Ambrosia Read online

  A shutter was pushed open from within and a man nearly fell out through it in his haste. He was a stallion of a man, his hair mussed and tussled, his robes hanging loosely, giving glimpses of his muscular physique.

  “Wait!” he called out to Erolina. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “That’s right, you didn’t,” she said without turning back.

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Not a chance.”

  Already the streets were stirring as she strolled towards the art district. Small clockwork mice scampered about, scrubbing and polishing the streetlights, watering flowerbeds, and angrily snatching up a candy wrapper when a grumpy child threw it to the ground.

  A mustachioed shopkeeper proudly set out a sign in his window when he saw her coming. “Móno oi ánthropi.” The same phrase hung on a banner above a jeweler’s shop, and the cobbler had it painted directly on her front window. “Móno oi ánthropi,” meaning humans only.

  Erolina received more than a few disapproving glances from the humans already going about their day.

  “It’s one of them,” an old woman whispered to her husband as he fidgeted with his laurels. “The traitors who slaughtered everything in the north isles.”

  “Those butchers hunted the griffin to extinction.”

  Erolina pretended not to notice, filtering her emotions as she was trained to do, only allowing herself to feel what she chose to feel. That was the amazon way. To do otherwise would be to give others power over her, and nothing was more unacceptable than that.

  “How can they let something like that wander our streets?” a young husband whispered to his wife. “It’s a scandal.”

  “Don’t look at her, you’ll be cursed,” the wife whispered back.

  Erolina paused and turned to the man, giving him a sultry smile and a little arch of the back. Then, with a playful wink, she blew him a kiss as if she knew him.

  His wife reacted instantly, smacking him on the arm. “What the trell was that?”

  “What was what?” I don’t know her.”

  “Oh, you most certainly did,” Erolina purred. “Last week, and it was wonderful.”

  The wife stepped back, aghast. “You scum!”

  “Scum? What? She’s lying. You can’t trust what an amazon says! She’s probably trying to put a hex on me.”

  Erolina walked away as the pair bickered, the argument growing more and more heated as she went down the street, becoming a spectacle. When no one was looking, Erolina allowed a little wry smile to peek out of her lips, content in the fact that the young husband was about to have a terrible day.

  ~

  Storgen tacked the last of his paintings to the wooden fence of an empty lot right next to the art exhibit row. It wasn’t technically part of the art district, but he figured it was close enough that some of the shoppers could see his paintings from where they were. He took a moment to soak in his creations. A city street at night with currant streets and merlot buildings, a young woman with lavender hair looking out her window at the blush starlight.

  “Hey Pops, can you hand me my kit? I forgot to sign this one.”

  Pops snored loudly from within the blanket he was rolled up in, a human burrito slumped against the side of the fence.

  Storgen rolled his eyes and walked over to his pack. “Thanks, Pops.”

  As he rustled through his things, a pair of elegant female feet stepped into his view, connected to the longest, most toned legs he had ever seen.

  “So, it’s you,” Erolina said. “The convict.”

  Storgen glanced around, checking to see if she was alone. “No, you see, a convict is someone who was found guilty through a trial. I escaped before I could be put on trial.”

  “A meaningless distinction.”

  Her presence was overwhelming as she towered over him. So close she was he could catch a faint whiff of her scent. Like a mix of sandalwood and strawberry. Exotic and alluring. A part of his brain wondered if it was her natural scent or if it was a perfume she wore, and even considered asking her the question, while the rest of his brain was looking for a route of escape and calculating exactly how many steps he could take at a sprint before she decapitated him.

  She made no move to attack, making him increasingly uneasy as they stood there in silence.

  Storgen’s eyes flicked down the street, ready to run. “So, are we going to fight?”

  She raised a silver eyebrow. “Do you want to fight?”

  He thought carefully for a moment before answering. “No.”

  “Then we don’t have to.”

  “Wait…you’re not going to turn me in?”

  She turned and began examining one of his paintings. “The laws of men mean nothing to me. My only duty is to the goddess Ambera. If she ordered me to hunt you down and kill you, I would do so without hesitation.”

  “Did she?”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “Do you really think we’d still be talking if she had?”

  “Probably not.”

  Erolina sighed deeply. It was an oddly natural thing to do, and Storgen had to remind himself that in addition to being a champion, she was also just a regular person.

  “My goddess had a tantrum last night, and has tasked me with the lowly quest to find new artwork for her temple walls and an artist to repaint her mosaic. It is an assault to my martial pride to be used this way.”

  It took Storgen’s brain a minute to catch up. He shook his head and stepped in front of his paintings, throwing out his hands proudly. “Well, I am selling everything I have ever painted. This is my first exhibition.”

  She reached out and touched a painting of an azure ship listing lazily abreast a cyan dock, sable and power waves lapping against its side, a young woman with lavender hair looking out from the captain’s cabin. Erolina ran her fingers over the brushstrokes, feeling the delicate imperfections of the paint.

  “You painted these by hand?” she asked curiously.

  “I did.”

  “They’re all terrible.”

  “I prefer, eclectic.”

  “The colors are all wrong. This isn’t what a ship looks like at all.”

  “You have a keen eye.”

  She took a step back and regarded them all. “Why do you always paint a woman with lavender hair in all of your paintings?”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, every single one.”

  Storgen smiled gently and reached out, placing his fingertips near the woman as she lay reading to herself in a field of marmalade, resting against a tree of apricot and marigold.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The image of her has been in my heart, since the day I was born. I’ve been searching for her since I was old enough to crawl.”

  This caught Erolina’s attention. “So, you don’t even know if she exists?”

  “Oh, she’s out there. I can feel it.”

  “Feel it?”

  “Hmm. Here, I’ll show you.”

  “Show me?”

  “Yeah, close your eyes.”

  Erolina placed her hand on her shapely hip. “Seriously?”

  “Go ahead, do it,” he insisted.

  She made no move to do so.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll do it.”

  He closed his eyes and stepped out into the morning light, holding out his hands to soak in the rays. “It’s the sun. I can’t see it right now, I can’t touch it, but I know it’s there. I can feel it.”

  Erolina studied him closely with her ruby red eyes. “You know, you are a sexy specimen to look at, but the minute you open your mouth and speak it just ruins the whole effect.”

  Storgen opened his eyes and turned around excitedly. “Did you know, when humans were first created, they each had two heads, four arms, four legs, and one heart?”

  “The current model is not much of an improvement,” she opined.

  “But the Fates feared their power, so they broke each one in two, leaving each human with one head, two legs, two arms, b
ut only half the heart.”

  He looked at the woman in his paintings tenderly. “Thus, humans would spend a great deal of their short lives searching for the other half of their heart. It was a way of occupying our time, so we would never be a threat to the Fates.”

  He reached out to the painting, placing his hand atop hers. “But that also means, if you can find the other half of your heart, then you can be whole again, as every human was designed to be.”

  As he looked gently at his painting, the spell was broken by the sound of a woman giggling. The sound caught him off guard for a moment, until he realized that it was coming from Erolina. She covered her mouth, trying to hold back the sound, as if she had never laughed before, and didn’t know how quite how to contain it.

  “Is something funny?” he asked.

  “You,” she said, breaking into a full laugh. “You sound like some frilly raving poet.”

  “What? You don’t believe in true love?”

  “Pffft. No, of course not.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m always serious. What you call love is just a vagary of perception, it’s not real.”

  She flicked the canvas with her finger, scratching the paint.

  “Love has never been real, and it will never will be real. Mortals are just animals, like any other. We eat, we drink, we mate, we fight, we die. There’s nothing mystical about it, it’s just base instinct. A chemical attraction, a mechanism designed to propagate a species. Cold hard math, nothing more.”

  Storgen looked at her sympathetically. “That sounds so lonely.”

  For the briefest of moments, a strange expression passed over her eyes. It was so quick one could have missed it entirely by blinking. It was a deep, hollow expression, her martial pride slipping aside to reveal something softer.

  She reached up to touch her locket, but balled her fist instead.

  “So, how much?” she asked sternly.

  Storgen blinked. “Wait, you want to buy one?”

  “I want to buy them all.”

  “Wow. Seriously? I thought you hated them.”

  “I do hate them.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “My goddess commanded me to hire an artist and purchase artwork, but was mum as to the quality of said works.”

  “Wait, so, you’re buying them just to tick her off?”

  “Do you want the money or not?”

  “Oh, I want it.”

  “Then package them up and follow me. You’ll be paid when we get to the temple.”

  “Oh wow, I can’t tell you how much I need this sale,” Storgen said excitedly, packing his things.

  “I’m not doing this for you.”

  “Hey Pops, you hear that? We’re gonna’ finally get off this rock.”

  From within the human burrito, a long dry flatulence flapped out from beneath the blanket.

  “That’s okay Pops, you just sleep it off. I’ll be back for you later.”

  The two walked in silence through the morning streets. With her long strides, he had to shuffle every few steps just to keep up with her. A part of his brain noticed that, displayed in his peripheral vision, was the most athletic and curvaceous backside he had ever seen on a woman, but another part of his brain noticed the glint of steel from the dagger she wore, and he kept his eyes pointed forward instead.

  While the adults in the street avoided her, many of the younger men leered, elbowing their friends and bragging to one another as they passed.

  “She’s beautiful,” one whispered. “She wields the Scythe of Ambera.”

  “She’s totally my type.”

  “What must it be like, to be loved by the gods that much?”

  “Dude, you wanna get cursed? You know what happens to men who lie with an amazon.”

  “They have the time of their life?”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Erolina seemed not to notice, and Storgen wondered if maybe amazon hearing wasn’t as keen as a human’s.

  When they reached the district division, a pair of guards stepped out from the gatehouse.

  “Prove your worth.”

  Erolina reached into her robes and pulled out her golden talisman. The men recognized it instantly and stepped aside.

  “Proceed, Scythe.”

  They looked suspiciously at Storgen as he followed her through.

  “I’m with her,” he said with an oversized smile.

  Storgen watched as a pair of wealthy families greeted one another up ahead. “Hail, noble,” one side chanted. “Hail noble,” the others responded. One by one, they took out their divine items, showing their citizenships, their familias, and their gifts, only giving their names to one another at the end as an afterthought.

  “You don’t flaunt your gifts like the other humans do,” Erolina noticed, breaking the silence.

  “I don’t like to brag.”

  She gave him a wayward glance. “You don’t want the others to know how much your gods love you?”

  “I don’t even have my own mother’s love, why would I want to earn theirs?”

  She shook her head. “You are the strangest human I have ever met.”

  As they reached the marble steps of Ambera’s temple, they found a bustling colony of activity, workers and masons digging, pouring, carving, sculpting, erecting, and detailing. Among all the guards, Storgen found one he recognized.

  “Hey Piers, whatcha reading?”

  The head guard looked up from his scroll. “Just got the new issue of Epoch.”

  “Can you believe they turned The Dark Hoplite into a harpy?”

  Piers threw his hands up. “I know. I mean, I should be happy that they are diversifying the lineup, but it just comes off as pandering to the harpy readers.”

  “It’s not like harpies buy the stuff anyway.”

  “Hey, you wanna borrow it when I’m done?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Erolina rolled her eyes as she walked up to the main doors.

  “What you got in there?” Piers asked, eyeing Storgen’s pack.

  “Piers, I’m shocked, after all we’ve been through together.”

  “Tough break pal, it’s my job. No one sees the goddess without being searched.”

  Storgen held his pack out. “Go for it, it’s just my paints, a couple of ripe gyros, and some sailboat fuel.”

  “Sailboat fuel? Do you have a permit for that?”

  “You know, what? I don’t.”

  Piers rummaged carefully though the pack. “There’s no sailboat fuel in here.”

  “Oh no! Someone stole my sailboat fuel! I should go to the constabulary and file a report immediately.”

  Piers furrowed his brow. “Wait a minute, sailboats don’t need fuel.”

  Storgen snatched his pack back. “Then why do I need a permit for it?”

  Erolina pressed her hand against the sigil slate and the ornate doors swung open. They walked inside, leaving Piers standing there, trying to figure out what just happened.

  Inside they found a line of aristocrats snaking around construction scaffolding leading to the inner sanctum. Erolina bypassed all of them and walked straight in, eliciting more than a few harsh glances.

  Entering the chamber, Storgen was stunned by the presence of the Empress of the Fall, sitting atop her throne of flowing amber, her hair floating around her like radiant fields of wheat.

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s awe-inspiring, but I got a schedule to keep,” Erolina grumbled, grabbing his shoulder and leading him on.

  The local magistrate and his family prostrated themselves before Ambera. “We pledge our service to our goddess, till death or dismissal,” they swore in unison.

  Ambera dipped her golden chalice into a barrel of sparkling ambrosia and drank. From her fingertips, pure ether flowed out, weaving itself into a golden vest of unparalleled beauty, a large fox crest running across the front.

  “And for your service, I grant you this gift,” the
goddess said benevolently, her voice like the sweet morning breeze. “Wear it always, it will heal your husband’s lungs, and prolong his life.”

  “Oh, thank you,” the wife gushed, cradling the vest in her hands. “We humans would be nothing without your bureaucracy.”

  “Yes, I know. Your family has given more tribute than any other this year, so I am naming you commissioner of the Festival of Colors.”

  The magistrate and his family looked at each other happily. “We are honored, oh, great one.”

  Ambera nodded graciously, her face full of grace, her eyes full of kindness. “I shall have my servants come by later today to explain your duties to you.”

  As the happy family left, Ambera slumped in her throne, her head falling back as she groaned. “How many more of these do I have to do?” she complained.

  High-Priestess Acantha checked her slate. “That was number seventeen…”

  “Uhhh.”

  “…out of five hundred.”

  “Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Acantha discreetly cleared her throat to let Ambera know they were not alone.

  The goddess raised her head and her face darkened. “Ah, my Scythe has returned.”

  Erolina bowed at the waist and held out Storgen’s artwork. “As instructed, I have commissioned an artist.”

  “Fine, let me see them,” Ambera grunted, placing a piece of gum in her mouth and smacking away as she looked them over.

  “What in the five realms are these?” she wondered aloud. “Is this supposed to be a bowl of fruit?”

  “This portrait is all wrong,” Acantha observed, pulling one out of the stack. “The eyes are so big, the mouth is so small. And is that a big…drop of sweat or something on the back of that man’s head?”

  Ambera crinkled her nose. “These are…bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  Storgen noticed the faintest hint of a smile on Erolina’s lips.

  Ambera looked up. “I love them.”

  Erolina blinked. “Wait, what?”

  “My new temple will be the most unique in the realm. Why? What were you expecting me to say?”

  Her eyebrow twitched. “I have no expectations, I simply do what I am told.”

  “Where is the painter who made these?”