Ayae stood silently on the shoreline beside Eidan and Tinh Tu as Jae’le laid his brother on the sand, sinking to his bare knees before he released the dead weight.
She could not speak. She had not believed that he would find Zaifyr. Had not believed that there would be anything to find. For the last four months, Jae’le had stood on the edge of Leviathan’s Blood: it did not matter if a part of the sun had risen and the sky was alight or if all three suns had fallen into the dark and the night sky met the water without seam. He had stood there, before the water, searching. He spoke rarely and refused all food and drink. He had placed his consciousness inside the creatures that lived in the depths of Leviathan’s Blood, searching not just for Zaifyr, but for a beast that had the necessary strength and delicacy that would allow Jae’le to lift his brother’s body gently from where it lay and bring it to the shore. Now, when he released the corpse of his brother, nothing in Jae’le’s face expressed loss. Rather, Ayae saw only triumph.
In her mind, Ayae had been easily able to imagine the state of Zaifyr’s body at the bottom of the ocean: the rotted skin, the discoloration in his face, and the bloat that ballooned his stomach. Yet, the horror she could so easily detail was not before her. Zaifyr looked as he did in life. With his green eyes open, he gazed up at Ayae lifelessly as she stared down at him. His auburn hair was clumped in wet knots, the charms of bronze and silver he had threaded through his hair tangled among each other. Across the rest of him, the charms that had once adorned his living body were still tied to his corpse, some bent and broken. Only his clothes showed the rot that she had expected to see in his flesh. It was in stark contrast to his body, a pale, white-skinned body that she could not turn away from—
‘It is just as it once was,’ Tinh Tu said.
—and which served only to highlight the unnaturalness of what she saw. ‘How is he like this?’ Ayae asked, finding her voice. ‘What has happened?’
‘He has died,’ the other woman said.
‘But his body! This is not how a body looks after so long!’
‘Do you plan to be hysterical, child?’ she said, turning her dark gaze on Ayae. ‘You would be exactly as I thought you to be, then.’
‘Enough.’ Jae’le rose from the sand, the word a command given harshly. ‘She is not to blame for what has happened here, sister.’
‘You have grown sentimental.’ Tinh Tu did not turn from her. ‘She is but another wedge that drives our family apart.’
‘We were splintered before she was born,’ Eidan said evenly. ‘It is not her fault that we find ourselves here, again.’
‘Again?’ Ayae broke away from the old woman’s gaze. ‘Again here in Yeflam? Again before the Mountains of Ger?’
‘Again,’ he said, simply, ‘in Asila.’
‘But he is not—’ She stopped herself. ‘You did not kill Zaifyr in Asila.’
‘We did.’
She tried to respond, but could not find any words.
‘He inherited the Wanderer’s divinity.’ As Jae’le spoke, a small pitch-black figure, no bigger than a cat, wound around her legs, its touch chill against her skin. Ayae had not seen Anguish leave the small tent. ‘When I was a child,’ Jae’le continued, ‘and when my brother was but a child as well, the Wanderer would walk the roads and paths of our world. He would be seen in villages and in towns and in cities reaching for the dead. He wore a black robe that hid all of his body, and when he arrived, you would see but moments of him, as if he were an image, flickering. It was said that the Wanderer took the dead into his own kingdom and that there they would be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. He was said to come for the gods themselves, but I do not believe that. We know that the gods were not normal beings like us. They had no souls. They have no souls.’
The chill on her leg ran through her body. ‘But Zaifyr,’ she said softly.
‘Zaifyr is like you and I,’ he said. ‘For a long time, we believed otherwise, but it is not true. Our divinity is not our being. What is inside us now has reached an understanding with the immortal part of us that transcends flesh. I often think that when others like us are afflicted poorly, when their bodies turn to stone, or gills grow along their neck and they cannot breathe our air, it is not because of the divine power within them, but because their souls have rejected the divinity that has been offered.’ He paused, letting his words sink in for a moment. ‘Or perhaps it is something different. A century from now, I may think so. But what I will not go back on is the knowledge that we are not divine, that we are gods, because I know that we have a soul, that we are tied to our flesh.’
‘In Zaifyr’s case, the Wanderer’s power holds tight to that soul, and when the bond is severed, when it is broken, it looks for him,’ Tinh Tu said, the end of her staff beginning to make a line in the sand, the start of a map, of a continent that Ayae could not immediately place despite all the maps she had seen.
‘So you could not kill him?’ Ayae said.
‘He could not die.’
The distinction was not lost on her. ‘Why did Zaifyr never tell me this?’
‘Because he does not know,’ Anguish said suddenly, his closed eyes on the body before him. ‘Is that not the truth?’
‘Truth,’ Tinh Tu repeated, lifting her staff from the sand, before bringing it down, once, then twice in the centre of her image. The sand flattened, the lines in it straightened, and Ayae was finally able to make it out, to understand what she had drawn. ‘I despise that word,’ she said, her staff rising again.
‘Sister,’ Eidan began.
‘No,’ she said, an edge in her voice. ‘Let her experience it. Let her know.’
Her staff fell a third time on the image of Asila.