Pherenike - Chapter 84

‘Cal.’

His Nike called him again. Like always, when her fiance was sick, her voice was the most tender.

Like driftwood carried by the waves, that brief call softly curved his lips. Deucalion’s genuine smile always came in his weakest moments.

Like trees sway in the wind, like shadows lengthen as the sun sets, like waves moisten the dry sand… When Pherenike called him, he smiled.

The girl was always the breeze passing through his branches, the long, warm afternoon sun shining on his body. Such a small thing was Deucalion’s sea. Her calling his name was the wave.

He was powerless before the blowing wind and didn’t know how to hide in the shade where the sun doesn’t reach. Truly, he did not know how not to love her.

He couldn’t help but smile. That love, close to defeat, always made Deucalion vulnerable. It wasn’t the poison his father forced him to swallow but she who made him weak.

‘What’s so good that you’re smiling? Even when you’re sick.’

‘……You haven’t left.’

‘I won’t leave until you’re completely healed. You know that.’

‘I do…’

‘Deucalion, it’s time to stop sleeping and wake up. You haven’t drank water for too long.’

When he opened his eyes, she was always there. The fact that she hadn’t left because he hadn’t fully recovered made young Deucalion treasure the gnawing pain inside. Sometimes, he wished that tiresome pain would linger a little longer.

‘…Even after I’m fully healed, don’t leave. Nike.’

‘Who would go?’

‘Don’t go while I’m asleep.’

‘Okay.’

‘Don’t go to the sanctuary.’

The answer he hoped for never returned. The girl, pretty as a young nymph, smiled deeply and bit the tip of his nose.

It was another dream. For a moment, he was lying in bed with his sick body. Many things in the dream were bigger or smaller than in his memories. For instance, he was a much smaller boy than he remembered. And everything around him had grown as much as he had returned to being a small boy.

Except for his Nike, Pherenike back then was very small and pretty. It was perfect. Her curly wisps tickled the boy’s cold cheeks.

That day, his young fiance had her soft platinum hair neatly braided behind her back, wearing a small bronze crown shaped like a fig tree on her forehead. It was a gift from him because she favored figs among all fruits offered at the sanctuary of Axiothea.

He remembered everything about her.

‘Don’t go to the sanctuary, okay?’

‘That’s not up to me.’

‘What if I keep being sick?’

‘Stop talking nonsense. It’s not like I’m leaving you forever; I’m just going away for a while.’

‘I wish the High Priest would drop dead tomorrow. I want to kill him.’

‘Even if he dies, there are plenty more priests to take his place. Killing him would just be a waste of your effort.’

Pherenike, half-leaning over Deucalion, eventually lay down beside him.

‘I always want to heal you faster, Deucalion.’

I wish to always be sick if it meant you’d never leave me.

‘Relying on time like this, waiting endlessly, it’s too suffocating. The dull sanctuary, the people even duller than the sanctuary… all of it was terrible, but seeing you sick brought me back to my senses. If something like this happens to you again.’

‘You’ve almost healed me already.’

‘I hate the word ‘almost.’ If it’s not everything, it might as well be nothing.’

To Deucalion, ‘almost’ was almost the same as ‘everything,’ an incomprehensible concept for him.

He wasn’t in deathly pain anymore. Seeing her while being in incomplete pain was better than not seeing her at all without any pain.

‘I’m not that sick anymore.’

‘Then, can I leave now?’

‘Don’t go, Nike. It hurts. I feel like I’m going to die.’

Pherenike, who hated the sanctuary more than Deucalion, started to argue for the necessity of the sanctuary around that time. Finally, she realized that true learning was essential, even for her who detested learning terribly.

Ironically, the reason was him. The mere thought of being separated from her felt like losing an arm, but she wanted to go to the sanctuary for him.

‘Cal, I was too arrogant.’

‘You’ve always been. Arrogant, presumptuous… So, just live as you were born.’

‘I’m sort of reflecting now.’

‘Sure.’

‘…I thought I could completely heal you by now. Like Atalanta. I thought there was nothing in the world I couldn’t heal… But it’s not like that. Look. The Althea keeps losing its way inside your body.’

He actually liked that her Althea was lost and aimlessly wandering inside him. If possible, he wished it would roam forever, unable to leave him.

If Pherenike hadn’t distorted her entire face as if she had become the most incompetent person in the world, he would have foolishly said that and gotten hit.