She’d been no more than six years old, giddy and giggling as children often were. She’d been fair-haired and light-skinned, like most of her village, too young to have anything to do around her family’s farm. The girl often took to sitting in the fields by herself, chasing the butterflies or trying to catch the newts by the river. She enjoyed being outside in the sun, drinking in the warm air as if she could never get enough.
One day, the girl had run into a pair of boys from her village. They were near her age, as far as I could tell, but their idea of fun was much different than hers. The boys had caught a stray cat, and they’d taken it to the river to hurt it.
Though I respected humans, I had always known there were those with black hearts and vile intentions. When you had free rein over your own choices, every now and again you were bound to make the wrong choice. Those boys were about to hurt something, but the girl stepped in.
Just a child, and she stepped in and acted like that poor cat’s protector, its guardian and its savior. I watched, perched on a nearby rock at the side of the river, invisible to all. I watched as she saved the animal and cussed out the boys using some very colorful language I was sure she’d heard from her parents, sounding so furious she made one of the boys cry.
But of course, simply saving the cat and chasing the boys off wasn’t what earned herself a place in my heart. No. Most humans would’ve stopped the boys, had they seen what they were doing. What most humans wouldn’t have done, on the other hand, was take the poor cat and spend days upon days nursing her back to health and making sure she was alright. Most would’ve just let the cat be.
I spent an awful lot of time watching over the girl after that. She grew older, and I kissed her skin with a tint of color, even during the winter months, made her yellow hair less yellow and more golden and shiny. Nearly everyone who met her knew she was favored by Summer, by me.
Morana. I learned her name when she was young. Fiery, feisty, full of defiance and courage; things her family hated to see in her, but things I found spectacular. I found myself watching her perhaps a bit too much, especially once she grew older.
I’d never had a bride. I wasn’t like my brother, in that he was lonely and constantly searching for someone to make him feel whole. I did not lock myself away in that castle; I was constantly out and about, and even though I was invisible to the humans, half the time I felt as if I was one of them. I was never lonely, not until the night I watched Morana give herself to a merchant’s boy.
Of course, I didn’t really watch. She was still young, and I knew they deserved privacy, even though they could not see me. But that night was when the seed was planted inside my head, when I started to wonder what it would be like to take a human bride and share my world with her.
Would she like to travel between villages and grant people boons? Would she enjoy the freedom I could offer? I found myself wondering all these things and more.
I’d tried to get my brother to leave his castle, to come out, to walk with me through the human streets and see them, truly see them for what they were, but he never did. He refused to leave the grounds of his castle; if he’d been human, he would’ve wasted away into nothing a long time ago. Alas, human he was not, nor was I.
My brother, Winter, was as cold as ice. He called himself Abner, just as I preferred Ishan. Though we were brothers, though we were both gods in a way, the similarities ended there. My skin was dark, touched by the sun, my hair a light brown with a few honey-colored strands. My eyes were a warm amber hue, while my brother’s were like frozen ice when the sun shined on it. My brother’s skin was pale, his hair colorless in its whiteness. We viewed the humans differently, searched for opposite things.
Until now, it seemed.
Until the day when Morana’s sister was chosen as Abner’s bride, and Morana volunteered to take her place.
I’d been there, I’d been watching. I always did, when it came time for my brother to search once more for a bride to fill his loneliness. He was cursed, in a way, cursed to crave the one thing he would never get… and now I was beginning to wonder if I was cursed, too.
The first human who I’d thought about showing myself to, the first human girl who’d had me wrapped around her finger from when she was a mere child… and she would belong to my brother.
Fate must be laughing at us all.
My heart dropped when Morana volunteered, and it sunk to the ground when my brother’s messenger agreed. I watched them ride off with the rest of the town, standing amongst them, even though none could see me. Her family was upset, her sister the most, understandably so.
Why? Why would Morana volunteer to wed Winter? She was favored by me, not my brother. If she should belong to anyone, she should belong to me.
I thought about teleporting to my brother’s palace and speaking with him, telling him to force his messenger to let Morana go and find a different bride from a different village. After all, there were countless villages scattered around the kingdom between our castles, so many other girls who would make a decent bride for Abner.
What stopped me from doing that was the fact that my brother would inquire as to why I was so vehement against him wedding Morana, and I would have to tell him the truth, the truth that suddenly appeared before me not too long ago.
What was the truth, you ask?
I wanted her. I wanted her to be mine. I wanted to have all of Morana’s smiles, her free spirit and her warmth. I wanted to give her everything a human lover could not, open her eyes to the world beyond the mortal realm.
And I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t tell my brother the truth because I’d spent so long dancing in his peripherals, acting like I was on another level, that I was better than him because I did not yearn for someone to temper the flames inside my soul. Abner… my brother would never admit it aloud, but he searched for a bride that would reignite the passion inside him, be the heat to his cold.
When I thought that, of course, it made sense that Morana should be the one. If there was ever a girl who could warm his icy insides, it was her. But then, I wondered about all of the other brides, what had happened to them—could I stand it if the same thing happened to Morana? There was a reason those girls never returned to their homes.
For the first time in a long time, for the first time in recent memory, I did not know what to do. I could not go to my brother without telling him everything, but I could not simply stand aside and let this happen. I needed to step in. I needed…
I needed her to see me.
Once I decided I needed Morana to see me, to see my form and know my face, a face that had been long forgotten by mortal men and women, it was simply a waiting game. The messenger had power, as did the magical beast they rode, but he could not teleport them back to the castle. Such power was beyond him, so they would have to make the journey by horseback, which would give me plenty of time to wait for the perfect moment to reveal myself to her.
The perfect moment… I’d know it when I saw it.
As it turned out, the perfect moment was a week into the journey, when the messenger had found a nice spring off the beaten path. They’d left the main roads a few days ago, traversing the wilderness on their own, avoiding any possible human villages and human riders on the main roads. The messenger and his horse could ride well into the night with nary a rest; it was Morana who complained, who kept telling him she could not ride all night, that she needed sleep.