Aeton was made for Ioasephyn, and she for him, of this there was never any doubt. Formed during The Great Making and joined while the world was still cooling beneath them, they loved one another before love had acquired a name, before anyone had thought to write songs about it, before jealousy, marriage, betrayal, devotion or heartbreak had complicated the matter. Theirs was the first love, and every love that followed would in some small way be measured against it.
In those earliest days, when there were no cities, no roads and very few creatures capable of asking inconvenient questions, Aeton and Ioasephyn wandered wherever they pleased. They rested in fields that shimmered gold beneath unfamiliar suns and watched the void ignite as pinpricks of fire appeared in the blackness and became stars. They crossed continents while the land was still deciding where it belonged, watched oceans gather in their basins, and treated earthquakes as little more than the world shifting in its sleep.
Others came in time. Some were born from Aeton and Ioasephyn, while others were molded from clay, washed ashore from stranger beginnings or climbed slowly from simpler forms over generations too numerous to count. The newcomers gathered together because living alone proved difficult, and their gatherings became settlements, villages, towns and eventually cities whose inhabitants quickly learned the benefits and burdens of having neighbors.
Aeton and Ioasephyn watched with interest.
They saw irrigation channels dug, walls raised, harvests gathered and songs invented for celebrations that had once required no music. They also watched men quarrel over the ownership of rivers, brothers draw borders through fields their fathers had shared, and rulers declare themselves descendants of powers they had never met. Aeton found this last development especially amusing until he heard a king announce to several thousand subjects that his authority came directly from Aeton himself.
“I have never seen that man before,” Aeton said.
Ioasephyn laughed for several days.
The laughter ended when they discovered statues of themselves in another city.
The likenesses were terrible.
Aeton had somehow acquired a beard reaching his waist and an expression suggesting chronic indigestion. Ioasephyn had been carved with six breasts and wings, neither of which she possessed. A priest standing beneath the statues explained to a crowd that Aeton represented conquest while Ioasephyn governed fertility and obedient wives.
The couple left before either of them was tempted to correct him.
They visited civilization less frequently after that.
Time passed around them without leaving much of a mark. Their children grew old. Friends vanished into graves and were replaced by descendants who knew Aeton and Ioasephyn from stories rather than memory. Those stories changed. Sometimes the couple were lovers. Sometimes siblings. In one kingdom they were enemies whose battle had created the mountains. Elsewhere Ioasephyn drowned Aeton every winter and restored him each spring because somebody had apparently decided love required agricultural responsibilities.
At first they found these inventions charming.
Then the stories became dangerous.
There were claims that sleeping beneath a tree touched by Ioasephyn prevented miscarriage. A lock of Aeton’s hair was said to cure fever. Dust collected from their footprints supposedly restored youth, although nobody could explain where one was expected to locate an authentic footprint several thousand years after the fact. Priests sold counterfeit relics. Kings claimed descent from them. Two armies once fought over a bone alleged to have come from Aeton’s left hand despite Aeton being alive, nearby and still in possession of both hands.
The most persistent story concerned their blood.
According to one version, Aeton and Ioasephyn had survived since The Great Making because the first love flowed through their veins in liquid form. Drink that blood and death would lose its claim upon you. Later versions improved upon the story by specifying how much blood was required, when it should be taken and which parts of the body yielded the purest concentration.
Aeton dismissed it as foolishness.
Ioasephyn was less certain.
“People become inventive when frightened of dying,” she told him.
For a while they withdrew completely.
Centuries passed.
Curiosity eventually betrayed Ioasephyn.
She entered a city built where a forest had once stood and found herself delighted by its bridges, public fountains and markets piled with fruits she did not recognize. Nobody paid her much attention at first. Her clothing was strange, but travelers were common enough that strangeness rarely lasted longer than a glance.
Then an old woman selling cloth looked directly at her.
The woman dropped the bolt in her hands.
“Ioasephyn.”
The name traveled faster than reason.
People gathered. Some knelt. Others shouted questions. Several pushed forward merely to touch her. Ioasephyn attempted to leave, but by then city guards had arrived, and the crowd had swollen large enough to block every street.
She asked the guards to clear a path.
Instead they escorted her to the palace.
Ioasephyn remained patient until the doors locked behind her.
The city officials treated her respectfully. That made the situation worse. They apologized for the inconvenience, brought food she did not want and explained that certain ancient texts required consultation before anyone acted rashly.
By nightfall she understood what those texts contained.
The blood ritual had survived.
Somewhere along the way, generations of storytellers had added measurements, prayers, instruments and precise instructions for separating her from Aeton. The procedure had become so elaborate that no living person questioned whether its complexity had anything to do with truth.
Ioasephyn told them the story was false.
They assumed she was protecting the secret.
She told them her blood possessed no power.
They decided that confirmed its value.
When she demanded release, the officials apologized again.
Aeton was on the opposite side of the world when he felt her fear.
He abandoned everything and crossed the distance as quickly as he could, pleading with the moon to raise the waters high enough to carry him. The moon, which remembered them fondly from younger days, obliged. Tides rose, currents turned, and Aeton rode the sea until the city appeared on the horizon.
He entered without disguise.
This proved unwise.
By then the population knew Ioasephyn had been found, and Aeton’s arrival completed the legend in their minds. People flooded the streets. Bells rang from towers. Some cheered. Others wept. A few attempted to cut pieces from his clothing.
The guards reached him before the crowd did.
Aeton allowed himself to be taken because Ioasephyn was somewhere inside the city and violence would only make reaching her harder.
He tried reason first.
The officials brought him before elders, priests and scholars who had spent their lives studying versions of his own history. He explained that the blood ritual was nonsense. A priest produced a scroll older than his grandfather’s grandfather and insisted the words had been preserved faithfully.
Aeton read it.
He recognized part of a lullaby he once sang to one of his daughters.
The line describing “love carried in the blood” had been taken literally.
He told them this.
They recorded his statement as further confirmation.
Aeton tried several other truths and watched each one reshape itself before reaching their ears.
By morning, they placed him in a cage.
Ioasephyn occupied another cage across the chamber.
Their captors had measured the distance carefully according to instructions copied from a manuscript copied from another manuscript translated from a language neither Aeton nor Ioasephyn had spoken for thousands of years. The legend warned that their power operated through union, so the cages stood far enough apart that their hands could never meet.
Ioasephyn gripped the bars when she saw him.
Aeton did the same.
Neither spoke for several moments.
There were guards in the room, and priests preparing bowls, knives and lengths of white cloth upon a stone table. Outside, a crowd filled the square, waiting for the immortality they believed would soon be distributed among them.
Ioasephyn looked at the instruments.
Her patience ended.
She shouted at the priests until her voice cracked. She threatened them with disasters she did not know how to create. She cursed their parents, their teachers and every ancestor responsible for preserving the ridiculous story that had brought them here.
Aeton listened.
When she finally stopped, he laughed.
Ioasephyn stared at him across the chamber, furious at first, then laughed too.
The guards became nervous.
The priests consulted one another.
Aeton looked at Ioasephyn and understood that they were going to die because people had preferred a story about them to the truth spoken by their own mouths.
He could accept his own death.
Hers proved impossible.
The oldest language returned to him.
It had been spoken before alphabets, before scribes, when names held more force than symbols could preserve. Aeton closed his eyes and searched for a place no jailer could enter, no priest could chart and no king could claim.
He found one.
Across the chamber, Ioasephyn had reached the same conclusion.
They began speaking at nearly the same moment.
The words were different.
The intention was not.
The cages emptied.
The priests fled.
Guards searched the chamber, the palace and eventually the entire city. Scholars examined the cages for hidden passages. Walls were broken apart. Floors were lifted. Wells were drained. For generations afterward, people argued over whether Aeton and Ioasephyn had escaped through magic, divine intervention, trickery or some final act of vengeance.
No one ever found them.
They had been hidden too well.
Aeton placed Ioasephyn in the mind’s eye, where no hand could seize her without first imagining her. Ioasephyn placed Aeton there too, somewhere beyond sight and close enough to thought that he could never again be caged by stone.
They found one another eventually.
There were fields there.
Perhaps they remembered them into existence.
They spent their days roaming through unfinished ideas, half-formed inventions, abandoned melodies and dreams people forgot before morning. Occasionally a poet glimpsed them without knowing who they were. A child might see two figures running across the edge of a daydream. A painter could spend years trying to recreate a face that appeared for only an instant before vanishing.
Aeton and Ioasephyn paid little attention.
They had seen civilizations rise from mud and return to it. They had heard themselves worshipped, misquoted, carved badly in stone and nearly murdered by people seeking eternal life. After all that, anonymity suited them.
So they returned to what they had done in the beginning.
They lay together in fields of spun gold and stared upward.
The darkness above them caught fire.
One by one, pinpricks of light appeared in the blackness.
And somewhere in the waking world, someone had an idea.
©2014, 2021, 2026 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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