The cypress trees haven’t changed. Tall as ever, wind-curved and whispering, their spires threading the edge of the sky like spindle-fiber. The temple is ruin now, half-buried in ivy and time, but you know its bones. You could walk it with your eyes closed—have, in dreams. The broken altar still stands, streaked with lichen, ash-scored from a fire long gone cold. You reach for it with hands you no longer trust to be steady. The stone welcomes your touch like an old friend who does not ask where you've been.

You had not meant to come. Truly. There were other roads. Other gods.

But he had always been the wind behind your choices, hadn’t he?

You breathe deep, and the air tastes like crushed laurel and memory. And then, you feel it. The shift. The telltale hush before a word spoken too close, the tingle in your spine that is not breeze but presence.

“I had wondered,” comes the voice, behind you now, light-footed and slanting, “whether you'd ever remember the way back.”

You do not turn yet.

Of course he’s here. He never needed summoning like the others. He was always the god of thresholds, of arrivals unannounced.

“Well,” he says, cocking his head. “If it isn’t my stray dove returned from foreign fields. What drove you back? Lost your way?”

A silence, the kind that tilts its head.

Then—bare feet in the grass, soft as foxglove. The smell of crushed mint. He moves like smoke, or secrets. Hermes.

“You were a fine one, once,” he says, and there is something like amusement curling around the words. “Bright-eyed and quick-tongued. Always lighting incense sideways, as though the fire might misbehave."

You finally turn.

Hermes stands like myth made skin—travel-stained cloak hanging careless over one shoulder, golden cuffs glinting against his wrists, a tilt to his mouth that dares and mourns all at once. His staff leans against his back, twin serpents glimmering in the dusklight. His eyes hold the color of river water just before dawn, changeable and deep.

You step forward, cautious, like one might approach a wolf long-forgotten to be tame. He does not move away. The wind stirs your robes. You reach—not with your hands, not yet—but with something deeper. The part of you that used to know every hymn by heart. That used to leave offerings of honey and orange peel at crossroads, whispering his name like a secret.

The god of trickery smirks, not with anger. Certainty, perhaps.

“So formal. Not blessed Hermes, swift and kind, as you used to sing it? Not guide of roads and keeper of keys? You wore my favor well, once. And now, all so suddenly, you come?" He leaned forward. "Tell me, why should I help you? What have you done for me, all these absent years, my dear devotee?"