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Sometimes, the dreams begin as they always do: He is standing in the dark, gazing down at a knife.

He never hesitates before picking it up. Never feels any tremble of fear. He assesses it with a strategist’s mindset, weighing it in his palms, running a finger over the serrated edge, preparing for the next step. During such moments he almost seems to be somebody else, an outsider, a witness, as if there is a great, insurmountable distance between his mind and his body. He wonders: Which way will be fastest? Most effective? What is the best place to cut? How can he keep his hand on the hilt if he starts bleeding out?

The relief of dreams like these—and the crushing disappointment, when he wakes—is that he believes it will work. When he calmly lifts the knife to his own throat, he is certain that he can succeed. Not long now, and he will be freed from himself, from this choking hatred, this unbearable heaviness in his lungs. Nobody will grieve him. The world will celebrate. The moral of every legend is that the monster should be slaughtered, and he is both self-aware enough to know that he is the monster and jaded enough to know that no hero is coming to do the task for him. He doesn’t even flinch when the blade presses into his skin, when he feels the hot blood welling up around the cut—

But then the dream changes, and she is there.

She is furious as she seizes the knife, her hands wrapping around his. They’re warm. So blissfully warm, and it’s not until now that he realizes he is freezing. She tries to yank the weapon away from him, but he will not budge, and the two of them are caught in a game of push and pull, the knife suspended between them, shivering against his neck from both their efforts.

“Stop this,” she demands. “You achieve nothing by choosing to destroy yourself.”

“You want me gone too,” he reasons with her. “You, of all people, should want me gone.”

But she won’t listen. She never listens. “Drop the knife.”

“No.”

“You must. There has to be something you want to live for.”

“I cannot think of anything,” he says, but as he meets those radiant, black-lashed eyes, he wonders if this is entirely true.

She notices him falter and tugs the knife away from him—but something goes wrong. He cannot see how it happens, cannot even comprehend it, but the knife pierces her chest. She gasps, a sound that cuts through his bones. He sees red. His hands—they are covered in her blood, and he needs to save her, but everything he does only drives the knife in deeper. And he should have known. They have told him this his entire life. Everything he touches will die.

“Everything you touch will die.”

Sometimes, the dream is more a memory.

He is still a child, and the other boys sneer at him with such overt revulsion that he feels he has been drenched in something corrosive. If only he could cleanse himself of it, scrub his skin raw, just for them to stop looking at him like that. He knows by now not to betray any emotion, though. That only makes it worse.

“We’ve worked out the solution,” one of the boys says, stepping forward across the Celestial Gardens, blades of emerald grass turning gold under his feet. A deliberate trick, done for the sole purpose of showing off that he has mastered his powers earlier than the others. In time, he will become a god of wealth, like the Death God’s father. This, perhaps, is the son his father had wanted. “So long as you do not touch anything, you cannot kill. We’re doing everybody a great favor, you see.”

He stares up at the boy, foreboding trickling down his spine. “What do you mean?”

The boy does not reply to him. “Grab his robes,” he instructs the others. “Be careful not to touch his skin.”

Fingers grip his arms and legs, latching on so tight he is sure they will leave behind red dents. He does not have the energy to struggle. He simply lets it happen, hopes it will be over soon.

A flame blazes in his peripheral vision.

Then it is thrust into his face, close, too close. He can smell the smoke, the fire licking at the threads in his robes.

“Hold him,” the boy commands.

They force his hands down, and this time he does struggle, out of sheer instinct. He writhes and shies away from the open flame, but there are too many of them, and he has not been taught anything about his powers like they have. A waste, the instructors had said, kicking him out before his first lesson had even begun. His only powers will be death and misery. Anything else is irrelevant. Besides, the other children will not be able to learn well with him there. They are too afraid.

And then he is holding fire. No, the fire is holding him; it won’t release him. It climbs higher and higher up his wrist, a unique, searing agony that eviscerates everything in its path. A silent scream builds inside him, pushing against the edges of his rib cage. His mind goes numb with the pain. He never cries, but the back of his nose stings with the smell of his own burning skin.

“I told you he is not like us,” the boy says, glaring his way with something torn between fascination and disgust, as though he is a newly discovered creature crawling out from the dirt. “Look at that. He’s not even screaming. He can’t feel anything.”

“How long do we need to burn him?” someone asks, coughing through the smoke. “My arms are growing tired.”

“Until he can’t use his hands to harm anyone,” the boy says decisively. Around him, the grass and the phoenix trees blaze a beautiful gold. Behind him, the horizon glows a serene pink, the clouds floating over the proud pagodas and polished walls. A slow hatred fills the Death God as he stares at the scene, at this place that has never been home. The outer corners of his vision flicker black. He imagines his hatred carving out everything inside him, hardening every inch of tender flesh to be found until he is completely hollow, bereft of anything worth saving, the blight on the realms they all believe him to be.

When they leave him at last, his hands have nearly been burned to the bone, so cracked and charred that he cannot believe they are his. It hurts to lift them, to cradle them, to even wrap them in fabric. It hurts simply to exist.

He lies back on the ground, closing his eyes against the pain. He does not know how much time passes before he hears her voice, floating down like a crab apple leaf in autumn:

“What happened to you?”