D’Argen did not remember how he returned to Evadia after Abbot’s death. All he remembered was waking up to those voices in his head – both of which now he recognized as the voice Darania spoke in when she got violent—when did Darania get violent??—and Lilian’s pleas. He did not remember who washed the blood off his hands. He remembered waking up in Simeal’s tiny house with Thar’s name on his lips and written on a scrap paper.

This time. Nothing of the sort happened.

He remained in the field of flowers that Lilian loved so much and had torn apart. He stayed sitting in the overturned earth and dirt and torn grass and vines and flowers with Lilian’s slight form a heavy weight on his lap. The sun rose and ran over his head, not laughing for once. It hid behind clouds that matched the clouds in his head. When it disappeared, the moon ran across the sky so quickly, it felt like she was trying to avoid him.

They passed him like that multiple times.

So many.

D’Argen no longer needed water and food to sustain his body, not since he reawakened his mahee with sound. Though the winds were soft, rustling against the grass, and barely kept his lips cracked dry and his stomach twisted, it was enough.

He remained.

He had no idea what to do.

His mind was a complete mess. He remembered Lilian’s violent outburst and then he remembered that he started running more often with them. Yet Lilian’s cold body remained limp in his lap for what felt like years.

Should he take their body home? What would they do with it? Lilian’s mahee was no longer inside it. He felt it break apart from his own, he felt the death even so many days later, as fresh in his mahee as when Lilian used their winds to tear a hole through their stomach.

But no.

That memory was wrong.

His head was pounding and his vision turned black in the corners every time he tried to remember how the hole in Lilian’s stomach was formed.

When Thar sat beside him in the flowers, he was as silent as always before. D’Argen did not turn to acknowledge the shade that even Darania had not seen. Darania? When did he see her last? His head pounded at the thought.

Eventually, the pain in his mahee turned into an itch running through his entire body. It was still there, that sharp, stabbing, horrible tear inside him, but his mahee urged him to run. He looked down to see there was no body in his lap and it made sense. What body? Whose? His fingers were stained red with the flower petals he had crushed earlier, trying to commit their scent to memory.

Thar stood at the same time as him. He reached out but D’Argen, for once, did what the shade had done to him for almost three thousand years. He ignored it. He opened his mahee and let it consume him. The winds of the open field pushed against his back and then slipped under his feet until he was practically flying to get out of there.

When he returned to Evadia, the first familiar face he saw was Abbot. Then he remembered Lilian’s death even if he could not recall what happened to their body.

The artist was lying on the ground in the large open field at the centre of the growing city, hands behind his head and smoking pipe between his lips. He was staring up at the night sky. D’Argen stood over him for a moment before turning to look up as well. The thought of bearing his throat to the open air had him looking away from the millions upon millions of stars in the sky and back at Abbot.

“Lilian is gone,” D’Argen said in lieu of greeting.

Abbot’s eyes focused on him, and his brows furrowed down. After chewing on his pipe for a moment, he shifted one hand out from under his head and pulled his pipe out.

“Who is Lilian?” Abbot asked.

D’Argen almost collapsed on his knees there and then. Everything inside him weakened and the only reason he did not fall was because a strong wind blew in and straightened his knees.

Abbot started chewing on his pipe again. “Did you take on a mortal lover, finally?” he asked. “You know, a lot of us were starting to wonder if everything was okay with you in that department. Just because we cannot procreate…”

D’Argen tuned out the rest of his words and shook his head. With the aid of the wind that kept him upright and the ice in his veins, he walked away.

It took him almost a hundred years to stop asking others if they remembered Lilian or knew their name. Like Thar, Lilian was gone from all their memories. It was like they never existed.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

D’Argen forced himself to remember Lilian, afraid that forgetting them would mean they truly never existed at all. He wrote their name down on a scrap piece of paper right beside Thar’s and kept it always against his skin under his robes at his chest. The pain in his mahee would never fade, even if he got used to it, but the name was important too.

One day, Acela called for D’Argen. He walked into the stone hall with a heavy step, made light only by the winds that had not left him alone even once since Lilian’s death. His mahee still hurt, but he was used to it at that point. When he laid eyes on the First Five, his mahee clenched so tight that he lost his breath.

Even though Vah’mor was glaring at him again, it was Darania’s small figure that had him most unsettled. She was smiling that brilliant and beautiful smile at him, calm and relaxed and the strongest of them all even though she did not look it.

“We have a request for you,” Darania was the one to speak and her voice tasted like honey and cold water, like spring air and fallen leaves.

“Since Abbot is no longer considered a god in the eyes of many mortals, I have decided to take his title away,” Acela started speaking then motioned to a single wooden stool for D’Argen to sit.

Vah’mor and Darania were sharing a low sofa with Upates while Acela and Zetha sat in wooden chairs with cushions and tall backs. When D’Argen took the stool, he felt like he was on display.

“Unfortunately, this has made him quite listless,” Acela continued once he was seated. “He has been lying around smoking and drinking and seducing any mortal woman that crosses his path. I had hoped that giving him some tasks to do would help him out of his… situation… but he either gives the tasks to another or it takes me more time to find one for him than for him to complete it.”

“You have said in the past that you do not know how your mahee limits your speed with another,” Zetha spoke up, taking over from her.

“And Abbot needs to remember the beauty of the world around us.” Darania’s voice made D’Argen flinch even as he turned to face her.

“We need him out of here,” Upates added in with a glare at the others. “He is disturbing the regimes we have in place. Encouraging others to act like him and ignore their tasks. It is not how it is meant to be.”

“How would you like a running companion?” Acela finished off their combined speech with a question.

D’Argen did have a running companion. Even when Lilian was still the God of Spring, they joined him quite often. After they lost their title and the incident in the Rainbow Fields, the two had ran together for almost three hundred years before Abbot joined them.

D’Argen could not say that. He looked at Darania and remembered hearing her voice when he fell and then remembered telling her of his memories that have yet to happen. He did not remember her response, but she was smiling at him now, hope brightening her features, and acting like nothing at all was wrong with his head.

“I will take him,” D’Argen finally agreed with a nod.

“Good. Good!” Acela clapped her hands together with a wide smile. “Help him remember that there are things to enjoy other than the narcotics he consumes on the regular. They do not harm us, but many mortals have died from their consumption and the last thing we need is for one of us to be blamed for their deaths.”

D’Argen nodded, even though he did not agree. He just wanted out of there.

He was barely listening as Acela and Zetha started recommending him places to take Abbot and sometimes Darania threw in a suggestion or two of her own. Even Upates offered a few locations, talking about the ever-expanding city he had started in the mountains and its huge stretch of underground caverns and tunnels.

Only Vah’mor remained quiet.

When D’Argen locked eyes with Vah’mor, he felt a shiver run down his spine. And though he was staring right at the other and he knew their lips did not move, he still heard their voice in his head, a whisper that said, “she was not there.”

The words made all of his blood freeze over and though they were inside, he felt a soft breeze try to pick up his long hair.

Vah’mor looked away and D’Argen continued to nod to the suggestions from the others even though he did not hear a single word. Once they were done, D’Argen stood up, bared his neck, and left.

The first places he took Abbot to were the edges of each of the oceans. He could not run fast enough to carry them both over the water, but with every peak they reached and every valley they crossed, Abbot’s face brightened, and his eyes lit up.

D’Argen kept them away from Evadia for as long as he could until Abbot finally caught on.

And when he did, he shrugged and only said, “They have the best paints, but it is alright.”

D’Argen remembered that the best paints came from the city Upates had built, the one where all artificers visited and dropped off their inventions for his perusal. He did not remember when those paints were invented, but the charcoal sticks were already gaining popularity through the lands.

And then D’Argen remembered the task he had given Olde, and he tried to think back on how many years it had been. He could not. Instead of returning to Evadia for their paints and to see Olde’s progress, D’Argen ran them both to the city built in the sharp peaks of the southern mountains, right where they met the wide swatch of still water that separated the land.

As Upates had said, the caverns and tunnels under the city were expansive. There was no direct path into the city itself, but D’Argen’s feet and Lilian’s wind and Thar’s ice all knew that he should turn left instead of right and take the smaller tunnel hidden in shadow instead of the one with the dead torch outside.

When they emerged from the tunnels to see the city, D’Argen’s vision doubled. He saw a tall spire with a small sun hanging over it and multiple bridges coming from it to other tall peaks where the mortals had dug their homes into the mountain faces. Then he saw that spire at half its height with barely a dozen houses sprawled at its skirts.

Then he saw the fissures in the ground breaking apart as demons crawled out of them in the hundreds, killings and destroying everything in their path. And then he sat in Upates’ living room as the first artificer told him and Abbot about an experiment, he was almost complete with. Upates was obviously excited by his progress, and he took them both to an underground chambre he used as a makeshift laboratory.

D’Argen’s empty stomach tried to turn itself inside out and leave through his mouth when he heard that same voice from his dreams, the same one Darania had used, the one that Vah’mor had spoken with in his head, laugh. Then the first of the demons opened its eyes.