Two heads snapped in their direction. ‘...Sym!?’ The humanoid one said, walking on long legs over to her, almost stumbling in his haste. He stood in front of her, unsteady, uncertain, before wrapping her tightly in his arms. ‘Una said you left to become an acolyte and I might never see you again. But you came back.’ He stepped back, taking her face in his hands, looking down into her eyes, ‘I missed you so much.’ He closed his eyes, tears leaking out from under long lashes, bending over to press his forehead to hers.

Hiru, thought Alene, one of Sym’s friends, one of Una’s friends from when she walked among the humans. She had seen bits and pieces of him in her memories as she strolled about the city, scenes of him laughing, his playful smile and dark expressive eyes. Veridia’s son. The son of the woman that had killed her.

Sym was laughing, tears streaming down her face as well as she held him. ‘I can’t believe you’re alive! I thought everyone had died.’ He paused for a moment, a strange, guilty expression on his face. ‘No,’ he finally settled on, ‘I’m still here.’ He looked at Alene, curious, ‘...and this is?’ He looked at her more closely, eyes narrowing in recognition, ‘Una!? But you died! I was there, and you were dead!’ The being behind him cackled, an uncanny, sinister sound that echoed loudly around the caverns. ‘I told you, didn’t I!?’ The being said, ‘I told you!’ Hiru looked back at the being, his face twisted with disgust, staring them down, before resolutely turning his back to them. ‘I tried so hard to find you,’ he said lowly, his voice filled with anguish, tears still falling down his cheeks. ‘Veridia separated your soul from your body, she couldn’t figure out how to kill you all the way, so I knew you were alive but I just couldn’t find you.’ Alene reeled as she took a steadying breath. So she hadn’t been dead at all? Or had the process actually killed her? But she had emerged from a bone fragment, one she had assumed had been part of her at some point. Her head spun with the new revelation.

‘You…you tried to find me?’ she said slowly. Hiru paused again, as if trying to find the words. ‘I…I tried to bring you back. It was wrong, what my Mother did to you. And what humanity did to your body afterwards.’ He said with revulsion, looking nauseous. ‘They…Mother radiated your body, she made the cells proliferate like cancer until you stretched across the city, enough matter for everyone to get a taste of the flesh of a god.’ He looked sick, but didn’t stop. ‘They,’ his voice broke, ‘they ate your corpse, thought it would give them god powers, give them immortality. So,’ he took a deep breath, steadying himself a look of angry resolution on his face, ‘…when Veris,’ he jerked his thumb roughly behind him, the other being raised its horned head, giving a chuckle hoarsely at the acknowledgement, ‘offered to help me find your soul, I accepted.’ His eyes flicker to Sym, something like an apology, a beseechment in his expression ‘I killed them all.’ His voice had lowered to a whisper, his eyes turning down to look at the floor. He swallowed heavily, ‘I sacrificed every one of them, took all their filthy greedy lives to bring you back. I forced them to give penance. Consumed them, soul and body. But…it didn’t work. Veris tricked me,’ his eyes flicked up to them, before he looked away, shame on his face. ‘Instead, now, I became her demi-god child.’

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Sym looked at him, shock in her eyes, her mouth contorted into a grimace of repulsion. ‘You…killed them? You killed them all?!’ She stepped back, shaking her head, her heavy hair swaying around her violently. ‘You murdered them, that’s, that’s genocide.’ She hadn’t looked away from his face, kept staring at him in shock as if he would suddenly deny it, as if he might suddenly say it was a misunderstanding.

Alene looked at her, laying a hand on her shuddering shoulder. ‘Sym,’ she said gently, Sym’s head snapped in her direction, displacing her hand, eyes still wide. ‘Is it really so different from my eating the fish god, they weren’t human anymore, if they ate my flesh they were something closer to demi-gods.’ Sym kept shaking her head, refusing the explanation. ‘No, no it’s not the same, not even a little,’ she said, ‘there were so many of them! And they couldn’t have all understood what it meant, there were innocent people among them, children!’ Her voice raised, the echoes of her distress and horror all around them like a thousand accusations. She turned from them, facing away with her arms folded decisively. Hiru looked at her back longingly, pained but not contradicting her.

He turned back to Alene, ‘Veris swore you were still alive, that there was no way a mortal could kill a god, that the ritual had worked and you would be able to recondense. So I tried to find where your soul could be,’ he held up his hand, stitched at the wrists, subtly glowing runes pulsing from under the skin. ‘I used my knuckle bones to cast, to scry you, but,’ he held up a shell around his neck, ‘it only led me to this.’

Alene reached out, touching the snail shell gently, her hand shaking. The shell grew warm, vibrating softly under her fingers, the string going taut around Hiru’s neck as the shell pulled away from him and into Alene’s touch like a magnet’s pull, reaching to rejoin, to be whole once more.

‘You found my soul shard.’