Aili kept watching the horizon from the borders of her territory, wondering what the line was and why Saia hadn’t come back yet. She wanted to move, leave the village and look for her, but then the monks would have tried to deactivate her and found out that they couldn’t. All the advantage she had just gained on them would have dissolved, which wouldn’t be a problem if she knew for sure that Saia was in danger. But there were thousands of other reasons she might be delayed, and now she was powerful enough that she could defend herself from virtually anything.

She tried to think of something else, like the experiments she’d been doing before Saia’s arrival. First, she’d tested her link to the mountain: she’d tried to diminish the amount of viss she was sending and found that if the quantity was too small, she started feeling uncomfortable. She guessed she could stop the stream of viss altogether, if she wanted, but didn’t try to, for fear of that discomfort turning into actual pain, or to cause another trembling.

After that, she’d been focusing on her senses, trying to figure out why deities could see, hear, or even touch and taste the world around them. She’d found out that smell wasn’t as instinctive as sight or hearing: it was deactivated most of the time unless she focused specifically on it.

She’d understood why only once she had tried to smell a bowl of soup at the center of a kitchen table, tuning out the people's voices not to pry more than what she was already doing: together with the smell of the dish came the one of the tablecloth, the guests’ body hodour and the traces of every single ingredient that had been used. Everywhere she focused, a dozen of seemingly unrelated smells came through her senses, and the fact she didn't have a nose made it harder to metaphorically close it or tune out a specific fragrance.

She detected a movement in the distance. All of her focus narrowed down to a point at the very end of her territory, over the seawater. Close enough to see the line in the sky making its retreat, but not to identify the person hanging onto it.

She waited even after it had disappeared beyond the clouds, observing the gray nothingness above as the sky became darker. She spread her attention on all of her borders, hoping Saia, Dan and Morìc would have crossed them soon.

The first ones to arrive were the two boys. She cured Morìc's eyes as Dan told her of the man who had attacked them and of Saia leaving to face him. They had waited for her until the line had disappeared, then scuttled back to Lausune, eluding the monks.

While Dan was as talkative as usual, Morìc refused to even acknowledge she existed, even as she healed his eye as new. He'd always been quiet in a sort of threatening way when dealing with her. Something had happened with the previous Koidan, and as long as she bore that identity, she had a part in it. She'd considered looking for the answer in the numerous notebooks sprawled all over the boys' living room, but she'd been trying not to slip back into the habit of snooping on people's writing. She'd been succeeding, partly because she was too caught up in her experiments to entertain the thought, partially because she felt Vizena's specter loom at the end of that particular road.

Dan wanted to wait for Saia, but she urged them to go home and rest. In the end she was alone again, wondering who the mysterious monk they’d mentioned was and what was his connection to the black line in the sky. At least, he had left with it and wouldn't have been a problem anymore.

Or so she thought, until a man who corresponded to the description crossed the border. It was dark, so the sentinels couldn't see him as long as he kept to the forest, and he was dressed like a monk.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The guilty face he answered with told her he hadn't been sent there on some sort of mission.

“Rabam. Saia told me to come here.”

“Where is she?”

He lowered his head.

“She left. Can I enter your temple? I'll explain along the way.”

As he said that, he opened a small bag wrapped around his midsection. Zeles’s sphere was inside it.

“Be quick,” she said.

He covered his head with the hood of his tunic and started running, avoiding the lights on his way. He maintained a good rhythm even as he stumbled down the flank of the mountain, then entered through the open doors at full speed. He stopped right next to the entrance and slumped down on the bench to his left.

“… and she promised me you'd have kept me hidden,” he concluded his explanation, panting hard. “That's why I'm here.”

“What does it mean that she’s with cloud people, now?”

“I can't give you more details, unfortunately. The visions didn't show anything of what's happening up there.”

Aili's viss was buzzing so strongly she wanted to discharge it on someone as a lightning strike, but as much as she'd studied them she didn't know how to go about that.

“They're dangerous,” she screamed. “They're constantly trying to get past our defenses and their weapons are getting more powerful. And you gave them Saia?”

“She left of her own volition.”

“No, she left to protect you and Zeles.”

The buzzing was too much: fear, worry, anger at Rabam and the monks, and at Saia for being so stubborn. She started to pace on her pedestal. A waste of perfectly good energy, but it was the only way to clear her head.

“She also told me to give you these,” Rabam said, quietly, as if any sound could start her off.

He took out a handful of glass pieces from one pocket and kept them on his open palm. They were seven, one for each god, Zeles and her excluded. He took out another shard from a different pocket, this time whole and not cut in half. She would have recognized her viss anywhere: it was Saia’s shard.

Aili remembered that she had left her a shard of her own and felt marginally better. Sure, she hadn't had time to tell her how to use it, but it was a good thing: the bigger the distance between fragment and sphere, the more energy was required to send the viss and the data it contained from one to the other. She would have figured everything out on her own, eventually.

“Leave them on the bench,” she said. “I’ll put them away later.”

He carefully set them down one by one. That gave Aili time to examine the viss they contained, connecting them to their original owners. She could easily recognize Mivion's and Dore's half-shards, since they protected the villages right next to Lausune, but she had no idea who the others belonged to. She'd have to touch their viss with her own to know. Unless she acted like Saia’s words had suggested: deactivate all of the gods, climb the mountain, force the monks to apply any change she requested.

Even now, the idea intrigued her and made her recoil at the same time. The system in place had to be changed, that much was clear. Giving so much power to a group of nine people, without the possibility and willingness to take it back for fear of wasting it, allowed the gods to essentially do whatever they wanted for two hundred years. They trusted the selection process too much and had no actual idea of how many things a deity could do without the sentinels knowing. But arbitrarily choosing an entirely new system and applying it was more difficult than both her and Saia could fathom. They risked breaking the balance the monks had reached; even if at first everything would seem to work fine, the flaws would start to become apparent over time, but at that point it could be too late to fix them.

There was also a fact she'd never admitted to Saia: she liked the general idea of gods. Her life had been peaceful, she always had food, a roof, instant healing for her wounds. All things she'd learned not to take for granted while she travelled around the villages. And not only she’d had those things, but everyone she knew did too, family and friends included. Even if her mom had left her and her dad when she was little, she'd always known there was someone making sure she was safe.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Her viss swelled with sorrow at the thought of her mom, but there weren’t tears to release it. For all the lessons Daira had taught her, she'd never warned her about her body becoming a trap for her emotions.

She focused on the temple again to calm down. Rabam had rested his head on the marble wall behind him and was now asleep. She checked the village, even if the pieces of her conscience she left to guard over it would have alerted her of any problem.

Nothing. Another night alone with her thoughts, watching over a sleeping humanity.

She recalled Cailes's words, the night when they first met the monks. That their system couldn't work on a large number of people, for the impossibility of keeping everyone in check. That implied the monks knew of other systems, of what was used before their predecessors found the mountain. She had to uncover the truth about their history. This time it wasn't just to satisfy her curiosity, but to know why the first monks set up everything exactly the way they did. What they wished, but most importantly, what they had wanted to avoid. Once she knew that, she could begin to think of how to fix their broken system. Or even better, she could share the truth with everyone in the villages. Let the inhabitants decide how they wanted to live, without anyone - not her, not the gods, not the monks - forcing anything onto them. But before thinking about how to get there, she needed to sort out the problems of that night.

She focused on Rabam’s bag and tried to awaken Zeles. She braced herself for the discomfort of having another deity awake inside her territory, even if she knew it was only temporary: the night before, when Saia had awakened Zeles to ask for his help, he'd immediately shrunk his area to cause as little intersecting of their viss as possible. He'd been so swift she'd barely registered the gesture, and only truly appreciated it after Saia's return as a goddess.

She poured a tiny bit of buzzing viss into his sphere, but he didn't wake up. She realized the monks had probably planned for the eventuality that neighboring gods would help each other overcome the control through the shards, and that only a human could activate or deactivate them.

So she awakened Rabam instead. He blinked repeatedly, not even raising his head from the wall.

“Can you wake up Zeles? In the bag,” she added, noticing how confused he was.

He opened it and activated the sphere with a finger, then closed his eyes and relaxed again. Aili felt Zeles’s viss spread out to include the temple, then his confusion, until his domain finally shrunk to the point it contained only his sphere.

“Hi, Zeles,” she said, trying to make him feel at ease. “I’m Aili. Saia's friend.”

She felt silly saying that, as if he wasn’t the deity who had watched over her since her birth.

He paused for a long time, his golden light gaining and losing brightness at the rhythm of his thoughts.

“She did save me. How? Where is she?”

Aili told him, repeating Rabam's words as best as she could.

“How... how did she become a goddess?”

“I don't know. Rabam doesn't know anything more than what I've told you.”

“And now she's above the clouds. She saved me twice in one day and I was sleeping the whole time.”

He sounded just as sad and tired as she felt.

“She will come back,” Aili said. “She has the power of a goddess, now. And her snakes.”

Zeles's sudden flare of light was the deity's equivalent of a short laugh.

“I’ve seen them in action, they're quite terrifying,” he said, then the viss resumed its normal flow. “What should I do next?”

“There aren’t many places you can go, unless you plan to leave the mountain. Vizena’s temple is still empty, you could take her place.”

Zeles seemed to consider it.

“Suimer… Saia’s family lives there. I have a feeling she’d like for me to take care of them. What about you? Is everything going well, here?”

Aili didn't want to burden him with her problems so soon after he had fought a goddess and survived certain death, but she needed the advice of someone that had been in her situation for two hundred years and she couldn't ask the other gods.

“I’ve been trying not to think about it too much, but being seen and treated as an entirely different person by everybody in this village is destroying me. I thought I could endure it because I had already accepted to leave everything behind when I became a monk, but this situation is completely different than that.”

“The monks should have anticipated it.”

“They've chosen me because it's the first time a deity has lived as a human in the same village they protect. I'm a bit of an experiment.”

“Do you have someone here you’re particularly close to?”

Aili thought about her old group of friends. She was acutely aware of their quiet houses scattered across the village.

“We drifted off. I was too focused on my research and travels, and them on their jobs, families and partners. Plus, they have an established life here, I don't want to involve them in this. I have two friends in other villages, though. We mostly exchange letters, but obviously I can't reach them right now.”

“Well, I suggest you find someone who's willing to be your friend, not as Aili but as Koidan. Even if you can't tell them everything, having someone you can talk to that doesn't see you as an actual deity can be refreshing. Saia was that friend to me.”

Aili thought about all of the people in the village at that moment. She didn't have a candidate in mind, but she was confident in her ability to find one.

“And if you ever need help,” Zeles added, “There’s the register.”

Aili felt her viss slow down for an instant. She knew about the register, of course. It would have been weird if Koidan had forgotten all about the people he’d been taking care of for centuries at convenient intervals of two hundred years each.

Daira had told her that the register was a list of the general information about a village’s inhabitants that each god kept for their successor. The monks made sure to remove any data that was older than three centuries, of course, before they put the new god in place and awakened them. They were very careful about not leaving too many traces.

For once, she wished they would have left even less. Looking around for that book was too big of a temptation, but of course she couldn’t tell that to Zeles.

“Thank you,” she said instead, trying to sound cheerful. “This is really good advice.”

“Glad I could help a bit. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

Aili realized she didn't know his opinion about the monks. Sure, he had tried to elude them, but that might have been out of self-preservation more than an actual distaste for the system they had in place.

“Yes. What do you feel about this whole situation? Do you think the monks should keep going like this?”

He took a lot of time before answering. Rabam's breathing resounded in the temple.

“People are too reliant on gods to keep everything going. They've become careless, and they think gods are always right, which makes them powerless when it comes to situations like Vizena's. If they had known that monks existed, that gods are humans like them and that ultimately they couldn't hurt them, they'd have fought back.”

Aili relaxed a bit.

“So you agree people should be more aware of what's actually going on here?”

“Yes. Beyond that, I wouldn't know what to change.”

“Me neither. We'll figure it out.” She stopped, reflecting on what needed to be done. “You don't know anything about how or why the villages were founded, by chance?”

“Have you followed the courses before the final ceremony to become a monk?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know everything I do. But I was just a helper, maybe a history scholar will tell you more.”

She thought back at her interrupted career as scholar, all of the books she had at her fingertips but didn’t read.

“Thank you anyway. I'll send someone to place you in Suimer’s temple.”

“Yes, please. I'll need to rest a bit. I imagine the inhabitants won't be happy to know Vizena is back, even if she won't hurt them anymore.”

“I truly don't envy you. Rabam?” she called, this time at a normal volume.

He was startled out of his sleep.

“Deactivate Zeles, please.”

He obeyed. He was about to fall back into a sleeping position, so Aili called him again.

“I need to talk to you. Please listen carefully.”

He rubbed his eyes and sat up straighter.

“Bring Zeles to Suimer, put him into Vizena's statue and awaken him. I know you’re a fugitive: if you try to steal him again, I'll tell the monks where you are and how you managed to elude them. Follow my instructions, and you'll be free to do whatever you want without my interference. Go back to your village, into hiding or in prison, I don't care at all.”

He looked at her with a hurt expression.

“I’ll do it, you don’t need to threaten me. Saia… I’m not sure, but I think she has just saved me. She managed to kill a goddess and become one, while I wasted so much time just moping around and not knowing what to do. I don't want to go back in exile, nor in any place where the only thing left for me to do would be thinking about my fuck-ups.”

He stood slowly.

“I want to stay here. I know what this means,” he added, pointing at the shards on the bench, “And I want to help.”

“It will be a lot less exciting than what you expect. We’re trying to build something new, not destroying the monks. And we'll have to be careful.”

He shrugged.

“Still better than what I'd do alone.”

Aili looked at him. She recalled Zeles's words about finding someone she could be somewhat honest to.

“Fine. We have an empty house in Chisellers road, you can live there.”

His eyes went wide. She could feel his viss buzzing even without focusing on it.

“The house of... the dead woman?”

“We cleaned it. The murderer is in prison.”

She had considered giving him Saia’s instead, but the monks were probably keeping it under stricter surveillance.

“Yes, of course, I know," he said. "It's just... I just realized I don’t remember the path I had prepared from here to Suimer.”

“Just take a boat. It's dark enough, Dore’s still deactivated and the monks haven't returned to guard the borders yet.”

He nodded, only slightly calmer.

“Good luck,” Aili said.

He was out of the door in an instant.