At times it seemed cathedral-vast, with distances so immense that whole weather systems wandered lazily through the upper dark. Thunderheads rolled in silence somewhere above columns large enough to have their own horizons. Yet the room was also close enough to feel. The scrape of hooved feet across stone carried with impossible clarity, and it seemed to echo.
Perhaps there were walls after all. Perhaps they simply chose not to remain in the same place for long.
Hadeom envied them.
Cern took his seat across from him at a table carved from a stone that remembered the stars.
Between them rested a black vessel of steaming liquid. Neither had poured it. It had appeared because reunion demanded ceremony.
Cern leaned back in his chair, one arm hanging loose. He looked different here; different yet the same. He wore his age lightly. Moss threaded through the seams of his dark robes, andnow and then, tiny leaves opened and closed along his sleeves as though responding to distant seasons. His face shifted subtly whenever one looked too hard at it—antlers in silhouette, then none at all; a shepherd; a king; a starving wolf beneath a winter moon.
Whereas Hadeom looked exactly like exhaustion.
Not weak. Not diminished. But the weariness in him was something far older and more terrible than fatigue. It was erosion.
He was melancholy. Morose.
He was done.
For a while neither spoke, in the way of old friends who understood the dignity of silence. The need for it.
At last Cern lifted the vessel and drank. “You’re fading at the edges, boy.”
Hadeom gave a dry smile. “You always did open with kindness.”
“I save kindness for mortals. They panic without it.”
That earned him the ghost of a laugh from Hadeom. The sound wandered away into the impossible room, echoing from places neither of them could see.
Hadeom rested both hands on the table. His fingers were long and pale, and he wasn’t sure he recognised them anymore. He didn’t recognise any part of himself.
“They do not pray to me anymore,” Hadeom said.
Cern shrugged. “They rarely pray properly to anyone.”
“No. This is different.” Hadeom stared into the steam rising from the cup between them and dancing in the shapes of memories—funeral processions, battlefields, corridors at the harrowed place he called work these days. “Once, they feared death. They honoured it. They approached the dark with ritual. Names. Coins over the eyes. Fires on hillsides.”
“And now?”
“Now they hide it.” His voice softened. “They push it behind curtains. Into sterile rooms. They speak of fighting it, defeating it, curing it forever.”
The room dimmed sympathetically.
Cern watched his friend carefully. “You think belief sustains us.”
“It does.”
“To a point,” Cern said. “But we were old before they knew the language.”
Hadeom did not answer, and that probably worried Cern more than anything else could have. But Hadeom was tired.
A long time ago, Hadeom had argued with Cern over frivolous things with the certainty of Earth’s gravity itself. Now he sat bent slightly forward, staring into nothing. “I’m tired, Cern.”
Cern leaned in. “How long since you slept?”
“I don’t.”
“You used to.”
