“Yes, Naha, and they had no power to harm me or even to command me as they once did. And I felt the wrongness before I went there.” It had been why I’d followed Yeine, feeling restless and angry and in search of excuses for both. “They were just children!”
His eyes turned to black pits, and suddenly I was truly afraid. “You love them.”
I went very still, wondering which was the greater blasphemy: Yeine loving Itempas, or me loving our slavemasters?
He had never hurt me in all the aeons of my life, I reminded myself. Not intentionally.
“Just children, Naha,” I said again, speaking softly. But I couldn’t deny his words. I loved them. Was that why I had decided not to kill Shahar, breaking the rules of my own game? I hung my head in shame. “I’m sorry.”
After a long, frightening moment, he sighed. “Some things are inevitable.”
He sounded so disappointed that my heart broke. “I—” I hitched again, and for a moment hated myself for being the child I was.
“Hush now. No more crying.” With a soft sigh, he rose, holding me against his shoulder effortlessly. “I want to know something.”
The couch dissolved back into the shivering bits of mirror, and the landscape vanished with it. Darkness enclosed us, cold and moving, and when it resolved, I gasped and clutched at him, for we had traveled via his will into the blistering chasm at the edge of the gods’ realm, which contained—insofar as the unknowable could be contained—the Maelstrom. The monster Itself lay below, far below, a swirling miasma of light and sound and matter and concept and emotion and moment. I could hear Its thought-numbing roar echoing off the wall of torn stars that kept the rest of reality relatively safe from Its ravenings. I felt my form tear as well, unable to maintain coherence under the onslaught of image-thought-music. I abandoned it quickly. Flesh was a liability in this place.
“Naha…” He still held me against him, yet I had to shout to be heard. “What are we doing here?”
Nahadoth had become something like the Maelstrom, churning and raw and formless, singing a simpler echo of Its toneless songs. He did not answer at first, but he had no sense of time in this state. I schooled myself to patience; he would remember me eventually.
After a time he said, “I have felt something different here, too.”
I frowned in confusion. “What, in the Maelstrom?” How he could comprehend anything of this morass was beyond me—quite literally. In my younger, stupider days, I had dared to play in this chasm, risking everything to see how deeply I could dive, how close I could get to the source of all things. I could go deeper than all my siblings, but the Three could go deeper still.
“Yes,” Nahadoth said at length. “I wonder…”
He began to move downward, toward the chasm. Too stunned to protest at first, I finally realized he was actually taking me in. “Naha!” I struggled, but his grip was steel and gravity. “Naha, damn you, do you want me dead? Just kill me yourself, if so!”
He stopped, and I kept shouting at him, hoping reason would somehow penetrate his strange thoughts. Eventually it did, and to my immense relief, he began to ascend.
“I could have kept you safe,” he said with a hint of reproof.
Yes, until you lost yourself in the madness and forgot I was there. But I was not a complete fool. I said instead, “Why were you taking me there anyhow?”
“There is a resonance.”
“What?”
The chasm and the roar vanished. I blinked. We stood in the mortal realm, on a branch of the World Tree, facing the unearthly white glow of Sky. It was nighttime, of course, with a full moon, and the stars had shifted fractionally. A year had passed. It was the night before I was to meet the twins a third time.
“There is a resonance,” Nahadoth said again. He was a darker blotch against the Tree’s bark. “You, and the Maelstrom. The future or the past, I cannot tell which.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has it ever happened before?”
“No.”
“Naha…” I swallowed my frustration. He did not think as lesser beings did. It was necessary to move in spirals and leaps to follow him. “Will it hurt me? I suppose that’s all that matters.”
He shrugged as if he did not care, though his brows had furrowed. He wore his Sky face again. This close to the palace where we had both endured so many hells, I did not like it as much.
“I will speak to Yeine,” he said.
I shoved my hands into my pockets and hunched my shoulders, kicking at a spot of moss on the bark beneath my feet. “And Itempas?”