"Who was she?"  Her voice was broken.

"Why does it matter?  You've won.  Congratulations."  The Fates once again held out the gleaming beetle.  An insect.  That is what you've done all this for...a painted bug.

"Did she have children?  A family?" Stale tears stabbed from behind her weary eyes.  She couldn't even look at them...let alone her prize.

"You did what you had to do.  Don't dwell on the past.  Instead, think of your future."  Again, they tempted her.  She could feel the power seeping from the legendary object.  She thought of the events that had unfurled within the past twelve days.  Persephone...the woman she had killed...the gods she had killed...Nyx...  She would have done it all for nothing if she didn't accept.  But if she did...then she would have done it all for herself.  "We know you want it.  Why else would you have accepted our invitation?"  She slowly raised her hand, already weighed down with guilt and exhaustion, to accept what (after all) was rightfully hers.

She pulled its wings apart, and a gust of pre power shot into her face.  It knocked her down.  It pulled her up into the air.  Is pushed her against one wall, then the other, then the ceiling, then, once more, she fell to the embroidered ground.  She could feel the strength, the immortality, the potential weaving through every muscle, every pore, every fiber of her marrow.  Her senses were sharpened.  Her broken body was healed.  I can do anything...

She lay there for what seemed like hours.  She counted every atom of water on the planet, she spoke the names of every child born that minute, then the next.  She knew the secrets of the heavens and the story of the earth.  Mama Saida was an orphan raised by her older brother, she couldn't have children.  Nyx was still rotting in one of the Fate's woven worlds.  Persephone couldn't kill her follower.  There were still one hundred and twenty-three people who believed in her.  She was all powerful...she hated herself for it...she...she was in love with Nyx...she always would be.  "I could bring her back."

"We're afraid not."

She sobbed.  "Take this from me...I've made a mistake.  Please!  I don't want this..."

"We can't do that."

"Please!"  The word was broken up between desperate cries.  Her entire body quaked beneath the intensity of her regret.  "Please..."

The Fates left the room...all but one.  "Life can't be given back."  She spoke slowly, but deliberately.  "At least...not without one to take its place."

"What are you doing?!"  The rest of them hissed after her.  "Leave her be!"  The Fate left submissively.

It took some time for her to gain control of herself again.  With the intensification of her senses came the intensification of her emotions.  She battled between two thoughts for what seemed like an eternity...even to her.  She knew very well what she could accomplish with her new found power.  What she could create, how many people she could help.  She also knew she could never be happy, she didn't deserve this power.  Nyx didn't deserve to die for it.  Maybe with enough time and enough to fix she would forget...but part of her didn't want to...

Nyx lay there exactly as she had rested in Yemeya's mind.  She deteriorated along with the city that surrounded her.  She knelt beside her twisted figure, coughing and sobbing from the sight of it all.  "I'm so sorry."  Why she spoke to her...she didn't know.  However this worked out, neither one of them would hear each other's voices again.  "I've left you a note."  She laughed through her tears at the childishness of her gesture.  "It explains everything.  I don't know what to do with this power...not without you.  You know, I had this naïve idea that somehow we'd win this thing together.  Think of what we could have done together, Nyx.  I'm so sorry it had to end this way.  I'm so sorry you have to wake up to this...alone...lost...afraid.  But you were always the stronger one, and I...I just can't...I can't live without you."  She placed the note in Nyx's pale hands and folded them gently over her heart.  She channeled the power within her, she kneaded it through her body and concentrated it in her shaking hands.  She laid them, glowing with the power they possessed, on Nyx's stomach.  She closed her eyes and let go of what she had once fought so hard to achieve.  She felt herself fading.  For a split second she was not herself...she was Nyx...then...she was gone.

Day 1.  "Yemeya?"  Nyx was frantically shaking her limp body.  "Yemeya, please, don't do this to me!  Wake up!!"

I'm still alive?!  It didn't work!  It didn't...Nyx?  NYX?!!  "NYX??!!!"  They stared in amazement, each wanting to embrace the, but too afraid of frightening the beautiful moment away.

Nyx was still holding Yemeya's opened letter. "Why??"  There were tears in her eyes.  "Why would you do this?"

"I...I couldn't bear to live without you."

"So you decided to make me live without you?"  Her face softened into a relieved smile.  "That was rather selfish, don't you think?"  They both laughed, and cried.  They held each other, never wanting to let go, as the sun set for the last time on the desolated city.

Neither one ever fully understood what had happened, or how.  All they knew was that they had both been born again, as mortals.  They could live together...and die together.

The power of the beetle had been lost forever, 'wasted' as the Fates thought, on two mortal lives.  What the Fates didn't understand, however, is that what world truly needed wasn't some all-powerful deity to restore order to the universe and keep the mortals in their place.  What the world needed...it already had: people.  Yemeya and Nyx spent the rest of their mortal lives making millions of small differences in the world.  They touched people's hearts and offered inspiration everywhere they went.  Bit by bit, they made the world a better place.  They weren't powerful, they weren't immortal...they were human, and, in the end...they had won.