Heavy limbed, she emerges from her bed of stone and brushes flakes of rock from her skin. She shakes sediment free of her dirt-darkened hair and picks pebbles and grit from between her toes, her fingers, her teeth. Her ears clear, then her eyes, and her other senses follow in a landslide rush as she hauls herself into the light. Crouched at the foot of the mountain slope, she fills her lungs with air for the first time in . . .

She doesn’t know how long. Last time, it was weeks.

Nothing has changed. The air on her skin feels the same as it always does when she awakens; its dry coolness mingles with the wet stone at her back. A stretch of gray forest is blanketed in the flat silence of a new morning. Aside from her, the only things that move are dust particles filtering through a shaft of sunlight at the cave’s mouth. A faint puff of steam materializes before her lips when she exhales.

“Cy.”

Her voice is hoarse, crackly as cloth stiff with dried mud, so she coughs and says it again. “Cy.”

Her name, or at least what she calls herself, because she knows it is what someone, some time, called her, and there were other names, but she doesn’t remember them. She remembers mostly moments like this one: the waking, the wandering, and the sleeping. The cycle has repeated ever since the day the stars fell, since the age of ash-snow and the stillness that followed. Lately the sleeping lasts longer, the wandering is less fruitful, and the waking is more difficult.

But Cy is awake now, so wandering she will go. She pulls on her buckskin breeches and the thick, moth-eaten woolen shirt she’s worn for years and sets out down the slope and into the forest. Skeletal trees creak in the breeze, and the mud sucks at her bare feet as she walks with the mountain to her back.

Her mountain. It is the tallest, proudest thing on the island, reaching skyward and crowned with fog. The further she strays from her den at its heart, the more she feels the tightening of an invisible string around her own.

Not too far.

As if she might abandon her post. Her power has diminished, but even at her height, she could never have left her own self behind. Though lately, the idea has appeal. If she could forsake this place, the way the others have, give up, disappear— 

She will never say that, yet the mountain already knows because she cannot help but think it.

“I won’t,” she promises instead. “Only the usual loop. See what the pickings are this time.”

An approving rumble beneath her feet settles in her marrow and becomes a subtle, seismic reminder of the churning in her stomach. She’s ravenous—not just for food, but for things. For tribute, adoration, someone’s meager regard. She hungers to be seen and reassured that she isn’t the only one left.

Yet as she forges onward, listening for the snap of a branch or the rustle of wings that signals quarry, there is none to be had. The absence makes her ache. Things were colorful and vital once. She knows this. She saw and felt it all, for the mountain was the steadfast hub of that life and fervor. Moss covered the stones, trees were thick with leaves and needles, and flowers erupted from the earth. The valley had been populated with animals, then crawling with people, and always ringing with the energy of her kin. Things changed constantly in the ever-churning flux of years, but she had never lacked company.

She hasn’t seen a person in over a hundred years. Maybe it’s been five-hundred. Spans of time that used to pass in a flash bleed into each other like a single unending day. The trees have lost their voices, and so have the animals, and the rest has been following ever since. The hunting is bad, the gathering not much better. The mountain looms over a blasted wasteland that clings to what it used to be, yet she refuses to let it go.

The sun is at its zenith as she reaches the river that traces a meandering loop around the island. She is leery of those whose hearts are water. They’re temperamental, rarely still, always reaching where they’re not welcome and making off with what is not theirs. Yet those were the very things she loved about the river—all her sly, tripping jokes, her bright smile, her nimble and explosive grace. It has been a long time since Cy has seen or heard any of that. The river has dried up to trickles and rivulets, and so has her conversation. Cy follows the old routes anyway and speaks to the river as if nothing is different.

When things first began to fall asleep, she was hopeful. She thought that if she refused to change, the river would feel it. She would reach the river’s cracked, dusty banks one day (banks that were wider every time) and find her in her human shape, perched on a rock at the center of white-capped rapids with a net full of fat, thrashing salmon clutched in her hands, grinning at the prospect of sharing her catch.

Cy is no longer so naive. The river is not coming back, and neither is anything else. One day, she too will stop waking, stop speaking, stop being. She won’t exist, and the mountain will be another mute monument to a dead world.

She drowns these thoughts in imagined rapids as she follows the river’s path and speaks louder until she is practically shouting. Old songs and sagas, memories and dreams, lists and questions and demands. It doesn’t matter. If the river has anything to say, it’s only in the slippery whispers of a language Cy can no longer understand.

—

Cy reaches the beach at dusk. Many hours have passed since she set out, yet her hands and belly are empty, and the only prizes in her pack are a handful of dusty pinecones, some mushrooms she found beside a rotten log, and a twisted hunk of metal she spotted at one of the dilapidated paved roads. One edge of it is smooth and curved like a wheel. It was catching the sun and winking at her until she had to stop. She’s always been drawn to things that shine.

Her stomach gurgles. It’s a silly thing, because she doesn’t need to eat. She doesn’t have any physical needs, really—when she exists like this, in a human shell, it’s like a game that she has long lost the desire to play. Eating is something she enjoyed once, because it was pleasurable. There are lots of things she enjoyed, lots of things that were pleasurable. Humans were so small, their lives so fragile and short, but the complexity of their senses was fascinating.

Now such appetites are a habit, a collection of irritating impulses. The hunt itself justifies each waking. It sustains her.

Still, as she looks out on the waves that caress the pebbled sand, she is hit with the dangerous but pertinent question that follows her, stretching like a shadow: why bother? Why do this at all, when every time she reunites with the mountain, she thinks it may be the last time. She hopes. If she gave up the pretense of having anything to watch over, she might fade faster. She could stay there, curled in the cool damp and dark, and do nothing.

 Her pride would never allow it. She’s too stubborn. Too flint-hearted, as the river would have said while her long, pretty fingers wove summer flowers into Cy’s hair or swiped tart berry juice over her lips. The memory raises goosebumps on her arms, and all she wants to do is curl up where the river’s mouth empties into the sea and cry. See if her tears can replenish what her words and stubbornness have not.

“Stop,” she commands herself. “You’re still standing. That’s all. That’s enough.”

She’s only thinking about these things because the day has been long and the energy that binds her in this skin is beginning to wane.

The ocean always makes her feel like this. It’s too vast and unpredictable. When she faces it, she can’t see what is past the horizon, if there is anything there at all, and she can’t see what is below. Taking it all in makes her feel heavy, exposed, and dull—but tiny and forgettable too, like a pebble shaken loose. The mountain valley may hold little more than solitude, but out on the sea, everything looks simply lonely.

No wonder the ocean is always taking, so slowly she barely notices. Gentle hands of foam and froth comb the sand and beckon with hushed promises, soothing even as it draws the island away, grain by grain, into its depths. It will come lapping at her feet soon enough and consume her too, though she doubts she’ll care by then.

She should turn back. She’s reached the boundary between her territory and that of another, if he still wakes as she does. There used to be laws. Lines drawn. Such distinctions were sacred. Tonight, she’s irritated enough not to care for formalities. The forest is empty, but the ocean must hide its own bounty, and the tide is low.

The strand around Cy’s heart tightens as the mountain calls her home. She ignores it. She gulps a few handfuls of river water, grateful that despite everything it’s still cold and clear, and slips over the beach toward a cluster of tidepools that dot the sand like birthmarks. She doesn’t mind them so much—the bottoms are visible even as the light fails, and the water within is still, showing the barest hint of her own reflection.

As she wades into the first, the water only comes up to her waist. The rough brush of sea grass at her ankles makes her grimace and reconsider. There are shellfish and crabs hidden between algae-covered rocks, though—tiny, diminished things, the lot—and a school of flashing fish curl through struggling remnants of coral. As she surveys the stretches of sand between each pool, she finds them scattered with more offerings: pretty polished stones; large, glossy shells; bleached curves of bone; old tools and treasures, keys and coins. All of it sits in wait, like the contents of a box of riches churned up onto the shore.

The excitement that brims in her breast startles her, but she is soon darting between pools, cavorting and splashing, stuffing her bag with obsolete treasures, stirring up fish and mollusks and plants by the dozen. She’ll take them back with her, cook them over a fire, and feast until the fade beckons her deeper into the mountain. Perhaps she’ll fall asleep sated this time.

The euphoria is short-lived as a sense of being watched washes over her. It’s so strong—so impossible after an eternity of no one—that her attention is snared as if by a net. Cy freezes and stares out at the open water, seaweed hanging in clumps from her hands, convinced she is seeing things.

There is something bobbing on the waves, not far off shore. An absurd little wooden ship. Its edges catch the moonlight in a way that reminds her of the slick sheen of spilled oil, whimsical and unsettling by turns, and its patchy sails twitch feebly like the breath of something dying. It hardly looks seaworthy. She should have seen it approaching. Instead, it’s just appeared, as if a hand dropped it from the sky to distract her.

The sight is so strange that for once she doesn’t know how to react; she doesn’t have time to decide, either. A figure emerges from around the corner of the cabin, leans over the side of the deck, and stares back. Though the boat is not near enough that she can see the stranger’s features, Cy can make out the broad shoulders and lean waist of a naked male torso with a pair of loose dark trousers cinched at the waist. A cloud of wind-lifted curls rise from his head, though she cannot ascertain their color.

He regards her just the same, discerning and curious, and her elation of moments before is replaced by deep-rooted frustration.

She knows who he is, though she has seen him only from afar: the master of heaving storms stirred up from the prow of a shining frigate; the hand behind fleets of towering waves that once battered the beaches and cleaved the cliff sides; he who conspired with wind and rain to besiege the mountain’s island. She has no great regard for him, though the river spoke of him with the circumspect fondness one uses to speak of a distant, unpredictable relation. The world, she said, was never big enough for him. The ocean could swallow even a mountain and not be full.

Of course he would linger. The ocean is as grand and enduring as a mountain, though it is unsettling to see him embodied like this, all alone in his little boat, depleted of his tumultuous tendencies, silent as the water tickling her knees.

Cy shivers again, thinking not of the river’s fingers in her hair but the gentle, beckoning hand of the sea diminishing the land she is bound to. And now he is here, awake and watching.

For what? How long has he been observing her make a fool of herself in a place she doesn’t belong?

In a surge of protective anger, she grabs a rock from the tidepool at her feet and hurls it toward the boat. She’s gratified to see the ocean flinch as the rock narrowly misses his head, and it clunks loudly enough against the deck of his boat that its echo cracks over the water. Less gratifying is how it doesn’t put him off. Her mood sours further at the sound of his chuckle, which is low and throaty when the waves usher it to her ears.

She cannot make him go, but if he’s just going to sit there in that ridiculous boat, she can very well ignore him. Cy finishes gathering shellfish from the surf, slings her dripping, over-laden bag across her back, and retreats toward the northern slope with the unwelcome eyes of the ocean on her back.

—

Next time she wakes up and digs herself from her den, she returns to the beach. Once again, it takes most of the day to get there, and once again, she finds little worth saving on her way. It’s the bounty of the tidepools that draws her back, and her desire to see if there is more—this is what she tells herself, and it’s what she insists doubly hard when the sand comes into view and her heart begins to race.

The tide is high, so all those tempting pools, strung together by stretches of treasure when the sand is exposed, are sunken in the shallows. But the boat is there. It’s docked amongst some rocks, and its peculiar lustre is even more striking than it was the first night she saw it. Cy watches for a while from the forest edge, and, when she sees no sign of him aboard or anywhere on the beach, she moves closer.

It isn’t as shabby as she previously judged it to be. Battered and long-used, perhaps, but the sails are fine, creamy canvas, and the wood is dark and worn smooth, inlaid with elegant, branching veins of iridescent nacre. With each subtle, rocking rise and fall of the current, they catch the failing light and make the boat seem to pulse with life. She places a hand on one vein-forked plank. The wood is warm. When she draws back, there is a thin coating of salt on her palm, so she touches her tongue to her skin. The taste is pleasant, briny and sharp, evocative of a world below the waves. It reminds her of the oysters and mussels she found in the pools. She’s running her finger along the same spot and considering sneaking aboard, just to see what sorts of things are worth finding (not because she is thinking, How strange it must be, to be able to go), when she gets that sense of being watched again. Not only watched, but seen.

Found out.

Damn.

She turns around. He is sitting on one of the larger rocks a few strides away, posture relaxed and expression turned inward. He’s wearing a shirt this time, a faded, long-sleeved thing with a deep neck that reveals a swath of brown chest, and the same loose-fitting pants. His feet, like hers, are bare, though they’re quite large, and his toes curl slightly over the lip of the rock, flexing in a way that strikes her as almost playful. Like something a child might do, unable to remain motionless for more than a handful of moments.

His eyes slide from her to the boat, where her back is pressed. “That’s mine.”

He isn’t accusing her of anything untoward, merely making an observation, though there’s a hint of pride too. The ocean is neither afraid of her nor bothered by her intrusion. Worse, he knows she was admiring something that belongs to him, coveting it just a bit, and it makes her neck hot. The incriminating traces of salt on her fingertips are rough as she rasps them together.

Cy frowns and juts her chin at the rock he’s sprawling on. “So? That’s mine, and you’re making yourself quite at home. Should we call it even?”

“I’d call it even if you’d gone aboard.”

“No thanks.”

He grimaces. Yet his eyes spark as they catch on her throat. “You did like my gifts, though.”

Cy forces her hand to stay at her side rather than fly to the carcanet she wove together with the things she had gathered on the sand. A large sand dollar is suspended flat against her breastbone, flanked by studs of colorful glass, pearly shark’s teeth, and shining shell shards. The other items she brought back that night adorn her den like a dragon’s hoard.

“I found these scattered on the shore,” she tells him. “All you did was look on as I took them.”

“Who do you think made sure they washed up where they did?” There is a knowing quirk at the corner of his lips. The breeze shifts his dark hair, a messy tangle of tight curls and loose waves shot through with soft white, obscuring a mobile, handsome face. “I wouldn’t presume to visit the great mountain’s island without first paying tribute.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“I’d be a fool to do that.”

The heat in her neck spreads to her cheeks and chest, though it is pleasant now. Flattery still assuages her. And it’s a counterpoint to the regret she felt this morning for how she conducted herself during their last encounter. How long has she wished for some sign of another who remains stuck in the cycle of waking? His presence is something new. A break in the bleak monotony of her routine. A change, if not a relief.

Emboldened by possibility, she approaches him and cocks her head. “Ah, so you’re merely generous? Is that why you’ve returned? To give me gifts?”

“I was curious. I wanted to see if you were like me.” An apologetic look rolls across his face. “There hasn’t been anyone else in so long. I was beginning to think I might be . . .”

“The last?”

“Yes.”

“Where else have you looked?” She dreads his answer as it forms on his lips.

“Everywhere.”

It’s not an encouraging thing to hear from someone so well-traveled, who has his currents to take him wherever he pleases. In her lowest moments, she has clung to the idea that her isolation is merely a symptom of her inability to leave the mountain. If she could travel, she would find others. They would rally and reawaken the world together. Surely.

Or not.

Sobered, she stares at her feet, which have sunken a little in the wet sand as if to remind her she cannot go.

“I’m Cy.”

“Salt.”

She tastes his name on her tongue, feels its dry tingle on her lips when she looks up at him and asks, “Is that what they used to call you?”

“It’s what I am if you take all the rest away.”

The question seems to have annoyed him, but she can’t imagine why.

“How did you know to come here?”

“The river.”

Cy is chilled again, this time with a stab of betrayal, a twist of envy. “The river doesn’t speak anymore. Nothing does.”

“No, but you speak to her. All the time. She hears you.” Salt’s brow dips as his eyes touch on her face, searching. “I hear you. And I thought—”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

“I’ve been listening. Sometimes the rivers carry echoes to me, of old things said to them, and it’s almost like the way things used to be, and . . .” He shakes his head. “I heard you. I couldn’t answer, but I thought you might be tired of being by yourself. Thinking you’re the only one left. That’s all.” 

She thinks of all the times she has lamented her condition to the river and pictures Salt doing the same, shouting to the indifferent sky, adrift on the open water as the sun beats down or the stars wink over the horizon, until he falls asleep and sheds his skin to rejoin the ocean. She pictures him waking up an indeterminate amount of time later, bound again in this body, unable to recover another small piece of what he was, starting it all over again.

“I am tired of it,” she admits.

The slump of his shoulders, there and gone, tells her that he is too.

“I’ll go, if you prefer. Move on,” he says. “Perhaps you’ve adapted better than I have to . . . this.”

When Cy says nothing, he fixes her with a weighty look, then rises to his feet and saunters away toward his boat, leaving large footprints in his wake. She watches him go, mesmerized for a few moments. Though his frame is long and broad, his movements are fluid, clean in a way that reminds her of the river. It endears him to her.

Just a bit. Just enough.

He is hoisting himself up over the side of the boat in a needlessly dramatic fashion when she jolts after him.

“Wait. Salt, don’t.” She stumbles to a stop. He slows to let himself hang there. “Stay a while. Until it’s time to sleep again, at least. That is how it goes for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He drops back to the ground, lithe as a cat, then turns and flashes her a quick, tight smile. “Don’t worry. By sunrise I’ll be gone.”

That isn’t what she’s worried about. She keeps it to herself.

—

They spend the night walking along the surf, just talking. Cy has become so used to one-sided musings that make her sick of the sound of her own voice—she didn’t realize how much she missed real conversation. It’s obvious that he has too, and that both of them have almost forgotten how to do it. Silences drag, or they speak over each other, apologize, and try to start again until a rhythm starts to emerge. He asks her about the island, and herself, and how she passes the time; he wonders if she can remember how long it’s been like this, or how many weeks or months pass between each waking, or if she ever chooses to wake rather than being wrenched from her mountain like an oft-discarded toy. She learns little of him in the constant flow of his questions, but she senses he has as few answers as she.

His voice is pleasing—low and musical, like everything he says is a secret.

Eventually they stop at a flat, rocky outcropping that juts out over the water. Flocks of birds used to roost there; people stood by and fished with nets or long rods. It’s narrower than usual tonight because of the tide but provides enough space to sit comfortably.

Cy picks up a loose stone, draws her arm back, and sets it skipping across the glassy water and out of sight. When she lets a second fly, small waves rise up to meet it on each fall, batting it along in circles and spirals until it is delivered back to her hands. She steals a glance at Salt, who looks on in amusement.

“The river told me about you too, you know,” she says, and skips the same stone.

He gives a disbelieving huff. “Flattering things only, I’m sure.”

“She said you could never be found in one place for long.”

“I don’t see why I should have been.”

She thinks on what he said earlier. “Have you really been everywhere?”

“Everywhere I can still reach. It used to be I could exist like this anyplace the ocean touched, whenever I pleased. Now I find myself spit out on the same spots. The currents are weak and easily confused. My ship is . . . well, you’ve seen it. Hardly a ship anymore. I never make it very far before I fade and have to start over. It’s like going in circles.”

A memory struggles back.

It was the same for her, wasn’t it? Every mountain was hers. She recalls emerging at will atop lush, humid jungles, or chilled, ice-capped peaks, or broad, rolling slopes overlooking endless grassland, or volcanoes exploding with magma and ash. How it felt to be the connective, conscious force between them.

The sky shook and the stars fell. Her territory began to shrink. Now she’s rooted here. One mountain overlooking one barren valley on one island.

“You’ve come to the wrong place if you’re looking to get away from that,” she says with a laugh. “This whole island is one big circle. There’s been nothing here for ages.”

“You’re here.”

“I’m not very good company anymore.”

“Well, you haven’t thrown another rock at me yet. You’re improving.”

She chuffs. “I’m sorry for that. I don’t even know why I did it.”

“Probably for the same reason I tried to bribe your goodwill. I should’ve just spoken to you.”

Her gaze drifts from the water to the sky, black and cloudless, and the moon heavy on the horizon. 

“It was a good bribe.” She absently toys with the shells at her neck, smiling sidelong as she recalls the elation of finding them. That—the excitement of discovery, the gift of happiness and curiosity—she treasures most of all. “I wouldn’t reject others, if you had any to offer.”

She’s only teasing. She hopes he realizes. It’s been too long since she’s had reason or opportunity to tease anyone, or be teased, and even then she was rarely given to teasing . . . she fears she isn’t doing it right. Before she can gauge his reaction, her stomach growls loud enough that they both hear. His face splits with a grin.

“Let’s see what I can find.”

Salt leans forward far enough that he can sink one arm into the water, up to his elbow. For a moment nothing happens. Then the water roils, and five fish leap out onto the rock, where they flop and thrash, silver-blue scales glinting. He looks at them with a hint of dissatisfaction (They’re all so small now, he remarks as they fall still at his touch), but to Cy, they’re a miracle.

Together they head back toward the boat, where they cook the fish over a fire and eat them slowly with handfuls of bitter lichen Cy gathered during the day. When the food is gone they fill themselves with the sound of the other’s voice until the moon is ghostly in the rosy rise of dawn. Salt is starting to look a bit like a ghost himself; skin ashen, hair lank, voice thinner, his body hazy. Only his eyes are still sharp. This close, they are deep blue, dark as the tidepools and diamond bright.

The call to return home is painfully taut, pulsing in her ears as the strand at her heart coils tighter. She climbs to her feet and brushes sand from her knees and calves, feeling as if traces of herself are falling away with it.

“Come back next time,” she tells him, afraid to meet his eyes. “If you can.”

She doesn’t wait for him to answer or to watch him climb aboard his ship and sail away. She’s not sure she could take it, when for the first time she thinks a next time might not be so bad.

When she reaches the mountain and slips back into her den, her energy is nearly spent, her body uncooperative. Consciousness is always the last thing to go, and though her limbs have gone to dust and her bones are silt and her heart is stone, the taste of salt lingers until every other sense has retreated into the dark and quiet of the earth. 

—

Next time, he is there, and the time after that, and every other. The stretches between wakings begin to feel shorter and less definite, though Cy has no way of knowing beyond a new spryness in her limbs. Sleep is more like peaceful submersion, and she wakes loose and ready to run. Down the slope, through the trees, into the sand, and he’s always waiting, with his boat and his easy smile, anchored by expectation.

Today, she does not set out immediately. She dawdles in her den, considering her collections, ignoring the eager restlessness in her legs. She has decided to bring a gift with her to the beach.

It’s only fair. Salt always gives her things for no repayment other than her presence. Once he returned the stone she’d lobbed at him, though altered. From one angle it was the unmistakable likeness of the mountain; from another, a woman’s face. Her face: her cropped clay-red hair, her narrow eyes and high forehead, her prominent nose. Her lips and a scar on her cheek had been detailed in shining nacre. He’d shown her how he did it—deft, considered slides of his fingers over stone, massaging the rough edges, wearing it away, making it new.

Her own fingers had itched to touch him like that. To be touched.

The most recent gift was a beautiful spiked conch horn, warmed by his hands. When she pressed it to her ear, it whispered old sailors’ tales and painted dreamy maritime images in her mind’s eye that followed her into the long slumber after. Though he always treats such generosity like a private joke they share—the intruding supplicant and his offerings to the great mountain—each act touches her and reminds her of what it was like to be known.

A visit or two ago, she tried to describe to him how the mountain had been at its most beautiful during the height of the warm season, when there were still seasons. Plants and insects and sun-heated rocks, the smell of nectar on the breeze, the cheerful burble of the river joining her voice with that of the falling rain, festivals or holidays in the valley that appeared as a riot of color and movement from the highest peak. Returning to the mountain on days like that, nothing had felt more right.

Cy wants to bring something with her that encapsulates it all. She knows there is no such thing outside her memory and the words she finds for it, but it is still with a surge of pride that she unearths a stout, dark green jar from her stores and tucks it carefully into her satchel before she sets out.

The way has felt shorter each time, and when she arrives it is still full daylight. Salt is lounging along the prow of his docked boat. His profile is sharp, his sleeves are rolled back and the deep neck of his shirt hangs open, and his skin as he basks in the sun is bright as bronze. Cy feels a twinge of hunger, though it’s not her stomach and it makes her mouth go dry. It’s the same feeling she had when the river smiled at her or made a clever comment or stole a kiss before dissolving into whitewater, daring Cy to give chase.

Ah, that. She’d forgotten that. Another appetite. As Salt notices her arrival and sits up to greet her, she wonders if he feels this sort of hunger anymore, if he thinks of old lovers and the thrill of an impassioned tangle, or if he’s past such things.

She manages not to think of it again until night has fallen. No gifts have yet been exchanged, and they finished their meager meal hours ago—shellfish and urchins and roasted mushrooms that seemed a banquet in his company. The sky is clear, so they’re watching the stars as the boat rocks beneath their backs. Her gaze is softening, and she thinks she might drift off right here, moved without moving, when one star streaks across the sky and leaves an ephemeral tail in its wake.

Salt twitches beside her.

“Do you remember what happened that day?” he asks.

For all their talk of memories and time lost, all their speculation of how much more they have, there is one day they’ve pointedly skirted around, as if the very mention of it is cursed.

“Cy?”

“I saw it, if that’s what you mean.”

She saw everything back then, though she still can’t explain what happened. Memory, to Cy, implies understanding, and this is something she has never understood and would prefer to forget. She folds an arm beneath her head and tries to recall anyway. It’s easier with him, less painful than doing so alone.

“Lights falling in the sky, and then a flash. On the horizon, I guess, but everything shook and was so bright for a moment. Too bright. And then hot.”

So hot her body couldn’t stand it and rattled apart. The next time she saw the world through human eyes, it was cold, dark, and silent. She walked out once, with the forest curling in on itself brown and yellow, and thought it was snowing. When she tipped her head back to catch a flake on her tongue, she choked on ash. It coated every surface, blotted out the light. A long time passed before the sun reappeared over a world indelibly changed.

“Didn’t you see?” she asks.

“I, uh . . . missed it. Mostly.”

“How?”

She saw the ocean that day from her vantage point at the mountaintop. It was all steam and clawing waves. The whole world was roaring like an animal gone mad.

“I was sleeping off a typhoon,” he admits.

Cy lifts an eyebrow and fights a smile, recalling the exhaustion that tailed a quake or slide. “You were hungover.”

“If you must put it that way, yes.”

She gives a yip of laughter, surprising herself, for there is little humor in this.

“We can’t every one of us be all-seeing, ever-vigilant mountains,” he grouses.

“I wish I’d missed it.” Perhaps he will think she is being flip, but her wish is sincere. If she were all-seeing, she should have seen it and been able to stop it. Instead, her powerlessness has haunted her and colored everything she has done since. She couldn’t stop it, she couldn’t undo it, but she could save what was left—yet she hasn’t been able to do that, either. “It was so confusing, and . . . I felt . . . all I could think was that it must be how they feel during a quake. Or a hurricane. It was dreadful.”

“It was.”

“I was powerful. We all were. You, the river, the rain—all of us. We were gods, weren’t we? They saw us as gods? But if that were true, we should have been able to stop it.”

Salt is quiet. She has never said any of this to anyone, not even the river, and now she can’t stop.

“We should have been able to bring things back to life,” she insists.

“So maybe we’re not gods.” He scoffs. “We’re just something they made in their image and named and then forgot about when they no longer needed us to make sense of the world.”

Stiffly, she says, “Sounds like you’ve thought about this a lot.”

“There’s been precious little else to do.”

“I can’t be so apathetic,” she tells him. “I miss it too much. The way things were. Feeling important. I have to believe it all meant something.”

“If I were apathetic, I wouldn’t have found you.”

She grunts.

“We can’t take back what’s already happened,” he says more quietly. “That doesn’t mean it meant nothing.”

He swallows audibly and rolls onto his side, facing her. His breath puffs against her cheek, and she stiffens in surprise when she feels his finger there, tracing a line from the bridge of her nose to the edge of her jaw. There’s a scar there, old and deep, from some storm or explosion or other minor disaster that struck the mountain too long ago for her to remember or care about. He lingers at the end of that one, then touches the small cleft at her eyebrow, the divot at her chin. If she turned to look at him, she suspects he would touch the others, too, just as thoughtfully, perhaps try to imagine their twins on the mountain’s face.

“Let it be what it is, Cy. Let things change.”

“Easy enough for the ocean, I suppose.”

“Less than you think.” His eyes linger on her face, then he sighs and lies back again, rubbing his thumb over his lip. “Would that we could remake the world between us right now.”

She’s spent too long hoping for that. Even a mountain loses patience after a while.

Piqued, Cy drags herself from her malaise and sits up to grope for her satchel, which has rolled against the side of the deck. “Actually . . .”

She can’t believe she forgot, except it’s easier than ever to be distracted by him. Every word or movement arrests her attention in anticipation of what he will say or do next and needles the hunger that never settled.

“I’ve brought you something,” she says, and frees the jar from her bag. The lid is screwed on too tight and stuck with age. She grapples with it a few moments, and when it finally comes loose with a squeak of metal on glass, she catches him staring at her flexing arms, his shoulders tensed. She holds the jar out to him, and he peers inside with a frown. “The conch you gave me, the things I saw and felt when I listened to it . . . I felt like I was part of what it had come from. I wanted to find something that might do the same for you. Give you some idea of what the mountain was like. What I was like.”

His lips curve, white teeth just appearing as he dips a finger into the jar. When he pulls it out, it’s coated with thick, golden liquid, which he studies with peculiar intensity before dragging his eyes back to hers.

“Honey?”

The way he’s looking at her makes her shiver as if he’s just swiped it off her skin.

“Mm hm.”

The last she ever gathered. She has long forgotten the sound of the swarm, but she can still feel how warm it was inside the hive when she carefully plucked the combs away, and the gentle vibration of life that tickled her fingers. She’s kept it all this time, for some imagined occasion. A celebration, she’d hoped. When things were right again.

Lately, things have felt right enough.

Salt is still staring at her. The honey has dripped down his first two fingers and is beginning to coat his knuckles. The sight of its slow descent heats her skin and wakes all sorts of dormant responses beneath it, until the heat is as thick and sticky as the honey itself. She bites her cheek and forces her eyes back to his face.

“Well, are you going to eat it,” she presses, “or would you prefer to wait until it reaches your elbow?”

“Yes, I’m going to eat it. What about you?” He holds the jar out to her. “Aren’t you still hungry?”

“Always.” She scoops out a handful, heedless of the mess, and extends it toward his own behoneyed hand. “Shall we?”

Salt scoots closer, leans toward her with a grin. “To the last of the great gods.”

He takes the tips of her fingers in his mouth and sucks the honey from them, and she, unthinking, does the same to him. The flavor is headier and sweeter than she imagined, with the slightest tang of his skin. It gilds every taste bud, slides down her throat like a careful caress, and fills her with the warmth of summer sunshine.

She’s taken back to a day that’s been trapped like a fly in amber. The valley is strewn with wildflowers, and the dew-covered grass is cool underfoot. A breeze smelling of rain chills the sweat on her neck. The hive is partially hidden in a crag behind a fallen pine, and the bees are calm for her as she takes her fill. The honey holds the essence of each tiny life, the warmth of each hand that touched the flowers it came from, the elation of every tongue that tasted it that day at a solstice festival, the richness of the orange light that caught it as the sun set.

Cy is there again, for an instant and an eternity, and Salt is with her. Until she opens her eyes.

Her forehead is tipped against his, and his soft hair tickles her temples. His hand has fallen to her lap and drips honey onto the thigh of her breeches as their knees press together. She is breathless and exhilarated, though her muscles are stiff, as if she has not moved for hours. The sky has pinkened, the gray of early morning flushed with color.

A sigh leaves his mouth and tickles her chin as he straightens. “How exquisite.”

He’s looking at her again with his tidepool eyes.

“That was just a taste,” she reminds him, too giddy and dizzy to be sad that none of it was real. She feels lighter, like she’s been afforded a chance she missed the first time.

“Potent stuff.”

“Imagine what another might do.”

“I am.”

His gaze drops to her lips just before she crushes them against his. Cy doesn’t hesitate; she isn’t gentle. She was born of tension and pressure, collisions of the same straining energy that compels her to pull his body against hers, hands twisted into the front of his shirt so hard she hears threads tear. The boat heaves once, throwing them both off balance. They tumble to the deck. Beneath her, he is solid but yielding, and his cool hands move like liquid over her face and through her hair. The heat that spread so slowly before washes over her again and again until she’s submerged.

The heat. Him. His hands everywhere, holding her under, holding her up.

Salt tastes the way she imagined. His lips, his skin. The sweet remnants of honey cling to brine and wet stone, a taste she desires. It feels like a second sort of home. He bestows each kiss with abandon, and the buzz of his breath tickles her mouth, pulling her closer and deeper. She drags her hips over his, testing him before she does it again. Their bodies may be shells, but they work as bodies do. Forgotten sensations leap over her nerves with such insistence she can’t keep a single one straight. He kisses her jaw, her throat. Sucks at the hollow between her collarbones. Nuzzles closer, cleaving, searching for any space, any opening, any gap in what keeps them apart.

In a rush, she reaches for the closure of his pants, fumbling with the ties, her fingers stiff and uncooperative. Blunt fingernails dig at her skin where he grasps the back of her neck and plumbs her mouth again.

She is craved and needed. He craves her. Needs her. The weight of his want fills her so completely she can do nothing but sink further.

And she . . .

The string tightens around her racing heart. Salt gasps and clips her lip with his teeth.

“Cy—wait. It’s—”

He shuffles against her, receding, and her knees hit the wooden planks of the deck. Where her fingers tripped over cloth and skin a moment before, they close around chilled, empty air. Cy groans and rolls off of him. Dawn light catches in Salt’s hair like a halo, the curls coiling and lightening until they’re puffs of seafoam escaping on the breeze. The rest of him is following, soaking into her, dripping through the gaps in the floor, pooling around her heavy feet. His eyes are wide, not with alarm or confusion so much as disappointed realization.

 He tips his head back with a wry smile, though his voice is little more than a whisper. “Well, this is inconvenient.”

Cy grits her teeth and cups his cheek in her hand. It’s cold and clammy and feels like it might drift apart if she moves. She bites her swollen lip and fights the urge to suck a mark into his throat, which has more the look of water than flesh. She could drink him up instead, carry him back with her that way.

Selfish. Impossible. He no more belongs in the heart of a mountain than she belongs at the bottom of the sea.

“We’ll have something to look forward to,” she suggests.

“You are. Every time. The only thing.”

His last words brush her ear so lightly she barely hears them as the boat rises and falls with another insistent wave, and then he’s gone. The pleasant flush of arousal that lit her skin has condensed into a tight, uncomfortable ball where her heart throbs again, and her head is clouded the way it is when she’s about to return to the earth. The distance from the mountain grows uncomfortable as her body wanes. Cy finds the strength to clamber out of the boat, across the sand, and to the edge of the wood. There she curls up at the riverbank—the river itself is gone, just a swath of dark earth with stubborn little plants beginning to sprout between smooth stones—and decides she is close enough to home.

—

The ocean laps the lip of the cave, wooing her where she wakes. Cy is limbering her restored body when she notices. Something feels different, but she thought it was the lingering rime of a dream. She pokes her head out.

The landscape is altered. The surf is mere paces away, curving to the west just off the mountain’s foot in a new-carved inlet. She can see the other side if she squints. To the east, the tree trunks are a richer brown, and hints of new grass poke through the scatter of crumbled leaves. When she focuses, she feels the subtle but shocking crawl of insects and worms in the dark soil. And she can reach further still, deeper into the forest, where a small river flows again, burbling with joy that is sparkling and infectious.

Cy clambers out, stunned. The air is close and smells of approaching rain, though the sun is bright and the ocean shines below it. Salt’s boat is tied near a moss-covered stone that spears out of the water, and he is balanced on the prow.

His eyes light on her as he drops to the ground, his arms spread wide as if he would like to embrace the entire scene before him. “Something to look forward to, indeed! Just like you promised!”

She promised so little. Nothing. Another short reunion; another stolen day.

This day isn’t stolen. It’s a gift, and she loves it. She loves him, as he stands there at the cusp of her world, at the foot of her mountain, basking in it all.

The earth purrs under her feet, and the whisper of the river urges her—as if she needs encouragement. Cy walks only as far as she must to throw herself into Salt’s arms. He stumbles backward and collides with the side of the boat, and she kisses him until he breaks for air with a surprised laugh.

“Come inside.”

She leads him down into her den, where they continue as if they were never interrupted by that dawn on the beach. If centuries have passed since then, it hasn’t felt like more than a minute.

He is a tricky thing to make love to. Their first is a frantic, crashing tangle on the upturned earth she just emerged from. He tries to be everywhere at once, do everything, take every bit of her in reach, and she is too shaken by her desire for whatever he will give to focus or steady him.

Their second is slower.

She makes him wait. She reminds him what it is to be still in a moment, because he does know how. With his body pinned beneath hers, she touches him the way she wanted to as she watched him shape a stone with his nimble fingers—careful circling of her hands over his cool skin, and he’s so smooth already, the curves of his muscles so fine, his hair as soft and light between her fingers as she ever imagined. It has been so long since she touched a human body that she loses herself in the rediscovery of the most basic details. A streak of sweat on his wrist, the timbre of a shuddering breath, the delicious mess of it all. Each twitch and tremulous gasp is a treasure as her mouth traverses his chest, the plane of his stomach, then lower to take her fill.

Watching him strain against an urge to slip free and cover her again makes her want to let him. They could take each other again like the first time. His patience runs out just as hers does. An inhuman sound escapes him as he surges up and wraps around her, rolls them both, and begins his own rediscovery.

How did she fear this once? Gentle hands combing her body, tracing scars and angles and rough spots; soothing assurances in hushed whispers against every inch of her laid out to him; the provocative press of his skin and scent and self, beckoning her to let the interminable build of liquid heat break and rattle her apart. They build toward a crescendo until there is nowhere else to go but over, together.

Cy feels weightless when it’s done. His presence at her side is peculiarly grounding, as if something more than their bodies has been exchanged. For once Salt has nothing to say.

It’s afternoon when she stirs again, drawn by his movement and the sound of rain outside. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s heard in ages. One of Salt’s long, thin hands is drifting slowly up and down her thigh. His body is cradled between her legs, his chin pillowed on her chest, though his attention is on the den. No one else has ever been in here with her, and she wonders what he makes of her collections. The conch and the idol he carved are tucked carefully near their feet with the honey jar. Shelves hewn straight into the walls are cluttered with obsolete relics from a time she was desperate to keep.

Time couldn’t be kept, and she knows she can’t keep him, either. She can’t bottle his ship and mold him into the shape of something to be contained and set aside, saved as he is now. Yet every time she has let him go, he has always returned—a little changed, but still hers, and she is a little changed too. The evidence is outside. The dampness in the air, the shy movement of nascent life, the river’s music, the closeness of the tides. They can’t remake the world between them, but they can honor what it was and welcome what it will become. 

Her eyes wander to the mouth of the cave, dripping with caught rain. Salt shifts, and her skin prickles at the feel of him.

“You want to go out and see?” he murmurs.

She reaches for him instead, pulls him up, and kisses him. Loose limbed and unburdened, she grasps him closer until he begins to melt into her. Their breath entwines in the cool of the cave, and his body is generous as the dew of their skin warms and mingles. Caress, collision, coming together. There’s a world in this, too, that they will make between them. Sifting through the old, arriving at something new, buried and untouched. The world outside will find its way, and they will wake to see it.