Her fingers fumbled around in front of herself. It had really come down to who she had felt more familiar with—who she had met first. If Val closed her eyes and imagined a world where Arius had swept her off her feet on her journey to the Summit, she could not conceive any other place than at his side. She was loyal to her friends in that way.

“I just feel safer around you, is what I’m trying to say. Arius gives me a bad feeling. He unsettles me.” In an effort to communicate the bad vibe that she gave him, Val clutched at the air with her curled fingers.

“Most of the time when he smiles or laughs, he seems like he’s faking it and trying too hard. I don’t know. It’s like he is trying to keep up the same personality that I saw in my vision, but it’s not genuine anymore. Arius seems kind of unhinged.”

Staying where he was, Tavras bobbed on the ocean surface while he took that into consideration. “I mean, Arius was never a stable person to begin with ever since he was a kid. Most recently, he did just have Evalaite pretend to cheat on him with his father and went through a break-up with her. Within hours, he latched onto you. Talk about a rebound!”

“No,” Val gasped. “I told Arius the truth, so he should be doing better. I thought that he deserved to know.”

“You did what?” Tavras burst out laughing so hard that he sat up and slapped at the water with his powers. The roaring splash sent drizzles across the wavy surface. “I can’t believe you, Val!” While he doubled over in laughter, he sat with enough surface tension across the water to support his weight.

“What?” She shrunk back, no idea what she had done wrong.

“Did you really tell Arius that with the intent to make him feel better?”

“Yes,” Val said slowly. Now, she was downright confused.

Having a hard time controlling himself, Tavras swiped the tears away from his eyes. “Well in that case, you just told Arius that he was in a sexless relationship with the sex goddess for eighty or so odd years! If you wanted to be nice, you should have just let him believe that his dad has fucked his girlfriend.” Again, Tavras hollered with laughter.

Though the latter seemed much worse than the former, Val had laden Arius with knowledge of much more than that. Feeling herself go pale, she suddenly came to terms with the full extent of her naivety.

The immediate, visceral reaction to Evalaite’s trick had already been experienced by him. Even if Val could deliver some relief in the aftermath, her information had come with some more worrisome troubles. The fabric of his memory had been altered to some undiscernible extent, possibly enough to change sizable parts in his sense of self.

For a moment Val thought of Tavras, the way that he had distressed over his humanity with the loss of his early, foundational memories. What if she had instigated similar turmoil in Arius, except he had to question everything in which he thought that he knew?

Then to add insult to injury, for the past eighty years, Arius—the one god of war, seated second on the Pantheon—had been conned into a sexless relationship.

While the former issues were much more troublesome, Val ended up becoming preoccupied entirely with that last bit.

He must be so pent up, she thought, even worse than her sorry, virginal self.

Toying with that idea, Val ran through every suggestive thing that had happened between herself and Arius. Maybe his coerced abstinence had made him relish in their naughty jokes. The Ravager could have been hoping that they would lead into something. The two of them were soulmates, after all.

No way. As much as she wanted to dismiss the idea, the thought would not let her go. The irresistible idea that Arius could have possibly desired her sexually rattled around in her head.

While he might have lashed out in abuse, that did not change the fact that he basically set the standard for male beauty. If anything, the same part of Val’s head which had produced the fanfiction scenarios about him imagined that his abusive nature could make him even hotter.

This whole thing with running away, maybe Val had been overreacting. When compared to the sort of power that he exerted on a daily basis, Arius had simply been reminding Val of a fraction of his power in the form of a small, aura knife.

Val shook her head hard; she needed to not think like that, justifying his behavior just because she had felt physical attraction to him.

But wait, she realized, this was what Tavras was trying to tell me all along.

If Arius wanted to satisfy his desires with his soulmate, that would involve sex which could lead to babies. Ergo, Val could never have what she wanted even if

An audible groan lifted from Val’s throat.

“What are you fussing about all of a sudden?” Tavras asked. “This is a wonderful gag that you played on the Ravager! I fully support this. Thank you so much for telling me. Sometimes, I really love Evalaite.” When he said that last bit, his eyes gazed into the sky almost dream-like.

Tavras snapped himself back to reality quickly. “Is this why he put that knife to your neck?”

Settling down with a deep breath, Val shook her head. “No. He was trying to isolate me from you but got upset when I wanted to stay by you.”

“Ah. Honestly, you can’t blame him there.”

“What?” Val gaped at him. The last thing that she had been expecting was Tavras to go taking Arius’s side on anything, least of all his abuse towards her.

“I mean,” he tried to explain, “Arius does think the lowest of the low of me. I have water as my informant, so I could learn that Evalaite never did more than kiss him in due time. For him though, he believed Evalaite’s portrayal of me as a… sexist, old god.”

Val did not blame him for not wanting to call himself the word and felt bad that his ex-girlfriend had slandered him like that. “I corrected that belief too, though.”

“I’m sure your statement of fact changed all of Arius’s feelings that he had for eighty years, just like that.”

Frowning, Val realized again her naivety in thinking that her conversation with Arius last night could fix everything. All of these issues had been ongoing a multiple of the years before she was even born.

“Still, he should have explained his feelings to me—talked to me, not threatened me.”

“Ah yes. We both know how great you are at understanding people. Did you really expect the Ravager to sit down and talk to you about his feelings?”

Her eyes darted either which way in her head. “Um, yes.”

“A little love advice from me to you, men don’t like doing that in relationships.” From there, Tavras went on a rant. “A man isn’t going to talk about his feelings period, especially not with someone that he doesn’t know very well, especially not when he doesn’t think he’s going to be understood, especially not when he’s a toxic cesspool like Arius the Ravager!”

She did not know what to do other than throw up her arms and retort, “He’s a god of love!”

“He’s a god of getting into his enemies’ heads to screw them over all the better. It does not matter what he set for his secondary attribute. He’s the one god of war, Val! I don’t know how you can forget this. He was probably running through war negotiations in his head and thinking how you were not in the position to ask for anything, given the power dynamic between the two of you.”

A shocked frown fell across her lips. For as long as Tavras has hated Arius, it gave him the ability to understand him excellently.

“As it turns out, I don’t know Arius very well either! He just told me last night that we were soulmates, and I was trying to be nice in talking to him.” Val had her nose upturned to the sky, confident that she had done more than Arius had a right to expect from her.

Tavras leaped up so that he could walk across the water to get closer to Val’s face and speak incredibly slow. “You were accepting help from the Ravager. Of course, he’s going to expect you to do things on his terms. I’m surprised that he didn’t have an official treaty drafted up between the two of you.”

Continuing, Tavras continued in a darker tone of voice. “I don’t know if you realized this, but when you accepted his help this morning, you were choosing between me and him. If things went well, I was fully expecting to never see you again and enjoy my days doing as I pleased on the sea once again. If things went poorly, well, I was planning on exactly this.”

Considering what both Arius and Tavras knew about her, they could not have expected her to know that she could only have one of them in her life. In retrospect, it seemed intuitive given the extremes of their rivalry. Maybe Val should apologize for expecting a millennia-old god and a century-old god to behave like grown men.

“Fuck me for expecting my mentor and soulmate to both be supportive of me at the same time.” Val just wanted to go back to training. Nether, at this rate, she might get a good opportunity to work with Divine Judgement.

“Did you ever consider how much he has to lose by associating with you? Literally everything!” Tavras hollered.

“For me, if we get caught, Suvier would give me a slap on the back of the hand and scold me for doing a bad thing.” Playfully, Tavras patted the back of his own hand effeminately while he spoke before resuming a furious stance. “They cannot actually do anything extreme to me because the ocean will rage and Leviathan will wake!”

“Arius, on the other hand, was brought into existence as a tool to serve his father. I have no doubt that his value begins and ends there. The God Supreme will irradicate his favorite son if he turns out to be a traitor to his regime. If he’s willing to risk his life to directly associate with you, throw him a godsdamn bone.”

Val tossed out her arms, spun around, and walked the other way across the turtle’s shell. “Why are you even defending him?”

In concern, Foofy trotted after her to stick close by. His ears laid down flat as he glared at Tavras.

“I don’t know,” Tavras cried. “I’m your mentor, and it’s frustrating to see when you don’t learn from your mistakes.”

“I am learning!” Val spun around to catch Tavras’s glare from where he had dashed halfway around the turtle to keep up with her. “Did I not do a good job at understanding you today? Arius was trying to isolate me from you and make me live somewhere else.”

A few steps back, Tavras took across the water. “You expected Arius to not only let me associate with you, but also stay living with me?”

“Yeah. I barely know him. He doesn’t get to dictate my personal life like that.”

One hand swiped over Tavras’s hair, and he tipped back his head to the sun. The light kissed his high cheekbones, a broad smile there. “You know what, I’m not even mad anymore.” Tavras let his laughter rollick from his belly. “In the name of fucking Suvier, this is the funniest conversation that I’ve had in a long while—and I talk to you every day.”

“Hey!” That was her last word in the conversation, because Val did not care anymore either.

Never knowing when to shut his mouth, Tavras kept at it. “If I’m completely honest, I would have attacked you a third time if I were in Arius’s shoes—albeit I’m not the one trying to foster an intimate relationship of any sort.”

After she had just rectified her relationship with Tavras, she preferred to pretend that she did not hear him just now. Val closed her eyes to practice her Aura Manifestation in the form of attacks to match her anger. The streaks of aura came out with ragged edges, unstable as they flurried around her.

She did not deserve to have a knife put to her neck by her soulmate. No matter what Arius or Tavras claimed. Val remained stalwart on her stance even as the sky took on an explosion of color at sunset.

At nightfall, she curled up on the serpent snapping turtle’s shell with Foofy at her back. Her body felt exhausted from how much had used her powers today, and she gave into a sleep that not even a behemoth’s rumble could stir.