It began with the sun.

In a long-ago time, long past memory, when the world was green and new and strong, men looked up at the sun, and saw that it was the source of all their life and power. And because there were many men in those days, too many to count, and many of them very clever, they wanted more, and found a way to take it. And that was the beginning.

The white sun rose, and billions died, men and tinapi, beasts and plants. The survivors huddled by the fireside for comfort, watching their world die around them. There was no going back, and they did not try. The horizons of the living world drew close, boundaries hardened, memory faded, and the survivors settled into a cold and brutal mode of life. One pyre became two, which became four, which became the Dominion, waxing and waning but never claiming more than the smallest sliver of the earth.

The past lived on in the minds of priests, ten brief years at a time, making copies of copies of copies of attenuated experience. Under the weight of ages whole lifetimes compressed to the length of a day in their recollection, a single monotonous narrative of death and regret, growing ever longer but never different. Some priests were masters, some slaves, some magnificent and some vile, but none were very happy, and the histories of their lives did not edify their heirs.

The priesthood passed to Shimrun im-Sutiri, and that was another beginning. His parents were prominent in the pyre. His mother had been kind enough, he thought, but he barely remembered. Later he would come to wonder, and then to doubt, because it did not seem possible that he had ever been really happy.

He could more clearly recall long days of misery in his earliest childhood, sobbing for his mother on a cot in a dark room with ugly paintings on the walls. The acolytes were patient, in their own way, but made it clear that he would have to stop crying eventually, and it would go better for him when he did. Really, did he have a right to cry? He was only one boy, and a pathetic one at that. Crying made him cough more, and the medicine was expensive. How much money did he expect Dul Karagi to spend on him? They could not keep paying forever. He did not like to think what would happen if the medicine ran out. So he learned his lesson, and stopped.

Time passed, and Shimrun grew, as well as he could, afraid of the shadows, and the light, and often of himself. He passed every challenge by being silent, small, and inoffensive, crying as often as he dared but not enough to frighten anyone. He was known as a harmless sort of monster, and rewarded with relative freedom. When other boys left the Painted Room, unannounced and unmourned, he reflected on their errors, and made sure not to copy them.

When the time came, he was let out of the Painted Room—in the proper way—and allowed to walk the uppermost two tiers of the Temple, so that he could see everything he was to die for. He knew the exact number of steps it took to walk the perimeter of each tier. If anyone ever saw him on these walks, they did not greet him, nor he them. He didn’t want to be a bother.

When despair took him at last, it very nearly killed him—until he found love on the other side. Love gave him pride, pride gave him anger, anger gave him courage, courage gave him hope. And so, with only a little help, he found the strength to continue, but only a little. The doubt and the fear were never far away.

He did what he could, but it never went right. His brothers died, one after another, in the space of three months. He was cast out of his own pyre, condemned to loneliness in the wild, held in contempt by all his remaining friends, and every effort to fix it only made matters worse. He did not remember so well, now, what hope felt like. But he kept going, because he still remembered the lessons of the Painted Room.

When at last he found a new brother, hope returned. It was wrong, because hope was always wrong, and he was condemned to die in any case. But there was another man, even weaker than himself, who called him ‘brother’ and succeeded where he had failed. If this man did not act as Shimrun would have—if his new brother made him frightened, or sad—Shimrun kept quiet, because he had no other friends left. Erimana and Rinti were gone, Gelibara dead, and Pimna did not love him anymore. As for Shunnar, or Rammash, he did not know if he liked them or not, nor they him.

Now Shimrun slept in a new temple, far from home, but he felt himself a proper master at last. He was not contained or constrained. He could walk the streets of High Atellu, escorted by his new brother in the form of a beautiful girl, who listened to all his stories as they went through the parks and gardens, and put her hand in his as they went to the new markets outside the walls, where the Moonchildren came up to buy the noble women, with their female domestics and all the wealth of their houses that his new brother had no need for.

When night came, his brother’s handmaiden would take him to bed, and Shimrun got something he had wanted for a long time, but never dared to ask for. He was frightened and ashamed, but he did not want to refuse, and he was happier for it until his brother slept and the girl sobbed in her pillow. He did not know what to tell her, and he left the room to sleep somewhere else. When his brother woke up and came looking for him, Shimrun did not know what to say to him either. In the end, the truth came out, and the handmaiden was punished. From then on, Shimrun stayed in the bed he was given, and the next handmaiden did not cry. As much. He did as little as he could without making his brother upset with him, and still felt bad.

Rammash and Erimana were both far away now. Shimrun felt he ought to be doing something, but he did not know what. He spoke with them daily—and with the man Zasha, whom he did not know—through Mana or Rinti. Zasha, especially, asked many questions, and Shimrun did not know the answers, or want to admit he did not know. He felt sure they were disappointed with him, and not sure that his brother would want him telling them all he knew, but never happy with the thought of saying no. Who else did he have to talk to?

His brother was not very interested in telling him things; he had his own business, which he kept to himself, and got impatient when Shimrun asked questions that did not concern him. So Shimrun watched, and did what he could to make his brother happy, because that was how he was used to living. His brother grew busier and busier, and Shimrun grew still lonelier, more eager for the times when they could be together and he could see his brother smiling in a pretty girl’s eyes.

When his brother was not around, Shimrun talked to the handmaidens. Shunnar and Pimna had long since stopped being friends, and helped him only when he asked directly, which he usually didn’t. They kept each other company. His brother’s handmaidens didn’t want to talk to him either, at first, but he was good at not being threatening, and when he asked them about his new brother, they could not restrain themselves. They told him many things, more than he wanted to hear, going back blooms and blooms. He listened, because it was hard to get them to talk about anything else.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

They told him what his brother would do to them, in the old days before he shrugged off his minders, and what he would say and do to them to keep them quiet. They told him what he had done to the remaining acolytes, once they were no longer an immediate threat, and how he had killed half the flamekeepers, and rounded up the survivors, with their sons, in the ruins of the Palace. They told him how he had dealt with his own mother and father, on the night he reclaimed his power—and that was the worst story of all.

Shimrun listened to all of it, and made no excuses, but offered no help. They saw he could not help him, but they told him anyway, because he was the only person they knew who did not know already. The younger ones, especially, were eager. He encouraged them, because it made them happier with him, until one day his brother came back and caught one of them complaining in mid-sentence. Then they both went up to the throne room, and Shimrun watched how his brother made her reconcile with her husband.

Then Shimrun knew, from the smile on Mannagiri’s drooping face, that he was only the little brother, and not so very loved. And he was not happy. He should have been angry for other reasons—for the handmaidens, or the acolytes, or the women outside the wall—but really, it was the look on that face that bothered him. The look that told him he was not respected, and the answering voice inside that asked him what he had done to deserve respect in the first place.

Dul Karagi seemed farther away now than ever before, and he did not see that he was doing anything to make anyone else’s life better. He could hear the wailing of the women at the market every day as the Moonchildren led them away—but there were not many women left to sell now, and the Moonchildren did not offer so much. The fire still shone from the temple, but Dul Atellu was no longer a living pyre.

Now Shimrun saw he had failed again, worse than ever before. The problem was not in the world, but in himself. He could not, would never have the strength to do what had to be done. But if he was part of the problem, that was another matter. He could remove himself, and maybe do some good in the process.

The houses of High Atellu were not completely gutted yet. Shimrun walked the streets alone now, going house to house and meeting nobody. There were kitchens in some of them, and nobody had bothered to take the sort of knives people kept for cutting food. Shimrun took a whole day picking out the largest and sharpest, and trying his best to make it sharper. He didn’t have much experience at sharpening, and neither had any of his predecessors who were still fresh enough to recall. Shimrun did his best, and hoped Haranduluz would accept it.

Then he went to see his brother in person, with the knife tucked inside the nice new clothes his brother had given him. He didn’t have a very good reason for getting physically close, but Mannagiri was distracted, and saw him as no threat—until his shaking hand tried to draw the knife, snagged it on his belt, and dropped it clattering to the floor.

Pathetic, to the very end.

It was not the ending Shimrun had hoped for, but it would do. He hadn’t really expected to succeed anyway. And he did not doubt, as the handmaidens carried him away between them, what the outcome would be. He was only disappointed that his brother did not seem very angry. It would make the end quicker—but he had hoped to finish his life as something more than a nuisance. Yet even that sadness was muted. Shimrun was used to disappointing himself.

“I’m sorry, Rammash,” he wheezed aloud as they hauled him out onto the temple’s terrace. “The rest is yours.”

He could have said more, but he didn’t have time. It was only a forty-foot drop to the next tier down, just enough to be sure to break him. And when he was broken the story was finished, and the whole volume of his life and the lives before him was recapitulated, life by life, one after another, each chapter more sharp and clear than the last, until the last crack of the last bone in the body of Shimrun im-Sutiri had finished echoing in the flesh and mind of Rammash im-Belemel at the edge of the Dominion more than a hundred miles away.

For some time he lay flat on his back with his eyes shut, sorting out the tangle of lives long since ended, all reverberating in his head. He’d thought he was Rammash, but he could recall, with only slightly less clarity, being Shimrun, Mendurnengi, Telpish, and Partul. Past that, it was less clear, but it was far from easy or comfortable to sort out which of the dozens of lifetimes he recalled was really himself. His haranu didn’t care to distinguish between them, but stitched their times together in a chain, one long life of the-Ensi-of-Dul-Karagi.

Ram disagreed, very firmly, and when he had got it to stick, or thought he had, he sat up and opened his eyes. He was still in the middle of the rookery, with an abizu and four bazuu floating overhead. Externally, there was no indication that anything had changed. And yet the world was different. The spirits were brighter, sharper, clearer to his mind; he had only to look at one, and it grew in his awareness. He leaned in, saw the spark that was Mana rush closer—

“Ram? Are you back now?”

A girl in a baggy hooded coat was sitting on the floor a few paces away. He put a hand to his head. “Yes. I think.”

“You think?”

“No. I know. Yes.” What was her name? “Yes, Imbri. How long was—how long has it been?”

“A good chunk of the day. I’ve no way of telling you any clearer than that. You mind telling me what all that was about? I could tell you were still alive, but I couldn’t wake you up. The abizu didn’t get it either, but ordered me to explain if it turned out to be something interesting.”

“Right. Well … Shimrun’s … dead.”

“Which would make you—“

“Yes. Yes, it would.” He didn’t want to think about it.

“That certainly counts as ‘interesting’ by our standards. I’ll take my chances.” And she shrieked up at the abizu, who shrieked back.

“I’m going to die,” Ram said to the floor, too quietly for her to hear. Three blooms. Less than three blooms now, closer to two and a half. Thirteen blooms had been an eternity—almost as long as he’d lived already. The ever-present threat of straight murder was only ever a possibility. This was certain, and soon.

And then? “Imbri. When we get sent to Kur, what happens to us? What does this abizu say happens to the ensis?”

“It says you don’t stay for good, but it doesn’t really know where you go. After a while you fade out. If I had to guess, I’d say you stay there for about ten blooms, and that’s why we need periodic kindlings. But that’s just a guess. Where you go from there, I don’t know, but it’s not Kur, and it doesn’t seem like Ki, either.”

“Right.” He picked at a loose seam on his shoe, and scowled. So much for that.

“It also says that we came from Nidriz in the first place, like everything else.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. They think everything does. I’ve told you that Nidriz—Kur—isn’t the kind of place you can just walk into, right? It’s more of a potential. Unfinished things. Ideas. Possibilities.”

“Which is where the magic part comes from?” He had little hope that this was leading to any kind of consolation, but it was at least a distraction for the moment.

“Yes. I’ve been talking it over with the abizu while you were out, and here’s what I’m thinking: if Kur is potential, and Ki is actual, then the kindling would be going against the flow, right? Sending something back. Which forces a kind of balancing of the equation. We push our world in theirs, and they return the favor.

“The bazuu? They want Kur, they want Nidriz. They don’t like actuality, they want their world of ideas—which isn’t really any world at all. Potential’s only infinite until you try to do something with it, and that makes it nothing at all. So the white sun degrades. Opposition to complexity. Knock down the tower, turn it into bricks.”

“… sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“That’s fine. I’m only thinking out loud anyway.”

Ram felt a sudden impatience with this wretched hole. He’d come here for answers, and got them too, and now he was more lost and miserable than ever. “Let’s just get out of here. I want to see the sun again.”

“Sure. Mind if I ask them for a lift down the mountain? It’s got to be late on peak day by now, and I’m sure the others have bailed. A shab could get us back to the Misishi gate in less than an hour.”

He stood up. “If you like. It probably won’t matter anyway.”

Imbri cocked her head. “You all right, Ram?”

“I just lost most of my remaining time. I’ve got three blooms left. Would you be all right?”

“If I had three blooms left to live? I think I’d try to make them count.”