The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

He reaches for the Stone.

It is gone.

But it was there, lying in my blood, a moment before. Dekarta frowns, looks around. His eyes are attracted by movement. The hole in my chest, which he can see through the torn cloth of my bodice: the raw lips of the wound are drawing together, pressing themselves closed. As the line of the wound shrinks, Dekarta catches a glimmer of thin gray light. Within me.

Then I am drawn forward, down

Yes. Enough of this disembodied soul business. Time to be alive again.

* * *

I opened my eyes and sat up.

Dekarta, behind me, made a sound somewhere between choking and a gasp. No one else noticed as I got to my feet, so I turned to face him.

Whwhat in every gods name His mouth worked. He stared.

Not every god, I said. And because I was still me after all, I leaned down to smile in his face. Just me.

Then I closed my eyes and touched my chest. Nothing beat beneath my fingers; my heart had been destroyed. Yet something was there, giving life to my flesh. I could feel it. The Stone. A thing of life, born of death, filled with incalculable potential. A seed.

Grow, I whispered.

29

The Three

AS WITH ANY BIRTH, there was pain.

I believe I screamed. I think that in that instant many things occurred. I have a vague sense of the sky wheeling overhead, cycling day through day and night and back to morning in the span of a breath. (If this happened, then what moved was not the sky.) I have a feeling that somewhere in the universe an uncountable number of new species burst into existence, on millions of planets. I am fairly certain that tears fell from my eyes. Where they landed, lichens and moss began to cover the floor.

I cannot be certain of any of this. Somewhere, in dimensions for which there are no mortal words, I was changing, too. This occupied a great deal of my awareness.

But when the changes were done, I opened my eyes and saw new colors.

The room practically glowed with them. The iridescence of the floors Skystuff. Glints of gold from glass shards lying about the room. The blue of the skyit had been a watery blue-white, but now it was such a vivid teal that I stared at it in wonder. It had never, at least in my lifetime, been so blue.

Next I noticed scent. My body had become something else, less a body than an embodiment, but its shape for the moment was still human, as were my senses. And something was different here, too. When I inhaled, I could taste the crisp, acrid thinness of the air, underlaid by the metallic scent of the blood that covered my clothing. I touched my fingers to this and tasted it. Salt, more metal, hints of bitter and sour. Of course; I had been unhappy for days before I died.

New colors. New scents in the air. I had never realized, before now, what it meant to live in a universe that had lost one-third of itself. The Gods War had cost us so much more than mere lives.

No more, I vowed.

Around me the chaos had stopped. I did not want to talk, to think, but a sense of responsibility pushed insistently against my reverie. At last I sighed and focused on my surroundings.

To my left stood three shining creatures, stronger than the rest, more malleable in form. I recognized in them an essence of myself. They stared at me, weapons frozen in hand or on claw, mouths agape. Then one of them moulded himself into a different shapea childand came forward. His eyes were wide. M-Mother?

That was not my name. I would have turned away in disinterest had it not occurred to me that this would hurt him. Why did that matter? I didnt know, but it bothered me.

So instead I said, No. On impulse, I reached out to stroke his hair. His eyes got even wider, then spilled over with tears. He pulled away from me then, covering his face. I did not know what to make of this behavior, so I turned to the others.

Three more to my rightor rather, two, and one dying. Also shining creatures, though their light was hidden within them, and their bodies were weaker and crude. And finite. The dying one expired as I watched, too many of his organs having been damaged to sustain life. I felt the rightness of their mortality even as I mourned it.

What is this? demanded one of them. The younger one, the female. Her gown and hands were splattered with her brothers blood.

The other mortal, old and close to death himself, only shook his head, staring at me.

Then suddenly two more creatures stood before me, and I caught my breath at the sight. I could not help myself. They were so beautiful, even beyond the shells they wore to interact with this plane. They were part of me, kin, and yet so very different. I had been born to be with them, to bridge the gap between them and complete their purpose. To stand with them nowI wanted to throw back my head and sing with joy.

But something was wrong. The one who felt like light and stillness and stabilityhe was whole, and glorious. Yet there was something unwholesome at his core. I looked closer and perceived a great and terrible loneliness within him, eating at his heart like a worm in an apple. That sobered me, softened me, because I knew what that kind of loneliness felt like.