Blood-Enchanted Eyes

Once there was a goddess, born of lingering grief.

She watched mortality with the distant, childlike curiosity of eternity. She wondered at its fragility. At its endings.
At the quiet that followed a final breath.

And so she stepped closer.
And closer still.
Until she stood at the trembling edge between the here and the ever after.

There, she bathed in the twilight of What Was, What Is, and What Could Be.

And instead of recoiling, the goddess rejoiced.
She embraced the shadowed seam and made her home within it. She drank of the interval.
She consumed the in between.

From her, and from her children, and from their children after them, came those marked with her sight.

Eyes that do not close at the edge of death.
Hands that borrow moments not meant to be held.
Mortals who may taste eternity.

But never without surrendering something in return.