Page 29

He slumps down on the floor by the foot of my bed, breathing tightly. “What you said before. About the pain. Can you stop it?”

I move to sit across from him, careful to leave a few feet of distance. “Yes. If you cooperate, I should be able to.”

“Do it, then.” He tilts his head back, squeezes his eyes shut. “Anything. Whatever you need. Just make it stop.”

“All right.” I hesitate, try to hide my surprise. “Is it . . . particularly painful this morning?”

He nods, just once. His voice is hoarse. “Like the world is being split open.”

It should not matter so much. I should not be feeling sorry for him; I should not be feeling for him in the first place. But my chest seizes, and it is not logic or debts or costs that I’m thinking of as I push up my sleeves and hold out my hands, letting my power rise like the ocean waves, rolling forward—and stopping abruptly, as if slammed against a brick wall. No matter how much pressure I apply, the barrier won’t budge. I can only see the murky darkness, the edges of his pain but not the root.

I glance up at the Death God. His jaw is locked, his body straining back from me, the way one would shy away from an open flame. He wears no armor, yet he looks as if he is about to go to war.

“If you truly want me to help you,” I tell him, keeping my voice calm but firm, “you must show me. Otherwise, nothing I do will work.”

A beat of silence passes.

He breathes in tightly, then moves his head the slightest fraction.

And he does.

He shows me everything, starting from the very beginning.

I see the palace he had grown up in, with sloping, emerald-tiled roofs and a courtyard sheltered by pear trees and a little pond filled with golden koi and a moon gate leading into the Celestial Gardens. His name, back when he had one and not just a title, was Keran. His father was a god of wealth—one of many, popular among the mortals and especially among the merchants, who polished his statues every day in hopes he’d repay them with coins. He was often confused for a god of fortune, but it seemed that to most mortals, the two were the same: Money was the most direct manifestation of good fortune. His mother, he did not know. The rumors went that she was a palace attendant, the lowest of the immortals, and had been sent away before he could stand. He had tried looking for her, begging for any details, but his father did not like talking about it. His father did not like talking about much at all—at least, not to him. With the other gods, he had a seemingly endless supply of things to say, important opinions to express about the world, about politics, about the best flavor of wine, about the latest promotion in the Celestial Palace and who ought to be blamed for the drought in the Mortal Realm and how fragile human empires were. How fragile humans themselves were. He often saw the older gods walking together down the corridors or sitting in lake-facing pavilions, stroking their silver beards over chess boards and waving a hand for more tea. Yet, alone with him in the palace, his father grew serious, distant, speaking in one-word answers or commands. The vast rooms were oppressive in their silence, and sometimes he found himself wanting to cry out, to scream, if only to break free from it.

As a child, he had assumed that he must have done something wrong to upset his father. Growing up, he had realized it was not what he had done at all, but what he was marked as: the future Death God. As loathed as a god of wealth was loved; as unwanted as a god of beauty was desired. Gods of every niche interest and specialty could find a comfortable home in the bronze-dusted clouds of the Celestial Realm, but this fate made it an impossibility for him alone.

Still, he hoped.

He fetched his father chrysanthemum tea by hand rather than by magic just to show his sincerity; he learned his father’s favorite poems and tidied the scrolls in the study; he never cried, never disobeyed, never protested when his father hid him from guests like he was a shameful secret.

Hope was a monstrosity that could feed on the most meager scraps—sometimes imagined meals. The smallest smile would have sustained it, the slightest nod or pat on the head. But even hope could not survive on nothing. Eventually, the dust settled, and the truth became clear: His father hated him, and he resented the fact that after everything, all the disappointments he’d harbored, he could not fully hate his father back.

What broke the suffocating silence in the end was not a kind word, or the setting down of two bowls at the dinner table instead of one, but the cold clap of a drum.

The dreaded sound that signaled the Death God’s ritual.

He had walked alone out of the Celestial Realm, his shoulders so stiff they felt sore, his hands trembling with fear. His father had not come to say goodbye. Had not even acknowledged the occasion, the torture that lay ahead. The other gods had gathered to watch him the way people gathered to witness executions, all of them murmuring to each other, their faces pulled apart with shock and disgust and horror. All of them keeping their distance, as if they would die simply by being within close proximity to him. The wide stone lane seemed to stretch on for an eternity. One child had been pushing and shoving against his friends for a better view, and when the crowd swelled and briefly broke, the child had stumbled forward, falling right into his path. Gasps cut through the air. And though it was a foolish thing to do, he’d crouched down by instinct, lifting a hand to help the child up—

The child shrieked and flinched back as if he’d lifted a spear.

He hid his hurt. He was good at that by now.

If his heart were a house, all the chambers would have long been emptied, the bare floors frozen over, the windowsills dusted with snow.

When he finally reached the border between one realm and the next, the cliff which dropped straight into the darkness of the Night Realm, he had looked back. At the rising mountains and shining waterfalls, the soft aureate mist and white-feathered cranes, the grand, gleaming structures of the Celestial Palace, a paradise in the Heavens. And he had looked into the loathsome, sharp-toothed faces of the gods. Those the mortals built shrines and statues for, their temples warmed by smoke carrying pleas, prayers, wishes, dreams. There was no mercy to be found, no concern for him, though they all knew what he would be enduring. Not even pity.

He tore his gaze away and stepped silently out from the edge of the precipice, letting the wind envelop him as he fell, the world dissolving to black. In a way, the darkness was more familiar to him than the luster of the Celestial Realm had ever been.

But he could not quite quell the fear gnawing at his stomach when he arrived at the Yellow Springs.

The black water lapped at his feet. The cold stung his face. This was where the ritual took place. He needed to submerge himself in those depths and survive it, somehow.

His teeth chattered madly as he undressed, removing first the heavy brocade cloak, then the broad sash around his waist, then the layers of lilac satin until he stood in only his white inner robes. He took a great, gasping breath and dove headfirst into the currents. Better a quick pain than a slow one, he’d thought. He had believed himself smart for the strategy.

But there was no strategy at all, nothing that could have made the torment more bearable. The only thing he could do was bear it.

Underwater, his mouth opened in a silent scream. All the souls of the deceased swarmed around him, clinging to the first sign of life, hungry and desperate and frenzied. Hundreds of thousands of voices, shrieking at once: