Shades in Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

vineflowers like fish, watching him; he can feel their intelligence, but he’s not sure what they are. Feral eyes watch from beneath palm fronds: some of his less-comprehensible siblings. She sits on the mossy branchroot of a big old tree, which looks exactly like the World Tree of Sky. There’s even a tiny white crystalline lump in the first crotch of the tree, which he’s tempted to look at more closely. He resists the urge and sits beside her.
    “I have a name,” he says. He goes by “Ahad” now, when mortals need to speak to him.
    “No, a real name. One of your own. Or two, or three, but one would be a good start.” She looks thoughtful, tapping her fingers against her chin, and he scowls.
    “I don’t want one from you .”
    “Why not? For all intents and purposes, I’m your mother.”
    “I have no mother.” Her face twitches, and belatedly he realizes this has hurt her. It gives him a vicious sense of pleasure for a moment, and then that fades. He is not the twisted thing he used to be, and he dislikes resorting to old habits. He amends, more gently, “I’ll find my own name.”
    She sighs. He hates that she has forgiven him already. “All right. As for the rest…” She shrugs. “You don’t understand yourself.”
    His nature, as gods call it. His affinity, his focus, whatever, he doesn’t know the secret special thing that nourishes and completes him and will make him strong. He’s spent a while trying to teach himself the gods’ language, which makes no sense to him beyond the most rudimentary level, and all of its vocabulary and conceptualizations are laced through with this understanding. Maybe if gods weren’t all crazy , their language wouldn’t be such an exercise in futility for him.
    “Thanks for telling me what I already know,” he says nastily, rising and dusting off his butt. No telling what, or who, he might pick up here. “You’re always so good at that.”
    Her jaw muscles flex so sharply that he wonders what she almost said—or almost became—in reaction to his words. But what she says is, “This is hard for me, too, all right?” Then she sighs. “I’d been hoping we could help each other, you and I.”
    “Help? What the hells do you need help with?”
    She looks truly annoyed now. “We two are the youngest of the gods, right now. And we were both human—more or less.” She adds this quickly when he sneers. “It’s a handicap that none of the other gods know how to cope with. But we share it, and so maybe…if we work together…”
    She holds out a hand then, and he looks at it. An offer. An appeal. A friend. He wants to reach for it. Oh gods, how he wants to reach for it.
    But he’s tried such things before. Tried to care about others, only to find that he is unimportant to them. Tried to trust, and been betrayed. So he hesitates.
    Then his lungs lock and his belly twists and all his muscles twist and fray apart, and he can do nothing but clutch himself and flee before he falls to pieces in front of her. (Of all of them, he cannot bear to seem weak to her.) The realm, which is half alive anyway, pulls him to a place that is better for him, full of silence and dark closeness and comfort, and there over time he is able to recover. When he does, he re-forms a material body so that he can laugh, bitterly, to himself.
    He doesn’t know his nature, but now he knows his antithesis. And isn’t it perfect? Fear is what will one day destroy him.
    *  *  *
    The god without a name experiments, because after all, he is curious.
    There’s a problem right away: not much really frightens him. Nihilism apparently has that effect. He does not fear pain because he’s known too much of it. Likewise degradation, mutilation, despair, or anything of the sort. What would frighten him is not merely the experience of these things, but the possibility that they might continue . If he can see an end, anything is easy to endure.
    And what is the opposite of fear? Courage, maybe. No,