21. Dust - The Homes That Lie Forgotten

“You… live here?” the Goddess asks, slow and uncertain. Her voice is still hoarse - by the Creator how Ilya remembers those haunting screams, clawing past gritted teeth, as she had spent hours healing the Goddess’ wounds.

Ilya shakes her head, willing the thoughts to subside. Instead, she looks around the offending room, covered from ceiling to floor in a thin layer of dust. The cupboards, the table, the chairs, none of them are free of it.

“Sort of,” Ilya replies. She rakes a finger over the top of the chair, dust sticking to the pad, a slate gray. Then she swipes over the seat itself. Once, twice, three times, clearing as much of the dust as possible, a frown fixed to her face. “It was my mother’s home. I only really use it when I’m passing through.”

The Goddess says nothing further, just watches Ilya with a measured gaze. She had not closed the door, Ilya realises. Sunlight bathes the Goddess in a humble light. Accents the edges of her frame and holds her like a statue in the doorway, impossibly still. Shadows fall across her face. Ilya watches, half awed, half concerned, stunned into silence by the sight before her.

Eventually, she comes to her senses enough to motion to the chair with the wave of a hand. The seconds tick by. Ilya wonders if the Goddess will actually sit down, or whether the sheer volume of dust has deterred her. But then she notices a sudden jerk of motion. A blink and you miss it movement, and the Goddess stands directly in front of her, divine form towering over Ilya’s and casting her in shadow.

The movement is jarring, to say the least. Ilya had expected her to sit, not lunger into her personal space without care or concern for how that might make Ilya feel. The sheer quickness of it too… Ilya can do little more than to react with a shaking jump and a measly little yelp.

“What happened to her?” the Goddess starts, a soft whisper. Brows furrowed into a confusion unbefitting of a divine being. “Why let her home fall to ruin?”

Ilya offers in return a small, pained smile. “She was a healer. People travelled from all over the kingdom to see her, so that she might help them. Until…” A choked pause. The Goddess waits, patient, gaze never once leaving Ilya as she speaks. “Until she healed the wrong person. A man some bandits were looking for - they didn’t like that my mother had healed him up and sent him on his way. I found her–” Ilya nods at the far corner, where boxes are piled up next to the stone base of the fireplace, “–cold. Bloodied from no end of cuts. I– she– it was far too late for anything to be done. She’d been dead for hours.”

By the time Ilya has finished, voice quiet, arms shaking, the Goddess’s expression has darkened into a heavy frown. Ilya glances up at her, watches the way her jaw twitches, tense with something akin to anger.

“Did you ever find them? The bandits?”

Ilya shakes her head. “They left a note - the only reason why I know the truth - but I couldn’t exactly afford to track them down. What would I have done, anyway? I’m a healer, not a fighter...”

Unable to bear that look on the Goddess’ face - so full of rage, so full of grief, and all for what? - Ilya turns on her heels. She occupies her thoughts with one of the shelves hanging on the wall, runs a finger over it just as she had the chair, drawing swirling patterns in the dust.

For a moment, she forgets herself. That she has company, a Goddess no less, whom she has just turned her back on and ignored. A patient, she reminds herself a second later. With wounds that have not healed.

“Rielik…?” she says. Meets nothing but silence. So Ilya turns once more, glancing first at the chair - still empty, of course - then towards the open door. Her gaze wanders around the room, becoming more perplexed by the minute, but there is no sign of the Goddess anywhere. Perhaps… she thinks, brows creasing with confusion, as she walks slowly from room to room, checking every inch of the dust coated floors and furniture, but to no avail.

Ilya sighs, heavy from the conversation, from a hard day of healing the grave wounds of a Goddess, and eventually collapses into the chair. Her eyelids flutter closed. Try as she might, she cannot remain awake, and sleep takes her into a calm and dreamless song.

When she hears the news from a friend a week later - “those bandits, Ilya, they’re hanging from their necks in the center of Vessen” - she covers her shock with a mask of curiosity. Deep down she knows what it means. Everyone else in town is left in a torrential mix of gratitude, of apprehension, of fear; trying to decipher whether their deaths are a blessing or a warning.

But Ilya knows. Almost as surely as if the Goddess had written her a letter, signed with blood.