Dust of Dreams

‘
Save us
.’ ‘
Make us rich
.’ ‘
Make us fruitful
.’ The gods never even heard such supplications from their followers. The need, the desire, snared each prayer, spun them swirling into Sechul’s domain.
    He could open himself, even now, to the cries of mortals beyond counting, each and every one begging for an instant of his time, his regard. His blessing.
    But he’d stopped listening long ago. He’d spawned the Twins and left them to inherit the pathetic game. How could one not grow weary of that litany of prayers? Each and every desire, so heartfelt, invariably reduced to a knot of sordidness.To gain for oneself, someone else must lose. Joy was purchased in reams of sorrow. Triumphs stood tall on heaps of bones. Save my child? Another must die.
Balance! All must balance! Can existence be any crueller than that? Can justice be any emptier? To bless you with chance, I must curse another with mischance. To this law even the gods must bow. Creation, destruction, life, death—no, I am done with it! Done with it all!
    Leave it to my Oponnai. The Twins must ever face one another, lest existence unravel. They are welcome to it.
    No, he’d had his fill of mortal blood.
    But
immortal
blood, ah, that was another matter. With it, he could . . . he could . . . what?
I can break the fulcrum. I can send the scales crashing down. It’s all pointless anyway—the Che’Malle saw to that. We rise and we fall, but each and every time the cycle renews, our rise is never as high as the last time, and the fall in turn takes us farther down. Mortals are blind to this spiral. All will end. Energies will lose their grip, and all will fade away.
    I have seen it. I know what’s coming.
    Errastas sought a resurrection but what he sought was impossible. Each generation of gods was weaker—oh, they strode forth blazing with power, but that was the glow of youth and it quickly dissipated. And the mortal worshippers, they too, in their tiny, foreshortened lives, slid into cynical indifference, and those among them who held any faith at all soon backed into corners, teeth bared in their zeal, their blind fanaticism—where blindness was a virtue and time could be dragged to a halt, and then pulled backward. Madness. Stupidity.
    None of us can go back. Errastas, what you seek will only precipitate your final fall, and good riddance. Still, lead on, old friend. To the place where I will do what must be done. Where I will end . . . everything.
    Ahead, Errastas halted, turning to await them. His lone eye studied them, flicking back and forth. ‘We are close,’ he said. ‘We hover directly above the portal we seek.’
    ‘She is chained below?’ Kilmandaros asked.
    ‘She is.’
    Sechul Lath rubbed the back of his neck, looked away. The distant range of stone fangs showed their unnatural regularity. Among them could be seen stumps where entire mountains had been uprooted, plucked from the solid earth.
They built them here. They were done with this world. They’d devoured every living thing by then. Such bold . . . confidence.
He glanced back at Errastas. ‘There will be wards.’
    ‘Demelain wards, yes,’ Errastas said.
    At that, Kilmandaros growled.
    Speak then, Errastas, of dragons. She is ready. She is ever ready.
    ‘We must be prepared,’ Errastas continued. ‘Kilmandaros, you must exercise restraint. It will do us no good to have you break her wards and then simply kill her.’
    ‘If we knew why they imprisoned her in the first place,’ Sechul said, ‘we might have what we will need to bargain with her.’
    Errastas’s shrug was careless. ‘That should be obvious, Knuckles. She was uncontrollable. She was the poison in their midst.’
    She was the balance, the counter-weight to them all. Chaos within, is this wise?
‘Perhaps there’s another way.’
    Errastas scowled. ‘Let’s hear it, then,’ he said, crossing his arms.
    ‘K’rul must have participated. He must have played a role in this chaining—after all, he had the most to lose. She was the poison as you say, but if she was so to her kin that was incidental. Her true poison was when she was loose in K’rul’s blood—in his warrens. He needed her chained. Negated.’ He paused, cocked his head. ‘Don’t you think it curious that the Crippled God has now taken her place? That he is the one now poisoning K’rul?’
    ‘The diseases are not related,’ Errastas said. ‘You spoke of another way. I’m still waiting to hear it,