He was Heaven’s favorite, once.
He was cast out, once.
My father hadn’t chosen to leave his realm. He hadn’t rejected his brothers, his king, his pantheon. In an eternity together, I had yet to spy an ember of hate for those who’d rejected him, unlike the flame that motivated our enemy.
I was the son of a freedom fighter. It was a role I didn’t take lightly.
“Go,” he said.
I realized I was looking at the door again.
I hedged. “I’m here. I’m listening. It’s just…there’s something on the surface that…”
“Go.”
Five mortal years. I couldn’t have anticipated what a month in Hell would cost me between the ever-shifting clocks and their terrorization of the realms.
The gods had sex and wine and power, butnothingfelt like the worrying impermanence of mortality. My proximity to it introduced me to a new sensation: adrenaline. I stayed on the surface, hiding my face, as I sampled one emotion after another.
It was my first taste at what it might be like for deities to have worshippers; though neither term quite described Shala, nor me. I had no temples, no altars, no name on human lips, hers included. I was a prince of the shadows, a harbinger, a hope for my realm’s future. I was a beacon for those within the immortal lands, not an entity for humans to seek.
Was this godhood?
It didn’t feel like it.
Trailing her curiously from my place behind the veil, helping her find a new village, organizing opportunities, creating blessings—miracles, as she’d call them—so she might thrive.
I spent my days with the barest licks from one feeling after another on my tongue, asking myself the sorts of questions that had no answers. Is that what a human might receive from a god who cared for them? I’d never spent so much time among mortals, and I’d become addicted to the new, the unfamiliar, the curiosity of it all.
This couldn’t be like this between all gods and their humans. I was sure of it.
I’d never encountered a mortal who buzzed with a crystalline soul like Shala. The same shimmering aura I’d watched as she wobbled between life and death had only intensified. Now, I spotted her pearlescence in a crowd of thousands. Despite the black hair she covered whenever she left the house, without the blush to her golden cheeks, free from the cadence of her laugh or seriousness of her dark eyes, the glimmer lingered.
Even the uneventful fascinated me.
Tonight, she was grinding barley into flour, and I couldn’t look away.
The unpleasant scraping of basalt mortar and pestle mixed with Shala’s gentle humming. Her tune dipped, climbed, then fell, over and over again. This low, fractured lullaby, twisted in some curious minor chord, belonged to no one but her.
Such a simple act: humming a haunting song of her own design.
She was a musician. A creator. A talent.
I stared, leaning closer than I intended, as I fixated on the crude, bare, hominess of what she’d made. Gods, kings, fae, and the lands of eternal were robbed of the profundity that lived in simplicity.
Utterly fascinating.
Her song was unbroken as she took a jar of fresh water and splashed it into the pulpy grains. She used the back of her hand to move her hair out of her face as she focused on her task, softmusic never leaving her lips. She didn’t need to do this herself. She had servants now. But she seemed to enjoy the labor, which I found fascinating.
A thin, glass-like fracture hinted at an ambush from my side of the veil an instant before I saw her.
“You’re growing soft, brother.” Izi. The taunting voice of my sister’s humorless smile forced me to turn away from the human.
It took a flash before I understood who’d entered.
While the world was as much hers as it was mine, I didn’t like her here.
“We can’t all be forged from lust and shadow, Izi,” I replied. I hoped she couldn’t hear my thinly hidden irritation. “Some of us have other things to do.”
