SONGS OF OURSELVES | ✓

❦ potentate

"I love you," it said. "And I love you enough to leave you."

On and on, echoing in his ears.

love you...

LEAVE YOU...

love you...

LEAVE YOU...

Xosa, who had run out of tears half an hour earlier, stared blearily at the false image.

"And I love you, too," he exhaled. As if it could've made her stay. "With all my heart."

A moment suspended in interminable tension. In the distance, the Goldsmith's machines whirred and rattled. Sunkanmi's figment smirked before disappearing.

Unburdened, Xosa tugged his wrist upwards.

But the handcuff held fast. Tight as ever.

"It didn't work."

The Goldsmith looked away, humbled.

"It has to be a secret unknown to anyone else. Compromising information only you know."

"Oh," Xosa froze. "But-"

The pitying glances. The embarrassed bristling. Laqueheia's solemn resignation. The Goldsmith's neverending amusement. How his followers hovered around her, protectively, long before Sunkanmi proved she was his twin flame.

Because they knew.

They all knew before he even had an inkling. It must've been so painfully, glaringly obvious to everyone in a twenty-mile radius. The uncomfortable half-life of affection left strategically unrequited.

But it wasn't one-sided at all, was it?

His feelings were returned, and-

"...Does she know?"

If Xosa could've died, the Goldsmith's silence would've killed him.

"Goldy?"

"The answer to that will not free you from this predicament any faster," they said.

Xosa had half a mind to smash a rock in the Goldsmith's stupid symmetrical face.

"What's the point of immortality if I never gain any wisdom from it?"

The Goldsmith glanced up from their workbench, sucking on a platinum nugget.

"You are old, friend, but you have never been wise."

Truthfully, the Goldsmith never considered what would happen if someone locked the cuff onto an inanimate object. They surmised the tree pipe provided enough living energy to sustain the cuff's magic, even without the benefit of blood. The Goldsmith began to question the very definition of life, seeing as the cuff so readily attached itself to Death's wrist in the first place.

"She's getting away," Xosa bemoaned, chin touching his chest. "And she'll get herself and Zeusah slaughtered in the process."

"I doubt that. She has more common sense than you give her credit."

"She behaves more like a Divinity than a mortal," Xosa scoffed. The confession burned his lips, too little, too late. "More than I ever did, at least."

"What will you do now? Surely that wasn't your only secret."

Suddenly dizzy, Xosa gripped his head again. The wall of reality was too high to climb. "How could she keep this from me?"

"The benefit of admitting she loved you outweighed her duty to say nothing."