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Bashal sleeps through most of the beginning of the universe. Leila keeps an eye on her, sometimes physically and sometimes mentally, throughout the debates and arguments and bursts of creativity. She sleeps in a circle, tail over nose over paws, looking smaller than she truly is. She gives off the air of someone who would be in a corner, or perhaps under a table, if corners or tables existed yet, which they don’t.
Being aware of her doesn’t use up any of Leila’s attention. That might be because such things don’t, when you have shared part of your soul with someone, or because as a god she can have near-infinite attention, if she wants to. There’s a lot for a new pantheon to figure out, to decide on. Leila plans with the others and wonders, with a different part of her newly-infinite self, if Bashal is relieved now that Selen is gone and her duty is done, if she is trusting Leila to make decisions in her interest, or trusting Ehlonna to make decisions in the interest of what will be their shared domain, if she is simply tired of concerning herself with their un-wolflike business.
Sometimes Leila gets impressions of such things from her, but now when she reaches out- or reaches in, perhaps, it’s difficult to describe- all she senses is rest. Bashal’s sleep is calm, unhurried, without dreams or expectations, the kind of long slow sleep of a boulder come to rest in a valley while animals and plants and the sun and the shade and the sun and the shade pass over its surface.
(This is not the kind of thought Leila would have had, once. What did she ever know about boulders and valleys? She is aware of her own self enough to know this, but not enough to know if the change would have disturbed her, before. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to spend much time pondering it.)
They form a world while Bashal sleeps. There start to be people, and places, and rules. Things get more real, if not more predictable. There is time, again, and at some point there’s been enough of it for Bashal to have been asleep a long time.
Eventually the first great council of the gods begins to break apart. There is a great deal still to do, still to understand, but enough of a foundation has been laid, enough boundaries put in place, that Leila feels she can safely turn away for a time. The others seem to think so as well, shaking off the last of the timeless, formless infinity like shreds of a dream, beginning to drift apart into their own personal discussions and directions. Ash and Ajora are already gone, as are Rai and Alokas; the bards have their heads together and Thren is excitedly drawing some kind of schematic in the air. Asmun, Athol, and Saren Raithe are having a conversation that she’s tempted to join, but there will be time for that later. There will be time for everything-- an idea she’s still getting used to.
As it is, she catches Ehlonna by a trailing breeze just before she disappears. Leila unslings the bow from her back and holds it out, making sure she doesn’t wince at its battered, fragile appearance. A splinter digs reproachfully into her thumb.
“This is yours,” she says. “Thank you for entrusting it to me.”
Ehlonna takes the bow, which instantly becomes whole and unmarred in her hands. She hefts it with a little half-smile.
“It couldn’t have been put to a better purpose,” she says. Then she turns, and Leila follows her gaze to where Bashal is still curled asleep, a little out of the way of the others. Ehlonna rests a hand on her shoulder.
“Take better care with her,” she says. “I can only heal what’s mine.”
Leila keeps turning that over in her mind even after Ehlonna leaves, even after she joins the small huddle around Asmun and settles in for a long metaphysical debate. This is the first time, she thinks, that Bashal has ever not belonged to someone. Or rather, it’s the first time that Bashal has belonged entirely to herself, and that’s important. That makes a difference in things Leila has been putting aside for a long time.
She knows that she hasn’t been exactly fair to Bashal. She’s taken advantage of her, perhaps, though only inasmuch as Bashal presented herself as an advantage to be taken. Leila doesn’t regret anything that’s passed between the two of them. They were fighting for their lives, for the survival of all of existence, and those things had to be prioritized. Bashal had told Leila that she was there to be relied on- though not in so many words- and Leila had taken that offer gratefully. There hadn’t been time for anything else.
Now, though, there is time for everything.
What Leila most wants to do is sit Bashal down for a long talk about it, to offer explanations and promises for the future. She discards that idea in an instant. The point is to prove that she deserves Bashal’s devotion, to show that she can return it in kind; forcing Bashal to talk just because Leila wants to is exactly the kind of thing she’s trying to get away from. Someone who truly cares for Bashal would find another way. After all, Bashal pledged herself to Leila without speaking a word about it. Surely she can find a similar way to demonstrate her own feelings.
She looks over as she considers this, and finds that Bashal is gone from her corner-which-is-now-actually-a-corner. Leila doesn’t worry. Bashal still feels calm, though more alert now, and quietly pleased. She’s probably out exploring her new domain. Leila thinks she could find her if she wanted to, but she’s in no hurry. There are things she wants to do first- things she’s guiltily aware that she should have done long since- and having a little time while Bashal is occupied suits her just fine.
---
In the early days of the world, Leila finds a wolf pack that runs on ice and digs their dens deep in the cold tundra. They have three pups this year, white and white and brindled gray, and their territory is large and well-defended enough that the winter hasn’t left them too lean. Leila brings them a reindeer, one that had fallen to its death in a crevasse, frozen and out of the reach of any scavengers who weren’t cheating.
“Hello,” she says, letting the reindeer down gently on the ground.
Hello, reply the two wolves who have been watching her approach. They crouch low, acknowledging that she is the most powerful of the three of them, but they do it without fear or awe. Most of their attention is on the reindeer.
“I will make a deal with you,” she says. “You can have this reindeer if you will help me.”
What help can we give a god?, asks one of them, a silver wolf with a darker face.
“I want to learn how to howl,” Leila says.
They never ask her why. Why is not a particularly wolflike question, she learns; they live in a world where things that happen simply happen, and are mostly the same things that have always happened, and beyond a basic understanding of concrete cause and effect, why rarely seems to come up.
She learns a lot of things in the three days she spends living with the wolf pack. In addition to howls, she learns yips and barks and grumbles and sighs, and how to read the scent-messages in the urine they use to mark the edges of their territory, and the meaning of different positions of ears and tails (some things she can guess before she’s told, small gestures that are familiar from Bashal, which pleases her). She learns that the banner-high tails with which they greeted her request meant that they were amused by the idea of teaching a god simple things along with their pups.
By the time she leaves she’s grown quite fond of her surrogate litter-mates. She calls them Promising Hunter Who Slinks In Shadows, White Coat Shines In Moonlight, and Unusually Large and Loyal, which is a sort of compromise, halfway between the way they think of names and the way she does. If she looks in on them occasionally in the years to come, makes sure they have fat prey and healthy babies, well, that’s her prerogative as a god. If she never tells Bashal that she maybe sort of named a little white wolf pup after her, well, that’s her prerogative too.
None of it is strictly necessary, of course. Leila can understand Bashal perfectly well, and any other wolf she cares to; part of being the god of whatever anyone needs is understanding any and all languages. There’s a difference, though, in the way her divine powers work. It’s more like having a perfect, instantaneous translator than it is actually speaking a language. She doesn’t mind taking the time to learn this one the wolf way. She wants to do this properly, after all.
–
Leila likes keeping an eye on the mortal world. It’s part of the job, more or less, but she pays attention to more than just her own pet projects. She likes to know which way the wind is blowing.
She doesn’t exactly go looking, but she does notice when Bashal quietly begins to develop a certain following. It’s a delicate distinction. There are a number of gods that mortals pray to when they’re dealing with unrequited love. The most popular are Alokas, for luck in their suit, or Terraw for charisma and popularity to help them win the object of their affections. The ones who begin to gravitate to Bashal ask for slightly different things. Please let me stay near the one I love, they pray, or may I be able to help them when they are in need. Those who stand guard say Bashal, grant me your keen senses that I may protect them, and those that do not stand guard ask simply that they may do so. Let me see my love again, some pray, let me only be in their company and I will ask nothing further. Others still: Grant me the strength to endure their indifference, day after day.
Those in particular sting a little.
Leila listens to them- it's not a difficult thing, to hear prayers meant for another god, if neither the god nor the supplicant takes pains to conceal them- and she watches and she sees that Bashal sometimes joins her followers on their long, solitary watches, that on moonlit nights they lean against her side and gather strength from her without ever knowing that she’s there. Leila wouldn't dream of interfering with that. Hearing prayers meant for another god is one thing, but granting them is another altogether, a blatant infringement.
Leila doesn’t answer prayers, though. She just…meddles, a little. Adjusts things. She carefully investigates each supplicant and the object of their affection and when she finds one she deems worthy of the devotion they’re receiving, she helps turn their head a little, or walks their dreams and leaves vague suggestions that they might begin to consider their companion in a way they never have before. The kind of people who pray to Bashal don’t ever ask for someone to love them back, so Leila isn't technically answering prayers at all, just creating small happy accidents. Happy divine accidents, perhaps, but there’s no rule against that. She doesn’t force anyone, just encourages, nurtures possibilities that were already there.
It works.
Yeras go by and Bashal’s reputation among the mortals begins to shift. The same sort of people still pray to her, but she’s no longer only the god of resignation, of lost causes. Even if her followers still don’t ask to have their feelings requited, they know that there’s a chance they will be, that sometimes those who pray to Bashal have unexpected happy endings. They have hope.
It seems like a fairly clear message to Leila. Bashal isn't the kind of god who would have missed someone interfering with her followers, even someone careful to never cross the line. And even if she somehow hadn’t noticed Leila’s meddling, there’s no way she could have missed the small adjustment to her own domain. A god feels that kind of thing in their core.
And yet, Bashal never says a thing about it. Leila waits and waits, and eventually gives up waiting. She doesn’t regret any effort that might have brought Bashal a little hope, but maybe it’s time to be more direct.
–
They are sitting in a hidden cave on Bashal’s plane. Outside, the moon is obscured by thick falling snow, silver-dark and hushed, angled just slightly away from the opening of the cave by a provident breeze. Inside, a cheerful campfire crackles quietly to itself; another extremely specific breeze guides its smoke and occasional sparks out through a convenient chink the rough stone of the roof. Neither of them actually need the fire, but Leila likes the alternate breaths of dry heat and crisp cold as the breezes chase each other around, likes the constant flicker of shadow and light on the walls. Bashal seems to like it too, as far as she can tell from the way Bashal’s feelings leave impressions in her own heart, these days.
Leila is attempting to design a god-weapon for herself, shifting the object in her hand between various shapes and hefts, trying to decide what could represent a god who can be anything at all. Nothing seems exactly right. The domain she’s adopted, as useful as it was in calamity, is difficult to reckon with in the new era of the world. Sometimes it feels like her own identity is slipping through her fingers. It’s no wonder she can’t shape a weapon to represent herself when she’s not exactly sure what it should be representing.
She gives in to ever-present temptation and lets her thoughts turn to Bashal instead, a much more pleasant idea to dwell on. Bashal, for her part, is staring out at the curtain of falling snow across the cave mouth, gaze unfocused and remote in a way that means she’s probably paying attention to one or another of her followers somewhere. Notably, she's in human form. She’s been spending more time that way than she used to. Leila wonders if it’s something inherent in being the god of shapeshifters, that she’s more comfortable now in all kinds of forms. Or perhaps it’s just that when they first knew each other, the human form was the one Bashal assumed when they forced her to talk. Leila’s been trying as hard as she can to remember that Bashal’s preference for wordless communication is the same no matter what body she’s using.
It’s easier, now that Leila has her own wolf’s form, now that she’s learned to convey what thoughts she needs to with tail and ears and the bulk of her body in the snow, and learned also that no ill will come from letting the other thoughts lie unspoken. Even in her usual form she’s become accustomed to the long silences between them. And Bashal does communicate, with gestures and expressions and with the almost-tangible sense of her that Leila still carries from the time when they were, in some ways, one united being. (It had been a last resort, and Leila is glad they’re free of it now, but she is also glad to be left with as much of a connection as they still have. It’s hard to remember now what she was like without the constant, quiet echo of Bashal keeping her company. She thinks it was lonely.)
A breath of wind makes the fire flare, scattering shadows and illuminating Bashal in profile. It’s strange, Leila thinks, as the warm light flickers over Bashal’s face- they rarely touch like this.
She’s long been accustomed to touching Bashal’s wolf form, to petting her and riding her and even falling asleep against her, and now also to tussling like puppies and curling together for warmth in a riot of fur and limbs, when she shifts along with Bashal. But even though Bashal’s been spending more and more time as a human, Leila can’t remember a time they’ve touched like this. Has she ever felt Bashal’s hands on her? The idea is arresting, catching at her in a way that’s half surprising and half not surprising at all, after all these years. Something that she hadn’t been aware of, but that had always been there, waiting patiently for the right moment to make itself known.
She releases her hold- both physical and divine- on the proto-weapon, and it disappears for now. Instead she stands and walks slowly over to Bashal, careful not to disturb her concentration. There’s been so much waiting between them already; what’s a few more minutes? She watches the mouth of the cave where the fallen snowflakes are melting slowly into little rivulets. Her heart is pounding, she realizes, nervous anticipation tingling through her body, even though she can hardly imagine Bashal rejecting her. Bashal is, perhaps, the surest thing Leila’s ever had in her life.
Somehow that thought doesn’t calm her nerves just now.
She waits until she feels Bashal’s attention shift back into this plane and then back into this cave with Leila standing beside her and the fire crackling at their backs. She cocks her head, acknowledgement and mild curiosity at Leila’s approach, a wolf’s movement even in this body. Leila takes a deep breath. She meets Bashal’s eyes and, moving slowly, reaches down to cup her face in one hand.
Bashal’s hair brushing the back of her hand is coarse and bristly, thick, the texture of wolf’s fur, but the curve of her jaw is unfamiliar, the smoothness of her skin, the angle of her cheekbone as Leila runs her thumb over it ever so softly. Her heart is still racing, though her hand is steady. A god’s hands are always steady.
Bashal rises to her feet- carefully, so as not to dislodge Leila’s hand- and doesn’t take a step back when the movement leaves them face to face, a little too close. Leila’s horns make her the taller of the two of them, but Bashal’s eyeline is a little higher; she has to lean up just the tiniest bit to feather a kiss on Bashal’s cheek, just past her own fingers.
Bashal closes her eyes briefly and stays very still. Leila has to bite back the flood of words that come to her instinctually- is this, can I, what do you- and only manages it because she’s been practicing. Instead she presses a little into the echo of their shared soul, trying to invite whatever Bashal is conveying, trying not to drown it out with her questions. It’s something like a pure white stag paused in a clearing in the forest, illuminated by the moonlight, alert and poised to leap away. A moment of unexpected, untouched beauty; a fragile moment, one that might inspire you to hold perfectly still, to barely breathe, hoping to prolong it for just one more perfect, impossible second.
In this new world they’ve made, though, no animal would startle away from Bashal, and neither will Leila. She takes Bashal’s hand with her other one, curling her fingers around Bashal’s in a slow, deliberate reassurance. Her palm is broad and slightly callus-rough, unexpectedly warm against Leila’s own. The simple heat of her takes Leila’s breath away, sends a twist of longing through her, imagining Bashal’s hands in other places.
Bashal opens her eyes. There’s heat in her gaze, too, and Leila meets her eyes, tilting her face up in invitation. It feels like aeons pass while they stand there on the breath-held brink, a stillness not so much peaceful as it is made of coiled potential. This will not be another thing Leila demands of Bashal, another place she leads and expects Bashal to follow. She holds steady despite her thundering heart. The wind gusts with unaccustomed strength and a swirl of snow prickles over her arms and face, dusts Bashal’s hair, makes the fire hiss and the shadows dance. When Bashal kisses her it’s soft but sure, and the hand she curls around Leila’s waist is anything but tentative.
Leila makes an offer not with words but with a flick of her imagination: the stone at the back of the cave has now always sloped down to a low, flat ledge, covered with a lush cushion of the softest moss. Bashal answers with a heap of luxurious furs that have suddenly always been waiting, perfectly tanned and cleaned, warmed by the heat of the fire. She squeezes Leila’s hand and they turn toward the back of the cave together.
Outside, the snow falls harder, blanketing the plane in a hush of white and obscuring the view of any who might happen by.
–
Some things do change, after that. It feels like a hunger has awoken in Leila for Bashal’s touch; luckily Bashal seems to feel the same way, and Leila is pleased to learn that Bashal will reach for her confident and unprompted rather than waiting for her invitation.
Still, it doesn’t feel like anything fundamental has shifted between them. Bashal doesn't seem to regard her any differently, or to have understood any deeper message that Leila was trying to convey. She finds herself a little frustrated for the first time, at a loss for what to try next.
Time is strange and almost unimportant to reckon when it doesn’t hold sway over you, but at some point after the second or third or hundredth time that Leila takes Bashal to bed and doesn’t succeed in communicating anything other than her pleasure, she finds herself visiting with Ehlonna. They are watching the consecration of their newest temples, as the chosen gods of an exploration across the ocean that has discovered a new habitable island. The twin temples are humble buildings but among the first erected, and they will become lavish when the settlement grows into a thriving civilization. Elsewhere, each of them has a devoted follower appealing to them from opposite sides of a mortal war. A god’s attention is near-infinite, after all.
Ehlonna asks after Bashal and Leila surprises herself by sharing the whole story. She wouldn’t have told any of her other compatriots, but Ehlonna is different: she was already a god back when Leila was a mortal, and Leila still has a different sort of respect for her. And for all that Ehlonnae keeps herself at something of a remove, she is still in some ways a part of Bashal and Leila, her history intertwined with theirs.
Ehlonna listens solemnly to Leila’s account of all her efforts.
“Why not explain your feelings the way you are accustomed to?” she asks. The question is simple curiosity, interest in Leila’s intentions, rather than judgment or censure, and Leila is pleased again with her decision to confide in Ehlonna. She considered her response carefully.
“I would like her to know that she- that we- don’t have to do everything on my terms. She put herself second for so long- to me, to our quest…to you,” she adds, a little daring, but Ehlonna only nods.
“I know she prefers other ways of communicating; surely I can learn those as well. I want any declaration to her to be a declaration for her as well, something she will appreciate and understand and trust. I’m good with words, but words are what I use to manipulate things, to convince and cajole and bend reality and the truth. Words can always be lies. If I can find the right gesture, that is something that can only be true.”
“I see,” says Ehlonna, and Leila thinks that her attentive consideration shades a little toward approval. Ehlonna’s aspect must be as varied and changeable as the weather, but the one she shows to Leila always has a certain amount of gravitas.
They sit in quiet contemplation for a time, watching the island and the war and a thousand other things.
“I think your idea of finding communication that is more native to Bashal is a worthy one,” Ehlonna says eventually. “But for all that, you’re still thinking like a person. It’s people who tangle complicated emotions and messages around sex. For animals, it doesn’t have the significance you are trying to convey. Not that Bashal is an animal- she never was, truly, or never wholly that- but if you want to demonstrate your understanding of her, perhaps that is somewhere to start.”
“Thank you,” says Leila. “I hadn’t thought about it that way. Which is your point, I suppose.”
“It’s only a suspicion, from someone who’s known her long, but not completely,” Ehlonna says. “She is no longer only what I made her.”
“I don’t suppose any of us are, really,” says Leila.
“No,” says Ehlonna, and surprises her by laughing. “But I am glad, to still be here and to see what you’ve become.”
So Leila goes to Bashal with her new intention and for a time she is the one who follows. They tour the planes: Everwinter, and Materia, and Ehlonna’s Wild, but also planes that are mostly city or desert or shifting magical ether; Bashal’s domain extends anywhere that animals live, and animals of some kind live very nearly everywhere.
Bashal changes shape with a sinuous grace that looks holy, even to Leila’s divine eyes, and she follows suit. She loses count of the bodies they inhabit, from insects to birds to creatures metal and magic and elemental. Bashal chooses a white form often but not always; sometimes they are simply animals like any others. For a time they don’t bother attending any of the other gods’ councils or revelries. They hunt together, sleep together, fly and burrow and run and swim together, groom each other and call to one another with a myriad of different sounds, build burrows and bowers and nests.
Something about it feels right, deep inside where she sometimes worries that she’s losing track of who she is. What better match for a god of shapeshifting than one who can be anything at all? Any god can take whatever form they desire, but Leila and Bashal are the two who have change and transformation at the very core of their nature, as the source of their divinity. Following Bashal through shape after shape is the closest Leila has gotten to conveying what she means. If they could stay like this forever she thinks that might be enough, but even a god cannot live indefinitely as a common animal without sacrificing their power, and Leila has so much more to do before she steps away.
–
The palace of the Abystral Plane is everything at once. Leila’s devotees, the blessed and the desperate, make their pilgrimages there and find whatever sort of welcome would suit them best: sumptuous mansions, impregnable fortresses, straw-thatched halls and castles with spun glass turrets, full of servants or music or books or weapons, a thousand thousand possibilities. Most visitors only ever see one aspect of it. Occasionally one of her particularly astute followers will learn to shift it from their first vision to something else, exerting their will on their surroundings as circumstances change and their needs evolve.
Leila sees them all. The palace shapes itself to her whim, but underneath she sees everything and nothing, infinite shapes and angles and colors and yet nothing solid at all, just misty ever-shifting blankness waiting for a form. Sometimes that feels like all she is at heart, too. The world spins on and the mortals pray and the things they want and need multiply until she isn’t sure what’s left of her anymore. All of them have changed, of course, since becoming gods. A divine aspect is a distillation of an idea more than it is a person, and the more the mortals embrace those avatars they’ve made of themselves, the more she and her friends become what they are believed to be.
It’s different for the others, though. In their changes they are becoming something, even if it is a distilled and crystalized version of the people they once were. Leila feels as though she’s slowly becoming nothing at all, dissolving into that same gray blankness that underpins the palace, just a canvas for a million minds to paint as they will.
She paces the walls (ramparts, lookouts, pathways, bridges) until the shifting shapes gnaw at her, and then goes inside to her own rooms at the heart of the palace, the private ones that barely rate a whisper of mortal myth. These are decorated as she likes them, elegant and luxurious in wood and silk and velvet, and they do not change unless she decides to replace one style with another. A graceful archway reveals a nighttime forest that should not- and indeed, does not- exist on this plane, but such things are of little consequence to a god. She finds her gaze drawn to it again and again.
How can she promise Bashal anything at all when she’s less and less sure of who she is? Even her own rooms seem to shift uncertainly around her as she paces. She thinks about her mortal history, the life that made her who she is, but although she can recall the facts in their proper order they don’t seem to connect to anything.
As if summoned by Leila’s thoughts- and perhaps that is exactly what happens- Bashal appears in the archway, emerging from a shimmering flurry of snow and fur as she shifts on the threshold. It feels like the gravity of the room bends toward her solidity. She pads over to take Leila’s hand and leads her to a low padded bench, wide enough for a dire wolf to sleep on comfortably when she chooses. Even in human form, her movements are graceful and silent as a predator’s. She draws Leila down to lean against her, a query and an offer of comfort in a quiet economy of action that Leila understands as well as any language, these days.
For once, she doesn’t reply in kind. Words are an anchor, a skill and a tool that have always been the first thing she reaches for, a part of who she is, and she is too tired and too diffused by a million people’s wanting to let go of this one thing she recognizes as her own.
“There are so many of them,” she says, gesturing to encompass the planes and the people and the whole world they’ve remade. “And every one that cries out for help needs me to be something different, again and again and again. I don’t begrudge them; I am their god. But I’ve been so many things, I don’t know what’s at the heart of me anymore, and if what I’m becoming is only shaped by need…I’d rather it was you, rather you than the whole world put together. What do you need me to be?”
Bashal gives this her accustomed solemn consideration, but there’s something almost puzzled in her face and the tilt of her head, like she’s turning the question over to see if there’s something she’s missed. She smooths Leila’s hair with one hand, then ghosts her fingertips in the lightest caress along Leila’s horn, the angle of her jaw, her arm, framing the edges of her.
“I need you to be yourself,” she says.
They are gods; they shape reality. Bashal’s desires outweigh those of a thousand thousand mortals, her need an anchor at Leila’s core, solid and true and unchanging. The room seems to coalesce around her. Bashal knew her as a mortal; Bashal first loved her as a mortal. When she bound them together Bashal became a part of her soul, and that soul belonged only to her- no divinity, no clamor of devotees, just one determined tiefling from the wrong end of Halr, terrified and fighting the only way she could. Bashal knows her as no one else ever has or ever will, and the sense of that self settles under Leila’s skin like coming home.
“Oh,” she says, and, “thank you,” and, unthinking: “I love you.”
Bashal smiles.
Leila catches herself just a little too late. She’s been trying not to say it like this, but now that she’s started all the words she’s been holding back for so long come tumbling out.
“Please believe me,” she says. “I swear it’s the truth. I know that I wasn’t fair to you, at first- but I cared, I did, there just wasn’t any space for us with the whole world disappearing into the mist, I couldn’t stop fighting that, not for a second. But I’ve been trying to show you how I feel about you- I learned to howl, I changed your domain-”
Bashal cuts her off by taking both of her hands and squeezing them.
“I know you love me,” she says simply.
Leila finds herself floundering, the stream of words she’s thought and bitten back so many times dangling half-finished between them.
“Do you?” she asks. “But do you understand-”
“How could I not?” says Bashal.
“Then why hasn’t anything changed, for us?”
“What would change?”
This conversation is so far from the one Leila imagined having, when she indulged herself in imagining it at all. She leans into Bashal for support while she tries to organize her thoughts.
“I suppose I thought that when I proved myself to you, when you really understood, something would be different.”
“Are you unhappy with the way things are?” Bashal asks, frowning.
“No! No, I’m not unhappy. I just want you to have what you deserve.”
“What more could I deserve? This is our reward. We are together. We have infinite time, now, for everything that we had to put aside to fight for the fate of the world.”
“You forgive me, then?” Leila can barely ask it, a question she hadn’t known was waiting at the heart of everything until it was on her tongue.
“There’s nothing to forgive. We are together,” Bashal says again, pressing her fingers lightly to Leila’s sternum, to the place where she can feel the echo of Bashal even when they’re apart. Leila understands; she understands however Bashal chooses to express herself, these days. She covers Bashal’s hand with her own and leans in to kiss her. Bashal holds her there, lingering, for a long moment.
“Better?” she asks when they part. Leila nods. The prayers of her followers tug at her, as they always do, but beneath every shifting aspect that she takes across the planes there’s something of her that’s real, steady, here where she’s leaning into Bashal in these rooms at the heart of her palace.
“Good,” says Bashal. She half turns to look at the archway to the impossible forest, which is shining faintly with the pure cold silver of a clear winter’s night. “The moon is out,” she remarks. “Do you want to join the howl?”
Yes, says Leila, with her hand in Bashal’s and the movement of her body rising, and with the place where their souls are joined deeper than thought, and with the word that she learned when she was only a child, just beginning to become herself.
So they do.