Chapter Thirteen #2
But of course. His rigorous activities were the likely culprit for its disappearance.
Blushing at the memory, he knelt to pick it up.
His useless clothes had no pouch or anything to hold items, so he slid it back into his ear to keep it safe for the time being, relieved to have found it. Then he tried the door.
He didn’t push too hard, not daring to hope, but it opened without resistance.
The corridor he was expecting—filled with the colorful mural on the wall—was stark. The once vivid paint was so faded it was impossible to tell what colors they were, and that was between the cracks and broken chips of plaster that riddled the walls.
For the extravagant offering room to lead to this was startling and unsettling, and he almost went right back inside. But curiosity got the better of him.
The temple’s structure was exactly the same, but rooms once filled with students were empty of life.
All of the murals and reverently maintained architecture was faded and crumbling, like it hadn’t been given a second glance in centuries.
Yet each room was stuffed with extravagance that made the palace look like a peasant hut: seats with embroidered cushions, tapestries and curtains and blankets made of every fabric conceivable, busts and small statues of marble or bronze or clay, heaps of gold and silver trinkets, often embellished with precious gems. Ethyr wouldn’t have been able to imagine such an amount of value, let alone in one place.
And it was in every room, different items but each a kind of opulence no one beyond Mahyria could have dreamed to have, or even see, in their whole lives.
But there were simpler items, too—the kinds of offerings that Ethyr’s village might have given: bundles of soft animal pelts, a simple but lovingly crafted coil pot, a little bird carved of wood. It made his heart ache for home.
He paused on his first step outside. Something was wrong. The world looked different. The city, usually spread out with such splendor that even the mountain couldn’t shadow it, was razed to the ground. Or near to it. Some walls or chimneys remained standing, but most of it was rubble.
He followed the paved road down the mountain to the palace.
The palace, too, was empty of people. Ethyr hadn't realized he'd grown so used to the bustle of servants and attendants, but the vacant, echoing halls were eerie without them.
Like in the temple, all the normal furnishings and decorations were replaced with piles of treasure, but there was not much else to see.
He left the palace to continue his trek into the city.
Wings fluttered. A shadow moved in the corner of his vision. He whipped towards it, heart pounding, to find himself face-to-face with Kiaro standing a hand’s length from him.
He staggered back, eyes wide. Kiaro stood still and silent, hands behind his back, watching Ethyr with unflinching calm. His navy tunic was only exposed as blue because of the braid hanging down his shoulder, more pitch black than any human hair could possibly be.
“Wh–wh–what are you doing here?” Ethyr gasped, bringing a hand to his chest as though it could steady his heart.
“This is the gods’ realm,” Kiaro reminded him blithely. “What are you doing here?”
Ethyr's face laced with heat. He adjusted his tunic, taking time to catch his breath. “I…” He squirmed. “Where are the others?”
Kiaro’s expression didn’t change but a long silence gave him an air of disappointment. “Doing what gods do,” he finally replied. “Answering prayers.”
Ethyr swallowed. Panic had dried out his mouth. “Why aren’t you answering prayers, then?”
“If you wanted to see the god realm, you could have asked us.” Kiaro turned his gaze out over the city and Ethyr felt as though he could breathe again. “Though I don’t know why you’d want to, it’s far less interesting than the mortal side.”
“There are—” Kiaro’s dark eyes flitted back to him, pausing the words on his tongue.
Ethyr sucked in a deep breath. “There’s something strange here.
It’s… different.” Kiaro watched him with intense eyes.
Ethyr swallowed again. “Why is this place so…” He didn’t even have a word for it. Kiaro gave it to him.
“Dead.”
“Yes!” he burst out, a little too excited. His voice echoed off the cliffside and he quickly closed his mouth.
“This realm only exists because humans believe it to exist,” Kiaro told him, as though it explained anything.
“What does that mean?”
Kiaro’s eyes bore into him. “It may feel dead, but it is not, because it was never alive.”
It was not really an answer, but Ethyr had a feeling more questions would lead to more riddles. His gaze drifted to the ground, then he turned to look back at the temple standing so solemnly at the top of the mountain.
“You can do what you want.”
The words pulled his face towards Kiaro again. “What?”
“I’m not stopping you.”
Ethyr bit his lips, raising his shoulders. “I just… was going to look at the city.”
Kiaro unclasped his hands to gesture down the road. Ethyr looked him over uncertainly before taking a few steps. When Kiaro didn’t move, he continued more surely. He was a few paces away when his neck pricked and he turned to see Kiaro following him. They halted at the same time.
“What?” Ethyr asked.
Kiaro’s face was placid stone. “What?” he returned casually. Ethyr glanced around. He awkwardly started walking again.
Partway down the road, he turned back around.
“If you are going to come with me, can you at least walk beside me?” he asked.
It was unnerving to have him a few steps behind.
Kiaro seemed to debate this for a second, then caught up to him.
With the god at his side and not trailing him like an assassin, he continued into the city.
Kiaro strolled beside him with the languid movements of someone bored and resigned. The long walk down the palace road, lined with nothing but yellowing grass, was not exactly titillating, so Ethyr couldn’t blame him. But he didn’t understand why Kiaro was coming with him in the first place, then.
“What makes it less interesting than our world?” Ethyr asked.
“As I said, there is no life. No soul.”
“There is you,” Ethyr pointed out. “And the other gods.”
“Yes,” Kiaro replied. “There is us.” Ethyr wondered if it was bitterness hiding beneath the words, or just boredom.
Ethyr kicked at a little pebble standing out against the smooth pavement but missed it and scuffed his sandal instead.
He looked up to see Kiaro watching him and he straightened, face warm.
It seemed no matter what he was doing, he could not do it without the god’s chillingly black stare on him.
So he decided he might as well try to get some answers to questions he’d always had.
“Were there really two suns before you made one into the moon?” he tried.
“Yes,” was all Kiaro answered.
“No moon at all… I can’t imagine.” He shook his head in awe. “What was it like, having no darkness?”
Kiaro turned sharply to him, then looked away without answering. Ethyr didn’t know why.
He bit his lip, knowing he should have shut his mouth after that. Why risk angering a god? But after wandering a bit farther, he gave in to his other burning curiosity. "There’s a tapestry in my room, showing the story of you humiliating that noble.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Kiaro said.
“You arrived at a party he was hosting and challenged him,” Ethyr explained tentatively. “I always wondered… why did you do it?”
“Do I need a reason?” Kiaro replied brusquely.
“I… I guess not.” But most of Kiaro’s legends, when he was messing around with humans, involved a comeuppance of some kind. This one had always stood out to Ethyr as incompatible with the others.
Ethyr didn’t expect anything more than that, but then Kiaro said, softly, “The party… it was a celebration of the day the last wild god fell.”
Ethyr looked curiously at him. “…So?”
Kiaro kept his face turned away and didn’t reply. Ethyr opened his mouth before thinking better, and closed it again. He didn’t know why he’d thought he’d get anything like an answer out of him.
The silent, desecrated city was more eerie than the palace. Though the buildings were broken walls and dust, the streets were clear and easy to walk through.
“What happened here?” Ethyr asked, the question slipping out before he realized he was saying it out loud.
“It is not what happened here, it is what mortals think happened here.”
Ethyr turned an unimpressed face to Kiaro. The god, amazingly, almost seemed to smile, but the quirk of his lips stilled so quickly that Ethyr wasn’t sure if he imagined it.
“They believe the Gods’ War happened here,” he explained further.
“Didn’t it?” Ethyr asked, baffled. After the flood that had wiped out the entire northern half of the continent, the civilized gods chased the wild gods back to the gods’ realm, where they battled one thousand long nights before the civilized gods emerged triumphant.
“No,” Kiaro replied.
“Where did it happen, then?” Ethyr asked. Kiaro didn’t answer. Ethyr wasn’t any closer to figuring out why he answered some questions and not others. Fickleness?
“So it’s all in ruins because of the Gods’ War?” Ethyr asked. “Which didn’t really happen?”
“It happened,” Kiaro corrected him quietly. “Just not the way humans were told.”
“Told by who?” Ethyr asked, confused.
“Us,” Kiaro said.
“What really happened, then?” he boldly prodded. Kiaro, again, remained quiet.
Ethyr doubted he would get the truth from Kiaro. All of this could have been a lie too, for all he knew. He was the god of deception, after all.
Ethyr stopped walking and Kiaro did too. “Seems it’s all the same, then,” Ethyr said, shrugging with his arms. “It’s all just destroyed. Is there a point to going further?”
Kiaro looked pensive, his gaze casting down, then up past Ethyr’s head. “It’s not all destroyed. It’s not all like this.”
“It isn’t?” Ethyr asked.