497 Ordinary Wonders (How Shiv Learned the Beauty of Loving the Person and Hating the People) [II]

Let me share with you the secret to never losing: It’s not taking every fight.

See, you’re not actually supposed to. You want to know who has more options than one person? Two. You want to know how to get out of a bad position? Get an army to support you. And you want to know how to keep the good days going forever?

Always have someone with an idea of how to get out of whatever mess you’re in. Good people, and lots of them. Especially since, at some point, you're going to do something stupid and need someone to pull you out of the fire, or you're going to run into something extremely stupid and find out that you have the wrong kind of stupid to deal with it.

—Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

497

Ordinary Wonders (How Shiv Learned the Beauty of Loving the Person and Hating the People) [II]

An inflammation of dread lined Adam's stomach as his divine anchor drifted ever closer to the shores of New Albion. Lingering flecks of brilliant fire broke away from his hovering shrine, conveyed across the distance by a Shard of Exalted Flame to make up for the anchor’s deficient speed. Through his minor temple of godly worship, Adam gazed down upon the land through the roiling storm clouds and bestowed the surroundings with his burning omniscience. All he touched was set aflame and became an extension of his sight. All he touched was revealed and scoured—truth smelted free as flowing magma from the melting armor of falsehood.

And the air was dense with such falsehood. Adam felt the environment resist him, the very atmosphere itself pry and attempt to reject him. He was a hostile entity, not meant for this ecosystem of liars and spies, but he was here regardless, for it was time to entreat with the greatest benefactor they had, yet adversary nonetheless.

The Great One would see their survival insured for now and in the long run as well, perhaps, but in the longest run of all, they were still only self-interested, playing their own grand games. Beyond Avalon, there were other things to consider, bleak and miserable questions relating to deicide. How did one kill a High God? Beyond even that, how could one kill something that struck down a High God? How did one spare those they love from further torment and sacrifice when everything and everyone seemed to be descended from a legacy of original sin?

A torrent of turbulence struck Adam's anchor. The clouds were turbid and murky with condensation; within them, the substance of lightning flashed, and the roar of thunder followed as if playing a percussive entrance to Adam's ominous arrival. He sank through the cloud-bed and fell from the stratosphere beneath curtains of forking storm stuff, lit upon the backdrop as a beacon of dawning Divinity in place of the sun itself.

In the distance, New Albion graced him. A dimly lit land, yet still resplendent in its own way, its fields bathed in a heavy downpour of unceasing rain, its vistas shrouded in the distance, masked by vapors and mist and mystery beyond.

But there was something else. There was someone else. As Adam drifted closer, his gaze wielded as a weapon, his omniscience remaining in place, casting a dense beam down upon the waters below, his shrine drifted forward as a sign of peace and goodwill. He knew the Great One was looking upon him, along with the rest of her birds. To drag his glaring omniscience across her land would be no different than running a naked blade down someone's skin. Her place of power was forged from masquerades, while he was a lesser tyrant of heroism. In an absurd sense, his presence here was oil visiting fire—made more absurd by the fact that the fire welcomed the oil in part.

As he drew closer, the waters beneath him flowed by, reflecting his shrine in moments of flashing lightning. Adam bade his pace slow even more, dragging out his imminent arrival.

The decision didn't go unnoticed, neither within nor without. Shiv was the first to respond. The true clone he'd dispatched on this diplomatic mission sat on the lowest step leading up to Adam's shrine, letting his legs dangle and staring off into the distance with an expression that was more vicious than apprehensive. He had his own vendetta against the Great One, but he was not so easily moved by lesser human anxieties. No, Shiv's nature was of strife tempered through higher virtue, and so he kept to that demeanor and philosophy. Before, Adam would have found jealousy in Shiv's imperviousness. Now it was just another variable to consider, both in advantage and disadvantage.

Shiv was fearless, willing to take on any foe, a genuine talent when it came to reading and breaking people—both physically, psychologically, and on a grand scale culturally—but he was also untethered from certain human experiences, and so the fears of those truly mortal escaped him sometimes. Not so Adam, even though he was on the path toward godhood. He remained tight and entwined with his humanity, and he had an entire Gate to consider: a Gate, a future, and a path for Integrated Earth to survive without being mutilated by the designs of ancient powers.

Especially since one such ancient power resided within Adam himself.

“Do not debase us with fear. Push forward. Bring us to this den that my former wielder has chosen to usurp and colonize. Before you arrive, banish all this pathetic weakness from yourself. You should think of bringing me down upon this island and driving its fragile carcass into the waves below. You should think of forging a new state upon its ruins to replace the sacrilege that was before. You should think nothing of your timidity and inferiority before a shadow of a god, a shade of a so-called High God, not even a fraction of her true whole.”

“I'm not afraid,” Adam said, and it wasn't truly a lie. Close to one, but not entirely. “I am worried, and I am trying to think. I am trying to prepare myself. And besides, what right tyrant would move at someone else's pace, even the voice of their own Divinity?”

A puff of incandescent mist expanded around the shrine. It displaced the other clouds. It blunted and broke lightning down the middle. It halted the rain and choked the passage of wind. It did all these things as the Sage expressed its explicit disapproval, yet could do nothing, for Adam was right—the argument was more than sound. It was mythological, and the Sage could demand Adam do no less. For to do so would be akin to godly self-mutilation. For a tyrant abided by no other will but their own, and Adam was the tyrant. The Sage was merely the expression.

At least for now, Adam thought to himself.

Shiv laughed aloud in mockery of the Sage. The incandescent mist swept over him, ripping an entire swath of his face away. Blood and vitality wept free from Shiv's wounds, but he offered only a scoff. He rolled his eyes and mended himself as he turned to regard Adam's effigy festooned at the center of the shrine. “Hey Adam, just remember: If the Great One decides to get really annoying and uppity, we can have the Sage talk to her instead. See how they like to be reunited. I think that will be a fun time for the two.”

“A wonderful suggestion,” Adam replied, his own sarcasm thick and barbed. The Sage ignored both of them, grumbling within the shrine as a dense pocket of Divinity that yearned to lash out at something that loathed everything but its own might. The Sage had, in a sense, as unpalatable a personality as one could possibly develop. There was no compromise, no affection, no enjoyment or purpose beyond the act of building its own mythology and expanding a skewed sense of nobility and tyranny across all of known existence.

Nothing more; never anything more.

But I am more, Adam reminded himself. He felt the weight of the azure headband grow tighter around his skull as he thought those words—he felt an ache where one of his eyes used to be, seared away because of mythology, irreplaceable because of mythology, made absent yet all-seeing because of mythology. He was in the process of the divine but still human enough, and in that state, between his demigodhood, he would hold on to his humanity with all he could muster so that he would not stride across the fault lines as gods before. I am still human. And I stay human long after I stop being human. I must. I must. I have seen the mistakes. I must. Because who else? Because there is no one else.

He looked upon Shiv again—thought of Uva, Valor, his father, the Starhawk, and so many more.

Who else can see the world made right for them?

Speed returned to Adam. The coating of aching terror never left him, but it felt paltry before his purpose. His shrine plunged through the air toward the center of New Albion, where the Thames flowed, and the Throne burned beneath its golden waters.

***

“Shiv. Shiv. Maybe you should do something. Might be a good idea. Shiv.”

The concern in Gone's voice grew greater with every passing second, but still, Shiv let the incident unfolding before him drag on a bit more. He was in multiple places at the same time, but the fullness of his concentration remained invested in the true clone aboard Adam's shrine. Being so close to his divine anchor, Shiv didn't even need to see his friend's empathic core to discern the thoughts and emotions leaking out from him. Unbearable tension was always a part of the great game. You played with what you knew, and you worried about what you didn't, and though the Great One had fallen far from their seat of glory, they still knew more about this world than any of them—and in a conflict of civilizations, oftentimes information was worth more than any skill.

A bargaining was set to take place, a bargaining that excluded Valor, for they couldn't risk the Great One somehow bringing the Thief of Lost Acheron back. The same risks applied to Shiv and Adam on some level. They were not immune to manipulation, not even remotely. But between Shiv's Harbinger and the Paragon's Divinity, they would hold their own, or so was the hope.

With Uva and Hymn making a backdoor into the Forbidden Empire, they would grow for themselves new options. If Gaia couldn't be reasoned with, couldn't be bargained with, couldn't be used, then their newly hired Recollector, fused to Harkness' mental clone, would go from an informational asset to something more offensive. After all, it could strike blows across time, and supposedly the Superintelligence known as Gaia remained bathed in a shroud of radiation, preventing the System from truly investing any skills within its depths. The idea was that mayhaps a creature born of the Outside might be able to circumvent that protection, just enough for a killing blow to be delivered or at least some amount of harm to be inflicted. After that, it would be Shiv's turn to unleash himself—him and whatever other expendable assets they had to spare.

Everyone except Valor.

“Legend Candles, I call upon your fire! I call upon your ire. I call upon your righteousness. We must burn these vermin—these wretches who know no honor, who are bound to no rule of hospitality. We must burn them until not even ashes remain!”

Blinding radiance bloomed over Shiv, but his eyes remained open, his Onus painting his eyeballs platinum while most others turned away to avoid losing their sight. Marikos was being dramatic as usual, conjuring a colossal spire of flame at the tip of his mace. He was on the verge of using it as well, and Shiv could see the last tethers of discipline snapping inside him. In doing nothing, Shiv was playing this close to the edge, but the situation required it. It needed him to seem like he was indifferent, and to some extent he was. If this went poorly, perhaps several hundred people would die, but those several hundred people would also be a lesson to all the others that one shouldn't try to smuggle mega mana bombs into Gate Piety and expect to get away with it.

There was a great deal of latitude present in the Gate. It was a free port, after all. It didn't have so much a black market as an open market. It was a mingling nexus of different empires and republics, of different Pathbearers who sought new experiences and the ability to traverse the surface and the Abyss for both personal and factional gain. That didn't mean Shiv was going to suffer fools gladly. Without Uva present, the patrols were up twelve times over, and the Gate's many Investigators, Diviners, Scouts, and Bearers of similar Paths strained their skills to keep the peace.

The most effective amongst the defenders proved to be the orcs. This didn't come as a surprise, as the orcs were skilled at sabotage and terrorism; after many reincarnations, novelties numbered few, and repetitiveness became the order of the day. Every attempt someone else made at bringing down the Gate had been something they'd done before and better. Special mention had to go toward Tequila and his old friends recruited from the HKPD. They were remarkably good at following leads and planting false opportunities in advance to lure out and entrap those intrepid saboteurs-to-be. The entrapments came in the form of false sympathizers, a sort of underground market that smuggled different faulty materials to people who wanted to assemble dangerous weapons inside the gate and also offered opportunities and intelligence that would engender assassination attempts. Naturally, the intelligence was tainted as well—and usually left entire assassin and shadow cells raided or eradicated based on their threat level.

Some security enforcement operations took place in the open, the most serious of which compelled Adam to move his burning eye across the sky above. The real work, as always, took shape in the shadows. This still involved Adam, as his glare affected everyone he burned. His fire could work in circumspect ways as well, only kindling when he commanded it to, combusting someone's soul so he could peer out from those he burned and everything he immolated, turning flesh, soul, and material treacherous to those who wanted to lurk amongst the darkness for protection. But the darkness didn't belong to them. It belonged to Valor, and when he wasn't here, it belonged to Whisper, Shiv, or any number of other High-Tier Stealth Skill possessors working in the Gate.

NovelPhoenix publishes the author's chapter for readers, while this version was reproduced without their permission.

And so, Gate Piety remained placid through continued efforts. And Shiv's impromptu militia were about to perform a very public humbling on this auspicious day.

Marikos had a Pathbearer seized between his pitch-black claws once more. This time, however, Shiv neither moved nor spoke to see them freed, for they were a ranking envoy of the Storm King's Court. As such, it would have seemed remiss for Shiv to lay his own hands upon them, for he was closely aligned with the Republic and acting as their executioner in a form. That would have caused an incident to spiral, and Shiv suspected that was a layered plan on the part of the Storm King, if there was any plot brewing there at all. That remained uncertain, and Shiv decided that he would see to discovering the truth should the offending envoys survive long enough to give an accounting.

He probably would. Maybe. Nothing was certain in life, just like nothing was certain in politics. As usual, the tension that came with the great game used by the Great One against Shiv, Adam, and Gate Piety could be in turn used by the Deathless against his enemies as well.

The Skyfolk District was in a state of full alarm. Many creatures flitted through the air, winged and not, all of them capable of levitation and aerial travel. All of them bound from a variety of monstrous tribes, awakened in unison or as separate factions and lesser dominions, all tethered to the Storm King of the Atlantic or the Bahamut of the westerly winds and even a contingent of Silverclaw's sky raiders, an extension of the Awakened lobster's aerial mercantile empire.

Much like the grounders, the skyfolk weren't a unified whole, not even remotely close. Their different races had significant contentions amongst the others, with the harpies regarded as more vermin than actual individuals, even if they came closest to being human-like in their behavior. Rather than a collective defense upheld in the honor of their supposed kind, most of the skyfolk looked on, watching the scene unfold as Marikos continued ranting and raging at the rest of the Storm King's terrified defenders as the bed of enchanted clouds threatened to succumb beneath the Dragon-Knight's immense weight.

Shiv and his interns were technically surrounded. They stood at the center of a cloud-borne courtyard where spurts of water descended from above in synchronized patterns, as the clouds had been seeded and patterned to behave. Meanwhile, cylindrical walls ran in interconnected patterns as they bobbed up and down, holding aviaries and nests for the various skyfolk. With this innermost corridor given to the Storm King's highest-ranking subordinates, most of them were garudas, interesting creatures that seemed to be a mixture of bird, kite, and person. They had a mess of talons, and their heads were almost humanoid, if not for the extended beak protruding down the middle of their faces. Furthermore, they had a single eye blazing bright with an elemental attunement of their choosing. Several of them projected beams of raw mana at Shiv and his interns.

It proved an act of folly: Shiv inflicted a Languor spell upon each of their magics, halting time for himself first, then spreading his bound field across their streaming magics until they too were contained within husks of temporal stasis. It pleased Shiv to resolve things this way, to exert more of his chronomantic and magical mastery rather than physical force. It was the gentlest capture he'd performed thus far. No limbs had been removed, no bones broken, simply a projection of power across from his Harbinger using the vector of an incoming attack. He felt a sense of satisfaction and approval radiate over from Kelhaus as well. Indeed, there was a display of higher mastery: to lay your hand upon an enemy and not harm them, to see them utterly controlled and not take harm either.

“It is supremacy,” Kelhaus said. “To apply your choice to another and have none of their choices matter to you in return.”

What followed would have been routine if not for the presence of Marikos, Bonk, and Candles, or the fact that Kura was also involved in the events—who started following Shiv in a drunken stupor after watching him subdue the Marikos in front of the parlor she'd apparently been inside of. Gone had joined in at some point as well. Shiv wasn't sure why, but again, he always appreciated her presence. Right now, she, more than anyone else, even including him, was the rational voice of their group. Shiv operated along another axis of rationality.

Sometimes politics demanded madness for optimal peace.

Though Shiv stayed his hand from harming the Storm King's subjects, he left them at the mercy of the main representative of the Descenders Union, as well as Kura and Candles: unaffiliated Legends who held personal loathings against the Republic; and Bonk, an orc who served the Paragon of Gate Piety—but sometimes his own cruelty.

If Shiv directly intervened and resolved things through his own violence, then it would be a direct incident, one easy to spin: the hound of Veronica Chandler acting on her behalf within the Gate Piety Special Economic Zone. Gate Piety, which might as well be a satellite colony of the Republic, regardless of its prior rebellion, would have additional implications of its own. Implications that would soon spiral out of control and bring even more grief down upon their heads.

Politics was a layered nest of ratfuckery. After all the time Shiv spent in the capital observing the nobles and being prodded and scolded by Veronica, he could only consider this act of ratfuckery amateurish, with half the dick still hanging out.

But that also made things easy to counter, for what the Storm King wanted was a specific scandal pointed toward Gate Piety. What he did, however, was overextend, and now Shiv could turn the same threat of scandals back upon him. For the Storm King had threatened hospitality before a knight of the Descenders Union, and thus, a grudge spilling over between the Republic and the premier monster empire ruling over the Atlantic now threatened to involve one of the Abyssal Faiths in the proceedings as well—a face that thought poorly of the Yellowstone Republic, no less.

All that cascaded to the present moment where Marikos was calling for a summary execution. The garuda trapped between his digits struggled and strained, screaming for mercy, shrieking in pitches Shiv could barely perceive. The rest of the Storm King's subjects dared not intrude, for to strike Shiv was one thing. Even if it was a suicidal act, it was a straightforward one: an engagement of hostilities between the Storm King and the Yellowstone Republic, with Gate Piety and Shiv in particular viewed more as a puppet state in between. That would further cause concerns of hospitality to be muddied.

Not so in the present case. In the present case, if they fought back, if they resisted detainment, if they tried striking Marikos or anyone else besides Shiv, or even Shiv by this point, then they would be engaged not only with Gate Piety but with another major faction under Gate Piety's protection. Such an act would be utter sacrilege, beyond the protection of reasonable doubt.

“Veronica would be proud,” the Harbinger said wryly.

Shiv rolled his eyes. No, she godsdamn wouldn't. At most, she would take one look at this grunt and then make a comment about how she could have solved this before it began or that it would have never become a mess under her at all.

“That's what she would verbally say, yes.”

The sizzling of flesh made Shiv's lip twitch. As the garuda thrashed, a pillar of flame rose higher from Marikos’ mace, and the pressure and heat in the atmosphere found itself amplified thrice over. Candles, by this point trapped between his growing rehabilitation and an instinctive urge to still burn things, cast a full spell, rather than a manifestation of raw mana. It was a complicated, spiraling shape of Pyromancy, and it fused itself around Marikos’ own spell to amplify its density and potency five times over, yet keeping it utterly contained and devastating all the same. The mace itself became a hilt, and the Pyromantic tip emitted from its head extended long enough to cleave horizons.

Shiv regarded Candles with a raised eyebrow. “What kind of spell was that?”

“Seeking flame,” Candles said, his voice fragile, his thoughts brittle, but the gears in his mind turning properly, if only in bits and pieces for now. Uva had put in good work on his mind. “It won't cut or burn anything other than what the user wants to cut or burn. It cleaves as one wills it. It is the least hateful of all fires. The least hateful… The least hateful…”

Candles repeated that final phrase several times over and stared off into the distance as Marikos waved his blade up high. It illuminated the crystalline veins and also the ghostly forms of the horrors waiting above—and that proved to be the breaking point. Pinned beneath Marikos' strength and slowly cooked by the heat, weeping free of his scales, the garuda stared straight up and saw not only the overwhelming expression of Marikos’ pyre, but also a legion of death and bone leering down. The garuda's spirit shattered. Shiv felt his morale and fortitude break at the same time, and he let out a pitched shriek that inflicted a similar effect on all his comrades. A series of fracturing spirits turned into a dozen, then a hundred, as more arriving guards bearing the Storm King's insignia upon their mithril armors received the same command.

“Drop your weapons. Dismiss your spells. Drop your weapons for the Storm’s grace, for the Storm's mercy! Drop your weapons and surrender. Don't let them take me. Don’t let them take me!”

At that, Shiv's lip twitched once more, and he let it develop into a proper smile. For the first time since he arrived on scene, he floated over and engaged with the garuda directly. Looking down upon the trapped skyfolk, he shook his head and sighed. “I'm still not sure if we should let this one go, Marikos. What do you think?”

Marikos, now given purpose and prey, was boisterous beyond measure; all his former depression had been forgotten. All his existential malaise shed for what he was in this moment: a knight with a reason to fight and someone to fight for. “No, Deathless, no! I say we imprint this one upon the clouds. I say we make him flames in the dark and leave them outside so that proper lessons can be imparted against such heinousness!”

“No, wait, please, please!” The garuda reached out for Shiv, once regarded as their easiest means to trigger a political crisis if everything went wrong, now the only salvation to escape a dragon’s wrath and fire. “We've submitted to your custody. We have surrendered. We are bound again by the rules of hospitality. We surrendered. We demand the dignity of prisoners. We demand it.”

“Then why did you break that dignity in front of one of the Descenders Union?” Shiv shook his head, and he looked to Marikos. “It's almost like they don't respect you, huh, Marikos?”

“No!” the garuda shouted. “I am nothing but respect! I am nothing but hope! I am nothing but! Nothing but! Please, please! Think of the Storm King's wrath—”

“No,” Shiv replied once more. There was force in his every word. Suffer the Implacable Dialectic made his language burrow deeper than sound could convey. "No," he said for a third time. "No, because you weren't thinking about what might follow. At least the Storm King probably wasn't, but I won't blame the Storm King directly before I have proof, so I'm going to blame you.

"If that bomb—" Shiv pointed to the Necromantic weapon uncovered amidst the rubble "—fell down," Shiv's hand descended through the clouds, "and destroyed the settlements below, then it was going to be another conflict between you and the Republic. We can't afford that right now. And I say we for a reason. There are bigger problems at hand, and I have to admit it would be really, really annoying for me to get involved. Really annoying.”

He started to laugh, but there was very little mirth in his ringing amusement. “The best outcome there was another few skirmishes, another couple of fights between you and Yellowstone over the Atlantic, but that's the best outcome. If that bomb went a little bit off and killed a couple thousand people, guess what? The grounders are as mixed up and messy as you guys. We'd have another problem. You'd be dealing not just with the retaliation of Piety, but with a bunch of different guys, mainly Lone Star, considering how many of them are in this Gate. Now, I know you don't regard the grounders very much. I know that you think you're special because you live amidst the storms and hold the Atlantic. I'm going to tell you this very clearly: You can be special, and you can be bled all the same. Don't take this as a political threat. Don't take this as an invitation to war between the Storm King and me. Take this as a lesson, if you will—because I'm about to tell you your future, and why Marikos is going to spare you, and why you’re going to die regardless.”

“Spare him?” Marikos said, surprised.

“My future?” the garuda whispered.

“Oh, yeah!” Shiv continued. A wide grin spread across his face. "Oh, you're going to hate your future. I assure you, you're going to hate it. You're going to hate it for a very simple reason: because you got spent without doing anything. The Storm King, whether he's involved in this or not—whether this little act of terrorism was spawned from your personal motivation or higher commands—doesn't matter. What matters is that you failed, and you failed in the worst way possible. You failed, and you threatened the political stability of your own people by doing so. I don't know how highly ranked you are, but now you are damaged goods. The minuses to pluses on your personal portfolio are tilting out of balance in the wrong way.”

Shiv swept the rest of the Storm King's subjects. "And that goes for all of you as well. It's all going the wrong way. The Storm King's not afraid of Gate Piety. I'm pretty sure of that. He's not even afraid of the Yellowstone Republic. If he were, he wouldn't fight them, but he's not stupid either, which is probably because he's been around for so long. Part of not being stupid is avoiding fights you don't need to have because it's going to cost what you need for the fights you want. To put it simply, it's easy for all of you to be given to us as an expression of apology. My guess is that you're all likely going to lose your positions. My guess is you're all likely going to be sacrificed. My guess is there's going to be another procession from the Atlantic in a few days. Another group of envoys, a little bit like you, but not really like you, to convey the Storm King's disgust with your behavior and to describe how appalled he is and how you all must be punished regardless. The only thing I'm not sure is if he wants us to do it so that we can make up for our befouled feelings, or if he wants to do it himself as a gesture of his strength.”

And Shiv knew he was right. For the words he spoke began building the dread inside the garudas and Atlantic-bound skyfolk. The darkness around him spread, and levels inside him climbed. Suffer the Implacable Dialectic rang with resonating power that called to Shiv's Severed Shadow, and Shiv let out a breath as he saw the garuda's single eye tilt and spin in despair. “No… no…”

Suffer the Implacable Dialectic 198 > 206

Trespasser Shaped of Dread and Null 322 > 324

“Poor sack of shit,” Shiv muttered. “You didn’t even think you were a resource to be spent, were you?”

The garuda barely heard him—was drowning deeper in his own dawning despair and realizations. But Shiv heard his own words and winced. He wondered how much that applied to him as well; how the great powers saw him.

Then, he realized he needed to wonder no longer as a presence loomed in the corner of his eye.

The Great One—in the guise of the Faceless Queen, only taller and older than what she had first presented herself as—emerged beside Shiv while Marikos growled threats to the broken garuda.

“Deathless,” the Great One said. “Quite a performance. Well done—with room for improvement still.”

“Great One,” Shiv greeted. “I suppose you came to talk for a reason?”

She hummed. “A word in private before what follows.”

Shiv hummed as well—and shook his head. “No. A word between you, me, and Adam. I know what this is about. You don’t get to use him as the Thief.”

“It’s not going to be a choice.”

“Then, I guess there’s not going to be much for all of us to talk about either, huh?” Shiv shot back. The Great One just stared at him with her blank face, but Shiv bit deeper. “There’s nothing but choice, Great One. Bad ones. Ones that get us killed. Our choices, and someone else’s. But you’re wrong. There is nothing but choice all around, and what we do with it. You tell us your piece, and we’ll give you ours. Then, we can all decide what kind of stupid mistake we want to make after.”

For the first time, he felt a pulse of frustration escape her. “You have no idea what you are to suffer.”

“I disagree. I think I have more of an idea about why I’m doing what I’m doing than ever before. And why you’re doing what you’re doing. How much do you pay attention to your own behavior, High God? How much do you stay in your own mind without casting it out from another perspective? And before you answer this for me, I just want to remind you that you didn’t see Avalon coming. You didn’t even imagine the possibility of failure when you pulled your sword free from the sun. At what point did your power cost you both awareness and enlightenment, and do you think you’re going to avoid that with me this time?”

The Great One’s silence continued. Then, without warning, she vanished.

Shiv snorted and rolled his eyes. “See you soon, you felling shit.”

“It is a terrible thing, for one who imagines themselves to be absolute and adult to be humiliated by a child,” Kelhaus commented.

Shiv sneered. “I think the greater terror is making that humiliation possible at all.”

“All make mistakes.”

“Yeah? Sure. But why is she still trying to make them? Seems pretty childish, wouldn’t you say?”

Kelhaus laughed aloud for the first time.