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1
The end of the world begins not with a scream but with a mist, spreading sinister tendrils on a dark, moonlit night.
Deep as I am inside Ixa’s mind, I don’t even notice. There’s just too much to experience. I may be able to see only the faintest shades of color through my blue-scaled, feline-like companion’s eyes, but even then, everything I glimpse is breathtaking. Groves of soaring silver trees sprout from pink stone hills. Scrubby purple grasses cling to their roots, tiny iridescent lizards darting across them. Glass flitters. They, like the silver trees and the purple grass, are native only to Gar Nasim, the haunting, remote island that is my current location.
Finally, after three months of running and hiding, pursuers constantly at our backs, I’m here on the island that Anok, the only goddess who’s still our ally, told us to seek. The island where, she told me, I would find my way to Mother and, through her, the way to unlock my full power so I can defeat the gods.
Except there’s no sign of Mother. Not even the faintest trace.
I sniff at a nearby tree, nose flaring with irritation when it immediately puffs a noxious odor in my direction. Trees and plants, they all have defenses invisible to the naked eye—after spending most of the last few weeks inside Ixa’s mind, I understand that now. And these silver trees, in particular, are quick to express their displeasure.
The tree releases another puff of odor our way, and Ixa wrinkles our nose, the motion sending a tickling sensation down the rest of our body. Stinky, he says.
He’s in here too, the shadow just behind my consciousness. I don’t know how it works precisely, the way we share one body, one mind. Only that it does. And that while I’m here, I don’t have to be in my own body. In the wounded, golden ruin that’s all that’s left of me after my confrontation with the Gilded Ones, the false goddesses I once thought were my mothers, all those weeks ago.
Britta calls it possession, what I do to Ixa. She says it’s as if I’m one of the demons written about in the Infinite Wisdoms, the false holy scrolls whose corrupt teachings I once followed to the letter. But she doesn’t understand. Ixa likes me here, welcomes me into his body. And I, for one, am grateful.
Whenever I’m in Ixa’s body, I’m free. Free of pain. Free of the torment that plagues my every waking moment.
For the few moments or hours that I’m here, I can just be.
I lope to the next tree, nostrils already expanding to catch the scents in the air. Have to keep moving, have to keep going. This is the steepest hill in Gar Nasim, the site of the Old City. Around us rise the ruins of the long-abandoned city of rose-hued stone, whose fallen buildings and the golden skeletons peeking underneath them tell a damning history. Of jatu, brothers to the immortal, gold-blooded alaki, slaughtering their sisters by the thousands in the very same city they once ruled. Of generations of deathshrieks, the monstrous-seeming creatures that are the resurrected forms of alaki, shrieking their songs of mourning to the wind.
No human would ever set foot here. No human would even dare.
But Mother has to be hiding somewhere close. Perhaps not in these ruins, precisely, but somewhere on this island nonetheless. Shadows, the onetime spies of the former emperor, Gezo, hide in abandoned places when they want to evade detection. That’s what White Hands, my onetime mentor and now firmest ally, taught me.
I just have to keep—
“Deka?”
Heat sears my skin and I gasp back into my own body.
Now, Britta is crouched at eye level with me, her burly form blocking the door of the tiny house where my physical body’s been hidden all day, her offending hand still on my shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” I hiss, jerking away, but that just sends my back slamming against the wall. The gold-crusted sores on my back tear open and pain explodes across my senses. I have to grit my teeth to keep from screaming.
I should be used to this by now.
In the months since my confrontation with the goddesses, when the sores first erupted across my skin, more and more of them have spread. They do so every time I use any of my abilities or move too vigorously, a constant reminder that my time is limited. As White Hands has made clear to me, every moment that I don’t reconnect with my kelai, which is the ancient name of the substance that gives gods their divinity, I’m closer to scattering into a thousand pieces, my body and consciousness lost forever to the universe. And once I’m gone, there’ll be no one to stop the Gilded Ones or the Idugu, their male counterparts, from bleeding Otera dry in their ravenous competition for power.
When blood begins seeping down my spine along familiar trails, Britta scuttles back, blue eyes wide with horror. “Sorry, Deka!” she says. “I didn’t mean to touch you. I swear I didn’t.”
“Of course you didn’t.” I can’t help the bitterness that creeps into my voice.
I was away. For almost a day—one glorious, blissful day, I was away from this body. From this pain. I was free.
And now I’m back here, with Britta, who’s standing there guiltily in her whole, unbroken body. Her body that heals within moments of any injury. Her body that’s free of sores and wounds and scars.
Free of pain.
The anger inside me rumbles louder. I hurriedly stuff it back down. It’s always there now—the anger as well as the pain. Monstrous twin serpents, slithering in the back of my mind. My new constant companions.
Even Ixa has never been so faithful.
Almost as if I summoned him, my shape-shifting companion rushes into the crumbling square surrounding the house. Ixa here, Ixa coming, he says, chest heaving with breathlessness, liquid black eyes wide with concern, as he threads over the broken stones and fallen statues.
He must have started back the moment I woke.
