Chapter 21
It might be hard to believe this, but I was conceived in your world. How I came into being isn’t a pretty story, but it’s more important than the stories of my siblings for one reason.
My mother, Elve.
She is my father’s second wife. The first Lady of Death was one of the Old Gods. My mother was not. In fact, she was human… but not an ordinary one.
Two years before my birth, my father got into a bitter fight with his brother Chaos.
Chaos had come to hate my father, and for good reason.
My father was unhappy at home because the first Lady of Death had decided to leave the Nightlands permanently, and she took their youngest son with her to wander the Transient Realms—a place between worlds where the gods can travel, usually never to be seen again.
My father wallowed for a while over the loss of his wife and son; then he started a secret love affair with Chaos’s wife. When Chaos found out, he was understandably angry. Maybe more than anyone could’ve predicted…
Chaos demanded retribution by way of a duel between the two gods. If they’d battled in one of their kingdoms, who knows what would’ve happened. But Chaos tricked my father into dueling him on Earth in a great desert. As a mortal.
But when my father came to this desert, my uncle did not honor the rules. He hid from my father.
And he murdered him.
A god killing another god always makes waves in the Nightlands. But this was different. See, after slaying my father, Chaos dismembered the body and scattered its remains all over your world. Hiding body parts so that they’d never be united again. It was Chaos’s attempt at salting the earth.
Because my father was the Lord of Death, when he was killed by Chaos, he couldn’t reap his own soul. So that soul wandered the earth, lost and without a body or any measure of hope.
That is, until he wandered north, to a land of ice and snow, where my mother lived.
My mother’s people herded reindeer, and my mother was a shaman who could communicate with the spirits of the dead who were passing through my father’s lands.
She was a legend amongst the people of her land for being the wealthiest woman in the north—her tribe’s reindeer herd was in the thousands, and all the people in her land were called her vassals.
My father didn’t care about any of that. She was the only human he’d encountered in his wanderings who could communicate with his lost soul. That was worth more than any amount of gold to him.
My father told her who he was and what had happened to him.
She could not touch him, for he had no body.
But he told her his story over the course of several days, and she fell in love with him so deeply that she pledged to restore him.
She didn’t know how; she was merely a human being with the gift of sight.
But when she prayed to her gods for help, one of them took pity on her and whispered a secret: If she could find all the body parts that my uncle had scattered, she could restore my father.
She gathered a group of her people, and they sailed around the world with my father’s soul, gathering his arms, his feet, his legs… And when they found the last of his remains—his sexual organs—my mother prayed to her gods for divine help once more.
This time, the wife of Chaos answered, my father’s mistress.
She told my mother to slay her favorite reindeer and assemble my father’s remains upon its hide, and to wail a lament for him.
This magical act resurrected him temporarily.
It allowed my father’s soul to reenter his body, long enough for my mother to copulate with him and become impregnated with a son.
I did say it wasn’t a pretty story.
My mother gave birth to me in the snow, surrounded by her people. And when she did, both of us were drawn into the Nightlands along with my father’s soul. The only proof that we’d even existed on Earth were the bloodstains from my birth and a single white lily that bloomed through the snow.
My mother said it was a symbol that she’d resurrected my father and restored order to both our lands. And when she was crowned Queen of the Dead, my father gave her the gift of immortality and the resurrection of her favorite reindeer, Maja.
As for me? I didn’t return to Earth for the first thirteen years of my life.
I was raised in my father’s palace, which stands on a great coast in my world.
I cried constantly when I was a baby, or so my mother says.
It is always night in my world, and my mother thought I was crying for sunlight.
My first real memory is of my half brother Kesh trying to drown me in a tide pool when I was four.
Most of my siblings believed me to be an interloper who didn’t belong in the Nightlands.
The only one of them I’m close to now is my half sister Mercy.
Mercy helped raise me when I was young. My mother was coming into her divine powers while trying to fit into court, and she was often overwhelmed.
Mercy fed and clothed me, and she took me out riding along the coast to show me more of our world and the souls that pass through it.
She introduced me to the denizens of our kingdom—the ones who live there permanently.
And she taught me about time, how it moves differently in different worlds.
She wasn’t just my older sister. She was my best friend.
When I turned ten, my father began showing me how to use my divine powers, how to be…
Grief. When I turned twelve, he gave me my Memoria bracelets.
At thirteen, he gave me a shard of starlight from the Nightlands’ skies, embedded in a jewel, so that I would always be able to find my way home.
And though he himself can never return to Earth, not in a physical body—what my mother did to resurrect him prevents that—he gave me permission to leave the Nightlands and travel to Earth, with my mother as chaperone.
My mother took me to Earth to show me… everything. Where I’d been born. The sailing path she had taken to find my father’s body parts. Sacred places. Battlefields. Cities. We spent a year together, traveling this world, and they are some of my fondest memories.
When we returned to the Nightlands, my sister Mercy showed me how to step through time and space, to walk in both worlds at the same time—how to live my life in the Nightlands while performing my duties on Earth, what we call “flying.” And once I mastered flying, I was crowned Prince of Mourning and officially began performing my Grief duties.
In your year 1776, I helped a man in New York grieve for his wife. Then a child in Nairobi, who lost his mother. In the Alps, in 1803, I carved memories of a kind but troubled village drunk onto my bracelets. In 1852, I began the year helping a viscount, a homeless man, and a nun.
And so it went. One after another, I performed silent counseling upon the lamenters of this world without ever leaving mine. The years in the Nightlands passed slowly while decades flew past in your world, something that was endlessly fascinating for me to observe.
All the changes happening in your world while mine remained unchanged.
For a time, things were going well. My father and mother were happy, and I moved out of the palace and into the Temple of Grief, which sits up the coast upon a rocky bluff over the sea.
The temple had been built for the former god of mourning, so I cleared it out and made it my home.
Two undead wolves prowled its border, so I took them in and made them my companions.
After this, I rarely saw my siblings other than Mercy, and I made friends with some of the Nightlands folk. I was happy to use the temple as a base for my flying and felt pride in my work. But after my eighteenth winter, something odd happened.
During one of my flights to your world, I helped a prostitute in Five Points, New York, grieve the death of her best friend. And when I was in the middle of collecting her memories, her small child looked me in the eye.
A human girl had seen me.
Me.
That had never happened.
My family had told me it was impossible.
Humans could not see gods when they’re flying.
So I dismissed it, assuming I’d made a mistake.
Then it happened again with this same girl, a few years later.
So I began to watch her during my flights.
When I had small breaks between the mourners I was helping, I would see what she was doing.
And I noticed that she talked to wandering souls of the dead that hadn’t yet passed on to the Nightlands to begin their afterlife journeys.
She possessed Deathsight, much like my mother had when she was a human.
This both alarmed and intrigued me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the girl heralded something bigger.
But when I mentioned it to my mother, she said that there had been other humans throughout history who possessed Deathsight.
It was a rare gift, yes, but not singular.
And since I wasn’t in the same predicament that my father had been in after his brother murdered him—none of my family had tricked me into a desert battle on Earth—then I shouldn’t worry.
So I put the girl out of my mind.
Tried to, at least.
But I failed to tell my mother that the girl had seen more than the dead.
The girl had seen me, a demigod.
No humans were supposed to be able to do that. Why could she?
On my nineteenth birthday, my parents hosted a celebration inside the palace.
It was the first time my entire family had gathered together since I was a child.
There was music and dancing, and everyone was getting along.
Even Kesh was amiable. I almost enjoyed his company, now that he wasn’t trying to drown me.
I was talking to Mercy in the great dining hall about the girl with Deathsight when I spotted a fissure in the floor.
It started as a tiny crack below my boots, then spread, zigzagging through the stone.
I saw deep puzzlement on my father’s face and horror in my mother’s. She began racing toward me…
Halfway there, she disappeared, along with the palace and everyone inside it.
I was dragged through the cosmos, pulled violently through my world into yours.
And that’s when I found myself on Earth, standing in a ballroom, surrounded by a chalked magic trap and candles.
Outside the magic circle was a wandering spirit of whom I had no memories etched into my bracelets. A moment later, I spotted a second spirit, who was known to me.
That spirit was Charles Voss.
His body stood outside the circle, but his spirit wasn’t inside it.
I knew I was in trouble, but Mercy had told me of occultist traps. I figured I’d find a way out of it, and I did—for a time. I escaped the ballroom, but quickly realized I couldn’t travel back to the Nightlands. Something was holding me on Earth, a magical protection like I’d never felt.
A divine aegis.
But once again, my pride reared its head, and I was certain I’d be able to break the spellwork and finally go home. Days spent on Earth were seconds in my world, so I had time on my side as well.
However, I underestimated the occultist who’d pulled me into this world. I was chased around the property until I found a place to hide within the ground beneath it. At least, that’s what I thought. But the occultist was two steps ahead and had set a stronger trap there.
All the truths I’d lived with for nineteen years—that I was immortal, that I couldn’t be hurt by a human, that I was always safe and powerful… None of these things were true anymore. My world had been turned upside down and shaken up.
Then, against all odds, the girl with Deathsight showed up and became trapped along with me.
And that’s when I knew I was really in trouble.