D’Argen could not recall exactly how he had lost the sight of colours in his other set of memories. He remembered that they had faded away, one by one, until all he saw were different shades of grey that he learned, over time, how to differentiate. He remembered Lilian talking him through it. He remembered being ashamed and scared both. If something was wrong with him, was wrong with the container for his mahee, would that mean there was something wrong with who he was? With all of them? Or, even scarier, just him?

He remembered how he panicked and had run into Simeal’s chambers. He remembered hesitating and then coming up with a lie on the spot for his haste. He remembered how Simeal found out anyway, through a random comment, and how the others learned as well but not one of them mentioned it in front of him. Like it truly was something to be ashamed of.

Thinking back to it now as he lay in a drab grey room with grey light reflecting off the grey ceiling, he thought them all to be fools – himself included. There was nothing wrong with him. He just saw the world in a different way than they did. He just felt differently than they did. And he was not the only one. That would be impossible.

The lack of colours in his vision now did not make him panic. Instead, they calmed him. The dark cracks on the stone ceiling were more worrying as they looked too much like ice.

D’Argen sat up and went to the door, refusing to focus on the cracks either over his head or under his feet. He needed to know where he was. The room was not familiar.

When he swung the door open, it was just in time to startle Sa’ab. She clutched at her chest with a quick breath and the torch in her hand trembled. Then she smiled wide. “I was just coming to see if you awoke.”

“I awoke,” D’Argen replied, and the words tasted like ash on his tongue. They were familiar and not at the same time. He hated waking up. He wondered, for a moment, if he could consume often enough and large enough quantities to never sleep again. Instead, he asked, “Where is Acela?”

“With the others. In the main chambre. Are you up for coming this time?” Sa’ab asked.

As so many times before when his mind played tricks on him, D’Argen was not sure what she meant by ‘this time’. He did feel better though. The pain in his mahee was there, he felt it stabbing and clawing and gnawing at him, but he had been feeling it for centuries now. It had already turned into a tug as familiar as when his mahee urged him to run. When he opened his mahee just enough to taste the ocean, the pain did not become stronger.

“Lead the way,” he said. He was not sure which way to motion though, and his hand just waved randomly in the air around them.

“Are you sure you are alright?” Sa’ab asked with a quirked brow.

D’Argen nodded and cleared his throat.

Sa’ab shrugged and turned from where she came. They were in a tunnel of some sort. The rock under their feet was worked smooth and straight, the walls were slightly curved and the more they walked, the more worked they were, but the ceiling was rough and low. D’Argen could touch it if he raised his hand.

Sa’ab did so with her free hand, the tips of her pale fingers not coming even close. But it was not her reach that drew D’Argen’s attention. It was her skin. It was so pasty and pale in his colourless world that she looked like a moving painting. The torch she was holding was throwing off lights that made a sharp shadow at the edges of her arm and she looked so much like the silhouettes in his vision when they were still only outlines.

D’Argen forced his eyes away and focused on the tunnel. They passed a few other wooden doors. Most were open, revealing similar small rooms like his own had been, with the same wooden slab for a bed and a torch near the door. Nothing else.

As they passed, one of the closed doors opened. Abbot walked out with a pipe between his lips. His face was drawn and pasty, but he still smiled around the wood at them.

“So, you are finally up,” Abbot greeted D’Argen with a heavy clap to his shoulder then joined them in walking down the tunnel. “I thought you would sleep for another day at least, probably two. Both you and Kassar were completely out of it when we found you and Kassar has yet to wake up.”

“How is he?” D’Argen asked, trying to put the pieces together without giving away his broken memory.

“He woke up in the night to drink and eat, then went right back to sleep. You both used a lot of your mahee to save all those mortals in the north. But it is over now. Now we rest and when we all get out, there will be no more demons.”

That answered so many questions and D’Argen nodded along. He still had no clue where they were though.

“You have not been to this part of the city yet, have you?” Sa’ab questioned in front of them. The fire’s grey light bounced off her white cheek, making her look like she was made of dirty porcelain. The tunnel curved sharply, split into three, and one of those splits led to a large cavern.

D’Argen stepped through the opening and his eyes wandered up, up, up, and up. It reminded him of a huge cavern with walls made of ice, but even bigger. The ceiling was the tallest thing he had ever seen outside a mountain peak and the ground had multiple levels to it as well. It looked large enough to hold half the city of Evadia.

As he stared over the crowd gathered there, he realized that while it probably could, the only people there were the gods.

Gods.

D’Argen scoffed at the thought and made both Sa’ab and Abbot look at him in confusion. He cleared his throat. “Is this all of us?” he asked.

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Abbot’s face darkened and Sa’ab’s smile faded away. They both nodded.

“We are under the city,” Sa’ab said and motioned around the cavern with her torch. It was not needed. There were fires lit everywhere and D’Argen even saw a stream of fire fly up from a small cluster of people below and light one of the dead torches. Yelem. He had survived.

“We found a way to keep the mahee from escaping and dissipating,” Abbot said next.

D’Argen turned to him so fast that his neck cracked. “What?”

Abbot nodded.

“I will go tell Acela you are awake. She was worried for you. Join us when you can,” Sa’ab said in farewell and walked off.

“Yes,” Abbot continued from earlier. “You have not been around many of us when they died, and be lucky for that. When the body dies, the mahee leaves it.” D’Argen knew this. “And if it is left on its own, it will dissipate and become part of the realm, but a part we cannot access.” D’Argen knew this too. “It becomes useless.” D’Argen disagreed with that, but did not voice it.

Instead, he asked something he did not know, “What of the bodies?”

“The bodies are only a container. They are what keep the mahee together. Without the heart beating and the blood moving, nothing is keeping the mahee together.”

“But mahee calls to mahee,” D’Argen said a phrase he could have sworn he heard thousands of times, but Abbot looked confused at the words. “We call to one another,” D’Argen explained the very simple nature of the phrase. “If the mahee escapes, does it not come to us? The closest to it?”

“Actually, yes,” Abbot answered, but he still looked confused. “We only recently found that out. How did you—”

“So, what of the bodies?” D’Argen interrupted to ask again.

“We burn them,” Abbot answered, still confused. “We take some blood and infuse it in stone. The mahee follows what it still believes to be its container. We use the ash as an extra barrier. The mahee is drawn to the blood and ash and remains in the stone. Do you want to see?”

D’Argen nodded in answer even as he asked, “In the stone?” Something about that sounded wrong.

“Yes. Here, come with me. There are still a few statues left to make. You can help me with the one I am working on now.”

Abbot led him down a walkway, through a cluster of Never Born, greeted a few others, and then finally circled around to a spot that immediately made D’Argen want to run away.

D’Argen knew nothing about different stones other than their colours. With everything in his vision now grey, it all looked the same. Yet this stone he knew. Abbot did not notice him stop and continued ahead, stopping the Never Born working at chipping the stone away from the wall. Abbot took up the broken pieces from a wooden bucket on the ground and took them to a quern. He dropped them in the top then motioned for D’Argen to come closer.

The runner did not feel the weight of the stone as he had in that house or the bracelet or even the staff, but he did feel a discomfort the closer he got. Abbot used the lever to start grinding the pieces until they were rough dust that spewed out from between the two spinning rocks. After collecting a small amount into a stone bowl, he reached into another bucket and pulled out a sprinkling of… ashes.

D’Argen did not dare breathe. The stone particles and ashes of the dead mixed.

“We only need a small amount, now that the body is gone,” Abbot explained. Next, he took a small glass with blood in it and an etching of a name on the side of it. “In fact, I do not even need to do this mixture now, but to show you how it works.” He poured a few drops of the blood into his stone bowl and then stirred it with a glass stick until it turned into a paste.

D’Argen wanted to gag.

The last step of the process was when Abbot led D’Argen to an almost completed statue. It did not have many details to the face, but D’Argen could already tell it was Vrianna’s plump figure and wide smile.

“We can work on the stone with our mahee, anyone can carve out the basic shape, but Acela has tasked me with creating the finer details. That is where this comes in.” After climbing a ladder to reach the face, Abbot used the glass stick and started working the paste into the shape of Vrianna’s thick lips. “Give me that torch over there,” Abbot said without looking away from his work.

D’Argen looked around for a torch and though the entire area was lit up, there was one torch that stood in a strange contraption in the middle of it all instead of on the wall. The metal cage that held the torch in place was heavy but D’Argen moved it without too much trouble. Once positioned near the artist, Abbot stepped away and adjusted the cage until the torch’s flame was right under the spot he had just shaped.

“It needs direct fire and a lot of heat. Yelem helps out when he can, but he is usually busy lighting and changing the rest of the torches around here.”

“How many?” D’Argen felt like he was speaking through a torn throat with how dry it was.

Abbot sucked on his pipe harshly and when no smoke came out, he frowned. “Over two hundred.”

That was wrong.

“How long was I asleep?” D’Argen breathed out the question in wonder.

Abbot was chewing on his pipe hard enough for the wood to crack. “A few months,” he finally answered. “We collected all that we could from the dead when Acela told us what to do with them. Then we all came back here and… hid.” The final word sounded like a swear.

“Where are the finished ones?” D’Argen asked next.

Abbot motioned over his shoulder as if shooing away a fly. He did not say anything more and was completely focused on refilling and reigniting his pipe.

D’Argen walked away, following the curves in the stone away from the workspace and climbing up and then sliding down.

When he saw Simeal’s statue, it was only one among hundreds others. They all stood tall in four concentric circles. Spots in some of the circles were missing, leaving the area open for another statue to join, but there were too many.

Milling about the statues were many of the Never Born. They dropped off flowers around some, took brushes with paints to others, sang or played or drank with their dead companions. Mostly, they held torches to the stone, helping it harden.

There was no statue for Lilian. There was no statue for Thar. It was like the two had never existed at all, even as D’Argen felt the ice in his blood and the breeze under his feet.

Then Delcaus’ statue drew his attention.

There were so many dead because Thar was not there.

D’Argen clutched at his chest where the paper with their two names was, and he felt something else through his robes. It startled him enough to open the top and pull it out.

The glass was so smooth and clear even if it was etched with delicate vines and tiny flowers. The stopper at the top was half as tall as the vial and made of soft gold, carved into even more flowers. The chain holding it around his neck was of a shimmering metal that was too tough to break without excessive force. There was no clasp to remove the necklace.

Even though this was the first time D’Argen had seen the thing, he knew that the blood inside the vial belonged to Lilian and that the golden stopper had just enough space inside it to gather some of the ashes of their body once burned.

A shiver ran down his spine and D’Argen quickly dropped the vile back under his robes, hiding it from sight. He looked around to try and find the source of his discomfort and his eyes met Vah’mor’s across the circles of statues. They were staring at him, chin down to hide their throat and lips curled up slightly in either disgust or anger.

D’Argen forced himself to raise his chin in respect to the other, then turned on his heel and ran away. To where, he was not sure. He could not go back to what remained of Vrianna as Abbot worked on her statue. He could not go back to the room he woke in. He had to get out and breathe, under the sky and the sun and the moon and the millions upon millions of stars that had changed so much.

He needed to be free.