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The lack of any malice in the question confuses him enough to glance up. Light streams into his vision, casting a hazy sheen over everything. He stares directly into the sun; it is so bright he can see nothing but vague shapes, shimmering motes of dust and floating specks of blue and amber. Has he imagined the voice? Is he losing his mind already? But then, after a few blinks, her features solidify into view. Wide brown eyes and bow-shaped lips. Robes as blue as the sky. Silver butterflies caught in her hair, moving when she moves. She has a kind face, he marvels to himself through scattered thoughts. Still, he will not let himself be deceived. There is every chance the other gods have sent her to finish their job.

She crouches on the grass beside him, and he tenses, bracing for her to start another fire—

To sever his hands—

To sink her nails into his wounds—

To make the pain worse, because that is all he has ever known, all he is destined for—

And finds only, impossibly, relief.

He breathes in the faint fragrance of peonies. He cannot place whether the scent is hers, or if it belongs to the thick, grass-green paste she is currently applying to his ruined skin. Where did that come from? Where did she come from? Every few seconds, she pauses and blows on his hands, and the cool, gentle air is so unexpectedly soothing that his throat closes with some foreign emotion. To his absolute humiliation, even his eyes prickle.

“Is that all right?” She is watching him, the sun hitting her irises at such an angle that they look like melted gold. The butterflies flutter in her hair as a breeze picks up, their wings gleaming. “Does that feel better?”

That feels better than anything I have ever felt before, he wants to say, but there is something more urgent he must find out. “Do you know who I am?”

“No.” She sounds apologetic about it, which is how he can be sure she isn’t lying.

“I see,” he says quietly, taking her in. Only now does he notice the dozens and dozens of scrolls crammed into her satchel, which is already beginning to split at the seams. And set down next to her: an opened red wood box with countless compartments and little bronze clasps. He glimpses a set of needles tucked into velvet cushions, vials of dried herbs, a worn notebook. She must be from the school of healing. He has observed its students from afar, more than he has with any other specialties. They all have that same pallid, exhausted look, as though they have not replenished their powers in decades, but also the same determined luster to their gaze. He wonders what that is like—training to save others. To be regarded as selfless and noble. To not have other gods recoil at the sight of you.

“But it is not too late to know you,” the healer says, perhaps confusing his scrutiny for offense. “What is your name?”

His name. Many have already stopped calling him by it, electing instead to address him as Death, or demon, or bad luck. Sometimes they do not call him at all; his name is left unspoken in contemptuous silences, in lengthy glares across a courtyard, in a curl of the lip or shake of the head.

“It is a secret,” he says.

“Oh.” She falters, then nods, but not before hurt flashes across her face. For some reason it bothers him, like a bruised bone.

He hears himself say, “But I can tell it to you, if you keep it a secret between us.” Foolish. His hope is sickening. He would have thought they’d burned it out of him, but here he is, so embarrassingly eager to offer up his name like a child offering a wooden stick as a gift: Notice me, stay with me. Even when he has nothing of value to give and everything to take. One day, he knows he will have to collect her soul too.

“Of course I’ll keep it a secret.” Her lips lift into a smile. Unguarded. Sincere. Trusting. He stares longer than he intends to. He cannot remember the last time anybody has smiled at him this way.

“My name,” he says slowly, refocusing his gaze on the pear blossom tree behind her, knowing she will soon forget what he says next, “is Keran.”

“Keran,” she repeats.

And this is where the scene fractures within the dream, where time distorts itself. Back then, she had spoken it softly, without recognition. He had let himself sit with that peace for a few precious seconds before he reached out and wiped a gentle thumb over her memory, removing their brief exchange. It was the only way. She was too kind, destined to become a healer. If the others found out that she had helped him like this, that she was acquainted with him at all, her reputation and future would be ruined, and he simply could not let that happen. He refused to destroy anything he didn’t have to.

But now, she says his name with dawning horror and flinches away from him.

“You,” she says, glowering down at him with the full knowledge of what he is. It’s the same look she’d given him after he’d stormed the Celestial Realm. That same concoction of betrayal and flame-bright loathing. “I was the first and only one to save you, and you repay me by coming to kill me? Do you not find it ironic?”

He has found it ironic since he first saw the fated vision above the Yellow Springs. So deeply, terribly ironic. He’d never thought the Heavens would have such a twisted sense of humor.

“No wonder they all hate you,” she continues with vehemence. “No wonder they would all gladly kill you. You don’t deserve happiness, or forgiveness, or kindness—the only thing you deserve is pain.”

Then she grabs his burned hands. Her touch is tentative at first, as if she means to do little more than hold them, but suddenly her grip tightens, and pain tears through him, ripping the breath from his body—

He chokes awake.

Even when the dream fades, the burning in his hands does not. Frowning, he sits up in his bed, and squints down. There are no new scars on his fingers, no signs of puckered flesh. But when his sleeves slip back, exposing his wrists, he sees them: black veins, crawling from his life line to his forearm. His heart lurches within his chest. He pushes the fabric back farther, and before his very eyes, the veins writhe as if alive, then inch forward, the same time the burning sensation sharpens and spreads.

So the Heavens have finally caught up to him.

He can feel the stars bearing down on the spires of the palace, watching through the windows, waiting to punish those who dare defy fate. That crushing, ineluctable weight. His rib cage is too tight, his breathing constrained. There is a careful balance to the way of the world, he reminds himself. When one kingdom falls, another rises. When one river ends, another begins. When one soul departs, another descends. The arrogant and ignorant might boast of breaking the Heavens, but the Heavens are unbreakable. Inviolable. That is like trying to break a wave with your bare fingers, trying to part the night with a sword. Every terrible, unlawful thing you fling into the void will only be sent hurtling back at you, with thrice the force.

He knows all this. He also knows a warning when he sees one.