Chapter 15
Mother has no body. Or, rather, she has only the barest outline of her body from the neck down. Her face is as it always was. Her wrists and hands. Even her feet, which are covered in delicate leather sandals. But the rest of her seems to have faded away, become translucent like those gelatinous creatures I passed on the way here. A map of blood vessels is all that remains inside, all of them emanating from her beating golden heart. But her skin, her muscles, her bones—they’re all gone. I’ve seen all sorts of awful things over the years, a thousand abominations frightening enough to haunt my nightmares to eternity. But to see my own mother like this, more a specter than a person…I clutch my stomach, all the food I ate earlier rushing to my throat.
Mother hurries over, embraces me. “It’s all right, Deka, it’s all right. I’m here. It’s as I told you, I’m here.”
But that’s not true. While she feels like she’s here—her body feels as solid as it did when I touched her earlier—
“You’re not,” I whimper, unable to hold back my emotions now. “I can feel you, and you’re solid, but you’re not here. Why are you not here?”
“Umu is a wraith.” The answer comes from all the gods, who stare at me implacably, as if they cannot possibly understand my agitation.
I turn away from them, inhaling in quick one-two-three breaths to get my emotions under control. I cannot allow them to take me over like they used to. I vowed I never would again. And yet here I am, weeping and carrying on like a neophyte entering her first battle. One two three, I count swiftly in my mind. One two three. And when you reach four, you will stop. Four.
Stop.
Inhaling again, I hold on to that word. Then I straighten, releasing my emotions and all my other doubts into the currents. I take a few more breaths before I turn back to the gods. “A wraith? I saw vale wraiths in the shadow vale. Mother is nothing like those creatures.”
“We speak of wraiths in the traditional sense,” Sarla replies.
At their words, everything inside me shrivels. “But wraiths are—”
Sarla inclines their head. “Restless spirits that have some amount of corporeality, just not enough to maintain their form permanently.”
By now, my body is shaking so hard, I’m almost afraid it’ll come apart. I whirl to Mother, desperate again. “But you’re here. You’re alive. Please tell me you’re alive.” My emotions are surging again, a hateful panic sending a lump to my throat. I squeeze her tighter. “You have to be alive, after everything I did to find you. You have to be.”
Mother squeezes me back, places her forehead against mine. “Breathe, Deka, breathe. I’m here, just as I told you. I’m here.”
“But?” I prompt, waiting for the end of the sentence.
I know Mother like the back of my hand. I know her smell, the way her hair springs back if you pull it just so. I know exactly how she shivers after she walks in after seeing the first snow of the season. That’s how I know the moment she’s being evasive. As she is now.
When Mother doesn’t answer, I turn to Sarla, who nods sadly. “Umu is only partly alive. What you see before you is her spirit, which is why she can never leave this place.”
“We could not bring her back in her entirety,” another voice says. This one sounds like the crackling of flames over fresh kindling, like the warmth that envelops you when you first enter your home after a long day.
I turn to find Baduri stirring in the hearth that makes up her throne. “Doing so would disturb the balance. Thus, she is bound to this temple, bound to its hearth. Were she to step one foot out, she would return to the natural order and have to take her rightful place within it.”
A hot-cold sensation washes over me.
The natural order.
“You mean death.” When Baduri doesn’t reply, I turn to Mother. “That’s what they’re saying, isn’t it?” My voice is high-pitched with hysteria.
This is the dire circumstance Lamin warned about, the reason Mother is bound to two gods. She’s already dead. All this time searching for her, and she’s already dead.
My ears are ringing now, my body slick with sweat. I can’t breathe, can’t think.
Mother takes my hand, squeezes it gently. One squeeze, then two, then patterns of two and three, just like when I was a child and needed comforting. “I almost reached Fatu,” she begins quietly, her eyes sad.
“White Hands,” I automatically correct. “She prefers to be called White Hands now.”
“White Hands.” Mother accepts my correction. “I nearly reached her. Myter had come to me a few days after your fifteenth birthday, you see. They and Bala”—distantly, I note that she has called Myter they instead of she, marking them as yandau rather than female, as I have been assuming—“are among the few who can interact with others outside Maiwuri. The few who are allowed to.”
Like Lamin,I acknowledge silently, waving for her to continue.
“They told me the truth of what you were: not alaki, not Nuru, but Angoro—god killer. I knew I couldn’t do anything to help you by myself, so I tried—oh, how I tried—to get to Fatu. White Hands. But I was discovered at the gates of Hemaira. Can you imagine—me, a Shadow, recognized? One of my old sisters remembered my voice. Remembered I had run away from the Warthu Bera years earlier. That was that.” Mother shrugs eloquently.
“Once the high priests discovered I was your mother, they took me to the place where they had hidden your kelai, chained me near it so they could see if and how it reacted to me.”
“That’s where I found her.” Myter’s voice rings across the temple as they float down to stand beside Mother.
They do it so swiftly, I barely have time to swallow the fact that my kelai is in the hands of the Idugu’s priests, and, by extension, the Idugu themselves. No wonder the Gilded Ones had to enact such stealthy methods to consume the bits of it they could.
“But I couldn’t free her,” Myter continues. “She was bound by celestial gold, which I couldn’t break, and because she was in the capital at the time, Bala couldn’t emerge so close to where the Idugu rested and risk corruption.”
I hear none of Myter’s explanations. The only thing I hear is “So she was alive when you found her.”
I level my gaze at Myter, who, to their credit, does not falter. Instead, they raise their chin.
“Yes,” they answer.
“But after you left with her, she became like this.”
“Yes.” Myter has the good sense to be concerned now. They take a cautious step back.
“What did you do?” I ask, rage simmering inside me. I feel it rising, an audible crackle over my skin. “Tell me exactly what you did to Mother.”
Myter lifts their chin again. “I took her spirit—”
“With my blessings,” Mother quickly interjects, sensing my rising anger.
“And brought it here and bound it to the temple.”
“And her body?”
“I left it where I found it. I knew the Oterans would never destroy it,” they quickly add. “It was too valuable. It had served as your vessel for nearly a year. It had to have something special, something different.”
My head is spinning. Round and round it goes. And my ears are ringing. When my voice comes, it’s as if from far away. “So you just left her. You just left my mother there, among those monsters.” I turn to Mother, accusing. “And you allowed them to. You allowed Myter to kill you!”
“No, I allowed them to take my spirit so I could find a way to contact you. I couldn’t do anything imprisoned in that chamber, but here, I could slip into your father’s dreams and I could speak to Anok when she discovered me doing so.”
I still, brow furrowing. “So that’s how she knew?”
I’d wondered how Anok knew where Mother was without the other goddesses knowing. Usually, they all seemed to share knowledge, as if they were different facets of the same brain.
“Yes. She was almost too far gone to the corruption when we first met, but I was able to communicate with her. It was she who warned me to no longer travel through dreams. If she could find me, so could the others.”
“And that’s why you never visited me?”
Mother nods. “At first, the ansetha necklace prevented me from doing so. Then, Anok’s warning did.” She brightened. “But that’s the beauty of all this, Deka, don’t you see? You can follow my body.”
I blink. “Follow it? To where?”
“Your kelai.” Mother is almost gleeful now. “Your kelai is back in Otera. Exactly where, I’m not certain. The priests keep it hidden under all sorts of arcane objects and divine power. And they move it frequently, to keep the Gilded Ones from finding it. But they don’t do the same to my body—they don’t hide it with arcane objects, because they think no one will seek it.
“You can use that to your advantage, Deka: find my body, and you’ll find your way there, to your kelai.”
“And once you do,” Sarla adds, “all you have to do is reclaim it, then surrender yourself to the natural order—”
“Wait.” I hold up my hands to slow the god down. This is all moving too fast for me. “So all I truly have to do is die? That’s all?”
I’d already known this, but it seems too simple, somehow. It seems too easy.
My suspicion is confirmed when Sarla shakes their head. “Much more than that,” the god says. “You have to choose death of your own accord. Without coercion, without fear. Sacrifice,” they intone. “All becoming requires sacrifice.”
“Of course it does,” I mutter. It’s always sacrifice with the gods.
“Choose death, Deka,” Sarla finishes, “and you will be reborn to your true self. A god. A conduit for the Greater Divinity.”
“One that will destroy the Oteran gods and restore the balance to this world,” the gods all intone with a devastating finality.
I glance across the temple, the weight of the demand sinking into me. I can save Otera—the entire world, even. All I have to do is die a mortal death. Choose a mortal death.
It’s ironic, actually. All this time, I’ve known I would die one way or the other. But I did not know I had to choose it willingly. But apparently, I have no choice. Because no matter my objections, no matter how much I want to remain as I am, in this body, with my friends, who have all become family, becoming requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of Deka for the Singular, the sacrifice of this life for that of a divine one.
And once I do all that, give up everything that I am, I’ll be reborn a god. A creature I despise. A plague on this world. One that may bring it peace or, perhaps, succumb to corruption and finally end it all.