Chapter One

It was cool and damp in Death’s Dark Hollow of Doom. Zyran didn’t notice it anymore. He had spent most of his three hundred and forty-seven years here, and the chilly mist was quite comfortable to him.

It made lighting candles an unpleasant task, though.

Zyran could have summoned a flame sufficient to light a candle in an instant. Come to think of it, he could have summoned a flame sufficient to light many, many candles in an instant. Like most of Death’s servants, he had an astonishing capacity for destruction. But Death insisted; she had made it perfectly clear that the tea candle was to be lit with a splint of wood, tipped with red phosphorus, called a match. And matches, when kept in the Hollow, invariably became soggy and nearly useless within a few hours. So Zyran often spent longer lighting the candle to keep the tea warm than he did actually preparing the tea.

It wasn’t that it took so long that annoyed him. It was that it didn’t seem to make any difference whatsoever to the candle or the tea whether the candle was lit with a match or not. It was especially infuriating since Zyran was permitted to light the cookfire, over which the tea would be boiled, with a simple flame at the tip of a blue-gray fingertip. Lighting the cookfire took moments. Lighting the tea candle took absolutely forever.

But Death would never relent. Zyran had asked her before, and her reaction had been surprisingly violent. Zyran had no intention of repeating the incident. He swept the match through a piece of folded sandpaper and was unsurprised when nothing happened. He worked at it for a while, becoming more and more irritated every time the match failed to light.

Suddenly he froze. Oh. It was painfully simple. The candle had to be lit with a match. That was non-negotiable. But could it be that the match itself did not need to be lit with its accompanying sandpaper? Surely Death could have no objection. And even if she did, Zyran could always say that the cookfire had been extinguished by the suffocating mists, and that the second use of magic that Death felt had been used to relight it. That had been known to happen.

Zyran glanced around surreptitiously. There was no sign of Death, nor of her other servants. Zyran held a finger a little away from the match head and reached out to the Song that was ever-present in the back of his head.

If he hadn’t been in a hurry, he would have settled back to listen to it for a while. He enjoyed doing that. Whatever its tune, the Song was always immensely comforting. Death’s other servants were not as dependent on its soothing properties as Zyran was, which he suspected had something to do with his youth. He hoped his cravings would fade as he aged.

But Zyran was in a hurry, and he simply reached out to the Song and drew a tiny measure of energy. A flame appeared on his fingertip, and the match sizzled for a moment before blazing to life. He released the Song, and the flame was gone as quickly as it had come. He used the match to light the candle and planted the match in the wet ground of the Hollow to extinguish it. He heard the water for the tea boiling and turned to get it, only to find Death next to him.

Zyran nearly flinched. He stopped the reflex at the last instant and simply removed the kettle from the fire and poured a small amount of hot water into the china teapot to warm it. Death, only about half again Zyran’s height today, watched patiently as he swirled the water around a little before returning it to the kettle to come to a full rolling boil again and put the teapot on a stand over the candle. Then he put several spoonfuls of tea leaves into the pot and perched a strainer’s arms over the lip of a teacup. The kettle quickly came to a boil, and he poured its contents carefully into the pot. He quickly replaced the pot’s lid and waited for the tea to brew.

Death remained silent and motionless for the five and a half minutes Zyran had calculated for leaves of this size to brew. Zyran poured the tea into the waiting teacup at exactly the right moment. “Cream and sugar, my lord?”

“Not today,” Death said calmly. “Thank you, Zyran. You’re getting quite good at that.” She took the offered teacup in her skeletal fingers, raised it to her long, equine skull, and inhaled the steam. After a little of this she sipped it gently. “Excellent. Feel free to have a cup yourself.” Then she glanced at Zyran from beneath her hood. “Oh. Sorry. I forgot.”

If Death had been anyone else, Zyran would have been annoyed. But Death was Death, and Zyran had no trouble believing that his master had forgotten that her servants did not have functioning mouths. Zyran’s head structure was humanoid, unlike that of some of his colleagues, and given that he had a movable jaw, he believed that he had some sort of oral cavity, but it was covered with a black, gummy substance that extended to cover half of his head and much of his neck. It was a part of him, a strange, organic mask that was known only as the Veil of Death. All of Death’s servants had it, and if Death knew what it was, she had never bothered to explain it to them.

Zyran waited for Death to finish her tea. The ancient god usually took a long time, doing her best to appreciate every sip, to extract every strain of flavor from her favorite beverage. An eternity was a long time, and Death had become an expert in the field of tea. But her fleshless hands were weak, unsuited to the task of tea preparation, and she didn’t seem to like the idea of using the Song to compensate. So as the most junior of Death’s servants, Zyran had long been the designated tea master. With Death’s tutelage, he had become quite proficient.

Today Death seemed out of sorts. Through his brief excursions in various mortal and spirit worlds, Zyran had learned that Death’s mental state was by no means ordinary—in fact, it had been succinctly described by another servant as “cracked.” But today Death seemed especially odd. Zyran caught the occasional dim glow of red underneath her hood. The red eyes were considered a sign that Death was about to have one of her violent fits, wherein she would scream something about the end of the world. She had been having them for about two thousand years, apparently. Not particularly long by the standards of the Hollow. But before these fits she usually went quiet, and today she was mumbling to herself. Zyran wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“You used the Song twice today,” Death said, her voice suddenly clear.

Zyran hesitated for an instant, unsure whether Death had seen him light the match. “Yes, my lord. The cookfire went out.”

“Did it now.” Death’s tone was flat, without any inflection whatsoever.

“Yes, my lord.”

Death drank her tea in silence for some time, without even mumbling. Zyran felt a prickle of worry. Surely lighting the match with the Song had not been a punishable offense, but lying to his lord and master, on the other hand...

“It would be unfortunate if any of my servants grew too dependent on the Song.”

Zyran tensed, waiting for the blow to fall.

“The Song is a wonderful thing. Pure energy, the lifeblood of all living things. But it is not alive in itself. No living thing should become a slave to a thing that is not.”

She looked at Zyran completely for the first time, and Zyran saw in the cadaverous, empty face a rare lucidity. Death was truly aware at this moment.

“It isn’t a bad thing to love the Song. All living things are attracted to it. But that was not the point of my instructions. I...” Death’s voice faded, and Zyran saw the old clouded expression come back into the empty eye sockets. “I... What was...”

Then Death’s eyes suddenly seemed to ignite, brilliant yellow at the center, fading out to red at the edges, brighter than Zyran had ever seen them before. The air around them shimmered with heat. Zyran made to leap away, but Death caught his shoulders. Her bony fingers dug into Zyran’s dark blue-gray skin like iron.

“Blood rains from the sky! The heir is found in storm’s eye! Fire fills sea and earth! The lost shall lose all cause for mirth!”

Death clutched Zyran, eye sockets burning, glaring down at Zyran’s empty white eyes. Seconds passed, and she did not move. Zyran waited nervously. Death’s suddenly impossibly strong fingers were becoming painful. The seconds turned into minutes. Zyran’s instinct was to call for help from one of the other servants in the Hollow, but he was reluctant to look away from Death’s face, as his master seemed intent on maintaining eye contact.

“My lord?” Zyran croaked. He hadn’t intended to be so quiet, but he found himself unwilling to speak any louder. Not fear, of course. Fear was for mortals. But a healthy sense of apprehension was a good thing to have when one served Death, surely. Even for an immortal.

Death did not respond.

“My lord?”

Death started. The fire vanished from her eyes, and she released Zyran. She glanced around herself, then down at her robes. “I...” Any clarity she had had dissolved into her usual confusion. Zyran waited.

“I have a task for you,” Death said, apparently giving up trying to remember what had happened. “There’s a group of mortals on a large, remote world that have... taken up a foul pursuit. Very... very foul indeed.” She tucked her skeletal hands into her sleeves. “They’ve begun to worship me.”

Zyran flinched. Death had very few opinions on mortals, or on anything outside her Hollow that didn’t have to do with tea or aesthetics. But the worship of death in any form was unthinkable. Zyran wasn’t certain why. But he knew that every mortal he had heard of who had ever worshipped any sort of avatar of death had come to an untimely and unpleasant end, usually specified by Death for ironic purposes. “How would you like them removed, my lord?”

Death burrowed her hands further into her sleeves until her robes resembled a contraption Zyran had once seen used to restrain violently insane mortals, something that had been called a straitjacket. “Simply, please. Fire will do.”

A fairy perched on Death’s shoulder. It snaked its head up to Death’s ear. She seemed to listen to it. Zyran wasn’t sure how, as this variety of fairy, a glowing, orange, fish-like creature known as a sakiru, was utterly incapable of speech. They were supposedly gifted with foresight, though. Zyran was of the opinion that if that were true, the sakiru’s existence was some sort of divine prank. Gods were the only ones capable of that level of irony.

Death nodded slowly. “Yes. Fire.” She withdrew her hands from her sleeves and sketched an oval in the damp air of the Hollow. Her fingers left behind trails of light. She flicked her hand casually, and the inside of the oval was suddenly very different from the outside. Zyran saw moonlit dunes and a vast starry sky before Death unceremoniously pushed him through the portal.

Zyran landed on his front in the sand. He heard the portal close behind him with a faint pop. He stood up, brushed sand off of his bare chest, and looked around.

He seemed to be in a large desert. There were mountains visible in front of him. Behind him, a sea of sand stretched into infinity, punctuated by great hulking monoliths of rock that jutted from the sand like whales breaching the surface. No, not monoliths. They were too… sculptural, somehow. There was a word for them. To his great annoyance, Zyran couldn’t think of it. A half moon, rising low to his right, cast the dunes in blue. And... there were stars in the sky.

Whenever he was sent out of the Hollow, which wasn’t as frequently as he would have liked, Zyran was amazed by the skies he saw. Suns, clouds, planets, and stars were all equally astounding. Even light sources strong enough to cast real shadows were largely unheard of in the Hollow, and Zyran amused himself by contorting his hands into odd shapes that made odder shadows for a minute. Then he took another look at the sky, sighed, and returned to the task at hand.

In the distance, between himself and the mountains, he could see several flickering lights, presumably fires, surrounded by dark shapes that he couldn’t quite make out at this distance. Mortals, he deduced, camped at the base of one of the rocks. But if the tiny dark shapes were his size, then the rock had to be…seventy times his height. Eighty?

He turned behind him to look at the sand and its great rocks, and was forced to adjust his perspective. Mesa, he remembered suddenly. They are called mesas. His annoyance vanished, replaced instantly by a deep, roiling shame. He had forgotten a word. That was an error, not just an easily corrected physical one, but a mental failing, a fault in his capacity to think. It was unacceptable. He was a servant of Death. He was better than that. He had to be better than that. He had been created specifically to be better than that. And Death could not know, of course, must not know.

He turned back toward the mountains and briefly wondered what the mortals were burning in a desert, but dismissed the question quickly. He would find out. He wasn’t sure how to tell which of them were cultists and which were not. Death hadn’t given him any sort of explanation. No matter. The universe could always do with a few less mortals. It wasn’t as if they contributed anything in particular, and they certainly used a disproportionate volume of resources relative to their importance. Tool-using and fire-wielding or not, they were animals, fertile ones at that, and their herds had to be thinned periodically.

Zyran began the trek to the lights. At least he had ended up in sight of the target this time. He could remember a number of occasions when this had not been the case, including one involving a rogue mage that had ended up involving swimming across a lake. The lake had contained a very large and very territorial reptile of some sort. It had attempted to eat Zyran, and he had been forced to have a violent confrontation with it to get it to stop messing with his body’s internal organs. He had healed up almost immediately, of course, part of the brand of immortality that came with being a servant of Death, but it had still been uncomfortable and incredibly annoying. There didn’t appear to be any lakes here, with or without large reptiles, but there was still going to be a long walk involved.

The walk was indeed a long one, a situation exacerbated by the fact that sand proved very difficult to walk in. The moon had risen high by the time Zyran had climbed up the lower flanks of the mesa the mortals were camped by and crept up behind one of the dark shapes, which had turned out to be fabric tents. The fire, by the scent, was burning some sort of oil. A collection of robed mortals were sitting in a group next to it, facing away from him. It sounded like there were more of them in the tents. That fit; they were usually pack animals.

Zyran called fire into each hand. Not a fingertip flame as he had in the Hollow, but a fully fledged ball of fire on each palm, ready to explode into action. Zyran liked fire. It was his favorite way to use the Song. There was so much energy coiled up in it, so prone to roaring out of control. At least for amateurs. Zyran had trained with fire for three hundred years, and it obeyed him like an extension of himself.

He took a deep breath, felt the excitement build up. He loved removing mortals. He knew how to draw out the process, keep himself occupied for longer. Every moment spent here was a moment not spent waiting on Death, and consequently precious. He hoarded every second, and if he could prolong his task, he would.

But he also loved dramatic entrances.

He blew the tent apart with an explosion of flame. A screaming mortal, the blast having destroyed its fragile legs, attempted to drag itself away from its tent. Zyran stopped it with a precisely aimed lance of fire through the back of its skull. Veiled mortals leapt to their feet all around, coming out of tents, jumping away from the campfire. They were all letting loose incoherent shrieks, reaching for weapons, trying to get into some sort of formation, the usual idiot mortal things. Zyran let them have a few seconds of fun before he obliterated five of them with one well-aimed gout of flame. There were more screams, and they reacted well, spreading themselves out.

A few tried to creep up behind him. Zyran could hardly contain his laughter as they came closer and closer, apparently convinced he was unaware of them. He destroyed several more tents and mortals as he waited for them to make a move. They eventually decided to launch a simultaneous attack, all three lunging at his back at once. He let the tips of their weapons get within a foot before he spun around, too quickly for mortal eyes to follow, and sent fire roaring into their covered faces.

He loved the Song. His centuries of training allowed him to move much faster than these mortals, but it was the Song that made him truly immortal, that gave him the power to whip between them like a wind and eviscerate them. The mortals tried everything: formations, loose coordination, surprise, everything, but they were no match for him. Dispatching them was easy, but the most fun Zyran had had in quite some time.

He made sure to keep one eye out for reinforcements. There were three camps in total, all seething like toppled anthills. This one was nearly destroyed, but the other two groups of mortals had joined together and were making their way across the sand toward him. The Song alerted Zyran as they came closer. He wasn’t fond of injury, however quickly he recovered from it, and all things being equal, he would rather avoid it. Not that the mortals stood much of a chance of actually hitting him. They could outnumber him by far more and, with the Song’s help, he would still be too fast to catch.

Zyran made short work of the last few inhabitants of the first camp. Mortals didn’t respond well to being set on fire. They tended to drop everything and run around screaming instead of dropping to the sand and putting out the flames. Zyran wasn’t sure what they thought they were achieving, but he thought it probably had something to do with the death cult they had set up. Maybe dancing for death was supposed to make their deaths less painful? He didn’t really want to ask.

Just as he finished off the first camp with a few well-aimed balls of fire, the combined forces of the second and third arrived. They circled him. Zyran was conflicted. On one hand, one of his favorite things to do with fire was to build it up enough to create an explosion, centered on himself, that would decimate everything around him. The other servants of Death always laughed at him, but he didn’t care—it made him feel powerful, and it was a beautiful thing to watch. On the other hand, killing all of the cultists with one blow would significantly decrease the length of his stay here, and that was the last thing he wanted.

He compromised by directing the explosion forward, wiping out only half. It was still deeply satisfying, and it left him twenty cultists to play with, a pleasing prospect. The Song told him that they were terrified, and he decided to have as much fun with that as he possibly could. He sheathed himself in flame, something that had taken a great deal of practice and many, many instantly healed burns, and spun around to face the remainder.

His show was marred somewhat by the skull he stepped on as he turned, his robe flaring dramatically. It was brittle from the flame and shattered beneath his bare foot. Shards of bone embedded themselves into the flesh. Zyran refused to let the injury ruin the moment, but he was deeply annoyed with himself. He had been so focused on the mortals’ fear that he had lost some of the total awareness of his surroundings that the Song gave him. A stupid mistake, one he hadn’t made since his earliest training. He was so in love with the Song that he usually let it inform him of every movement of air within fifty paces of himself. He loved that complete knowledge of everything around him, and to be truthful, he was surprised that he had focused his perception so completely on the mortals. He would have to watch that carefully.

Zyran directed his attention to more important things. His foot healed up in seconds, tissue knitting back together and pushing out the slivers of bone that quickly became ash in the heat from the fire surrounding him. It had taken long years of training for Zyran to work up to a fire of this temperature, but it was well worth it for dramatic purposes. It melted sand into a thin layer of glass in his immediate vicinity, creating a shimmering halo around his feet. He reached above his head and let off a gout of flame into the night sky. Harmless, but the mortals shrank away, terrified. Zyran couldn’t help but feel a wave of disgust at the sight. Mortals were so easily manipulated. Their lack of time was crippling. They were scarcely alive long enough to learn the basics of existence. It was a miracle any of them were sentient.

He lashed out on an impulse, sending a whip of fire into the semicircle of mortals. In an attempt to redeem the simple gesture, he contorted the fire into snakes, a complicated task, wrapped it around a few throats, and closed the loops, all at lightning speed. Four down, sixteen to go. He felt suddenly annoyed. His enthusiasm had robbed him of entertainment. He struck out in anger, immediately realized his mistake, tried to draw the flame back, and found he was too late. Another seven gone. Only nine mortals left! A number of invectives he could apply to himself raced through his mind. He released the sheath of flame and drew his concentration back to the cultists. Clearly he wasn’t focused today.

He released fire almost entirely, leaving only a mid-sized flame in his left hand. He leapt to the nearest cultist, caught it around the throat with his right hand, jammed his left hand into its mouth, and let loose. The mortal died in seconds. They were horribly fragile. One could hardly do anything with them.

The next mortal got a perfect lance of fire the width of a finger through its left eye. Zyran forced the fire deep into its skull, killing it quickly. He enjoyed it so much that he employed the same tactic on the next cultist, this time through the right eye.

The remaining six mortals clustered together. The milled uncertainly for a few moments as Zyran advanced toward them. Then one flung its sword to the ground and fell to its knees.

“Yield!” it called. “I yield! We all yield!”

Another cultist stabbed its cowardly compatriot through the throat, much to Zyran’s surprise. It was an odd thing for an animal to do. Stabbing an ally didn’t fall into the category of self-preservation.

“We will never yield!” it snarled. “You, creature—you are nothing! Nothing!” It ripped its veil off.

There were two categories of mortal. The first, known loosely as Fey, were imbued with the Song—not nearly as much as proper beings were, but enough to give them some veneer of sapience. The other kind, of which there were many more, ranging from the smallest bacterium to the largest and most complex mammal, were not. To Zyran’s surprise, these mortals did not exhibit the telltale traits of Fey, namely elongated facial structure and pointed ears, and they did not feel like Fey in the Song. They had to be of the second kind. They had to be animals. And yet they spoke with words, the same kind of words that the Fey used. That was odd. Singular, really.

“If Death wishes our company, we will join him!” the mortal screamed. Zyran wasn’t wholly sure what sexual dimorphism might be like among this strange brand of animal, but he thought it might be female.

He was still considering it when it—she?—lunged at him, brandishing its strange double-bladed weapon. Zyran caught the staff’s upper blade with his bare hand out of reflex, stopping the cultist in its tracks. It looked shocked for an instant, but wasted no time hitting him with its bare hands. Zyran stopped it by driving his hand into its abdomen, ripping his way through flesh and pulling out a large chunk of some organ or other. The animal screamed loudly and staggered backward, but didn’t fall over immediately, so he gave it a push for effect and walked over its still-shrieking body toward the four huddled mortals.

They all threw their weapons down at once. Zyran laughed and swept a tongue of flame around them, just to scare them. It looped around them and snapped back to his hand like a boomerang as he continued coming toward them. He did that for show sometimes in the Hollow, when he and some of the older servants were not on assignment. It was a good trick, if not particularly practical. It certainly worked on the mortal animals. They looked terrified.

When he was about twenty paces from them, Zyran suddenly noticed something odd. The air, which had previously been astonishingly dry, felt damp. He was so surprised by this that he stopped walking and looked around. The clouds around his feet were not smoke, as he had assumed, but fog. The fog snaked tendrils up around him, and Zyran recognized it by its gloomy weight. It was the same mist that pervaded Death’s Dark Hollow of Doom.

That didn’t make any kind of sense that Zyran could think of.

There didn’t appear to be a portal of any kind anywhere, which Zyran would have assumed was the cause. The fog often clung to the Death’s robes when she left the Hollow, but she did not seem to be present. The mist might even have come with other servants, Zyran supposed, but none of them had appeared in the last few seconds either.

The mist’s longest tendrils reached Zyran’s head. The cultists were watching him strangely, but didn’t seem likely to do anything anytime soon, so he ignored them and focused on the mist, trying to determine what it was doing. It didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, just swirling around ominously, which was something that Death often had it do within the Hollow. And then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, it was gone.

Zyran stood there blinking for a minute before deciding to get on with his task. He no longer felt any particular excitement about ridding the universe of these animals. The mist had disturbed him. As a servant of Death, even as a junior one, he should be acquainted with most things related to his work. He shouldn’t be surprised by things like this. He should understand them. He had no idea what the mist had done and he didn’t like it.

The shortspear hit him in the upper right side of his back and ripped out through his chest, its broad tip plunging forward into the air with a substantial amount of blood and tissue.

The pain hit him an instant later like an avalanche. Zyran was used to pain, and he controlled it well. This was markedly more intense than he was used to—he was more accustomed to cuts, burns, and the occasional broken bone; the aquatic reptile had been a rare level of disaster—but it would all be over in a few seconds if he could just remove the spear, and then he could utterly destroy whatever mortal had thought he could be killed. Even now the blood vessels should be healing up to stop the loss, and then he could break off the tip and remove the shaft without blood getting in the way.

Except they weren’t.

The blood didn’t seem to be stopping. It was gushing out in torrents. And the pain certainly hadn’t abated at all.

It took Zyran about four seconds to realize that something was very wrong.

He steeled himself, gripped the shaft with one hand as close to his chest as he could, took the spearhead in his other hand, and snapped the head off. It was agony. The spear’s shaft was slippery with blood, as was the head, and he didn’t have as good a grip on either as he would have liked. He tore his hand badly and snapped at least one of his ribs, significantly worsening the damage to his thoracic cavity.

He dropped the spearhead to the ground and gripped the shaft from the back, suddenly uncertain. He wasn’t trained in mortal healing, which, shameful as it was, was what he would need if this injury was not going to heal, for whatever reason. The first solution he thought of was to remove the shaft and cauterize the wound with Song fire, but it occurred to him that this injury was less of a cut and more of a gaping hole. He wasn’t certain something like that could be sealed at all.

As long as he was thinking of fire, though…

He turned, trying to ignore the fact that movement made his pain skyrocket, and saw the eviscerated mortal from earlier gazing back at him, its hand outstretched on the sand. It was holding its head just enough off the sand that it could see him. He was surprised by the level of hatred and satisfaction in its eyes. It didn’t seem to understand that its kind was expendable, or that he would be perfectly fine.

A simple burst of flame would serve. Nothing that required too much effort. As long as the mortal paid for his pain. And it had to be quick. His vision was dimming, already nearly black around the edges. He wasn’t sure if immortals could lose consciousness, but if they could then he had very little time. He raised a hand and called fire.

Fire did not answer.

Zyran froze. What? He tried again. No… He heard muttering behind him, and suddenly realized that for the first time in his life, he was in danger.

He turned to face the animals. The dying one had no more weapons and could not hurt him, but these ones were picking their weapons up from the ground, their eyes betraying their thoughts.

But Zyran was not helpless, even badly injured and without fire. He made a decision in an instant and ripped the spear’s shaft free from his back. Pain screamed through him, but the Song helped him hold it at bay. There was nothing he could do about the blood, which was now leaving him at a significant rate, but he could end this quickly, even in his current state.

He held the stick like a sword with both hands. “Stick” didn’t quite do it justice. It was a solid piece of hardwood with a straight grain. He could break it fairly easily, obviously, but against a mortal, it could inflict serious injury.

One cultist came at him alone and head on, a stupid mistake. Zyran let it approach for a moment, eyeing its sword, before executing a solid swing that connected with the animal’s head with a sickening crack, making its lifeless body crumple to the ground. He ignored his damaged right scapula, trapezius, and rhomboid, which made the movement extremely difficult and agonizingly painful.

The pain was a steady pulse, his vision darkening with every beat, and the Song in the back of his head was in rhythm with it, something that relaxed and focused him. He found his reaction a little surprising, given that the situation was getting worse with every second, but he wasn’t going to think too hard and jeopardize it.

Two of the remaining cultists seemed to have lost their nerve and were backing away again. The third one glanced at its companions, gave a dismissive grunt—disgusting beast—and advanced toward Zyran with a long knife, apparently constructed from bone.

He had no time to draw this out. He lunged forward in a smooth movement, hooked the makeshift club around the back of the mortal’s knee to trip it, and drove the splintered tip into its throat as it fell. He was withdrawing his weapon from the ruins of the mortal’s cervical vertebrae when it happened.

There was silence. For a moment he didn’t understand what had happened. Then he realized.

The Song was gone.

He wrapped his mind around the concept just as the effects smashed into him. The silence. There was nothing comforting in the back of his head, no constant, gentle murmur.

The weakness. Standing was suddenly barely possible. The effort of holding onto the stick was too much. He had to drop it.

The blindness. He could see with his eyes, but it was nothing, nothing to the wealth of information the Song gave him. He had no knowledge of the world around him, only what his pitiful, fragile organs could tell him. At the same time what he saw and felt were more real. The sand on his bare feet, sticking to his bloody skin. The heat from the flames warming his back while the cool night air showed him the effects of a desert breeze.

The pain.

The pain blazed through him, unimaginable, unstoppable, unconquerable, unending. It enveloped him completely.

He collapsed onto the sand and screamed and screamed. There was nothing. Only pain.

For an eternity, that was all there was.

Then he took a breath, and there was sand and there was pain and there was blood and there was fire and there was silence inside his head where was the Song?

He was still trying to understand how to see the world without the Song, how the world could even exist without the Song, when a cultist entered his pathetic limited field of vision, interrupting clouds of smoke, drove a sword into his abdomen and ripped it out again.

For the first time, Zyran understood why some mortals wanted to die. If this was how they felt pain… It was the first coherent thought he had had since the unthinkable had happened, and was followed by a wave of disgust that he had anything in common with such creatures. A brief instant of clarity, and then he was gone again, overwhelmed by pain.

A few heartbeats of pure agony lasted forever. Then there was a sort of dim awareness, cloudy and vague, as the initial shock faded, and to his bewilderment he was on his feet. He had no idea what had happened. He was still trying to process where the Song had gone and how much it hurt as his body somehow moved.

It did more than move. As wave after wave of pain crashed into him, he caught impressions, fleeting glimpses of what was happening.

He saw his own hand, coated in dark venous blood, halfway into a mortal’s throat, fingers curved and stiff like talons.

He saw arterial spray in mid-jet, surging from a hole in the other mortal’s chest. He saw falling bodies and fire.

He saw a smoky sky and realized he was back on the ground, and everything was suddenly clear, as if life and sound had come back into the world after a long absence.

He was screaming in long, horrible, gurgling wails, drawing breath in torturous stabbing gasps in between. There was blood everywhere. Theirs, his, it didn’t matter, it was hot and sticky and there was a great pool of it underneath him and it was choking him and coming in great spurts from his chest. His body was ignoring him. One hand was out to the side, rapidly clenching and unclenching. The other was clutching at the hole in his stomach, trying to hold in the blood that was welling out. His back was repeatedly arching and coming back to blood-soaked sand, each time bringing new agony. His legs seemed to be twitching and jerking. Occasionally one would kick out without any instruction and lines of fire would light up throughout his body.

Zyran tried to bring everything back under control. After a few seconds of concentration he managed to turn the screams to sobs. Stopping the writhing took longer, but he did it. He couldn’t remain completely still, but he thought a certain level of trembling was acceptable. He did his best to keep still and breathe as he tried to examine his options. He didn’t seem to have any. Even if he thought cauterizing his injuries was a good idea, the Song had abandoned him. He barely warded off a huge surge of panic at the thought, which cost him the control of his arms, and it took him a few seconds to get them back.

When his faculties were more or less returned, he saw it. A massive figure, swathed in mist, robed and cloaked in black, with a long skull for a face, gazing down at him.

This is how mortals see her.

Zyran felt a tide of relief flow through him. Everything would be fine. He relaxed. My lord. He wanted to say it out loud, but realized that he didn’t have enough control over his speech to manage it. All that came out was a whimper.

Death glanced down at Zyran. She looked vaguely surprised. “You look rather the worse for wear.”

Zyran couldn’t answer. He could only stare up, trying to control his body’s shudders.

“I think tea would be the ideal solution.” Death peered at Zyran for a moment. “Oh, sorry. I forgot. Hmm.”

Zyran’s relief was rapidly being replaced by stunned horror. No. Everything will be fine. Please. It has to be. Some part of his mind registered the irony that he had thought Death would save his life.

“Ah!” Death said suddenly, lifting a skeletal finger. “I know!” The finger quickly sketched a tiny portal in the air, and a sakiru popped through it, looking as surprised as a faceless fish-fairy could look. There was a smile in Death’s voice that could not be expressed on her rigid skull. “Healing powers!” She paused. “I think. Probably. It would make sense, don’t you think? Prophecy, healing, don’t those sorts of things go together?”

Zyran lifted his head and brought it thudding back down on the sand in anger and desperation and immediately regretted it.

Death crouched by her servant’s head. “I’m afraid Issimil insisted I let you go.”

Zyran stared blankly at her. Issimil was the Eternal Lord of the Song, ruler of all magic in the universe, Death’s opposite number. Had it been Issimil himself who had severed Zyran’s connection to the Song? But why? What have I done to offend him?

“He said you were mucking up the web of life and time or some such,” Death said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I don’t really know. It’s his business. We work together, you know. So I like to stay on good terms with him. Besides, I think you’ll do just fine as a mortal.” She was smiling again. “You’ve hit a bit of a rough patch, obviously, but overall I think you’re doing just grand. I know it’s probably not quite what you had in mind for your future, but if you be positive and make the best of it, I think you’ll have lots of fun! You’ll probably even be able to use the Song again if you try hard enough!” She gave Zyran a pat on the shoulder that was probably meant to be friendly, but it hurt. Her fingers came away bloody.

Death sketched another portal in the air and stepped through with a wave. The sakiru attempted to follow her through, but the portal closed too quickly and the fish-fairy swam through air for a moment before it stopped, looking dejected.

Zyran gave up and closed his eyes.