Death of the Divine
homil had imagined jumping before. Just imagined. The act itselfT would be too selfish to contemplate. But on nights like this, he would imagine—freedom.
With his back to the steel cylinder, he let his legs hang over the ledge, indifferent to the fifteen-foot drop to the roof below and the many-story drop below that. Since the water tower atop his building had stopped working, the broad lip around the base of the drum made for a good place to sit. In these night hours before the factory beside the apartment complex woke, the tower provided a welcome respite, quiet in a city that could never shut the hell up.
Usually, Thomil came here when his apathy failed him, when he felt more emotion than was wise or bearable for a Kwen and he needed to quiet his mind. This time was more complicated. He was surprised at himself, not for his anger, not for his apathy, but for the bizarre way they had twisted in the wake of his fight with Highmage Freynan. His apathy should be for the mage, a cog in the evil machine of Tiran, and his anger should be for Tiran, the machine itself. He couldn’t quite understand how it had ended up the wrong way around—how he had ended up so, so angry at Sciona Freynan.
After all, the true nature of Blight fit with everything he already knew of Tiran: that the city was a monster built by takers for takers. Thomil had
known this since his first lucid moments on this side of the barrier. The anger had been a constant burn in those early days, but Thomil had grown numb to the injustice over the years, as all Kwen did if they were to survive.
The great machine of Tiran was designed to work that kind of defiance out of a Kwen, one small indignity at a time. But slowly, an old fire had snuck back into Thomil’s soul, reignited by the warmth of Sciona Freynan’s lab— this other world where only knowledge mattered, where truth was not only attainable but ultimately good.
The anger that gripped him now had its roots in that lab. This fresh and foreign rage, hurting to the heart, was the sort of feeling that only came from betrayal, and betrayal could only come from trust. Reasoning backwards from there, Thomil arrived at an utterly ridiculous truth: he had trusted Sciona Freynan. Against all his better judgment, he had come to believe in that frenetic little mage and the way she saw the world. Like a starry-eyed boy, he had come to think that this Tiranishwoman appreciated him as a human rather than a commodity.
What a laughable mistake for a grown Kwen to make.
Thomil cradled one open hand in another, tracing circles on his left palm with his right thumb. His calluses had softened in the last few months.
How had he let this happen? Sure, when the mages told a Kwen to do something, there wasn’t much room to argue. If they wanted you to change jobs, you changed. But this was the first time Thomil had let a Tiranish person change something inside him.
Somewhere in his time playing mage’s assistant, he had forgotten what he was: not a citizen of this city, just flesh that it fed on. He had mocked Highmage Freynan’s blindness, but he had been just as blind, hadn’t he?
Seduced by a light that was best left alone? And Thomil was the more pathetic of the two, for he hadn’t burned himself pursuing the ideals of his gods and kin. No, his lure had been the meadow-green light of Sciona Freynan’s gaze. He had started to live for the moments the mage smiled at him, the moments he could make her brow crease in thought, and the way her eyes would brighten when she came up with a response. He had forgotten how he and Maeva had returned to their father’s resting place two
years after his death to find the grass growing verdant among the bones.
Painfully green and up to their knees.
The brightest meadows grew from dead things.
“Maeva,” he murmured into the night. “How did I let this happen?”
There was so little wind within the city’s barrier. To get a proper breeze, one had to climb high. It was another reason Thomil liked it up here. He would always miss real winter, real wind that raked the skin raw and reminded him, with each searing breath, that he was alive. But here, in the numb half life of Tiran, this cool breeze was enough. It let him imagine that he was back home on the plains.
“Uncle?” a voice said, and Thomil started.
“Carra! Gods!” He turned to find his niece on the ladder, the breeze stirring her red hair around her like wildfire in the dark. “Devil child, you scared me.”
When Carra was little, Thomil had taught her to move like a hunter. It was a useful skill, allowing her to melt into the safety of shadows in the Tiranish homes where she worked, but Thomil did rather regret teaching her in the moments she snuck up on him.
It should have been alarming to watch his precious niece hold so casually to the ladder, her thirdhand potato sack of a nightdress flapping around her skinny frame. But he reminded himself that she climbed rooftops like this every day. Chimney sweeping was a job for boys, but most employers didn’t look closely enough to see the difference so long as a child got the job done quickly. And, as dangerous as it was to clean chimneys, it was still one of the safer jobs for a Kwen girl in this city.
“It’s late,” Thomil said as Carra climbed easily from the ladder to the ledge beside him. She always washed when she got home from work, but tonight, she hadn’t quite gotten all the grime off her face before flopping onto her cot.
The Tiranish had an almost obsessive aversion to dirty things. While Thomil couldn’t be around to protect his niece, a thick layer of soot was the best defense against the sort of trouble that plagued a pretty Kwen girl— even a scarred one. And Carra made a good boy. Too good. Even with her
long hair and nightdress loose about her, there was an implacable hardness to her. That was Thomil’s fault. Maeva hadn’t been here to teach her daughter the gentler arts of their people. Arras, for all his brute strength, had also had an infectious warmth about him that would have softened Carra’s edges. All Thomil had was resentment, locked tight in layers of apathy.
Carra had grown up looking at that. She had grown to emulate it, however poorly it might suit her.
All the energy that had been loving in Maeva was cold in Carra. All the power that had been steady in Arras was wild in her. Angry.
“What are you doing up here?” Thomil asked.
“I got up to get a glass of water and didn’t hear you snoring up a storm.
It was weird.” She arranged herself on the lip beside Thomil and let her legs dangle by his. “Couldn’t get back to sleep without the racket.”
“Mmm.” Thomil knew he should throw a joke back at her. He couldn’t.
“You look like crap.” Carra spoke Caldonnish to Thomil most of the time, but her voice in their native tongue always sounded too much like Maeva’s. And right now, the echo of his sister was too much for Thomil. He turned away so Carra wouldn’t see the tears standing in his eyes. “Are you
all right, Uncle?”
“No.”
Caldonnae didn’t lie to their children and little siblings—though Maeva had always managed the truth with more grace than Thomil.
“Oh. Um…” Awkwardly, Carra scooted closer to Thomil so her shoulder touched his.
She wasn’t good at dealing with emotions—her own or anyone else’s.
That, too, was a failure of Thomil’s—and Tiran’s, he supposed. A Kwen girl didn’t survive this city without many layers of armor, and often not even then. Thomil had just never escaped the feeling that Carra’s real parents would have taught her to navigate this life better. They would have found a way to make her strong without making her jagged.
He put an arm around his niece and kissed the top of her head.
“I love you.” He didn’t say it often enough. It was such a beautiful sound in Caldonnish. It would be a pity for such music to disappear from
the world.
“All the gods!” Carra looked up, surprised at the uncharacteristic display of affection. “What did those mages do to you?”
“That’s a damn good question.”
“Did that fuckstick Renthorn hurt you again?” Carra clutched the neck of Thomil’s vest and pulled it sharply as if expecting to find cuts and glass fragments.
“No, no.” Thomil caught her hand. “It’s nothing to do with him.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Carra, you know how I tell you never to trust any Tiranish, no matter how sweetly they talk?”
“And I always ask if you think I’m stupid? Yeah.”
“Well…I’ve been stupid.” Thomil looked down into the dark, unable to meet his niece’s eyes. “I made a mistake. I didn’t follow my own rule.”
“That lady you work for.” Carra’s voice took on an immature note of delight, and she nudged Thomil with her shoulder. “You like her, don’t you?”
“That’s—beside the point. I trusted her.”
“Gods, Uncle, you’re serious! After all the lectures you’ve given me!”
“I know.” Thomil swallowed the derision because he deserved it for letting himself fall so deep into those green eyes. “I lost myself a little. And it took today—took something terrible—to bring me back to reality.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I always thought that the cruelest thing about Blight was that it was senseless. You and I are alone here without our people for no reason. Our tribe is gone for no reason.”
Carra pushed away from Thomil to look him in the face. Her smile had vanished. Thomil almost never spoke about the crossing.
“What does any of this have to do with Blight?” she demanded.
“Everything,” Thomil said quietly. “All of this is because of Blight.” He stretched out a hand to indicate the city below. “All of this is the reason.”
“I don’t understand.”
So Thomil explained. He told Carra everything he had learned in Sciona’s lab earlier that day. Because she would surely pry until she had the truth and, selfishly, because he didn’t want to be alone with it.
Ultimately, selfishness had governed Thomil’s entire relationship with his niece—beginning with the way he had raised her: wildly, defiantly Caldonn. He told himself it was how her parents would have wanted it.
They would have wanted the last of their line to remember their names, feel their absence, sing their songs, and speak their language. There was probably some truth to the assumption, but the deeper truth was that Thomil couldn’t bear to be the very last of his people. A selfless guardian would have let Carra be Tiranish. Let her put her hair up and fuss over dresses like a Tiranish girl, let her grow up to speak without an accent, then come to resent her uncle for his poor manner of speaking and the dirty Kwen habits no amount of time could break. Instead, he had raised her Caldonn, and Caldonnae did not hide from the truth. So, he told her what he had learned of Blight, adding this night to the long list of wrongs he had done his niece.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying, even though he knew that few Caldonn gods cared how sorry a man was for the harm he did.
“I’m sorry,” because he knew the anger that ran in his niece’s veins and how easily it could turn to fatal poison.
“I’m sorry,” because he knew telling Carra all this was cruel.
“I’m sorry,” because, knowing the cruelty, he was still too selfish to carry the truth on his own.
Maybe that was the resonant chord that connected him to Sciona Freynan and her hateful magic. Without his community to hold him to account, he was a selfish creature. And this was the real death of his tribe.
Caldonn deities were all gods of community. Eidra of Motherhood, Siernaya of the Hearth, Mearras of the Hunt, Thryn of the Fields, Nenn of the Rivers. These gods were great because, through all their mighty push and pull, they left the world more than they took from it. The Caldonnae had been a great tribe because they had lived by those ideals. The tribe was the self, and the self was the tribe.
But when there was no tribe, there was only Thomil piling his pain onto his sister’s daughter. And when did trying to keep that pain alive become an act of weakness? Of ego?
Thomil had used Carra’s precious few memories of her parents, twisted them, to take some of the pain off his own soul, and at some point, that pain had to supersede all that had been good about the Caldonnae. At some point, Thomil had to concede that Tiran had eaten the entirety of his tribe.
Perhaps that point had already come and gone with the relentless and monotonous turning of Tiran’s gears, and Thomil had just been too spent to notice.
It was still dark when he numbly finished explaining the horrors and answering his niece’s questions, but chimes from a distant church said that morning had come. The factories that towered over the Kwen Quarter were waking, conduits clunking as they prepared to siphon energy for another day’s production. Carra didn’t say anything. Just pressed her lips into a thin line and nodded. Then she descended the ladder to the rooftop and faced the textile factory that loomed over their apartment complex. She balanced right on the edge as the factory lit with siphoning spells in lieu of morning sunlight.
Had Thomil stood on that ledge with the knowledge of Blight, he would have doubted his balance, his will to live. He didn’t feel that worry for Arras and Maeva’s child. She was made of stronger stuff.
Her shoulders rose and dropped in breaths of increasing intensity until, at last, a great breath filled her body. And she screamed, hair wildfire about her, arms thrown back with the fingers flexed as if to claw the heart from the world. The sound was bone-grating, echoing with the voices of a thousand lost Caldonnae—but it lasted only a second.
In the next moment, the factory’s central conduits roared to life and drowned her little human voice.
Carra didn’t relent in the face of the noise and the blinding light. She roared back at the factory and went on roaring even though no one in the world could hear her.
In the artificial light of the textile mill, Thomil looked on what he had done to his niece and knew that he had served himself before his family— just like a Tiranish.
Eidra, forgive me. He closed his eyes and prayed. Thryn, forgive me.
Nenn, forgive me.
His gods never answered. How could they in this world of metal and gears where they had no voice? Why would they when their last son had forsaken them for a pair of false green eyes? The only god to answer was the roaring maw of Tiran.
Thomil opened his eyes and knew for certain in his broken heart: This was how the Caldonnae truly died.
In pain too great for two small souls to bear without corruption.
