It was late by the time Roman returned to his room after dinner. Sweat was breaking out on his brow, lining his palms.
He was about to marry a stranger. A girl who looked at him with disdain.
He tore off his jacket, ripped away the bow tie at his throat. He kicked off his brogues and unbuttoned his shirt and then fell to his knees in the center of the floor, curling up as if he could ease the pain in his stomach.
He deserved this, though. It was his fault that he was his father’s sole heir.
He deserved to be miserable.
His breaths were ragged. He closed his eyes and told himself to inhale, exhale, inhale.
He could hear his wristwatch ticking. Minutes were passing, one after the other. He could smell the rug beneath him. Musty wool and a faint trace of shoe polish.
When he opened his eyes again, he noticed the piece of paper on the floor.
Iris had written.
He crawled to it. His hands were trembling as he opened the folded paper, surprised to find a very short but intriguing message from her:
What do you know of Dacre & Enva?
For a moment, he was overwhelmed by her seemingly innocent question. But then his mind started racing through the myths he knew. The stories in the old volumes he had inherited from his grandfather.
It was a welcome distraction. He could lose himself in this; he could write her back because it was facts she wanted, nothing more.
Roman stood and whispered, “Please light the lamp.”
The old estate answered, flickering his desk lamp on. The lightbulb cast his room in a soft golden glow as he approached his built-in bookshelves. He began to sift through his mythology tomes, handling them carefully as most of them were falling apart. He was trying to decide which myth to share with Iris when a few loose leaves fell out of one volume, drifting down to his feet.
Roman paused. Page after page, tinted caramel with age, and full of his grandfather’s handwriting. He picked up the sheets and glanced through them, realizing it was a recording about Enva and Dacre. A myth that was rarely known these days.
His grandfather must have written it down and tucked the papers away in one of his books for safekeeping. He had often done that, forgetting where he had placed his writing. Roman had found everything from letters to stray ideas to random story chapters, years after his death.
And as Roman skimmed the handwritten myth, he knew this was the one he wanted to share with Iris.
He carried it to his desk and sat, working to transcribe it on the typewriter.
You’re in luck. I happen to know a thing or two about Dacre and Enva. There’s a myth I’m familiar with, and I’ll share it with you. I found it tucked away in an old tome, handwritten and only half complete. So keep in mind that its latter part is missing, and I have yet to come across it.
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There were two families that divided the gods of old: the Skywards and the Underlings. The Skywards ruled above, and the Underlings reigned below. Most of all, they hated each other
—as immortals are prone to do—and often engaged in challenges, to prove who was more worthy to be feared or loved or worshiped among mortal kind.
Dacre Underling, hewn from white limestone with veins of blue-lit fire, decided he would capture one of his enemies because he was bored of living day after day, season after season,
year after year. Such is the weight of immortality. As the god of vitality and healing, he craved a challenge, so he asked a human who lived below if they knew the name of the most beloved Skyward divine. A god or goddess whom mortals praised and loved.
“Oh yes, sire,” said the denizen. “She plays music on a harp that would melt the coldest
of hearts. She ferries mortal souls after they die, and there is none as fair as her above or below.”
Dacre decided he must have this Skyward goddess.
Up through the earth he traveled, through kilometers of stone and the gnarled roots of trees and the bitter taste of soil. When he reached above, he was overwhelmed by the might of the sun, and he had to linger in a cave for three days and three nights, until his eyes could withstand the light of his enemies. Even then, he chose to wander at night, when the moon was gentler.
“Where is Enva?” he asked the mortals he came across. “Where can I find the fairest of Skywards?”
“She can be found in the last place you would think she’d be” was the reply he received.
And Dacre, who was too impatient and angry to overturn every stone for her, decided he would call up his hounds from below. Sinewy, fire-hearted beasts, with translucent skin and teeth that spawned nightmares in dreams, the hounds roamed the land that night, searching for beauty and devouring those who got in their way. For Dacre assumed Enva was lovely to behold. But when the sun rose, the hounds were forced to go below, back to the shadows, and they had not found the one Dacre sought.
So he summoned his eithrals from the deep caves of beneath. Great wyverns with filmed eyes and membranous wings and poisoned talons. They could withstand the sun, and they flew through the sky, searching for beauty and destroying whatever moved beneath them. But soon a storm came, and the eithrals’ wings threatened to tear in the fierce winds. So Dacre sent them back below, even though they too had not found the one he sought.
It was only when he walked the land himself that he came upon a graveyard. And in the graveyard was a woman, ordinary by Dacre’s standards, with long dark hair and green eyes. She was dressed in homespun; she was barefoot and slender, and he decided he would not waste his time asking her where to find Enva.
He passed her by without a second glance, but as he walked away … he heard the music of a harp, sweet and golden, even as the sky was gray and the breeze was cold. He heard the woman sing, and her voice pierced him. He was stunned by the beauty of her, beauty which could not be seen but felt, and he crawled back to her, over the graves of humans.
“Enva,” he said. “Enva, come with me.”
She did not stop her music for him. He had to wait while she sang over every grave, and he noticed the soil was richly turned, as if these humans had just been buried.
When she sang the last song, she turned to look at him. “Dacre Underling, god of below, why have you wrought such chaos among innocents?”
“What do you mean?”
She indicated the graves. “Your hounds and your eithrals have killed these people. With your power, you could have healed their wounds. But you did not, and now I must sing their souls into eternity, for your creatures took them before it was their appointed time.”
Dacre at last found the strength to rise. When Enva looked at him, he felt insignificant
and unworthy, and he wanted her to behold him with something else. Something much different than sorrow and anger.
“I did it to find you,” he said.
“You could have found me on your own, had you taken the time to look for me.”
“And now that I have found you, will you come below with me? Will you dwell where I live, breathe the air I inspire? Will you join me in ruling the world beneath?”
Enva was quiet. Dacre thought he would perish in that moment of uncertain silence. “I am happy here,” she said. “Why would I go below with you?”
“To forge peace between our two families,” he answered, although peace was truly the last thing on his mind.
“I think not,” she said, and she melted into the wind before Dacre could grasp the hem of her dress.
He burned with fury; she had slipped away. She had denied him. So he decided he would unleash the brunt of his wrath on innocents; he would refuse to heal them out of spite, knowing Enva would soon have no choice but to answer him and give herself up as an offering.
His hounds tore across the land. His eithrals haunted the skies. His anger made the ground shake, and he created new chasms and rifts.
But he was right. As soon as innocents began to suffer, Enva came to him.
“I will follow you into your realm below,” she said. “I will live with you in the shadows on two conditions: you will uphold peace and you will permit me to sing and play my instrument whenever I desire.”
Dacre, who was enchanted by her, readily agreed. He took Enva below. But little did he know what her music would do once it was strummed deep in the earth.
Roman finished typing. His shoulder blades ached; his gaze was bleary.
He glanced at his watch, so exhausted he struggled to read the time.
It looked to be half past two in the morning. He had to be up by six thirty.
He closed his eyes for a moment, searching within himself. His soul was quiet; he was no longer swarmed by that suffocating panic.
And he gathered the sheets of paper, folded them in perfect thirds, and sent the myth to Iris.
