So she said none of it. Instead, she said, “I’m afraid,” and she had to choose her words very carefully, “of what you can be made to do. I think your friendship comes with a price that isn’t yours to remit.”

Silence.

“Maybe you’re a smart woman.” The Shadow said, and dropped his head for a moment, so his ghost-smoke hair could lie still and nearly weightless on his shoulders. And, still looking down, he added, “And not the only one with that fear.” A pause. He was long and rangy and lean, wire tight and those wires surged with power. She didn’t get that God-sense from him, the urge to fawn at his feet and bask in his radiance, but she got something. A whispered effervescence, light against the skin. Even sitting hunched over in moss and the barely phosphorescent flowers, he was a magnificence and that hair, that mystery matter that shimmered like starlight, blended into the fine velvet of his coat.

“But,” she said.

“Don’t finish that. The reasonable answer is no. The unreasonable answer is no. There can be nothing for me like that. Like you. And you’re a wise woman. Canny smart. But have you found the problem here, in your logical thought?” His eyes were shimmering with their own light as he looked at her.

She did. “You can’t undo what’s been done already. You already care about us.” She took a deep breath. “But would you die, for me?” She paused, then hurriedly, “Or would you give me yet more of yourself. The way you fed the gods. Would you give me part of your life?”

“Or…would I give it to someone else?” he said, very, very softly. He made a face and rose once more, pacing across the ground once. “You tread dangerous ground with even more dangerous speech.”

“I don’t want it,” She said, with feeling. “Not now. Not ever. I will never accept a piece from you. I wouldn’t degrade you like that.” She paused. “Or myself.”

“How would immortality be degrading yourself?” He asked, with a surprised expression.

“I’d be a thief, if I took it without your permission. I’d be a monster if I manipulated you into giving it to me. And I don’t want the misery it brings. Look at your gods. Look at you.” And she panicked a little. Because that might have been too far.

But no. His smile was a bit more full-hearted, less self-loathing and bitter. “Alright, then. A bargain, with no more blood than you will, right now. I extract a price from those I do not call friend. Should I call you friend, Hawk Rayne?”

“No,” She said, miserably. He acknowledged her lie with a slight and knowing smile. Oh, how she wanted to say yes. “For your own sake,” she added.

He waved an inhuman hand and let it pass. “So, I’ll need one of your group to pay. The boy and the bright one get a pass. The bright one especially. Your shining Emile has their teeth in life’s jugular. They’ll do for the boy, too. That old man you’ve got, he’s baggage who will cost you dearly. I’d recommend losing him, but you won’t. Your heart’s too big for that. So that leaves you. It’s Mattias I care about…despite you worming your way in rather effectively.” He attempted a smile. He managed a bitter grimace. “He’s the skin I have in this war. You’re the nearest I’ve ever gotten to getting him out of here.”

The silence between them shifted, became less fraught, more daring. “You mean…you’ve been trying.”

“And his Service to Nasheth is as much a part of him as a limb. You intend on taking him with you, when you go back to the God-world?” He loomed over her, and she wanted to drown in his beauty.

“Yes,” she answered. The idea of leaving him behind had never occurred to her.

“Good. Then my help is paid for. And you’ll have no reason to come back.” And he watched her, his terrible hands clenched against the folds of his armor.

“Isn’t that uncomfortable? What you’re wearing?” She said.

He looked down at himself, looked around, and then went “Ah.” He picked at a sleeve. It had once had skillful embroidery sewn into the border. Most of it was frayed, or shredded away. “I had ideas, once. Making this world a better place. I had soldiers. I had an army. I didn’t damn myself so far as to call myself a God, but others did it for me. I like to think things were better for my people while I could protect them. But it all came to nothing, in the end. I wear it to remember those I failed.”

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“Like tonight? In the pavilion?” She said.

He dropped his head and shook it, sending nebula clouds flying as his wonderous, terrible hair shifted in the breeze. “I’m sorry you saw that. But spectacles like that happen, with me or without me. Did you know once Nasheth was particularly enamored with her camp one time, and she chose to make it permanent? Every worshipper for weeks was sacrificed to make the tent into a tree. Probably because there was one in the middle of it, a little one, not a fruit-bearer. She pressed herself, her presence, into every nearby mind. And she turned them all into part of that little tree. Up they’d climb, with branches growing from their hair and leaves for eyes and tongue. Children abandoned in the grass (for a moment or two, until Nasheth’s power came upon them) washing left in piles in the field, hunters dropping bow and game both to go and put out leaves and become a part of the Earth’s own Temple. The tree is so massive, there’s a pavilion-sized hollow in the center, held by a single living pole in its center. It sits there still, empty. Nasheth ignores it. It wasn’t grand enough for her. Thousands of lives spent, and she won’t darken its door.”

Hawk didn’t know how to react. He waited for her response, then continued with his own story.

“And the worst part was…they could still think. The men and women and children she’d subverted to trees for her glory. Their thoughts were all full of her. When the magic blows through the right way—you haven’t seen it, I’d wager. There hasn’t been a magic storm since I built the Nexus—their thoughts are filled with nothing but her. It plays over them, you see. It’s like a frame, like you’d put a plant on. A framework for thought. Magic plays across it and there, you have a thought. You have awareness. You have life. But it’s frozen there, forever. Forever wanting to climb just a bit higher, so that the God would delight in you, just that bit more…and it’s all for nothing, because it’s a place she no longer wishes to go.”

“Is that temple still there?” Hawk said.

“Ah, no.” he brushed violet claws across the gentle grasses. “Thing caught on fire within two cycles of its creation. Argon got into an argument with someone and his hand slipped, more’s the pity.” A long pause. “I’m not gonna leave anyone frozen in a moment of complete fear, Doctor Rayne.”

Her lie about her name hurt. She wanted to hear Doctor West from his lips. She wanted him to tell her more about his world. She wanted his kiss. “That’s a good thing.” She said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. And she studied his face for the longest time. As long as she could without it getting awkward. “Do you really believe that the Gods are going to try to invade the…God-world?” She hesitated, stumbling over the pretentiously unfamiliar phrase.

“Think it? Girl, I’ve seen their plans. The hour they feel it is within their reach, they will attempt to seize that world above. And they seem to think they can get away with it.”

“They might be able to,” Hawk said. “We’ve got guns, we’ve got weapons, but time, down here, moves a lot faster than it does up there. Your entire world, Sir, has existed in ours for all of three days.” She paused, let it sink in, watched his beautiful, alien, horrible, wonderful eyes register just how bad that could be. “It takes more than three days to mobilize an army.”

“Aye. Or their replacements, when the first line gets turned to trees or stardust.” A pause. “What is a star? Is it a thing in the God-World? Because I’ve always had these words and nothing to put them to.”

But she was left back in the dirt, several words before that. “I hadn’t thought that far. Jesus. We’re not going to be able to respond at all, and—”

A hand, violet, with claws, cupped her shoulder, gently. “You’re not alone, Hawk Rayne. I think of the Nexus as a line. You put my friend on your side of it, and I will not stop trying to safeguard your world.”

“The Light Archon matters that much to you.” She said.

He turned his head and spit, and his spit seemed to eat the grass. “Phagh. Light Archon. His name is Mattias Well-Wound. His father was a clockmaker. They picked him when the last Archon died with no apprentice.” A pause. “Which might have been more than a hundred years ago.” A pause. “Maybe even two.”

She said, “What?” in a very quiet voice.

“Young boy tossed up on the pylons to my Nexus and told ‘keep the temple going’, and how does he respond? He tries, and he curses the gods, gives more to the people than the Temple is getting. Might as well have hung a bell on a raw steak and offered it to my beasts. There’s nothing I love so much as a person with a good heart.”

Hawk nodded. “He has a very good heart.”

“He does,” The shadow said, still looking down at her.

“Em and Henry have good hearts. Henry isn’t very brave and Emile is…Emile. They’re not going to change and…and I wouldn’t want them to. But they’re good the way…the way Mattias is good.”

“That might be. There’s two more hearts in your party, and only one I’d grace with my time.”

And she saw her opening. “So you know you shouldn’t trust Kaiser.”

“As I know water is wet and a beast gets hungry,” Said the Shadowmaster. “Don’t worry, Hawk Rayne. I’ve got your back to the Nexus…and from there on, too. Nothing is getting to your world without it first going through me.”

She nodded. “I should go back to the others.”

“Aye.” He said, and watched her.

She couldn’t take it anymore. “Do you have a name?”

“Why waste a name on a half-eaten thing like me?” He said. “Go on. Get back to your camp and your pile of moss and rest for the night. Your sleep is safe with me watching.”

And then he was gone.

And Hawk lay in the wild grasses of this world, and watched the place where he had been until the moss all came alight.