He considered the bird god. She appeared to have forgotten that she was a god at all and was flitting around the ruins of her god body as a soul shard. Though she had once been magnificent and mighty, she was now in shambles. He could relate. He thought that hunting a weakened god would be a good initial step back into hunting after Yanus, but so far he had only managed to empathize to the point of compassion with his mark. He wondered how she had gotten to this state. If whatever happened to her was traumatic as his own experience. She didn’t seem unhappy, though. But that could just be the lack of memory. Was that the trick to happiness? Simply forgetting the things that made you unhappy. It seemed like a cheap trick. He didn’t want to forget.
He wanted… to be stronger, maybe? To come out gaining something from the experience, despite its dismal failure as a hunt. It felt like everything he did was at some sort of loss.
This wasn’t working. He turned from the bird god. He didn’t want to hunt. He wasn’t sure he ever would again. He felt ashamed now, of how casually he had wreaked havoc on other gods. With how little regard he had treated their lives. A hobby. He had treated their deaths as a hobby. His stomach churned. He felt sick. He returned to the cave he had found in his flight from Yanus. It reeked of blood and death and fear. He slunk in. He deserved this. He deserved to drown in guilt forever. He curled up tightly, his head tucked under his tail, closing his eyes, trying to close out the world.
He slept and slept and slept. The bone needle in his heart ticked. He dreamed.
In his dream he was watching Noctua making dream wine.
‘Do you know why I made you?’ Noctua asked. He worked as he spoke, sterilizing his glassware carefully.
‘I’d assumed it was some sort of experimentation with the rules around godhood’ Novem replied sarcastically after a beat.
‘Hm. Well, you’re not entirely wrong. A good part of it was loneliness though. Loneliness and vanity. I wanted to make someone who could share my experience. The world feels awfully big to mortals, but as a god it can be even bigger. We have the additional dimension of time, stretching infinitely in both directions, and sometimes even more than that.’
He was looking through a wicker basket holding the beads of Novem’s dreams now, carefully selecting dream fruit before washing them with a frothy, milky soap.
Novem recognized his own dreams, from when he had been alive. He dreamed mostly about his hunts then, and sometimes about being hunted. He had forgotten that part. Being hunted.
That was how he had died. He’d forgotten.
The unnerving sensation of hungry eyes on his back, glinting when he turned around. The subtle off beat of footsteps overlapping with his own, just out of sight. The heart stopping terror when he realized they had circle around infront, flanking him. The waiting. The seconds that felt like minutes and the minutes that felt like hours. The helpless surrender when it finally attacked, the certainty of death. The hot sensation where teeth punctured him, his life blood seeping out.
A prickle of fear went through him.
‘I didn’t make your dreams into wine to threaten you.’ Noctua eyed him knowingly, a small smile playing on his lips. Novem hated that smile. It must have shown on his face.
‘You’ve always been so difficult. Everything is a confrontation.’ He sighed, ‘being a parent is so hard.’ He turned back to his work, crushing the fruit with his hands, staining them a deep indigo.
‘You stole my eye!’ Novem said astounded.
‘You were being reckless.’ Noctua countered disapprovingly. ‘And not just at that party.’ He poured the pureed fruit into the sterilized cask, it swirled mesmerizingly. He opened an ornate pot on his work bench, measuring out a portion of starry cosmic yeast carefully.
‘It’s easy as gods to get trapped in our own heads, wrapped up in our own fixations. Most of us are primarily solitary, and it can be disheartening to form bonds with the non-endless. Their lives are so short and filled with meaning, it’s hard to relate. But with dreams we can. I had hoped you would at least be able to relate to your mortal self.’
He was adding honey now, thick and sticky, checking to measure the relative density of the confection as he did so.
Novem pouted, a little abashed. Noctua studied him.
‘I’ll give you back your eye. I didn’t take it to hurt you.’
Novem was silent. Considering. ‘It did hurt’ he emphasized, ‘but more than the physical pain, it was humiliating.’ He needed Noctua to know how truly awful it was, the agony and degradation of it.
Truely, Noctua should understand the severity of the injury he had caused. Pain to a god was different from pain to a mortal. Mortals had a unique quirk of evolution allowing them to forget painful experiences rather quickly, sheltering their psyche. Gods and their given affiliates and acolytes did not have the same mental composition, undergoing a drastic mental shift during their conception. Many endless creatures, Novem included, tended to live as much as possible in the present, completely absorbing themselves in it. The alternative was often being mentally crushed and driven mad under the weight of eternity, some driven to the point of forgetting themselves entirely, setting themselves adrift in a sea of ignorant bliss. For those that chose to stay cognizant, therefore, any painful experience, no matter how small, was amplified. It lived with them forever, sharp as the day it was cut into their anima.
Noctua lowered his eyes. Novem wasn’t sure he would get more acknowledgement than that. But that was already more than he expected.
‘I don’t want it.’ He said decisively. And he didn’t. He couldn’t bear to have them taken out again. And it felt good to choose. He decided he liked his new eyes. Even the milky one. He liked being able to choose to see the future, or the past. And it didn’t feel like a step backward to choose them. Noctua smiled, and Novem found he hated it a little less.
