Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She lived in a time before death. This was, at least, what Prime would tell her, all drifting hands and absent smiles. 

It wasn’t as if people didn’t die, when she was alive. Prime would say it was a deathless time because nonexistence, to him, was not true death, rather erasure. She would argue otherwise, that for the soul to cease existing was the truest death of all.

Prime did not see it like that. Gods, he said, were different. 

She did not think it was a matter of gods against humans. Belief was not constrained to mortality. He thought that was the most delightful thing she’d ever said.

She did not really like him. In this way, she was different than most, but she had no need for his tinctures and wish-granting. Her grandmother raised her to provide for herself, to find no comfort in false gods and prophets, and for this, she was eternally grateful and resentful.

This mindset, this belief that she could give herself the moon and stars, drew the attention of Prime, beckoned him to her window to peer as if she were some animal to examine. She could bite and snarl at him all she wanted, but he always stared curiously at him, wearing down her defenses with sheer stupidity. Because he was not pestering her to be cruel. He showed genuine interest in her habits and methods. 

She let him follow him as one might allow a dog to heel. She walked through her village with her newfound shadow, garnering envious glares and glances, all for being the only unlucky one to attract the attention of a god.

“Everyone hangs off me,” Prime said, picking autumn leaves out of his hair, turning them green with a flick of his wrist. “If you have the opportunity to make friends with the person who provides goods, why shouldn’t you?”

“Are we friends?”

“Aren’t we?” He sent her such a pleading look that she had to look away. 

“You’re a god. Gods don’t make friends with mortals.” It was what her grandmother would tell her as she brushed her hair. Gods don’t play nice with humans, so don’t think they will when they come tumbling through your door.

“That’s boring. Who says that? Old women and their dogs?”

She bit back a retort, focusing instead on churning the butter before her. They were in the yard, catching the last remains of autumn light before winter.

He sighed beside her, beginning to cast a spell that would make the butter instantly, but she slapped his wrist away, scolding him. “I need to make this alone. I can’t get too complacent. Besides. This is my only workout.”

Prime groaned. “Any other villager—”

“Would love the opportunity, yes, you’ve mentioned.” She pulled away from the pole. “But, as we’ve established, I don’t need your help and, in fact, would be quite content to have you gone.”

Prime mumbled something that sounded vaguely mocking, and she chose to ignore him, turning back to the churn. “You should go visit the children. In the infirmary. The passing sickness looks like it’s sticking.”

“Is it? How can you tell? It’s only been a few days since it arrived.”

She shrugged. “Something about the air. I’ve always had a knack for knowing when things die.”

Prime was silent, before humming, a curious thing. She turned to look at him. “It’s nothing odd. You just learn to look out for things. I used to want to be a nurse when I was much younger.”

“You say that like you’re old, now.” He let the weird tension drop, something he’d inflicted, easily passed. “You’re very young.”

“I’m twenty-eight.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “I was, I don’t know, twelve, then.”
“Ten and a half years isn’t much.”

“How old are you, that ten years isn’t much?” she grumbled, mindlessly pulling off the lid to the churn to examine her progress. “Can you help me bring this up to the house?”

“I thought you didn’t need my help.”

“I would ask this of anyone with me. Up.”

Prime laughed, the sound more like a delighted giggle, before hoisting up the churn effortlessly, as though it was a feather. He followed her up to her house, obviously making great effort to step exactly in her footsteps. She found it funny, almost. The silly mannerisms of a child.

She dismissed the thought as quickly as it came.

She did this often when it came to Prime.

She awoke in utter darkness. So cold she was certain Prime had dumped river water on her to wake her up. She waved her arms around clumsily, knocking over something on her bedside table.

She forced herself to stand, shivering from head to toe, her legs trembling at the weight of herself. She fumbled around her nightstand, striking a match to light a candle. She gripped the handle of it and stumbled through her house, until she was in the kitchen, filling a glass of water and drinking like a desperate, dying thing. 

“I reckon you’re sick.”

“Shut up,” she said hoarsely.

“I’m just saying,” Prime said, gnawing on a cigar when she turned to look at him.

“What are you going?”

“Tobacco tastes good.”

“You’re supposed to smoke that.”

“Smoke it? Why would you smoke it?”

“It’s—not important. Can you run to the infirmary and get me medicine?”

Prime looked at her, waving his hand, a bottle appearing like a mirage. 

“No. If you do that every time, you’ll ruin the economy. Think of the economy, Prime. Take a bag of radishes and some of the butter and get me proper, economically-friendly medicine. And walk there, while you’re at it. Smell the roses, or whatever”

Prime rolled his eyes but did as she asked, even the walking comment, using the door like a proper, normal person. She collapsed back into her couch, wrapping a spare blanket around herself, shivering herself sweaty. 

She waited an eternity, almost regretting having asked Prime to walk, but it was worth it to get the annoyed look in his eyes. When the door clattered open, she was already melting into the cushions, not out of true heat, but rather desperation. She reached out for the bottle without looking up.

It was cold in her hands, and cold going down, bitter but soothing. She allowed herself to be rearranged so that Prime could sit next to her. If he weren’t here, she would have had to trudge to the infirmary alone, likely forced into a cot alongside other sick villagers, where the air would kill her before the sickness.

“She’s loaded up on patients, in there,” he remarked quietly. “You were right, it’s staying, the passing illness.”

“I'm typically right about these things.” Her voice was grainy and strained. In these few moments, it had gotten worse, grating her poor vocal cords into a raspy mess. 

“I commend you.” Prime pushed around blankets and pillows to reveal her face. “Do you feel better?”

“It won’t take effect immediately. Idiot.”

“Mine do. What am I supposed to know about mortal tinctures?”

“You use freaky god magic.” She coughed, waving away his warm, remedy-hands. “It’ll work. Those people stay sick because they’re all clumped together. That’s why I’m here, in the comfort of my own home. It will pass.”

Prime made a noncommittal noise. She hoped it was a weird, non-translatable godly agreement. 

“Leave me alone. I want to sleep this off.”

Prime shrugged and did as she asked, ambling off into the hallway, vanishing either into her bedroom or the guest room. It had once been her grandmother’s room before she’d passed, but now it just gathered dust, as she’d never had a single person over.

“You should clean for me, while you’re here!” she called after him. He did not respond, but he had always fulfilled her other requests. “Normally! No god magic!”

There was an audible thump this time, and she hoped it was him throwing a mop and bucket down on the floor. She curled up into her side after a while. Prime’s humming softly drifted through the house like fading sunlight. Fingers through the air.

She fell asleep. It was calm, the air alive but not loud. It reminded her of her youth, being a child whilst her grandmother cooked. She had hummed as she worked in the same way. Prime even sang songs that sounded like they came straight out of her grandmother’s era. All dragging vowels and rasping words.

When she woke again, the air was made of smoke, flooding her lungs, stealing her breath. No matter how hard she gasped and choked, no oxygen rushed to meet her. Fingers curled around her throat and constricted. Robbing her. Depriving her.

She tried to scream. Only a hacking sound emerged, a heavy pressure on her chest, as if Prime were sitting on her. Is he? She deliriously waved her arms around, the limbs heavy, weighted.

Warm fingers wrapped around her forearm, gently bringing them back against her chest. She mumbled something incoherent and the hands brushed hair back from her damp forehead. It was painfully warm. She writhed to get away, but the hands simply pressed harder, as if placing divine fire in her blood.

“You are not bettering,” a voice drifted above her. Like strands of fine silk, they dance, they weave into insanity. “You worsen.”

“It will pass,” she said, the words melding together, stringing into one. “It must.”

“You say that every time you wake up.”

“This is the first.”

“It is not.”

She was silent a moment. “Can you not make me better?”

“I thought you did not like that.”

She swallowed thickly. “I prefer it to dying.”

“I am afraid…” The god carded his fingers through her hair. “I fear I cannot.”

“You are god,” she said hysterically. “What god cannot save someone?”

“I have long relinquished the ability.” Prime brought her dying body to his chest. A lamentation dripped off his lips, a mother’s thing, said to dissuade death from the cradle. “I could…”

“I don’t want to die,” she said, allowing tears to fall freely from her sickly eyes. “Do anything, if it saves me, Prime.”

“A few springs ago, I made a god. Another. To him, I gave Pestilence. This is his doing. He is angered by something. In giving him his abilities, I have removed my own ability to heal his sicknesses. If you truly want to be saved, I can do only one thing.”

“Anything,” she pleads, griping his tunic, “anything at all.”

“…You will hate me, when you come to realize what I have done.”

“Salvation is not something to hate.”

“I hold you to these words.” As he spoke, he covered her eyes with a smothering hand, and it caught flame. She wanted to scream, to claw away the god fire, but it was fruitless. It ignited her face and damp hair. She was kindling.

Maybe Prime’s idea of kindness was killing her before the illness did. Maybe that was why he was incessant about her being all right with it.

Her mortality melted away. Burned. Died.

What emerged was far uglier, every corner of her soul upturned, sold for parts, divinity installed where faulty mortality used to churn. What emerged was a god.

Prime stared at her across the table. She noticed, now that his divinity, his small fragments, rushed through her blood, the intricacies of his emotional expression. His ears twitched when he was nervous. His pupils minutely grew oblong when he was angry. His hair darkened to straw when he was upset.

She hadn’t noticed these things before. She’d never needed to.

“I hope the days fare you well,” he said, not timidly, but with an ounce of uncertainty. His irises even grew pale to prove it. He swirled the tea in his cup.

“How do you think they fare me?” she asked flatly. Her cup grew cold. Gods, she had learned, had no need for food and drink. They sustained themselves off prayer. Adoration and offerings.

She wouldn’t want to drink even if she could.

“I do not know, which is why I ask.” Prime stared down at the liquid. She wondered what stared back.

“My body has forgotten illness. Has forgotten exhaustion. Everything that made me human: gone. Should I be glad, Prime?”

“You begged me to do anything.” Prime’s eyes turned hard. “Was I meant to predict your thoughts to me fulfilling your wishes? I listened to you. You said you would not despise me if it meant your living. If your ire is bloomed off your godhood, then turn it inward.”

She set her jaw. Worked it as she looked anywhere but him.

“Besides, you mention the worst that humanity has to offer. Who cares if you no longer grow sick and weak? You are healthy and strong now. Is that not good?”

“Forget my words.” She massaged the headache forming behind her brow. “They are foolish.”

“They are not foolish. They are the words of mortality. It is not a bad idea to forget them, however. You are mortal no longer, after all.”

She repressed a sigh. “I do not even know what I am the god of.”

Prime considered her. Waved a hand. “I gave you Death. It was all I could think of, in my wanting you to live.”

“Death,” she mused. “To give the thing I gave up humanity to avoid.”

“You are human,” Prime stressed. “Just not one who dies.”

“To be human is to die.”

“How precarious.” Prime pushed his cup aside. “I am done. I am leaving in the morn.”

“Leaving, now that your one source of entertainment is no longer intriguing?”

He considered it a second.  “Yes.” His bluntness was of no surprise to her, but it stung to hear anyway. “You will always be interesting, my human friend. Simply not as much as before.”

He left her in her quiet, mortal home. It was no longer for her.

She followed soon after, her footsteps leaving golden, godly prints in the grass.

Chapter Text

She was a young girl when the winds stopped blowing. When the rain ceased to fall and the crops slowly began to wither. Young enough for her parents to not know whether they should or stay.

They stayed. All seven of them, her parents, her siblings, her.

She often trailed her father as he surveyed the farm and held the bucket into which he tossed meager roots and leaves. She helped her mother boil them to eat.

It was barely ever enough. Their supplies would diminish and they would pass more days hungry than fed. Her littlest brother would wail deep into the night, but her mother would be unable to feed him.

She was allowed to pass her days in the woods. Foraging, her father would correct, passing her a smaller bucket, one different than the one he used for the farm. Berries, roots.

That deep into the forest, she made a small shrine, out of twigs and leaves. Atop it, she’d set small portions of the berries she’d find that day, beg some god out there to help them.

She wouldn’t know it then, but her littlest brother died sometime when she was in the woods. Her mother would say her father took him to a relative’s house because there were too many mouths to feed.

Her siblings would diminish in this manner, lost to sickness and hunger, their little bodies unknowing of how to cope with profound absence, until it was only her and her parents, the baby in her mother’s stomach.

(She would wonder, when she was older, if those berries she’d set aside for gods and wishes would have been able to save them.)

(It would take decades to rationalize that babies could not eat berries and that handfuls could not sustain five.)

She nearly gave up on the shrine after years of starving. She had picked the forest dry of edibility and every small amount counted.

She apologized to the god she had been feeding, placed a berry and a twig, and turned around.

Wind breathed onto her back, caressed her skin, asked her to turn back. And foolishly, she did, whipping around desperately.

The god was a dream. Wind between trees, falling leaves, tender flesh of fruit. It whispered through thoughts and charmed between licks of air. It said it would gift her something very soon. She just had to keep coming back.

So she did. All twenty years of age and hopeful, she came back and back, gave everything to the god of broken promises and autumn breeze.

And when the god returned, he was of human form, a boy a bit older than her, long-haired and pretty-faced, smiling softly, and with even gentler hands did he reach for her. “Hello,” he said to her with a young boy’s voice, entirely different from grasping winds and carried words.

“Hi,” she said stupidly, entranced by the sight of full flesh and lively eyes. “Are you the god I’ve been feeding?”

The boy-god laughed and nodded happily. “I did not hear you until you until recently, though. Sorry for returning so late.”

She is a year older now than she was before. But it had been fine because he had returned, just for her and her meager offerings. When she told him as much, he laughed his boy-god laugh and held her hands tighter, brushing hair from her face, smiling.

“Come with me,” he said, eyes bright, aura warm.

“But my parents—” she had said.

The boy-god waved a hand. Her hand is cold when he leaves. “It will be fine. The rain will come if you leave.”

She paused. (Later, she would realize the god had purposefully withheld the rains, had gathered the clouds and tucked them in a bag, kept her hungry to make her hunger for him.)

“And they will flourish?” she asked, timidly, afraid to leave home.

“The grass will grow green and the berry bushes will repopulate. The farm will be plentiful.”

Trusting, she took his hand, spirited into a world beyond her small, family home.

(Even later, in a cave full of leaves, she’d know why he evaded her question; her parents would die, but the grass would be green and the berry bushes would refill—nature tended to recover when starving mouths weren’t picking them dry.)

He would bring her to a coastal city, full of people in white clothes passing white buildings, carrying clay pots and leather bags, some hassling for business from their stalls and others carefully avoiding the call-outs. She marveled and awed, and he had laughed beside her, finding entertainment in her shock.

“This is my city,” he said, walking her through cobblestone streets. “I take pride in its beauty.”

“How far is this, from my home?”

“Far.” Simple, monosyllabic answer, one she had not thought to question further.

They passed the day eating and drinking, the boy-god snatching pastries and meat from stalls, watching her eat them with a strange look in his eye.

“I have never eaten sweet bread,” she said, licking her fingers, “or glazed meat. Is this a delicacy here, in your city?”

“It is street food,” the boy laughed. “Something peasant mothers buy their peasant children.”

“What a luxurious life they lead,” she said, smiling at him. He handed her a cup of amber liquid and she let the warmth swallow her.

“They would not think that.”

“Many people are ignorant to the beauty of their lives.” She stared at her sticky fingers. “Can you grab me a towel?”

He procured one out of thin air. She exhaled a laugh and wiped her hands down. She tried to give it back to him, but he waved it off, cleaning it of sugar with a careless hand motion and allowing her to tuck it into the waistband of her skirt.

“Why have you brought me here?” she asked softly. She had been holding the question back for fear of the boy-god immediately spiriting her back to her lowly village.

“What do you mean?”

“This is a very nice place and you have expressly claimed it as yours. What use is it to bring a village girl with no gold or food to her name to your blessed home?”

The boy-god tilted his head. “You are very pretty. I like staring at pretty things.”

Her blood pinched her cheeks and warmed her skin. She pushed him away from her to fan her face. He laughed and she could barely grab enough of her bearings to pout at him. His resulting smile was the stuff of dreams.

“Besides,” the boy-god continued, “you prayed to me even as your belly went empty. Your faith wavered, yes, but it persisted. Your love is something many mortal men would have wished to be the bearer of, had you not been born to a village mother and father. I do not fault you for circumstance. But I will adore you for what you do in spite of it.”

She felt like she was burning. From the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. The boy-god did not comment. He led her through the market streets and into a park, bringing her to a bench so she might sit.

She stared at him as he beckoned a few trees into place above the bench to cast a cool shade upon her. It was certainly not difficult work for a god of nature, but she was pleased by the effort he extended nonetheless.

“I would have you stay with me a while,” the boy-god said. His mouth is a crescent moon. “Your presence in my life would be quite lovely.”

“If you’ll have me,” she replied with a handful of butterflies in her stomach, “I would stay as long.”

(She would come to regret these words. They would be bitter things in her memory, an agonizing promise she hadn’t known she’d made. What had been offhand to her was eternity to him. Swearing a soul to the devil had never been easier.)

She lived in luxury’s lap for weeks without incident. The boy-god, who claimed to have to name and refused her every insistence to give him one, gave her everything she could ever wish to have; food and drink, affection and frivolity. He bought her colorful dresses and tall-heeled shoes. He hand-fed her and ensured she was content every day and night.

He had no reason to, but he insisted on loving every bit of her, even foul parts that were raised in a small, mortal village. It relieved and astounded her. She felt, for once, like a completely normal girl.

She was then, naturally, surprised when she started predicting things before they would happen. She could see a babe and know it would not survive the harsh winter. Spot a man and see him laughing with a wife he would not have for a few years yet.

It was odd. It was strange. Brief flashes of things she had never seen would play across her vision as if they were truly happening before her, but she somehow doubted that her dead siblings could reanimate like that.

(Her sister spreads jam on a thick slice of toast. Both are warm and freshly made. The jam smells like blood. The bread tastes like tears.

“I have long missed the taste of home,” she says, licking the fruit off her thumb.)

She did not voice any of this to her boy-god. He already looked at her with seeking eyes, as if he knew there was something rotting in her heart. As if he knew she could see the day wherein she lost him, forced to live out her days in a dingy cave, her splendor lost and her heart empty.

She pretended she did not see it. When her little brother haunted the corners of her rooms, his clothes too loose for his dwindling frame, his eyes too hungry and his hands too sharp, she firmly told herself that it was the lack of sleep. It’s what she told her boy-god too.

(He smiles pityingly at her. “You are insane. Or you are guilty. Come, tell me which it is.”)

No. She really shouldn’t tell him. If she lost him, she would have nothing.

(This would be true years later. She was nothing in her cave.)

The road was crumbling. Fragments split off and vanished, filled with soil splintered with grass.

She didn’t know what to make of it. A chill tickled her spine.

(The man stands far from her, his face shadowed but his eyes glowing a vivid, acidic green. “Your status is regrettable,” the man says, voice gentle but haunting, “and were you not my friend’s favored, your death would be soon and swift. Alas, I leave you. You are insane. Go and tell your god.”)

She had grown to learn that nothing was real. Reality itself was a handful of thoughts and assumptions. She could think all she wanted, hold the proof that she existed, but Descartes was wrong, when he would come to these conclusions in fifteen years.

She turns to the road again. Cobblestone, freshly set, the workers chattering as they headed off one last time. She hums, crouching down to tap at it. It was solid beneath her.

Then, she will turn to gaze at the houses that would line the street, all rotting and crumbling, one burned here, another mossy there. She pursed her lips at it, but elected to make no comment.

(A family reaches their hands out from the windows. She stares but she is not real. She can’t reach back out. Her hands are falsehoods. Her desire is a figment. The family is choked out, a hive of bees sedated, and she turns away.)

She sat. Sniffed and laid back, watching clouds drift along the sky at a snail’s pace. The worn stone was pleasantly warm along her back. She sighed.

A carriage trotted down the street, and it passed her by harmlessly. She wasn’t really on the street. She’d tried to kill herself like this many times before. She could think she was on the road as a car hurtled down, the engine revving, but she really wouldn’t be. She thought, but she wasn’t.

(A man in his reverie, and she will scream, “YOU ARE INSANE. YOU ARE INSANE. YOU ARE INSANE. Drown yourself in your bathtub, dash yourself on a windshield, let them think you are a witch—die, because you are guilty.

“You are guilty…” She stares at the man. He ignores her, and in his notebook writes, I think, therefore I am.

“You are not evil. You are insane.”)

“You are neither.”

“Leave me be,” she tells her boy-god. She pressed her cheek into the rough road, letting it scrape her skin and draw blood. He sighs above her and drags her up by the shoulders.

“Are you trying to die?”

“I couldn’t even if it were the case.” She allowed herself to be dusted off. He rubbed her cheek and the wound mended itself. “Why are you here?”

“There will be a girl rotting in these streets for the past five centuries if I don’t.” He brushed her hair from her face. “Ignore what Prime said. He doesn’t know you like I do.”

“Uh-huh.” She patted the cobblestone. “Sit with me.”

He did. She leaned against his shoulder and watched as the house burned down.

“…You’re not insane.”

She made a non-committal noise.

“You’re not.”

“I was told to tell my god.”

“He won’t know you.”

“I am telling you I am insane.”

“…Okay.”

“Okay.” She pointed at the burned skeleton of the family home, years untouched. “That would be me.”

“But it’s not.”

“Because I am insane.”

“…I love you.”

“You can’t.”

“Because you are insane?”

“Because you made me insane. I miss my forest.”

“You could return.”

“I live in the present, the past, in the future, and yet that forest is nowhere there. I have lost it. And I am insane.”

“I could fix you—”

“Fix me?” She laughs. “I am not broken. I am insane, not broken. I am a god.”

“Are you?”

“You said you’d give me the world.”

“Have I?”

“No.”

“What more do you want?”

“…A cave.”

“A cave?”

“A nice, damp cave, with vast walls.”

“And this would satisfy you?”

“…No. But I could content myself.”

“Then I will give it to you.”

She inhaled and the street vanished. It was a field, untouched by man.

She smiled.

Chapter Text

At times, the world of shadows is more alluring than the light. The way they dance over the terrain, colors only the most observant could see. She likes picking them out; a color here the shade of the yielding flesh of an apple, a color there the hue of midnight waltzing. It is beautiful and it is all hers. Especially now that they decide to paint her skin too, decorating her in the colors of silent weeping and the bitter of wine.

She wanders with them, her footsteps perfectly in line with theirs, toe to heel, a rolling movement. It is the only way she can walk with them. Otherwise, she is shrouded in light, ripped from the grasp of the shadows.

She made sure that never happened.

Toe to heel. She wonders what about heel to toe makes her footsteps make the sound a flickering light makes. The shadows, in the colors of a cat’s purr and a snake’s hissing tongue, tell her that she is too young to know. She disagrees but doesn’t voice it aloud.

She turns the corner with them. Skims across shallow puddles and slips under awnings. She is the silence of the second before a midnight awakening.

When she reemerges, she is daybreak.

She was not hungry in her youth. Her parents worked hard and she was a single child. The only mouth to feed was hers. And she ate greedily.

Her fingers were sticky all the same. Tainted with wanting and her childish desiring.

She stole whatever she wanted. Crammed sweet bread into her mouth and snatched glimmering bangles off market tables. She was never one to be caught, however, her figure slight and her features unassuming. Little girls with gaunt faces and trembling hands would be caught before her.

She took great thrill in theft. In stealing away with a pocketful of jangling gold and hoarding them under her bed. Sometimes she’d present them to her mother, who would stare at her only daughter with suspicion in her eyes and something like distaste, but she’d take the jewelry all the same, wearing the delicate necklaces and heavy earrings and selling the rest.

Her father never asked any questions. They all preferred it that way.

Her thievery would not go permanently unnoticed, however. Her mother had to keep a rotation of secondhand stores she would sell to after one too many grew suspicious of her abundant “family heirlooms” and “unwanted gifts.” Street vendors would keep their stock within closer reach.

Stealing was harder but it was not impossible. She continued, reveling in succeeding in even harder conditions.

This would get a girl killed, but she would feel sad only for a few weeks. Such is life, her mother would argue, nudging her back into the market square.

So she tucked all that grief and anger neatly into her heart, and then into her hands, making them deft and quick, until taking a ring looked as casual as asking a question of the vendor. Suspicious glances became adoring ones. Some stolen objects became gifts for the little girl who expressed deep interest in their careers and lives.

No, she was not hungry. She simply thought it was fun.

She rolls a stone between her hands as she watches Prime’s brother work. She has no clue what running a kingdom entails, nor is she inclined to find out, but surely it does not mean prolonged death, the hours slowly carving through the ribcage to still the heart.

She casts her head to the side as Philza works tediously through the acts proposed by nobles. Meanwhile, the other brother plays in his silly field, having been challenged by some peasant boy. She wonders if he was always so easily goaded.

“Take these to the Council room for me, will you?”

She snaps out of her reverie and bows deeply, taking the stack of papers and slipping into the shadows out of habit. She’s been doing it too often in front of Prime’s brother, but he had yet to comment on it.

She wanders through the colors of snake bites and strangled prey. Things jump out at her from the darkness. Slender, winding hands, gripping at her shirt, clawing at her pants. She kicks them off second-naturedly.

She steps out from the chair’s shadow, rising abruptly, to the surprised scream of some servant or another. She waves a careless hand and they vanish. She deposits them in some city or another and sets the papers on the desk.

The Noble Council office is closer to the fields than the office the empire’s ruler used. She peers out through the curtains to spot the youngest brother, his back to her, pink hair wild under the winds of the Arctic.

She decides to sit on the sill. Could potatoes even grow in abundance like this in the harsh weather? Was he spilling some god magic into the soil to foster growth?

She winds the cord of the curtains around her finger. She feels silly, watching the man like an over-eager vulture, but she can’t help herself. It’s almost humorous.

The brother tenses after a while, glancing over his shoulder with bright red eyes. She doesn’t react, knowing his eyes will skim right over her, and they do, bouncing off her figure through the window onto everything else. He frowns and hesitantly turns back to his work.

She loosens the curtains and slips back into the darkness. It embraces her with arms of dry tea.

She did not hunt with the men, who did not trust her to wield a blade, much less face off with an animal, but she followed all the same. Her father always said he wanted a son to inherit his home. A son to go hunting with.

She was not that, and she did not pretend to be, but as she sat high in the trees, she could almost see the appeal of it. Almost wish her father did get a son.

She kicked her feet, exhaling lightly as her father notched his arrow to let loose. It flew through the air and struck home in the throat of a deer. She watched indolently as he removed the projectile from the wound, bringing up a spray of blood and a bit of gore around the head.

An eerie fascination filled her chest at the sight of dripping blood. It was the dark of a nightshade. It was the copper of a coin.

She bent down, trying to catch a better sight of it, but her father had already wiped the gore from the head and had slung the deer’s corpse onto the cart. She huffed and craned her neck to look at that instead—thin rivulets of pretty blood streamed down the animal’s neck.

“Have you always found interest in death?”

She whipped around, nearly toppling off the branch, caught only by a breezy arm; it wound around her and scooped her back into place. The voice had been the sound of crackling leaves and the beginnings of a storm.

His face was something she couldn’t describe. It was erratic planes and obtrusive oblongs. She couldn’t find discernible features. He was the first footfall on overnight snow drifts.

“Who are you?” she asked with quietly mounting terror.

“Me? No one of note.” The thing wearing a human’s skin settled down beside her. It was all she could do to refrain from throwing herself at the ground. “You haven’t answered my question.”

She swallowed harshly. “N-no,” she stammered, fingers curling into the bark of the tree. She wanted to place a nation between them. She wanted to slip into the shadows.

“What about it is beautiful?”

She flinched away from the eager face, if it could be called that. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Then why do you like it?”

“I like…transitions. I think.”

The thing hummed. “Transitions.”

She edged closer to the tree’s trunk. “I should go home now.”

“If you could, would you want to manipulate transitions?”

She paused. Gawked at the thing who smiled without a mouth. “What is that supposed to mean?”

The thing beckoned her closer but she refused. It sighed and held its cupped hands out. A small sphere of shadows writhed within it. “Wouldn’t you say that shadows are transitionary? They divide here from now. They are time, manifested.”

“No one would say that.”

“I would.” The thing lashed a hand out to grip her wrist, the ball of shadows wriggling into her palms.

She should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. She stared at the thing in her hands with awe. The colors of plum juice and sunrise laments.

“You could have it,” the thing said, releasing her wrist when it could tell she wouldn’t shove it back. “I just want something in return.”

She gazed at it suspiciously. “What could I offer in return for such a boon? I’ll have to decline—”

“It’s nothing, really,” the thing said, dodging her attempt to pour the shadows back upon it. “This isn’t a large gift I am granting you. It’s not as if I’m carving out a rib for you. I just want one little thing in turn.”

“What?”

It reached out to tap against her collarbone. “That little heart of yours.”

Immediately, she reeled back, her back slamming into the trunk. The shadows in her palms tense. “I’m not gonna die for this!”

“You won’t die.” The thing waved a careless hand. “With this”—it gestured vaguely towards the shadows—“I’ll give you immortality, too. I’ll even throw in a few extra things, if that pleases you. All for your heart. Isn’t that a breathtaking offer?”

She shook her head wildly. “I don’t know what you are. Why would I trust you?”

It smiled its mouthless smile. “Why wouldn’t you?”

Niki Nihachu wakes up at the same time she always does, at the precipice of dawn, the shadows that typically tug at her shoulders receeding carefully, clinging to every scrap of darkness they can. She sighs and presses into them—stepping, toe to heel, ignored by the flickering lights of the candles lining the walls—emerging in her kitchen.

She hadn’t meant to follow the void brothers into their half-shared-half-fought nation, but she ended up here all the same. Boys fight eternally in meaningless wars and Niki Nihachu is overlooked. The way of things, as she has orchestrated it.

There is an odd bitterness in her chest all the same. With the tackiness of drying jam and the dense gray of a cloud. It takes a home in the place where her heart should be but no longer is.

Niki Nihachu tries to breathe and she makes a batch of cookies. She mixes her wet ingredients and then her dry. She separates the dough into neat rows of misshapen balls and throws it in the oven. She sits on the floor and she watches the dough flatten into cookies, the edges browning, the chocolate melting.

She is sea glass. She is something weathered by time, but unfeeling.

She breathes as she pulls the cookies out, nearly burning her thumb but uncaring. She is the head of an arrow, biting deer flesh. She is a collection of stolen rings.

She is the color of a summer hunt and a missing daughter.

Niki Nihachu glances up as the bell above her door rings. She smiles wanly at her girlfriend as she strides in, her hair a wild mane slicked into a ponytail. “Hey,” she says, offering a burning cookie to her.

Puffy seizes it up and swallows it in one motion, making a vague noise of satisfaction. “They’re putting Dream in prison.”

Niki Nihachu makes a face at the bluntness, but otherwise makes no remark, instead focusing on racking the rest of the cookies to cool.

Her girlfriend sighs longsufferingly. “Aren’t you gonna say anything? I know I’m dating a woman of little words, but c’mon.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know! That you think he deserves to be there?”

“Do you think he deserves to be there?”

Her girlfriend is silent. Niki Nihachu looks up at her and they stand in complete and utter silence. “You don’t, huh.”

“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I feel like I should. And I kind of do. But you didn’t see him when he was at his lowest. He always came to me. Do you remember the day we sought refuge from the storm?”

She does. It is seared into her memory; dead bodies face-down in the flood, bloody hand prints clawing at wood. Niki Nihachu was undying then too, but she had, for the first time in centuries, feared. She feared the sight of Death in her white shroud, hanging around some corner to collect what Prime had taken so long ago.

She does not say this. Instead, “Was he kind to you, then? I remember how distant he was. He would have denied us, if not for his friends. Will you still extend him grace?”

“…I think—I think I led him astray.” Puffy sits suddenly at one of the tables. Niki Nihachu grabs another cookie to hand her. “He would always come to me when he felt…I don’t know. Like the weight of leadership was crushing him. And it felt good, to be the one that someone so high and mighty like Dream would come to confess his sins and wants to.

“But he came to me one day, talking about how the kids were annoying Found[[ i will no longer be writing out goerge’s name, or at the very least using it as a last resort. other people just know him by his last name except dream and sap]] and Sap, and—I told him that actions have their consequences, and he turned into—into this. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

“You tried your best.”

“My ‘best’ almost got those boys killed, Niki.”

“Almost isn’t definitive. Sometimes trying is all that matters.”

Her girlfriend moves to say more, but Niki Nihachu shoves a third cookie in her mouth. Her girlfriend makes a strangled sound and she laughs at the face she pulls.

“Help me set up,” Niki Nihachu says, ignoring the way the ugly gray of her chest has shifted to her stomach; an unsettled hue.

Pandora sits on the horizon like a rotting leaf.

Niki was not a starving girl, but she hungered all the same. When she ran away with divinity in her hands, she didn’t know where to go. She couldn’t go home—without her heart, her face grew pale and she found it difficult to emote; her mother would know, in a heartbeat Niki no longer had, that something was wrong.

So she went north and pretended she was normal.

But the shadows beckoned to her in the alluring shades of moth wings and snake teeth. She absconded into their arms for months, then years at a time. She learned to press her feet toe to heel, to shrink into the size of a bug, to be so nondescript that she could take the clothes off a man’s back.

Niki learned and she adapted, and under the watery gaze of the moon, she realized that she was god.

Chapter Text

The man wore a cape of lion’s fur and an expression of divine nonchalance. The boy stared up at him, the crinkled edges of his vision shriveling with the strain of hunger, almost blinding him.

He held out a piece of cured meat with a delicate hand. The boy did not care if it was laced with poison. He might have even preferred it. Anything was better than the bitter cramping of his stomach. He shoved it in his mouth as though the man would retract the offer if he were not fast enough.

The man did not. In fact, he pulled more out of a small, leather pouch, handing each piece out slowly, as if he knew the boy would eat in all in one go.

“What is your name?” the man murmured, almost as if he didn’t expect the boy to respond.

“They call me the fool,” the boy said in the same low tone. With his stomach on the fuller side of empty, he was now savoring each bite of food, already missing the future in which he would not have it.

“Ah, so the people here are cruel.” The man allowed him another bite before dusting his hands. “Walk with me.”

It wasn’t a question. The boy hesitantly stood and followed, a pace behind, his shoulders hunched and his hands wringing.

The man took him down several winding streets. The dilapidated buildings became ruins. The ruins became rubble. The rubble became an empty, sprawling plane of gray dust and coarse dirt.

“This used to be a church,” the man said, pointing at the shadow of a square burned into the dirt. “Did you ever go to church, when you were younger?”

The boy didn’t know how to say that the war started when he was seven, so he wasn’t particularly sure if the answer to that was a yes or no, so he settled for a shrug. The man hummed, stepping closer to where the church should have stood.

“I’ve always liked the idea of a holy house. But what’s the use of it, if no god moves into its sacred halls and finds a place to sleep? It is just a pretty building, then. Stained glass with no meaning.”

The boy did not know what to say, so he did not speak.

The brothers stand on opposite ends of the room. The timid brother accepts the brash brother’s ire and allows it to settle deep inside his stomach. He hides it from the world so that his brash brother might become a respectable citizen.

The timid brother is fifteen when his brash brother enters the war. Although, enter wouldn’t be the right word. The war was a state of being and the brothers have been in it as long as they can remember. To be at war is to struggle to eat. To be at war is the posters that line the walls: BUY MORE WAR BONDS AND STAMPS; Victory waits on your fingers; Her careless talk costs lives.

War is his brash brother shoving him in a closet and telling him to wait until he comes home. It’s ignoring this order and crawling out days later, half-starved and fingers bloodied from clawing at the wood.

The timid brother eats what little he can and waits by shattered windows. When the battle comes to his doorstep—bombs and bullets and bulldozing tanks—he moves with the crowd. He shuffles through bodies and pushes ever deeper into the belly of his nation. He pushes and he carves and he ensures that he survives.

He glances over his shoulder all of one time—to catch sight of his mother’s home as it crumbles beneath the blow of an explosion, and he does not cry, but it is a near thing.

The man turned to look at the boy. He shrunk from the distant gaze.

“Why don’t you fight in your army?”

The boy tugged at his fingers. “I was too sick to fight.”

“Now you aren’t?”

“Now we all are.” The boy’s legs gave out and he dropped to a kneel. “Before you encountered me, did you spot anyone who looked fit to fight?”

“I suppose I didn’t.” The man continued his examination of the dirt. “But all who I have encountered were women and children. You are the first man.”

“This nation has deprived itself of men to save itself, and it is dying anyway.”

“It is a quiet tragedy that happens here.”

“It is not quite so quiet when you live amongst the noise.”

“I don’t mean to dismiss your troubles.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.” The boy looked up at the man. “Why have you brought me here?”

The man inhaled loudly. The boy could feel it unsettle the dust and pull at his clothes. The uncertain sadness wound up his arm like a tentative snake.

“I saw a dog, the other day,” the man said, his voice nothing but a flame in the wind. “He gnawed hungrily at some corpse or another. And I thought: if the dog could turn against his beloved owner, what must have become of the people who still walk and breathe?”

The man’s gaze landed on the boy and he recoiled, a deep shame flooding his nerves as he bowed his head from the offending stare.

The ghost of the church hung over him. But he didn’t continue his line of inquiry. The boy wrung his hands with gratitude he couldn’t voice.

“Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be a god?”

The brothers stand on opposite ends of the street. The timid brother shrinks into his diminishing shoulders and tries not to clasp his hands over his ears as his brash brother yells.

They did not look all that identical all those years ago, when the brash brother went to war and the timid brother stayed home, but now the difference between them is a gaping chasm—it is what the stars are to nightingales.

The brash brother marches through the maze of debris, and the timid brother, as he always does, waits anxiously on the other side. When the brash brother’s fist balls his tunic, he does not react, accepting the hatred as he always has.

“Why have you left the home?” he demands with a vengeance in his eyes that the timid brother has before seen only in the eyes of dying men.

“They would have killed me. I had to leave—”

“‘Had to leave’? You left our father’s memories in that place to die alone! You should have died with him, buried under all that rubble.”

The timid brother clamps his mouth shut. His brash brother tosses him aside and runs a hand through his short hair—that is another thing the timid brother belatedly realizes. The hair he had been dutifully growing out since their father’s death is now as short as any soldier’s.

Maybe there is nothing left of his brother beneath the grays and browns of his uniform. He is a soldier wearing a brother’s skin. And the timid brother takes his misplaced patriotism with all the fear he’s always had.

The man extended his hand. The boy stared at it with barely contained mistrust. “What do you mean?”

“You are stupid and you are peasant-born, so I understand if you don’t know of the Void God,” the man said, his hand withdrawing into his pockets. He pulled out a small effigy of a young man.

The boy took it gingerly when it was offered. “What is this?”

“One of many representations of the Void God.” The man watched as the boy turned it over in his hands. “Somewhere, there is a village claiming to be his birthplace. There, they use the visage of a stone, for they believe it’s what the Void God would have wanted, being an aspect of the void rather than a mortal with physical appearance.”

“Which do you think is true?” The boy didn’t really know what the conversation was about, but his mother raised him with manners.

The man shrugged. “Who am I to decide the whim of god?” After a pause, he continued, “I like the rock. It is simple.”

The boy glanced at the statue in his hand.

The man hummed. “This” —he tapped the statuette, long and well-manicured; even the upper class struggled during the long droughts and constant assault, so who was this man?—“presupposes that the sight of the Void God is known. But people would not know what he looked like even if he stood in front of them. Do you know how I know?”

“How?” It was a breath. A puff of smoke.

“Because I stand before you and you haven’t said a word.” The man straightened. Tossed off his lion skin coat and let it vanish into the brittle breeze. “Hark, I say, meet your god.”

The man was addressing the church’s shadow, that thin outline, but dead things don’t speak. The man sighed, turning back to the boy. “Would you ever want to be god?”

The boy’s palm dug into the effigy. “I wouldn’t deserve it…”

“No one deserves anything.” The man twisted his wrist and the statuette appeared in his grip. He examined it idly as the boy glanced down to find his had vanished. “Your nation didn’t deserve to die. Neither did your mother or your father. No one deserves anything but things happen despite that. Your godhood would be a natural progression. Starving boy to famine god. An evolution, of a kind.”

“Why me, then? Of all the people starving in this war.”

The man looked away from the little model. It truly wasn’t in his likeness. “I saw what you did to your brother.”

A chill danced up the boy’s spine. He ducked his head and folded his arms to his chest. The gaze laid upon his crown was a burning thing.

“I won’t condemn you,” the man said. “It would be wrong of me to. I have done…bad things. But in doing so, you get godhood. Maybe it was a good thing.”

“I have killed my brother and I must call it good.”

“What else would you call it? Deserved?”

The boy averted his eyes. “I’m not sure.”

The man’s hand came out again, the fingers lithe and delicate, unmarred with the teeth-marks of hunger. Would he look like this, removed from the context of his all-consuming war? Would he be lovely once more, a mother’s son huddled up on his mother’s lap?

He reached over with his god-cut hand and the man smiled.

It was a haunting thing.

The brothers stand on opposite ends of the warzone. But war is a state of being, so here the warzone is a thirty square meter room, with the wardrobe knocked over and the vanity glass long shattered.

The brash brother no longer stands. He leans heavily against the wall, blood foaming on the edges of his lips. There is a stab wound in his side from the glass shard clutched in the timid brother’s trembling hand.

“I should have killed you,” the brash brother says, a spray of bloody spittle landing at his brother’s feet.

“You should have. You tried very hard. I clawed at the closet door for days.”

The brash brother falls to his weakened knees and tries to heave past his drowning lung. It is ruptured with the weight of a sickly brother’s desperate, festering want.

“You should have died in the war,” the timid brother continues, although he does not feel quite so timid now. He is some lofty wind or passing cloud. “It would have been kinder for you.”

“Kind,” the brash brother spits out. “What do you know of kindness and war?”

“I know a lot.” The brother kneels, pressing the shard to his brash brother’s throat. He smiles. “I know that it is kind of you to give me your body. Do not worry. I will take my fill.”

His brash brother’s eyes widen. Except, he doesn’t look so brash now, sprawled helplessly on rotted wooden floors, blood trickling from his mouth, from his side.

The brother splits him ear to ear and calmly sets the shard to the side. He has not eaten in weeks, whetting his appetite only with grass and leaves. He has denied his body the fruits that he has seen others indulge in.

But now he is a man starved and he won’t let his brother be defiled by any other hand. So he bends down and he does as promised—he takes his blood-owed fill.

And brother looks down at brother, blood dripping down his chin, and he speaks: “This time, I will be your keeper, Cain.”

But his brother does not respond. He lacks the throat to speak.