Zeles contemplated the dawn rising over the waves, thinking back at the monks’ attack. It had started in the early morning, with Dore creating a wall of light at the edge of his domain, but without expanding it to attack. Lorin had reached out to tell him the monks were arriving, and then retracted for the rest of the day.
As soon as there was enough light to attack, shadows had started to come out of the forest and approach the northern border. He was amused by how they stood just outside, extending a hand every once in a while to gauge whether his barrier was still there.
They had left hours later, before the life in the village could become too animated. Part of them hadn’t returned to the village, remaining hidden between the trees, probably waiting to take advantage of any distraction that might come his way. He failed to see how he could ever have feared them in the first place.
Still, he couldn’t help thinking about his old life in Lausune. People had started relying on him too much, taking unnecessary risks after they realized that nothing could actually hurt them. He doubted it would happen in the near future in Suimer, considering everything the inhabitants had lived through, but he still had to keep it in mind for the younger generations.
There was also the question of his death. Sooner or later the monks would have replaced him, either because his energy ended, or because one of the other gods changed their minds and attacked him. He needed to teach them how the monks were supposed to control gods, how they could leverage their rules in case his successor decided to hurt them in any way or take decisions they didn’t agree with. But they wouldn’t have any leverage if the monks could make them fall asleep when they wanted.
The only way he could make sure they would be safe even after his death was to teach them how to defend themselves from manipulations, and even how to use them against a god. Sure, that would have involved them in what was happening between him and the monks, but at least it was for their protection, not his own.
He was trying to decide how exactly to organize something of that scale, when he saw someone approaching the border from the forest's side. He immediately formed his wall of wind, then realized it was Rabam and let it dissolve. He looked past him, expecting an army of sentinels in pursuit, but he was sprinting from tree to tree, bush to bush, and surveillance seemed to be scarce enough in that particular spot that nobody had noticed.
Still, Zeles cleared up a path for him inside his territory, wishing he could expand it more before the monks realized he was there. But Rabam slowed down before reaching the border. His eyes were wide, his movements cautious.
“What's happening?” Zeles asked, letting the sound of his voice travel past the border.
Rabam was startled, but kept going at the same speed, without slowing down nor accelerating. He was holding something to his chest with both hands. A book, as far as Zeles could tell.
He stopped just in front of the line, kneeling instead of crossing it. He put the book on the ground, half of it on Zeles’s side of the border, the rest outside.
“Rabam?” Zeles called again.
He stood without answering, then turned and ran away as if someone was chasing him. Zeles couldn't do anything to stop him, and he was already too far to hear his voice. He took the book inside his territory, leaving it on the ground. He read without opening the pages, wondering why Rabam had looked so scared. It didn't take long for him to understand.
Rabam had been missing for too long. Aili had begun counting the hours, then the minutes and finally the seconds, since it helped her not to freak out entirely. She had started pacing, then realized the monks could see her through the windows and stopped. It was the worst possible time to give signs of worry.
Whether he was safe or not, she assumed the letter hadn't been delivered to Zeles, and try not to think about the possibility that the monks had intercepted it instead. She suspected she wouldn't still be awake, if that was the case.
Until she knew what had happened, either through Rabam’s return or the monks deactivating her, she needed to find a way to give Zeles a new letter.
She started writing it with the pencil and letter on the table inside Rabam’s cell, adding her worries about his disappearance. A part of her watched over the village, both looking out for dangers and wondering who she could ask for help.
She was considering Dan and Morìc, when two people stepped over the border on Tilau's side. She focused part of her attention on them, still thinking about what to write.
“Welcome to Lausune, I'm Koidan,” she said with her fake male voice. “Who are you?”
“I’m Ceila,” the woman said. “And he's Lassem. We come from Suimer.”
Aili let the pencil fall on the table and observed them better. They corresponded to Saia's description, and she could see a bit of her in her brother. Their rucksacks were filled to the top with tools and clothes.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“We're planning to explore Lausune for a few days.” Lassem's eyes were shining with excitement while he looked around at the mundane life going on all around him. “We're doing a trip around the mountain.”
“And we need to give you something,” Ceila added. “From Zeles.”
She put down the backpack and opened it. Everything was pressed tight, with an efficiency Aili couldn't help but admire. She moved a stack of folded clothes aside to extract a thick book. It was huge, the leather that encased it well-kept but clearly old.
“Wait,” Aili said, remembering the sentinels. “Don't take it out here.”
Ceila stopped and put it back, looking confused.
“Would it be too much trouble to bring it to the temple? I can ask someone else if you don’t want to.”
“Sure,” she said, putting on the backpack again with Lassem’s help. “We planned to visit anyway.”
They took one of the streets that converged toward the temple.
“We’re supposed to tell you something else,” Ceila said, looking at Lassem.
“Right. That Rabam has given him the book.”
“Rabam?” Aili repeated. “Are you sure the name was exactly 'Rabam’?”
He nodded.
“I repeated it a lot to make sure I wouldn't forget it.”
“Not when we were in Tilau, though,” Ceila specified. “Zeles has warned us that Dore shouldn't hear it.”
Aili realized at that moment that Dore had already seen the book, and depending on what was written there, he could be aware of her betrayal. The fact that Rabam had delivered it to Zeles and not her directly made everything a bit suspect. Or maybe she was overthinking and he was returning home, he was just being more cautious because of all the surveillance on the mountain.
“Has he told you about a letter, by chance?” she asked.
They shook their heads. She decided to be careful anyway and send another one.
She finished writing it while Ceila and Lassem reached the temple.
“Leave it there, please,” she told them, her statue pointing at the blind spot on one of the benches.
She started reading the closed book while Ceila and Lassem explored the temple. She was mildly surprised to find out it talked about history. Her interest grew when she read the first lines, since the chapter started with the monks' arrival at the mountain.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Her viss buzzed with excitement as she read from the beginning. She barely noticed Ceila and Lassem leaving to find a place for the night and kept going until the book was finished, in the late evening. Being a goddess meant being able to read quickly, but she had to stop every few pages to recall what the other books she'd read said about some of the events she was encountering again.
She had no way to prove or disprove the facts described in the first five chapters. They talked in detail about the arrival of the first monks to the mountain, after fighting the guardian. Like Daira had said, the text mentioned that even its general shape was unknown.
The book mentioned that the guardian had disappeared three times in the history of the villages: once during the excavation of the crater, the big chamber at the center of the mountain where the monks’ viss was preserved, once during the rule of the sixteenth abbot, and once under the fiftieth. The anonymous authors hypothesized that the guardian left to find others of its species to breed, which suggested it was more similar to an animal than a divine presence.
Other events recalled the ones described in the sacred texts: an army of ships approaching from the seas and a giant made of fire walking in Suimer's bay.
That last event was even more surprising: apparently the monks had gathered half of the spheres on one side of the mountain, taking care not to carry them too far from the shore, while placing the remaining ones halfway between the villages in order to offer the inhabitants partial protection during the fight. The villages had survived that way for three days straight, a risk she didn’t expect the monks would ever be willing to take.
The events were all narrated in great detail, with names and dates, but she struggled to imagine a hundred ships, or a humanoid fire several towerlengths tall. She couldn't shake away the feeling that there was something in there she should be paying attention to, but as much as she thought about it, she couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was.
The rest of the book seemed to suggest that the events of the first part were true, since it presented names, facts and dates that were identical to the ones in all of the volumes she'd read about the most recent past of the mountain. Except for one glaring difference.
She opened the book to the page in question to examine it better. There was a drawing on the right and a text on the left.
Under the sixteenth abbot, the council of the priors decided to change the engravings on the lower side of the shield that covers the well, completing its pattern. A new shield was created, with the addition of lines that would limit the amount of viss flowing from the deity to the mountain, without losing the power to keep it whole. The new pattern is shown on the next page.
Even after watching Rabam work and listening to his uncertain explanations about what he was doing, Aili didn't know nearly enough about patterns. But the drawing on the next page suggested it was too similar to the one that produced warmth sewn on the inside of the monks’ tunics. And the monks seemed to agree with her, because the next lines reported that:
Two years later, a group of viss scholars demonstrated that the pattern was wrong, and the old shield was put back in place. Only one god was created at that time, but they established he didn't pose an immediate danger.
The lines that came next had taken Aili by surprise, since they looked exactly like the rest of the text, but the content had been written by someone else.
It's me. That god is me, and I had to study that pattern for my job of sewing tunics. We were warned to never use it, because it's similar to the one that creates warmth, but it's actually the one we use to make rocks explode. I'm hoping that it's not true and all of this is an elaborate trick of the priors, but what if they actually did this? What if I'm a wrong pattern away from making everything explode? I would never forgive myself if I killed someone in Suimer.
Aili appreciated how he hadn't left any viss on the page behind despite being clearly distressed. Delivering her the book through Ceila and Lassem had been risky, but the chance Dore had seen the message in all of those pages was sufficiently low.
Her first thought was that it was all a ruse of the monks to convince Zeles to surrender. They were too attached to traditions and slow to change to ever consider modifying the pattern they used to create gods. Not after it had worked perfectly for centuries, not when it was too similar to another one that they knew created explosions.
Now that she thought about it, the choice of pattern was another thing that betrayed their ruse: they knew Zeles had been a tailor, so he had to know both the patterns for warmth and the one for explosions. Choosing a different pattern wouldn't have alarmed him nearly as much.
All of that explained why Rabam had delivered the book to Zeles, and not her. He'd been captured.
She felt a surge of buzzing anxiety at that thought, and only managed to calm down a bit by repeating that she was still awake. Still, she needed to save him, and she had nobody to send up there. She would have gone herself, if the monks didn’t have her shard.
She set aside the problem for an instant and added a second part to the letter for Zeles. She explained the ruse in detail and begged him not to trust what was written in the book, nor Rabam's future appearances. She still needed to solve the problem of how to get it delivered, since she couldn't count on Rabam's hidden paths anymore.
She examined the book again, caught between two problems that were too big to solve. She wondered whether the rest of the book was false too. The attempt at deceiving Zeles had been clumsy enough it was a real possibility. Or maybe, she hoped, they had just taken an actual history book and added the pages that supported their lie. On one hand, it was weird they would sacrifice information they had kept secret for all of that time. On the other, it didn't reveal anything too important, and it made the lie seem true.
She was reading again the attack of the giant fire creature when the date gave her pause. She was sure she'd already seen it somewhere else in the book.
The nagging feeling of something crucial hidden just out of sight followed her closely as she examined the pages from the beginning, until she finally found it: the attack corresponded to the second disappearance of the guardian. The third time it had left, instead, was when the army of ships had reached the mountain.
She made a quick calculation: there was a window of about four hundred years between a disappearance and the next. And the next time would be, give or take a few years, the one they were in. Even without the calculations, she had proof of that happening: a ship had reached Lausune, after all.
She closed the book with a thump. The regularity of the attacks suggested that whoever lived outside the mountain knew when the guardian would leave next. They could attack again, at any moment. And the book left out the crucial information about how long it took for the guardian to return.
She resumed pacing, not caring anymore if the sentinels could see her through the windows at the light of the torches outside. She was getting ahead of herself, just like Zeles had. There was no proof that any of that was true. Finding the entirety of the mountain's history inside a book after she and Rabam had spent so much time looking for it, after the monks possibly learning that it was just what he'd been looking for, was too suspect.
Still, she couldn't rule it out until she had proof it was all a lie. It did no one any good if she weakened the monks and the other gods to the point they couldn't protect the mountain against an outside attack. And if it really happened, she and Zeles would have to collaborate, possibly throwing out any sort of control they had over the situation. Giving up the rebellion, even.
She had to know more about the situation. Everything always came down to that, not knowing enough. And there was only one person she could ask.
She reflected a bit on how to approach the conversation without giving out too much, then focused on the forest, where her territory and Dore's barely touched.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. “I’ll be quick.”
She remembered how their last conversation had ended and hoped he wouldn't retract his domain, since she couldn't expand her own further.
“What do you want?" he answered.
“A couple of visitors came here through your territory,” she explained. “They wanted to cross to Izgos, but I stopped them because I found something weird in their backpack.”
“I think I know what you mean. I've seen it too.”
“It's about the mountain's history.”
“Part of it.”
“Part of it,” Aili repeated. “What do you mean?”
“That most of it is bullshit. They seemed to genuinely think it was a book of stories, so I let them go.”
Aili tried to gauge his feelings through the specks of his viss that floated closer to her border, but couldn't find enough of them to have a clear picture of his state of mind.
“You didn't alert the monks?”
“I don’t trust them. And what if they ordered me to kill them? Zeles could take revenge on me. Any of us gods can stop those two if they reveal too much or they start believing what's written there, so I don't know why I should be the one risking it.”
Aili was glad to see her lies were still having an effect on him, even if he was clearly annoyed at her. There was also the possibility he'd been instructed by the monks to give her those answers.
“Which parts are false, exactly?” she asked, but his viss flared with annoyance and his domain shrunk to the point she couldn't reach it anymore.
She kept pacing. She wanted to believe he was talking about the parts of the book about the guardian. A dangerous hope, since without knowing if he'd talked to the monks or not she'd be better off distrusting him completely.
As an alternative, she needed to know whether an attack was coming before anyone else would notice. She wished she could send someone out of Lausune’s border, but even disregarding the sentinels, no inhabitant in their right mind would have accepted.
She stopped, realizing she didn’t need any of them. Saia was already on the other side of the border.
She focused on her shard, buried inside her body. It was still pulsing with Saia's viss. She only needed to push her message through the channel that connected it to Saia, and she would have received it.
Her viss jumped around in excitement at the idea of talking to her again, then slowed down when she realized that they hadn't agreed on a code beforehand. Luckily, she had established one to use with herself when she was planning to record the monks’ trials by storing her viss on a rock. She still remembered most of it, and the rest was easy to invent again. Now she only needed to communicate it to Saia.
It was early morning when she finally felt ready enough to try.