"Now get this. According to the first edition of Mercer's Travel Guide of Unique Sights and People of Greater Secuna, 'dawn at the Temple of Vrailne is something everyone must experience once in their lifetime. The grey fields blush with the rising sun, a spicy ambrosia perfumes the air, and the black obelisk fades into existence like a smudge against a saffron cloud. The sight fills her priests with fresh joy each day, and the weary petitioners cheer after their nightlong vigil.'"

I lowered my book to stare at the welcome sight down the hill, where flames leapt among the acres of untended fields and long-abandoned temple cracked beneath the heat.

"I doubt this is the vision Mercer intended when she published this eight years ago, but it is worth an update, right? Maybe something like, 'There was nothing quite like the smell of burning ambrosia at the dawn of the goddess's demise.'"

That witticism earned me no response.

"You're right. The update shouldn't taunt the reader with what they can't experience. We'll leave it the author to describe the 'scorched earth' and 'broken temple.' Let's focus on what she can strike out instead."

There was still no response as I turned back to the book.

"'Vrailne stands unique among the divine.'" I plucked a pencil from my backpack lying at my side and scratched that part out. "That will have to go, of course. Your situation is now unique among the gods, but you are no longer capable of standing, per se." I turned to the next line. "'This goddess is her fields, is a single stalk of whorled thorns and succulent pads, is the seed that renews, is the shadow that bestows transformation on the worthy.' Yup, that's gotta go, too."

I glanced down at the two-inch vial near my hip, half-buried in the hastily shorn grass.

An eddy was forming in the mass of orange seeds it contained.

"Although, the seed part can stay. Now how about this last bit? 'One may only pray the newcomer's beauty will spread swiftly to all countries of the Secuna.'" I tapped my lip with the pencil. "Beauty. Beauty. Beau--why, yes, if she counts your current burnt and ruined state. I find that quite beautiful." I sniffed. "And fragrant."

A faint rustling sound reached my ears.

So close.

Time to be a little hands-on for my final taunt.

I tucked my tattered copy of the travel guide into my backpack and picked up the last intact piece of the goddess, save for that in my vial. The stalk was a lurid shade of saffron and overdressed in grey--grey thorn clusters, grey pad leaves, and, yes, seedpods of grey.

I turned it in my hands, tilted it find the best angle, then I jabbed it into the flames of my cookfire.

The rustle grew, the seeds scratching at the side of the glass nearest me.

After a second, longer jab, my fire-poker started turning a lovely shade of crisp black. Getting to be my favorite color.

At the third poke, a leaf pad plopped off into the flames, just beneath skewered Bredt sausages. I could not have planned that better. “You think that will throw off the seasoning?”

“Menace!” Her seeds rattled about in accompaniment to the voice that hissed inside my head. “Murderer! How dare you! Who are you to do this to me!”

How dare I? Who am I?

I inhaled some more of the day’s lovely aroma to appease my temper. Watched the smoke rise over the field down the hill. Poked the fire a few times when the fragrant entertainment didn’t quite work. Then, finally, I said, “Your Grandiloquent Weediness, we have already gone over this. Hundreds of times. Over four years. Don’t tell me our issues have already slipped from your hard little minds.” I grasped the vial and sluiced cold invisibility from my hand onto glass. “Does this help any?”

She gasped. Then, her orange seeds jumped against the invisible glass like wormy beans bent on escape from the soup pot. Ping, ping, ping. Music to the ears; far better than "the groans of delight" her petitioners released at the sight of her.

After a moment, the seeds subsided. She had either beat some sense into herself, or she had prodded loose a memory from a self-centered little shell. Better be the latter.

"You,” she said. “Boy. Destroyer.”

I let half her comment go. She was near-sighted, horribly so, if she couldn’t tell the difference between her then thirteen-year-old petitioner and her current seventeen-practically-eighteen!-year-old captor. But destroyer?

“You destroyed my life first with your curse.” I dropped my focus, and the little bottle slid back into visibility. “But let’s not let bygones be bygones; you owe me. You fix visibility’s lingering grievance with me, and you get to live.” Inside that vial. Forever.

“Inside this bottle? Forever?”

Treacherous little vine. If I hadn’t gotten to know her in all her saffron guts and unglory, I would suspect she had rooted about in my mind and sucked up those thoughts like fresh water. Not so. I was just used to her thought processes.

They were pestilent.

And growing stale.

“That bottle is no better than how you left me,” I said.

Of course, now she’d reply, in a snotty huff, “I have done nothing to you. I will have nothing to do with you.” And then, usually I would hare off to the next county, principality, state, or country on my list and start the field-destroying all over again.

Today, I couldn’t, for there was nothing left to burn.

“I remember you.”

And today, she surprised me.

“Yes, I remember you . . . ” If she possessed her shadow form still, she would draw it close, perhaps tickle insubstantial fingers of darkness over my shoulders, whisper moss-soft lies inside my brain. But she didn’t, being one glass vial too distant from the earth for that. “You asked to be remembered by everyone. I cursed you with permanent invisibility.”

No! I shot to my feet and felt like kicking her into the fire--popcorn exotica--but managed to save my head and plan instead. Always the plan.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“No. I wanted you to undo this curse I was born under. I wanted people to remember me for longer than moments. I wanted you to make it so no one could forget me ever again. You know, for a goddess, you don’t have a strong memory, at least, not of anything that doesn’t involve the worship of you, or the infestation by you, or the squooshing of you. If that is the way you want it, you got it.” I snatched up the vial; forty-one orange seeds rattled inside. “I have forty reminders ready.” I shook her prison. “Right here.”

"The invisibility was an extension of the degenerate nature of your soul, a degeneracy evidenced by your theft of my being--”

“How easily do we forget, yet again. I appropriated you, all forty-one of you, from temple-version you. My just due after you ignored me, week after week after week, Your Disgrace. So much for your famed malignity--sorry, magnanimity. So easy to confuse the two concepts around you.”

“Thief!” A seed pinged against the glass like an irate stomp of foot. “Gross violation of my being called for gross action. You wish me to undo this harm, thief, then let me live.”

I sat back down. Set her back down. Picked up the forgotten stalk from the grass. The end had gone out. All that was left was darkness and dying smoke. Just like the fate of her last field, soon.

“Oh, you will live,” I said, first twirling the stalk, then gesticulating her way with it. “In that bottle. Forever.”

“No. This world has grown inhospitable to me over the last four years, all of my fields disappearing, and now this last one you have destroyed . . . Return me to my home world, murderer, and it will be as you ask.”

Disappeared? Try burned and razed by yours truly, just like this one. Of course, it was too much to ask that she remember that distinction, thanks to my curse.

Wait. Wait just a minute. Did she say, return her home? On another world?

With the smoking end of my pointer, I scooched her away from the cookfire. It must be melting the gooey parts she called a brain. Brains. “Uh huh. And where is this home world that we are talking of?”

“I do not know, I have drifted too far, too long, so distant, and . . . ” As her point drifted, so did her seeds, eddying inside the only home I desired her to possess. Then the rustling stopped abruptly. “I need assistance. You must ask the Sphinx.”

I would have believed her tricking me if not for a certain geographical tidbit: the only populated place she had not sown corruption had been Isle Island, home of Sphinx statues amongst other things.

“How can a statute you help you?”

“Fool. Statue? Fool.”

No, a fool was someone, anyone, whoever stood in line at your temple asking for transformation.

“Callow fool of a human male.” One seed smacked against the glass. “Sphinxes are not statues. They walk the worlds, all of them. This one, too. And mine.”

I had traversed the world over, both the Greater and Lesser areas of the Secunum Empire, as well as the parts it had dropped, the parts that had dropped it, and the rest that no one, much less Secuna, cared about. And I thought I had gone quite a ways in those four years.

Well, it could be a trick, but it could also not be. Either way I’d play along. After all, I still had time, and she had . . . an itty-bitty bottle.

“All right, where is a non-statue member of this extremely paw-sore society?”

“Foolish destroyer, the Sphinx I am acquainted with resides many hundreds of fields distant from this one you destroyed. She is in the possession of the Immortal Man of Grey.”

"The Collector?"

I remembered him well. Had a lot of hopes pinned on him once.

Well, maybe it was time to use something stronger than pins. Perhaps something with large claws, larger teeth, and a mocking purr to be remembered by.

“All right.” I tossed the stalk in the cookfire as I rose, ignoring her hiss and ping. “It’s time to pay Collector’s property a second visit.”

#

My copy of Mercer's Travels dedicated twenty pages to the Collector, which was nineteen-and-three-fourths more than the goddess held, eighteen more than Isle Island, and seventeen more than my family. What could I say? Mercer was a fan of exotic foodstuffs and their dealers and an even bigger fan of a long-lived recluse and his mansion of grey nestled in acres of lawns and timbers, rivers and roads, and guards and more guards.

Collectorates, as the most avid (and affluent) fans called themselves, decked themselves out in white neckcloths and three-piece grey suits--or old-fashioned dresses with layers of petticoats, for the ladies. They dyed their hair grey. They strolled about with grey walking sticks and touched up the grey paint job on their houses. All because their beloved trendsetter lived in a house of grey upon an estate so vast that it made some small countries envious (especially, formerly waterlocked Isle Island), and all because he wore the same grey suit with the same white cravat and same grey cane over the past three centuries.

Well, I hoped it wasn’t the same suit, but if Mercer's pet theory were ever proven, the perfume industry would boom with the magic-made fragrance of Dirty Man in Rank Clothes. A grey liquid, of course.

Those who couldn’t afford to emulate their subject made due with gawking and eavesdropping and gabbing too much--or composing nineteen pages too many in a popular guide that many bought and few read and even fewer used. Lay people lined the streets where his vehicle, the only magicless, horseless one around, was rumored to maybe rumble on by. Inside ears, portable voice-boxes were tuned into the daylong channel dedicated to their sole subject. And every newspaper worth its sheets kept a prognosticator on hand just for him. The predictions on his doings were more closely analyzed than farmer’s almanacs in famine seasons. Even tongues and lips formed his name more often than that of any deity real or fantasized, more than all deities collectively--verminous plants included--so that eventually the gods shriveled up and died from neglect. (Hence their current decline.)

Or so the first version of the guide would lead one to believe.

Perhaps an edition not eight years out of date would have an update worth reviewing. Time could have palled Mercer's enthusiasm for the subject, or her rhapsody might have doubled at the expense of something worth reading about.

Like the steady shrinking of a goddess's domain over the past four years.

Or a sighting of a living, breathing mascot from Isle Island.

Or the growth of the Kerun family business.

Outside of the pages of a biased guide, the unadorned truth was far simpler. Collector had never failed to fascinate Secuna. He ventured forth constantly from the idle mind and into equally idle conversation and equally idle fashion because few things lived as long and unchanged as he. Not even the gods lasted as long before fading back into the ether from which they were formed.

The other part of Collector’s equation for fame included living the life of an eccentric recluse on four square miles of land fiercely protected against all outsiders.

I doubted even his dumb-as-a-post guards ever met him. In truth, no one ever saw him. No one heard his voice. No one saw his vehicle. Except for a few lucky vendors. The people only heard of his acquisitions and that long after the fact--a form of advertising that even my parents made use of, once.

My mother’s predilection for naming her children after her most prominent pregnancy cravings actually held the Collector’s attention (via a minion) for all of a week. Couldn’t fault him much for that; after all, few but Mother Kerun wanted to live on, say, Bredt sausage for a year or, especially, Tavers potatoes (“No other name for taters will do! One hundred and one uses, for one hundred and one years, and still tasty, too!”).

So, my sisters and brothers were thus born and thus named, and thus many a childhood day I put up with their muttered protests over being walking advertisements for the Kerun family import/export business.

They were fortunate; the Census had designated me as the sixth infant in the household lineup. A place-holder designation awaiting proper filling in by my family . . . and still waiting to this day.

But no more. I finally had the goddess where I wanted her, and by the time I was through, I would have anything I wanted, and I had enough of seclusion. I had enough of being forgotten. Enough of being nameless. Enough of being invisible in every sense of the word.

Once upon a time, I was a Collectorate. Heck, once upon a time, I wanted to be the Collector. But he was a wasteful man who didn’t value the attention he had. Instead of glorying in his fame, he bought trinkets and creatures and humans of rarity and hid them away like he hid himself in a costly grey cage.

Yes, once upon a time, I wanted to be Collector.

By the time I was done, he was going to want to be me.