“Please come join us for coffee, Eleanor,” Lucelle says over my shoulder. I shoot her a look and she gets into my mind, privately talking to me. “You stabbed her, shoved her into the Void, and ignored her when she came out just so she could apologize to you. You will be nice to her.”

I sigh, then look to the door. “Fine, come in.” I step out of the way and she skips in with a smile.

“This place is really nice. How do you keep it so well maintained?”

“You should know that dust does not settle in the Void, Eleanor. Either way, the entire house is made of Void rock.”

“I should get myself a house out here. Oh, we can be real neighbors, then!”

“No.”

“Oh, Emily, come on.” She sits down at my couch. “Don’t you get lonely?”

“I have everyone I need right here.”

“Your friends are lovely, but what about others? What about meeting new people?”

“I don’t need to meet new people. New people don’t like me.”

“You’re being pessimistic.”

Lucelle comes in and gives a cup of coffee, the brownish liquid that’s supposed to keep you awake, to Eleanor, then sits with her own. “You really are, Emily. You can be whatever you want in this world, so no one is going to ridicule you for your appearance.”

“Well, Rike at the office wrote a little bit about your eye, but that’s nothing to worry about.” I self-consciously check to make sure my hair still covers it up.

“I’m surprised to see how quickly our times are progressing,” Iyo says as he sits down next to Eleanor. “I feel like just yesterday, we were learning about automobiles.”

“I’m surprised you’re even talking about automobiles anymore,” Eleanor adds. “Teleportation stations are the newest hit in Everencia. It’s amazing what happens when you stop using violence at every corner, right, Emily?”

I’m walking out now. I hear them asking for me, but I don’t need (or want) to deal with it. I get back to my room and take my staff from the corner, then get to the Beacon. I input the directions to send me to Ascentia and I set the rift to be open for ten seconds. After I open it, I walk in, leaving the Void, and all of my friends (plus Eleanor), by themselves. Immediately after passing through the rift, I am walking out of a small building in Ascentia. I feel the sun’s rays on me during sunset, my favorite time of day. I see a few happy faces before I walk up to a large building connected directly to two others. I press and hold down a buzzer with the number ‘23’ on it, then the door not too long later. I walk through the door and start climbing the stairwell to the twenty-third floor. It took a while, and now that I’m at the top, I want to sit and rest. However, I instead knock on the door with the large ‘23’ on it, then wait a few moments before the door opens.

“Emily, what a pleasant surprise!” Goddess Yhannason exclaims as she sees me in the door. She is wearing a t-shirt and what looks like how underwear used to look, though today, they’re just classified as shorts. She steps up and wraps her arms around my neck in a hug, then backs up to hold the door for me. “Come in, please.”

I step into her ‘apartment,’ a whole floor in a complex that she owns. It’s extremely clean and proper, plus it is very modest, just like Yhanna. She would never want a whole house, let alone a mansion or a palace. I go to her small dining table and kneel onto a pillow on the floor. She loves a certain culture that is simpler. While I enjoy beds and sitting on chairs at a table, she would rather sleep on a bed mat on the floor and kneel on pillows. I don’t mind either way, to be honest. “You’re very casual today,” I comment. Her hair is all kinds of messy and she has clearly not spent much time grooming herself.

“Ahh, it’s a lazy day for me,” she replies from the kitchen, which is just a second part of the living/dining room separated by a bar. “I didn’t think anyone would be making any visits today.”

“I can come back later, if you’d prefer.”

“No no, you’re here! Besides, I’d like to chit chat some more.” She walks over with two cups of drinks and places one in front of me. “How’s everything with Allu?” she asks with a grin. “Have you made any moves yet?”

I wave it off. “I’m not going to make any moves; I’m not even that interested. Why are you always trying to get me into a relationship?”

“You should know that it feels good to have someone to depend on. Is there someone like that in your life?”

I take a sip of the tea she gave me, tasting the vanilla in it, exactly how I like my drinks. “I guess, I’m not sure. I depend on you, but you’re supposed to be depended on, you know? I depend on people, but I don’t have to.”

“You mean to say that you can get through anything on your own, hm?” She shows a bit of playfulness in her voice. “Anything at all?”

“Alright, not anything. I just don’t need anyone to help me in what I’m doing. I don’t know if I even need myself anymore. What does a demigoddess pledging to defeat Descentian gods do when she is told those times are over?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say those times are over. You just see much different interaction these days. I hear Argoncin is working with Death to create something that would drop tensions between the worlds. Something about having chosen campaigners or something duel each other a few times a year to see who the titleholder will be for the next couple months.”

“Sounds like a good way to get many of your best fighters killed.”

She says after taking a sip, “Not from what I hear. Apparently, they would be held in one of the two worlds, not the living world, so mortals will not die, and actually recover quite quickly.”

“Lovely. Why would they do that?”

“Well, it helps prevent wars and it brings in a lot of potential heroes for future wars. I’d bet a lot of contestants will come forward for the fame and fortune that comes with it.”

“So, we’re back to being gladiators, and we have the audacity to say that we’ve progressed in time.”

Yhanna laughs. She has a lot more humanity than most gods or goddesses, I’d say, by the way she lets her emotions run free sometimes. She also shows a casual side, which is something not many immortals like to do. “Emily, you’re just being stubborn. Why can’t you just enjoy life the way it is?”

I put down my cup and sigh. “I don’t feel satisfied. This Descentian blood on my hands, this magic I can bend to my will, it feels exhilarating… for a short time. Then, I’m bored. I crave for more and more, but I don’t feel like I’m getting what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s what I fear all beings of the Void inevitably want, which is mass destruction.”

I seem to have brought the mood down a bit. Yhanna lightly sets her glass against the table, then shifts to sit cross-legged. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“What am I supposed to do? As you demonstrated before, it’s nearly impossible to rid me of the corruption. If a goddess can’t, then what?”

“We’ll figure something out, Emily. Maybe your father knows a bit about it?”

“I haven’t seen him in… so, so long. I can’t remember the last time I spoke with him, Yhanna.” I look down, letting my emotions flare for a second, which I know is a mistake the moment I do it.

“Is that what is bothering you, that your father isn’t around?” She is genuinely upset for me, and it shows in her voice.

I shake my head, keeping my vision low. “No, no. That would be silly of me.”

“I don’t think that would be silly at all.” She rests her hands in her lap. “Have I ever told you about my family, Emily?”

I look up, feeling a bit intrigued. “No, you haven’t.”

She shifts, then settles again. “Well, as you know, I used to be a magic healer many, many, many years ago. Though, when I was just a wee little girl, I lived with my mom, dad, and two brothers, both older than I. My family was kind to me, especially my brothers, like they were my guardians. When I started going to the schoolhouse, they would walk me to and from school every day. When I began studying magic, they would let me practice on them. When they went to war, they came back with scars for me to restore. When I finally decided to join the armies with them, my parents rooted for me the whole time and wrote me every month.”

“I never knew you fought in wars, Yhanna.”

“I didn’t,” she replies. “I was a lover, not a fighter. I healed everyone I could for the years that the war lasted. Not a single day went by that I went to sleep with anything but an ounce of energy or mana left. I met many people, saved many people, and let too many men fall in love with me. You see, when you are a medic, you spend a lot of time with the soldiers.” She giggles, “I remember this one time when my brother and another man were in the same ward I was serving in. I was stitching up a small wound on the soldier and he started to flirt with me. He stopped really quickly after my brother threw a tray at him.”

I smile, then say, “Your brothers must have been great people.”

She nods. “I couldn’t have asked for any better ones. Vesinetorix, the eldest, stayed with me as soon as I signed up. Anywhere I went, I would end up putting him back together at least three times during each week. He was always such a mess, but he told me that he kept himself going for me.” I spied a flash of tears beginning to well up in her eyes. “He knew that if he gave up, he left me vulnerable to the demons. He guarded me with his life, and every single time he left the healing wards, he told me he would be back with more work to do.”

I sense a turn for the worse in this story. “I can’t imagine how that must have made you felt.”

“It made me feel like I was making a difference. Everything I did was to help them hold back our enemies. I really felt that if I gave up in my duties, my soldiers would not be able to continue. That’s how they made me feel, like an angel over humans in a sea of death.”

“What happened to him?”

She stops for a moment to take a drink, then continues with a quieter voice, “Vesinetorix, out of the blue, left the wards one day with a different phrase. He told me, ‘Goodbye, Yhannason.’ As if I wasn’t already on edge that afternoon, I received word that something happened to him on the battlefield. Word passes quickly among the soldiers going in and out of battle relentlessly. I imagined him being alone out there, with no one to fix his wounds. Before checking on my fellow healers, who were… more than willing to do more work in place of me, bless them, I ran out into the fray. I continued until the green forests turned dark and ruined. I saw more bodies than I had in my entire life, but kept going, calling his name all up until he answered my shouting.” She stops, then wipes her eyes before looking down.

I offer, “You don’t have to keep going if you don’t want to.”

She nods, then starts again. “He called me over to him, then took my hand in his because I was already starting to tend to a gash in his chest. He told me to stop, then said, ‘Hanna, enough. Too much this time.’ He kept a smile on his face to not make me feel sad, and told me that he loved his little sister.” She sniffles, then proceeds. “One of the demons saw us there and was going to strike both of us down. It stopped, though- I don’t know why. I guess something about a woman crying over a body caught them in their tracks. I kept my eyes on Vesinetorix with my hand in his, just crying in the dirt until… I forget what happened. I don’t remember much of what went on after, but I found myself before the gods. They wanted me to join them, but like you, I refused. I wanted to finish the war and heal as much as I could until it was all over, but…”

“The war was done,” I finish for her. I remember reading this story when I was just a human child. I read about how both sides’ forces suddenly stopped fighting one day, and how it was because of a statue in between them. The area was sanctioned in memory of the statue and the hero soldier it was clasped to. Maybe Yhannason doesn’t remember because she ascended that day. I don’t think she realizes that she died on that battlefield, too.

“Right. They told me I could continue watching over my family and soldiers long after they were done fighting, so I agreed to become the Goddess of Love. Not long after, I met Nazanth here, too. I visited my parents frequently before they eventually passed. The last they told me was how proud they were of my brothers and me. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I couldn’t save Vesinetorix out there. If only I caught the signs… he said ‘Goodbye,’ not-“

“Yhanna, don’t bring yourself down. You did everything you could.” I stand. “I want you to come with me.” This goddess has very little appreciation for her      own good deeds. It's about time I repay her.