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Anaxa once did an experiment on his heart, listening to it pat-pat-patter on throughout countless days. He listened to it during sleep, when he woke and showered, during lectures laughing to himself when it spiked as students and professors alike tried to invalidate his great performance. He stayed up three whole days to see if the lack of sleep would change its cadence, stared at droma’s until his eyes went bloodshot, and fought animals hostile and aggravated all while recording his rhythm. He left the Grove, listening to his heart thump in his ears as the golden threads surrounding Okhema tried to touch it for the briefest moment.
Aglaea told him only fools couldn’t understand the rhythm of their own heart. She pressed her hand against his chest then, the thumping sound dissipating under her cold, sightless eyes. She held onto it for a long time until the sound of Anaxa’s heart threatened to make him go mad.
It was everywhere, swarming his eyes and ears with its insistence. More. More. More desperation. More need. More desire. Set your heart ablaze and let it fly freely away from you. It was an organ Anaxa knew he needed, so he would like to keep it to himself.
“As if you can make that decision,” Anaxa could hear Aglaea say.
Days later, after he subjected himself to Aglaea’s hand over his heart, she told him that a great performer needed a proper costume. To spill blasphemy, one had to look like a proper blasphemer.
Anaxa knew why she said it, but he didn’t comment. There was no need, when Aglaea had already made up her mind. Still, he didn’t want to give in, yet still, he did. He listened to his heart steady in his ears thrumming away, a nuisance in even the nosiest of settings with her Garmentmaker’s mechanical teetering as they moved around weaving thread and singing their masters praises. Aglaea caressed them like a lover and looked at Anaxa like a prospect, like whatever had blossomed had died and reborn into something she couldn’t bear look away from.
He scoffed at her playmaking. She was always better at setting the stage than rehearsing on it. If left to him, there would be no room left for such flimsy and only cold facts mingled in with harsh reality.
“Stick your arms out and hold your head high,” she said to him, allowing the Garmentmaker to follow her as she closed around Anaxa in this intimate space full of silky cloth and encased in her cold lack that had brought them together as if huddling for warmth from their imperfections. No, the holes inside them that made them perfect, and without doubt, ready for the next step.
“You’re too thin,” she said. “Too tired. Too pale. You’re missing too many parts. Your clothes are holding your body together.” She touched his waist, and the makeshift corset keeping him in place. “You’re missing your wit as well.” That part, her sharp gaze landed onto him in accusation. She wasn’t pointing to flaws, just facts that her golden threads had cheekily whispered into her ears in hopes of spurring on something fruitless.
“And you’re too meddlesome,” Anaxa responded in kind, graciously letting her circle his broken down body. “Too blind. Too emotionless. You yearn too much, dear Aglaea, and to what ends?”
She smiled, yet he couldn’t see. Her body was behind his, hands pressed against his back where she could hear the thumping of his heart even from there. It had no cadance, no rhythm she hadn’t already heard. Golden threads spilled out of her and the Garmentmaker watched as the dance continued, taking measurements, equating loss with gain.
“Shall I make you a golden outfit?” she asked him. Threads weaved around his neck, around the thin of his ankles, the tightness of his waist, frail of his wrists, and the exposed part of his under arm. “I’ll stain you in golden threads and weave you in my design. Then your place in our journey will be undeniable to those around us no matter what blasphemy spills out of your mouth.” He found himself shivering, growing cold from her gaze and warm from her words.
He scoffed. “Even if I were to let you do as you please, I would never become yours.”
Aglaea shut him up. Anaxa wanted to sprout mockeries about her still being so full of miserable emotion, but his tongue was pulled from his mouth by golden threads. It was wrapped thrice and pulled taunt, drool and saliva dripping down shining threads as Anaxa strained to keep face. Gold was tight around him now, keeping his body in place as she moved around him, soft golden locks pressing against his chest once more, listening to the abyss that pounded wildly there, desperate to be let out.
“And no matter what you say, this will not stop beating so wildly,” Aglaea responded, pressing a hand against his heart. To respond when he couldn’t, his heart pounded in double speed. Rather than laugh at his helplessness, Aglaea only sighed very slowly. “To think this feeling would still remain…”
She looked up at Anaxa and his brow furrowed, clearly having a witty response that he couldn’t give light. Her hands held either side of his face, pulling him down to her and catching his tongue now in her own fingers. “I would like for you to not be so reckless in the future.” She sighed again. “What an impossible thing to ask.”
Her fingers were replaced with her lips. She pressed into his mouth, golden threads moving his tongue to her liking as if Anaxa couldn’t achieve her pleasure by his own means. He had always been excellent and achieved all things with callous perfection. This was no different, yet Aglaea sought control in her own hands by her own threads.
So, they mingled together a human and demi god in their simplest forms. Aglaea kept her hands tight around his face, fingers threading into his hair and nose brushing his. She ran her tongue along his mouth, consuming him with ease, testing to see if he had all his teeth and if his cheeks still lined with muscles. She wanted to see what of him was in order, so she could scold what was not.
Anaxa had all fingers and toes, all teeth, and a still beating heart. His body still worked, so he didn’t understand the need to check if it did in the first place. “I can hear it here too,” she said, running her tongue along the roof of his mouth and eliciting a sharp hiss from him.
“I still have veins,” Anaxa emphasized, only to be made mute by Aglaea’s threads again.
“Just like golden threads.” She pulled his arms down, wrapping them around herself until they were flush against one another. Her head rested back on his chest, her glassy eyes staring off to the side at nothing. It was haunting. “What can you feel?”
His tongue was let go, and Anaxa rolled his jaw. He felt trapped, yet free. The revelation alone opened him up to an even greater happiness, knowledge gained in stagnation. “Your body is still warm no matter how cold you are. It’s suffocating. Let’s be done with this farce.”
Aglaea ignored his wishes, wrapping her arms tighter around his waist. She looked up at him even knowing there was nothing to see. She wanted Anaxa to see her eyes, all knowing yet empty even now. She demanded completion. “The show isn’t done, performer.”
He agreed. He disagreed. More hatred. More desire. To finish this particular act, he leaned down and kissed her back. It was slow, methodical, coaxing, learning, and growing, everything long hours of research in dark skies yielded. She tasted of nothing but longing, and Anaxa wanted her desperately.
“Does this feeling still remain?” he mocked her, breaking off the kiss for but a moment.
“Must you be so insufferable?” she asked.
He answered with another kiss.
It was her game to play here in Okhema. Her golden threads that weaved around his body, making him move to her will. He would never come to her beckon otherwise.
Yet they only remained like that, kissing, holding, breathing their heartbeats in through their mouths. Anaxa’s lips felt bruised and sloppy, littered with her yearning like iron on his tongue. He probably looked like a mess, but his body had never been put together properly anyways. He held all of himself with great pride even now as he lacked air enough to make him loopy, a cackled laugh bursting forth.
Must you do that now? Must you always cause a scene? Must you stir this withering heart?
Aglaea pulled him to his knees and sat on his lap. Abundance pooled between them, needy and great, but they didn’t give it notice. Instead Anaxa stared at the gold weaver and Aglaea listened to the beating of the great performer's heart.
“It’s prattling on even now,” she remarked.
“I don’t wish to hear your mockeries,” he responded.
“Then don’t hear them as such.” Aglaea ran her hands through his hair, pressing against the tenderness of his scalp, and feeling for herself how the thickness had thinned. “Should this heart continue to beat, hear them for what they are, so that this feeling may live on even when it leaves me.”
Anaxa scoffed and Aglaea pushed him to the ground. He wouldn’t give it name even as she laid over his body and touched him tenderly. Her eyes were far off, as she didn’t see the need to perform the concept of proper sight, and she touched his body to map out each crease and scar, each missing hole that made up his inevitable perfection.
Anaxa wasn’t allowed to touch her until much later, when he was already opened up and the gold weaver was satisfied. She let her threads go one by one, curious or perhaps terrified by what he would do. He did nothing out of the ordinary, really. Kissed her. Held her. Caressed her. Made love to her with such a slow passion one might think they were both on the verge of death.
It was comical, a great tragedy.
His heart pounded wildly, reminding him he was alive. He wished he had slept less, so he could chalk it all up to a delusion. He wished golden threads were still wrapped around him, so he had something to blame, yet he felt no regret. Aglaea whispered into his mouth that this would be the first and last time, and Anaxa didn’t believe her.
She listened to his heartbeat the entire night until the sound echoed in her ears as well, an infestation of love, a great yearning passed between them. He wrote down theories in his head, memos and misgivings, grievances and successes. He could’ve done more. He could’ve done better, yet no matter how much regret he wanted to feel over their time together, nothing but the pounding of his heart was present.
Aglaea sent the garment to him a week later, ornate and dressed in gold. Anaxa wondered if she wanted him to wear it at his funeral. He instead wore it the next time they met and watched as emotion was still able to breathe out of her mouth. Just a thin thread, but it was still yearning for more.