry leaves with the ship, Thena watching from their clearing as the white sails disappear on the horizon. Nights turn into days, summers into winters, days and months pass and one day Harry returns. Despite the time separating them, they still meet by the sea. Allowing their words to hover across each other’s skin. Promises of the life they will someday have. When night falls and Harry builds a fire he tells Thena of his home. One day, he swears he will take her there – to see the cliffs, the mountains, the docks, to see how the sea there is an inky black and terribly angry.

There is one night, ripples of water lap along Thena’s ankles as she walks the shoreline. The water is turning colder, the nights longer. Pulling her cloak around her shoulders, Thena closes her eyes as the breeze bows across the water. Thena makes her way back to the small fire. Flames crack and spark into the night. Mixing with the sounds of the water hitting the rocks down the shore. Winds rustles the leaves on the trees, in the distance Thena can hear a wolf howling and then, the sound of Harry humming.

Stretched out along the blanket he had brought, eyes closed a tune on his lips. Thena finds it impossible for her mouth to not burst into a smile at the sight in front of her. Settling down in the place beside him, Harry shifts closer until his head rests on her lap.

Absentmindedly she runs her fingers through Harry’s hair. Twisting the curls and dropping them back into place. His hair had grown longer in his time out at the sea.

Harry takes her hand in his own running his thumb along the ridges of her knuckles. Cracked lips brush over the back of her hand and Harry opens his eyes. “I believe I could love you forever,” he breathes over her skin.

Thousands of words choke in Thena’s throat. Chills travelling up her spine and covering her entire body. Gently, Thena pulls her hand from Harry’s grasp, trailing it along the edge of his jaw. She wants to remember all the lines of his face, remember the Harry looks as the sun sets before them, remember how the light of the fire reflects in his eyes.

Thena watches the boy in front of her and loves him so much she can barely breathe from her heart pounding against the cage of her ribs. Thena takes Harry’s hand, mapping the veins along the back, the callouses of his fingers, the black and blue markings around his wrists. Thena dips her head until her lips brush his.

“Forever is a long time.”

Harry does not reply, but his eyes – his eyes, tell Thena that there will never be enough time.

Weeks later a plague sweeps through the village. Thena almost loses Harry. Suddenly, forever does not seem long enough. She sees the two of them, hand in hand, walking through the years together. A life where time is nothing, where death is nothing. Thousands of years, lifetime after lifetime. Sprinting wildly through time together. Standing and facing the rise and fall of empires. And they laugh because they have a thousand more years stretching out before them.

Thena spends days and nights pouring over the books her mother believed she had hidden. Until finally, one night with nothing but a lantern guiding her through the trees, Thena meets Harry by the sea tattered book in one of her hand and a dagger gleaming in the other. Magic pours from her lips and he steadies her hands when they begin to shake. Cuts are made across their ribs, in the place where their heart beats underneath. Blood spills across the rocks running down to the sea at their feet. Thena speaks in a long dead language, ancient words tumbling from her lips into Harry’s. Around them the flames rise higher. The stars shine brighter. The wind picks up the speed. A thousand years of her coven whispering the words with them. And just like that it was done.

Suddenly all that is left is a deafening silence as the wind and the flames die down.

“What if we cannot find each other in the next one?” Thena asks, worry lacing her voice.

Calloused fingers weave their way through her hair, brushing over her temple. “I will always find you, in this life or the next.”

Time slips away, the cuts in their ribs heal to faint white lines. They tell no one, what they have done a secret between the two of them. Until the time comes for them to leave.

But there is one night, as Thena’s sister combs her fingers through Thena’s tangles hair, when Thena cannot help herself. Words spill over from the place she keeps them buried deep down in her chest. Thena turns around when her sister’s hands stop moving. In that moment Thena realizes her mistake. She watches as her sister’s eyes grow wide. Fear and revulsion crossing her face. Hate blooming in her eyes. Dark magic, she spits as she backs away from Thena, blood magic.

That night, Thena runs. To the clearing by the edge of the sea where her blood had spilled only a few nights before. Crawling down the rocks until she reaches their place. Harry is meant to be there waiting there for her. She had sent him the signal that they needed to run – to begin their lives, to begin their forever.

Nothing is there.

Only the sounds of the waves crashing against each other, lapping against the rocks on the shore, the wind echoing in the caves. Thick silence wraps around Thena. Her heart grappling with fear. The silence almost feels as if it is mocking Thena and her actions.

Again Thena runs. Dress flapping around her legs and muscles burning as she races back to the village. The smell of smoke reaches her first.

The screams are the next.

Harry is there. In the middle of the village under the stars where they had once danced together, around the flames. Only now the flames work their way up a cross, licking their way up his body. Wild eyes find Thena in the crowd. His eyes – once the colour of the sea when it was calm, darkened to the colour when it harbours a violent storm.

Hands grab her, tearing at her dress, pulling her hair, dragging her across the ground until ropes tighten around her wrist and wood is under her feet. Heat rises through her body. And she can’t breathe, she can’t move, all Thena can do is watch. She mutters words in the ancient language until Harry’s pain vanishes, taken away and given to Thena to bear. Because she would burn a thousand times over if it meant Harry had to never bear that pain.

Flames engulf them both as they watch each other burn. Stars above them begin to fade to black and Thena can no longer hear her own screams ringing in her ears. Breathing becomes more and more difficult, each one more painful than the last. Blood pounds in her ears and Thena knows that this is the end.

Forcing her eyes open, Thena watches as Harry closes his own one last time. She watches as his chest rises and falls like the waves on the sea and then, he is still.

The night is ripped open as Thena cries his name. Until the sound echoes through the village and all the people gathered around the flames. She screams so loudly that the whole world and the skies can hear her. Throat burning with the sound of his name until it no longer sounds like a name at all, only a broken cry of love and death.

Blinking through her blurred vision, Thena glances up to the stars one last time. Focusing on them, burning bright in the night sky. Soon everything fades to black. Thena takes her last breath of this life.

In the morning the sun rises over the village as it always does. Bodies are taken and buried in shallow graves. All day people in the village whisper the names of the lovers they burned the night before. Guilt clear across their faces. Night comes and blankets the people and their homes. There is no fire, no dancing, no laughter, no celebration. In the middle of the village the ashes still smoke, curling up into the night sky.

Moonlight reflects on the waves of the ocean. Somewhere along the water’s edge, along the rocks, Thena opens her eyes once more.

Present Day.

The salt in the air stings Thena’s cheeks as she walks down through the town. Winter has led the sea to become colder, crueller than Thena could ever remember it being. Although it had been decades since she had come back to this place.

The path down the sea had once been familiar. Now, the small village Thena had been born in was long forgotten. Replaced by a picturesque town on the edge of the clear, blue water. It now looks like it belongs on the front of a postcard. All small buildings and sleek boats docked out in the cove. The trees Thena had loved to run through all cut away.

Thena finds the graves near the sea.

Years had slipped away since she has been to this place, and there are times when even Thena can’t remember everything as clearly as she once had. But they were still there. Under an old olive tree, twisted and worn by time and the salt in the air. On a small overlook, hidden behind the tall grass. This was the highest point in the village, the clearing where lifetimes ago the trees had opened to the sea. One could stand here and see the whole world stretching out before them. Thena liked to believe that Harry would like them to be at this place. It was one thing that time had left untouched, one most people had forgotten about.

She had considered having the graves where Harry’s home was. But that was not a place Thena had been yet, still waiting for the time when Harry would take her there.

Tugging the jacket around her, Thena buries her chin further into the leather. Hiding away from the sharp bite in the wind. Lifetimes ago, this had been the very hill all the girls would climb to catch the final glimpse of the boats. Hands twisting in their skirts as they watched the white sails fade away, swallowed by the sea and the sky. Flowers adorning their braids and desire filling their eyes. Wondering when one day they too would go and sail the endless sea. Time after time, Thena had watched the ships come and go. Sat in this very spot in the tall grass with her sisters, watching and waiting to see the white sails. It was here Thena had waited for Harry to return that first summer – their last summer in that life.

A breeze rustles the grass around Thena’s legs, the wind cutting through her jacket to her very bones. Chills ran down her spine as she steps closer to the graves. Wind from the sea blowing her hair in a thousand directions and Thena closes her eyes. Feeling the salt against her skin and the smell of the sea, remembering a life so long ago. Despite the cold, the sun breaks through the clouds, shining all around her. And somewhere in the wind, Thena swears she can hear Harry whispering her name.

Thena jerks around and there is nothing. Nothing but the grass and the sky and the graves at her feet.

Years had worn the names away to almost nothing, the date etched below them all but faded to the point of never existing at all. But they had.

Kneeling until the grass reaches near Thena’s shoulders, she presses her palm to the stone. Thousands of memories rush forward, each more painful and vivid than the last. There is an ache is her chest and feels like time is slipping through her hands. Blowing away like sand in the breeze. One day, there will be nothing left. Thena is not sure what happens then. The ache beats deep in her chest as she drags the tip of her finger along the letters of his name.

Clouds begin to roll in off the sea, darkening the skies. Scattered rays of sun shine down around her as the wind picks up once more. It sends the nerves buzzing through her body, like a fire spreading through a forest. Tilting her head into the sun’s warmth, light and shadows dance around her and the stones and it breaks Thena’s heart. For this is all they are now. Two stones, two names. Two ghosts of what they used to be. Side by side with nothing but the entire world laid out before them.

Palm pressing on the top of the stone, Thena stands and stares out onto the sea. Watching how the sky spills over into the water. A thousand times over their story has played out, only to end in tragedy. Thena wonders if they will find each other in this life. And the ache within her flares once more, but despite all the death and the pain and the sadness, Thena would spend a thousand more lives searching the world for Harry.

“My love,” she speaks softly, hand still on the stone and the wind carrying her voice out to the endless sea.

Her hand slips from the stone as she takes a step back. Reminding herself that there is nothing here anymore. Only two graves, worn by the years. So, Thena turns and walks back down the familiar path through the grass. Not allowing herself to look back.

And the graves were alone once more.