Shades in Shadow

THE GOD WITHOUT A NAME

“Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a god imprisoned here. He was a terrible, beautiful, angry god, and by night when he roamed these white halls, everyone feared him. But by day, the god slept. And the body, the living mortal flesh that was his ball and chain, got to have a life of its own.”

I inhaled, understanding, just not believing. He was speaking of the Nightlord, of course—but the body that lived by day was…?

Near the window, Hado folded his arms. I saw this easily, despite the window’s darkness, because he was darker still.

“It wasn’t much of a life, mind you,” he said. “All the people who feared the god did not fear the man. They quickly learned they could do things to the man that the god would not tolerate. So the man lived his life in increments, born with every dawn, dying with every sunset. Hating every moment of it. For two. Thousand. Years.”

He glanced back at me. I gaped at him.

“Until suddenly one day, the man became free.” Hado spread his arms. “He spent the first night of his existence gazing at the stars and weeping. But the next morning, he realized something. Though he could finally die, as he had dreamt of doing for centuries, he did not want to. He had been given a life at last, a whole life all his own. Dreams of his own. It would have been…wrong…to waste that.”

—The Broken Kingdoms, chapter 17, “A Golden Chain (encaustic on canvas)”

The god without a name stands at the tip of the Pier of Sky, toes balancing easily on its all-but-useless railing as he gazes down at the world spread below.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” says Yeine, appearing behind him.

He does not look back at her, because he doesn’t need to. Her presence is everywhere around him: in the infinitesimal motes of pollen drifting on the city’s updraft, in the leaves of the World Tree that spread above, in the unseen motes of life that wriggle and devour each other along his own skin. Curious, he lifts a hand and is not very surprised that he can see those motes now, with a slight adjustment of perspective. Once he believes he can see them, he can. So simple.

He believes the motes dead, and they die.

A moment later they twitch back to life.

He sighs and turns at last to look at her over his shoulder. She’s sitting on the railing a few feet back, her bare feet dangling over the half-mile drop, her brief curls stirring a little in the occasional gust. It’s not her, of course. Not wholly her. The totality of what she is spreads, vast and viral, across all of existence and beyond it. This is just the fragment of attention she has chosen to spare for him.

“Should I be honored?” he muses aloud, not really expecting an answer.

Yeine shrugs. “Maybe I should be.”

“Humility does not become you, Gray Lady.”

“Nor you, so I don’t know why you brought it up.”

He smiles a little, reflexively. He never actually feels like smiling, but he has survived by the skillful mimicry of expressions for too long to stop doing it now. Then he turns back to the view, gazing out over the city and the night-dark landscape, feeling the whole of the world within the scope of his perception. He could perceive so much more, with only an adjustment of his interests. He is interested in so little, however. Just the world will do.

He asks, “Do you plan to stop me, if I decide to kill myself?”

“No. Why would I? Your life is yours to do with as you please.”

“Ah. So quickly do we abandon the human guise.”

“You were never human.”

“Technically, I was.” It really is only a technicality, though. Once he was half human—aware and himself and made of delicate, magicless flesh by day. With the setting of the sun, his consciousness vanished, subsuming itself into another’s until the coming of dawn. Two thousand years like so, or was it only a thousand? Perhaps he shouldn’t count the rest times. But humans still don’t live to be a thousand years old.

She’s right; he was never human. Now, however, he is something else entirely, and the change does not please him at all.

“But,” he drawls at last, “humans die. I couldn’t. So sad.”

He hears Yeine shift a little, drawing up her legs and resting her feet on the railing. If she’d been mortal, she’d have been a fool to sit that way; one strong gust would have sent her to her death. The same applied to him, standing on the railing like this…or it would have, if he’d been human.

“Is it jealousy, then?” she asks. “Is that what you feel now, looking down on them, knowing what you are? Would you rather I had made you one of them?”

He would. And yes, he is jealous of their freedom to die. But he will never tell her that.

“What I feel,” he says slowly, careful to keep to partial truths because she will sense a lie, “is…curiosity. For what I can do and how much you’ll let me do. I was a slave for centuries, after all. It’s my nature to test the length and quality of my chains.”

“That isn’t your nature.” She shrugs. He can see that through his skin, because his eyes are irrelevant now. “I can’t tell what is. But this much I’m sure of: you’re too damned proud to submit to anyone or anything, even your own self-pity. Even when you have no choice.”

There is always a choice. From the Arameri vaults, he has stolen a powder made from Oree Shoth’s blood for the day of his own choosing. But it is dangerous to think of these things in Yeine’s presence; gods are uncannily perceptive.

“You could have told me,” he says, to distract both her and himself. “I wasted thirty years trying to be human.”

“What’s thirty years to you?”

Nothing, and they both know it. But…“I wouldn’t have spent them here.”

Here is the palace called Sky, where he has spent thirty years scheming and striving for victory in a dangerous game that in retrospect wasn’t really all that dangerous for him. He has earned wealth and power and one precious name for himself: Hado Arameri, fullblood, third in line to a crownless throne. With only a few judicious poisonings—or a flick of his will—that throne could be his. But doing so now would be like all his other victories, all his other names: hollow.

“Every child needs a womb,” Yeine says airily. Which makes no sense, because she has never given birth, and she knows full well that he was never born.

But then…he had known, on some level, that he was not human. Denial made the process of discovery a slow thing, logic fighting its way through reluctance and completely irrational distaste until even he could not deny the truth. Mortals cut themselves but did not heal in moments. Mortals did not hear wind blowing on the other side of the world. Mortals aged, no matter how fit or well fed. Perhaps this is what she means. The past thirty years have been necessary, a safe stasis in which he could feel himself simple and small before discovering the reality that he is vast and strange. And now, when he can no longer deny the truth, when there are no more illusions to nourish his childish hopes…

He looks down at the world and thinks, again, how easy it would be to destroy. If he can’t have it, neither should they.

Then he turns and hops down onto the plank of daystone that is the Pier, heading back into the palace. She says nothing as he brushes past.

The god without a name walks around the world for the sheer novelty of it. The underwater parts are better than the aboveground. Sea volcanoes and glowing monsters in the dark are interesting. Humans, alas, hold little mystery for him.

He enjoys it all, regardless. Going wherever he wants, at whatever pace he wants, for as long as he wants. That part will never grow old.

When he reaches the coast of the Senm continent again, walking up naked from the sea amid crabs and seagulls, he is unsurprised to find Yeine sitting there on a blanket. Her hair is wet, as though she’s been swimming, and he recalls that her mortal life was spent in a landlocked forest nation. She smiles when he sits down beside her.

“Why do you bother?” he asks, by way of greeting. “I don’t even like you.”

She laughs. She’s happier as a god than she ever was as a mortal, but he knows better than to point that out to her. “You don’t like anyone. And why do my little visits bother you? If you really don’t care about them.”

“Maybe I find them annoying.”

“Lies. Look at this.” She holds out something, and in spite of himself, he is intrigued enough to look. She’s holding a nautilus; it trembles as it lies in her hands, feebly trying to pump water that does not exist through its hyponome.

“I watch things die all the time,” he complains. That’s the jealousy talking.

“So do I. I kill most of them. But I’m not killing this one. Look inside.” He does, and almost flinches as he perceives small worms within the creature’s body, tearing at its flesh with sharp teeth. They’ve already carved a bloody hollow for themselves near—but not through—a vital organ. Each of the nautilus’s tremors coincides with a bite.

Without thinking, he moves a hand to kill the nautilus. She takes his hand to forestall him. “What are you doing?”

It’s amazing that he has to say this. “Why are you letting it suffer?”

“Did you look?” At his scowl, she rolls her eyes. “Look deeper.”

So he does, though there is bitter bile in his mouth as he endures the creature’s suffering. The worms are just trying to survive, fine, but it feels wrong that they leave their prey alive while they do so. It’s wrong for suffering to continue for one minute, let alone endlessly, when death is available—

And then, belatedly, he sees what he did not before. Within the nautilus are her eggs, almost ripe and ready for laying. Even as she dies, the mother nautilus pumps strength to these children of hers. Strength, and something more.

“She chose their father for one reason,” Yeine says, “and that is because he had no parasites within him. Most of these, his children, will be immune to the death she suffers. Many will suffer other deaths, just as bad. Life is harsh in the sea.” Yes. He’s seen that. “But a few will survive. If she lasts long enough, she can lay these eggs before they kill her, and the parasites won’t be able to touch them.”

The creature lacks the mind to feel vindictive pleasure, but he feels plenty of it on her behalf. “Then…”

Yeine closes her hand and the nautilus vanishes. “I suppose we’ll have to see. She’ll take no harm from my playing—not that that will help much.”

He watches her, wondering if he is this to her: a struggling, weak thing infected with the devouring parasite of mortal thought. An experiment that might—might—manage to produce a few good outcomes before he fails.

She throws him a skeptical look. “You think I have nothing better to do than give you object lessons about things you already know?”

So much for that, then. “Why did you show me the nautilus?”

“I just thought it was interesting.” She gets to her feet and stretches. She’s naked, too, probably because she was swimming earlier, and reflexively he thinks about sex. That was his job for a long time, after all. He doesn’t have to do that, not anymore, but the habit is hard to break. This annoys him.

“How’s my other half?” he asks, to be cruel and to distract himself. “You and Nahadoth getting along? His black hole finding your balance beam with no trouble and all that?”

She chuckles. “You’re very predictable. He doesn’t ask about you at all, you know. Why would he?”

She takes off, running into the ocean and jumping gleefully into a wave that is cresting near the shore. He leaves while she’s preoccupied so she won’t see how much her words have hurt him.

The god without a name doesn’t seek out other gods, but he doesn’t hide from them, either. Their attention is a palpable thing, intermittent. He knows when the oldest ones notice and ignore him. The younger ones watch him, a few coming to visit, and he ignores them in turn until they go away. He spends time with mortals but does not care about them. He leaves the planet sometimes, visits others that lack life altogether, and finds his greatest peace there.

Through it all, he feels a sense of disquiet. Something is missing. Something is wrong.

Well. What else is new?

“Well, you could use a name,” Yeine says when he finally seeks her out.

They are in the gods’ realm, in a pocket of it that she has shaped to look like a rain forest. It isn’t. Small entities swim through the vineflowers like fish, watching him; he can feel their intelligence, but he’s not sure what they are. Feral eyes watch from beneath palm fronds: some of his less-comprehensible siblings. She sits on the mossy branchroot of a big old tree, which looks exactly like the World Tree of Sky. There’s even a tiny white crystalline lump in the first crotch of the tree, which he’s tempted to look at more closely. He resists the urge and sits beside her.

“I have a name,” he says. He goes by “Ahad” now, when mortals need to speak to him.

“No, a real name. One of your own. Or two, or three, but one would be a good start.” She looks thoughtful, tapping her fingers against her chin, and he scowls.

“I don’t want one from you.”

“Why not? For all intents and purposes, I’m your mother.”

“I have no mother.” Her face twitches, and belatedly he realizes this has hurt her. It gives him a vicious sense of pleasure for a moment, and then that fades. He is not the twisted thing he used to be, and he dislikes resorting to old habits. He amends, more gently, “I’ll find my own name.”

She sighs. He hates that she has forgiven him already. “All right. As for the rest…” She shrugs. “You don’t understand yourself.”

His nature, as gods call it. His affinity, his focus, whatever, he doesn’t know the secret special thing that nourishes and completes him and will make him strong. He’s spent a while trying to teach himself the gods’ language, which makes no sense to him beyond the most rudimentary level, and all of its vocabulary and conceptualizations are laced through with this understanding. Maybe if gods weren’t all crazy, their language wouldn’t be such an exercise in futility for him.

“Thanks for telling me what I already know,” he says nastily, rising and dusting off his butt. No telling what, or who, he might pick up here. “You’re always so good at that.”

Her jaw muscles flex so sharply that he wonders what she almost said—or almost became—in reaction to his words. But what she says is, “This is hard for me, too, all right?” Then she sighs. “I’d been hoping we could help each other, you and I.”

“Help? What the hells do you need help with?”

She looks truly annoyed now. “We two are the youngest of the gods, right now. And we were both human—more or less.” She adds this quickly when he sneers. “It’s a handicap that none of the other gods know how to cope with. But we share it, and so maybe…if we work together…”

She holds out a hand then, and he looks at it. An offer. An appeal. A friend. He wants to reach for it. Oh gods, how he wants to reach for it.

But he’s tried such things before. Tried to care about others, only to find that he is unimportant to them. Tried to trust, and been betrayed. So he hesitates.

Then his lungs lock and his belly twists and all his muscles twist and fray apart, and he can do nothing but clutch himself and flee before he falls to pieces in front of her. (Of all of them, he cannot bear to seem weak to her.) The realm, which is half alive anyway, pulls him to a place that is better for him, full of silence and dark closeness and comfort, and there over time he is able to recover. When he does, he re-forms a material body so that he can laugh, bitterly, to himself.

He doesn’t know his nature, but now he knows his antithesis. And isn’t it perfect? Fear is what will one day destroy him.

The god without a name experiments, because after all, he is curious.

There’s a problem right away: not much really frightens him. Nihilism apparently has that effect. He does not fear pain because he’s known too much of it. Likewise degradation, mutilation, despair, or anything of the sort. What would frighten him is not merely the experience of these things, but the possibility that they might continue. If he can see an end, anything is easy to endure.

And what is the opposite of fear? Courage, maybe. No, too easy. Gods are never simple. (He will not be simple.) Apathy? If that was his nature, he would be the most powerful godling in all creation. He tries on each of these anyway, placing himself in test scenarios. He picks a fight with a stronger godling and loses badly. Takes him several years to recover. Then he visits a number of hells, deliberately spending a few days in each of the ones he finds most distasteful. Alas, they are nothing compared to Sky’s worst, and just knowing he can leave whenever he wants dulls their sting. He visits the Maelstrom, and oh yes, it’s frightening, not the least because it may not actually kill him. Fall into it and suffer eternal joy, maybe, or eternal bad jokes told by a wooden-eared comedian. But the greatest likelihood of being swallowed by it is instant death, and that is something he’s craved too long to fear now.

All this tells him one thing, though: not just any fear will harm him. Only a particular sort of fear does the trick. He feels discomfort whenever he fears actions that could have the effect of making him closer to others. It is the fear of intimacy that counteracts his nature. So he travels back to the mortal realm and becomes a whore.

That does not go well. He stops because he detests cleaning up bodies.

Still, he learns from the experience. Users of any kind will always be in danger from him. Too much like his old life, parasites gnawing at sore spots in his scarred vitals, but he is not Yeine; he will not abide such filth. Anyway, he’s not a nautilus; gods do not evolve through their children. He must develop his own immunity to what hurts him.

He finds that other whores are safe from him. He does not accidentally kill them, even when he couples with them. This is because they know what it is to be used, and they share the loathing of users with him; this becomes something they can bond over. An adjustment: he becomes a pimp instead, quietly driving away the other pimps, taking good care of his girls and his boys and his ask-me-firsts in ways that no mere mortal could.

The ones who crave drugs or drink, he heals or satisfies as they wish. He kills those users who would do more than the usual harm—and he can be in many places at once to do so. The streets he works acquire a reputation. Other whores come begging him to take over their streets, and he expands his territory cautiously. But no other godlings are interested in this particular demesne of mortal life; he has no competition. A few times mortal criminals try to kill him. Mercilessly he obliterates their organizations’ leadership and takes over, mostly because he’s bored and partly because stupidity annoys him. Thus does he accidentally end up in control of nearly all the city’s organized crime.

Well. That’s something new.

It is fascinating. There are intimacies to be courted here, too, the bonds that keep hard people together in a hard business, and those bonds are strong—like family, like comrades in war, like love, though leavened with generous portions of resentment and ambition and greed. He mostly lets them do whatever they like so long as they don’t hurt too many people and don’t destroy the business. Despite such careless control, the organization thrives and grows wealthy and strong.

There’s a problem one day. The lieutenants report it and he grows curious enough to go and investigate. In one area of town where he has found no pimps to kill, there are many whores. They run themselves and have fought hard for their independence. When he approaches their spokeswoman, she curses him, tells him they would rather die than be owned. “Yes,” he says admiringly, and feels the first surge of something that must be his nature. It is too unfocused for him to grasp.

The passion of his response surprises her into silence. (It surprises him, too.) He asks the woman what she and her comrades want. She gives him a list of demands that would make most criminal lords laugh. Her hand trembles as she hands it to him, in fact. She expects to die—but she did not lie; she is willing, if by her death her comrades can be protected. Yes, yes, gods yes. He considers the logistics only long enough to figure out how it might be done, vanishes and has a few conversations, then comes back and offers her his hand. Bemused, she takes it. “Partners?” he suggests, and when she nods, that flutter is there again. He feels good. This is good for him. He wants more.

He gives his new partner everything she wants. He buys houses all over the city and lets her choose the staff. The whores may live in them or off-site as they choose. Their housing is paid for—because after all, their beds are a place of work. Their medical care is paid for. He hires servants to see to their material needs, nannies to tend their children. His foot soldiers are permitted to visit the houses only if they can behave. He kills the ones who don’t; he has precious little patience. They mostly behave anyway, because they already know this about him.

Thugs gossip like fishermen. They go away satisfied and awed and spread the word, and others quickly begin to come. Some are hungry to sample whores who regard themselves and are treated as people—such a rare thing in this world. Some are merely curious. His women have stretch marks and fat rolls, and his men don’t have giant prehensile penises or lantern jaws, but the sex is apparently amazing anyway. There’s a house for everyone: those who crave simple pleasures and those whose driving impulses are more complex. Those who need and those who have only vague interest. If there is pain, it is by mutual agreement. If there is perversion…well, that is a matter of perspective.

He stops calling them whores. What they do is too skillful a thing for such a simplistic word. They are the residents who make these houses homes; they are sexual engineers; they are artisans of flesh and emotion. He is unsurprised, therefore, when one of his godling siblings comes to him, sheepishly requesting aid. She has always been curious, but mortals make her nervous. So delicate, so strange. He pairs her with his partner, that so-wise woman who demanded the earth from him and got the heavens…and then it all goes wrong.

They fall in love.

They fall in love, damn it.

It’s so wrong. How can she do this to him? He has given her everything. He accepts his partner’s resignation with bitter, bitter grace; it is only another betrayal. She should know better. Her lover will only turn on her. Lovers always do. He tells her this, along with a choice few other cruel things, until she gives him a look so pitying that it shuts him up.

“You have to try anyway,” she says gently. “Even if you know they’ll hurt you. That’s the whole point.”

But he was trying.

It hurts so much when she leaves that he is sick with it. He curls alone in the room he rarely visits, in the enormous bed that he never sleeps in—he hates sleep—and shakes for hours, with the door and windows sealed shut and blackened so that no one will see.

Time heals. The god without a name recovers, slowly. Not fully.

Other godlings come, after the first one’s glowing report. Some want to be clients and some want to join the artisans, and finally he realizes he’ll have to do something about this.

So he sets up one last house, this one in the poorest area of the city—but quietly, because he is perverse, he makes it the most special of them. He works magic into the walls as they are built: whatever the clients bring with them will be returned threefold. Beauty for beauty, contempt for contempt. He requires the godlings to learn their trade from the mortals. The mortals think this is hilarious, but it is only wisdom; mortals are the experts in this. Mortals are strong…and he knows, better than anyone, how utterly useless gods can be.

But the experiment, the experiment! He glories in it, quietly. Once his special house is ready, he sends invitations to the sorts of people he wants as clients and turns away most who come soliciting. This must be a thing of privilege, he thinks, feels instinctively—but not the sort of privilege that can be bought with money or fortune of birth. When clients come, he charges whatever they can afford. Once, on impulse, he brings in a homeless woman, who does nothing but weep in his arms all night. That’s all she needs. When she is done, though, she’s better. Not healed, but happy. He hires her as the housekeeper.

He names the house the Arms of Night. Perhaps Nahadoth finds it amusing, if Nahadoth is paying attention at all.

(He sometimes wishes he’d taken Yeine’s hand. She does not return to him again. Beyond this regret, he feels nothing. It is safer this way.)

Meanwhile, the house’s reputation grows. His criminal enterprise does, too, until his power rivals that of the Arameri. He works mostly through proxies now, having long since turned over management of the syndicate and his various businesses to others (because it got boring), though he retains direct proprietorship of the Arms (because it isn’t). One day there are overtures from a rival group, seeking alliance. He ignores them. The rival group sends him a message anyway—via his own shadow, which comes to life and speaks to him. They are an organization of godlings, and they have a proposition that they are certain will interest him. Curiosity outweighs annoyance. He agrees.

The woman who walks into his office is everything he should hate. She radiates strength like a shroud of flame and wears her beauty as a shield for the blades of her tongue and mind. The way that she looks at him puts him instantly on edge. Arameri looked at him like that, back when he belonged to them. But then he sees her frown and twitch her gaze away, and instantly he understands. Mortals should not have natures, not like gods, but this one almost does. She is so much her father’s daughter that she wants him instantly—he is the shadow of her father’s lover, after all. But. She is so much her mother’s daughter that she rejects that echoed desire as simplistic and base.

How interesting that she refuses to merely lust for him. A perverse part of him wants to test this. Seduction will not work, he guesses at once; she will reject that, too. But something more than seduction perhaps…? Something he has never tried before. He will befriend her, then, if she can be friended. He will…like her. As an academic exercise.

Ah, and she tries the same with him. She will not lust, will not be driven like an animal by half-divine instincts…but she will consider. She will, if she finds him worthy, choose.

The proposal she brings is ridiculous. He’s not interested in protecting gods or mortals; let them all kill each other. It’s laughable that Itempas has chosen this method for his atonement. It will never work.

He agrees anyway so that he can see her again.

The Maelstrom pays a visit. The world doesn’t end. Alas. Sieh does end, though; stupid, ridiculous Sieh. Took him long enough.

Glee gives him a name.

Perhaps being immortal…is not wholly pointless.

Much, much later, the god whose name no one else will ever know stands atop the Pier of Sky, which now is little more than a shard of rubble jutting out from the world’s most magnificent grave cairn. It’s not very stable, but he’ll be all right. He’s a god. That’s…all right, too. Not terrible, at least. Could be better.

He knows the manifestation of his other, former self the way he knows his own skin. (When he has skin.) It’s strange, and always will be, to see a face that so reflects his own, though of course his is the inferior copy. For countless aeons they communicated with each other only through messages written on fogged mirrors and the like. (Toward the end, the only thing he ever wrote was, “How much longer?” And Nahadoth would answer, “Not long now.”) They stand in silence awhile, looking at each other for the second time.

“You’ve found yourself,” Nahadoth says.

“Mmm-hmm. Even got a name now.” Two, actually, one of them bestowed upon him by his fellow godlings. He hates it: Beloved. But at least he has the other name. It is precious. With it, everything is easier to endure.

Nahadoth nods. “I’m glad to see you well.”

“And I you.” He gazes at the god as hungrily as he gazes at the night sky—not that there’s a real difference. He can never get enough of such terrible beauty. But there are courtesies to be exchanged, commiserations. “So. About Sieh.”

“He is dead.” The words are careless, and the god’s voice is inflectionless. It is a lie. Nahadoth’s head tilts up, toward the mirror of the starry sky. “I think.”

“You think?”

“There is…something.” The god’s eyes have narrowed, as though he is squinting across an unimaginable distance in an effort to see something he can barely make out. “A suspicion, on the other side of nothingness.”

Sieh was a horrible father and a wretched friend and a barely competent employee, completely unworthy of being missed or mourned. But. “What do you suspect?”

That luminous head shakes. “I will not discuss it. The most minute possibilities are affected by observation.” As if to emphasize this, Nahadoth then pins him with a glance. “What are your intentions now?”

How amusing to see the living embodiment of darkness and chaos change the subject. But this conversation with Nahadoth is interesting enough that Nahadoth’s shadow decides to play along. “Now? I intend to live, as Yeine bade me.”

As if speaking her name summons her, there is a flicker and Yeine appears, too. For the god whose name is a precious, secret thing, this makes him happier than he will ever let either of them see.

“About time,” she says. She’s smiling.

He shrugs. The shrug is another lie. He’s gotten it honestly. “Well, I’m not very good at having parents. You can’t expect me to listen to everything you say.” This makes her laugh, and he feels warm inside.

“Itempas’s daughter will not last,” Nahadoth says suddenly, as if he can’t help but cast a shadow over any moment of brightness.

It would be worse to have never met her. “She’ll die when she dies. When that happens, I’ll move on.” He has promised her this. “She might get tired of me before that, anyway.” That will hurt, too, if it happens. But he has to try, even if he knows she’ll hurt him. That’s the whole point.

Yeine steps closer to Nahadoth. They don’t touch in flesh, but the drifting smoke of him twitches toward her, and she lifts a hand to twirl it ’round one finger. This isn’t really an idle gesture; there’s power in it. Her other fingers begin to move, weaving the smoke she’s spun, and she grins. “I don’t think you’ll be rid of her that easily.”

Damn meddling. He narrows his eyes. “What are you doing?”

“She cannot be made immortal,” Nahadoth says, watching Yeine’s fingers form ever-more-complex one-handed cats’ cradles out of his substance. “We learned that long ago, with our other mortal children.”

“But the skein of her life can be spun a bit longer,” Yeine suggests, lifting her other hand now, doing something he can’t see with her thumbs. “Stretched to its natural limit, so to speak. Do you think she’ll mind?”

“Perhaps you should ask her.” Of course they will not. Gods.

“She knows how to end herself, should she feel the need.” This is a boon that only he out of all of them understands fully, having endured life without that escape option. Yeine’s brow furrows in concentration. “It helps that she has so much of Itempas in her. She is steadiness, stability…Ah. There.” She drops her hands, the weave vanishing before he can fathom more than a few strands of it. “This is not just for you, mind.”

Because Glee is valuable in her own right—to the world that Yeine values so much, and for Nahadoth, as a weapon against Itempas. That is a cynical interpretation, perhaps, but it is also true. Still…he starts to ask how much more time they’ve given Glee, then closes his mouth. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Every moment will be a blessing.

But he licks his lips, unsure of what to say. He has reason to be suspicious of favors.

Nahadoth looks amused. Yeine looks sour. “It wouldn’t kill you to show gratitude,” she says. “Though I suppose I’ll have to get used to your terrible manners. With Sieh gone…” She falters, just a little, then pushes on. Her smile is genuine, if tinged with sadness. “Well. In most families, it’s the youngest who ends up spoiled.” They vanish then, leaving him alone with his discomfiture.

He is still uncertain if he likes being a god at all, let alone a god in this pantheon.

He doesn’t hate it anymore, though, and that is something. He likes being alive, too. That feeling is new and altogether strange, and he knows it won’t last forever. Nothing good ever does. But perhaps…he can learn to like being happy. While it lasts.

(Though he will never say any of this out loud. He has a reputation to maintain.)

Conjuring a cheroot, he stands, stretches, and heads home to the life he has made.