The pen hovered over the blank page for a long time, and even when Silver pressed it to paper, all that happened was the ink spreading from the pen tip in a big blotch. He didn’t know what he wanted to write. He made himself start writing anyway, I am Silver, a Myajac, a God; and, I am filled with regret…

“Rayale!”

The Myajac looked up, watching his brother approach. Mechanically, he closed the journal, holding one finger over the pages so that it marked his spot, expecting this meeting to be short. Now when I look at you… I just feel, he thought to himself as the roughly humanoid silhouette occupied his doorframe, odd spiritual essences and colors swirling through it, sometimes flares of color on the featureless face, sometimes just a muddy brown murk. I just feel, he tried to make himself think it, think the name of what he felt.

“I know how to fix your mistake.” The voice coming from this, this… thing, was many voices all at once. Silver waited, expecting more, but the silence stretched out.

I think you have forgotten how to talk to people who are not part of you. Deliberately, the Myajac set down his pen, and withdrew his finger as a bookmark from the journal. He folded his arms against his chest, pressing them close, and waited. He stared up at the odd roughly human shape that was all… all shadows with colors that surfaced from time to time. One Being that was Many Beings, his brother had said when selling this idea to them all. One Being with the all mighty power of many beings.

“Rubis is dead,” his brother continued in the weird all-voice tone, and Silver knew that he was expected to respond.

He lifted one arm away from the tight hug he was giving himself with his crossed arms, the chains attached to the manacles about his wrist clinking as he gestured, “I had noticed.” He did not say what he felt, but inside he could feel the tight burning heat of barely repressed rage. I hate it when you kill my creatures! He hoped his tone had stayed calm enough not to antagonize the not quite One Being.

“It took that wolf you picked out and made it human.”

That burning sense of rage turned to a rock of anxiety that sunk to the bottom of his body, spreading tingles of worry through him. He looked down, focusing on his divine vision, searching, and he felt relief when he found she was still alive.

He realized his brother had kept talking, “... just need a new Myajac. I want to make one out of that life magic based human race you cultured. When we make him, we can use him to help bring the rest of you back in. Assuming I catch you all.”

Silver looked down, taking a deep breath in, then out, looking up at his brother without raising his eyes, trying to hold the rage down, “Well now, you’ve got me, isn’t that the most important bit?”

The laugh was absolutely gut-wrenching when it came from all those voices at once. “I shall kill that mutated runt before it makes more of… them.”

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Silver could feel the special emphasis and knew what it was for. “No.” His heart skipped a beat, what had he just said? “I mean,” he struggled, grasping at any ideas that he could, “I mean, I made the Uryans dependent on mystics. And, if you choose a Uryan to help… mend us, then, a liana is just that much more power and presence, right?” What am I doing?

There was a silence. Silver was trying to think of ways to tell his brother that one forest god wolf turned human wasn’t going to make them relive the world they had escaped before. “That’s the first clever thing you’ve said since you so cruelly tore us apart.”

Silver gulped, “I can work out a plan, I can help you make this happen. We can make it right.” I am tired of all this death.

That horrible cackling again, “Good, good, I am glad to hear you starting to understand again.”

And just like that the shadow faded from his door. There was an oppressive silence, an ominous feeling left.

Silver pulled the journal back over to himself, opening it again. He reread his first line, and then lifted his pen, and continued.

I was not always this way; I can still remember being a child however many hundreds of years ago that is now. I still remember my mother, and I remember my twin brother before we began calling him Bane.

Bane suits him. He helped me… the pen paused, hanging in the air above the page, ink dewing up at the tip, threatening to splat down. Slowly, deliberately, he finished the sentence, kill my own mother to become what we are now.

He wanted to follow it up with excuses. He wanted to explain that he didn’t always know Bane was bad, he wanted to say he didn’t know what he was doing, that he had just followed along. He wanted to say Bane had always been so smart, and he had always struggled to keep up. Instead, he wrote, I love where love isn’t earned, and trusted where trust didn’t belong. And when I look at myself now, and look at what my brother still is, I am… he couldn’t even make himself think it earlier. He felt paralyzed, trying to write it now. He felt shivers going through the core of him, but yet, he felt compulsion to tell someone the truth. Letter by letter, he finished the sentence, revolted.

And from there, it started to flow easier. He explained how the death of his mother made them Myajacs. Then we made Gods. After this he explained how they had all tried to shape the world around them with their superior magic. Tyranny made them rebel. He wrote of all the sorrow that had followed, and the poor decisions to give up freedom that ended with him here.

Writing was slow, it took hours to express each thing, and sometimes it was messy and he started over. It helped the time to pass, and it was the only thing that brought him relief each time he had to interact with his brother and all the people sealed into that space with him.

My brother is being pretentious when he calls himself One of Many because it is almost always just him. The parts of the many that were most like me would try to create, and then he would overwhelm us and destroy what we had made. He always governs with such an iron fist. So, one day... I just… fell away. And here I am, I have found myself. I couldn’t get away, some of the others did. And as I look at my hands that are hands and not a magical thought, and I look at my writing and feel the cramps in my fingers and the ink smears on my clothes… I am glad that I am alive. But… I regret. I regret… so much.

Silver hadn’t escaped, and his Nearly One Being brother called the ones that had gotten away, the Lost Ones. And Silver wrote about that too. He wrote about all the plans they made, he wrote about everything, the history, his hopes for the future, page by page, filling this book with every wonderful and horrible thing.

But today, his pen hovered over the page, circling back to the most recent events.

And so I decided that the new God would be a Uryan because I could not let him kill a single wolf. Now Bane says we should have killed her when we had a chance.

Sometimes, I still wonder if I agree with my brother.