[A/N: This Chapter is quite long but very important for what cos next.]
The following nights were a succession of reunions. Every ti Leonard closed his eyes, the desert waited for him, and Maia with it. They walked along the crests of the dunes, talked about everything and nothing, or simply remained silent, nestled against each other as the ember sun rose over an infinite horizon. Leonard told her everything about Alexandria, his future plans, his doubts as a young emperor.
Maia, with infinite patience, described to him the wonders of The Other World, the life of spirits, the music of the wind in the leaves of the world tree.
Love was born, not as a brutal lightning strike, but as a rising sand, gentle and inevitable. It was in the looks they exchanged, in the brushing of their hands, in the comfortable silence that settled between them. They were two souls who had recognized each other beyond the boundaries of reality, condemned to love each other in the unreality of dreams.
But... it wasn’t real.
Leonard knew it, deep down. Every awakening was a tear, a brutal return to a world where Maia did not exist. And Maia, for her part, knew it better than anyone.
She was a spirit, the most powerful of Taurus’s daughters, destined to watch eternally over her elent, the sand, and perhaps, one day, to answer the call of an elf worthy of the na.
Not to fall in love with a passing human.
Yet, as the weeks and months passed in the real world, the idea, first crazy, then obsessive, germinated in her mind. She refused this destiny. She refused to lose him.
Her plan was simple, and she was ready to carry it out alone. She was going to disobey Taurus, her father, her sisters, the immutable order of The Other World.
She was going to leave everything for him.
And commit the greatest taboo: Possess the body of a mortal.
She would wait for the right mont, the flaw in the world tree’s vigilance, and she would escape.
But as she refined her plan, she sensed another presence. A familiar presence.
Her little sister, the youngest of the Pleiades, was watching her.
"I know your secret, sister..." said rope.
The youngest of the Pleiades and the matriarch of the Siren race.
Maia turned around: "And are you going to tell Father?"
rope had a translucent gray body, with ridges on her back, faint gills hidden by her long blue-green hair, and gray eyes.
"No, actually..." Before she could finish.
"You cannot follow ," Maia replied, her voice soft but firm. "This is my choice to disobey Father. You know what that implies?"
"Death, rope, death..."
"No, freedom," corrected her sister, her eyes sparkling with determination. "I too want to taste what’s out there. I want to live, Maia. Not just exist. I want to recognize and understand what this feeling called love is."
Maia contemplated the infinite desert of her kingdom, then her sister’s gaze, burning with the sa fire that consud Leonard.
***
The night of the great departure arrived, enveloping the world of spirits in an unusual silence.
Maia had waited for this mont for years, watching for the flaw in her father’s vigilance, that precise instant when Taurus would be absent from The Other World, even for a mont.
Her sister, rope, stood beside her at the edge of the Fountain of Youth, whose luminous waters illuminated their faces with a bluish glow.
The youngest of the Pleiades, the one who ruled over the elent of water and whose hair evoked seaweed dancing in ocean currents, looked at her with excitent.
"Are you sure you want to co?" Maia asked. Her golden braid slid over her bare shoulder, and her eyes shone with fierce determination.
rope nodded vigorously.
"I don’t want to spend eternity waiting. You’re leaving for love. I’m leaving for freedom. I want to see those mortal worlds you told so much about."
"You risk losing everything," Maia insisted, placing a hand on her younger sister’s shoulder. "Our father will never forgive this betrayal."
"I know," rope replied with a bittersweet smile. "But existing eternally without ever living, is that really existence?"
Without waiting for an answer, she plunged her hand into the sparkling water of the fountain. Maia did the sa. Their fingers intertwined one last ti, and they concentrated.
The transmigration spell was complex.
They had to project their essence out of Yggdrasil, toward the mortal world, and find a receptive body.
The world wavered. The branches of the world tree began to tremble. A voice, deep as thunder and ancient, resonated in every fiber of their being.
"MY DAUGHTERS... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
The voice of Taurus, the King of Spirits, the world tree itself, exploded in their minds with a power that made them stagger. Maia felt her essence tear apart, as if living branches were being ripped from her soul. Beside her, rope let out a stifled cry.
"YOU HAVE BROKEN THE PUREST LAW. YOU HAVE REJECTED YOUR OWN NATURE."
"Father, I beg you," Maia whispered, tears in her eyes, her body already beginning to disintegrate into particles of sand. "I love him. I cannot live without him."
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the anger.
"THEN YOU WILL DIE WITH HIM."
At the mont when he would have their mory and awaken their spiritual nature, only five years remained before their essences would be destroyed...
rope wanted to protest, but Taurus’s voice interrupted her.
"IN MY MAGNANIMITY, I GIVE YOU ONE CHANCE... RETURN AND DRINK THE WATER OF THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. AND BEG FOR MY FORGIVENESS!"
Then nothing more. Silence fell again over the world of spirits, while the two sisters were hurled out of The Other World...
their essences streaking through the worlds like shooting stars.
...
Maia opened her eyes in a body that was not hers. She was lying on a narrow straw mattress in a dark, damp room that slled of laundry.
Her hands, which she raised in front of her face, were rough, marked by dostic labor. A servant’s hands.
She sat up slowly, her head spinning. mories flooded in waves.
She stood and examined her new body in the small copper mirror hanging on the wall. A woman in her thirties, with a tired face but still lively eyes, hair tied in a bun. A servant of the imperial palace of Alexandria.
"He was there, sowhere in this palace. Fate works in mysterious ways," she smiled. Even though she decided to keep her mories, she was going to live five beautiful years with Leonard.
The weeks that followed were a mix of intense happiness and bitter disillusionnt.
Maia, under the identity of this servant, managed to attract the Emperor’s attention. The looks they exchanged in the corridors, the brief encounters arranged in the gardens at nightfall, everything rekindled the fla of their dream nights.
Leonard recognized her. He felt that familiarity, that inexplicable connection. One evening, as she brought him wine in his private apartnts, he took her hand.
"I don’t know what you do to , but since you’ve been here, I feel like I’m rediscovering a dream I had long ago. Are you...?"
Maia felt her heart tighten. He rembered, in a way. She wanted to confess everything, but she held back. How to explain the inexplicable?
"Perhaps so dreams deserve to beco reality, Majesty," she simply murmured.
Their affair began that way, discreet and passionate.
Maia gave him what she could: her love, her presence, and soon, a daughter. A little girl with golden eyes and fine hair that promised to turn silver.
Leonard was overjoyed at the child’s birth.
But the reality of imperial power quickly caught up with Leonard. He was the Emperor, and an emperor could not settle for a servant as his official companion. Moreover, he already had his fiancée, who had already given him two sons.
"I have to tell you sothing," he said one evening.
Maia, rocking Olivia in her arms, looked up at him. She knew. She had always known.
"I have to marry soone else... It’s a necessary alliance for the Empire; the Imperial family needs the Draken family..."
She didn’t cry. She had lived too long not to understand the chanics of power.
"I know, Leonard."
He approached, stroked the baby’s cheek. "I will always love you. You and her, you will always be my favorites. But I cannot..."
"You cannot do otherwise," she finished for him. "I understand."
The legitimate Empress arrived a few months later, beautiful, young, and perfectly aware of her existence and her bastard child, but it changed nothing that her eldest son was the heir prince.
Maia found herself alone with Olivia in a small house, discreetly maintained by the Emperor’s funds.
So Maia devoted herself to her daughter, without telling her her true origin.
"Mommy, why are you so sad sotis?" Olivia asked one day when she was five.
Maia held her close. "I’m not sad, my Kleopatra... I’m just... fulfilled. Because I have you."
On the other side of the empire, rope had made a different choice.
She had awakened as the daughter of a Viscount, raised in good manners and destined for a fine marriage. She rembered nothing. Neither the spirits, nor her sister, nor the curse. She was simply Irene, a young noblewoman promised to Duke Frostvine, a stern man in his thirties.
The years passed; she married and beca Duchess...
Irene woke with a start in her bed, breathless, body trembling. Her sheets were soaked with sweat.
She brought her hand to her face and pulled it back, horrified: her skin had beco slightly translucent, revealing veins and bones beneath, before gradually returning to normal.
mories flooded her mind like a tidal wave.
"Shit..."
"Olivia..." she murmured, eyes wide. "Maia’s daughter... That child I t, whose mana resonated with mine..."
She rembered now. "She really does look like her..."
Irene curled up on her bed, pulling her knees to her chest. She closed her eyes, letting the tears flow silently.
", who wanted freedom so badly..." she whispered in a broken voice. "I ended up in this life... married to a man I don’t love, with mories I didn’t want. Plus, I only have five years left."
She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.
An idea germinated in her mind.
’Should I return to The Other World and drink the water of the Fountain of Youth? It’s my only chance to survive.’
But imdiately, she shook her head.
"No." Her voice echoed in the silent room. "And if I only have five years left to live... then I simply have to live them fully!"
She sat up, wiped her tears with a determined gesture. Duchess Irene, once rope, the youngest of the Pleiades, mistress of the Sirens and waters, had just made her decision.
"Live my life fully with you... Kaiser."
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