Parvani wept at the feeling of sunlight on her body.

She wept again at the sight of her city, full of voices and laughter and children running through the streets. The gossip she heard in the crowds was that Hajan’s second-eldest son had taken the throne, a young man often teased for his love of poetry and astronomy. His first decree was to return funding to the temples, funding that had been redirected to his father’s wars, which were now undergoing peace negotiations.

Her mother wept, too, when she saw her.

Parvani felt as safe in her mother’s arms as she felt at Hades’s side. With her mother stroking her hair, she told her what she’d done, feeling again a guilty stab between her ribs. Her mother kissed her brow, a blessing reapplied.

“Is it right?” Parvani asked later, drinking her mother’s tea. “What I’ve done?”

“It was what you set out to do.”

At the reminder, shame flooded her again. But her mother continued to hold her, and she hoped, somewhere, that Ranya’s family now felt some measure of peace.

Before she’d left, Parvani had asked Hades if she could help bring dreams to the living. Not nightmares, but sweeter things, the sort of dreams that made you sigh upon waking and made your heart beat calm and steady.

Sometimes a field must burn to grow wheat. This would be her way to atone.

Her mother combed fingers through her hair as Parvani told her this. “And will this make you happy?”

Parvani glanced at the empty mango tree behind their house. “Yes.”

Her mother smiled, and her eyes were shining. “Then you know what to do.”

They spoke of gods as immortal, eternal, a strength to be feared. What, then, would they say of the goddess who walked barefoot into death, baring her skin to grief and mortality? What stories would they tell of the girl who repeatedly lived and died and lived again, a phantom traveling between worlds, the pale horizon between spring and winter? She was neither warm nor cold, alive nor dead.

She was the queen of death and dreams and memory, and she was coming home.

Faithfull

Faithfull

Karuna Riazi

At my mother’s wedding reception, I had a tough time finding the right dish that embodied “Yulia has decided to become a cougar.”

It was troubling, as I usually had a gift for eating my feelings. I could figure out if a really bad day warranted something with a ton of cheese pulls, or a mug cake with a few extra guilt-free shavings of chocolate around the rim. I knew how to feast out of spite for the douchebag who swerved around me at the red light. Out of relief in passing that physics test I did not study for. Out of . . . something . . . for my cougar mom?