“The one with the cold-water spring, so it was always cool, even in the summer…” The young man gave a dreamy smile. “I did love that lake.”
“Then you may go there again,” Azaiah said, holding out his hand.
In the haze that followed, Azaiah did his job. He led the shades to the boat, one by one, and reminded them of something they loved, something that made them happy. It was a long process after a battle such as this, when everyone who’d fought lay dead. But Azaiah was patient, and it wasn’t until the very last one that he felt a surge of unease.
The girl was hesitant, hovering at a distance from the crowd until no other specters remained. He waited for her, patient as ever, and reached out a hand. “It will be lovely there, I promise.” She was from a small village a day’s ride away and had gone to the battle unwilling, dragged crying and afraid from her home and given a uniform that didn’t fit and a sword she hadn’t known how to use. It made sense that she was nervous about taking this final journey.
“Your favorite place, in the grove of trees, the one where you carved your name,” Azaiah began, but stopped as she shook her head and took a step backward. “You needn’t be afraid of me. I won’t hurt you.”
“But you did,” the girl whispered. “That’s why we all have to get on your boat.”
Azaiah paused, but it wasn’t as if her reaction was unusual. Some people thought it was he who killed those who were marked to cross the river, but he had never done that, not once. “No, little one. I am the calm after the storm. I am the quiet that brings you home, the captain of the boat that needs no wind. I do no harm.”
She still looked suspicious. “But why did we all have to go?”
“All of you come to me, in the end.”
“But all at once? Someone was supposed to be okay,” she said, wringing her hands. “Why would they do this? Someone lives, and that’s who wins.”
A simple explanation of war, but not incorrect. “I do not know the reasons,” Azaiah said. “Only when it is time to come and bring brave soldiers to the river. I am sorry it went as it did, for you and yours.”
“Foreverybody, though,” she said, but the pull of what was to come was too great, and she drifted toward him, over the mud and the bodies trapped therein. When she came to stand by him, it was another couple of seconds before she’d reach for his hand. But then she relaxed and smiled at him. “Oh. I thought you were scary, before. But you’re not.”
The thunder rumbled, and the girl winced—and then smiled again. “I guess it doesn’t rain when you’re dead.”
“It does for some,” Azaiah said, leading her onward to where the boat waited. “There is a village in Thalassa where it rains every day, at least a little. The fishermen there dive into the storms to find the best fish. When I take them across, they’re always happy if they know it will rain where I’m taking them.”
“That’s nice,” she said, hand in his. “No one liked it, here.” She gave the battlefield one last, disinterested glance, and then she climbed into the boat. She was gone in moments, to her grove and the tree where she’d sat in the sun, carving her name into the bark with her father’s old knife.
Once he’d seen the spirits safely across, Azaiah thought about how the last one said he’d seemed unkind. In all his years wearing Death’s mantle, Azaiah had never been calledunkind. People feared him not because of what he did, but what he represented. The end. A change. But he had never once been anything but gentle with the spirits he guided, no matter how they cursed him or called him names, or chanted songs to keep him at bay.
You were never unkind, that you know of,a sly voice inside him murmured, and he remembered suddenly being in the muddy field, with no memory of the walk it took to get there.
Unsettled, he spent that night in his house on the shore of the river. It was a small thing, as he wasn’t there often and didn’t need much space. He’d created it when he was new to his realm, carefully using his mind’s eye to build it. At first, it had resembled the wooden house where he’d lived as a mortal, with the shrine to the household gods by the hearth. Over time, it shifted to look more like the windowless structure where he’d spent the last night of his mortal life, dozing before a fire and dreaming of the beings who would become his siblings.
It had changed over time, as all things did. For a while, after he first met Nyx, it looked like a tavern on the rain-slick streets of the imperial city. Then a canvas tent with a table and a lantern, though he’d added fanciful strings of beads and glass, little piles of stones from the river that changed color when Azaiah looked at them. He was never sure what they were, those stones, since the river was time itself—perhaps they were memories, shimmering with happiness or anger or sorrow. They were warm to the touch, but other than their shifting hue, they were naught but stones when Azaiah held them. Sometimes, he worried they reallyweresouls, and returned the pile for a new one. Just to make sure.
He wished he had been able to walk for a time with the woman who was Death before him, before he took the scythe and cloak. There were so many things he didn’t know, and maybe if he’d had the chance to ask her… Though how would he have known what to ask? He could not have foreseen asking,What makes up the stones in the river? Is it all right to take some into my house? But she might have told him about corruption, about the rain that would come, about the bond he would have to make to see that it did not touch him.
His siblings knew of that one, so perhaps that was less important. But the stones, the river… he would have liked to ask about those. About the source of the river that wound endlessly through his realm and disappeared into the mouth of a cave, a darkness so deep Azaiah could not see into it. Of course he’d tried to ride the boat into it, just to see, but the boat carried on and left him standing on the shore, watching it disappear, only to find it waiting tied up by his house.
Before the tilt and the shift that took him from the prow of his boat to the rocky shore, he’d thought he heard the sound of water rushing faster, faster—and felt a cool wind, like whatever was in the cave created a breeze. He’d thought there might be a waterfall, had a vague sense of something wet on his face, like condensation, like tears. But, he supposed, it didn’t matter. One day, he would have his chance to see. He’d watched Death—the one before him—walk with her companion into the dark waters of the river, float without a boat toward the cave that stood open like a mouth, waiting to devour. They hadn’t been afraid, holding hands and laughing like young lovers swimming in a summer lake. They’d hardly noticed him as they went into the cave, and he heard only a soft gasp of delight before they were gone and he was alone with his cloak heavy on his shoulders, the weight of his scythe inescapable.
Azaiah waded into the river of souls, flipped to lie on his back, and let himself drift. The river wouldn’t carry him anywhere he wasn’t supposed to be.
As he stared up at the endlessness of time itself, he felt a pull, a tug on the spirit that made him what he was. Azaiah closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he found himself on a ship.
It was one of the ships that sailed near his brother Avarice’s well, from the armada that had recently begun to grow in size, forming a kingdom of sorts. Avarice had mentioned it to him, hadn’t he, how some ambitious captain came begging for a crown?
If he wants a crown, soon Ares will be here, making the seas boil and looking dashing in their sailor’s garb—don’t tell them I said that, Azaiah—and of course Leviathan will head this way, if Ares is here, and you’ll show up right after to clean up all our messes. Does that ever bother you, Brother? Putting the toys away after we play with them?
Azaiah had assured him that it didn’t. He wasn’t thrilled at his siblings thinking of humanity as “toys”—but they were, weren’t they, to all of them but him? He was the one that took care of them, in the end, so they could eventually come back and his siblings could continue their games of war and conquest, tragedy and despair. The others did not concern themselves with the mother grieving over a baby in a hut somewhere in the mountains that divided the continent. Avarice hardly bothered now with simple desires—someone who wanted a crown brought better gifts than a poor woman who had very little to give. Ares loved war and conflict and strife like a child who wanted nothing but candy for supper, never caring about the stomachache to follow.
Leviathan had even less use for humans. He liked to make the seas rise up and great whirlpools form in the depths, simply because he could. That doing so caught up hapless creatures and entire boats of people was not his problem. Somnus and Pallas needed mortals for their realms to exist, but Pallas was gone now, corrupted, and her temple in Kallistos had fallen to ruins. Somnus, who grieved her, slept on his forest throne, where Azaiah imagined she haunted his dreams. And with the influences of Art and Dreams dimmed in the world, that meant others were on the rise. War, plague, disaster, greed. Without the Weaver and the Painter to bring beauty from the dark, where did that leave people?
Taken down to the river of souls, set adrift, to be born once more when the chieftains in the lands across the mountains from Nyx’s empire put their swords down and gather together in companionship, tired of war and death, of burying their young soldiers and fighting the same endless fight for the same piece of land. When Nyx’s emperor lies forgotten under a linen shroud… or when a new, stronger leader marches their troops into the heart of the Palace of the Moon and lays it to waste. From the ashes something new will arise. And then to ashes it will one day return.
Azaiah stood at the railing, glancing up at the sky. It was dawn, and with the rising of the sun came a streak of crimson red, lighting up the clouds like fire. One of the sailors muttered to another, “Red sky at morning, not anotherfuckingstorm,” and Azaiah realized why he was there. The ship would sink, probably… and, yes, he could feel the spirits here, poised on the brink, not yet aware they were heading toward a location found on no map, though the shore would be welcome enough, in its way.
