A Cage Sublime

Do you know what it’s like to be the lover of a goddess?

It’s the best and the worst thing at the same time.

The waters are clear and cool, the sun is warm but not scalding, a menagerie of plants and animals surround me. Every day and every night, a thing of beauty. The halls of the library whisper to me, urging me to read the tomes and learn the secrets of the universe, or immerse myself in the legends of hundreds of cultures.

My cage is a thing of beauty, and a wealth of knowledge that many mortals would never know.

It’s a place of wonder, but it is still a cage: A cage I willingly walked into.

She told me it was for my safety that I remain here. I know not what that means, but I yearn for the day I will see her again.

I sat waiting in my voluntary exile with the knowledge that out of everyone on the planet she picked you as her consort. There are plenty better looking than I, many far smarter, wittier, and better than me in many ways, yet it was I she chose.

I walked through the garden library until I came upon my old friend Spireglint.

“How fare thee, wanderer?” The mechanical bird asked, perched upon a high branch.

“Hello Glinty,” I said, my eyes wandering to the blue sky above.

“Why so melancholy?” The golden bird asked, his bauble eyes twitching down in my direction as he began to preen his metallic wings.

“The usual.”

“Is it so bad to be loved by a goddess?”

I sat on one of the myriad stone benches beneath the blooming tree.

“The love of a goddess is a passion far greater than any other, Glint,” I began. “It will consume you, as you know there will be no other that will equal her. You will crave her touch and none other. She will whisper things to you in the cosmic afterglow: things only she and you know - reassurances about how much you mean to her.”

The clockwork bird tilted its head, silently urging me to continue.

“But there is also a terribleness. She cannot spend all her days with a mortal! She has duties and intrigues and plots to attend to, as all deities do. So you wait for her, each day a long, torturous crawl. You awake each morning, expecting to find her returned, and as night falls you swear you feel her touch before succumbing to dreams. If you’re very lucky, you might see her in your sleep.”

Glinty flew down to the bench.

“Ahh, sleep is a mystery to one such as I: I am but an animated construct.”

I smirked and continued walking.

“Sometimes we mortals see things in our sleep. Hard to tell if it’s a message from her or an actual dream, you’ll never know...”

Glint softly pecked at my hair. “Go on wanderer. This is what I was made for.”

“...Just as you’ve given up hope, she’ll return and every day absent will feel worth it for the wait. Then inevitably she will leave and the cycle repeats.”

“Is it worth it though?” Glinty asked.

I sighed as I stood up and began to walk the orchard rows.

“I cannot give a straight answer, for me it is, but I would not wish this life on another. Their life will forever be altered.”

The bird flew along above me and looked down on me from a high branch, his golden feathers shadowed.

“Things always have a price,” he said, “even in the realms of the divine. You still love her, and she you. Perhaps that is worth the price?”

“Perhaps,” I replied as I began a walk along my paradise of a prison, the day waning into a pleasant night full of the sounds of the nocturnal chorus, and the stars above as I returned to my marble abode.

The moonlight - a thin, silver razor - cut across the marble floor of the library. I traced its path with a fingertip, feeling the unnatural cold of the stone beneath. The silence was so profound that I could hear the distant, rhythmic sigh of the tide against the cliffs far below - a sound that had become the metronome of my solitude.

Five years.

One thousand, eight hundred and twenty-six days since her departure.

The number had become a prayer: a curse, a counting of beads on an invisible rosary.

In the west wing, I had read every scroll and codex. I had conversed with the star-souls trapped in the celestial globes until their cosmic gossip had grown stale. I had watched the slow, deliberate dance of the seasons from my tower window and had witnessed the same pattern of green, gold, and white repeat itself five times over. The garden she had planted for me was in its fullest summer flowering: night-blooming cereus releasing a scent so heavy and sweet it was almost a solid presence in the still air.

She had always loved flowers.

My thoughts were interrupted. A voice floated to me from the aether.

"...My love?"

The words did not come from the doorway, or the window, or from behind a bookshelf. They bloomed inside my skull, a familiar resonance that vibrated through bone and breath. It was a voice I had heard in dreams for five years: a phantom echo I had chased through sleepless nights.

Now it was terrifyingly real.

I didn't turn. I couldn't. My body had locked in place, a muscle of memory and disbelief screaming that this was just another cruel fantasy conjured by a desperate mind.

"Are you deaf to me now, my poet?"

There was a thread of amusement in her mental voice, a delicate tease that was achingly, uniquely her.

"You used to claim you could hear my thoughts across an ocean."

The air in the library shifted. It grew warmer, charged, as if a summer storm had gathered itself in an instant. The moonlight seemed to thicken, to coalesce. And there - appearing out of a beam of light - stood Nysa.

She was exactly as I remembered, and yet entirely different. The goddess of my memory was a creature of dawn, of golden light and rosy-fingered clouds. This woman was fashioned from the night. Her hair, once the color of sun-ripened wheat, was now a cascade of silver-white, pinned back with jeweled combs that glinted like captured stars. She wore a gown of what looked like woven dusk, shifting through shades of indigo and deep violet with every movement.

I couldn’t help but fall to my knees in reverence.

“My goddess!” I could barely get the words out, my mind reeling. Soon, though, I regained my breath. “...But you've changed?”

She tilted her head, a gesture so familiar it sent a jolt of painful nostalgia through me. Her lips, the colour of a bruised plum, curved into a slight smile.

“Change is the only constant, my love. Even for the eternal.”

She glided towards me, her bare feet making no sound on the cold marble. When she reached me, she didn't raise me up. Instead, she knelt, her silver hair brushing my cheek as she leaned in.

Her scent filled my lungs. Not the heavy perfume of the cereus flowers, but something sharper, cleaner, like new snow falling on ancient stone.

“I am sorry I was gone for so long,” she whispered, and this time her voice was audible, a low, melodic hum that seemed to resonate in the very air. "Wars in the heavens do not observe a mortal's calendar, and I was not the same when it was done.”

I reached out a trembling hand and touched her face. Her skin was cool, as it had always been, but there was a new tension in the set of her jaw, a hardness in her eyes that had not been there before.

“Wars take tolls on goddesses?” I whispered.

“Yes, there's that creative soul I've so cherished speaking. Always asking questions, always wanting to know more. The war is over, I am home. And we have so very much to catch up on.”

Her smile did not quite reach her eyes. They were ancient and tired, holding a galaxy of sorrows I couldn't begin to fathom. The cage around my heart, which I had so carefully constructed over the past five years, shattered.

I had waited for my goddess. But a different goddess had returned. Yet she was the same too. Regardless, the love I felt shone through. A fire reignited in my chest, and I finally allowed myself to be consumed by it.

“Welcome home, my love.”

Spireglint chirped from where he perched on the windowsill.

“You have been missed, Mistress.”

It might be a cage, but it was my cage, and now the queen had returned to it. For as long as she deemed it fit.