Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you. My creed is Love, and you are its only tenet — You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love." I can do that no more — the pain would be too great — My Love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.
JOHN KEATS, Love letter to Fanny Brawne
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The existence of God and the existence of Man. One of these is a mistake. Take your pick. It doesn't matter. Anya Sharma has always lost the coin toss against fate, she will keep doing so. Because what is a girl half human and half god, anyway? If not the serrated sorrow of her mother. If not the haunting absence of her father. Anya was born out of light, pure divine light, daughter of the sun god Surya and a human, a mere human.
Pink fleshed and crying, Kriti Sharma always said that her daughter was perfect. But Anya knows that things that are perfect things are dead things. Empty things. Graveyard silence and mourning cicadas. Anya is an impossible thing made of iron and water. She is flesh and blood and bone, and the light of ten thousand suns. She is a dream with teeth. Too good for perfection. Most of the time, Anya feels shapeless. It is an odd feeling. But it's hard for her to tell apart the sadness of the world from the sadness of her self. She feels as if she is floating in an endless void, with no sign of land or rescue. As she sinks further and further down, she finds that the dark gets darker and it's not really black so much as the last degree of reds. The secret blood of reds. And there's a dark so deep beneath the sea that the creatures beget their own light. This feat, this fact of adaption is beautiful, though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish. Anya, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden by eternal darkness.
