In his dream, Keiro stood at the center of the fire.
Bodies crashed and raced around him, in terror and pain and fury, and their screams wheeled like the stars. They shouted at him, begged him to make it stop, crumpled writhing at his feet. He saw their flesh cook, their blood boil. In the red ruins of their faces, their eyes stared wide, accusing, hateful and hurtful. They could not flee the flames, and so they watched him as the fire devoured them. Watched him with bubbling skin and lipless mouths frozen in ringing screams.
Keiro stepped toward the closest one. His hands passed through the flames, the heat of them flickering against his skin, but he did not burn. He found a face. Resting one hand against the top of the hairless head, he slid his other hand down to the neck, to cup the jaw where the scream vibrated against him. It was all bare, sticky flesh beneath his palms. Still the flames danced around this body, devouring, eating away—and still the body stood before him, screaming, staring. The fire burned, but it would not kill them.
Only he could do that.
Keiro’s hands moved, his arms flexed. It was an unfamiliar motion but it came to him easily. The snap echoed loud through the night, louder than the flames, louder than the screams. His hands fell, and the body fell to the ground, silent and closed-eyed and completely consumed by flames.
All the bodies surged forward, their hands reaching, pressing, leaving behind pieces of black flesh so their bones scraped against him. Screams tore through their throats, a thousand voices begging for relief, begging for release.
Keiro reached for the next one.
He jerked awake, a scream halfway out of his mouth, and tried to thrash weakly free of the reaching hands. There was one wrapped tight around his arm, another pressing hard against his chest, more and more and more crowded at his back, the heat of their burning flesh suffocating—
A soft, soothing rumble vibrated through Keiro’s body. He lay still, panting with his eyes wide open in the dark, telling himself that it was Cazi like a pillow beneath his shoulders, Cazi whose chin rested against Keiro’s chest as one clawed foot held his arm firmly but gently, that it was the mravigi’s warmth rather than the heat of a fire. When Cazi’s eyes opened, their dull red glow was not the comfort Keiro would have wished: in the darkness, the light made Keiro’s flesh look mottled black and red, the skin sloughing away . . .
The rumble again, a wordless reprimand and consolation both. Keiro forced his breath out through his teeth, his hands clutched into motionless fists at his sides. “I had to,” he croaked aloud. Surely a sound would shatter the dream, send it skittering away to the dark corners of the room, to the dark corners of his mind. But his voice didn’t sound like his own voice. Keiro turned onto his side, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, his face pressed into Cazi’s flank. If he pressed his eyelids tightly enough together, his vision turned white, both eyes seeing the same.
“You’re allowed to feel pain,” a soft voice said. It was not Keiro’s voice, truly not his voice, nor was it Cazi, and Keiro’s shoulders went stiff with alarm—not because it was a stranger, but because he knew that voice. “I made an old friend of pain. It’s easier, to think that a friend would hurt you. That way, at least, you can justify that it’s done out of love. It gives a reason to the mindless screaming inside you.”
Keiro sat up slowly, swiping at his cheeks with the back of his hand. Behind him, Cazi shifted, wrapping himself into a smooth ring around Keiro: head on one knee, tail tucked over the other. Keiro could just barely pick out the lines of the slight form crouched in the cave’s entrance. “Good evening, Brother,” Keiro said, and there was only a faint waver in his voice.
“There are some people,” Fratarro said, “who attract pain. It’s always been so, since the start of time. People who pain follows like a second shadow. You seem to be one of those people, Keiro.” His eyes shone, but in the darkness Keiro could not tell whether it was with fury or with tears. “You would do well to make a friend of pain, too. I do not think it will be leaving you anytime soon, and a friend is easier to bear than an unwelcome guest.”
“I . . .” Keiro fought to find anything intelligent to say to that, anything that was not simply a bitter laugh that sent his innards spilling out through his mouth. “I will keep that in mind. Thank you.”
A sigh. “I wish you wouldn’t patronize me.” It wasn’t said with any malice—a simple statement—but Keiro still rushed to deny it and to beg forgiveness at the same time. A sharp motion stilled his words, Fratarro’s hand chopping through the air. “‘Patronize’ was the wrong word. I wish you wouldn’t just placate me. There’s no joy in a one-sided conversation. And I have no one else to talk to.”
Keiro closed his eye, focused on the steady, sturdying warmth of Cazi at his back. “I was alone for seven years,” he said. “Completely alone for most of that. I know it’s nothing compared to your centuries, but . . . I do understand what it’s like. How the silence invades and twines so deeply around your soul that to speak feels like to kill. That the sight of another face, any face, would be at once the world’s greatest blessing and a punishment to set your very being ablaze.”
He thought of all the people his own lonely life had touched—sharing the road as a wandering preacher, the Fallen who had cast him out, the plainswalkers who had taken him in, mages and broken mages, the mravigi—so many lives he had touched, and he did not know if any of them had been made better by him. He knew some, like the plainswalkers and the disobedient Fallen, were far worse for having met him. He thought of the burning bodies, remembered his dream-self so carefully snapping their necks, and shuddered. Perhaps that was why his throat twisted and his voice grew rough with touches of anger and venom, and why he said something he should not have said: “At least you were never truly alone. You always had Sororra.”
He tried to bite back the words, but it was too late. They’d slipped past all his careful defenses and filled the darkness with heavy acrimony. Knowing the fraught relationship between the Twins, Keiro expected the silence to come alive and grow teeth, to rear back snakelike and swallow him down in smooth, smothering gulps. Keiro gripped the fabric of his robe so tightly that he almost thought his knuckles glowed in the darkness.
But the silence between them slept. “Yes,” Fratarro finally said softly. “There is that.”
Keiro’s held breath left him in a soft whuff at the unexpected surprise of not being obliterated. At still being able to breathe. He held his own silence for a while, wrapped around the shock of such an obvious misstep not having cost him his life. Another low rumble from Cazi shook down to Keiro’s bones, but the mravigi did not take his glowing eyes off of Fratarro.
“My sister will be coming back soon,” Fratarro said. His voice held none of the simmering frustration Keiro had become accustomed to—that had, in fact, been absent from everything Fratarro had said so far—and more of the spiraling despair than Fratarro usually let show. That realization chilled Keiro more than his own brush with mortality, but he couldn’t have said why. “She’ll be proud of you, I think. She always did have her favorites.” Fratarro lifted his eyes, and the red glow softened his face, smoothed out all the lines a god’s eternal worries had put into it. He looked almost like the boy whose body he had stolen. “I worry she won’t be as pleased with me.”
Keiro saw the dagger between his feet again, the sharp edge that would slice him to pieces at the first misstep. It felt like there were more daggers now, more edges to dance along, more ways to slip. “Sororra loves you.” It felt like the only safe thing to say. “She’ll always love you.”
“Do you think so?” The red light shone off tears, gathering, falling. “Truly?”
Keiro’s lips parted, but no words came out—all swept away by the tide of a god’s tears.
Fratarro, still crouching, moved forward on the balls of his feet and the palm of his good hand, a feral thing, uncertain and alien. As Keiro reached out, his fingers only trembled slightly. Fratarro took his hand, and then the boy fell against his side, head buried in Keiro’s shoulder, hands curled against his chest. “I feel so alone,” he said, and the words sounded strangely doubled, as though two voices were speaking them. “Trapped.”
“You’re not alone.” Keiro put a tentative hand against the back of Fratarro’s head and, when he didn’t flinch or snarl, petted his hair as he would a dog’s. Keiro had always understood how to soothe a child’s capricious moods.
Behind them, Cazi shifted with a sigh, moving to bring Fratarro into the curl of his body, draping his tail over Keiro and Fratarro both. Keiro made wordless, soothing sounds, and he thought of how Sororra had done the same as Fratarro had screamed with the pain of the distant destruction of his hand. This was a much softer pain, but that did not mean it cut any less deep.
With his face pressed against Keiro’s shoulder, Fratarro’s voice was low and muffled as he said, “He’s sorry about Cazi.”
“What?” Keiro leaned back, gently gripping Fratarro’s shoulders so that he could search his face by Cazi’s red-white glow.
Fratarro blinked, a small frown on his face. “I didn’t say anything.” There was no trace of deceit in his voice, and Fratarro had never been called anything but honest. He scrubbed at his cheeks with his good hand, twisted his shoulders under Keiro’s hands to free them, and leaned back on the balls of his feet—a boy distancing himself from hurt, and a god pulling his mask back down.
When he spoke again, his voice was firmer and more certain, even if the words were little different. “I’m sorry about Cazi.”
A chill crept down Keiro’s back.
“I wish it could have been different,” Fratarro went on—thinking, perhaps, that Keiro’s silence was anger. “And I wish it could be undone. But it’s so much harder to reshape a made thing.” He reached out—not with his good hand but the bad one, dangling limp from his wrist. He turned his hand and rubbed his knuckles across Cazi’s snout. The Starborn didn’t move, didn’t blink. “I wish I could give you back your wings, but some things can’t be undone. Not even by a god.” He pulled his hand back, fingers hanging uselessly. “I hope you don’t hate me.” It took Keiro long moments—too long—to register that those words were for him.
Still, Keiro did not respond even when he realized he needed to. He had spoken both foolishly and brashly this night, and both had been dangerous steps. He thought, now, before he spoke, turning his words and feelings over in his mind, feeling them crash against the terrified pounding of his heart. A more considered answer did not necessarily make it a better one. Cazi’s tail flicked against his leg—a warning? An encouragement? “I don’t,” he said finally, and the words were at least mostly true.
He had the ancient eyes of a god, but his face, when he raised it beaming to Keiro, was the face of a boy and nothing more. A boy named Etarro, who had been born and raised in the darkness and—the preachers whispered—who had had an unnerving fondness for watching the sun rise.
It didn’t last nearly long enough, the boy’s happiness twisting away into a god’s concern. His hands rested on the ground, the fingers of the good one scraping fretfully at the dirt. Perhaps it was only a trick of the light as Cazi shifted, but the fingers of Fratarro’s bad hand almost seemed to twitch. “What will happen,” Fratarro asked softly, one hand moving against the dirt from a claw to a fist, “when she comes back?”
“Don’t you know?”
The shadows played eerily across Fratarro’s face, lit from below by Cazi’s scales. “Don’t you?”
Keiro wanted to sink into the earth and stone, or to run beneath the stars until his feet bled and hardened. He wanted to sleep, to hide himself away from all of it if only for a short time . . . but there was fire in his dreams, and fire was such a dangerous thing.
“She always said she wasn’t any good at shaping.” Fratarro dug his fingers into the ground, twisting and scraping. “She never understood she was just good at a different kind of shaping. Not all shaping is done with hands and matter.” When he pulled his fingers from the earth, there was dirt caked beneath his nails, streaking his skin, and Keiro remembered his dream—how the flesh of the burning dead had clung to his own skin after he had snapped their necks, and how easy it had been. “She never understood herself, and so she never understood her strength. I don’t know if she ever truly will.” With his dirty fingers, Fratarro reached out to cup Keiro’s jaw, fingers boy-small but god-strong. If his other hand worked, Keiro wondered, would Fratarro rest it on the top of his head, waiting for that so-easy twist? “You’re strong, too, Keiro. You have to be.”
A laugh shook its way out of Keiro’s throat, past the press of Fratarro’s palm. If he screamed, Keiro wondered, would that feel any different? “I am whatever my gods need me to be.”
Fratarro dropped his hand and his gaze. “She’ll be proud of you,” he said, echoing his own earlier words and the fatalistic tone. His face hardened to flint, any trace of boyishness sloughing away. “Well. I should be as prepared for her as you are. You’re awake now.” He shifted away and settled, crossing his legs, his back straight, palms upward on his knees. There was no trace of movement in the left one.
Keiro pushed himself away from Cazi, folded himself into a mirror of the boy. His mouth was death-dry, and fire danced behind his missing eye. Still, he made himself say the words, a rumbling intonation plucked from that deep well inside him that had been shaped by careful, cautious, calculating hands: “Power first, for without power there is nothing. Control, mastery, and finesse can come later. First you must regain your power.”
Fratarro’s face creased with effort and concentration, and the world around them trembled. As showers of dirt pattered on his shoulders, as the heavy air thrummed against his ears, Keiro sat motionless, waiting. And he did not stare at Fratarro’s left hand—he didn’t need to look at it to know it wouldn’t twitch, wouldn’t move, wouldn’t ever be what it had been, or what it needed to be. There were some things written so indelibly across the stretch of time that not even a god could change them. Some things could not ever be undone.
“She’ll be proud of you, too,” he said anyway. He did not know if Fratarro heard him, and did not know if the words were his own or if they belonged to the voice that sometimes used his mouth. He didn’t know if there was a difference, anymore.