“You don’t seem surprised by the thought.”
Andor was so small. His hair flopped over his eyes, and he didn’t look up as Nyx tucked it behind his ear. “Mom fell in love with Father, once. Everyone says so. So I guess you can fall in love with Death. He’s nicer than Father is, right?”
Nyx laughed softly. “Nicer than most people, in fact. He has to be, to take us across the river.”
“Can you tell me about him?” Andor looked up, and his eyes were bright. “I think about him a lot. I mean, not him. I don’t pay attention to gods except for War, but I think about what he is. Death. How it feels. If it hurts, or if you don’t care when it’s done. Why shrouds look the way they do.”
“I can tell you.” Nyx hugged him close again and smoothed down his hair. “He likes games, for one thing. That’s how we met. Your uncle had just died—Uncle Tyr—and Azaiah found me in a tavern and asked for a game.”
“Azaiah.” Andor said the word slowly. “What was the game? Did you win?”
“I’m not sure if it’s over yet,” Nyx said, his voice low in the empty tent. “But it was a Winter board, and when he dealt the cards, the whole tavern shook with thunder…”
* * *
The camp was near a creek. Azaiah knew his sibling was there, could feel Ares’s influence like the hot wind coming off the fire. He could also feel the little spark in his awareness that told him Nyx was close, but as much as he wanted to see him, Azaiah instead sought out his sibling’s flame.
Ares was a ways away from the fire, watching soldiers play dice with their usual smile: fondness with a tinge of mania, the light turning their red-gold eyes the color of fresh blood. They waved at Azaiah, who wondered if any of the soldiers would notice him. But the men continued shouting and laughing and groaning over their game, and he was unseen as he went to sit by his sibling on the ground.
Thunder rumbled, and one of the soldiers at the fire glanced up but then shrugged and went back to the dice.
“Brother,” Ares said, pulling free the tie that kept their hair braided and letting the strands fell flame-like around their face. Their bright eyes seemed to look through Azaiah, to the cool, dark heart of him. “What troubles you?”
Azaiah sighed. Ares was not a kind god, not by any stretch of the imagination. They couldn’t be, not when their realm was strife… but they weren’t cruel, either. And Azaiah felt as close to them as Leviathan did to Avarice, the only one of them who had no name of his own. As Somnus had been to Pallas, before he’d lost her. They tended to move through the world in pairs, didn’t they? Chaos and Greed. Death and War. Dreams and Art. There had been more, once, Azaiah knew. Corrupted, perhaps, or gone beyond without choosing a successor. Immortality was not easy. Immortality with a purpose such as his, harder still.
“I am worried,” Azaiah said, lying on the ground, his head on his sibling’s thigh. He closed his eyes as Ares’s fingers, gentle though callused, carded through his hair, and he sighed. “I saw Leviathan, on a ship. He told me he’d locked away his empathy. It rained.”
These were disparate pieces of one picture, and Azaiah knew it, but he felt… tired, in a way he was not supposed to. The ache of being without Nyx was growing, an emptiness that he could not seem to fill. Perhaps it was how his brother Avarice felt, the gnawing hunger that could never be satisfied.
“That old dragon,” Ares chuckled, the sound like crackling logs in a hearth. “He did, yes. I don’t know how. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. He hid pieces of himself down in the caves, the ones near the mage island. You know he likes the water there.”
“I don’t want to stop caring about people,” Azaiah said. He turned his face toward Ares, looked up at them. “It is the end, if I do. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Ares said. “The pull of your power will be impossible to resist. You’ll take everything, everyone, until only you and the dragon are left.” They didn’t sound particularly worried. “I think it’s happened before. I think sometimes it’s supposed to happen. The greatest fire of all,” they murmured. “And then the chaos settles and life returns, and eventually people come back, and they dream and they dance, and they want what someone else has, enough to kill for it. And it begins again.”
“So I… should let myself be corrupted?” The idea made Azaiah uneasy, and he sat up. “I don’t think I want that, though. Does it—does it matter? What I want?”
“Of course it does,” Ares said. “You want Nyx.”
“Yes.” Azaiah lay down again, staring up at the clouds that covered the moon. “If I could, I would take him with me tonight. It would stop all of this.”
“Stop what?”
Azaiah closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth of his sibling’s fingers on his scalp, in his hair. “I woke in a battlefield with no memory of being there. The dirt had turned to mud, and everyone was dead.”
“That happens,” Ares said, unconcerned. “Plague?”
“I would remember that, wouldn’t I? I have before.” He did not like plagues. The dying lingered too long, and the wails of the sick were awful to hear. He could not take them until they died, and the suffering of the body before the time came to release the spirit made him ache. “They don’t die all at once. And there was a girl. She was afraid of me.”
“People don’t like to die,” Ares said. “I have seen shades turn from you on the field of war, eager to get back to the fighting. Cursing you, even as they let you lead them on.”
“The mud,” Azaiah said, “I think it was mine. I think I… came there, and brought the rain. I think I took them all, and I think I was not me when I did it.”
There was more he could tell Ares: about the boat, the people who saw him there, even when he had not meant to be seen. The fisherman on the coast. People who were not supposed to notice him unless Azaiah wanted them to.
“It rained when I took the sailors to the river. It could have been Leviathan. But I think it was me.”
Ares gently pushed at him, urging Azaiah to sit facing them. They took Azaiah’s face in their hands, squinting. Above them, thunder rumbled, and Azaiah felt a light, warm tickle from the hands on his face. It took him a moment to understand it was drizzling, and Ares’s fire was turning the rain into steam. He startled, but Ares made a sound and tightened their hold, and something flashed in their blood-flame eyes.
