Cw: mention of suicide

I couldn’t sleep the night after my interview with Falerior. Instead I scrolled through camera footage of the village I’d gotten killed.

We’d fled Salaphi after killing that ancestor god—Tarangor, I think?—and exfiltrated before Kives sent her angels after us. We’d left a cloaked orbital relay so we could keep in contact with the surveillance equipment we’d left behind, but as far as I knew none of us had actually looked through the footage. So I’d gone back to see what the hell the Oathkeeper was talking about.

Present-day Salaphi was a ghost town.

Several buildings had burned down, including the chapel in the center. I remembered being in there—a lot, actually; it featured in some of my nightmares. The carvings were so intricate. Hundreds if not thousands of man hours must have gone into those. That was a significant loss.

Nothing moved in the town but wild animals. Smaller ones, scavengers for the most part. I recognized a few from Earth, where our evolutionary histories overlapped, and the others were small enough they probably filled the same ecological niches. There’s a word for this in Velean: veidikori, which translates literally to “scavenger ground” and dynamically to “the desolation after a battle.” Somehow I got that feeling even before I saw the wolf trotting past one of our cameras with a human arm in its mouth. But the wolf was the moment I decided to find the battle.

Falerior said “Alcebios took them all”—it seemed like a metaphor, but I knew from my comm that he meant it almost literally. But Alcebios was an ascendant god. If they were moved to manifest, it wouldn’t be for a dinky little village in the middle of nowhere. Those were more equivalent to mass harvest events, and they resulted in legends, not rumors: the missing continent of Atlantis, the plagues of Egypt, the annihilation of Pompeii. I considered that she might have gone after the Kives tree, but it was still hanging out in the forest, semiotically intact. It was actually pretty cool, you could see it from orbit when the sky was clear.

Alcebios’s frequencies were death, discord, and a progressive aspect of battle. There were legends that she sometimes appeared to people moments before their deaths, in the form of a naked but cloaked woman bearing their own mortal wounds on her body. If it was an etheric event it might have shown up on our recording equipment, but I didn’t see anything like that. I felt confident dismissing the theory after I scanned the record for divine emanations on Alcebios’s signature and didn’t find anything.

So I went backward in the record. It’d been months since we left, and apparently weeks since whatever disaster had hit. I searched alone—the others were asleep. That felt correct, for some reason. I don’t know if I would have asked them to help if they were awake. Weeks of nothing scrolled by, until I saw my first glimpse of a survivor. A lone man, dragging a rundown cart with his belongings, leaving the village behind. The cameras automatically tagged him with his designation—M-43—leftover analytical baggage from our intensive study of the social dynamics. I watched in reverse as M-43 spent his last few days in the town digging graves. The dead had been violently killed, large gashes memorializing their last moments as their bodies bloated in the tropical sun. As I continued to rewind, their faces grew less mottled and distorted by death, and one by one the archive’s facial recognition system identified them as members of the village. The last to be revealed was F-53; the archive dutifully reported that she was married to M-43. I wouldn’t have known otherwise. M-43’s face was as emotionless as the archive. He worked mechanically. The only sign of his grief was the dead look in his eyes.

I skipped past him retrieving the bodies, skipped past their deaths, looking for the cause. I found them all gathered together—well, gathered in two groups, brandishing weapons at each other. Not professional weapons—scythes and axes and shovels. Farmer’s tools. A pit formed in my gut. I was expecting bandits, or a monster, or maybe a demigod of Alcebios. Not the last survivors of the town doing each other in.

I didn’t watch them slaughter each other. I skipped backward, looking for something else. A group of five had left the town; two women emerged as corpses from homes they’d entered earlier and never left. One of them had seen regular visits from others—probably an illness. The other had entered healthy, hours before they pulled her body out. Could have been a stroke, but I suspected it was suicide.

A week earlier the town’s population numbered in the low thirties. The disaster had clearly already happened. People were packing up to leave; you could see the weight on their shoulders as they trudged through their tasks. No one smiled. The chapel and a couple buildings around it were burnt-out husks. Wait, that wasn’t my fault, right? I thought I remembered setting Tarangor’s body on fire before I left. I could have jumped forward again to double-check what happened to the ten or so people who weren’t there later, but honestly I didn’t want to know.

I skipped back a month this time, checking to see if the chapel was still burnt down. It was. There were more faces in Salaphi, fifty or so by my estimate. The oppression that would be present a month later was still evident here. Maybe worse. I saw fights in the streets. People yelled at each other; others pretended their neighbors didn’t exist. No one made eye contact, and I was willing to bet that wasn’t just for Estheni social reasons.

No one had obvious wounds. There was a weight on my chest and shoulders whose presence was becoming more obvious as I continued to watch the village implode on itself. I skipped backward a couple days, but on some level I knew. I knew. I just didn’t want to see.

I navigated to the day we killed Tarangor. I watched myself lead Arguel to the chapel. We had no cameras inside, but I didn’t need cameras to remember what happened next—

—the blade biting into her neck, the spray of blood, the shock in her eyes, warm wetness on my face—

I shuddered.

Somewhere beyond the cameras’ field of view, I was lying catatonic in the med bay. But the people of Salaphi were still there. The ruined wall was just barely visible from the angle of the one good camera we had aimed at that area. No one approached the chapel, which it turned out I hadn’t burned down after all. No one except Arguel’s husband. Mila, I think. He carried her out with their children. When they got near, they became hunched and anxious, as if expecting a predator to spring out at them at any moment. The etheric stain we’d left on the village had lingered, and everyone under its shadow was becoming fearful and paranoid.

Two days later they set fire to the chapel. It didn’t help.

*

My doomscrolling—doomstreaming?—was interrupted by Abby’s voice cutting through my rumination.

“Lilith? The medical translator was activated and your cloak is on. Is everything okay?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” I said. “I used the translator to clear my head.”

Did you know that sleepiness is the result of waste products building up in your brain? Did you know that you can just translate those out of your brain?

“And the cloak?”

“Practice,” I lied, shutting it off. The flood of guilt and self-loathing immediately came back.

“Lilith,” Abby said warningly.

“Commander,” I replied. “I reviewed our intelligence on the aftereffects of the Salaphi op. We can retrieve our equipment now.”

There was a pause. She had to know that wasn’t everything, but with my recent graduation to “adult,” at least in Velean terms, we were assuming that I knew she knew and was making the decision not to tell her. Or at least I think that’s what was happening.

“Thank you for your efforts,” she said. “You should sleep.”

“Oh yeah, why are you up?”

“Because it is morning, Lilith.”

I pulled my awareness back to my physical body and opened my eyes. The Estheni blocked their windows with a rolling wooden shutter, and the sun was peeking through the seams in mine.

“Ah,” I said. “But I’m not sleepy.”

“The medical translator could fix that, if that’s your concern.”

I chuckled. “Lots to do today. I’ll just rough it.”

“What’s bothering you?”

What was the Velean adult thing to do here? No one fucking explained anything to me, and I’d never seen the others be emotionally vulnerable like this with each other. But Abby had always been there for me, and she’d understand if I didn’t get everything right. A culture full of people who lived for centuries probably wouldn’t expect me to become an expert in a couple of days, no matter how much it felt like I had to be.

“The village is gone,” I said. “We were supposed to help them, but instead we wrecked their home. Now they’re all going to end up in other villages with their own ancestor gods. Did we actually help anyone?”

“You used the knowledge from that encounter to help the Vitares family,” said Abby. “Deicide missions are difficult. It’s not a weight just anyone can bear. It helps to take your victories where you can, until we go for the kill. These questions will become less pressing once we’ve killed a god or two.”

“Just like that?” I said.

“Just like that,” said Abby. “You’ll have saved billions.”

“For some other god to snack on,” I said. “When does it end?”

“When we’ve killed them all and the planet is safe. But you knew that.”

I sighed. “I did. I need to go check on Roel.”

“Of course. But, Lilith?”

“Yeah?”

“I know it’s hard. But you’ve performed above and beyond what was expected of you. We’re all incredibly proud.”

I walked into Roel’s room with a smile on my face. She was awake already, chewing that root they used for pain relief. She was going through a lot of that stuff.

“Hey, mouse,” I said, trying out Kuril’s pet name for her.

“Don’t,” she said sharply.

“Uh, sorry,” I said. “Can I call you ‘hamster?’”

“Mouse is what my mother called me,” Roel said softly.

“Oh,” I murmured. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t meant to—”

“It’s fine,” she said, rolling over in bed.

I sat down in a chair next to her bed, first picking up the Alcebiad so I didn’t have to sit on it. I thumbed through a couple of pages to see if I could read any of it. The little I caught seemed pretty neutral, but my vocabulary was limited.

After a couple minutes, Roel shifted so she could see me again.

“What’s a hamster?” she asked.

I hid a smile. Even making her sad wasn’t enough to suppress her curiosity. “It’s a rodent. Little bigger than a mouse. Back home we’d keep them as pets. You put this little wheel in their cage and they just run on it to get exercise.”

Roel’s brow furrowed. “How big was the cage? Wouldn’t they have trouble turning?”

I blinked. “No, you just keep them oiled. They turn just fine.”

Roel giggled a little. “I don’t believe you. Why would oiling your wheels help a rodent learn to steer them?”

“Ohhhh!” I laughed. “No, the axle is connected to the cage. Like—here, where’s your drawing desk?”

“On my desk,” said Roel.

“That seems redundant,” I said, getting another giggle out of her. “Okay, look, so you’ve got the wheel, right?”

I drew a picture of a hamster wheel for her. Roel decided that she wanted to design a better one. One that the hamster could steer. We passed the morning laughing at each other’s increasingly silly designs.

The empty village and the burnt-out chapel weighed heavily in my thoughts, but I kept a smile on my face. I’d caused a disaster for Salaphi, and I’d brought disaster to Roel, too. The least I could do was help her deal with it.