2.

 

There was a terrible calm. It lay across the haunt-infested killing ground, familiar in some emotions, unfamiliar in others.

Zaifyr had drifted across the torn-up ground for an indeterminate amount of time. He was no longer aware of day or night and the living were becoming difficult to see. He knew they were there, lurking around the boulders, beneath the flags and behind the sunken siege engines. To him they were like the bones on a dig site, the unseen promise of horror. Even though he could not see them, he was unable to forget them entirely because of the suppressed Leeran soldier he was in. She wanted him to follow the living, to walk through the barricades that her army had built and rejoin them there. Drawn by duty and faith: the urge was easy to resist, but he was without an alternative. He could not return to his body. He feared that when he took hold of the thread to lead him back to himself, the haunts would see their chance to live and swarm him again.

Or so he assumed. It was difficult to know what would happen, since Ger’s death.

The awareness of the god’s death came to him in a wave. It washed over him, invisible yet tangible. It had lifted the incorporeal body of the soldier upward before dropping both to the ground and leaving him caught in a calm that settled around him uncomfortably. There was an expectancy to it, as if he was waiting for something important to begin—a calm born unnaturally and dangerously.

He had felt the same in Asila over a thousand years ago, the night before the fires had been lit, three days before his brothers and sisters had arrived.

That night he walked down the twisting path from his castle, the long, dark road to the city below him. He remembered being struck by how much of a metaphor it was, how the physical form of his home and kingdom had become an apt representation of how he felt about his life, the lives of those around him and the dead. It was an author’s thought, a conceit that if it had come to him before he finished his book—that book—before he had sent it to be printed and carried to those important to him, he would have written the words down. But it had not.

It was a month since he had laid his quill down.

A month since he had sent it to his brothers and sisters and heard nothing. Had he expected them to reply? To acknowledge his demands? He had, but he had not been surprised by their silence. Their voices did not matter, anyway: those around him that spoke endlessly, constantly, they were who mattered, they were who he owed.

They asked for food and warmth. For simple desires, denied to them. They asked for the comforts of the living.

Their want was all they knew, all he knew, now.

At the end of his path, looking over the darkly lit city, he had flushed his power through them, granting them their desire.

A thousand years later, standing in the haunt of a woman who had those same demands, the man who had been known as Qian did not know why he had done it. He was aware of walking down the road, but by then his mind had fractured. He had lost track of the years, lost track of the writing. He remembered nothing of the final chapters and had not recognized the end when he read one of the surviving versions at Jae’le’s.

The book had begun as a private history, a map of his inner thoughts in relation to those he had claimed to be his parents. He could remember clearly the anticipation he felt and the rush of ideas, but it faded as the years he spent working on it grew and research took him around the world, to the bodies of those he could reach and to the new gods. By the end of the book he had lost hold of who he was. He had given himself into the suffering of those around him. He had given into their demands and, in turn, issued his own.

He still did not know why, beneath the stone arc that ended his decline into the city of Asila, he had given the dead life. Oh, it was not a real life, but rather a violent corporeality by which their shattered minds could grasp their desires. Afterward, he remembered that uncomfortable quiet of having done what he believed was right.

He had walked the streets, his bare feet navigating the fallen and lost, while his mind was quiet for the first time he could remember. He could see the haunts everywhere, their usually sketched forms solid, filled with color, with the flush of life that they had consumed and the warmth and the satisfaction they felt.

It had remained so the whole day, and then the next; and did so for three more mornings as the morning’s sun rose over the quiet, empty city, until his brothers and sisters arrived.

And then—

Well, then they had fought.

Sitting on the killing field, Zaifyr knew that he should return to his body. Though the calm of Ger’s death was disconcerting, it had soothed the haunts around him. Whatever the wave of force had been—energy or life or something other, a concentration he could not explain but which was linked to Ger’s divine life—it had sated the cold and hunger that the haunts felt. Zaifyr was certain that if he took hold of the line back to his body now, he would be able to follow it, to return himself with none of the threat he had previously felt.

When he prepared to pull himself from the Leeran soldier, prepared himself for that, he felt a new presence. It was akin to the wave that had lifted him after Ger’s death, but not directly so. It lacked the perfection the god had, the completeness. This new presence, this new being with its flaws and failures that were so apparent, reminded him—

Hello, it said.

It reminded him of himself.