Page 59 of Solivagant

Black, red, and so much gold.

Gold pupils were narrowed on me, and I fell to my knees immediately, my head bowed in penance.

Would he punish me for breaking the rules? Kill me? Whatever he’d do, I hoped it would affect myself alone, and that the village wouldn’t be punished for my disobedience.

I hadn’t taken the chance to look at him properly. But I’d seen enough to recognize he was one of them. The Others. The ones who gave us the rules we lived by, and that I’d selfishly defied.

Nothing happened. After long minutes of waiting, I dared to raise my head, and to peek at him quickly.

When nothing happened again, I chanced a longer glance.

He was beautiful.

Dark skin over heavy muscle. He was drenched in gold. Of course he would be. He was a god, after all.

He was leaning against a wide tree, brow furrowed in rage. Or was it pain? His chest rose and fell with labored breaths. Gold poured from his skin, particularly around his biceps, and I realized that the skin was split. He was hurt. Badly. Muscle and bone exposed over his arms as if someone or something had attempted to tear them clean off. What could have done such a thing?

His fingers twitched, but refused to respond to him, the damage in his arms clearly affecting his use of them.

The gold was blood.

Did gods bleed?

I stood slowly. His eyes followed. I took one step backward, then another. As I’d suspected, he didn’t move to stop me. He probably couldn’t.

If I were sensible, and fortunate, I could probably go right back the way I came, leave him to his fate, and no one would ever know that I’d broken the rules. My secrets would remain my own.

But what of him?

He would be left alone. Injured. Left to slowly bleed out and die.

A fate none deserved.

Tobias still wasn’t home. I raided the supply of bandages and some of the food he’d prepared for dinner, shoving them in a bag and collecting a bucket of water before heading back in the direction I’d just escaped from.

He was still there. Still bleeding.

I approached cautiously, but there was nothing he seemed to be able to do even if I hadn’t.

Perhaps it was foolish. If I helped him, and he healed, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t still punish me for the rules I’d broken. But the thought of not helping sat far more uncomfortably within me than whatever he might do to me afterward.

He hissed at me as I approached him. I continued anyway.

I cleaned his wounds, and though he glared at me the entire time, he didn’t stop me.

Once the bucket was filled with gold and his wounds were cleaned, I wrapped them, as best as I was able to.

Feeding him made me a little more nervous. But as I brought bread and dried meats to his lips, he eyed me with something other than malice as he ate.

The seasons changed. White swallowed green around me. My breaths left me in puffs of heated vapor. It was even more dangerous to be here in winter, harder to hide my tracks in the snow.

But I’d risk just about anything for him.

Red on stone and frost.

Shadows that swirled with excitement.

“My Jem.”