The two of them entered the ruins alone, just as the sun set.

  This was a place of surprising contrasts. The bones of the site were obvious in the form of ruins, just like any abandoned town in the fundamental ways: sandstone walls of half-collapsed, mostly roofless buildings, worn rounded by centuries of wind and the torrential seasonal rains which passed through here once a year, with all trace of wood or fabric long since rotted away. Yet atop that were the signs of a new culture moving in, not rebuilding, but leaving their mark nonetheless. This place was not abandoned, for all that it was empty and no longer a city. It was, in its unique way, very much cared for.

  Unlike a truly desolate ruin, the streets were clear, at least to the point of being navigable. In fact, as they passed through the outer walls, it became apparent that fallen rubble had been either pushed out of the way into the mouths of alleys, making the central avenue through the forward market district an uninterrupted corridor, or repurposed to delineate… The closest approximation Kaln knew were flower beds, such as he knew from Rhivkabat and had seen in Boisverd, but these obviously held no flowers. They were desert flora—cacti, various other succulents, and sparsely spiky bushes. The beds were not densely planted, and held no additional soil, the pavement simply having been pried up to give the hardy plants access to the sandy earth below.

  Aside from the little grow plots, erected where market stalls would once have been, the Hiiri had made their presence known by their decorations. All up and down the street, positioned between or in front of the beds, or in ancient doorways and windows, were a great variety of stone statues ranging from idols of Hii-Amat and recognizable sculptures of Hiiri and animals to purely abstract decorations. Nearly all were painted, or had been before the windblown sand had gotten at them.

  The walls themselves were painted, too, in bright colors that had obviously been touched up with some regularity. Unlike the eclectic plants and other decorations, the murals seemed to be designed along a consistent theme. It was also abstract, or maybe just decorative. The swaths of bright colors arced and overlapped along the walls, each like a single-hued rainbow, all embellished by more intricate borders of geometric designs or knotwork, and would fancifully twist to avoid empty doors or mark alleyways and other wall breaks. It created a unified overall effect, the paint seeming to flow across the walls like multicolored water.

  Kaln’s inner librarian, the part of him whose sparse knowledge of the fundamentals of archaeology still exceeded his understanding of Hiiri culture, silently winced at this use of an ancient site. It was a small part, though, and he pushed it aside. All this belonged to the Hiiri now; they had a treaty and everything. It was theirs to do with as they felt best, and preserving knowledge of an ancient culture couldn’t be a high priority when that culture was still alive, right next to theirs, and far more powerful.

  “Hiiri ritual practices are…humble,” Isabet said, peering around as they walked. “Humble and practical. And…playful is a good word, I think. These, all this… I believe every part of it was added, one piece at a time. One pilgrimage at a time. It’s both holy and…”

  “Comfortable?” Kaln finished.

  She nodded. “Yeah! That’s the word I was fumbling for. I think it would be very disrespectful to disturb anything, but also… I don’t think we need to be too worried about misstepping here.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best,” he said. “The temples and practices of the Nine are very much not like that…but then again, I was never religious. Maybe Hii-Amat’s way suits me better, anyhow.”

  “Me, too,” she murmured. “I mean no ill against the Shepherd or her Flock, but…”

  “Sometimes things just don’t feel right,” Kaln said lightly, also gazing around at the quiet scenery on the intuition she didn’t want to be looked at in that moment. “Not everything’s for everyone. No disrespect need be implied. I’m…kind of amazed, though, if this is the work of years of random individuals. It looks so coordinated.”

  “Yes, the Hiiri are like that,” Isabet agreed, nodding. “Individualistic in their way, but…always with an eye toward the harmony of the group. They give each other space to be themselves and try not to disrupt the overall peace of the community. I have to say they’re a lot better at balancing those two opposite goals than…the culture I grew up in. All of this is so very Hiiri, the way you can tell it was all piled up by various individuals, but it’s all so interconnected and harmonious.”

  “It’s hard to think these murals weren’t designed by one mind,” said Kaln, gesturing at the wall alongside which they were walking. “Look, even the way the colors are laid down in gradients—that’s really clever! It almost seems like they shimmer when you walk along them.”

  “Flowing like water,” she said with increasing animation. “And look, you see how the plants and statues break them up only to add to the effect? So the arrangements, the sight line, it looks like it’s… Yes, I’m certain now! See how it leads the eye?”

  “Yeah, you’re right!” he said, grinning as he caught her mood. “It’s like… Oh, that is so crafty, I’ve never seen the like. Isabet, I think this is marking out a path through the ruins!”

  “It is! The way the colors flow along the street and then twist at that intersection?”

  “Right, right! So it’s leading—”

  “That way, toward the fortress!”

  “—ahead, to the old temple!”

  Both of them broke off, looking at each other quizzically, and then back at the dim streets, their painted embellishments seeming to shimmer faintly in the last crimson rays of sunset.

  “Of course,” Isabet said more quietly. “The truth of the divine in the subjective.”

  “I know I’ve read about that concept, but…I’m coming up blank,” Kaln admitted. “I may have mentioned that I was never particularly religious back home.”

  “It’s a spiritual practice used by…well, a lot of religions, I think. I didn’t realize that included the Hiiri. Sacred spaces or ritual practices will be deliberately designed such that they may be perceived in different ways, enabling the god to direct individuals’ attention in different directions without making their presence overt. The Shepherd and the Huntsman both use it. Not Machann, though—too logical, that one.”

  “What about the Jongleur?” he asked, thinking back to Emeralaphine’s warning about bardic gods and their influence. Kaln was almost certain the Jongleur had been the one to address him directly during his apotheosis.

  Isabet frowned, shaking her head. “You’re either one of that one’s followers or baffled by them, I couldn’t tell you. The point is, here and now…”

  “It seems we’re to have separate conversations,” he said.

  The mage drew in a deep breath, fidgeting nervously. “Right of course. That’s only… Um. I know it may seem rather pointless to ask at this juncture, but… What is she like?”

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” Kaln said gently. It was the first instinctive reply that sprang to his mind, but it was also the pure truth, and he let it continue spilling out. “When I encountered her, it was…well, an out of body experience, but that description doesn’t feel like it does it justice. But honestly, Isabet, after living with the Hiiri these last few weeks, you probably know what to expect even better than I.”

  “I know.” She unconsciously rubbed her hands against her trousers. “I…yeah, you’re right. It’s just the prospect of meeting a god, in person. Even a small, friendly one. You know?”

  “I do,” he agreed, patting her back once. “It gets easier after the first one.”

  They walked together for another block of the ruined town, and then parted with subdued farewells where their individual paths diverged, each guided onward by the semblance of a clearly marked path obvious only to themselves. Isabet still looked understandably nervous, but Kaln was confident Hii-Amat would quickly put her at ease. For his part, he found now that he felt only calm and anticipatory.

  The ancient temple stood at the highest point of the settlement, on a promontory around which the ravine and river bent. Kaln climbed the chipped and sandblasted stairs, observing that the Hiiri decorations extended to the portico of the temple and no further. Perhaps they didn’t wish to impose their own sacred decorations upon those of a different tradition.

  Whether or not they knew it, that would have been explicitly permissible. Kaln had never seen a deconsecrated temple of the Nine before, but he knew the formalities and they had been carried out here. All their temples featured an obelisk engraved with all nine names, positioned directly in front of the door and forward just enough to provide space for an average humanoid to pass within. Even after all these centuries, the square indentation upon the floor where it had stood when this was a living temple remained. The obelisk, however, had been ritually broken—carefully chiseled in half between the names of the gods so that the crack did not damage any of them. Now, as was doctrine, the base of the obelisk sat to the right of the door, its broken half lying on its side to the left, signifying that the Nine no longer claimed this as sacred ground.

  Kaln hesitated, glancing back and forth between them. After his personal encounter… But then, this was explicit acknowledgment that they held no sway here. Rhivaak itself no longer claimed this land. He was not trespassing.

  He stepped into the darkened temple.

  Nature hadn’t been kinder to it than anywhere else. The dome was half-collapsed, exposing the sanctuary to the night sky; half the chamber was buried in rubble, the other still shielded by the intact part of the ceiling. Kaln knew most domes would lose all integrity if damaged that heavily, but this one had been held up by the prescribed nine support pillars, of which six remained intact.

  He was alone. It was quiet but not silent, the gentle sounds of wind and the nearby rapids punctuated by the occasional call of some desert night bird. It was dim but not dark, devoid of lamps but graced by a starlit sky.

  To his own surprise, Kaln spent not a second dithering. Though it hadn’t been explained to him beforehand, now that he was here, he found he knew exactly what to do.

  The memory of his brief meeting with Hii-Amat rising up, he closed his eyes and cast his awareness back. It was distractingly…ineffable. The experience of rising out of himself like that was something he no longer had the faculties to parse, but he remembered the outline of what was important, here and now. The way she had introduced herself—taught him to do the same, to hold that sense of who he was, and used it to push him back into himself before he came undone.

  Who was Ar-Kaln Zelekhir?

  He brought to mind the images he had shown her, back then, and thoughts related to them. The pleasant, dusty smell of books—the musical ruffling of paper and parchment, the scratching of pens, the warmth of sunlight and lamplight illuminating characters written with such honed mastery that they were both rapidly applied and as exactingly precise as an architect’s diagrams. The memories of a scribe. But he, Kaln, was something more than that. Now, oddly, he found the faces and voices blended together into a rush, but he let them—that, too, felt appropriate. People, countless people, friends and colleagues and strangers, even the odd rival. Literature was an ocean through which he swam like a fish, the interaction of others a sky that held him aloft like updrafts on which sailed a hawk. Kaln was a people person, a lover of the written word in all its forms, and…

  More, now. That was who he had been. He had changed.

  After the first hesitant twinge, he did not shy away from it, for this was his truth. The ache of betrayal, the searing fire of grief, and deep darkness of depression and the bitter, toxic pall of hatred, of the promise of vengeance, which he had wrapped around his heart as if it were a comfort when he had nothing else. Egged on at every step by the shadow which had led him along. Confronting them, now, Kaln found that these things were behind him…but still part of him. This had helped shape his path, led him to who he was. Even having turned away from that course, the faded shadow of it lingered in the truth of his identity.

  And now?

  There was more still, but the more that there was remained in flux. It was a happy more, though, a light and warmth that so suffused him that its glowing tendrils seemed to thread back through the darkness which lay behind. He was still finding his way with them, those connections were young and just forming, but they were powerful. Kaln was not alone. He had a family. Already, they were part of who he was, resonating with the very core of him. Their voices, their faces, the sense of who each of them was as it continued to develop in his understanding… It was frequently tinged with exasperation, and often with confusion, but in every case with love.

  With the love he had chosen when he stood before them and rebuked the shadow.

  Standing in the dim quiet of the long-abandoned temple, feeling the echoes of so much history rippling out from where he stood and plunging deep into his own truth, Kaln found it again.

  The glow, the power. The change wrought in him by the Entity’s manipulation, by the use of the shadow crystal in that Timekeeper contraption, by Hii-Amat’s gentle intervention. Shaped further by the brutality of Atraximos…further still by many more encounters since. In fact, that was always how he had tasted it in the past, coming to know more of his newly divine nature only when that power tasted something which caused it to grow.

  This was the first time he felt it…simply as it was. Always there, deep within him and yet all around, blurring the boundaries between Kaln and creation itself—just as the experience of apotheosis had been. It was a precarious balance, but a stable one, now. He was a godling, no longer a man and not yet a god, a thing caught between and slowly expanding to encompass…whatever he would. Of course the power was always there. It only made sense that there must be a way to touch it at will.

  In hindsight, it made sense that the method of so doing was the same as a goddess had shown him, teaching him how being such as they introduced one another. Not with words, but with the gentle extension of unfiltered truth.

  This is who I am.

  Immersed in the glow, he realized that he was not alone. She hadn’t approached him; she was already here. Of course she was, this was her land, the land of her people. Divinity formed an indentation in reality, carved grooves and made deep puddles which shaped the course of events. Touching his own, Kaln had a dim awareness of the vastly more powerful pressure exerted in the near distance—or what was the near distance, to senses such as this.

  To the north and west, the four in their realm of the Evervales. Beings which eclipsed him by many orders of magnitude, their presence both overwhelmingly powerful and so intricate he could not possibly have parsed what they might be thinking or doing. As before, they seemed to be ignoring him; no channels of interest stretched toward him from their overwhelming being.

  To the south, even stronger, the Nine. Suffusing Rhivaak, his home—or what had been his home, before the Nine had ordered him out.

  In the moment his awareness brushed across them, Kaln discovered they were not like the four. They were watching. Not closely, not with very much interest, at least so far as he could tell. But thus attuned, the notice of such powerful beings was a force in and of itself. The barrier was still intact, keeping him out. That distant regard seemed to hold no intent, merely… Due diligence. He was too close, and deeply entangled with Izayaroa, to be ignored.

  They were waiting to see what he did, and what they might have to do about it.

  But even that was only a passing awareness, because as significant as it might be, it was distant. Here and now, Kaln was smack in the middle of the deepest indentation at all. The overwhelming dip in reality created by the immediate presence of a god.

  A dip filled with warmth, with welcome, and amusement. And, in that instant that he noticed her, Hii-Amat called forth her power.

  Perhaps if he’d had the opportunity to study it in detail, Kaln might have been able to observe this exercise of divine power, see how it worked and how he might do something similar, but it was just too fast. Like a fox pouncing on a mouse.

  Power swelled, roared, coalesced, and then he was jolted physically out of that ineffable, semi-meditative state of observing thought and being and reality by an impact to his very mortal torso.

  He flopped over backward, landing on a cushion of pure energy that spared him a painful introduction to the stone floor, with a goddess sitting on his chest. A physical, heavy goddess.

  She was a fox—at least in shape. Her eyes were pools of sunlight, her luxuriant coat rippling with all the shades of sunrise and twilight and casting a warm glow throughout the temple besides. Bigger than a fox, too—about half the size of a human. About the size of a Hiiri.

  Grinning, Hii-Amat patted him lightly on the cheek with one dusky crimson paw.

  “There you are. It’s good to see you again, little brother.”