The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

“Love makes cowards of us all.”

I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.

Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

It took so many tragedies, to make a nation.

You were a hero stepped straight from myth, shining and true, and you were a mortal woman, scarred and weary, and God forgive me for trying so hard to separate the two.

Another jealous lash there, as if you owed her, as if children were born indebted to their parents.