I was going to pulse Roel in a minute. Honest. It had just been a long day.

Running my own op was emotionally exhausting. When I was following the commander’s orders I could just focus on doing my job, but being in charge of everything was a whole different ball game.

Back home I would have dealt with all this… thisness by putting in some headphones and rocking some Billie Eilish. But, uh, for some reason it hadn’t felt like a good idea to bring my phone on a pre-industrial deep cover mission.

“Hey Val,” I subvocalized. “You awake?”

After a pause, I received a very diplomatic “yes.” I might have woken him up.

“Didn’t mean to bother you. A while back you mentioned playing a song,” I said. “It was… something dramatic. I forget the name.”

“Road to Nowhere,” he chuckled. “I suppose it is a little dramatic. What about it?”

“I was just wondering if I could get you to play it for me.”

A brief pause. “What, now? Over comms?”

“I guess you’re right.” I sighed. “Eh, don’t worry about it.”

“That was not a refusal. It was just an unexpected request. The commander would never ask for a remote performance, for example.”

“Well, as everyone likes reminding me, I’m not the commander.”

“I can’t remember even one instance of that. I’m at the organ now. Pay attention. I will not be background noise.”

I laughed. “I’ll pay attention.”

He didn’t respond, but I could imagine the thin smile on his face. “I’m synced. The others have been notified, so we won’t be interrupted. This is an adaptation of a very old song, maybe two hundred years before the widespread adaptation of reincarnation technology.”

“How do you know?”

“The best analyses use textual analysis; additionally, the mode of this song was popular in that period. There are old Veleans who claim to remember it being sung up to a thousand years before, but old Veleans always lie.”

“Of course they do.” If you went back as far as the dawn of reincarnation, why not pretend you went back ever further? Masters of the Old Ways were supposed to have mastered reincarnation before Eifni Org.

“I checked, regardless. There are statistical methods to vet the reliability of those claims based on scatter patterns, and in this case our elders are frauds. So our estimate remains twenty-nine centuries after Eifni—still quite ancient. That the song has endured proves its significance. Now, rewritten for the notion organ, that significance can be expressed directly. And… we begin.”

I still wasn’t used to the experience of the notion organ. All the art I’d grown up with had some kind of medium—it was an inescapable prerequisite. I just didn’t have the experiential context for ideas and meanings getting beamed into my head. Like I was being told a story, but without the telling, just a story unfolding in my mind. And it started with—

Fire and death.

They found each other in the ruins, each reeling from tragedy. The craftsman’s family slain; the mayor’s family turned against him.

I felt their bitter grief deep in my chest. The howling loss..

What redress could there be? Who can restore the dead? Who can take up arms against his own family?

I was the mayor, exiled because I would not become a kinslayer. I was the craftsman, returning to beloved dead and burning home because I was not there to defend them.

I had failed, and the price was fire and death.

They were merely known to each other before calamity struck them down. Now they were brothers in loss.

Together they dragged the bodies from the fire and set them on poles. They left them for the crows, that their spirits would live forever on the wing.

The mayor warned the craftsman that he was pursued. For your service to the beloved dead, the craftsman vowed, I will die to hold off those that hunt you.

I felt his desperation, the dark need to escape twisted into the shape of gratitude and devotion. The noetic tones of the notion organ made the vow ring hopeless and hollow.

The mayor refused.

Let the dead serve us as we have served them, he said.

So they waited, and the hunters came. The brothers had no bows of war—even the craftsman’s boar spear had broken in the hands of his eldest son. But with a hunting bow and the night, they slew the mayor’s pursuers as they investigated the funeral poles.

I was the craftsman, picking off silhouettes in front of the embers of my home. I was the mayor, driving a broken boar spear through an oathbreaker’s lungs.

I took my vengeance, a price of fire and death.

They left the dead to the wolves, consigned to the frozen earth. Now the future held nothing: no peril, but no hope. Empty like heaven. Empty like loss.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

My family have slain yours, said the mayor. Turn your wrath on me next.

But the craftsman laughed. Hypocrite! If I must endure, then so will you.

I have no grave-price for your beloved dead, said the mayor.

But the craftsman laughed again. The wolves will eat your grave-price tonight.

There was no road for the brothers. No home to return to, no beloved to give warmth against the eternal frost. There were no gods to curse for this fate, only the indifference of men.

Then aid me, said the mayor. Kill them all.

I was the craftsman, with no purpose but collecting arrows to pierce more skulls. I was the mayor, who no longer needed to become a kinslayer to take revenge.

I was fire and death.

The notion organ stilled, returning me to the real world. My heart was racing and my jaw was clenched. Both of us were silent for a long time.

“Holy shit.”

“What did you think?”

“It was great,” I said. “Like, actually. I really liked it. Actually, interesting thing about that.”

“What?”

“There was this emotion kind of underpinning the main thing. Like, you’re sad, but you’re kind of angry? I used to feel that all the time back in college. I was in kind of a dark place, and just hating everything. When it got really bad… actually, nevermind, you’re going to make fun of me.”

“You’re safe. I’m curious.”

I sighed. “I used to pretend I was an angel. Like I had a flaming sword and wings of fire and everything, so I could just burn down the campus and then fly away. Wouldn’t have to deal with anything, I’d just burn it all down. I don’t know why I thought that would make things better, but it felt like it would.”

“You were scared,” Val said. “You were imagining what it would be like to be more powerful than the things that were hurting you.”

“I guess. I also felt betrayed. And maybe people wouldn’t do the shit they did to me if I could set them on fire.”

“Ha! No, I suppose not.”

He’d said this was his favorite song. There was a question on the tip of my tongue and I couldn’t bring myself to ask it—he’d tear me apart. But something had clicked, and I had to know.

Well, if you’re going to fall, fall forward.

“Who betrayed you?” I asked.

There was a long pause. My adrenaline spiked, sharpness in my cheeks and neck, waiting for the blow to come.

He chuckled.

“I suppose there’s little point in dissembling. It was my parents.”

I took a deep breath to steady myself. “What did they do?”

“For future reference, you should never ask such a question back on Veles. It will read as a transparent probe for weakness, and the obviousness of the attempt will connote extreme disrespect for the target’s social abilities.”

“Oh.”

Well, that was that, then. I was too rattled to try to figure out what was being said on the Velean inference layer of the conversation, but that was a closed door if I’d ever heard one.

“Velean medicine considers sexual fetishes to be disordered calcifications of the human arousal system,” said Val.

What.

“Arousal is a stimulus-response system, so a human being at optimal levels of function should have the ability to self-determine their arousal response. It’s a mere quirk of neural structure—simple to treat with reincarnation technology. Allowing fetishes to go untreated allows for the possibility of sexual incompatibility between otherwise willing partners, decreasing the overall happiness of a society.”

“That’s, uh, not really how we treat it at home.”

“Your former culture doesn’t have a choice. Ours does, and we chose to eliminate fetish formation from human neural expression. But this has not eliminated them from Veles. Some Veleans have allowed their fetishes to imprint on their identity—sometimes immigrants, but more often older Veleans whose existence predates the public health measures. The same demographic, as it happens, with the luxury credits to spend on short-sighted waste like reproductively viable bodies.”

“Um,” I said, “I’m not sure wanting kids is a fetish.”

“I do not know my father,” said Val, ignoring me. “I was told that was the point. My mother preferred not to know who had impregnated her. Once the body had served its purpose enhancing her sexual encounters, it would be remanded to the institution that produced it for her in exchange for a fresh one.”

“Holy shit. In late pregnancy? Did they get the kid out first?”

“No. I assume they gave the abortion ethics guidelines no more than a cursory glance. We are not discussing the kind of institution that cares about the Velean Medical Standards Board.”

Val gave a short, humorless laugh. “I am fortunate that the Board cared about them. I was born prematurely. When my mother went into labor, it triggered her comm’s emergency medical alert. The witless fool hadn’t modified her default settings; the emergency workers who picked her up were from the nearest medical center, rather than her illicit reincarnation center.

“There are services for cases such as mine. I was preserved. My mother’s case was pursued and then dropped. This is common among old Veleans. They have thousands of years of accrued favors and influence; no system of law conceivable can overcome that. So that is the reason why I am one of the only native Veleans.”

“Holy shit,” I said again. “At least you get to be a native Velean? I kind of wish I’d been born here.”

“We are pariahs,” Val spat. “For each of us that exists, there’s a story like mine. We are the shame of an entire planet.”

“That’s—I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry Val,” I said. Quick, think of something sympathetic to say! “Did you get revenge on your mom?”

“I’m merely a world-class moirologist. I can’t touch an old Velean. But perhaps in a thousand years I will be able to ruin her.”

“Fire and death,” I said. “And until then, you’re slaying gods?”

“Burning this world will have to suffice until I can burn my own.”

Alarming sentiment at first, but it felt—right. I’d felt so often that life had fucked me over. All that stuff could go die in a fucking fire. And I hadn’t been able to burn it myself—I mean, how can you burn fucking depression?—but if I could, then I would. And it’d be right. Because abuse, depression, hopeless, poverty, oppression, all that shit shouldn’t exist. Evil shouldn’t exist.

Evil shouldn’t exist. That was why I was here. Evil shouldn’t exist.

“Let me know if you need me to raise any funeral poles,” I said.