Soft, sprinkling rain caught in her hair like dew drops. The Goddess of the Reaching Green stood on the porch of her humble home, staring down at the gifts the villagers of this one-road town had left on her doorstep: baskets of fresh-baked bread, the smooth river stones that she loved to worry between her hands, crowns of flowers, and glimmering abalone shells. Things that had brought her joy for many, many years.

Faces peeked through curtains and cracks in doors, around corners and behind books held at angles of practiced nonchalance, all waiting for the same thing. Her smile would bring out the sun, just as her tears caused rain to fall and her anger burned the fields and forests. The sky was gray with swollen clouds, as it had been for months; the rivers were full, and everyone was ready for long, warm days.

But her sorrow did not waver.

The goddess left the gifts on the damp ground and closed the door, but not before catching the villagers’ expressions of confusion and disappointment. Have we done something wrong? their eyes said. And she did not know how to respond, because the answer was both yes and no, and the why of it all eluded her. She’d chosen this life because of its smallness, its distance from her squabbling brothers and sisters and the burdens they carried. Yet she found herself with a heaviness of her own, a sinking in her stomach and a fatigue she could not name.

She sat at her table and mended her clothing. Working with her hands usually helped her mind to turn, but not today. Tears blurred her vision and mangled her stitches, leaving wet spots where they dropped on the cloth.

Outside, the clouds rumbled, and rain continued to patter on her roof.

The next morning, there was a knock at her door. In all her years of shepherding the seasons of this land, she’d had days where the requirements of her duties weighed more heavily, where the smile felt like a performance, or the fire was quenched too soon. She had not, until now, been unable to get out of bed.

A weak wave of her hand summoned a gust of wind to blow the door open. It was her neighbor, the baker, his hair wet from the rain, holding his arm protectively over a plate of steaming chocolate and cranberry scones. He took one look at the damp stains on her pillow and rushed over.

“Goddess, are you unwell?” He placed the plate on her nightstand and knelt beside her bed.

“Not unwell, only sad.”

“But…it is summer,” he stammered. “Our crops require light. Our people grow weary of the constant rain.”

“It has only been one extra day,” she reminded him.

“Yes, but you have never faltered like this before. Is there anything we can bring you? Anything we can do to make you smile?”

Without meaning to, she frowned. Lightning flashed and thunder peeled overhead.

The baker flinched.

“I am sorry,” she said, and meant it. There were many cruel gods in the world, and she had come to this isolated place to avoid becoming like them. “I simply need a little more time. Thank you for the scones.”

He left in more of a hurry than he’d come.

After a week, the rivers spilled from their banks. An ever-rotating group of villagers with beseeching prayers and gifts came to visit her.

“Please, Goddess, don’t you care about us?” one would say.

“Goddess, can you not see what you are doing?” another asked.

“Our crops are drowning, and soon we will go with them.”

And always, always, “Tell us what to do to make you smile.”

She finally cried out, “I do not know!” and the blacksmith’s face flickered with fear.

What a storm there was that day.

Why couldn’t she stop? The sinking in her belly had become a hole, had become a pit, had become an emptiness that she could not fill. Of course she cared about the village; her heart had not stopped aching since the end of winter. Of course she saw the effects of so much rain; her eyes leaked, but they were not blind to suffering.

No one came the next morning.

Or the next.

By the following afternoon, her eyes had dried, not because she was no longer sad, but because her tears were spent, and she was too tired to collect more.

Outside, footsteps sloshed through flooded streets, and shadows hovered near her windows. “Goddess?” they called, unsure. “Is it over? Have you seen fit to grant us mercy?”

The muscles in her cheeks twitched one at a time as she fought to remember what a smile felt like and construct one on her face. She watched her features move in the bathroom mirror. Her lips stretched as they should. Her teeth gleamed white.

Golden rays broke through the gray, and cheers sounded beyond her walls as the villagers rejoiced and discussed preparations for the summer festival.

In that moment, the Goddess of the Reaching Green felt split in two—the bottom half of her face a facade for the people she called hers, while her eyes remained desert-barren, dead and empty. But they did not know. They did not care, as long as the sun came.

Summer passed in smears of plaster and a barrage of hammering. The water drained and left damage behind that needed tending, the farmers rushed to construct new beds for crops that must last longer into the cold months before harvest, and she pretended not to see the furtive glances over shoulders and under hat brims at her pasted-on smile. What they saw reassured them. She was fulfilling her function. She was cured of whatever madness had caused her to punish them—and madness it was, because what had they done to deserve it?

Nothing and everything and nothing again.

She did not burn in early autumn, and they threw their meager Harvest Feast and called her benevolent, beautiful, kind. In corners where they thought she could not hear, they murmured that they deserved this break after the extended spring, and anyway, nothing was dry enough to be reborn in wildfire.

The truth was that the pit in her stomach had never left. She did not have the anger required for flame. All the rain had washed it away, and she could not pretend at rage the same way she could pretend at happiness.

No one asked for her side of the story, or they might have been prepared for what came next.

In winter, white flakes fell from the sky. “It is called snow,” the goddess told them. She had only heard whispers of it from her sisters in the north. It had never snowed here before, but this year it built up blanketing walls that became suffocating hills, all of it cold, so cold.

They could not reach her, buried in her house, and the silence and solitude were a service to the ice in her bones—not her heart, never her heart, because she could not stop the wondering and worrying for the people she still, despite everything, held within it. But the ice filled in her hollowness, just a little.

And then it melted, slushed, evaporated, and she wished she could go with it.

That spring, she could not bring herself to cry.

She needed help, but who was there to answer her call? The humans of her village did not understand, and her siblings’ attention could be a dangerous thing. There were rumors of witches and druids that lived in the wilds who took their power from the earth.

Perhaps one of them could tell her why she was broken.

Drought was not a word she of the Reaching Green had ever heard until the old soothsayer came to read the cracks in the land. The foreigner waved her staff—tied with herbs and rattling bone—blew sage-scented smoke over the fields and buried a citrine-embedded animal skull beneath the town square.

The goddess watched all this from her window and cracked her first genuine smile in over a year. This magic was a farce, but there was renewed hope on her people’s faces. The sun was already shining, so no one noticed the difference.

“Your goddess must be reminded of her duty,” the crone said. The villagers nodded along, hope twisting into something else, something electric and ugly.

Her smile fell. She had given them her light, her tears, her heart, and she thought they had been grateful. But this…they did not care for her. Only what she could do for them. Her soul had known it almost a year before her mind.

The soothsayer pointed a crooked finger toward her window. “If she will not willingly give you rain, you must take it from her.”

Oh, how they tried.

They quickly learned how easily fire caught across the sun-scorched grass.

She did not know what else to do but wait and hope things would get better, but time itself could not heal her heart. Seasons became meaningless, as did her name. She reached for nothing, and green was a distant memory. Despite all the sadnesses of the world—many of her own creation—her well of tears had not refilled. Months had passed since anyone had brought bread or curses to her door, so she had no fire to end their collective misery, and more sun born of a fake smile seemed one cruelty too far. All was gray and brown, crisp and fractured.

She was surprised, one timeless, empty day, by a knock.

“You must make her leave!” someone hissed—the baker, she thought, who no longer had much wheat to bake with—followed by a yelp and a hastily shut door.

A second knock.

Of course the villagers wanted her to leave, but who would dare attempt to remove her? She arranged her body like a fortress wall and her expression into ice, then gestured for the wind to open the door. The breeze smelled of dust and ash.

“Sister.” The woman standing on her threshold was unfamiliar, but the word rang through the house and down into the hole in her chest like a tolling bell. The stranger-who-was-not was tall and well-muscled, with calloused hands and scrolling tattoos over her bare arms and neck. Her tone was gentle, her broad features lacking the trepidation or supplication or detestation of the goddess’s other visitors. “May I come in?”

Her throat was scream-raw from the long weeks of wildfire and the longer weeks of quiet that came after, and she found her voice as if stretching toward a far-off light. “Who are you, to ask to enter my home and call me sister?”

“I am known in the north as the Goddess of the Endless Blue, but Blue will suffice.”

She took a step back. “You are my replacement.”

“That is why they summoned me, but it is not why I agreed to come. You need help.”

“I did not call for it.” Not from you.

Blue looked back at the brittle, broken land and its brittle, broken people. “You did. But if you do not want me here, I understand, and I shall go.”

This felt like a trap. A precipice. A siege upon her walls that made her defenses—so carefully constructed—look like sticks held together with twine.

The ice over her face must not have been thick enough to hide all her thoughts, because her sister said, “Don’t be afraid. You are free to choose, Green.”

For the briefest moment, stone shook within her, rocks tumbled loose, the pervasive scent of smoke and ash gave way to fresh-turned soil and nascent blooms. She blinked and all was as it had been. “What did you call me?” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“Green. You are Goddess of the Reaching Green, are you not?”

“Yes, but…”

“Ah.” Blue cocked a smile that made Green wonder if the storm rising within her echoed the weather in the mountains. “Do you mean free?”

Green swallowed the thunder in her throat. “It is a lie I would love to believe. But I have seen what happens when I attempt to choose.” The only thing stopping the villagers from burning her house down while she slept was the scant hope she would ‘choose’ mercy again, as they thought she had during the first floods.

“I have been where you stand, sister. And I know we cannot return to how it used to be, contorting ourselves into the shapes others demand of us until there is nothing of us left. There are two other paths: let a different kind of weathering continue to feed upon you, or help them understand your wildness can’t always be tamed to their needs. They must learn to adapt. And you must try again, and again, and again, until your choosing becomes too ubiquitous for them to fear.”

“I am not a fighter. I do not have your strength, nor the fire or kindness I once possessed.”

“You will find it again.”

“How?” She faltered then, the fortress crumbling, breaking her voice with it. “How am I supposed to try once more, never mind as long as you say it will take?”

“We can help them rebuild stronger than before. We can teach them to nurture you as they would their own mother.” Blue reached out a hand, palm up, fingers open in invitation. “Then, when all of that is done, I will remain here.”

Green stared at Blue’s hand, uncomprehending. “We would do all this work, only for you to replace me?”

“If you wish.” Blue shrugged. “But this is your village. I know you care for your people, otherwise none would be left standing. If I stay, we will split the duties of the seasons whenever the other needs rest. I have seen it work before. You need not do any of this alone, ever again.”

I have been where you stand, sister. Blue had left her home to come here. A home she had fought hard to make into a place that loved her, that saw her for more than how she could be used. “You would give up the haven you carved for yourself to help me build one?” She shook her head. “Why?”

“That is all we can do, until the whole world is a haven.”

A shiver passed through her, an inexplicable shrinking of the sinkhole in her heart. How different this was from the frivolity of small gifts. She had never been shown such a true form of kindness—one with no expectation of return.

Green could almost picture it. A goddess-eye view of the world, not as it had been, but as it could be. But the villagers had started to emerge from behind the protection of their walls, glaring through the open door, hands on weapons that would drive her out if she would not go willingly. Fear quaked in her belly. Heat lightning flashed in the clouds.

She expected chastisement, or platitudes aimed to ease and calm.

Instead, Blue said, “I know.”

A little breath escaped the Goddess of the Reaching Green. She placed her hand gently, uncertainly, in Blue’s. “How do we begin?”

They stepped out into the street together, all eyes fixed on them, on what they would do next. “With a demonstration of tenderness, should you allow it.”

Though Green did not know what that meant, she nodded, and suddenly Blue’s arms were around her, and it was warm, and full of sorrow and anger and promise all at once, and it did not heal everything, but it said I see you and we will make them see too.

The hole within her did not feel quite so depthless or insatiable. Green clung to that relief with every meager ounce of strength she had left.

And once more, soft, sprinkling rain caught in her hair like dew drops.