I hesitated. "From whatever it means for you specifically." Mousikí didn't answer right away. The grass bent and swayed around us. “My life is what I hold dear….That’s what I’ll lose” I didn't have an answer for that. So we walked on in silence, and I let the question settle into the space between us where all the other unanswered things lived. We had walked in silence for a while before Mousikí spoke again. Not the heavy, reluctant silence from before — something softer this time, more thoughtful, like a man turning a story over in his hands before deciding how to tell it. "Geira and Panoúkla weren't always one being," he said. "I'm sure you knew that." "I knew," I said quietly. He nodded, eyes still on the path ahead. "Then you know they were two, once. Separate. Distinct." A pause. "In love, the way gods rarely allow themselves to be — fully, recklessly, without the careful distance that immortality tends to teach you." I said nothing. I had never thought of Geira and Panoúkla as two halves of something broken and remade. To me they had always simply been — whole and ancient and inseparable, the way the tide was inseparable from the sea. The idea of them apart felt strange. Wrong, almost. "When Geira resurrected Ying," Mousikí continued, his voice careful and low, "and her twin brother — she did it alone. Behind Panoúkla's back. Without a word, without a warning. She broke the vow they had both made and said nothing about it." Something cold moved through me at the mention of Ying. I kept my face still. "Why?" I asked. "Why would she do it alone? Why not tell Panoúkla?" Mousikí was quiet for a moment. "Because she knew Panoúkla would say no," he said simply. "And Geira couldn't bear that answer. So she made the choice herself and hoped, I think, that love would be enough to weather the consequences." He exhaled softly. "It almost wasn't." The grass whispered around us. I thought of Ying — of the sacrifice she had made for me, of the weight of a debt I would never fully be able to repay — and wondered if she had ever known the cost of her own resurrection. Whether she had ever known that it had nearly split the gods of Life and Death apart at the seam. "Panoúkla was heartbroken," Mousikí said. "Not just hurt — heartbroken, in the way that only happens when the person who wounds you is the last person you ever expected to." He turned the flute over slowly in his fingers. "She didn't leave. She didn't rage, the way Forá had raged. She just — went quiet. And quiet, from Panoúkla, was somehow worse." glanced at him. "But they forgave each other." "Eventually," he said. "The way people who truly love each other always do — slowly, painfully, with a great deal of silence in between." The ghost of something crossed his face. Not quite a smile. "They joined together as one. You know that part. Most people think it was purely a gesture of love — a merging of souls as a symbol of their bond." He tilted his head slightly. "And it was. But it wasn't only that." I tilted my head, watching him. He was quiet for a moment, as if weighing how to say the next part. "Panoúkla never fully trusted her again," he said at last. The words were gentle, but they landed heavily. "She forgave Geira — genuinely, I believe that — but forgiveness and trust aren't the same thing, and some part of Panoúkla knew that. Some part of her would always wonder, in the quiet moments, whether Geira might make another choice alone. Another exception. Another act of love that looked, from the outside, exactly like a betrayal." The field opened up ahead of us, wider and brighter, the distant shimmer of water catching the light on the horizon. I barely noticed. "So the joining wasn't just symbolic," I said slowly. "No." Mousikí's voice was soft. "It was a safeguard. By merging, they ensured that neither of them could ever act without the other knowing. No secrets. No decisions made in the dark. Every thought, every impulse, every moment of doubt or temptation — shared." He paused. "They bound themselves together so completely that betrayal became impossible. Not because the desire for it was gone, but because there was no longer any space in which it could live." I let that settle over me, turning the shape of it slowly. It was an act of love. I could see that. But underneath it, running like a hairline fracture through something beautiful, was the shadow of what had made it necessary. Two beings so devoted to each other that they had chosen to surrender the last of their separateness — not only out of joy, but out of grief. Out of the particular grief of loving someone and no longer being entirely certain you knew them. "That's..." I searched for the word. "That's both the most romantic and the most heartbreaking thing I've ever heard." Mousikí glanced at me sideways. That small, quiet smile again — the real one, not the performance. "Most true things are," he said simply. And we kept walking.
