Chapter Text
“Why?”
The warlock laughs, and it is a dry bitter thing. They lean forward, the shape of their bones sharpening beneath paper-thin skin. “You know why.”
They reach forward and a cracked necklace swings beneath a withering hand like the pendulum of a clock.
Tick, tick, tick.
He is running out of time.
Tick, tick, tick.
They both are.
Tick, tick…
His voice is little more than the rasp of metal on metal when he tries to speak again, sparks searing his lungs. “What have you done?”
Tick.
The amulet drops, clinking on steel hands that were once his. “My life for yours, god. My life for revenge.”
He remembers that god. Vengeance. He should have known.
He still doesn’t know how to move, this body foreign to him, but the warlock takes care to stay in his view. They kneel before him, and it is a scene he is almost familiar with.
But they are not praying to a dying god. They have no demands of him, save that he die here.
Nothing escapes his throat this time, just a sharp click. “I do not think I hate you,” the warlock says, taking his stiff limbs, folding them until he too is kneeling.
Grass, what little of it is left, sways softly. He wishes he could feel it. It has been so very long since he has been allowed a mortal body. The wind seems gentle, carding through the warlock’s brittle hair.
Had they been human before this? Before they sold their soul to an undead mockery of a god, before they gave their limited life to seal him away? Surely they had.
“I do not think I hate you,” they say again, voice a whisper now as their vitality drains into this spell. Their hands, so steady in the battle before, reach up and they shake like the skies above as they are ripped apart. “You did not have a choice, war god.”
He did. He had a choice. Mortals always do. But he cannot say this, not with this cold unmoving body. There is a chill that seeps into his steel bones and claws at his slowing heart and his now-unnecessary breath freezes in his lungs.
This no-longer-mortal shell blinks. The spell lunges hungrily lunges forward, and he feels the spell complete.
He has not forgotten how it felt to be afraid. This spell, he knows how it works. The snapped wires at the base of his neck hiss softly. His eyes will not open again, not until this cage of metal rusts and by then, he will be long dead, his name as a god forgotten and his original mortal self returned to dust.
But the warlock sighs, their dying lungs rattling. Shaking fingers press against his face, tilting his head up. “You were always a doomed god,” they murmur. “Ever since you stole that divinity. But you were kind, at least.”
Metal creaks softly as his hands are moved to rest in his lap, cupping the air. His eyes are gently opened.
“A funny thing to say about something like you, I suppose, but you were.” Grass sways in the edges of his eyes and the trembling sky stretches above the rocky wall.
“I worshiped you once,” they say with a quiet sigh, ducking out of his view. He thinks he can feel them rest their head between his knees.
I’m sorry then, he tries to say, for taking your belief. I have never earned it.
“I thought I would have been your priest. And I…I do not think it would have been such a bad thing.”
The stars above have stopped shaking. There are constellations missing, points of light that had once been other suns, planets, moons simply erased from the night’s sky. The hum of desperate prayers in the back of his mind finally dies.
This world has once again been cleansed. Gods have fallen and risen, mortals have ascended, and the sky itself repainted.
Yet, he is not dead. None of them are. They four usurper gods, who had stolen the divinity from cruel deities and kept taking until all that was left of their mortal selves was a set of solitary graves, they are not dead and rotting as the seers have predicted.
He comforts himself in knowing the other three are far from here, walking the earth in bodies of flesh and bone and no longer wrapped in the sharp threads of Destiny’s loom.
“I am sorry for you,” the warlock breathes. “You, and all the fates we have suffered. I do not know how long you will stay here. But the contract is complete now.” Urgency blooms in their deathly soft voice. “Let me be your final follower. Let my soul escape to that crumbling plane you once called home.”
He has never called that place, full of blood and hate, home. But who is he to deny this wish?
There is a soft sigh and the warlock is gone.
There is quite a bit he has missed from his mortal days.
The silence, for one.
For the first time in centuries, there are no voices howling for attention, no prayers to be answered, no bloody wars to dance through because that is what he was the god of.
There is nothing.
He can finally think.
But oh, what can he think of? There are gaps in his memory, holes from where the god burned the mortal, and he does not think he can even remember his name.
He remembers almost nothing, save for his final conversation with the warlock-priest.
There is an open pack lying nearby on the slowly re-growing grass, the thick canvas slashed open by an arcane blade. He doesn’t know how he can tell.
A book, lying half covered by the pack. It’s his, this he knows, and there is dead magic held within its pages. He feels something that might be a pang of regret, even if just for how he had once labored over each spell in his mortal days.
There is also a snapped quill, and as he watches, the breeze he cannot feel carries half of it up and into the cracked stony wall encircling this place. Ink slowly seeps into the dirt, and briefly, he has to wonder at the mundanity of it all.
He had only just lost his godhood, that blinding aura of light finally gone, so why had he owned such mortal items?
He considers the apple lying beside the pack, the skin mottled yellow-red, far from the perfect uniform sacrifices once given to him.
It has not been very long. It is still fresh and there is a new sun, golden rays peeking over the edge of the stone wall to his right. He faces north, then, unless the sky has been changed so that he cannot even recognize the day.
This is a new world he does not belong in, with his hands stained red and blood on his teeth and old corrupt divinity.
But he would have liked to see it for himself.
He is, after all, mortal again. There is very little to feel as a god. It is a selfish thought, a selfish hope to think that he would be allowed into this new world scrubbed clean of the old one’s crimes, but he had been a selfish human and a selfish god.
This is a fitting punishment, then, he supposes. Frozen here, just as unfeeling as he had been in his godhood and forced to watch these small snippets of life pass on by. This stone wall encircling him will crumble, the grass will grow, but he will remain here until this metal cage rusts and breaks.
He wonders if that is how he will be freed.
He wonders if this now-mortal soul of his will travel to that gray plane and if he will stand before the dead and be judged, just as every free soul has been, or if that place has been torn asunder, the cloaked deity within cast down to earth like him.
He supposes he will find out, in time. It is always time, isn’t it?
But for now, he will kneel here, a vestige of that old cursed world.
He does not think it will be too bad. He is used to feeling little. At least it is quiet now.
The apple rots as the sun cycles on by.
Smooth yellow-red skin begins to ripple, spots of decay eating through the surface. The grass has nearly swallowed it now, and when the rain comes, it breaks apart.
Perhaps it will grow from a seed into a tree. He has never witnessed time crawl by like this. No, he was far too impatient, far too human to do such a thing. And once he ascended…gods like he did not pay any mind to things like this.
He was the one who took life, sundered it with a single word and who reveled in the pulse of war. He would have thought this beneath him.
But he is alone now, with nothing but this crumbling temple, a quiet wind he cannot feel, and the growing grass as company.
It is…lonely.
He never thought the silence would bother him like this, but he cannot help but wonder if the cataclysm had destroyed the rest of the world.
There is no birdsong, no chirp of crickets, and he cannot even hear his own breathing because he cannot move. There is only the soft hiss-hiss of grass and the cold sun above.
Idly, he wonders if he has begun to rust yet, if the rainwater has begun to erode him, piece by piece.
He’s not quite sure which he would prefer: a quick decay like the rotted apple melting into the dirt before him or to stay alive like this.
…Is he alive?
He cannot touch, he cannot move, there is no breath in his lungs and his heart does not beat. He cannot speak and he does not feel any more mortal than when he had been a god.
Surely he exists, but he does not know if he can count himself as alive.
That’s a surprising thought. He has been alive for so long.
He supposes he matches his final priest now.
He cannot look down. Are they still curled before him? Are their bones still here, cradled by the soft grass or have they crumbled to dust?
His shadow stretches before him, long enough to be thrown against the rough stone wall. He wishes he could feel the sun.
There is a small seedling poking up through the dirt.
He is almost afraid to take his eyes off it, lest he lose it to the grass that sways in tune with the breeze.
It is small, little more than a weed, but it grows beside the worn canvas bag and he has very little to cling to but hope.
How long has it been? He’s not quite sure.
But he doesn’t want to count days, not when he’s all too aware of how he will cling to this number.
It is rather surprising how quickly time is passing though.
Days and nights slip by as he floats, his soul a small thing in this iron cage of a body. Is this normal?
He’d thought those incessant prayers chains, ropes binding him while their words demanded his attention but now…
It’s too silent.
He cannot feel anything, not his limbs, not the rain nor the frost that had begun painting the grass with diamonds.
He is losing time and if he does not consciously focus on some aspect of the slowly-changing world around him, there is only the thing sitting where his heart should be.
He doesn’t know what it is, but it is dark and cold and so very lonely.
It grows when he lingers over its existence so he tries to put it out of his mind.
He turns back to the small plant standing stubbornly against the wind. He hopes the frost doesn’t kill it.
It’s snowing again. How many times has it snowed? Quite a few times, maybe.
The apple tree stands tall now, stretching up to the sky.
He thinks he’s happy it survived that first winter. He cannot be sure.
It had borne fruit that spring. One had fallen not too far from where he is, but there is no sprout there.
He supposes it’s okay.
There will be no life, nothing but tall grass that blurs together despite his perfect vision into a single swaying block, but the body and seeds will rot and they will feed the things still alive in the dirt. If there are things still alive.
It doesn’t feel quite so real. The colors of the sky and grass are too sharp or not enough, and—
There are stars in the sky, right?
He sees them every night. So why does he hesitate?
He looks up, he can only look up, and there are flat dots against a dark canvas.
Are those the stars?
Slowly, he traces the path of one as it drifts, spiraling irregularly.
No, not stars. Just snow.
It falls out of his view. It should land on his hand. It should. He thinks. He can’t feel his body, but he knows where it is. He knows, right?
Oh, there are more trees now.
He can see their shadows thrown against the wall before him. If he tries, he thinks he can make out his shadow.
It doesn’t feel like his.
He doesn’t have a form. He is just something incorporeal trapped in this steel cage. Perhaps that dark spot he’d once been afraid of was just him.
Fitting, he supposes. What else is war but a stain?
He’s a little glad that he does not really exist anymore.
This is just a lingering shadow of that long-dead god he thinks he might have been. He is dead. The Scribe has written him away and the seers amongst the mortals and immortals had all declared his fate.
The moving painting before his eyes shifts and a dead leaf falls. It brushes across his vision and he hears it scrape against something.
It’s not him though.
The thing he’s trapped in—not living in, never living, not anymore—isn’t his.
He doesn’t know what that leaves him though. Nothing, he supposes.
He is nothing.
He does not exist.
So why is he still here?
The apple tree is gone.
There are others; an entire copse, the crumbling stone wall nearly obscured by bark and leaves, but the first one is gone.
There is a rotting stump, wood old and gnarled, where it should be.
How long has it been?
This isn’t—he’s not alive. He cannot ask to die. Nothing will answer. He is the echo of a dead god and a dead human and you cannot kill what isn’t alive. But why can he see then? Why can he hear the whispering of the wind and the rumble of thunder?
This isn’t life.
So why is he still here?
He wants out.
Nothing here is real, nothing really changes because it is all just color, just red-blue-green-black and he does not remember what the world should look like, but it shouldn’t be this.
He is dead, let him be dead, let him go—
Please, let him go, let him go, let him die, please, please, please—
Let me die, let me die, please, please, stop watching and help me, let me die, please, please, please, please, please, let me go, let me go, letmegoletmegoletmego—
…
How long has it been?
He doesn’t recognize the apple trees around him anymore.
He has seen what might have been the shadow of birds pass by, but they never land.
Perhaps it is because they can sense the dead thing that haunts this broken temple.
He supposes they’re right to do so. This place must be cursed. A god of war does not die quietly and whatever he is cannot be natural.
The animals know. But it seems mortals still do not have that same sense of danger.
The faint sound of running, feet pounding into the dirt, grass hiss-hissing at a frenetic pace and he startles back into…well. This not-quite dream solidifies.
Moonlight illuminates this copse of trees as two small figures stumble in, tripping over roots.
One tugs the other along, tail bushed out and ears flat against their head, and he is surprised when he finds that he understands their tongue.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the first whispers, pulling them both before the largest tree. “We just need to hide. Come on—” he pries the hands of his softly crying friend away from his face “—don’t touch it. It’s okay. We need to hide. Don’t cry.”
Oh.
They’re children.
Some long half-forgotten piece of his divinity stirs in recognition.
War.
The second child nods, sniffling, rubbing furiously at his eyes, uncaring of the dark liquid that smears across his face.
It is inelegant and graceless, a deep panic he remembers tinging so many of his prayers woven into their movement, but they scramble up the tree with help.
He spins, the branch he clings to shaking, and he reaches a hand back down. “D-don’t leave me.”
The other’s voice is serious, and he can almost taste the broken vow in the air, dust drifting off of his sealed memories. “I won’t. I promise.” He claws his way up too and in the darkness, he can see them cling to each other. “We need to stay quiet now though, okay?”
The second nods again, burying their head in his friend’s shoulder.
Eyes flash in the dark, shining like a cat’s, and there is a feeling that wells from a spring he’d thought long dead.
If you are a god, and the child’s voice is so shaky in this desperate prayer of his, don’t let them find us.
He doesn’t want to be here. He shouldn’t be here. This child shouldn’t have to pray to this dead god-thing trapped in a steel cage. There are other gods, better gods, to pray to. He can’t do anything.
I can’t answer, don’t pray to me, please, he silently begs the child. Shouting sounds behind him and there are shadows flung violently through the trees.
Grass folds underfoot, heavy armor ripping and tearing apart the peace of this place, and there are two soldiers who step before him, torches held high, firelight making monsters of the trees.
Those coin-bright eyes squeeze shut, but the quiet prayer does not stop.
He cannot look away.
“Stop.” One of the soldiers puts her fist in the air, the tip of her bloodied sword ghosting through the tips of the tall grass. Her long pointed ears twitch and she spins, gold eyes like the fire held in her hand.
Her companion shifts his grip on his blade, impatient.
Had he been a normal mortal, he would call her gaze harsh, intense. But he is neither and he has seen far worse.
She stares at him, face unreadable in the severe shadows thrown across her skin and behind her, the two children still cling to each other tightly. The corner of her mouth curls up. “We are leaving.”
“What?”
“We are leaving.”
“We’re not supposed to leave survivors! They’re just two f*cking kids, they can’t have gone far.”
The elf snarls, her ears flat against her head. “What part of ‘we are leaving’ is slipping through that ale-addled brain of yours? This is a dead god’s tomb. If they are lost here, they are as good as dead.”
Her companion’s hand darts up to clutch a necklace beneath his silver armor. A holy symbol, one he has never seen before. The “A dead—which one?”
“You cannot speak their names, fool,” she hisses. “It has been struck from the Records by the Scribe.”
He rolls his eyes, blade dipping down, his grip relaxing. “Fine. You don’t need to be such a massive bitch about it though.”
Their firelight flickers and the prayers do not—
The sky is blue and the stars are gone.
The children are still here, curled up together against the trunk of the apple tree.
That incessant hum of prayer is absent again. He almost misses it, even if just because he’s lonely. It’s too quiet.
He has entertained the idea of his presence warping this broken temple, but he had not thought it possible, not with this cursed non-existence he leads, but he…well, he supposes this is hope. He hopes that the elf-soldier’s words were wrong.
There has been too much death done in his name. He gazes at the pair and—
They’re standing in front of him.
Slowly, they both bow, the shifter child, his tail wound tightly around his leg, whispering a not-so-quiet “Thank you.” His friend’s tears have dried, the long cut marring his cheek now closed.
I did nothing, he thinks, but the second child leans forward and puts something, an offering maybe, down. This close, he sees scratches raked along their arms, their legs, and he is too familiar with the ever-present gleam of fear and vigilance in their eyes. They have seen war, and perhaps had this still been the old world, he may have caught a snippet of their desperate prayers in the storm.
He does not think he would have cared so much, not until their hearts grew cold, bitter or full of rage.
But the child’s voice is still quiet and gentle when he speaks. “I hope you like it.”
Don’t give a dead thing like me your prayers, I have no altar for you, no answer.
But they are gone.
The sound of mangled strumming drifts across the air, but it is not the broken-hearted kind.
Things have changed again. The tree that had protected those two children has fallen now, but the splintered wood is still new, pale. When did this happen? Apples lay scattered on the ground, painted ruby by the dew and new morning sun.
“Oh!” Someone skips into his view, instrument now half-slung over a shoulder. “I’ve never seen this place before.” The stranger shakes his head, delicately pointed ears poking through his dark hair. But there is an aura of mortality around him, an instinctual acknowledgement of time and dust. Half-elf, then.
He picks up an apple, turning it over in the dappled light and bites into it, humming. It takes him a moment before he notices the way something in the air changes to fit his song. The old magic had been rewritten then, just like him.
The stranger spins, hoisting the instrument again when it begins to slip, and he realizes that he’s young. Not an adult, not by half-elf or human standards. A boy with his first instrument.
“Oh.” The stranger bows to him. “Hello.” He looks around this not-temple with its crumbling walls and apple trees and he tilts his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were here…Can I stay a while?”
There is a careful reverence in his tone and he hates it.
I do not exist anymore. There is nothing to fear.
There is no answer to his question, but the stranger nods, sitting across from him, his instrument now in his hands. “Well, if you don’t mind, then I guess I’ll stay.”
He stays. He doesn’t know his name and he thinks he speaks, words freely flowing from his mouth as he talks of anything that crosses his mind.
He doesn’t bother trying to keep up with the stranger’s conversation. He is losing too much time.
But he tries to remember his face. It’s the very least he can do for this not-quite-worshipper, whose gifts come in the form of childish but earnest song.
He’s not quite sure he succeeds, but at least when he realizes that it is once again winter and that young half-elf is long gone, he remembers a small mole beneath bright eyes, a brighter laugh, and quick hands on an instrument whose shape he doesn’t exactly recognize.
Snow crunches underfoot—when had winter come again?
He doesn’t recognize the trees again, their roots longer and more gnarled, their branches more numerous as they stretch up to claw at the steel-gray sky.
Something is dying here. A goat, bite marks scattered over its flanks, pale bone jutting up through a shattered knee.
Not war, but a hunt. He knew a god of the hunt once. They were…
He. They had been a he. And they had been friends, hadn’t they? He and the Hunter…they ascended together. They should have fallen together, their names crossed out by the Scribe.
What had happened to the Hunter? Something mortal, he thinks. Maybe not death, though that is perhaps the most mortal thing of all, but something still mortal.
Red blooms against the snow, freshly fallen flakes melting to steam against the goat’s labored breathing. It will not last long.
It is a desperate thing, then, to come into this place of not-death. He knows the wolves are hovering outside, sharp yellow eyes watching it die.
They will not step foot in this crumbling maybe-temple. He supposes, once again, they are right to do so.
There is something else here though. Something brave enough to wander inside.
He flits past him, flakes of snow stirring in his wake and he curses quietly as he kneels beside the dying animal. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and with a flash of a knife, there is death singing in the air.
His bow clatters against his quiver when he stows it against his back, slinging the goat over his shoulders, uncaring of how blood drip-drips down into the snow.
“Wolves,” the stranger sighs, gazing over his head to where the animals must be waiting. “We’re all hungry this year, sorry.”
His eyes trail down and surprise flickers over his face. “Oh, is this—” Hastily, he bows, fingers tightening around the goat’s legs. He looks back to the ring of bloodstained snow, marks like the petals of a rose where it had scrabbled desperately in its cling to life.
Don’t, he begs, tracing over the hollowness of his cheeks, the tremble of his frost-nipped hands as this stranger debates over leaving a sacrifice. Don’t. I’m not a god, not anymore. I am not alive, leave me nothing.
“I…we need this, god.” The stranger shakes his head. “I don’t know your name and I’m sorry. I’ll come back later with an offering, I promise. But we need this.”
He still hesitates. He sighs and he—
Branches poke out from the side of his vision and the stranger is kneeling before him.
Oh. He’s almost forgotten that there is a physical thing where he seems to be. The stranger brushes snow off of this steel cage and he says, “I promise I’ll be back with something better.”
And he stands, hoisting the goat carcass, and he walks away.
He doesn’t come back. But perhaps people are not supposed to find this cursed place where a dead god-thing haunts the grove of apple trees and crumbling rock.
