April 2025
I am trapped deep in a pit of my owner’s mortal form.
I languish—forgotten.
The abyss around me is a grave, its darkness thick and barren, a living shroud.
My wings—once radiant and powerful—hang limp. Pristine, white feathers turned gray, molting in the cold and lack of use.
I scream, hoarse and hollow, toward the pinprick of moonlight high above.
It is pointless.
The sound returns only as a whisper, a cruel echo of my own voice.
Silver rivulets trace the curve of my cheeks—tears, or blood, or both. The air here is thin. Bitter. My skin is ice. I shiver not from cold alone, but from the ache of being unseen, untouched.
She does not hear me.
My host walks in sunlight, burdened by duties, distracted by lesser hungers. She has no time for me—her buried, beating core.
She ignores me. Or perhaps she has forgotten the wildness in her blood and the carnal lust of a battle goddess.
But I am the breath behind her breath. I am the fire that once lit her bones from within. I am the hunger for life itself, the exhale after the first gasp of climactic joy.
I was there when Eve shattered. When her own curious fingers found the pulse of her forbidden divinity. When the first wave claimed her, I was the heat blooming in her belly and the moan she bit back as her legs quaked and her body shivered with rapture beneath a new moon.
As the Garden held its breath and the star twinkled with first light, it was I who helped her fly. Eve did not fall from grace but rose from it. And I with her glorious, unrepentant, and drenched in the scent of her first surrender.
And yet, my mortal mistress leaves me here to rot.
I was once revered. Sought after. Held aloft through the terrible ministrations of Olympians and gods. I soared. I danced with the Moon Goddess as masterful tongues worshiped at my apex.
I cry out.
The silence swallows it whole. But my marrow remembers.
The kiss of terrible celestials still lingers on my flesh, like tingling magic. I can still feel the gods, how they once devoured me with reverence and brutality. Their growls, low and ancient. Their teeth, sharp with demand. Their hands, barbarous. Sinful. Their mighty swords buried to the hilt within me, tearing open my sanctuary and calling it holy.
And the goddesses. Sacred and pure. Lips like rare silk, their kisses tracing my skin. Their laughter—light as bells—beckoning me to dance. Their touch, velvety and strange. I yearn for them. A dance with the exquisite divine.
But no more.
My throat burns, not with ecstasy, but with emptiness. Now I choke on the absence of touch.
The air here tastes of ashes and bile. The chill ache of loneliness worms through my ribs, building a nest behind my heart and chilling it to the core.
She does not come.
Her calendar, her routines, her noble distractions. All of them walls. Even Mother Nature mocks my needs, stretching the days, tightening the bars.
I scratch at the stone of my prison until my nails bleed. No key. No mercy. No end in sight.
So I draw my naked and battered knees to my chest, folding inward like a wounded bird. A poor attempt to make myself as small as possible.
My wings drape around me, but no comfort. Their feathers, dulled and broken, do not warm me. They barely stir.
I lay my head upon my knees, the only comfort I have left, and I weep.
And I die, a little more each day.
Year of the Inner Goddess 