The sky bled gold.
It always did when she wept.
But today was something different. It was dusk.
But the sun refused to set.
Eos, Goddess of the Dawn, knelt upon the stone threshold of the eastern horizon, holding a man who no longer resembled one. His skin sagged like old parchment, his ribs etched beneath flesh like brittle roots, his breath like a thread pulled taut over centuries.
She looked untouched by time. Her skin gleamed with the first light of every morning, eyes warm as the womb of the sun. Immortal. Eternal.
He had once been her lover. Now, he was her burden.
No-her crime.
They had called him Tithonus, Prince of Troy.
A mortal who had dared to love a goddess.
And she, radiant with that reckless kind of love only gods and fools possess, had dared to love him back.
When she begged the Council of Immortals to grant him eternal life, she was met with uneasy silence, until, one by one, the gods relented. Love softened even the stars.
All but one.
Chronion, the God of Time, rose from his still throne at the edge of the cosmos. His voice was the grinding of glaciers, the rustle of dying leaves.
"Let the mortal have eternity," he said, "but not escape decay."
And thus, Time cursed what the Heavens had blessed.
Tithonus did not die.
He endured.
Years became centuries. Centuries became forgetting. The world changed but he remained shrinking into himself, into pain, into nothing. His soul was a candle long after the wax was gone.
And Eos, the poor Eos, she woke up every dawn with him in her arms, radiant and unchanged, feeling her sin breathe weakly beside her.
"You should have died a thousand years ago," she whispered, lips against his ear.
But Time would not allow it. Not until now.
"I have envied mortals their ending," she confessed. "And you… you have lived the proof of why."
No response. No tear. No protest. Just a breath.
From the folds of her robes, she drew a dagger
Aetherfang
A blade forged before even Chronion's name was first spoken.
She kissed his brow.
"Forgive me dear."
She drove it through her own golden heart, then into his withered chest.
A single breath escaped them both.
The light flared.
And for the first time in eons, dawn would rise… without her.