The carpet was almost finished. Morìc cautiously raised his hands from the loom, as if a sudden movement could scare the woolen strings away, and checked his notes again. He had written them two weeks before, when one of the carpets had shown the promising signs of a breakthrough.

He touched up the pattern, pushing his viss into the wool while he worked. His work was complicated by the fact he had to keep the pattern hidden, seamlessly integrated into the design he'd chosen. Not only it made the process slower, but it was difficult to gauge whether the carpet wasn't working because the pattern was wrong or because he had messed it up while trying to hide it.

It was all Koidan's fault, as usual. He had disrupted the first patterns he'd made, tangling and cutting the strings together.

“Other people must not know about viss and magic,” he'd said. “So don't create visible patterns.”

He had let his work alone once Morìc had learnt how to hide them, which wasn't easy considering the string had to be a color not used in the rest of the carpet and not surrounded by other strings of the same color. Purple was ideal, but the die was difficult to find at a good price. He had adjusted by sewing the pattern mostly on the back of the carpet, which was then covered by a cheaper cloth of the same size attached to the bottom.

After making sure the pattern was identical to the one he had planned, he detached the carpet from the loom and laid it down onto a cheaper rug, on top of a low pile on the floor. He passed his hands over its whole surface, seeking the viss he'd left at regular intervals in the strings while weaving. He knew he needed a bigger amount if he wanted it to last for a few days, but he could always add it in the following weeks if the carpet proved itself worthy of further work.

The viss was still there, which was in itself promising: usually he added it just to discover it wouldn't stick for more than a few minutes. But in the last few weeks it had never disappeared once.

He took a few seconds to admire the shapes he'd weaved before looking for the small purple dot he'd sewn at one extremity of the carpet, at the center of a brown-red diamond shape. He touched it as delicately as possible, without pressing down, and pushed his viss out from his palm. He waited for a bit, until the viss had enveloped the entire pattern, then looked around for any sign of movement.

The edges of the carpet trembled and raised a bit from the floor. It was just an instant, then it returned still. Morìc increased the flux of viss, but nothing changed.

He passed his hands over the surface, looking again for the viss he'd stored in the strings. It was supposed to last for at least a couple of hours while the pattern was active. He had made sure there were enough holders for it to last that much, requiring a lower expense of viss on his part. But now the reserve of viss he'd carefully put together in hours of weaving was gone.

He grabbed the wool with both hands as if to tear it apart. Instead, he bent forward until his face was buried into the carpet and screamed.

“Are you alright, Moric?” Koidan’s voice asked from above.

“Fuck off,” he yelled. “You do what I asked or you can fuck off.”

He felt tears stinging his eyes. He knew that if he let the frustration take hold it would be the only thing he could think about for the rest of the day, so he focused on the carpet again to try and understand what went wrong.

The only explanation was that the pattern had consumed all of that viss at once, a lot faster than he had anticipated. So he needed to change the pattern again, just a bit, just to fix that small mistake. Adding some more holders, maybe.

“It's possible,” he murmured, reaching out for one of his handmade notebooks. “It’s possible.”

He knew it was, because he'd seen it. He remembered the sea flowing under the carpet for days and nights. He remembered Irdes sitting on his talons at the front, eyes focused on the horizon, while Morìc hugged Dan tight to prevent him from falling off.

The man never rested, looking for the storm.

“I don't see it,” he muttered every once in a while, as if to shut up someone too insistent. “But it's out there. We'll find it.”

Morìc never understood why the storm was so important. He was too young to ask, too focused on entertaining himself when there was nowhere he could go and nothing to do. He'd played for hours with the colored shapes of the carpets, imagining they were small houses and fields he could crush with the tip of his finger. There was a road enveloping it all, a purple path that curved in waves and spirals around the houses.

Later, much later, he had cursed himself for staring at the pattern for days and not remembering even a single piece of it. But the more he thought about it, the more the dullness of those days was smashed together into an incoherent ball of boredom. Until, that is, they finally saw the storm.

It appeared on the horizon like the shadow of a giant monster. Irdes sat a bit straighter after days and nights in the same position, letting out a yell of exultance. He flew the carpet straight toward it, despite the tendrils of rain extending from the monster.

“Hold on to your sister, Morìc,” he had said. “We'll reach it soon and pass straight through.”

From that moment on, Morìc strained to see the mountain that Irdes and his parents had talked about so much before their departure. But its vague shape only became visible after another night, then they were inside the storm and nothing could be seen anymore.

The water came up and down from both directions as the carpet flew high over the waves. Morìc held Dan and pressed himself down onto the carpet, face buried into the wet wool. At some point there had been a sudden swerve, Irdes yelling something. Dan's own scream answered him, straight into Morìc’s ears. Then his memories were full of rain and the monotonous reassurances of Irdes.

“The hard part is over. We're almost there!”

The mountain was on the other side of the curtain of rain. He remembered not being particularly impressed by it, but not exactly why, because any other feeling or thought was annihilated by the voice that started talking from the sky.

“Who are you? How did you come here and why?”

Their life at Lausune had started with a lot of bargaining and talking to the air on Irdes’s part. He'd quickly pushed Morìc and his brother inside an old house before the storm could pass completely. Then there had been even more waiting. Dan was constantly crying, Irdes always talking to the voice in the sky, and Morìc slept every time there was a moment of silence.

He'd asked about his parents, of course, then saw the worry and pain on Irdes’s face and learned not to mention them. He was always clutching the carpet, and now Morìc knew he was gathering the viss they needed to go back. Except he was going alone, this time.

“Another storm is coming up soon,” he told him one night, while Dan was asleep. “Koidan will take care of you. There's a family nearby who has accepted to check up on you every day, you can eat with them and ask them for help if you need something.”

He didn't seem to notice Morìc’s tears, even as he delicately patted his head.

“You'll be fine. Take care of Dan and keep the techniques we've taught you a secret.”

“When are you going to get us back?” he'd screamed then, unable to hold back anymore.

“I don't know,” he answered.

Not even a month later he was gone, and the carpet with him.

Keys turning in the lock brought him back to reality. He bolted out of the living room and into the kitchen.

“Home!” Dan yelled, then both the entrance and his room's door slammed in quick succession.

Morìc surveyed the kitchen, then opened the pantry. He observed the ingredients, knowing he needed to use as little of them as possible, while also accounting for the few clean tools at disposal and his basic cooking skills.

“I’m making eggs,” he yelled.

Dan's door opened. An instant later he appeared on the kitchen’s threshold.

“Sorry, I'm eating at Nusam’s today.”

“Again?” Morìc said, not entirely surprised.

Dan shrugged.

“You know you can invite him for lunch too, sometimes?”

Dan's face filled with guilt. He sat down on a chair.

“Maybe someday.”

Morìc sensed his reluctance and shrugged, not pressing the point. He probably didn't want his weird brother around.

“Any progress?” Dan asked in a tone that tried too hard to be cheerful.

“Yeah, some,” Morìc answered while breaking an egg.

The silence that followed told him that Dan knew he was lying, and probably told Dan that Morìc was aware he knew, but neither of them could do anything about it.

“How was the date with Eita?” Dan asked.

“I didn't know I had a date.”

“You did,” Dan’s tone became a bit annoyed. “Last night.”

Morìc chuckled, without much humor behind it.

“Well, let's hope she forgot too.”

“I thought you went out! You weren't in your bed.”

“I wasn't in anyone else's, if you're worried about that.”

“I’m serious!” Dan stood. “Were you really working on the carpet?”

Morìc took a deep breath and found his chest weirdly heavy.

“I wasn't feeling it.”

“You're never feeling it. Even with your ex it was like this, you could at least have told him what you really felt instead of letting it all…”

He moved his hands in front of him.

“Fizzle out?” Morìc offered, eyeing the bubbling surface of the eggs in the pan.

“Yeah. Fizzle out.” Dan dropped back onto the chair. “You don't care and I hate it.”

He looked sincerely upset. Morìc wanted to comfort him, but knew he couldn’t give him any explanation without making things worse. Because the truth was that any person who wasn't Dan seemed ephemeral to the point it wasn't worth it. Anything happening around the mountain felt fake, as if it was a break from his actual life and not part of it. Nothing he did there mattered. And at the same time, he was painfully aware that to Dan, that was his life. There wasn't much he could remember before their arrival at Lausune.

His brother tapped his fingers on the table and stood.

“I’m gonna get ready, now.”

Morìc nodded. He ate the eggs straight out of the pan, then left it on the side of the kitchen counter that was already occupied by the previous day’s dirty tableware. He returned to the living room and eyed the carpets, considering which failed experiments he could bring to the market the next day. He grabbed two of the ones who were laying on the table and put them on top of the pile that he’d been trying to sell. Money was tight as usual, even with the vissins Saia had gifted Dan. He'd felt guilty when his brother had given all of them to him of his own accord, because he knew Saia probably wanted him to keep them. Even guiltier when he'd used part of it to buy more wool.

Maybe it was time for him to accept they would never return home. He'd have to sell all of his carpets, which was no easy task considering he could barely manage to do that even if it was his actual job. He would need to find another one that earned him more, make peace with Eita and eventually even Koidan.

He picked up another notebook and flipped its pages. It was the one he'd been writing on four weeks before. He had started a new one after the carpet he was making at the time had floated a finger from the ground. He'd spent the following week filling its holders with more viss, but when he'd tried again the carpet hadn't moved. He started to think the wool wasn’t retaining viss for some reason. Maybe the sheep of the mountain were a different kind from the ones back home.

He flipped some more pages, until the date caught his attention. He closed the notebook and got up, trying to remember when it was the last time that Koidan had talked to him. He'd broken an agreement they’d made years before: he would not have talked to him again, and Morìc would have stopped begging him and the other gods to make him a flying carpet. That was when he had decided to learn weaving.

He checked the dates of the most recent notebook: Koidan had asked for his help shortly after the breakthrough, then the carpet had stopped working, all the improvements he'd made in the past month suddenly useless. And it wasn’t the first time he had tried that experiment anyway: he always repeated them multiple times before deciding they weren’t bringing him anywhere.

He went through the older notebooks, scattered in various piles all across the room, to find all of the instances when he’d tried similar carpets to the one who had worked: one was five months prior, another was two weeks before then, and the first almost a year before.

It had been Koidan's fault the whole time. He had allowed the carpet to work only because he needed his help, then deactivated it again once he had refused. Which also meant that it wasn’t his carpets that didn’t work, it was Koidan who didn’t allow them to fly. He’d never respected their agreement, and only outwardly broke it when he needed help.

The door of the bedroom opened and Dan stepped out.

“I'm going now, I'll come back at…” he trailed off, looking at Morìc as if wondering what was going on.

Morìc closed the notebook and sat down on the stool, his back to the loom. All of the work he'd done was for nothing; he could never have succeeded, not even if he'd kept trying for years. He'd spent mountains of vissins on wool when he could have taken better care of Dan, he'd spent all of that work on the carpets when he could have resigned himself to his fate and built another life where they would both be happy, or at least not struggling anymore. Koidan knew that, and still he had destroyed all of his efforts without telling him anything.

Dan was crossing the room. Morìc didn't know how to tell him any of that, nor if he should. But he couldn't bring himself to reassure him, when it took so much of his strength just to hold himself together.

“Morìc?” Dan called him.

He waved his fingers in front of his eyes, then put a hand on his forehead as if to check for a fever, first the palm and then the back.

Morìc felt something scrape against his skin.

He instinctively reached out to stop him and grabbed his hand. He felt something on the back with the tip of his thumb. Dan tried to retract his hand, but Morìc managed to have a look at it before he could: there were two small square-ish shapes on his tanned skin, one next to the other, white and red.

Dan stepped back, hands hidden inside his sleeves. His eyes were wide with guilt, which made him look a few years younger.

“They’re scales,” Morìc said.

Dan nodded, lips tight, clearly fighting with himself on whether to tell the truth.

Morìc looked at the ceiling, trying to piece it together. He knew what sea snakes looked like, and to whom Saia sold most of her catches.

He looked at Dan again.

“So you’re actually going to eat with Lihana and her family, now?" he asked.

Dan lowered his eyes.

“They needed a babysitter and I asked them to stay for lunch. I kept going there for a while…”

“I know,” Morìc commented.

“Don't be angry at them. I've told them that you agreed with that.”

“I’m not angry; I just don't understand why you're doing this. It could interfere with...”

“I know!" Dan almost yelled, then lowered his voice. “I want to swim better.”

“Why?”

“So I can cross the sea again. I'll go home and find Irdes, so he'll fly here and take you back.”

Morìc looked at him, unable to say anything. Dan started twisting the cloth of his sleeves, looking uncertain.

“I thought, since the carpets aren't working and you seem unhappy here… If I find another way to go home, you won't have to…”

Morìc stared at him for some instants, then stood and walked toward the door, past Dan and the pile of carpets. He stopped halfway through, turned around and hugged his brother.

“Don't eat sea snakes today, please.”

He nodded, hugging him back.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk with Koidan,” Morìc said.

“Ask him where's Saia,” Dan yelled while he left the house. “I don't think she really went back to the mountain!”

He'd hoped to find the temple empty at noon, but there was someone inside. He recognized the new letter carrier, sitting on a bench with his face in his hands.

“Do you need something, Morìc?” Koidan asked in his ears, voice tense.

“I need to talk to you.”

“You do realize we can talk anywhere, right?”

Morìc put his back to the wall next to the door and crossed his arms.

“I’ll wait.”

“You know what? Just enter, maybe you'll save me from this situation.”

The doors creaked open. The letter carrier didn't seem to register the sound, and Morìc entered softly not to startle him.

“So you're telling me that the spheres…” Kadam mumbled.

“There's a person,” Koidan said. “Do you remember what we said? Go home and rest, tomorrow we'll talk some more.”

Kadam raised his eyes. He was startled to see Morìc standing at the center of the room.

“Hi,” he said, his voice sounding forcefully cheerful despite his cheeks being a bit wet.

Morìc greeted him with a quick wave. He needed to hold onto his rage if he wanted to obtain what he wanted, and having a crying stranger to comfort didn’t fit into that.

Once the letter carrier was finally out of the temple and the doors closed behind his back, Morìc planted himself at the center of the room and looked up at Koidan’s statue.

“The pact was not to talk or interfere with each other,” he said. “But you broke it to undo my efforts of making the carpets fly.”

“I… I've already listened a bit to what you were saying earlier. I'm sorry you had to find out that way, I should have been more open with you about my reasons.”

“You can tell me now.”

“Well, first of all you don't know what's waiting for you on the other side of the sea, right? If someone brought you here, it means something bad might happen if you go back.”

“That's it?” Morìc said, raising his voice. “I already knew that. We'll disguise ourselves and be careful.”

“There's also the possibility you might not find what you're looking for.” Koidan's voice was softer now. “You don't remember what happened to your parents, do you?”

Morìc's fists closed.

“Has Irdes told you?”

“No.”

“But I need to try. You do understand that, right?” Morìc realized his tone was almost pleading and took a deep breath before going on. “I need to know what happened.”

“I understand, trust me. Better than you imagine.”

A few moments of silence passed before Koidan spoke again.

“There's also a guardian out there that attacks anything passing through. You were lucky the first time, you might not be the second.”

He was about to protest that he knew about the guardian, that he would fly high enough to avoid it, but stopped. It wasn't enough, he realized at that moment. Irdes had waited for the storm because it was a way to pass through unseen.

A chill ran through Morìc's bones as he realized what might have been of him and Dan if they'd tried to cross without knowing that.

“You could have told us,” he spat out, trying to hold onto the rage, but it was rapidly evaporating the more he realized what a fool he’d been.

“I thought it was safer that way. Especially since you were young.”

“Well, now Dan wants to become part sea snake and cross alone. At least promise me you'll stop him if he tries.”

“I will, thank you for letting me know.”

The statue kept staring at him. Morìc shook his head and walked over to where Kadam had been sitting. He leaned against the wall, one knee on the bench.

“Here’s a new pact: I’ll help deliver your letter, you'll build me a working carpet. I won't do anything until it’s ready and outside of your territory. Then you'll let me and Dan leave. I have a way to avoid the guardian.”

“Normally I'd be a lot more concerned about this, but I'm running out of time. I've tried to convince Kadam, but he needed some answers first and... Well, he won't recover in time, I fear.”

“Why? What should I do?”

“You'll have to go to Suimer, but without ever entering Dore or any other god’s territory. You have a week, maybe even more, but try to be as quick as possible. Do you think you can handle that?”

Morìc nodded.

“The letter is for... Well, there's no point in hiding that, the locals call him by his actual name. It's for Zeles, the new god of the village.”

“New god?”

“Yes.” Koidan’s voice became bitter. “I’m sure he'll tell you about it all even if you won't ask.”

Morìc nodded, impatient to begin.

“Agreed. Now give me the carpet and the letter.”

“I don't need to make a new carpet, the one you weaved two weeks ago should work perfectly, as far as I can tell. I didn't mess with the pattern, I didn't even know it existed to be honest. I've just removed your viss from it.”

Morìc felt a wave of warm pride, despite everything: it took years of learning how to use the loom and studying magic all by himself from the basic rules he already knew, but he'd finally succeeded.

“About the letter,” Koidan said, lowering onto one knee and raising a bit one of his big fists. “I have it right…”

He stopped moving. His mouth was open and his eyes were still looking at Morìc, but his voice couldn't be heard anymore.

“Koidan?” Morìc called out.

The silence and the perfect stillness told him he was alone in the temple. He waited long enough to feel chills crawl up his back. He walked back toward the doors, then slipped out and ran home.