The Gloaming of the Gods

After a few silent moments, his voice came quietly as from a long tunnel. "As a boy I lay out at night and gazed at the heavens, and the stars seemed to me benevolent bits of incandescence. I never dreamt they would one day appear ominous in my sight."

Her hand crept over his thigh and found his, and he threaded his fingers through hers before he continued.

"It is perhaps the most pleasant illusion of childhood, to never imagine that the deep mysteries among them could hold unpleasant things."

"The eyes of childhood are necessary," she said softly, "for if we were to see the whole first, in the harsh light of adults, we might never find the beauty at all. We would be too blinded by all the bad. You must always keep a part of that little boy, Albus."

He traced her palm, running up her long fingers and finding the rough patch where the wool from the loom burnt the skin.

"Headmaster Dippet was at the conference. He has asked me to come to Hogwarts and teach."

"That is as it should be. I dream too, Albus. I see what you are…what you will be to them. You are the thread that will continue on through the destruction. You will be the one to show them the way when their world crumbles. When everyone loses, and everyone is equal. In that wreck of civilization you will be the hope. They will look to you for it."

"Then you see the way much more clearly than I."

She smiled slightly. "I am made of youmembmember?"

He watched as she reached for the bag behind her and drew out a small downy figure. She held it in her cupped hands between them, and he saw that it was a small phoenix.

"I walked for hours and hours and I found myself in Athens, at the base of the senate. And there he was, just emerged from his own ashes at a place where men once came to talk of a dream. That is what a great civilization is - a dream among men. And I saw what my gift to yould be. be. You are wondering where to find the strength you need to continue down your path. And I will give it to you, now. This piece of hope. You shall tend it and bequeath it to a new world."

Albus looked at the small ugly bird she placed in his hand and then up at her face.

"I find myself caring for little but you, Freya."

"You do care, Albus. You care so deeply about those faceless men and their descendants to come that you could never rest easy, never live with your own shadow, if you did not play your role."

He raised a hand and held it inches from her face, barely running it along her hair.

"To be given all that I could want and to see all that I cannot have. These years I have never longed to wander elsewhere. Just to be here with you. To build a little house. To run my hands over your belly when it is big with child, and to look in your eyes and catch them in my hands at the moment they enter the world."

He smudged the tracks of her tears with his thumb.

"All men to come must be your children," she choked out. "This has always been a stolen season."

"But how to go on without you? When you are present in every thought, every dream?"

She shook her head. "We are not always lost to each other. How can we be? Though I may burn for it later, I will not give you up completely. I will come to you when you are most in need, even if it is only in dreams."

"Dreams," he whispered, "always dreams."

"Look for me in the gloaming, Albus. The gloaming is ours alone."

He set the phoenix down gently in the grasses, then turned to her. He laid her out in the moonlight and Night crouched around them, dipping dark fingers into the river.

He drew her dress down her body until all of her secrets were spread before him and touched every one. She rose on her knees and did the same to him, whispering her love words over his bared skin and giving kisses like drops of rain. When she pressed her open lips to his throat and touched the tip of her tongue to his adam's apple, he shuddered and pulled her down with him to the ground, drawing her hair over his face and breathing deeply.

Her kisses left wet paths that looked like silver stretch marks in the moon's gaze. The skin of her shoulder was salty under his mouth as he bht hht her up his body and sought to find the deepest part of her, the soft warm womb of her soul. He cried out to be let in, and she yielded in welcome and took him into the wet pool where she twined around him and sunk to the bottom.

~~**~~**~~

He dreamt that he was alone by the river and the salt he had tasted was from his own tears. He looked into the murky waters and they fell into the river, and when they hit the surface they were blood red. They flowed along through eddies and currents, through streams and into oceans, until there was no water, no life on earth that was not touched or quenched or sustained by it.