”I take it things didn’t go the way they planned…” Kes replied.

”Very much they didn’t…” Anara answered. ”We abused our world… became as a blight upon it, so that it became stark and barren. And we, a stark and barren people to live upon such a world. We lost our balance with nature, and… between men and women. Few know that part of the legend, it is mostly passed from mother to daughter, or so my mother told me… My mother used to pray to The Eight every day, as I do still… Perhaps they listened after all? Perhaps… perhaps they guided you to me…” She spoke the last of that shyly.

Kes smiled softly. ”Perhaps they did…” She wondered if these eight gods and goddesses could be real… but she had no real information to go on, so she had no way of even forming a theory, all she could do was to form fanciful conjecture and imagine that it might be true.

”Do your people have deities?” Anara asked curiously.

”Mm, oh, no, we don’t… Some of us believe, have believed since the time before, that, when we die, the core, the essence of us, becomes part of the air… That we can then travel out among the stars, to find new places to live. If that’s true, I think it may even be that some of us return, to live other lives among our people.” Kes told her. ”Most of my people don’t believe such stories anymore though – most think we simply cease to exist when we die.”

”That… is a depressing way to think.” Anara replied.

”I always thought so too. It’s never seemed like it could really be true to me though… I just… if it were true that we just fade away, I’d think, I don’t know, that we’d act differently somehow. That we’d be different… And, logically, it just… um, well… I don’t think that string of reasoning follows through to anywhere. The only way it makes sense is… if nothing makes sense and everything is meaningless… and that just doesn’t seem right… Especially with so much meaning everywhere I look… Especially… especially when I look at you.” She finished softly.

Anara’s eyes, even unseeing as they were, had an intense look to them. Her wife moved in and kissed her, moved herself so she was partly on top of her, and Kes’s hands traveled over her skin, her eyes fluttered closed, and every part of her came alive in anticipation of what was to come. It, this, was by far the best feeling she’d ever felt… The kiss parted, and Anara spoke softly to her, telling her that she loved her, before kissing her again.

In her mind, Kes thought she really should say it back, but Anara wasn’t really giving her an opportunity to say anything at all, and she was anything but regretful of that, so she just let the thought go and assumed she’d probably be saying it soon enough at some point… If she had her way, after all, they were going to do this more than once before they fell off to sleep again.

Claiming and being claimed where turning out to be, by far, her favorite pass-times…

———-

to be continued