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Loving Mara Sov is, Petra Venj has long known, like loving a thunderstorm.
Mara is power, and terror.
Mara is safety, and security.
Mara is home.
"How very far I would go." Her wife whispers to her in a dark room, as they remain locked together in a desperate embrace, as Petra in their shared mindspace clings desperately to Mara's image of her to preserve her sense of self.
"How very far I would go, for fear of losing you."
Petra wonders how every time she realises that Mara is well and truly a goddess; a creature of breathtaking power who bends reality to her whim by sheer force of will, who shapes the universe with her presence as surely as a black hole does with it's mass shadow, how that knowledge can never manage to terrify her.
Because Mara is simply Mara, hidden as she is within that sky-grinding metaphorical storm.
And Petra has a map.
Loving Mara Sov is like loving a pulsar.
"I would tear it all down." Mara whispers in the night, and Petra lays spellbound. "For you."
She sees it in Mara's eyes. The universe dissolving in a wave of black fire, physical laws upended in desperate fury and rage as false vacuum states collapse black holes to nothingness. All this, Mara says, should Petra Venj be lost to the tides of mortality.
Mortal Petra Venj, her body -fragile, mortal flesh-and-blood vessel- crisscrossed with endless scars earned in the service of her Queen, her once-orange eye covered by a patch and a curtain of silken hair to mask the chewed-up scarring of a whining, skittering shock-stave, who wonders why loving Mara Sov doesn't feel like loving a black hole.
How ironic, thinks the gallows humour of the career soldier, that the First Lady of a God-Queen whose breath sings storms into a city cast from molten dreams would be injured by lightning.
Because Mara is radiant. She is power and charm and willpower wrapped in steel-bright charisma, charisma that drips from her words like honeyed, lava-thick venom from the fangs of a wish-dragon.
Except Petra Venj has an antidote.
Because Mara Sov is not mortal, but she is still human, and loving Petra Venj is like loving the sun, for Mara Sov.
Am I still human? She wonders in her quiet moments. As the bitter, clattering, aged machinery that constitutes reality whirs and clicks and breathes around her. She, who sees the imperfect junk-sequences stitched into the physical laws of the universe, fourteen billion years of improbable clockwork that rearranges itself at her will.
She who was born of that union of starlight and darkness that birthed a people. The progenitress of the Awoken race.
I must be human. Still. She always decides as the thought experiment plays itself out in her mind, end over end, variables never changing the ultimate answer. Because I could not be without Petra Venj. She remembers me, truly.
She knows that she could not be, not without Petra knowing her, loving her. Mara knows her very presence in reality would not be possible unless Petra can do the near impossible, able to worship her without the lens of that devotion warping her knowledge of Mara's self by the merest tiniest fraction of a percent. And Mara knows this is true, because she still does not know why she loves Petra Venj.
But she does, oh she does.
She sees Petra as a hundred things.
A shatterpoint. A locus of a series of decisions made before the universe. A cage, glittering with neon-bright power that sings like chimed crystal when Petra's own power lifts her knife from her hand and into a delicate, effortless spin.
But Petra is a woman. A woman who loves Mara Sov so truly that she does not know why Mara Sov loves her back, but accepts it happily because it is simply how reality works.
And reality is that Mara Sov will always love, has always loved, and can only love Petra Venj.
"Because I am yours, eternally." Petra murmurs in moments of doubt, when she has no idea just how true that statement is.
"As I am yours, my heart." Mara whispers back in the confines of their shared minds, watching as that indelible law carves itself ever more firmly into the bedrock of reality itself. "Eternally."