Death #2
A long, long time ago, longer than anyone can really say for sure, certain aspects of the natural universe got a taste for experiencing the rest of the universe through human perceptions.
They wanted to see with human eyes, to feel with human hands.
They wanted to walk in the world they had shaped and borne, and they wanted to be mortal and immortal at the same time.
“Possible” and “impossible” are two sides of the same coin, and it’s a coin spent only by humanity.
A rainstorm doesn’t know that it’s impossible for it to put on a Sunday skin and go dancing down at the church social, and so nothing stops it from doing exactly that.
A mountain doesn’t know it’s impossible to fall in love.
And in the beginning, the people didn’t know it was impossible for the moon to be a person too, to want and wish and wonder, to come down to the world below it and feel all the things there were to feel.
They dreamt the moon into human skin, and so the moon put it on, and it joined the great, surprisingly possible dance of everything there was.
But even as the universe was learning how to want more widely and deeply, even as it was reaching out and selecting skins to slide itself inside and live through, there were aspects of creation that never came together in quite so simplistic a way.
They were too vast or too primal, Titans set against a backdrop of gods and monsters, and there was not room for them in the world as it was.
Some ideas were too big to wear a single skin.
Enter the human alchemists, in their arrogance and eagerness—and their tiny, terrible spark of the divine, for they, like the forces of creation, seemed determined to redefine what it meant to be “impossible.” They spun shells of skin and bone for those concepts, luring them out of the ether where they had been so content to linger, winnowing them down and refining them until they could be slipped into their own human hearts.
All incarnates were a little odd, a little inclined to rewrite the laws of reality around themselves.
That was only to be expected when you were talking about people who were also abstract concepts too large and difficult to be easily contained.
The incarnates who had been forced into existence by the hope and hubris of alchemists were …
Well, they were probably not supposed to exist in the first place, so it was only understandable that they would take their oddity to new heights. David turns a corner and stops for a moment, struck as always by the house midway down the block.
It’s a riot of color, like a rainbow refracted through an even greater prism, then wrapped tight around a simple two-story Berkeley home.
The front garden is filled with flowers and fruiting bushes, the branches of the peach tree near the fence bent low with the weight of the fruit they struggle to hold.
There’s a fence around the yard, but it’s barely necessary: no one else is so much as glancing at the house, not even the people driving by who should be seeing it for the first time.
David feels Máni stir under his skin, the god waking and stretching toward the sun in response to the sight of the house, which is practically a beacon for the preternatural.
Nothing that bright can exist in this reality without some sort of help.
And help it has. The people passing as if it was nothing remarkable literally can’t see what they’re missing: it’s screened from them, tucked between the seconds on the clock, tick-tock tick-tock.
David knows the reason, knows the illusion is only possible because the human incarnation of time itself is living inside those garishly painted walls.
Still, it’s as impressive as it is terrifying.
Not as terrifying as the fact that he’s walking toward it of his own accord, heading for the gate in the wrought iron fence. He shouldn’t be here. He knows it, and Máni knows it, surging forward and briefly trying to seize control.
David pushes him gently aside, and although Máni is a god, he goes, willing to yield to the human owner of their shared body.
It’s always like that for the healthy relationships between the mortal and the divine: the gods know that they move into already-occupied bodies, immortal hermit crabs seeking shells to settle in, and they try to respect the fact that the humans were there first. It doesn’t work like that for all the incarnates, David knows; the seasons are born beating in the hearts of their human hosts, and because of that, the humans grow up entangled and inseparable from what they might one day become.
As far as he’s aware, it’s the same for the Horae and for the day and night.
Mortal measures of time living out their lives while so tangled with the universe that they become one and the same.
Sometimes he looks at the minor incarnations and wonders whether there are any truly human humans left. But of course there are.
There are the alchemists.
He closes the gate behind himself as he steps into the garden, following the winding brick path up to the porch steps.
Each board is painted a different color, all of them eye-searingly bright, none of them blending with one another.
He puts his hand on the porch rail and for a moment he can’t remember why he’s here, what could possibly have been important enough to justify bothering the people who live here.
They’re important people. They must be, to have a house that’s painted in so many colors.
He’s not important. He’s no one, he has no right to take up their time, to interfere—
No. He takes his hand off the rail and gives it a look, half-amused, half-annoyed.
“Upgrading the security system again, eh?” he asks, as if the air itself might see fit to respond.
“It’s a cute trick. I’d appreciate it a lot more if I weren’t here to see my superior.
You know, the lady who’s banging your brother? ”
It’s a wild guess which one of them would have modified the house alarms in quite this manner, but he’s confident he’s right even before the house puts out a pulse of what feels like pure disgust and the front door swings open.
Which would be all very eerie and unsettling in a haunted-attraction sort of way, if not for the redhaired woman standing just inside, her hand still on the doorknob.
There’s a streak of white running from the crown of her head down through her long, shaggy bangs.
It makes her look a little bit like an anthropomorphic personification of a candy cane.
He’s never been able to get an explanation for what did that to her hair, but her brother has the same streak, and neither of them are bleaching anything.
Somewhere in the past, they were both traumatized enough to turn a strip of their hair an inch and a half wide white as bone, and given how traumatizing the pair of them are, he doesn’t like to think about that more than he actually has to.
David trots up the stairs, nodding casually to the woman in the doorway, like this is no big deal, like she’s no big deal, like he’s not terrified halfway out of his mind every time he has to remind her that he exists.
“’S’up, Dodge?” he offers.
She steps aside to let him in, rolling her eyes (pale gray, like fog over the San Francisco Bay, like moonlight on the mist, and nothing living should have eyes like that: they’re horror-movie eyes, the eyes of the walking dead, and her pupils are black spots in a sea of nothingness, stripping him down, seeing all the way to the bones of him in ways he never agreed to) as she does.
“The usual. I’ve got a fresh new batch of proofs to review, and a team of Australian mathematicians who think they’re about to revolutionize the field. ”
“Are they?”
She smiles like a slashed throat. “Like hell they are. Their work is sloppy, and they have so much hinging on a proof that I disproved when I was eleven that it would be funny if they weren’t wasting my time.”
“Sounds cool.”
It does, actually. Dodger Cheswich is the living embodiment of mathematics, one half of the Doctrine of Ethos, and when she talks about math, it’s so far beyond him that it might as well be poetry, elevated and alien and beautiful all the same.
He doesn’t like to talk to normal mathematicians, the ones who might expect him to understand them, but Dodger?
He can listen to Dodger talk all day long.
She barks a laugh. “Don’t humor me, moon-boy. Judy and my brother are up in the library. And they’re both decent, so you don’t need to worry about walking in on them.”
David makes a sour face. “Once was more than enough.”
Judy’s an attractive-enough woman, all soft curves and long black hair, but finding her entangled with Dodger’s male equivalent, both of them naked and her glowing a soft, lambent peach color as her divinity rose to the surface, had been more than any man should be forced to see.
Unless joining in was an option, which it had most critically not been in that instance.
Judy is his superior in the hierarchy of the local Lunars, and Roger is …
Roger is not quite as terrifying as his sister, but that’s only because he spends more time remembering how to be human.
Dodger treats her humanity as a limitation, something that’s keeping her from truly understanding the underpinning mathematics of creation.
Roger embraces his. Humanity means hot coffee and baseball games, good books and better lovers.
And, at the end of everything, his sister.