Do we know, or do we not, friend?
Both sides are framed by the reluctant hour
and chiseled on the faces of men.
✧
I
used to be a God. The thought doesn’t come to me arrogantly; it doesn’t come to me with any emotion at all. I just remember, with a placid kind of dissonance, all that I had once been. I had never though the best years of my life would be my distant youth; I never thought all I would ever amount to had already transpired, and now—
Now what?
My stare across the city square of Delumine. It is brimming with pegasi and unicorns; merchants; scholars. The cool winter air does not seem to bother them, veiled as they are in wool scarves and blankets. It had been snowing. Now it is not. The sky is a solid grey, like one long sheet of metal—but that is the only thing that reminds me of home.
Maybe, I think, things would play out differently—if only I had joined a Court. But I had not. I was a roamer, a wanderer—and I continue on my way, through Delumine (where I had been investigating their black markets) and beyond, into the fields, into the forest.
I am through Illuster, and into the edge of the Viride. I can hear the Rapax but do not want to venture too near and so I decide to turn back the direction I had come, to the edge where the meadow meets the trees. Behind me, the forest stretches old and forlorn. I recognise it as something ancient, as something cursed, and that too reminds me of my homeland—
Those are the only similarities, however. Delumine seems soft where Oresziah was hard. The pegasi are an anomaly, as are the unicorns—on my island, no one had wings with which to fly, or a single spiraled horn. Everyone had been dual-horned, like bulls or oxen or antelope or stags, and everyone had used them as—
Even remembering makes my horns ache.
I had been a God, once—
Young, vivacious, and death could not touch me. I had been the harbinger of it, with a future gem-bright and certain. Don’t we all think our desires are fate?
Damascus meets me; he does not accompany me into cities for obvious reasons. But I feel his approach, low over the trees, and know he has been hunting to fill that insatiable appetite. When he lands in front of me, in the clearing, his jaws are blood-streaked and strung with flesh. When he lands, he breathes out harmless cyan vapour that dances into nearly incomprehensible shapes; a leopard that rises and twists into a butterfly, before dissipating.
He rumbles, “God’s die, too.”
And does not know his all-too-obvious passage through the sky had attracted attention...
