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Help me . . .
He murdered . . .
My family . . .
I promised I would . . .
Still waiting . . .
To hunt me down . . .
Drowned . . .
He was looking everywhere . . .
Not enough time . . .
Go back . . .
Home, except . . .
Nobody saw . . .
Is my mother . . .
Lonely . . .
Too late now . . .
He was forced to feel their pain. Each individual death cut into his mind with the exact intensity the soul had experienced in their final moments. And there were so many terrible, tragic, unthinkable ways to die. He felt the hollow pinch of starvation, the slow erosion of one’s mind and strength until they were driven to madness, clawing at dried roots and mud just to fill their bodies with something. He felt the slow, corrosive power of poison bleeding into the veins, the blunt force of a stone to the head, the heaving, building agony of four limbs tied and pulled apart. And soon he could not separate the voices from his own.
Please. Make it stop. Please, please, spare me, please, I don’t want this—
“Have you seen enough?”
I jolt back into the present, gasping as if I’ve been underwater myself. My hands shake, and it is with difficulty that I meet the Death God’s gaze.
His face is somber, emotionless, if only a shade paler than usual, yet I cannot help seeing two of him. The god sitting composed on the stone floors of his palace, and the boy shivering on the banks of the Yellow Springs.
Keran. The name lingers like the warmth of the sun even after it has disappeared behind clouds again. I test it out, silent, on my tongue, just to feel the shape of it, but I do not speak it aloud. Danger lies there, in naming your monsters. You risk turning them human, and then they become even harder to kill.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he says tersely. “It is revolting.”
I huff out a weak laugh. “How am I looking at you?”
He does not answer me directly, but he drops his gaze first. “I would rather you go back to what you were doing before. Glare at me again as though you are trying to calculate where to stab me in the heart, if I have one. Mock me with your eyes. Look past me as though I do not exist. Anything but this.”
“You act as if I am powerful enough to affect you.”
“You are powerful. And I am”—he pauses, with something that borders between disbelief and disgust—“affected.”
I blink at him, searching the haughty, cold planes of his face for some sign I had not misheard. “Was that intended as praise?”
“If you choose to think of it as such, I cannot stop you,” he says, still not returning my gaze.
“Well, then, you are lucky I am using my powers for you rather than against you.”
I adjust my position until I am cross-legged, then place both hands closer to my core, my index fingers pointed up, my thumbs pressed together. Then I inhale deeply, shifting my focus inward, shaking my mind free of the Death God’s memories like cobwebs. In their place, I imagine sunlight, strong enough to melt away snow. I envision a room full of familiar faces, all turned to me in awe, smiling, hands reaching out. Rows of banquet tables readied for the announcement of the Celestial Healer, and the applause that follows my name, like heavy rain in the wake of a long, long drought. The news of my promotion spreading, rather than the repeated stories of how my parents had been ready to turn their backs on the Heavens for a few hundred thousand worthless lives. That is all forgotten now, gathering dust in the archives of immortal memory. I am aglow, weightless, the best of the gods. Everything I touch, I heal. Everywhere I go, I am welcomed. And from deep within the Yellow Springs, my mother’s soul watches, proud at last of what I have become.
