Epilogue

“Your oldest friend,

Legacy, God of Gods”

The City lay in ruins.

Leshin stared out into the desolate desert where the ocean once glistened under the sun. She crouched down, traced her fingers in the sand, picked up a seashell and tossed it out into the distance. Everything smelled like dead fish. Considering all the dead fish rotting away along the beach, Leshin wasn’t surprised.

“The Filial Council session let out,” Ilaki said as she ambled up beside her.

“And?” Leshin asked, leaning back on her elbows.

“Looks like your plan is panning out,” Ilaki said. Her ivory dress rippled in a fitful breeze, which brought yet another swirling dust devil up the shore. “But they’re skittish. Half of them don’t even think God is really dead.”

“Reasonable enough, considering,” Leshin said as she dusted off her own tunic and stood up to her new, towering height. “I’d never assumed it could be possible in the first place.”

Turning around, she looked up and down the desolate heaps of The City’s remains. Dried-out palm fronds in piles, sand and dirt-covered wooden houses leaning off their timbers, and pave stones pulled free from the streets. Not a single structure had escaped the earthquakes. And the tides, even as Leshin had done her best to hold them back, had slammed through house after house before vanishing entirely. There would be no salvaging The City. It had died along with its creator.

“Has Smirk gotten back to you about the soil problem?” Ilaki asked, and Leshin nodded.

“Apparently, his people… My people can replicate it,” she said. “He mentioned that they just need to mix in iron and something called mag-ne-sium with fertile, sandy soil, and after blessing it, it should be good enough for laying clutches. So, I suppose you all won’t go extinct.”

“You’re still one of us,” Ilaki said, and Leshin looked away.

She couldn’t quite say what she was anymore, but her vow made it impossible for her to refute Ilaki’s statement. Indeed, she still had all the marks of her Kinfolk ancestors. Her tail, her gills (redundant as they were, as she no longer needed to breathe at all), and her webbed fingers and feet definitely made her stand out from Smirk—or Rayåzun Aotsvrik, the One who Opens Doors, as the Chalzaera called him, though she still preferred the old nickname. Still, she wouldn’t be the first of her new kind who had not come from a human bloodline. And the fact that Leshin’s comprehension of higher dimensions meant that she could see Ilaki’s brain as easily as she could see the woman’s face… Well, that made things complicated for her.

Clothes hid nothing anymore. Little had disturbed her about her new heritage quite so much since she and her sisters had emerged from the temple and hiked across the desert to The City. Modesty, apparently, was not a concept many of her Chalzaeric kin understood. Smirk did, as he was born from a human family, but most trueborn Chalzaera never knew a life where clothes held anything more than symbolic meanings.

She shuddered. She just couldn’t shake the shame. The fear that she had made a horrible mistake.

“I did this,” Leshin muttered. “All of this…”

Ilaki lightly smacked Leshin’s hand, since she couldn’t reach her face. “If God had sacrificed us,” she said, “we all would have done much more than this.”

Leshin nodded. She wiped a stray tear from her cheek as she started walking toward the city center. She wouldn’t ignore Ilaki anymore. Couldn’t, either.

With Ilaki following along, Leshin passed dozens of fresh-dug mass graves, piled high with rotting Kinfolk. Men, women, children… Fewer than five thousand of The City’s residents had survived. Not even one percent of the population. All were injured. She approached the grass-woven medical tent where Smirk and the rest of her sisters waited for her. She glanced off at her mask, her face, the root of her Divine Mother’s Bond—which she kept by her side, stored in a convenient, leafy pocket in the sixteenth dimension. She had so many regrets, but for some reason, the bond itself was not one of them. While she had trouble communicating with the withered spirit of the Divine once known as Shin’Torani, what little she received was kind. Gentle. Maternal, even. It felt good.

“—our needs. But how long must we wait before you can arrange this… transportation?” a Guild-head Leshin didn’t recognize asked Smirk as they stood under the tarp, side by side.

“Thirty or forty days, I would say,” Smirk replied with a grimace. “This world may lie in the heart of the Sphere of Creation, but it is… quite a large Sphere, and there are hardly any more of us than there are of you. I’ve spoken to the local commandant, and he is arranging for two more relief convoys, which should keep your people fed and watered until then, but rations will be strict, and… Leshin!”

Smirk grinned, waving Leshin over. She bowed at the hip to the Guild-head. “Well met, honored Guildsmith,” she said. “I am Leshin dono Ki’luin, the One who Refuses.”

“Ah,” he said, “the ascendant one! My lady, I am Linoshi dono Si’liu, head of the Thatcher’s Guild. Now, I am told you—”

Leshin let the man drone on as she let out a long sigh. As she had expected, no one from her generation had lived to see her escape. Silika was a thousand years dead. The moment Leshin was offered up as a sacrifice, she had simply disappeared from the girl’s life, and that was that. No second chances, not even for a heartfelt goodbye. Silika would never know what happened to Leshin, and Leshin would never learn what Silika had done with the rest of her life. All of Leshin’s old friends and family had gone on to live and die as she had wallowed in her numbness. And thanks to the Al’Ruon’s meddling, millennia had gone by in what felt like only a few decades. Now, the Ki’luin name didn’t even exist anymore. No one remembered her.

“—that we will not have to suffer the indignities of God’s demands of sacrifice is a wonderful gift,” the Guild-head said, finally wrapping up his painful monologue. “Again, as I speak for my entire Guild, we thank you for what you have done.”

“Thank you, honored Guildsmith,” she said, bowing at the hip once again. She turned to Smirk. “Rayåzun,” she said, nodding, “might I have a word?”

“Of course,” Smirk said. He walked out of the tent, and Leshin followed him to an abandoned market square, where once the Lower Sort would exchange their hard-earned money for the right to eat. Ilaki walked right past the two of them and continued on toward the beach again.

“You have been a good friend, but will you really be able to get everyone off this planet?” Leshin asked. “No one came to find you for ages. What makes you think your kin even care?”

 “The seal on this reality only unraveled with the beast’s demise,” Smirk said. “No one could get to me before. I’ll admit, the Fraternity of Defense can be callous with mortals, and were this a human world, I imagine they would not care at all. But this is a small reality in the midst of the First Sphere. Not much of a trip from the Seat of Tora’Tsif. And, of course, it contains a unique and endangered sapient species, a new Art with incredible potential, four tame Fountainheads, and two Chalzaera—one of whom is a CFoD officer. They have every incentive to run a conservation mission, and I will hound anyone who tries to stall it.”

She smiled, though the term “conservation” stung a bit in the back of her head. As though her people were mere animals to the eyes of this supposedly superior race of immortals. From what Smirk had told her so far, the High Command were a dwindling, divided group of squabbling bureaucrats whose desperation against a foe they could never hope to match had only alienated them from the rest of the Sphere they supposedly ruled over. In many ways, Leshin found that quite a familiar state of affairs.

“Where will you take us, then?” Leshin asked.

“You plan to stay with the refugees?” Smirk said, frowning.

She turned away, gazing off toward the beach, where she spied Shina and Ilaki sitting together, holding hands. Whatever spell the Al’Ruon had placed over her priestesses had not worn off at all—even now, any wounds they took closed up in moments. It would seem that the lingering fragments of their master’s Will still kept them young and healthy, and in all likelihood, they would remain that way forever, whether they appreciated it or not.

“You sound disappointed,” she remarked.

“Ah. Yes,” Smirk said. “I can’t pretend I’m not—I’ll admit, I always did enjoy your rantings in the dungeon. For many years, they were all the comfort I had.”

“‘Rantings?’”

“Yes, and your ravings, too—always loved those.”

“Oh, do shut up.”

Smirk chuckled. Gazing off into the sky, he let out a long breath. “Truth be told, we could use you. New blood is rare to come by. You are incredibly skilled, and our foes—”

“I have served enough,” Leshin said, surprising herself with the force of her voice. “And I have suffered enough. I am Chalzaeric, yes, but I will not place myself above any others. Immortal though I may have become, I… I am still Kinfolk. I was robbed of a normal life for thousands of years, and now…”

Shina and Ilaki embraced on the beach, their lips locking as they leaned into each other and intertwined their tails.

Leshin smiled, her own tail swishing playfully. “Well, I may not have a normal life by any measure, but I will have a life. And I plan to make the best of it.”

With that, she left Smirk in the square and joined the two tiny women, picking Ilaki up and ignoring her indignant squeaking as she plopped herself right next to Shina and sat Ilaki down on her lap. Shina leaned on Leshin’s shoulder and let herself settle.

Smirk walked away shaking his head with a smile. And as Mikele, Kilini, and Nikime all waltzed by, kicking dead fish and singing drunken ballads as they shared a cracked bottle of Okolehao, Leshin sighed and leaned back, staring at the blue, cloudless sky above. Shina shifted across her chest and kissed her on the cheek.

Leshin couldn’t lie; she was happy.

And there we have it!

I first dreamed up the outline of this story back in 2016. I knew I wanted people trapped in a temple on an island, pursued by an angry Al’Ruonic god. I had originally planned to release six novels set in the Three Spheres, and this one was supposed to be book number four, but I went back and forth on so many details that I figured this would just be one of those ideas that would bounce around in my head forever. But after “Call an Ambulance” was received so well, and after I stalled on my other full-length novel project, “Tomorrow’s Remains” (which I really have to get around to re-drafting one of these days), I figured that I might as well start this novella to whet my writing appetite for a while. But for some reason, once I got started on this one, I couldn’t stop. I’d found an excuse to be the unapologetic edgelord I was meant to be, and I leaned in hard.

I do not plan on writing anything nearly as dark as this in the future, though I will say that misery flows so freely from my keyboard that I have to make an active effort to be peppier here and there. This might come as a shocker, but I didn’t have a very happy childhood. The least bad part was the cult, by a wide margin. It’s easy for me to pour angst onto the page, considering the hell I grew up in, and this was a great outlet for me. But there’s only so long you can wallow before you have to come out the other end and live in the moment. After all I have suffered, I have begun to emerge into a world outside of my own head. And even though the AI revolution dealt a death blow to my editing career last year, I am still here, I am still young, and I am finally excited for my future.