Zaifyr could see Se’Saera’s face, her girl’s face, her young woman’s face. He could see both crack and split, as if a larger force was breaking her body open.
‘No!’ Lor Jix’s voice was a bellow around him. ‘What have you done?’
The sky above Heüala was riddled with fractures. Within those fractures, the silver light of the city had lit a shifting mass. At first, Zaifyr thought he saw Se’Saera. He imagined that the multi-headed form of the god had been drawn into the broken sky. But no, he realized it was something that flowed in constant movement, much like a river, and appeared to have its own current. Zaifyr felt his awareness pulled, but only the part of him that was divine, that held a god’s power. The river was trying to draw him through the cracks and beyond Heüala, he remained lying on the ground. Above him, the splits began to widen and the impression he had of a river buckled under what he saw. He saw not just movement, but time.
He saw fate, saw it run into itself, flood over its possibilities, its outcomes, saw it submerge and erupt.
He saw choice.
‘What have you done?’ Jix’s voice, again. His hands shook Zaifyr roughly. ‘Godling, you must stop what you are doing!’
Zaifyr could not sense the sphere, could not see the thoughts, could not sense the gods. However he had reached the sphere that had contained fate, he could not return to it. Instead, he felt only pain. It was primarily in his chest, but it was of such acuteness his vision swam. The towers of Heüala looked as if they were changing, as if they were both rising and crumbling, the domes and flat roofs breaking and forming. But when the vision of what he saw did not alter, Zaifyr realized that it was not pain that caused Heüala to change, but rather that he was witnessing change. Beneath the new, moving sky, the City of the Dead was rebuilding itself, was fashioning itself on the new thoughts it could sense.
Zaifyr pushed himself away from Lor Jix and rose unsteadily. Beneath the burned soles of his boots, the ground shifted, and he felt paved stone, dirt, grass and even snow. Before him, the walls of buildings warped as stone turned to wood and wood turned to brick. Doors disappeared and reappeared, each time with different designs.
‘There must be a god in the holy city!’ Jix shouted. ‘Se’Saera must be here to focus Heüala! What have you done to her?’
A small town.
No, a trading outpost. That, Zaifyr realized, was what Heüala was shaping itself into. The rough wooden buildings, the dirt streets, the vendors with stalls on the side of the road.
‘Answer me!’ The Captain of Wayfair grabbed him and thrust him against the wall of one of these stalls. ‘Tell me what you have done!’
‘What do you see?’ His words were painfully torn from him, but what startled him most was the arm he lifted to fend off Jix. It was completely red and had, within its depth, a pulse. ‘What is happening to me?’ he whispered.
‘It is life, godling.’ The other man shook him. ‘Tell me what you have done so I can fix it when you leave!’
The thought jarred him. ‘What does the city look like to you?’
‘It is a port town.’ He spat the words at Zaifyr. ‘It looks like a thousand others perched on shorelines throughout the world.’
‘I see a trading post.’ He tried to take a deep breath, couldn’t. ‘Jix, we’re not meant to stay here. No one need live in the City of the Dead.’
‘Are we to live and die only to live and die again?’ The Captain slammed him against a wall that appeared differently to each man. ‘Our existence is not a carousel. We are not beasts to ride in a carved circle forever.’
‘That is the lie the gods created. There are no rewards. There are no punishments. There is only the life we make.’
‘Se’Saera would change that!’ Jix hurled Zaifyr into the dirt road and kicked him viciously. ‘She will give us order and purpose. Do you not see that? Think of how long we have lived. I have spent over ten thousand years waiting for you and your trial. That is what the Leviathan asked of me. I was faithful. I was patient. But my reward would have been an illusion. A lie! Se’Saera offered a chance to change that, not just for me, but for all of us.’
‘We should make that choice.’ His red hands could not push him up from the ground and he slumped backwards. ‘Tell me why we cannot?’ he asked, staring up at the man.
‘What choice would you make without a god?’ Lor Jix loomed over him dangerously. ‘How do we create our morals? From each other? What do we take as guidance? We need the divine for that. They are what binds us together as a society. They are what separates us from the animals. We need Se’Saera!’
‘Enough.’ A bright blade fell flat on Jix’s chest. It was held by Queila Meina, and behind her stood Steel, as strong as they had been when they walked into Heüala. ‘Not so long ago, you called her an abomination,’ she said, walking around him, to push him away from Zaifyr. ‘I don’t know what happened to change that in your mind, but to me, Se’Saera remains very much that. Her parents are the same to me.’
‘You did not live for more than three decades,’ he said, pushing the blade aside. ‘You are but a babe in existence.’
‘Is that why you are so quick to kneel?’
Jix roared in fury, but unlike Zaifyr, Meina was not racked with pain. When the ancient dead threw himself at her, she stepped to her left, and drove her sword through his chest. Zaifyr expected the colour to leave him, for him to be defined by the white lines of a haunt, just as the dead who were struck down by Se’Saera had been changed. But though a ripple ran over his body, it was no more than a blink. Jix’s hands curled around the mercenary’s neck and Meina, in response, disappeared.
She reappeared behind him and grabbed the back of his clothes. ‘You have the will to stay here, do you?’ she said, throwing him into her soldiers.
‘This is the domain of a god!’ he shouted with such anger, such intensity. ‘I will not leave Heüala to the likes of you!’
‘Take him,’ Meina commanded her soldiers. ‘Throw him out of the gates. Drive him out into the fields. Show him that there is no river any more, and no ship to sail upon it. Throw him into the new world and see what he makes of it.’
The Captain of Wayfair roared in defiance. Zaifyr heard him warn Meina, heard the threat he gave after, but each word rang with less and less conviction as the soldiers of Steel dragged him out of the gates of the City of the Dead and into a world he did not know.