"*Get up.*"

The voice came from nowhere.

It came from inside the dark and from inside his head at the same time, with no separation between the two. Deep. Male. Not loud. The kind of voice that didn't need to be loud because it had never met anything that didn't listen.

Dante's whole body went rigid against the stone.

(Who—)

(*Where—*)

He turned his head — uselessly, because there was nothing to see in any direction — and tried to make his mouth work.

"Wh—" He swallowed. His throat was raw. "Who's th—"

"*Get up.*"

The same voice. Same tone. Slightly less patient.

"I — I can't —"

"*Get up.*"

This time the voice didn't ask. It *pressed*. There was a moment of pressure inside Dante's chest, the kind he'd felt in dreams sometimes when something in the dream wanted him to do something and he couldn't, and his arms moved on their own. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. Onto his hands and knees. Up onto his feet.

His legs almost gave out under him.

He stood. Swaying. In the dark. Listening.

The voice didn't speak again.

For a long moment there was nothing. Just his own breathing and the slow drift of cool air past his left ear, and the cold of the stone through the soles of the soft shoes he was wearing. He didn't remember being given soft shoes. He didn't remember being given the robe either. The Hall of the Heptarchy already felt distant, the way a dream felt distant within five minutes of waking up.

(Did I imagine the voice.)

(It told me to get up. So I got up. So either it was real or I'm doing this on my own and giving someone else the credit for it.)

He laughed once, hoarsely, in the dark. It sounded wrong.

He started feeling his way around. The wall, when his hand met it, was rough and damp. Cave wall. He kept his right hand on it and started walking — the schoolboy's trick from a TV show his mother had liked when he was nine. *If you're lost, pick a wall and follow it.*

The breeze got slightly stronger as he walked. That was his only marker — the only signal that he was going somewhere rather than in circles. His shoulder hurt. His knees hurt. The cold settled into him as he moved.

Then, very far ahead, there was light.

A patch of less-dark, somewhere in the distance, that he stared at for a long time before allowing himself to believe it was there.

It was.

His pace picked up. The patch resolved into a glow, the glow into a definite hole, and then he was at the cave mouth and the daylight *hit* him and he flinched back hard, both arms over his face.

When he could finally squint at the world without it feeling like staring into a furnace, he stepped to the threshold and looked out.

He stopped breathing.

---

The forest was the wrong size.

That was the first thing his brain offered him. The trees in front of him went up and up — straight gray-brown columns broader at the base than any tree on Earth had a right to be, broader than cars, broader than rooms — and somewhere very high above his head the columns disappeared into a green that was not green so much as a green built out of layers of other greens.

The light came down through it in long gold shafts. Real shafts. They fell in solid, defined paths through the air, and where each one landed it lit up a perfect circle of moss or fern and the rest of the floor stayed dim. The colors were *unfamiliar*. Moss with a faint blue undertone. Ferns too bright at the tips. Small white flowers low to the ground that swayed without wind.

And underneath all of it, the deep settled *quiet* of a forest that had been a forest for a very long time and did not particularly care whether he was there.

He sat down on the lip of the cave. Hard. His legs had decided, on their own, that they were done for the moment.

He looked down at the back of his right hand.

The mark was still there.

A broken sun. Half a gold disc, patient and faintly warm against his skin, and the other half — *not there*. Not dark, not black, just *missing*, the way a sentence with a word cut out of it was still a sentence but no longer made sense.

He held it up to one of the gold shafts coming down through the canopy. The mark caught the light and held it, briefly, and he could have sworn the gold half *brightened* — not by much, not dramatically, but visibly. As if it were drinking.

He lowered the hand.

(So it does something.)

(Solis said I had no Blessing. He was sure. He looked into my chest and looked away and was *sure*. But this is here. This appeared after he turned his back. So either he was wrong, or this is something else, or —)

He didn't finish the thought.

He didn't have to.

Because at that exact moment there was a small dry rustle behind him, and a voice he had heard once already today — the voice that had told him to *get up* — said, conversationally, from somewhere just above his left shoulder:

"Took you long enough."

---

Dante did not turn around.

It wasn't bravery. It was that his body had locked. The way bodies locked when they had been startled by something the deeper part of the brain had already decided was *too much*, the way deer locked in headlights, the way mice locked when a shadow crossed them.

He sat very still on the lip of the cave and did not breathe.

There was another small rustle. The flap of something feathered. Then, a few feet to his left and slightly above him, on a low branch of something that looked like a tree but might not have been, a *crow* settled itself.

A big one.

Bigger than crows had any business being. The size of a large cat, easily, with a wingspan that would have been ridiculous on a smaller bird. Its feathers were *very* black — not the black of dark feathers, but a black that seemed to drink the light around it. Its beak was long and slightly curved and clean. Its eyes were small black pearls.

It was looking at him.

It cocked its head.

"Hello, Dante."

Dante had been ready, in some deep automatic part of his brain, for many things. The cave. The forest. Even the voice in the dark. He had not been ready to be *named* by a bird.

His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

The crow waited. Politely. As if it had time.

"I —" Dante said.

"Yes."

"You — *talked.*"

"I did."

"You're — you're a *bird.*"

"That has been pointed out to me," the crow said. "It has, I will admit, a degree of accuracy."

Its tone was dry. The patience of something that had had this exact conversation more times than it cared to count and had stopped being offended by it about a thousand iterations ago.

"You can't —"

"I can, though." The crow shifted its weight on the branch. "I am doing it now. We could continue debating whether I can, or we could move on to the part where I tell you why I'm here. I have a slight preference for the second one."

Dante stared at it.

The crow stared back.

After a few seconds in which neither of them moved, the crow tilted its head the other way and added, more gently: "I told you to get up. In the dark. That was me."

"I —"

"Just nod, child. You'll get there."

Dante nodded. Once. Very small.

"There we are." The crow shuffled its feathers. "Good."

It was quiet for a moment. The forest noises went on around them. One of the small white flowers near Dante's foot bobbed slightly in the not-wind.

Then the crow said, almost as an afterthought: "Try not to be alarmed."

"By what —"

The crow *fell* off the branch.

It didn't fly. It dropped — and as it dropped it *changed*, mid-air, in a way Dante's eyes refused to fully process. The black of the feathers stayed. The shape of them did not. The wings folded into something that was not wings. The beak softened. The legs lengthened. The body compressed in some dimensions and expanded in others, and what landed silently on the moss in front of him was not a crow at all.

It was a cat.

A big black cat. Sleek. Long-bodied. Unblinking yellow-green eyes with slit pupils that had not been there a second ago. A tail that flicked once, lazily, as it sat down on its haunches and regarded him.

"Better," the cat said, in the same dry voice. "You'd have run from the crow. Eventually. Once your brain had finished catching up. The cat is —" it considered, "— more domestic. Less alarming."

"You — are you —"

"I am the same one who was just a crow. Yes."

"How are you a *cat*."

"With very little effort, in fact." The cat raised one paw and considered it, as if checking. "It's an old form. I've worn it before. The crow is —" a small pause, almost wistful, "— the crow is mine. The one I prefer. But people scream, sometimes, when they see it. Especially the first time. And you have had a *very* long day."

It set the paw down.

"Also — and I'll grant this is petty of me — there's an old superstition where you come from. About black cats crossing your path."

Dante stared.

"It seemed appropriate," the cat said. "Given the circumstances."

The cat's mouth did not technically move when it spoke. Dante noticed this with a small far-off corner of his brain. The voice arrived the way the *get up* voice had arrived in the dark — not from the cat's throat exactly, more *around* the cat, the way a song arrived from a speaker without the speaker having a mouth.

"Are you —" he tried again.

"I am. Yes. To the question you are not yet asking, the answer is yes."

"What question."

"The one you'll ask in about thirty seconds when you finish working out what kind of thing speaks to mortals from inside their own heads and changes shape on demand. I am saving us both some time."

Dante sat with that.

After a moment he said, very slowly: "You're — a god."

"There it is."

The cat's tail flicked again.

"In a manner of speaking. *God* is a fairly stretched word. I do most of the things a god is supposed to do. I have done them for a long time. I am, however, what you might call *out of fashion* with the rest of the management."

It tilted its head.

"And before you ask which one — I'm afraid we'll get to that, and we'll get to that imperfectly, because there is a small problem with my name."

"Problem?"

"You'll see. Don't worry about it for the moment. We have more pressing things."

It looked at him for a long second.

"Why are you here."

The cat said: "Because no one else was going to be."