A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

When he stumbled onto a scatter of enormous
bones, hinting at some unhuman, monstrous god of long
ago, the wind – as it slipped down among those bones,
seeped between jutting ribs and slithered through orbitals
and into the hollow caves of skulls – moaned that god's
once-holy name. Names. It seemed they had so many, their
utterances now and for ever more trapped in the wind's
domain. Voiced in the swirl of dust, nothing but echoes
now.
    Let's play a game.
    There is no gate – oh, you've seen it, I well know.
    But it is a lie. It is what your mind builds, stone by stone.
    For your kind love borders. Thresholds, divisions, delineations. To enter a place you believe you must leave another. But look around and you can see. There is no gate, my friend.
    I show you this. Again and again. The day you comprehend, the day wisdom comes to you, you will join me. The flesh that encompasses you is your final conceit. Abandon it, my love. You once scattered yourself and you will do so again. When wisdom arrives. Has wisdom arrived yet?
    The wind's efforts at seduction, its invitations to his
accepting some kind of wilful dissolution, were getting
irritating. Grunting, he pushed himself upright.
    On the slope to his left, a hundred or more paces away,
sprawled the skeleton of a dragon. Something had
shattered its ribcage, puncturing blows driving shards and
fragments inward – fatally so, he could see even from this
distance. The bones looked strange, sheathed one and all in
something like black, smoky glass. Glass that webbed down
to the ground, then ran in frozen streams through furrows
on the slope. As if the beast's melting flesh had somehow
vitrified.
    He had seen the same on the two other dragon remains
he had come across.
    He stood, luxuriating in his conceit – in the dull pain in
his lower back, the vague earache from the insistent wind,
and the dryness at the back of his throat that forced him to
repeatedly clear it. Which he did, before saying, 'All the
wonders and miseries of a body, wind, that is what you have
forgotten. What you long for. You want me to join you? Ha,
it's the other way round.'
    You will never win this game, my love—
    'Then why play it?'
    He set off at an angle up the hillside. On the summit, he
could see more stone rubble, the remnants of a temple that
had dropped through a hole in the earth, plucked from
mortal eyes in a conflagration of dust and thunder. Like
cutting the feet out from under a god. Like obliterating a
faith with a single slash of the knife. A hole in the earth,
then, the temple's pieces tumbling through the Abyss, the
ethered layers of realm after realm, until they ran out of
worlds to plunge through.
    Knock knock, right on Hood's head.
    Your irreverence will deliver unto you profoundest regret, beloved.
    'My profoundest regret, wind, is that it never rains here.
No crashing descent of water – to drown your every word.'
    Your mood is foul today. This is not like you. We have played so many games together, you and I.
    'Your breath is getting cold.'
    Because you are walking the wrong way!
    'Ah. Thank you, wind.'
    A sudden bitter gust buffeted him, evincing its displeasure.
Grit stung his eyes, and he laughed. 'Hood's secret
revealed, at last. Scurry on back to him, wind, you have lost
this game.'
    You fool. Ponder this question: among the fallen, among the dead, will you find more soldiers – more fighters than nonfighters? Will you find more men than women? More gods than mortals? More fools than the wise? Among the Fallen, my friend, does the echo of marching armies drown all else? Or the moans of the diseased, the cries of the starving?
    'I expect, in the end,' he said after a moment, 'it all evens
out.'
    You are wrong. I must answer you, even though it will break your heart. I must.
    'There is no need,' he replied. 'I already know.'
    Do you? whispered the wind.
    'You want me to falter. In despair. I know your tricks,
wind. And I know, too, that you are probably all that
remains of some ancient, long-forgotten god. Hood knows,
maybe you are all of them, their every voice a tangled mess,
pushing dust and sand and little else. You want me to fall to
my knees before you. In abject worship, because maybe
then some trickle of power will come to you. Enough to
make your escape.' He grunted a laugh. 'But this is for you
to ponder, wind. Among all the fallen, why do you haunt me ?'
    Why not? You boldly assert bone and flesh. You would spit in Hood's face – you would spit in