Chapter Text
Time still moves oddly in the Underworld, but Osha finds it passes smoothly, and without complaint.
She spends a lot of her time in the greenhouse, changing the tulips from white to black to pink to orange. If she really focuses, she can paint each petal a different colour, and this delights her immensely. She doesn’t feel complete, not quite yet, but she certainly feels more herself than ever with her knees in the dirt.
You can see her there now, eyes shut, hands clasped around a tulip. Osha’s brows are furrowed and there’s a faint hum, a faint static in the air. It’s different to the thrum that lives beneath the city, but in a way the tunes go together – a unique harmony to the music.
Osha focuses on that, the music she can hear somewhere far away, and the notes that dance in front of her dark vision. Warmth spreads through her fingertips, trickles down her palms, and when it fades she opens her eyes, and removes her hands.
The tulip is no longer a tulip at all. Instead, a white edelweiss sits in its place.
A smile spreads slowly over Osha’s face. It had taken her months, but she had done it.
You see, since changing the colour of that tulip all that time ago, Osha had been determined to do more. She called to her power every wakening minute, so sure that if she just kept trying that something would happen. In doing so, she realised that she could only feel her power when she was inside the greenhouse, and since then she’d been experimenting – making the tulips smaller and larger, changing the colour, digging her hands deep into the dirt Qimir had brought to plant seeds she hoped might someday grow.
And today, almost six months after she had first stepped foot in the Underworld, she had focused her power long enough to change the plant entirely.
Osha leans down and inhales the flowers scent deeply.
“Very good,” a voice from behind interrupts.
She looks back over her shoulder, and there is Qimir, smiling down at her.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she says.
“I didn’t want to pull your focus.” He steps closer, and holds out a hand for her to take. “I have something for you.”
Osha reaches up and slips her hand into his, allowing him to help her to her feet. The action is familiar, but it does nothing to stop the heat that rises to her face.
Qimir spent more time with her, since that first time they’d fought. He took her along to work on the city, watched her whisper to her flowers in the greenhouse. Sometimes he let her read to him, anything she liked from the library, and he’d rest his head in her lap and she’d pull her fingers through his soft, midnight hair, wondering how the history books could have got it so wrong about the Lord of the Dead. To have a being that powerful lay himself in her lap and drift his eyes closed to only the sound of her words sent butterflies soaring about her stomach, and it took all of her willpower not to lean down and press a soft kiss to his temple.
For just as time had carried on, smoothly, and without complaint, as had whatever she felt towards Qimir. Six months she’d spent by his side now, and it was obvious to her that she was falling in love. Every touch of his hand, every glance he sent her way set her heart racing, and the odd connection she felt between the two of them, like string, had pulled itself taut.
Osha had the suspicious feeling that they were both simply waiting for the other to make the first move.
“Another gift?” Osha asks, pleased. Qimir was always bringing her something – crystals and vases (something to work towards, he said) and shiny objects. She had them dotted around the castle, and a few in the greenhouse, and on occasion she caught him smiling at them when he thought she wasn’t looking.
Now, Osha brushes off her knees and Qimir leads her forward, pushing open the greenhouse door and stepping out onto the rock. Osha follows, and when she sees what he’s brought her she gasps, dropping his hand to approach it quickly.
Flapping it’s tiny bone wings and encircled by a green, necrotic light, is a skeletal bird. A robin – if Osha was recognising the bone structure correctly. It’s entirely skeleton, just like the servants Qimir enchanted for the castle, and when Osha comes close it darts towards her, zooming around her head before landing on her shoulder. It pecks at her lightly, and Osha laughs, delighted.
“Look at you,” she cooes, and the bird chirps, hopping off her shoulder to instead land on her palm as Osha brings it up. “You’re beautiful.”
The bone bird pecks gentle kisses into her hand.
“What will you name him?” Qimir asks, smiling.
She thinks for a moment, tipping her head, considering, as the bird hops around her palm. He really is tiny and seems smaller with no meat to fluff his form.
“I’ll call him Pip,” she says, “he’s about as big as.”
Qimir huffs a laugh, and then there are hands on her waist as he comes up behind her. He presses the full length of his body to her back and leans over her shoulder to peer down at the bird.
“Hello, Pip,” he greets, voice low and quiet.
His touch feels electric. She’s sure she can feel the thrum beneath her feet reflected in his hands, burning into her hips. Osha takes a deep breath, and the movement brushes her shoulders against his chest. Qimir turns his head, nose brushing her locs, and his hot breath on the side of her neck has her eyes falling closed.
“I made him for you,” Qimir whispers into her ear, and it sends shivers lighting down her spine. Qimir’s fingers twitch at the action.
Slowly, slowly, Osha turns her head and when their eyes meet her breath catches.
This is it, she thinks as she tips her chin up.
This is it, as Qimir leans down further into her space.
Finally, finally, finally, as their lips brush together.
Heat blooms in the palm of Osha’s hand. It feels like liquid sunlight oozing from her skin, and then the pain fades and all that’s left is raw power rushing to her fingertips. Osha knew that feeling, it was one she had rarely felt since joining Qimir in the Underworld, and the sudden tug of her power on her mind, and Qimir so close makes her breathless.
Qimir’s grip on her waist tightens, and he turns his head away, to stare at her open hand. Her heart thundering, Osha’s gaze follows.
Pip remains in the centre of her palm, happily pecking her skin, but he is skeletal no longer. A real, live robin sits in her hand, plump and soft and joyously alive.
For a moment, they both simply stare, dumbfounded. Osha can hardly believe it, this living being in the Land of the Dead, oblivious to the weight it held in it’s small frame. Osha drops her hand, and Pip flaps his tiny wings, hovering in the air before zooming off to perch atop the greenhouse. Both Osha and Qimir spin quickly to follow his movement.
It is incredibly silent, in the world of the dead – if it can even be called that.
Osha can bear it no longer. “I don’t understand. Why now?”
She turns to face Qimir, but he’s staring at Pip with an odd expression. It’s something hopeful and wonderous, and when he flicks his gaze to land on Osha the tiniest of smiles tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“The power of two,” he murmurs.
Osha frowns, flicking her eyes from Pip to Qimir. “What’s that?”
“You haven’t read about it?” He asks quietly. He seems almost dazed, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. “In a way, it’s a myth. An idea, more than anything. A partnership – in which two beings combine their power for greatness.”
Osha had read a lot of books about a lot of Gods. Never had that phrase come up. It stirs something inside her, and she wills with all her might for Qimir to tell her more.
“It’s an unbreakable bond,” he goes on, and he takes a step toward her. Excitement seems to have settled over his skin, and Osha suddenly feels as if she were on the edge of a precipice, a monumental moment. “Those involved only grow more powerful when it’s achieved.”
Was that what she felt? Her connection to Qimir? There was a want there, and she knew that was hers alone to own, but there was something else too, a desire that went deeper than her affection for him.
Could it be they were supposed to be together? Not just in love, but in power, too? She had dreamt all her life of a soulmate, always wondered if there was an equal to her being.
And it made sense, suddenly, how Qimir could bring flowers back from the living world, how she could manipulate those flowers when she seemed to be cut off from her power. They were using each other’s talents to harness their own. Qimir could only bring flowers back when he combined his magic with hers. When I preserved the flowers and the soil – like I do the dead – they stayed alive. And Osha could only call to the tulips after that – after they were imbedded with necrotic magic. They worked in tandem, because you needed both life and death for life after death. It was a balance, a give and take, and the connection she feels to Qimir slams into her with full force.
I feel like I know you, Qimir had told her, and all this time she had felt the same, because of course they knew each other. They were two sides to the same coin, each one needed the other for the cycle to go on.
Osha looks towards Pip. Life could be created in the Underworld, but it had to come through death.
Qimir steps close once again, grabs her hands and holds them tightly in his own.
“Can you feel it?” He asks, invigorated. Green light seeps from his hands, and her blood rushes to meet it. It’s like dawn breaks through, and the two of them glow so bright there’s nothing she can see but him.
“Why now?” Osha asks again and Qimir’s enthusiasm goes soft. He places one of his hands on her cheek, and she tips her head into its weight.
“It’s been said that strong emotions can stir even the slightest power.”
Heat rushes her face and she laughs, and Qimir laughs, and then she’s tightening her grip on his hand and turning, running.
They sprint, laughing like mortals, and Osha’s lungs burn as she pulls Qimir along. Twice he almost trips on the jagged ground and twice she tugs him back to his feet. They run through the half built city, legs a flame, and only do they come to a stop when they’ve reached their destination.
Hand in hand they stand before the River Styx, and Osha looks to Qimir, and he looks right on back.
She feels when he lets his power seep into hers. It rushes straight to her head, makes her dizzy, and the static beneath her skin and the thrumming heart of the city tune into a single harmonised note; godly and resplendent.
Palm up, slowly, she raises her free hand to the sky and pulls.
Greenery erupts from the riverbank. Lilypads sprout on the waters edge. There’s grass, real grass, overgrown and leaning over the water. The rock of the ground softens beneath their feet and sticky mud sucks their shoes into the floor. Reeds shoot up, the smell of water mint wafts into the air, because there is air. A breeze drifts through, and beside her she hears Qimir gasp. Heat relaxes into warmth, like the comfortable feeling of summer just beginning to break through the spring.
Osha lets her power go easily and slowly Qimir draws his back into himself.
“Osha…” Qimir breathes, eyes stuck on the river before them. She can hardly see it through the tears in her eyes.
“Is it beautiful?” She whispers, and a small shiver lights up her spine when the breeze circles around her.
The God of the Dead seems lost for words, and that is a triumph, she thinks. After a moment he swallows, and squeezes her hand.
“Of course it is,” he says, voice alight with awe. “It was made by you.”