No, he could not forgive men their pettiness, their squabbling, their ridiculous and violent worship. Of course, as a young god he had spent several eons encouraging this behavior, but in truth men had never needed encouraging. How could one change the nature of men? Twenty thousand years of Adrash’s urging—two-thirds of his life, bent to this endeavor—had not made them more peaceful, any likelier to see reason.
Nor, obviously, did the threat of annihilation.
They could not pretend ignorance. Adrash had made his feelings known for millennia. When his words and actions had failed to inspire permanent change, he abandoned mankind for the void. As their empires had grown ever more contentious, he dredged material from the blind side of the moon and constructed the Needle. At the height of their power and hubris, he had hurled the two smallest spheres down, killing hundreds of thousands and blanketing the earth in dust for a decade. The Cataclysm, as men now called it.
These efforts to communicate his desperation had been folly, Adrash now understood. Mankind’s ingenuity in the face of trial was short-lived, and Adrash did not possess the energy to continue reminding them of their priorities. He felt the constant temptation to simply complete what he had begun with the Cataclysm, and send all of his weapons to their task.
You have been too patient , he told himself. You have waited on them long enough.
And yet—inexplicably, in the face of all reason—hope remained. When he could stand to hear them, he listened to the thoughts rising from the world below, hoping to hear a call rise above the others and proclaim change. He wondered if his constant adjustments to the Needle of late were an attempt to signal this person, to create a sigil in the sky for a prophet to recognize.
For there had been prophets once, he felt sure: Men and women who had spoken with fearful, exquisite voices—voices that resounded into the bowels of the earth, filled the void with light, and nearly shook Adrash’s heart to a halt.
They had existed, had they not?
Sometimes, Adrash wondered if he had only invented these avatars to keep from going mad.
Sometimes, he wondered if he had prevented madness at all.
Perhaps his obsession revealed the rot that had already spread throughout his soul.
‡
He turned somber eyes away from the Needle and looked upon Jeroun, a bluegreen marble rolling on a sheet of stars. A shallow ocean covered the world but for two small continents straddling opposite sides of the equator: Knoori, the home of man, and Iswee, the perpetually cloud-covered home of the slumbering elders. Everywhere else, uninhabited islands lay scattered like windblown seed.
From experience, Adrash knew the difficulties of navigating between those islands, of traveling from Knoori to Iswee. Mortal men rarely dipped foot in or sailed upon the ocean for fear of its predatory fish and reptiles, but Adrash knew those beasts numbered fairly far down on the list of dangers. Nonetheless, for eons he had preferred to live upon the ocean, where he could be alone, a man instead of a god. But for his armor, which he usually caused to retreat until it was a white helm clinging to his hairless scalp, the sun had shone on his bare black skin.
As the world turned, Knoori rose on its side, a confused mass of sharptoothed mountains, high plains and parched barrens. Cities spotted the continent, a hundred magefire lamps revealing their shapes. Here, Tansot, a five-pointed star of purple radiance. Here, Seous, a blue snake lying alongside River Anets. The sun edged out from behind the world’s swollen belly, unhurriedly extinguishing these fires. For a few seconds Lake Ten turned into a reflecting pool. The pine hills of Nos Ulom became a blanket of jadestones, the deserts of Toma molten gold.
The world was blindingly beautiful.
Adrash could not bear to look any longer. He closed his eyes against the radiance, let the tumblers fall in his mind, and unlocked his soul, allowing the world’s prayers to flood in.
The first to announce itself: A wordless cry from an imbecilic mind.
The nameless woman called from the unmapped valley in the Aspa Mountains—a place shielded by such deep magic that even Adrash had to concentrate in order to see it from orbit.
He heard the woman’s appeal with such clarity because it was old and familiar to him, but he had little sympathy for the people living along the shore of the ensorcelled lake. The majority of mankind lived in far worse conditions, though most had more variety. The old woman had stumbled onto one of the world’s great secrets and used it to sire a race of idiots. While highly nourishing to bone and muscle tissue, once ingested elder skin acted on the human body like a slow poison, causing prenatal damage and retardation of the brain.
The people of the valley were useless. Adrash ignored their clumsy, aimless prayers, though they were loud. Due to the proximity of so many elders and their ancient buried magics, the valley acted as a focusing lens.
In a lukewarm way, it bothered Adrash to see so much power put to so little. There were times when he wished someone would discover the valley’s secret. The resource would be hoarded and abused, of course, but it would be an interesting development. If it fell into the hands of the Stoli government, Adrash could expect a great deal more traffic in orbit. Dozens—and in time, hundreds, even thousands—of outbound mages would rise from the surface of Jeroun, high on reconstituted elder blood, eager to make names for themselves.
They would come with gifts and weapons, open hands and fingers tipped with magefire. Arcing lightning from one to another as they flew toward the moon, ready to challenge their god or simply beseech him to show compassion.
They would all die, burned to cinders by the light of Adrash’s eyes, crushed to dust in his arms. His palms itched thinking about it. He tightened his fists, remembering the way a man’s blood burst from his body in the void. For a brief moment he even felt the rekindled flame of his youth, a time when he had impulsively aligned himself with this or that leader, capriciously giving vent to his lust for warfare.
No, he had never been a charitable god—not a father or an easer of pain. It would be enjoyable, punishing those who came calling at his door. Nonetheless, he shook the vision of violence from his eyes. Useless conjecture, and ultimately an undesirable development. Best if he never had to look a man in the face again. He let his thoughts drift away from the nameless valley, searching for more encouraging, or at least interesting, voices.
Men prayed to him for rain atop the broad, slightly tilted tops of the Aroonan mesas, clasped hands permanently dyed red with the blood of sacrificed bandi roosters. They cried openly for rain, which had not come in strength for three years. Their women, who neither prayed nor begged after years of burying their children, spat at this display of weakness.
In a seedy flat above a basket shop in Jompa, a prostitute prayed for fifty cril, otherwise he would be dead by morning. He had gambling debts. Adrash knew also that the man had jaleri eggs lining his urethra and would be dead by month’s end.
On the southeastern shore of Nens Abasin, a young acolyte of The Unending Luck cast her line and prayed for an old, sick fish. She had no desire to incur the soul debt for taking a new life. The order forbade her from throwing back a catch, yet her luck had been so abysmal lately that she would not hesitate to do so. Breaking the rule would undoubtedly mean more bad luck in the long run, thus reinforcing the cycle, but the girl did not care. She could not see how it mattered. Luck touched some and shunned others altogether.