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The Shadows We Cast

The city of Noyo was a city of inequity and suffering. A city built upon a mountain of bones. An untold number of human corpses had been laid as the foundation for the great city. Though they were not shackled in chains these men and women had been bound all the same. The supremacy of Azka and other Low Gods of his ilk was the bedrock of this woe-begotten world.

Sitting on a massive velvet cushion in the open hall of Azka’s palace, Kunza gazed out over the cityscape below. Past the smooth columns painted warm shades of autumnal reds and oranges, domed roofs of copper and bronze spread out from the base of the pyramid. In the shadows of sharp-angled, cyclopean buildings were wide roads of stone running like rivers beneath gorges of sun-bleached limestone and sandstone. Even from the palace’s vantage, the buildings of the inner quarter were colossal and grating to his eyes. Further in the distance, near the walls, was a tangle of smaller dwellings. Squalid huts and hovels inhabited by those humans lucky enough to be given residence behind the towering white walls. Had still possessed the eyes he had been born with he may have wept but the eyes that Talara had given him - eternally smoldering the dim reddish glow of dying coals - allowed for no tears.

Soft footsteps echoed from the polished stone floor at the far end of the empty hall. Kunza stood as Azka’s Chosen filed in through the high-arched doorway leading from the front portico, their massive leonine bodies moving with a languid grace. The eight colossal, bronze-winged lions took their places on cushions spread around the long brazier recessed in the center of the hall, casting a few dismissive glances toward the man in his vulture feather cape and crow feather headdress. His skin was freshly ashen to further accentuate the pale gray tones that Talara’s blessing had bestowed upon the skin of his and his people.

The eldest of Azka’s Chosen, Tialta, settled itself hulking frame on its cushion and set its cold, predatory eyes met Kunza’s. “Keep those foul eyes off me, ka-man.”

“Don’t call me ka-man.” Kunza’s gaze remained steady and unyielding. The embers embedded in gnarled, scarred sockets flickered. “Your Sovereign, Azka, has already accepted my station and I expect you to respect it as well. I am Talara’s emissary and you will treat me as such.”

Piata, the Chosen that had come to Kalaro to announce Kutali’s death a year before, spoke. “You’re a man. And we will treat you like one.”

Kunza sat down on his cushion, brushing his cape aside as he lowered himself. Their provocations were nothing. Being a man was not the insult they thought it to be. It was a blessing. To be human was a gift from the High Gods for men would inherit the earth. Talara had told him so. The reign of Low Gods upon the earth was at an end. Their hubris would weigh them down and they would drown when the Gray came to finally swallow them. That is what his Goddess had shown him. She had shown him what was to come just as she had shown Azka on the day Kunza had arrived in Noyo as Talara’s emissary.

“Do not get too comfortable, Kunza,” Tialta said. “You’re here only due to Azka’s generosity. If you fail to uphold your end of this arrangement, it won’t matter what you call yourself, I will rip you to pieces where you sit.”

Kunza repositioned himself on the cushion, letting himself sink into it. “Do you doubt my Goddess?”

“I doubt you,” Tialta said. “You may have fooled Azka -through bewitching or guile, I do not know- but you haven’t fooled me. You’re nothing to Talara. You’re a man with delusions of divinity. You’re a fraud imbued with dark magics.”

Kunza smiled. “Believe what you will but rest assured I will uphold our arrangement.”

Azka’s Chosen grumbled and whined but they would do little more. They were bound to their Sovereign's wishes and Azka followed Talara’s word.

The Chosen turned their attention away from Kunza and spoke as if he were not there. Kunza turned his attention back over the cityscape below and listened. Each of them spoke of the strife in their own dominion. As viceroys of Azka’s kingdom, it was not often that all of them were together in one place. They spoke of famine and starvation. Human laborers dying in droves. The output of copper and gold mines in the east was dwindling. The farms of the northern parts of Azka’s domain were faring particularly poorly. Herds of cattle lay rotting in the plains. But most concerning was the influx of refugees from the Gray-stricken Far North. Desperate humans and godlings and even full-blooded gods were migrating south. One of Azka’s northern villages had been raided by a rogue godling a month before. Nearly half of the village’s people had been slaughtered. The village’s ka-man had been gutted and decapitated. His skull had been stripped clean of flesh and brain and used as the godling’s cup.

The world warped beneath the strain of the Gray, beginning to crack and crumble. Becoming malleable as it had when the Serpent died. A world to be reshaped in Talara’s name.

With no introduction, Azka’s children came from the opposite end of the hall, where it connected to the central palace and all of the Chosen abruptly ended their conversation. Kunza and the Chosen rose as the godlings took their places at the end of the hall before Azka’s high throne. They were magnificent creatures, more than twice the size of the Chosen. They were massive, their leonine bodies covered in lustrous fur that shimmered resplendently in the shaded hall. Their front legs ended in massive, dexterous paws and the back legs were vaguely avian and ended in two splayed paws with exposed talons. Their wings, folded on their backs, were bright gold and each feather was as sharp as a blade. Manes of silken bronze feathers adorned their necks and framed their lion heads.

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Down the bridge of their noses were intricate designs that radiated a golden glow. These designs ran along the top of their head and down their neck to their shoulders, a pastiche of sharp, tapering lines intersecting one another in perfect symmetry.

The godlings sat on their raised cushions of purple silk, leaving one empty between them where their brother, Kutali, once sat. The hall was silent. Below, the city’s din was distant like a storm rumbling far on the horizon. Thousands of voices became a deep, incessant murmur. The sound of human and inhuman workers laboring outside the city’s northern wall. The sharp strike of hammer upon chisel. The creaking and groaning of cart and sled. The moans of men and women, lesser giants, and cyclopean slaves as they toiled at the site of Kutali’s mausoleum. Yet in the palace, the commotion of Noyo was much like the slight breeze that drifted intermittently through the columns of the hall: a barely perceptible sensation in the stifling stillness of the godlings’ presence.

Kunza watched the godlings as they sat, frozen on their tier of the dais. Their gaze skimmed around the hall, aloofly sweeping along the assembled counselors and then out over the city and then back to the hall. Golden eyes, detached and dispassionate.

To be a god was to be at the precipice of eternity. What must a moment such as this be to a being that lives for centuries? What must it be like to be near-immortal? Kunza’s gaze fell to the empty cushion. Not even gods were totally divorced from death. Sooner or later, Talara would inherit all, mortal and divine.

Nearly a quarter of an hour passed in that oppressive stillness. Then through the tall doorway leading to the inner palace came Azka. Everyone in the hall prostrated themselves as he mounted the raised dais on legs like tree trunks. His slumped back was only a man’s-length from grazing the ceiling’s severe vaulted arches. Azka looked similar to his children but his features were more exaggerated and more haggard. His once lustrous coat was dull and thinning. The thick lines of light covering his head, neck, shoulders, and back were faded a sickly yellow. His mane sagged with a somber weariness. The once-gleaming bronze feathers that ran from around his neck down his back were thin and patchy. The skin around his eyes was bald and drooped with age. Sores, covered in the finest medicinal powders and salves, dotted his legs.

A long, gravelly sigh and the god seemed to deflate a bit in the softness of his dais. “Let us begin, then,” he said, rheumy, clouded eyes settling on his children sitting before him.

The oldest of Azka’s godlings, Ketabi, sat up, eyes falling upon Kunza. A slight jolt ran up Kunza’s spine in the godling’s gaze. “Kunza of Kalaro,” Ketabi said, syllables rolling together in a low purr. “By Azka’s decree, for a year you have been allowed in his palace at your discretion and gaze upon wonders no more mortal man has ever seen. In his endless generosity, you were given one year to bring forth the fruits of your supposed relationship with the High Goddess, Talara. You swore at the feet of Azka, Sovereign of the Eastern Wind, that you would bring with you a means of weathering the Gray. So where is it?”

Kunza prostrated himself once more and then rose from his cushion to stand by the brazier. He looked along the rows of Chosen looming over him and then to the godlings and Azka at the end of the hall. He cleared his throat and let his voice loose, loud and slightly raw. “I assure you, Ketabi, I have not been idle. In Talara’s name, I bring to you, Azka, a glimpse at the breadth of Talara’s power and influence in this mortal realm.”

The Chosen nearest him, shifted irritably. His aura was heavy around him, bolstering his words and strengthening his conviction. His Goddess was with him. He could feel her cool touch in his chest. “The Gray is a grim pestilence seeking to blot out the brilliant light of your divinity. It seeks to strangle this light. But where there is light, there is shadow.” The hard leather soles of his sandals clapped against the marble as he strode forward.

“Get on with it,” Tialta said.

“As mighty as you are, even gods cannot weather the Gray alone. There cannot be light without shadow. And that is what Talara offers you, Azka.” His aura swirled and surged as he spoke, riled up by his words. He raised his hands before the godlings as if offering himself to them. “I offer to you,” he said, “the shadows.”

His arms dropped and with them, six of his apostles dropped from their perches in the vaulted arches above. They slid along the columns they had perched upon and landed, each of them, at the edge of the hall. All of them, tall and lanky. Dressed in flowing tunics the color of sandstone, their faces covered entirely save for slits exposing clouded white eyes and ash-pale skin. Only now did the faint, lingering stench of death come from their patchwork bodies. The hall erupted into chaos but his Shadows kneeled before the Chosen and the gods, unflinchingly.

“What is this?” Ketabi shouted, looming over Kunza, lips curled and magnificently gruesome teeth bared. “You dare smuggle assassins into Azka’s sacred hall?”

“Assassins? Oh no, my godling, my Shadows are not assassins. Unless, of course, you chose them to be.” Kunza looked and bowed to Azka, still sitting placidly on his dais. “My Shadows are yours to command.”

“And why should we want them?” Ketabi asked. “What use would Azka have of human sneakthieves?”

Kunza smiled a thin, cold smile. “Humans, they were originally but now they are so much more. You could not sense them, no?” His Shadows stayed kneeling, heads bent in supplication. They would not move until he told them to move. Unerringly. “That is because they are beyond life and death. They do not eat. They do not sleep. And, most importantly, the Gray does not touch them.” Kunza looked at Azka once more and the god’s eyes met his. “In the plaza below, you will see one hundred of my Shadows, ready to obey your every command. Given time, Talara could give you an army of these Shadows. But she can also give you something much more. Despite your power, gods are all too mortal. But through Talara, that does not have to be so.”

The Chosen turned their attention below to the plaza surrounding the palace where his Shadows stood in a line on either side. But Azka kept Kunza’s gaze. In the god’s impassive gaze, within those beleaguered eyes of amber and gold, Kunza saw promise. A promise of a better future. And Azka was the first step to that promised world.

“Follow my goddess and we shall build a paradise amid this damnable Gray.”