There is night and there is day and there is that hour in between

where a woman walks alone.

He called her Dawn and she called him Love

And they lay beneath the pearl grey skies in a time when the world was younger.

Lighter.

Softer.

---

His eyes were bluer than her skies

Skin as flushed and delicate as the light she cast in the wake of the stars

He called himself Tithonus

She called herself Aurora

And she took him away to live with the gods.

---

The fields and hills of that heaven pleased him and his goddess pleased him

For he was a hunter and a lover and a mortal

Young and strong and drunk on ambrosia.

---

She found him fairer than her deathless brothers

Fairer than the light she gave the earth

Fairer than the shepherds' song as they sang to the skies in the evening

Fairer than life itself

And so she went to her king and begged for the life of her love.

---

Her king was cruel and granted her her wish;

Tithonus would live forever.

---

Forever and forever and forever

Ever aging

Ever fading

And she cursed herself for the slight of "forever young"

Youth a word she had forgotten

While Jupiter laughed.

---

"Let me go back, dear heart," Tithonus whispered with the rasp of years

"Let me go back to my mortal fields and streams where once I slew the deer."

Aurora cried and stormed and brought in the day with rain

Cursing the gods and cursing herself

But her eyes were strong and her will was his

So she brought him back to his world.

---

"Ever after you shall be mine

and ever after I shall hear you sing" she said to him and let him go.

He sprang from the hands she cupped to her breast

Her mercy, his wish, a grasshopper unshackled by broken limbs.

"Sing to me in the morning and at night, before my sister rises in the moon," she called after.

---

"Remember me," he sang. "Remember me."

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a/n there is a greek myth about Aurora, goddess of the dawn and the hunter Tithonius (who was naturally a mortal, since most of the stories run that way) and she asks that he be given eternal life, without eternal youth. So in teh end she turns him into a grasshopper. I always hated the part about the grasshopper. it seems a very unromantic thing to turn your lover into.