Page 51 of The Endless One

He flicked his fingers and a small box emerged from the dark water surrounding them. The gravesingers all froze, each of their featureless faces turning toward the object that would give them the smallest amount of humanity back.

He opened the box and stared down at the tongues within it. These were the first things he had removed from these spirits. Their hissing was nothing that he wished to hear. They had always spat insults at him in some form, and there had been no conversing with them.

Until now.

The tongues disappeared from the box, free to return to their owners, and one by one, the gravesingers started to speak.

“You fucking monster!”

“What did you do to us?”

“Two hundred years, Deathless One! You cursed us for two hundred years!”

“What cruelty did we ever do to you that was worthy of this? You, with all your infinite knowledge, could have simply let us go!”

On and on it went. He had expected the complaints, of course. Perhaps he even slightly believed that he deserved to hear them. He hadn’t been kind to any of these women.

But they hadn’t deserved his kindness either.

Finally, he lifted his hand and shouted, “If you do not quiet, I will take them from you again!”

It took a few minutes for the last ones to finish their grumbling, but finally he was able to hear nothing but blissful, wonderful silence.

“I am only here because of her. You know of whom I speak.” Crouched before them as he was, he could have stared into their eyes if they had any. “I want to keep her safe, but I don’t believe any of you are actually doing that as well. So tell me now, what is your endgame?”

“To see a gravesinger leading the coven. As she should have done all those years ago,” one of them said.

“We want to help her, to ensure that she will not fall behind like all the others. The witches these days do not respect the old ways. They have not seen what will happen if we do not respect the ways that came before.”

“She needs our help. Without us, she will fail.”

But then he heard the quietest voice among them, a timid sound of someone who had not spoken in a long time and who was unsure if she should ever speak again. “She’s going to get hurt if we don’t help her. Someone has to try.”

He stood and waded through the spirits. “Who said that?”

None of the gravesingers moved. They remained crouched as they were, some of them glaring up at him. He could feel their hatred, even without eyes.

But one spirit didn’t look at him at all. Her face remained turned toward the ground, as though she didn’t want him to see her.

He knelt in front of her, watching carefully as she became more and more uncomfortable with his scrutiny. “You are the one who said someone has to try. Well? Go ahead. Try, gravesinger.”

“She doesn’t know what the God King started, and without us telling her what has happened, she won’t be able to…” The gravesinger swallowed. “Someone has to stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“What the God King put into motion. The world either needs several gods or no gods at all. There cannot be a single god, Deathless One. You should know that. It is too much power for one person, and even with so many of you as you were, there wasn’t enough attention given to almost any of you. Too many people worshipped him.” She spat the last word like a curse. “Now he wishes to re-create that again. He needs to be put in his place. He needs someone to show him that there are others who can rule.”

“And you know how to do that? You think she can do that?”

His mind whirled. What were they up to? Surely they understood how dangerous it was for them to meddle in the affairs of gods. But perhaps they didn’t care, after all these years of death.

Another gravesinger chuckled behind him. “We think we can help her do that. Or you can, Deathless One. A god can always rise up against another god.”

“We already tried that,” he grumbled under his breath. “The coven will never be stronger than him.”

“That is a lie. You are their god. All the sacrifices are yours, no matter how much you give them back. You can use what they give you, and you take back what you have given them.”

He shook his head. “No. It has never been that way. The only situation in which I would be stronger than the God King is if I keep all the magic for myself. That is how the other gods were so powerful. They were selective in who they gave their gifts to, and even then, they rarely gave it at all. The magic was a gift, rather than a right.”