My god, my god.
There had been, in all of this, some comfort in knowing that we were not the first to pass through and wake up in flesh. Since the baptism, since they called him up from the acid of the sea with prayer, we’d known about Yshwa. He remained throughout the years, drifting by and over, his face shifting, the bones underneath bubbling and moving. We understood Asụghara’s resentment of him, for his refusal to take flesh again for the Ada, but his choice made sense. It has always been obvious that Yshwa, like other gods, is not moved by suffering in the ways humans imagine.
Perhaps he would take flesh one last time, when the world was ending, just to watch it burn. Or he might continue to stay away, despite how many people awaited his glorious redescent. If we were him, we would do that, stay away. Why exist in this realm by choice? Humanity was ugly and cratered; it made sleep a relief, a brief escape where we could slide into another realm. That was as close to death as we could get, as close to the gates, to returning home or anywhere else. If we had been released like Yshwa, no amount of praying or fasting or midnight vigils would bring us back, no matter how much olive oil or blood was spilled in our name. But that was not what happened.
We remained trapped and so Asụghara softened toward Yshwa as he kept visiting the marble for his meetings with the Ada. At first, Asụghara would turn away and pretend not to hear the soft ripple of their conversations, the only form of prayer the Ada was capable of anymore. Ever since Soren, she couldn’t kneel or press her palms together to worship Yshwa the way she used to—it felt false. Too much had been broken. So the Ada simply spoke to him as they took walks along grassed paths and black beaches, where they would sit on sea bones and watch the water.
Yshwa was different every time he manifested. He used variations of his original human form, changing the height, the degree of brown in his skin from mild to deep, the cleanliness of his linens, the kink of his dark hair, the breadth of his nose. His hands would be long fingered with smooth, pearled nails, or broad and stocky with callused palms that he picked splinters out of as they spoke. Sometimes he was tall, thin, with a graceful neck and tired eyes, his skin black as stone. Or he’d be thick, barrel-chested, thighs like foundations, skin like burnt sugar. He was always gentle.
When Asụghara started to turn toward him, slowly and hesitantly, Yshwa called no attention to it. He continued the conversations as if he’d been speaking to both Asụghara and the Ada all along, as if he’d always known the beastself was listening and his words had been meant for everyone. We approved of Asụghara’s change of heart because, after all, Yshwa understood better than anyone what we were going through, having died in his own flesh form, and having him was better than being alone here. Besides, since his embodied days had been so long before ours, we could accept him as an older sibling. It was nice to have another brothersister.
We tried to teach ourself to see humans as he did, with the same grace, to follow his example. After Soren and the loss of her faith, the Ada had decided that her life was better with Yshwa in it after all. It didn’t matter to her if he was real; she believed that the church around him was irrelevant, and she hoped that her afterlife would be one of oblivion. The Ada chose him because she needed a moral code to control us with, one that could protect her and others from our hungers. Yshwa had a good code, a simple one: love. Still, we found it difficult, unnatural even, to embrace his ways. The only vessel we truly cared about was ours: the Ada. Apart from her, we did hold Saachi in some regard for being the container of a universe, and Añuli for being Añuli. The Ada, however, cared about more than those two—she cared about Saul and Chima, about her friends; she had a long list of loved ones. We did not, as the beastself had demonstrated with Itohan’s older brother in Georgia, and were not inclined to—most of what we knew of humans was what the beastself knew, that they were cruel, that their world was cruel, that everyone was, inevitably, going to turn into dust. We could see the logic of the beastself’s philosophy—to hunt and feed on bodies, to use them in wringing out pleasure, to put that before anything, because otherwise, why were we alive and what was the point?
But it was not the using of humans that alarmed the Ada enough to try and guide us with a code. It was the places we went for pleasure with Asụghara guiding us—the ecstasy we felt in tricking humans and watching their heartbreak, watching them crumple against walls, seeing the shocked pain in their eyes. We had no remorse; we left that to the Ada. We became complicit in many betrayals, met men who lied and devastated their women, who despised humans like we did, who acted like they were gods and not humans. We let Asụghara play with these men, and when she was tired of batting them around and baiting them with the Ada’s heart, we helped her remind them that divinity was deliberately not accorded to all flesh, that they were nothing, no better than the women they thought they could injure. The men all confessed their love to the beastself, with their mouths or with hunger in their eyes after she left them, after she threw them all away. The Ada suffered in this because, like a human, she had loved some of them.
When we were faced with Yshwa, it was easy to justify the things we had done. We did not care. The Ada wanted to be contrite. Asụghara wanted to burn the world down. We were guilty only of allowing the beastself to run the body into mattresses and hearts. What did it matter?
“You are weak with lust,” Yshwa told us.
“Argue with the beastself,” we said, and we left Asụghara out for him.
She shrugged. “They are only humans.”
“You’re no better,” he countered. “Driven by instinct, incapable of restraint, ruled by desire.”
Asụghara hissed, offended. “You don’t understand—” she began, but Yshwa raised a hand to silence her.
“You forget,” he said. “I once had a body too.”
The silence that fell was weighted. “I just want to be free,” Asụghara said eventually.
We wondered if she meant from us, if she wanted to be a separate self, with her own body, doing as she pleased. If so, she would have to learn, as the Ada had, what things in this life were impossible. The whole is greater than the individual.
“I thought you wanted to follow my teachings,” Yshwa said, but he meant all of us, not her.
We hesitated. The Ada wanted to follow him, that much was clear; she had never tried to steer all of us as firmly as she was attempting now, but we were many and she was small.
“Don’t ask me to stop for the humans,” Asụghara spat. “Taking from them is the only pleasure we have left.”
“You can’t lean on that forever,” Yshwa said.
“Do you have a better plan? Do you know how to make the pain stop?”
It was only with eyes like ours that we saw Yshwa flinch, just with fractions of his skin, as if he was remembering. “It doesn’t.”
Asụghara spoke for us. “Then we won’t either.”
He came up and laid his hand on her cheek. It burned, and she turned into the Ada. “Do it for me,” he whispered.
The Ada’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s not fair, Yshwa. We just want it to stop hurting. Or have you forgotten? At least you got to die.”
She wanted to look away—we wanted to look away—but Yshwa held her face tight. His breath felt like a thousand tiny cuts against our skin.
“We’re gods,” he reminded her. “I don’t have to be fair.” When he pressed his mouth to her forehead, our bones boiled underneath. The Ada closed her eyes. “I will lead you,” he whispered, “down the paths of righteousness for nothing, other than the sake of my name.” When we looked up again, he was gone.
It was not the last time he tried to save us, to pull us out of our own condemnation and wrap us in his peace. Yshwa knew the Ada’s secret fear—that she had become evil because of the things Asụghara had done.
It didn’t matter. He was not enough.
We stopped hunting because it had lost its shine, but we could not give Yshwa what he wanted. There was too much safety in sin, too much sweetness to walk away from. We took lovers who belonged to other people, kissed husbands after the sun had set and also in the broad brightness of afternoon. We gave the Ada new men, not entirely reformed, but not as cruel as the ones before them. She felt a little safer with these ones, so she wrote about them to Yshwa, like evidence of small remedies, proof that she was slowly, somehow, being saved.