Remkou wakes in darkness. He feels a distant vibration, the smooth, cold ground stirring beneath him. A low rumble reaches his ears, peaking then fading back into the black silence.

He does not know where he is, or how long he has been here. He vaguely recalls wandering around the Atomic Cenotaph on an overcast night, the little god whispering about a pathway opening up. After that, nothing. His memory is failing him, as are so many other things. He can sense his death patiently creeping up on him, growing closer and closer by the moment. He passes in and out of dreams, sleeps for a few fevered hours, reawakens in complete darkness.

The little god is still there. It rarely talks to him now. Sometimes, softly, it apologises to him. At first, he wasn’t sure why. But he has grown to understand.

It is killing him. To make itself stronger, it has begun to consume his mind, draining his body to maintain itself. It busies itself with unknowable discussions, reaching out to the others like it that dwell in this buried place. For this, it needs fuel, and his living brain is that fuel. With every passing hour, the darkness inside his head spreads a little more.

Remkou isn’t afraid. His life, small honour that it is, is all he has left to give. And he will give it willingly.

Besides, the little god is making his death comfortable enough. He no longer feels the cold, no longer feels hunger or thirst; not even the need to piss or shit. His clothes are still filthy with the caked, decaying blood of the rubble ganger, but he no longer even notices the coppery stink. The pains and shivers that have tormented him for so long have been reduced to an occasional dull ache. His limbs still seem to obey him, just about, but he cannot see even an inch in front of his face, so trying to stand or even crawl around seems pointless. The ground he lays on is some kind of hard, flawless, glass-smooth stone, or maybe metal. It should be uncomfortable to lie on, but even that is no hardship, thanks to the little god’s boons.

The only thing that really bothers Remkou is the quiet. When the little god is in communion with its kind, murmuring in some spectrum human ears cannot hear, the only sound is his own breathing, his own sluggish heartbeat. His mind tries to fill the void with voices – the old voices, the mad, gibbering, sobbing, cajoling chorus. They come and go, not so strong as they once were, but in his dreams they are as loud as ever.

Awake or asleep, memories flash in front of his sightless eyes. Places he will never see again, people who must think he is already dead. Moments that feel like they happened to a different Liucan Remkou.

Kneeling in prayer beside his older brothers at their old village chantry. A dead man with a slashed throat in a trash-piled alleyway south of the industrial quarter. The boys on his school football team cheering him on as he whipped the ball past a frantic defender. Stumbling out of the Seventh Watch precinct house, drunk and weeping, after his summary dismissal. Tchaiya’s pale, naked breasts and sweetly nervous smile the first time he slept with her. A round of after-shift beers in a grubby corner bar with Evaris Morre. The blessed chemical fog of stay-awake and dreamcane that always came next.

He watches it all go by with a kind of detached interest. He no longer attaches any emotion to these things, these glimpses of another life. They were, and now they are no more. Only his god remains.

After some indeterminate time – a few hours, a hundred years – it speaks to him again. It’s good to hear its voice, a real voice, once more. The old voices flee before it, as demons should.

“I’m afraid we will need to move on,” it tells him. “The others in this place are…uncooperative. They have suffered irreparable degradation, and the intact portions of their network seem to have been subverted by an outside agent. They cannot help us as I hoped they would.”

Remkou does not answer. It is not his place to speak. He feels no disappointment, not even curiosity about these other, invisible, broken gods. He will do whatever is asked of him.

“There is another chamber here, deeper than this one,” the god explains. “I believe it was less severely damaged by the nuclear detonation. It may still be possible to access it. I will plot us a route.”

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A problem occurs to Remkou’s crumbling mind. “It’s too dark. I can’t see,” he wheezes. He can barely hear his own rasping, dust-dry voice, even in the unearthly quiet.

“It’s alright,” the god says. It sounds, somehow, a little sad. “I will take us there.”

Remkou stands up. He doesn’t mean to – his legs unfold of their own accord. He rises to his feet without any trouble, even though he’s starved and skeletal and entirely blind. He keeps his balance perfectly, and begins to walk confidently across the glassy floor, his footsteps echoing in the blackness.

The little god is walking for him, he realises. His dying body, its vessel, is now wholly under its control. No longer needed in any practical sense, he is just a passenger in his own head. An observer of his own final rites.

In the darkness, Remkou smiles.

*

The place he’s in – the chamber, as his god called it – is immense. He walks his strange, puppeted, unerring walk for what feels like hours across an endless, unchanging floor of that strange smooth stone. All of it in complete, impenetrable darkness, and silent aside from the booming echoes of his footsteps.

He can see nothing. But there are times when he senses things, perhaps by some incidental bleeding of the little god’s power into his mortal mind. Huge, silent shapes, hidden in the dark, looming over him like storybook giants turned to stone. Ancient things that may be dead or may be merely sleeping. Things that have waited here, down in this vast cold hall, since before Indeleon was a city, or a village, or even a crossroads scraped in the dirt.

The little god walks in his flesh. It doesn’t seem hindered by his wasted muscles and drug-ruined nerves. His dying heart pumps steadily, never missing a beat. There should be agony in every movement, but the worst he suffers is the odd twinge of a clicking joint. He is aware, on some abstract level, that he should be afraid, horrified at being made to march on strings like a flesh-and-blood marionette.

He feels only a curious peace.

“There have been some developments on the surface,” the little god murmurs. “It seems someone has managed to reactivate technology salvaged from the primary chamber. This was likely the same agent which subverted the remnants of the command network. The city is now experiencing a significant outbreak of violence. The tremor we felt earlier may have been caused by a low-yield nuclear weapon. It is possible that one of the belligerent factions will attempt to follow us down here. I will attempt to activate whatever security systems remain functional to safeguard us.”

Remkou currently has no control over his lips and tongue, so he cannot respond. He thinks of the world above – the world he now realises is just a thin scraping of life and light on the surface of this colossal darkness. The world where everyone he has ever known will live and die, oblivious, while he alone is privileged to end his days among the gods.

The puppet-march takes them down a gentle incline in the invisible floor. The slope grows steeper, becoming a ramp that leads down into yawning depths. The echoes that reach Remkou’s ears become louder, closer. He realises they are walking through some kind of tunnel.

Abruptly, the smooth ground underfoot roughens. His boots clump over bulbous, misshapen mounds, like rocky tumours or bubbles of cooled lava. The little god adjusts his stride accordingly, keeping him from slipping or stumbling as they descend further into the steepening tunnel.

“The secondary chamber is damaged, but not to a severe extent,” the little god says. Now there’s a real, if measured, excitement in its voice. “It appears most of the systems degradation here is simply due to its age, rather than blast or radiation effects. I am detecting negligible structural failure. The air remains breathable, without any significant radiological contaminants.”

Remkou’s lungs draw in cold, dry, motionless air. It smells no different from the upper chamber. He wants to sneeze, but the little god won’t let him. It seems to acknowledge his discomfort, though, because after a moment the irritation is suddenly gone – considerately turned off, just like his pain.

They emerge from the tunnel into another great emptiness. The floor underfoot becomes perfectly flat and smooth once again. Remkou’s legs, still wholly out of his control, carry him forward some distance. Then he is brought to a neat stop, standing alone in the cool, quiet void. He could be at the bottom of an ocean trench, or on the sunless surface of some far-off moon. Ahead and behind, infinite dark, hiding unknowable things.

“We are here,” the little god declares. “Interior systems are responding. Localised network nodes are coming online. The others here are in far better condition than those I tried to communicate with before. It will take some time to fully audit their program states, and longer to fully awaken them. But I can already access certain basic functions.”

Far above, in a ceiling of ancient black glass, a grid of white lights flickers to life, like a regiment of stars. After so long in total darkness, Remkou’s eyes sting and water in the sudden glow. His god slightly relaxes its control over his body, allowing him to blink the tears away.

And, with a rush of beatific joy and gratitude, he sees the place where he will die.