Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The realms shared an exhale at the advent of mortal calendars and their passage of time.
The nebulous, tingly void that accompanied “forever” was tedious, without structure, lacking in purpose, urgency, momentum.
The gods shared a collective, if unspoken, joy when humans evolved to seek the worlds beyond the veil, speak to their gods, and parse out the endless nothing into something.
Hell and its palatial ceilings, its vibrance, spices, columns, and costumes. A realm known for parties thrown in honor of truth and liberation was transcendent. Pleasure, power, oblivion, and timeliness spun pantheons and their deities into bliss so monotonous that it began to lose its luster.
With forever on our hands, many of the undying sought something that could only be found among the humans.
Mortals added a ticking clock to the concept of existence, and for that, the realms delighted in a collective newness.
Sleeves pushed to the elbow, hair slicked, posture as princely as I could muster, I sat through the perfunctory briefings on promotions, demotions, titles, and other royal necessities required of any kingdom’s ambassador before my father stopped the meeting.
The dukes and counts and elite such-and-suches had departed, leaving the two of us alone in the sparkling marble room.
My father and I had moved from round tables and desks and tablets to the tufted cushions near a diamond-white fire while he went on about this and that and things that most certainly mattered, if only I could stop thinking about a salty sea, a cave, a mortal woman who’d asked me to stay…
His pale eyes lit, an unusual crinkle creasing his temples as he smiled.
Hell’s agelessness could have made us brothers. Some pantheons favored beards and wrinkles and elders. Instead, I looked back at the tanned face, raven-dark hair, and thin, kingly circlet of a crown as he smirked at me.
“You’re looking at the door like you have somewhere to be.”
I couldn’t help but steal another glance at the floor-to-ceiling double doors before returning my attention. “I apologize. I have…something on my mind.”
There was a relief to the upward pull of his mouth. “I’m glad you’ve found something to do.”
I straightened. “I’ve always had a purpose. You’ve given me—”
“A title, a crown, a kingdom.” He waved it away. “You inherited a war. You were born after The Fall, and as such, have been spared encounters with Heaven. I want a better life for my son than I was given, and as such, pray you never meet an angel. Though…”
His thoughts drifted to an unspoken agreement we’d never discuss.
He was an angel, once.
He was Heaven’s favorite, once.
He was cast out, once.
My father hadn’t chosen to leave his realm. He hadn’t rejected his brothers, his king, his pantheon. In an eternity together, I had yet to spy an ember of hate for those who’d rejected him, unlike the flame that motivated our enemy.
I was the son of a freedom fighter. It was a role I didn’t take lightly.
“Go,” he said.
I realized I was looking at the door again.
I hedged. “I’m here. I’m listening. It’s just…there’s something on the surface that…”
“Go.”
Five mortal years. I couldn’t have anticipated what a month in Hell would cost me between the ever-shifting clocks and their terrorization of the realms.
The gods had sex and wine and power, but nothing felt like the worrying impermanence of mortality. My proximity to it introduced me to a new sensation: adrenaline. I stayed on the surface, hiding my face, as I sampled one emotion after another.
It was my first taste at what it might be like for deities to have worshippers; though neither term quite described Shala, nor me.
I had no temples, no altars, no name on human lips, hers included.
I was a prince of the shadows, a harbinger, a hope for my realm’s future.
I was a beacon for those within the immortal lands, not an entity for humans to seek.
Was this godhood?
It didn’t feel like it.
Trailing her curiously from my place behind the veil, helping her find a new village, organizing opportunities, creating blessings—miracles, as she’d call them—so she might thrive.
I spent my days with the barest licks from one feeling after another on my tongue, asking myself the sorts of questions that had no answers.
Is that what a human might receive from a god who cared for them?
I’d never spent so much time among mortals, and I’d become addicted to the new, the unfamiliar, the curiosity of it all.
This couldn’t be like this between all gods and their humans. I was sure of it.
I’d never encountered a mortal who buzzed with a crystalline soul like Shala.
The same shimmering aura I’d watched as she wobbled between life and death had only intensified.
Now, I spotted her pearlescence in a crowd of thousands.
Despite the black hair she covered whenever she left the house, without the blush to her golden cheeks, free from the cadence of her laugh or seriousness of her dark eyes, the glimmer lingered.
Even the uneventful fascinated me.
Tonight, she was grinding barley into flour, and I couldn’t look away.
The unpleasant scraping of basalt mortar and pestle mixed with Shala’s gentle humming. Her tune dipped, climbed, then fell, over and over again. This low, fractured lullaby, twisted in some curious minor chord, belonged to no one but her.
Such a simple act: humming a haunting song of her own design.
She was a musician. A creator. A talent.
I stared, leaning closer than I intended, as I fixated on the crude, bare, hominess of what she’d made. Gods, kings, fae, and the lands of eternal were robbed of the profundity that lived in simplicity.
Utterly fascinating.
Her song was unbroken as she took a jar of fresh water and splashed it into the pulpy grains.
She used the back of her hand to move her hair out of her face as she focused on her task, soft music never leaving her lips.
She didn’t need to do this herself. She had servants now.
But she seemed to enjoy the labor, which I found fascinating.
A thin, glass-like fracture hinted at an ambush from my side of the veil an instant before I saw her.
“You’re growing soft, brother.” Izi. The taunting voice of my sister’s humorless smile forced me to turn away from the human.
It took a flash before I understood who’d entered.
While the world was as much hers as it was mine, I didn’t like her here.
“We can’t all be forged from lust and shadow, Izi,” I replied. I hoped she couldn’t hear my thinly hidden irritation. “Some of us have other things to do.”
I resisted the urge to ask how she’d found me, as there was only a fistful of options. More than likely, she had caught my scent when passing through the village.
I never knew where she was hunting, and to be fair, I rarely cared.
“Your rage is delicious,” she purred. “A Prince who fights for his kingdom, his people, one whose diplomacy matches his wrath, shouldn’t be so scrumptiously angry in a fishing village. I’ve never tasted it topside before. Do share.”
“I don’t like to be interrupted,” I said honestly. “Your presence is often worth my ire.”
Her chuckle diffused the blood-and-thunder storm brewing within me, if only for the moment.
It was possible that she’d asked around Hell for my whereabouts, but I preferred to believe that my ever-increasing absences had not yet caught the attention of the realm.
“Come now, Amagi.”
She plucked the word for ‘ice’ from proto-Sumerian.
Our true names were too powerful to be shared, even among siblings.
Our chosen sibling monikers—Amagi for me, Izi as the counterpart word for fire—fit like bespoke gloves.
She’d brought the words back like trinkets from the first mortal language etched into their cuneiform during one of our first visits to the surface, and we’d kept them between the two of us ever since.
I resented the intrusion.
She’d robbed me of a new marvel. How could I focus on bucolic minor chords when I was being haunted by a nuisance?
“Tell me, brother,” she purred.
My lip twitched, souring against her familiarity.
Izi wasn’t my full sibling. Though we shared a father, we neither looked nor behaved alike. She favored her mother, the Queen of Shadows, Weaver of Nightmares, and Mother of Succubi. It was quite the title to fill.
“I appreciate your interest, Izi, but I don’t need your help tonight.”
The First Daughter of Succubi lived and breathed topside. She thrived on mortal attention, sipping her power from their lives like wine from a goblet.
“I’m the expert among humans.” She clucked her tongue.
Izi moved toward Shala and I bristled.
“I’d prefer that you keep your hands off of her,” I said through my teeth.
My sister made a face as Shala continued about her task, face quirked in judgment rather than fascination, as if this visiting a mundane ordeal was below her.
“Why? Are you scared I’ll do something?”
She took a few exaggerated steps toward Shala, dragging fingertips down the length of Shala’s arms.
The human’s lullaby paused. She shivered, shaking off a chill. Her brows pinched as she looked toward the door.
“Hello?”
Izi’s hands clapped together in front of her mouth, face sparkling with excitement. “Oh, my is she perceptive. Is that why you’ve chosen her?”
She expertly baited a question that I refused to answer.
I had no knowledge of Shala’s clairvoyance beyond her brush with death. Mortals pierced the veil in their moments before passing, and as such, she had asked me, not her god, not an angel, but me, to stay.
Her invitation remained an open door.
I had her permission to appear even now.
I wasn’t about to work through the trepidations that kept me behind the veil with my sister.
Shala regained composure after Izi’s frost dissolved from her arms, straightened her shoulders, then returned to her task. She no longer sang.