POV: Aphrodite
Love does not replace loss. It grows around it.
Eros walks beside me.
Not in the restrained human-scale presence that has been his default since the manifestation, not in the between-space ambient quality of the months before — just walking, at the specific pace of two people who are walking together rather than one following the other or one leading the other.
The ruins of the old shrine.
The structure that the Moon Goddess's authority maintained through the lunar channels, finding the channels gone and the maintenance gone with it. The physical architecture in the specific state of something that was built well and is deteriorating gracefully — not the catastrophic collapse of something that was poorly built but the slow honest return of something to its component materials now that the force that was holding it in its assembled state has been removed.
