Chapter 3 Daesra
DAESRA
I CAN’T help but feel my memory is playing tricks on me again. I thought she would be mine forever.
For a long moment, I simply stare, waiting to awake from this nightmare, unable to fully grasp what I’m seeing.
Her. Sadaré. Dead. On the stone floor of our home—the home I built for her, to hold her and keep her safe, regardless of her own strength.
This can’t be her. I shake my head desperately as my chest feels as though it’s collapsing under the weight of what I’m seeing.
This isn’t Sadaré, this lifeless form staring sightlessly at the ceiling, her green eyes dull instead of flashing.
This can’t be happening.
A guttural moan escapes me—the only sound in the suffocating silence.
Even earlier this sun-drenched afternoon, when we were both pressed against the tree, I imagined we had eternity, whatever our arguments. In my mind’s eye, she’s still alive, and I’m smiling down at her.
Now the light through the window is fading. I don’t know why this realization disturbs me so much, stirring me into stilted motion. Time passing, perhaps, and indicating this isn’t a nightmare—a hint of the darkness to come.
I fall to my knees next to her. A scream builds inside me, growing from the bottomless hole where my heart once was.
When it bursts out, ripping through my throat, the stones of the house shake and the seams shower dust all around me.
Spots of gray land on Sadaré’s ashen cheek.
She doesn’t flinch, of course, lying as motionless as ever.
I reach to brush the flecks away before I freeze.
It’s as if touching her lifeless skin will make this more real.
Pogli whines.
Pogli. I’ve forgotten him. It’s hard to remember anything else with the sight of Sadaré’s body devouring me from the inside out.
He shuffles forward, nosing at her unmoving arm. And then, when there is no response, he licks her cheek.
At first I’m angry—at him, at myself—that he can touch her where I could not.
But then I remember he’s the embodiment of my love for her, created in the maze and freed with us.
He lets out another piercing whine that tugs at the invisible wound in my chest. He doesn’t lick her again, only sits with hunched little shoulders and his head and wings hanging.
He’s realized what I’ve tried to deny. Accepted what I’ve been too fearful to face.
She’s no longer here.
But she can’t be gone. The denial still tries to ensnare me, to lessen this pain, though it’s more of a furious, futile protest at this point than a refusal to accept the truth.
She was supposed to be with me forever. She was supposed to put on the ring before mortal death could seize her. To become immortal alongside me.
The ring. I reach for the leather cord near her throat. It’s been cleanly snapped, and there are marks on her neck from the bite of the cord. The ring is missing. Someone has taken it. Taken her from me. Perhaps they held on to the ring as she fell, holding it instead of her as she hit the ground.
The image blinds me. Rage blinds me.
I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them. It’s the only thought I can form. Fury burns as hot as a god’s fire inside of me. It replaces the yawning grief, at least for a moment—not consuming me, as long as I keep feeding it. And feed it, I do.
I can’t let whoever has done this get away with it. I will avenge her. I promise her. I promise myself.
With that resolve, I can finally touch her. I close her staring eyes with gentle fingertips that betray none of the violence simmering under my skin, covering the nothingness in them where they were once so full of life.
And yet, I can’t seem to let go of her. I pull her head into my lap, cradling it. Pogli lays his chin on her arm, and we both sit in silence. The only sound, the only movement, is my shuddering sobbing.
But I can’t lose myself to grief, so I let my resolve harden in my chest into something like hatred, a cold and yet burning hole where my heart once was. Changing myself, as I am able to do. Replacing one thing with another. Scraping my tears away.
Soon, I’m only left with hatred.
Not only will I kill whoever has done this to her, I’ll rip out their guts and feed the steaming entrails back to them. I will flay them alive and make a cape of their skin. I will kill kings, I will kill armies, I will kill gods if I have to. Whatever it takes.
I pet her hair, my tears falling onto her forehead like raindrops. “You told me to live and live differently. But now you’re dead, so what can I do?”
She probably wouldn’t want me to embark on a rampage more befitting of the daemon I was than the god I am now. But how do I, as a new god, one that has never existed on the mortal plane like this before, fight my enemies? By getting them drunk on wine?
I want to get drunk on their blood. Someone’s blood, in particular. This god’s. Because it must be a god who took Sadaré from me. No one else would dare.
So be it. I’m going to bring death upon the deathless. I’m going to kill a god. And then I’m going to drink their golden blood like wine.
But first, I have to find them.
I DON’T REMEMBER LEAVING THE house. I don’t remember the fire I ignited inside, only the heat of the flames at my back as I walk away from it—Sadaré’s pyre.
The fire doesn’t only consume the wood and stone, but rages across the entire vineyard, at once lighting the dusky sky and swallowing it with black smoke.
Only Pogli looks over his shoulder, whimpering, before following at my heels.
I don’t know exactly when I reach the town Sadaré and I visited that morning, but it’s late.
A few stragglers remain awake to greet me with bitter remembrance and insults—and then fear.
I don’t hide myself this time by masking my appearance.
I appear as I am and embrace the hunger deep within me, casting it outward like the rending howl I can’t release from my chest without tearing myself in half.
That silent cry is a living, bloodthirsty thing.
It calls to the rest of them, assembling them as they stumble out of their houses, their eyes filled with only interrupted sleep—but not for long.
Something else replaces the tired confusion in their gazes, and then even the fear.
When I leave the town, they’re clawing each other to pieces. Once more, Pogli whines at my feet, but I ignore him along with the screams and the sounds of ripping flesh, just as I ignored the flames that devoured my home.
Perhaps, along with Sadaré, so went my will to live differently.
I walk on.
I BEGIN MY VISIT IN the Tower of the Gods on my knees. Not how I would have preferred to present myself, but the memory of how I even got here is hazy. I’m coated in dirt and ash and flaking blood. The blood is rust colored. Not mine.
I don’t remember leaving Pogli outside the colossal doors and climbing the endless spiral of stairs, but here I am, nearly alone.
The transparent rose-gold walls surround me at the top of the Tower, where I kneel before the bright, ethereal curtain that separates the divine realm, a swirling world of pure aether, from the mortal plane.
Only Horizon stands on the other side: my divine parent, god of both sea and sky, a vague figure of twining blue and silver light.
Mortal guards were stationed here when I arrived, but they left not at Horizon’s command, but mine.
Whether they obeyed willingly due to my divine if confusing status or because I forced them to obey is a question I don’t care to consider.
At least there’s no one else, god or mortal, to witness my shameful state.
I’ve been on my knees here before, when Sadaré brought me to the Tower, tame and collared, but I hardly remember any of that, either. I wasn’t present under my own power at the time.
Now I’ve never been more powerful. And yet I’ve never been more desperate, more hopeless.
“Sadaré is dead,” I croak. My throat is rough. Perhaps from disuse, perhaps from screaming. I still can’t remember.
Perhaps it’s more that I don’t want to remember. And so I don’t.
Horizon only notes my horns and claws along with the rest of my appearance—new additions since they remade me. “Trying to be a daemon again, my son? You freed your soul from those bonds. In return, I made you a god, and yet this is how you choose to comport yourself?”
“As a god, I can look and do as I please,” I grind out through my teeth, which feel sharper in my mouth. “Tell me who did this to Sadaré.”
I imagine Horizon might withhold such information so as not to encourage any daemonic backsliding, but they simply say, “Death.”
Obviously she’s dead, so there’s more to the word than the mortal condition. Rather, a divine name.
“The god,” I say slowly.
“Yes.”
In the end, it doesn’t matter which god it was.
“I’ll still kill him.” I speak the words aloud before I realize it.
Horizon’s tone is uncompromising. “He can’t be killed. Isha Aggatar, he calls himself. Master of Death.” They add, almost as an afterthought, “He prefers the older languages for naming.”
“A traditionalist, hm?” I shrug, feeling lighter now that I know who it was, despite who he is. “Well. I don’t care what he prefers. If he doesn’t want to be subject to death, he needs to give me back Sadaré.”
Horizon remains unmoved, which makes me want to shake them. “He won’t. He has rules, and he never relinquishes a mortal soul from his realm once he has it. And that’s where Sadaré is.”
I was about to say Fuck his rules, but instead I shudder at those last words, trying and failing not to picture those dead oceans that surrounded the maze, hungrily lapping at its outer walls, trying to get in while Sadaré and I were striving to escape.
“Then you bring her out. Give her back to me.”
My words are more of a demand than my kneeling might suggest.