This Side of the Cosmos

A red eye. A bus ride. An endless sea of people on their way to their daily routines. I watch a woman out of the corner of my eye, her hand shakes as she holds out a rusted tin can with holes in the bottom. I pretend not to notice her as I keep up my pace.

I can’t help but feel that that woman is just like me: holding out a soul riddled with holes, begging for someone to give me something that would slip right through the cracks. I get on the train just as the doors are sliding shut, shoving my way through people, crinkling my nose against the sudden waft of body oder that comes from someone around me, though I couldn’t guess who.

Oh God, it isn’t me, is it?

I feign a cough in order to discreetly smell my own armpit and… of course it is. That’s just my luck. It always turns sour after I find Eva. I sigh, and go back to staring into space.

I think of her, as the train rocks beneath me on its track. Staring at me with bright green eyes over the edge of a coffee cup, her black painted nails shining in a stark contrast to the white of her skin—her ode to a life of danger she couldn’t possibly lead. She wore that color for me, I know it, though she would always pretend it was something she had picked for herself. But she wasn’t one with the darkness. 

She was the light—the awakening of my dead heart, a beauty that would make any athiest believe in God.

Once the thoughts come, they come like a freight train. In this lifetime, she looked different. Still hauntingly beautiful with big brown curls and eyes that I wanted to stare into until I died. I could still see her gazing at me from over the pages of a book, pretending she was reading but really studying me intently. In every life, she always looked at me like that, half quizzical and half awed, as though she’d never be able to figure me out.

I remember the first words she spoke to me in this life cycle, after weeks of me being too shellshocked to even utter hello. I remember because I had thought the same question over and over, every moment of every lifetime, since the first time that I saw her. Yet, not once in a thousand years would I have ever dared breathe them out loud. That was Eva: bringing life to the things I would have let die.

Do you believe in soulmates?

I shake the thoughts from my head before I humiliate myself with something like tears and focus instead on the couple in front of me. They sit way too close together, the woman’s scantily clad legs swinging over the man’s lap, lips pressed together and breathing each other’s air. 

It’s disgusting.

I would give anything to have that.

I can’t. 

Not yet, anyway. 

Not with Olve’s curse hanging over me like a guillotine.

I’m thinking too much and I don’t notice that my stop has come and passed. Again with the damn bad luck.

I finally step off the train at the right stop, trying to put as much distance between me and my thoughts as possible, sprinting up the stairs and into the open air. The night has grown dark, though the streets still mill with people. I’ll never understand humans, how they don’t bother looking up when the most beautiful things in existence are hanging in the dark above them. How they don’t notice the dark has gotten darker, the night is more dangerous than it was meant to be.

I look up, remembering what it was like to see the stars from the other side of the cosmos. The moon is there but now it looks sickly, and wan. It is nothing more than a hunk of rock reflecting the sun. It makes me remember how hollow I am, and I quickly look back to the street.

I make my way down the cobblestones, the last reminder of times gone by. It looks different than I remember. The street lights are brighter, the buildings taller. But her door looks the same, a flaming red with a golden handle. I knock.

She appears in a flash, same aura as ever.

“Cassian?” she says, her eyes widening behind spectacles that she doesn’t need.

“Hello, Adisa.” I say, stepping in as she opens the door wider. She embraces me, filling my nose with the familiar scent of flowers.

“What are you doing here?” she said, stepping back and smiling sweetly. I tug at a tendril of gray hair, chuckling slightly at her disguise.

“This is what you went with?” I said. She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head. 

“No one bothers an old woman.” she said, but she waved her hand, letting the disguise drop. Bright red hair in wild curls springing around her face, piercing blue eyes staring down at me from a slender and beautiful form. Her dress is as red as her door, a single band of gold adorning her wrist.

“That’s more like it.” she said, her voice taking a more melodic tone as she smiled to reveal her perfectly white teeth.

“What do I owe this pleasure, Cassian. It’s been a long time.” she stepped deeper inside the room and I look around. It’s the same. Small, but homey, with leather chairs and a wall stacked full of books. It makes me smile as she hands me a cup of steaming tea.

“I need your help.” I say slowly. She stiffens slightly, but to her credit her smile remains the same as she takes a sip of tea and a seat. I follow.

“I know what it is you seek, but I fear I cannot help you.” she said softly, her eyes turning regretful.

“Her name is Eva.” I say, hoping that some sense of humanity will sneak into the goddess and change her mind. “She’s beautiful, just like you, she’s…”

“You want me to cross Olve.” Eva said, and deadpans. I smile as genuinely as I can. 

“You’re the only one who can.” I say. She studies me for a long moment.

“You know, I was planning a trip to Yemen tonight. There’s people there who desperately need my help. With your bad luck, I’m surprised I was even home.”

“That is lucky. Especially since I need your help, desperately.” I say, smiling wider as I begin to see her resolve crumbling. She’s going to help me, just like always. She can’t resist—she is the goddess of freedom, after all, and watching me squirm like a worm on a hook is against her very existence.

I watch her as she studies me, I can almost see the thoughts milling about in her head before she abruptly stands and moves to the books. Sighing heavily, she takes a heavy tome from the shelf, blowing dust off the thick bound leather.

“You’ll have to let me watch the memories. It’s been too long since I’ve been in the sky, and my powers are weakening.” she said, sitting back down and opening the book. I’ll never understood why she chooses to live here, when this world has never been kind to her.

I don’t argue, holding my hands out, palms upward. She could see every humiliating moment of my life if it would help her, every secret I had written on my soul. She squints, and looks at me once more, before taking my hands in hers and closing her eyes. In a moment, I’m living it all over again.

I’m standing against sunset, arms outstretched as shadows stretch deeper, preparing the night for the stars to shine. When there is no light to be seen, the stars arrive. One by one, taking their positions in the sky in every corner of the universe. I never understand why so many were created, when only a fraction can be seen from the planets. But even so, I love each and every one.

I see the earth animals arrive next, crawling from their holes. Owls, foxes, scurrying things awakening and beginning their nightly ruminations. I whisper to them, sometimes, when the shadows try to lengthen and the creatures’ teeth elongate. I’m the one that holds them at bay. They settle, under the sound of my song, and go back to their contented wanderings.

My breath catches in my throat as the best part of the night begins to rise: the moon. Tonight it is full, almost blindingly bright with an ethereal glow that I can feel down to my bones. I am the lord of the night, the keeper of the shadows, and yet I find the light of the moon to be more beautiful than the night itself.

As I stand, Olve, the goddess of luck, appears beside me. This night is different. Before dusk, I caught glimpse of the woman behind the moon, and her form is all I can think about. Olve intertwines her fingers in mine, but I barely notice. Though she is the one I’m pledged to, I can’t even tear my eyes from the sky.

Olve notices. She’s jealous.

Then starts the downward spiral of betrayal. She watches as I grow more and more distant. She starts playing with the luck of mortals. She sees the moment I meet the moon’s keeper and learn her name. She tries to win me back.

I had never meant for it to happen. I had never meant to betray her. But when I looked into Eva’s emerald eyes for the first time, I had seen something that called to my soul, and I couldn’t turn away. I had tried to run from it, to return to Olve, to choose the woman I didn’t love but was honor-bound to. But how could I deny a piece of my own soul? How could I turn from the being that was created, just for me? 

Flash forward and I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, wishing I would fall. It’s been a hundred years and I’ve yet to find her. Those emerald eyes are only haunting me in my dreams.

Of course my bad luck streak began shortly after, and it swept me right to her door. This time, her father shot me. Then I was caught in a sandstorm. The next time, it was a car crash. Over and over and over, I find her just to die.

“May you wander the earth as it grows in bitter unrest,

doomed to forever chase what you cannot have,

Should you find her in every lifetime,

each time your luck will run out. 

Cursed to yearn without fulfillment.

Cursed to look but never touch.

Cursed to find, but never hold.

You will never be together, not for an eternity, and then some.”

An eternity of wandering, and all I remember are emerald eyes.

I’m back in Abisa’s room, sweating and gasping and trying to unhear those words that destroyed my very existence.

Abisa shuttered as she pulled her hands from mine, gazing at me with tear pricked eyes. She had never seen it like this, felt the way I felt. She looked away from me, as if unable to bear it, and looked to the book in her lap. A circle of ancient runes and symbols swirled as if in a great dance, and she was the choreographer.

“Well, it’s really her.” she said softly, as the swirls spoke in a language only she could understand.

“I know it’s her.” I said, more sharply than I intended. I always knew it was her, the very second my eyes met hers my soul became a battering ram in my chest, trying to reach its other half. 

“Would you undo it all, if you could? Go back to Olve? Save you, and her, and the earth from its fate?”

My eyes snap to hers and I answer without even needing to think,

“Never.”

Abisa nodded, furrowing her brow.

“There are whispers…” she starts, shaking her head and wiping a sheen of sweat from her brow. I bite my lip to remain patient, rather than pushing her for more answers.

“Creator is not happy with Olve. The darkness has become too dark, there are things creeping into the darkness that should not be. The moon has no keeper, either, and she is dying.”

I simply nod, looking at my hands. Shame wound itself into a knife in my gut—this had been my fault, afterall. All of it had.

The dark still called to me, begging to be righted. I spent every night in the wild. But I can barely tame it while trapped in the body of a man. I couldn’t stop the chaos, as I had been created to. Eva didn’t know it, she never remembered.

Still, I saw the same yearning staring back at me in those emerald eyes. It was why she was always drawn to me, no matter the lifetime. She was drawn to the night, fascinated by the dark and had urges to tame it. It’s why she studied me like she could know all truth simply by memorizing every line in my body. 

The night needed his moon, just like the moon needed her keeper.

“There is a way, but it would end it death no matter what the outcome is.” Abisa says.

“Who’s death?” I ask. 

“Olve’s, or yours.”

“That is not a hard bargain.” I say, fully meaning it. One way or another, the curse had to end, even if it meant my end would come with it. Abisa looked back to the page, reading the star map with renewed vigor as her brows furrowed.

“It seems this time is different.” Abisa says, a sudden intake in her breath having me slide to the edge of my seat. Her eyes widen as they glance over the page. With a little cry she closes the book and meets my gaze, her eyes boring holes into my very being.

“This time is the last, Cassian.”

My blood becomes frozen.

“The last?” I breathe out, as though the words were an alien tongue. “How can this be? Olve cursed me for eternity!”

I find myself standing, my body shaking as I yell at my only true friend.

“Bad luck?” Abisa smirks, before my glare sobers her. She rises to grasp my hands. “Your penance is up. If you do not end this, your curse remains, and you stay in this form until you die.”

“How could I fight against Olve? I’ve already found Eva, my luck has already turned.” I say, dread steadily growing inside of me. 

“Just for tonight, let your bad luck be your weapon. Stop trying to tame the darkness.” she said, her eyes turning a deep, storm blue. I do not fully understand.

“Luck is powerful, but it is weilded by want, undermined by will, and overcome with love. You have all three, bound together in your bones. On top of it all, you have me.” she said the final line like it was a nail in Olve’s coffin. 

Freedom.

I stand alone among the shadows, waiting.

I know Olve will come. She never could resist taunting me with the hope of redemption, only to pull it away and vanish. But there would be no vanishing, not tonight. Abisa’s plan was a good one, and one way or another this would end before first light.

I turn slowly, watching the lines of the horizon. I begin to take a step forward, but my foot catches an upturned root and I trip. I hit the ground under a symphony of laughter.

“I see you found Eva.” Olve says, her voice dripping disdain like the rain dripping on the sodden ground around us.

I’m up in an instant, every fiber of my being full to the brim of hatred; it’s about to run over. I turn to face her, all blonde hair and curves and vitiation. A small part of me wants to slap the smirk off her face, but with my bad luck I would accidentally slip and break my neck. I crossed my arms over my chest to hold back my itching fingers.

“Hello, lover.” her voice is like poison, and I shiver. “Come to beg for your life back, once again?”

“No.” I say simply, waiting. I can already hear them coming, the howling in my ears and the crying for my song growing louder with every breath. Just for tonight, I didn’t sing. Just for tonight, they can have their way in the dark.

Olve can’t hear them, though, they aren’t one with her soul.

“Why did you call me down here then?” she whines like a petulant child, kicking slightly to show me the hem of her silk dress, ruined by muddy water.

“Well, Olve, as you may have noticed, the night is growing out of control.” I say, nonchalantly.

“Of course I noticed.” she snaps, frowning that I’m not on my knees before her. “Why did you bring me here?”

“If you don’t rescind your curse, the chaos will take over. They’re going to hurt… people.”

“Why would I care about people?” she cackles, her laugh drowning out the howls of the night.

I tilt my head, I can smell them in the air now, the coppery scent of shadow and phantom. I flash a grin, and I’m sure I look maniacle. 

“I thought you’d say that.” I say, raising my arms in a silent offering to the creatures of the night, should they choose to take me. 

Red eyes. Screams arise. An endless sea of shadow like a tidal wave, washing over us both.

Claws puncture her rusted heart and my luck slips right through the cracks.