But no amount of soothing would make her see him as anything but a grim specter of imminent death, and eventually, she made her way back below to once more try to convince her fellow sailors that they needed to stop carousing and drinking, to brace for the storm to come.
“They don’t listen, you know. You can try. I used to, sometimes. But they only ever hear what they want to.” The voice was familiar, and Azaiah smiled and turned to see Leviathan, in his human form, leaning nonchalantly against the railing. His hair, which was the color of a crow’s feather in the light, or the spill of oil on water, was braided with shells and sea glass. His garments looked like he’d fashioned them from fishing nets, shells, and strips from the sails of downed ships. His eyes were as clear and empty as the glass in his hair, and Azaiah had the feeling that most of Leviathan was still moving, restless, beneath the waters.
Azaiah embraced him warmly. “Hello, Brother. I saw your vast wings beneath the sea. Is it to be a storm, then, that takes this ship?”
Leviathan shrugged. “Part storm, part whirlpool, part crew’s distraction. I can’t stop it. The pressure is too great. Are you here for all of them? If so, then yes, it’s probably the storm. They usually survive, one or two, if it’s something else.”
Azaiah squinted, considering, but eventually shook his head. “I cannot tell. Much depends on what some do, when choices are given to them.” He could tell Leviathan was bored by the conversation, as he was already looking toward the water, a wind stirring his hair that did not touch Azaiah’s own. “Some of them saw me. But I don’t know if that means they’ll all die. I hope not. I’d like the girl, Natty, to go back home. I don’t think she wants to be here.”
Leviathan shrugged. “They know what might happen, when they come to the sea. It is not theirs to conquer, though they think otherwise. But if they see you, doesn’t it mean they’re supposed to go with you? I can’t remember if that’s the rule or not.”
“I’m not sure there’s arule,” Azaiah said. “I can show myself without taking their souls, if I want to.”
“But did you mean to show yourself?” Leviathan asked, and made a soft noise when Azaiah looked away—because no, he hadn’t meant to, and that was troubling. “Avarice told me you’d visited. Asked about companion bonds, being corrupted.”
Families were families, weren’t they, even if they were made up of gods? Families talked. “I was concerned about Pallas.”
“I heard she left.” Leviathan sighed. “Once, I threw ships into rocks and dashed sailors on shores, and she and her muses captured it on canvas. She gave me one of the paintings, and I keep it… where I keep things.” His eyes went shifty. “You can just see the edge of my wing. I like it.”
Azaiah smiled. “I have one, too. Me, with my scythe, in a field of wheat. I miss her.”
“So does Somnus. He mopes around the waters near Mislia, sometimes. Hoping he can send a dream to one of their conjurers, maybe, and they might help her. Find the entrance to Pandemonium, where the demons live; entice one to come and bond with what is left of her soul. It won’t work. A corrupted god can’t come back.”
“Do you worry it will happen to you?” Azaiah asked, as the clouds began to gather.
“No. I made sure of it. I used to care too much about them, you know. People. I had to take away that part of myself. Corruption for me would be… nothing. Stagnancy. Storms are violent but necessary. They bring rain to places that need it. Clear out the red tides, the ones full of the little creatures that strangle life before it can start. Storms carry sand and make islands. Destruction begets creation, we all know that.”
Azaiah nodded. “Yes. I would be the storm without the calm after, if I were corrupted. That’s what Ares said.”
“Yes. You have to care about them, the people you lead to the river. Ares and I, we make sure they get there. I suppose Avarice sends them there, too, in his way.”
“Avarice said he was corrupted,” Azaiah said, moving to stand closer by his brother as the storm grew, the water starting to churn beneath him.
Leviathan smiled down at the waves. His eagerness was obvious. “Yes, of course. As long as humans exist, desire will always be corrupted by greed. Although I think he wasn’t so much corrupted as he… evolved. He grants wishes sometimes, and sometimes he doesn’t. He’s capricious enough to keep the balance, I think.”
“How do you take away empathy?” Azaiah asked, thinking of Nyx.
“Well.” Leviathan smiled, though it never reached his endless, empty eyes. “I can’t tell you that. It’s my little secret. But I had to do it, because no one wants to be with Tempest. Not like you and your Nyx. Where is he, anyway? I thought he’d be with you by now.”
Azaiah shook his head, watching the sky shift above him. “He has mortal things to attend to, before he leaves with me. I am nothing if not patient.”
“You are so much more than that. That’s why Death has to have been—once—a mortal. Patience isn’t enough. I’m patient, Azaiah. I can wait eons, through storms untold, for the smallest of new islands to grow from the sand carried by the wind. Don’t let your man wait too long, hmm? Though if you become corrupted and the world needs to be leveled, I suppose that’d be all right. For us, anyway. We’d be the only two left.” Leviathan turned his face to the sky, smiled, and raised his arms.
Azaiah saw a shadow of wings, just a shimmer, before Leviathan looked back at him, true form pushing at the edges of the human one—Azaiah had always wondered, though never asked, why he had a human form at all—and said, “Don’t worry, Brother. The rain you’ll feel is mine.”
With that, he climbed up onto the railing and dove into the water. Something much larger than a tall, lanky human hit with a splash, and the ship pitched in its wake. Azaiah stood at the very prow of the boat as the rain began to fall, softly at first, then more heavily as the storm picked up. But it was only rain and an echo of thunder, without the rising waves that usually alerted sailors to danger.
Peering over, Azaiah saw Leviathan in his true form, a great, dark dragon beneath the water, wings rising and falling and whipping the sea into a frenzy. Without sailors on deck to notice, the ship was sailing directly for the whirlpool in the distance. By the time the thunder and lightning and the ship’s lift and fall roused them from belowdecks, the crew was unsteady from ale and taken by surprise, the captain half-dressed and shouting orders that Azaiah knew were born of desperation rather than forethought.
The deck bells rang, a clarion sound amidst the tumult of sea and storm. Azaiah thought about what Leviathan had said, how it would be only the two of them left if he allowed himself to be corrupted. He did not feel corrupted as he moved across the deck, waiting for the first of the sailors to fall.
“There’s— Is that a boat, beside ours?” one of the sailors shouted. He pointed starboard. “No one could be in that, right?”
Azaiah looked, and there it was. His boat, waiting in waters that were somehow calm, removed from the storm. It was to begin, then, and soon.
But the sailor who saw his boat was still alive. And that was… interesting. Perhaps unsettling.
It was Natty who stopped in the middle of the deck to stare first at the boat, then at Azaiah. She was soaking wet, breathing hard, terror etched in every line of her face. “You—you said you weren’t cruel!”
