“This is the place.”
Keiro lifted his head slowly, exhaustion running through his veins. But he fixed his eyes on the preacher who had spoken, one of the informal scouts Sororra had requested. The woman was tall, and eyeless, and one of the most obstinately pious people Keiro had ever met. Sororra loved her. No—Sororra was thrilled by her. With Sororra, the distinction was important.
Keiro looked around slowly. The place Derra had led him was flat and featureless, likely some farmer’s field at one point or another. He’d preferred the gentle, sprawling hills they’d passed through a few days ago—they’d reminded him of the hills near the Plains, where he’d been happy, before everything had changed.
Derra had led him ahead of their group, claiming to have found a place that met Sororra’s exacting specifications. Looking around slowly—feeling almost too tired even to turn his head—Keiro suspected that this was, indeed, the place.
Secluded, but near enough to a number of surrounding towns or villages—they’d passed through two within the hour, and Derra promised there were others within the same distance. Featureless, and untouched by humans, and enough space for growth. Most importantly, within a day’s walk of Mercetta, the capital city of Fiatera.
“Go,” he said to Derra. “Bring them all here.”
“This is the place, isn’t it?” she asked excitedly. “It seems perfect, just the kind of place they—”
“Derra,” he interrupted. “Go.”
Still she hesitated. “You’re . . . you’re not coming back to tell them yourself?”
Keiro turned to look at her, his one remaining eye to both her missing ones, but she knew, or felt, or saw his look. She quailed before it. With her missing eyes, she had seen what happened to those who opposed him. Derra left, picking her way back toward the road, until the darkness hid her from his sight.
There was a mask he wore, shaped by all the things he needed to be. He allowed himself to take it off only when he was alone, only when there was no one to see him without his armor. He could not let anyone think of him as weak. As Derra walked away, Keiro let his mask fall, and the exhaustion hit him the same way it always did. He could keep his back straight and his head high for as long as he needed to, but as soon as he allowed himself a reprieve, the weight of it all came near to crushing him.
Keiro sat down on the ground. The grass was short, but soft, and it tickled at his elbows. He wanted so badly to sleep, but that would be dangerous—though it would be some time before Derra returned with the others, there was no telling how long, and no guarantee he would wake in enough time. And if they found him sleeping . . .
Keiro shook his head, half in denial and half to wake himself up.
“You can sleep,” a soft voice said behind him. Keiro did not need to turn—that was a voice he would know anywhere. Cazi, who was always there, even if he was not always seen. The Starborn slunk to Keiro’s side and lay at his side, tail curling around Keiro in comfort or protection. “I will watch.”
It was so very tempting . . . “You won’t know when they’re close any better than I will. I’m fine. I can manage. I’ll have to.” He could not let himself slip, not even for a moment.
A rustling made Keiro twist, and another mravigi slunk forward through the grass—belly low to the ground, as though trying to move through the knee-high grass the same way they’d moved through grass that was taller than a man. Another followed, and more, and more—
“We will watch,” one of them said. The pattern of the star-bright scales was unique to each mravigi, would identify who had spoken, but they blurred before Keiro’s eye, the stars on the ground and the stars in the sky. Twins’ bones, he was tired . . . “Sleep. We will wake you before they arrive.”
It was easy to argue with Cazi—he was young, still, and his steadily growing vocabulary left him ill-equipped for any real persuasion. More importantly, he was only one, and loyal as optimistic as he was, Cazi couldn’t do everything. But all the Starborn—the hundreds of them that had lived beneath the ground and watched over the sleeping Twins, that had followed the Twins on their circuitous journey from the hills to Fiatera, that had remained unshakingly loyal—Keiro could trust them with his life. They were, perhaps, the only ones who knew the stakes as well as he.
And he wanted so badly to sleep.
When he leaned back, Cazi was there, as he always was. The Starborn curled around Keiro, a solid pillow of flesh and scale, and the soft glow of his star-speckled scales lulled Keiro quickly to sleep. He got so little of it that he could sleep almost anywhere.
He dreamed of fire, and of Sororra’s eyes.
Entirely too soon, Cazi woke him. “Be here soon,” he said, and Keiro sat up, back sore, head sore, heart sore. He checked the position of the stars—it had been little more than two hours since Derra had left. They hadn’t gone so far ahead of the group, and that likely meant they’d stopped in one or more of the villages. That very possibility was why Keiro had chosen to wait.
Keiro stood, twisting his back to feel his spine pop, stretching his arms. He felt more tired on waking than he had when he’d fallen asleep, but that was nothing new. Whatever sleep he did get was fitful, exhausting, plagued by dreams—nightmares, he supposed. Could it be called a nightmare when the night never ended?
The other mravigi were nowhere in sight, away in the grass or the fields or the trees, away wherever it was they spent their time. Perhaps they were still nearby—Keiro had long suspected they could dim their scattered glowing scales at will, but he’d never seen them do it, and if it was a trick Cazi had learned, he kept it a secret as well.
A snout bumped against Keiro’s hand, and he looked down into Cazi’s red eyes. The ember-glow of them was always comforting. “Strong now,” Cazi said. Like a child, the mravigi was still learning to speak, but he didn’t need a large vocabulary to make himself understood. Keiro rubbed the small flap of Cazi’s ear in thanks, and turned to face the direction from which they would approach. He waited, back straight, single eye fearless. His mask was firmly back in place.
And they came. Gods among men, and their loyal retinue.
Sororra and Fratarro led their followers, as they always had. Though they wore the bodies of children, there could be no mistaking them: as they approached, Keiro could feel the waves of their power radiating off them, pounding like a second heartbeat. He wondered, sometimes, how anyone could be near them and not be driven mad. He wondered why anyone would want to stay.
But those wonderings did not come often. Keiro had grown expert at quashing those sorts of thoughts.
“A fine place you’ve found for us!” Sororra called out. She was practically overflowing with joy, almost childlike in her glee, but that was a dangerous comparison to make.
Keiro bowed as they approached. “I thought it might suit your needs.”
In the crowd of followers, Derra shifted but said nothing. Everyone knew she had found the place, but it had been Keiro who sent her looking, and so Keiro would get the acclaim. Such was the way of the world.
There were some new faces in the crowd of followers. Not very many, not many at all, but some. They must have stopped in two of the villages, then.
“Does it meet all your requirements?” he asked. As Sororra gazed happily around the chosen spot, Keiro tried to catch and hold Fratarro’s eyes. If the god wished to speak against this place, or have Keiro speak against it, as he had the last likely spot, their time was running quickly by. Finally Fratarro gave him a glance, and a small shake of his head in the negative. Keiro felt his shoulders relax in relief—this leg, finally done!—but the feeling was short-lived. The tension he’d been carrying between his shoulder blades spread to suffuse his entire body. Fratarro would not meet his eyes again to answer Keiro’s silent, desperate question: Are you really ready?
“Yes,” Fratarro said, which made his sister crow with joy, “this will do.”
They all cleared space for their gods, backing away until the Twins were little more than darker shadows in the night. Keiro couldn’t hear what Sororra murmured in her brother’s ear, and he couldn’t see clearly the line of Fratarro’s back to know if the words helped or hurt. But at length Sororra left his side, and came to join her followers, all watching with expectant eyes. She bounced on the balls of her feet, fidgeting with her hands before her. A feral grin covered her face, but didn’t quite touch her eyes.
He can do it, Keiro thought fiercely, and he knew the thought was not entirely his own.
Fratarro spread his arms, and the ground beneath Keiro’s feet began to tremble.
For a long while, nothing happened save the trembling, the earth growling a low warning like a threatened dog. When things did begin to change, it was so imperceptibly at first that Keiro didn’t notice until he closed his eye against the pounding in his skull. When he opened it again, he startled to see that the ground before Fratarro had bulged upward, swollen, swelling, as though something were trying to break free—
Sororra crowed again, her laughter ringing bright, and the boil surged higher. A hill, burst forth from the earth below, pulled from nothingness, shaped by Fratarro’s hands and his powers.
Keiro’s heart swelled with pride as the hill grew taller, wider, a Mount Raturo in miniature and growing rapidly. He really could do it. Even with his useless hand, and the lacking powers it represented, Fratarro could still shape the earth to his will. He had made minor shapings well enough, but this, this showed his true power, the power he had wielded centuries ago when he had pulled a mountain from the earth, when he had made a paradise and a race to populate it, the power of creation itself. It proved to Keiro and Sororra and to Fratarro himself that he was not useless, that it hadn’t all been for nothing. It proved that there was hope, yet.
The mound grew quickly to a hill, to a small mountain, and then its growth slowed, until it stopped entirely. It was a mountain, there was no denying that, but it was nothing close to the size of Mount Raturo, and wouldn’t even challenge some of the Highlands mountains. Keiro’s heart sank as he watched Fratarro lower his arms, shoulders curving forward, spent. In their whispered conversations, Sororra had declared their new home would be far bigger than Raturo, a lance to touch the moon itself, tall enough they could see beyond every edge of the world. Fratarro, with a tight smile, had always agreed. And they had both looked to Keiro: Sororra’s gaze daring him to challenge her, and Fratarro’s alternating between begging him not to and hoping that he would.
Sororra was no longer crowing, and the smile had fallen from her face.
Keiro turned quickly to face their followers and raised up his arms. “Look!” he cried. “Look at the glorious new home Fratarro has made for us. We will fill its halls—” Gods, he prayed Fratarro had shaped halls into the place, it would be his head if he lied to them now. “And people shall flock to beg entrance, and the citizens of Mercetta will quake with fear to see us looming over them.” The followers sent up a raucous cheer—they didn’t know the mountain was meant to have been bigger; didn’t have desperate hopes that were so easy to dash; didn’t need to wear a mask so crushingly tight.
Sororra forced a smile at them all and then turned her back, striding quickly toward her brother.
“Wait a moment,” Keiro told the followers when they’d stopped cheering. “We must make sure everything is in order.” He moved more slowly as he went to join the Twins where they stood together in the shadow of the new-made mountain.
As he approached them, he could hear Sororra saying, “—did perfectly fine.” She had her arm around her brother’s hunched shoulders, the sides of their heads pressed together. Keiro felt an intruder, but why did they keep him if not for moments like this? “You pulled a mountain from the earth! You made us a new home.”
“It’s not what we wanted,” Fratarro said. Keiro heard the incrimination in his voice; heard you where he said we. But as usual, any anger Fratarro felt was twisted to point only at himself. His good hand was wrapped around the bad one, squeezing and rubbing as though it had only gone numb and would work again if he could just get his blood flowing through it. “If it wasn’t for—”
“You knew this was a possibility,” Keiro interrupted. He’d learned to redirect Fratarro before he could spiral down too deeply. “You knew it was a possibility, too, that nothing would happen. This is a success, by all counts.”
Both Twins looked at him, and neither had anything friendly or particularly charitable in their eyes. But Fratarro sighed, and shrugged off his sister’s arm. “We’ll practice more,” he told Keiro. “It’s as you said. ‘Practice will make all the difference.’” He forced a smile at his sister, brittle and already half broken. “One day, I’ll be strong enough.”
Fratarro turned to the mountain, and gestured expansively back toward their followers. The Fallen cheered and raced forward, eagerly going to the hidden entrances Fratarro showed them, learning the trick to opening the doors, exclaiming over the brilliance and the beauty of the home Fratarro had built them. It would be good for Fratarro, to receive praise unbidden. Keiro hoped it would take some of the brittleness from his smile.
At his side, Sororra murmured, “Do you have your doubts still, Keiro?”
“No,” Keiro said instantly. “Never.” Sororra would take her reassurances in any form, and didn’t mind the lie beneath the spoken words—she knew the lie was there, and he knew she knew, and that was the kind of power she valued most.
“Good,” she said, smiling the same brittle smile. “Then let’s go see what my brother has made.”