Archive of Our Own ^beta

You finally think of what to say. Too bad it’s too late. Too bad your body is gone, something light and spread out and floating in a warmth that is so calm and so all-encompassing that your eyelids can’t help but flutter closed against the d—

“And I saw a beast rise out of the sea, having seven heads, and ten horns, and upon his horns were ten crowns, and ^[upon his head the name of blasphemy…”

Your brother’s soft words in the air, your brother’s soft fingers in your hair, idly brushing your bangs back from your eyes.

Time is slippery on days like this, your mind gently bobbing in and out of consciousness like a paper boat tugged between the shore and the tide.

“And they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast! who is able to war with him!”

You yawn, roll over. “Me,” you say, nuzzling your cheek into your brother’s knee. “I’d war with him easy.”

“Oh, would you?” your brother asks, but you are too tired to reply; you hear his smile in his voice, and it instantly soothes you back to sleep.

The woods outside are splashed red as the sun takes its daily death, a full moon already threatening to reveal itself from behind the clouds. But Caleb should be in the house—he loves cooking dinner as the sun goes down, watching it through a window fogged with smoke. When you were children, he’d come out with the first sight of the moon, plates made for the both of you so you could sit in the lantern light and trace the stars while he whittled away at another whistle.

Now only birds watch you. Vultures smelling your rotten flesh.

And inside you a chorus is screaming.

You run your calloused hands over this older, lankier body. You’re thin, too thin; you feel the ladder of ribs when you breathe in too deeply; you touch your face and feel sharper cheekbones where there used to be baby fat.

No beard, though.

This isn’t my face.

You feel the realization burst from the cellar of your mind like an escaped captive—the world is suddenly alive with static so loud it hurts your ears, so loud it’s in your chest, competing with your heartbeat.

I’m in Belos’s mind again? But why do I have his face? That’s not how the mindscape spell has ever worked. Is this another trick from the Collector? Like when you woke up in Belos’s clothes? But the Collector—

He—

You’d flown in front of—

Hunter had said that you could become trapped in someone’s subconscious forever, but that was when you’d gone in with him via a spell, not been—well—

Killed. Eaten.

He has you now, your bones in his stomach. Metaphorically, anyway. Or literally? You remember hearing your bones cracking more than you felt them. The rot had hurt as it’d spread, of course it had hurt, but somehow it was like hearing a shout at the end of a very long hallway. The blank looks on Eda and King’s faces were a million times worse.

Your stomach clenches like it could somehow break you open from the inside.

“Pip, wait up!” Caleb. Again. Always running after you: no, Pip, don’t run off!/no, Pip, you have to stay close!/can’t you just listen for once?

The knowledge that you’re —no, no, that Belos is fifteen slips in through a crack in the door, pretending it was always there.

And through that crack comes a vicious anger that heats your cheeks and your back and makes your stomach clench again.

“Will you just talk to me?” your brother pleads. “Please, Pip?”

You taste dirt and something that could be copper or could be blood. You shove yourself up, spitting.

Your eyes flutter open to a field of browned grass, the curled corpses of leaves blowing across the land, over the distant tops of trees and thatched roofs and gallows being emptied by the churchmen in black. A cool breeze whispers across your ankles and under your shirt.

You feel the weight of something on your face, covering half your vision. You touch it and you feel wood.

“Yep, c’mon, rub the sleep out your eyes. We need to start heading back; it’s about to get dark out.” That’s your brother’s voice, a voice you know deep in your bones, a voice you’d know if you never heard it for a thousand more years.

But I don’t have a brother.

You push yourself up off Caleb’s knee, rubbing the heel of your palm into an eye. “How long was I out?”

“I’d finished Revelation,” he says, half-smiling. His hair is longer than it usually is, slipping now out of its ribbon. Something about seeing his face unscarred itches deep down in the guts of your mind, but at least he looks just as tired as you remember.

“You always say that,” you reply, fitting your mask back over your face, strands of your hair getting caught on the tiny hooks of its antlers. Somehow this, too, feels like Caleb’s fingers. Or gives you a similar feeling, because he’d made it for you and you wear it everywhere. You don’t know.

You’re eight, and eight-year-olds aren’t known for being eloquent.

“You should be bored of it by now,” you say. The monsters and witnesses and visions of apocalypse entertained you, sure, but you’d long suspected that Caleb was exaggerating your attachment to the story. For his own pleasure? Who knows. Big brothers were puzzling creatures, sometimes.

“Maybe if I read it enough,” Caleb shrugs. “It’ll end differently. You never know.”

“We do know,” you say forcefully. “That’s not how books work.”

Caleb pulls your mask down just long enough to flick you in the middle of your forehead.

For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another, your father is saying from the pulpit, from the hospital bed, his IV tubes full of spirits; Not as Cain, which was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's good.

“Oh, shut up,” you snap, turning away again, hugging your chest. “Haven’t I heard this enough times?”

You jerk your head up

        —all those weepy Palismen souls—

his voice again, not your voice, his voice, his, and you know you only have a few moments before the memory truly starts and he takes control of you again.

(Is he really controlling me, though? Why would he show me all of this?)

Maybe you just need to wake up. Now on your feet, you try and take your—Belos’s cursed hand, hissing at the way it feels like the bones are breaking through the skin, like your arm is somehow more invisible ants than real flesh. You feel something ripping open across your face—the scar on his nose—yes, and the chorus is angry now, angry like a tidal wave before it destroys the village along the shore, angry as it chases your thoughts into corners and eats them and—

“Focus!” you say out loud. “Focus, Luz.” Your cursed hand hurts too much to use, but you can still drag your fingers along the ground, drawing a circle through the dirt.

“Okay, circle. Step one: done.”

The world shakes with a dull thud, throwing down the table in front of you, tools clattering to the dirt floor.

Another. Another. So loud it almost makes your knees buckle.

Da-dum. Da-dum. The Titan’s heart.

“Philip?” Caleb. Behind you. “What are you doing?”

When you two get home, the faces at the dinner table are dark. Caleb gently kicks the front door closed behind him, earning the attention of your mother, who is setting the final place at the table. Her hair is brown tile tonight, her face two stories with half-suns painted across her cheeks and the rest chipping white paint.

Your mother says something like it might be words, but you can’t make sense of them—her voice is the whisper of windows opening and closing. She opens the door of her mouth and feathers fall out.

Same for your father. Your father’s house of a head is tilted down, door open and ale pouring out onto his lap and the slab of pork he’s furiously sawing with his knife. Apparently, the waterfall means something, because Caleb replies that he was just reading to you out in the meadows.

You hold your brother’s hand, and keep your mask on.

More soundless words, of which none come from you. Caleb gives your parents a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and tugs you forward, gesturing towards the seat furthest away from your father. Your fingers dig into the tablecloth as Caleb sits down beside you, still talking.

“Of course, I still make him study; he’s been doing well, speaking more. Isn’t that right, Pip?”

The memory distorts; everyone suddenly moves forward, closing in on you. Mother is seated beside you, Father is looking up, and Caleb is gripping your knee, looking at you expectantly with that wide rictus that always tightens your chest.

But you know you can speak if you’re only looking at him. Your parents think you talk too much, too loud, and yet when you choose not to talk, that’s a problem too, even when you curl your knees to your chest and rake your nails into your skin and try to make yourself as small as they want you to be.

It doesn’t matter. Caleb isn’t ashamed of you.

“Yes,” you say easily. “We read Revelation again.” Then: “I’m going to go to the bathroom.”

Caleb squeezes your knee. Hard.

Your father-not-father’s knife breaks his plate in half. He shoves himself to his feet, your mother-not-mother and brother-not-brother shrinking away as ale gushes out his mouth.

You hear wood breaking. You catch yourself halfway to the floor. When you open your eyes, your claws are stuck in the door, four deep scratch marks across it like a bear’s tried to get in.

You’re on your knees, looking through the wreckage of shavings and the branches of Palistrom trees.

 “Where are they?” you snap, not looking at him. “Or is the prodigal’s brother finally getting his revenge?”

“Philip,” Caleb’s voice is laced with a thread of warning. “You need to leave.”

“Just give me a Palisman, then.”

“You need to let the Sisters of the Sanitarium look at you.”

“And what? Debride both of my arms? Use me as a breeding ground for that vile fungus they put on you?”

“Is that any worse than this?”

“You don’t even know if it’ll work.”

“It’s worth trying!”

Your stomach clenches like he’s lodged his fist inside you, your body folding around it. You sputter and cough until thick globs of black spit are dripping off your lips, your skin bubbling with a thick, dark sound.

You feel his hand on your back, like you’re a child again. You feel your skull crack, feel something growing through the hole.

“Will you listen, then? To my side of the story?”

“What’s there to tell?” You cross your arms over your chest, fighting down the urge to dig your palms into your eyes and claw free the burning tears building up behind them.

You’re such a fucking child.

“You went to Isaiah’s house and told him I’m only his friend out of pity,” you snap. “I finally have someone to talk to for all of a month before you swoop in and—” The anger kills the words on your tongue, makes you shove your hands back through your hair so you don’t make fists of them. “I just—why? Why would you do that?”

There’s a wooden door frame standing there in the snow, opening now to only the Titan’s gray, hardened vein. The iron pipes you and Caleb had hammered into the mountain’s side now jut out like bones from broken flesh.

And all of them dry.

On the top of a frame is a nail and note, the wind rustling it gently. You yank the note free, reading with a fury closing your throat.

Caleb can never leave now, it reads in big, swooping letters, so neither will you.

I may not know much of your human god, but I know he cannot reach you here. Don’t stress, dear brother, for he would not save you even if he were.

Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you. We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.

Your brother’s voice is softer. “Please, Philip.”

“I’m not letting them touch me.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Until she gets home.”

Your brother ignores that. Your breathing is hound-loud and haggard as it fills the entire room. And the shadow on the floor has one long, growing antler.

“Caleb, please.” You might be crying now, you might not, but your voice breaks all the same. “Please, please, I can’t do it. I can’t. It hurts. It hurts so bad.”

Your brother, your dear, traitorous brother, wraps his arms around you, his cheek heavy over your rabbit heart. “I can’t.”

You groan, trying to pull away from him.

“I can’t—” he says, holding tighter onto you, his fingers sinking into the mud of you. “I can’t help you if I’m only making you worse.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” you hiss. “She’s taking you away from me.”

That threat in his voice again. He pulls away, hands still on your shoulders to hold your gaze captive within his own. “Philip, enough. Let’s go see Sister Manitbus—”

You rip away and invert your lungs until something black pools on your stomach and your pants and the dirt beneath you, the curse eating through a few Palistrom twigs as it splatters. You swipe a trembling hand across your mouth, choking out a laugh. “Or maybe you got her with child so —” Your arms are weak, are weakening, are melting like candle wax before a flame. You brace yourself up on one arm and one fist. “So you’ll have someone new to chase after you and roll over at your word. Well, my apologies for not being convenient anymore, brother.”

Your shadow has a second horn.

You look over your shoulder at your brother, his tired, apple-bruise eyes, the deeply etched lines of his frown.

“Philip,” Caleb says with a cold anger. “You’re not yourself. We’re going to the Sanatorium. Now.”

You almost tell him that sometimes, when the magic inside you is surging and filling every part of your body with fire, you feel more like yourself than ever. But then again, that’s something you can hardly admit, even to yourself.

“I told you,” you cough, more black dripping from your lips; “I’m not going.”

Caleb opens his collar and a little wound opens in the air, yellow magic haloing it as it lengthens into a staff and—

“Flapjack?” You hear the sound of your voice underneath his, just for a moment. Caleb holds his Palisman’s staff tight, his feet planted firm into the ground, ruining the glyph you’d tried to draw.

“Either you’re going to go with me or you’re going to get off my property,” Caleb says. “Your choice.”

“He’s not the kind of person you want as a friend, Philip.”

“Why? Caleb, he is like me! You know…strange.” The memories rush up like a geyser— Isaiah, who never liked to be touched, whose head was always tilted down when the schoolmaster marched by, who tried to bring a bucket of worms he’d collected from the freshly rained lawn into the schoolhouse just so the younger children would not stomp on them. You’d walked with him back to his house that day, because he liked to wander and his mother liked to panic if he was even a moment late getting home.

And sometimes you wanted to tell Isaiah he made you feel better because he was the stranger, though for once you knew better. Regardless, his strangeness had felt kin to yours, like two gears fitted together, turning perfectly in different directions.

“You don’t—” Caleb runs his hand over his cheek, sighs. “You need to learn how to talk to normal people, Philip.”

Caleb gives you that pleading look he always gives. That, please be quiet, please understand, please don’t make me talk you through it slow.

“Yes, the ‘normal’ people who shoved a dead lizard down my pants. My bad.”

“Pip—”

“No.” You turn back around, stomping your way across the hill you’d run to in your anger, the same hill with the same tree where he’d first taught you how to climb.

You hear your brother’s footsteps coming towards you, the snapping twigs. 

“Piii-ip,” he says. “Come here.”

You cross your arms over your chest. “Go away, Caleb.”

Your brother gathers you into his arms, resting his cheek on your back. “I’m just doing what’s best for you.”

You mime him with your hand, mouthing his words back at him. He grips your wrist and pins it to your side; you feel the warmth of his face on the back of your neck.

You throw the pillar of mud you call your arm at him, but the bird on his staff flashes its eyes, a pellucid hand springing from the ground. It grabs your fist, the sound of bones breaking audible.  Caleb grinds his heel back, knuckles going white.

But you saw him wince. The Palisman’s grip tightens on you, white-hot pain rippling up your arm and making your knees buckle. Caleb shoots a glance at the bird.

“Don’t you see, Philip?” Caleb asks, voice softening again, like you’re just having another tantrum, like you’ve gotten him into trouble and your wide, sad eyes are already making his anger start to fold. “You could have magic and greater control of it. We—we could get you all healed up, and then I can show you how to carve a Palisman for yourself. Haven’t you always wanted a pet? Don’t—uh—yes, don’t you remember how you used to chase Misses Jacobsen’s chickens around her yard while I thatched her roof?”

“I remember one of them biting me,” you say. “I cried so loudly that you fell off the roof and broke your arm.”

 “And we took care of each other after, didn’t we? Like we always do.”

The pale hand gripping you snaps your wrist into an unnaturally acute angle.

“Flapjack, stop!” Caleb snaps, averting his gaze just long enough to miss the glyphs on your free arm glowing red. Ropes of mud grow muscles and sinew and talons as they burst out of the ground, grabbing onto any available part of your brother’s body. The fist glitches yellow, allowing you to jerk yourself free.

Your claws reap the ground as you jump for him, a wild animal upon its prey, his body crumbling under you like paper.

Now therefore thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thine hand; your father quotes still.  When thou shalt till the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength: a vagabond and a runagate shalt thou be in the earth.

Your father’s huge fist pounds on the podium, loud as an axe cracking through wood: your father’s bony hand falls onto the thin, scratchy hospital sheet, almost soundless.  

Then Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

You don’t remember where you got the knife.

After you cut Caleb’s throat, you start running—your awareness, your sense of your Luz-ness, rips through this shared body like a bullet, and behind you, you hear Caleb’s body shifting, hear your mother asking you to bring her gum from her bag, hear your father asking you about your day at school.

You run and you run but the voices never get any quieter.

And then he’s in front of you, sitting there with Caleb’s head in his lap, and in the dark you can see that he’s trembling.

“Get away—” Belos voice dies as he looks up at you, at the sheen of tears on your face. His own body shifts—hair growing lighter, skin growing taut, a curse breaking across his shattered nose.

The Belos you know. “Luz?” he asks.

You nod. “I know about Caleb. About”—you snort back the phlegm threatening to block your nose, feel your tears burning your eyes from both sides. “About everything.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I think you absorbed me by accident.”

“Yes, well, the Titan’s magic is certainly overwhelming, and—”

The world shakes; King or Eda must have hit him. “And I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”

“I think I’m losing mine, too.”

A party favor blows behind you, loud as a shout from God.

Belos’s eyes widen as he leans a little bit over so he can look behind you. You won’t turn. You won’t.

Laughter, some strong and some pitifully weak.

This is the video you rewatch whenever you start forgetting the sound of your father’s voice.

“When my dad was in the hospital,” you say, slowly. “I-I found these clowns in the hallway—they were meant for the sick kids who were staying there, but I convinced them to come to my dad’s room because I wanted to cheer him up,” and you’re smiling.

The younger you is laughing, climbing into your dad’s bed. And he’s laughing, genuinely laughing, not just half-heartedly chuckling to try and smooth over your newfound adult fears—

but then his laugh turns into a cough. And it just keeps going.

Your hands dig into your thighs.

Belos’s eyes return to you for a moment. Then he smiles, crooked and fake: “Well, since I’ve apparently relinquished my privacy,”—the smile falls, and he says, voice low and quiet: “Evelyn would not let me near the body. I had to wait until she had buried him to dig him back up again.”

You rub your arm. You are looking down. You say, not knowing why, not knowing much else other than that you are just so fucking tired: “I was at school when it happened. They called me to the principal’s office until my abuela could come pick me up. And then at the funeral, Mama wouldn’t let me go see him unless she was holding onto me in case I’d — I dunno, do something. Make a scene. Like I always do.”

“For days, my ears rung with the spell she struck me with in the back of the head. I can hardly even remember what I did afterwards. I just remember touching my face some centuries later and finding it inundated with tears.”

Belos looks down at the corpse in his lap, thumb rubbing over Caleb’s cheekbone. “Sometimes I like to smash a teacup or a plate on the floor just to see if I can wake myself up.”

“I would write all these stories where his soul had been kidnapped by dark wizards and if I learned magic I could save him, and then he’d wake up.” Your voice breaks. “And he’d be okay.”

Something changes in his face, but before he can reply, you swipe at your eyes and clear your throat and say, “So now we know each other’s tragic backstories.”

He’s quiet for a heartbeat, then solemnly answers, “Indeed.”

You feel in this next moment the suffocating weight of all these dead futures and pasts—all the possible yous you could have been, all the good men he could have been, all of them murdered and rotting, all your twin sufferings for nothing.

And for a moment, you timidly hope he’ll prove you wrong, that he’ll stand up, somehow, and show you the part of him that still wants to do good.

Crash.

The world shakes so hard you both fall. Your knees should hurt, but the pain is an echo from the end of a long hallway, although you can feel how the ground is now damp and you just know, somehow, that it’s with blood.

“Eda and King must be attacking you,” you say, the words stupid and obvious as soon as you do.

Your eyes shoot back towards him as you hear his skin shifting, a sickening wet sound: he’s young again, the Philip you met between the pages of a diary. He’s not wearing his blue jacket, but then his body glitches again, white sleeves rolling up to reveal the freshly bleeding glyphs carved into his arms.

Still, he smiles at you: “So have you come to your senses, finally? You know there’s no hope of you getting out of here if your so-called friends kill me now.”

And so the hope passes…

“How are you even controlling your—your big dragon body if you’re in here with me?”

“Oh, come on, Luz, from everything you know about me,” he replies. “You should know I’m excellent at compartmentalizing.”

… but the past is still awake.

In an instant, the blood-soaked ground swallows you both, dumping you onto a dreary, gray-tinted playground. You shove yourself up, eyes scanning the empty play structures and sandboxes for him, but you don’t see anything or anyone.

You look down: your body, thank God, but with smaller limbs and paint-splattered overalls. You get on your feet, calling out, “You know, Belos, it was pretty surprising to learn you killed your brother because he wouldn’t let you be an Old-Timey crackhead.”

Does he even know what a crackhead is? Regardless, he doesn’t respond.

“And for the record,” you continue, your voice higher and squeakier—you’d laugh at the sound of it were the situation not so serious. “I’m not joining you because last time I tried, you almost turned me to stone because I wouldn’t let you genocide my friends, which is peak crackhead behavior if you ask me.”

“Happy birthday, mija!” you hear behind you. You instinctively snap your head around at your mother’s voice—then immediately let your shoulders drop. At the table is your mother and father and your collection of stuffed animals, everyone wearing party hats. Your 8^th birthday party, everyone in class invited and yet no one in attendance, although you had told yourself that was okay, because you didn’t really have any friends in class, anyway. Because you didn’t like them, because they were stupid and mean, and totally not because they just didn’t like you.

The table is set: dinosaur tablecloth, dinosaur cake, little magic dollar-store pills for every cup of fruit punch.

Your parents’ bodies frame your empty seat, their heads now houses. Of course. Belos sits on the edge of the bench, idly cutting your stuffed tiger open with a blood-rusted knife. He turns his head towards you, bracing his elbow on the table and his chin on his knuckles. “My poor, sweet, Luz,” he says, shaking his head gently. “I fear your mind has gone worse than mine, because I remember turning you to stone because you li—”

You launch.

After your father’s funeral, you dream of your old house, a ranch-style building you’d broken in as a toddler with your crayons and your paints, with your heights etched along the doorframe and your macaroni art pockmarking the fridge like freckles. You had a tiny garden with blue flowers and a room painted green. You had a hammock in the backyard where your dad liked to read to you.

In the dream, you are running through the house, trying in vain to close the windows and doors: they keep flinging open, keep letting in the cold rain. Something is coming. Something very, very bad is coming, this you know deep in the pit on your gut, this you know like you know your own name, but you can’t keep it out because nothing. will. stay. closed.

You hear Belos’s laughter before you see him trying to climb through your living room window—hair matted and wind-whipped, flesh sloughing off and blackening like his blood had turned to ink.

You see your dream-self as if through a telescope, scurrying up over the couch and ignoring how he slices at your arms and your chest, ignoring his monstrous, incoherent roar, so you can slam the window down on his neck.

You blink. Your arms are healed, dotted only with those mystery bruises you always seem to carry. He’s in front of you, face-down in the anthill that has grown over your father’s grave.

In real life, your mother had furrowed her brow and directed her feelings to the gray sky above, before packing you and your flowers back into the car to go get something with which to kill the ants herself.

You must be in the interim of this memory, or maybe you need to turn back to see little-you and younger-mom coming up the hill with a jug of jolly poison in one hand and fresh flowers in the other. Right now, though, Belos is pushing himself up and spitting out ants, laughing bitterly as he rubs a hand over the back of his unbroken neck.

“Well,” he says. “There goes that plan.” He spits out more dirt, then falls back onto his haunches.

The world crashes so hard it tilts and falls back down, like a painting being corrected.

“I can’t kill you, and you can’t kill me. Neither of us can control where your mind ends and mine begins. What a funny predicament we’ve found ourselves in, haven’t we, Luz?”

“I—”

He cuts you off with another laugh, running a hand back through his hair, clumps coming out between bone-thin fingers. “All this death and destruction because I always have to know better. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

He shifts; you hear bones breaking, flesh ripping, and in the end he’s his child self again—no mask, no sword.

Belos sighs, looking down at his hand, now seemingly all the smaller clasped around his large knife.  “Maybe the Titan is trying to tell me something. What do you think, Luz?”

“It have been more accurate to turn you into a clown.”

You’re still a child yourself, though perhaps a little older than earlier, your hair no longer crazy fingers with bright hairclips for joints.

Suddenly, you feel tiny pinpricks along your skin. A quick downward glance reveals scarlet ants climbing up your legs and into your shorts, that the anthill on your father’s grave is in full bloom, spreading through the grass like thick tree roots.

“See, the difference between you and I, Luz,” he replies, ignoring you as you yelp and hop to bat the ants away, “is that even if I die here, there will be no Witches left to vilify me. I will have slain History itself, and the Isle will be thick with me: so much salt no Witch or deadly flower will ever grow, and a thousand years of acid rain will still not wash me away. What of you? Your body’s been turned into a few orbs of light that have already floated away. When I’m done, there won’t be even a memory of you to martyr. So who’s really lost?”

You stomp down on the glyph you’ve drawn in the cemetery dirt. “Still you.”

Back and forth, a play repeating: you kill him, he kills you; your father dies, Caleb dies; your father has Caleb’s voice, Caleb laughs at clowns until the laugh turns into a cough.

Your father’s head is a house that’s pouring water, that’s cracked and decaying, like a star drawing into itself as it becomes a black hole. Your father’s head pours ale and gets so red it spins around like a top. Caleb’s head is a house on fire, the cellar door his open throat.

Da-dum, Da-dum, goes the Titan’s heart.

In the end, King rips Belos off the Titan’s heart. All the times you killed Belos had stayed his dragon hands, just a bit, because if there’s anything you know about Belos, it’s that he’s a liar.

You finally think of what to say. Too bad it’s too late. Too bad your body is gone, something light and spread out and floating in a warmth that is so calm and so all-encompassing that it almost hurts to flutter your eyelids open—

And in the Earth’s biology I saw a new Evolution

It was as though a New Planet had appeared in space

For death and hell were cast into the sea of nuclear fire…

Your father’s soft words in the air, your father’s soft fingers in your hair, idly brushing your bangs back from your eyes.

The day is blue and bright, clouds so white they almost burn. Beside you, your mother is eating one of the tiny sandwiches she’s packed as your father reads from a slim brown volume. Below, as you turn your head, you see the pale houses of town all packed close together at the bottom of the valley, like eggs wearing little brown hats. You think this is fine weather to go fly a kite in, but you don’t entirely feel like getting up, either.

He reads a little more, about the new species encasing the Earth as One, and then your mother takes the book from him, clearing her throat before she continues:

And there was a New Canticle,

And all other inhabited planets heard the Earth singing

          and it was a love song.

You roll over in your father’s lap, moving your wooden mask to block out the curious eyes of the sun, and go back to sleep.