But I will not pretend it didn’t trouble me.
Then there was a shimmer, all that my mortal mind could perceive, and the whole world sang clean when they stripped the mortal covering from him and cast it away. Itempas did not cry out, though he should have. I would have. Instead he only shuddered, closing his eyes as his hair turned to an incandescent nimbus and his clothes glowed as if woven from stars and—I would have laughed, if this had not been sacred—his boots turned white. Even with my dull mortal senses, I felt the effort he exerted to control the sudden blaze of his true self, the wash of heat that it sent across the surface of reality, tsunamis in the wake of a meteor strike. He stilled it all, leaving only profound silence.
Would I do as well, when I was a god again? Probably not. Most likely I would shout and jump up and down, and maybe start dancing across any planets nearby.
Soon, now.
When the blaze of Itempas’s restoration had passed, he paused for a moment longer, perhaps composing himself. I braced myself when he focused on me, as he had promised. But then, almost imperceptibly—I would not have noticed if I hadn’t known him so well—he frowned.
“What is it?” asked Yeine.
“There is nothing wrong with him,” Itempas replied.
“Nothing wrong with me?” I gestured at myself, with my man’s hand. I’d had to shave again that morning and had nicked my jaw in the process. It still hurt, damn it. “What is there about me that isn’t wrong?”
Itempas shook his head slowly. “It is my nature to perceive pathways,” he said. An approximation of what he meant, since we were speaking in Senmite out of respect for my delicate mortal flesh. “To establish them where none exist and to follow those already laid. I can restore you to what you are meant to be. I can halt that which has gone wrong. But nothing about you, Sieh, is wrong. What you have become…” He looked at Yeine and Nahadoth. He would never have done anything so undignified as throw up his hands, but his frustration was a palpable thing. “He is as he should be.”
“That cannot be,” said Nahadoth, troubled. He stepped toward me. “This is not his nature. His growth damages him. How can this be meant?”
“And who,” asked Yeine, speaking slowly because she was not as practiced as the other two at rendering our concepts into mortal speech, “has meant it?”
They looked at each other, and belatedly I realized the gist of their words. I would not be regaining my godhood today. Sighing, I turned away from them and went over to the curving nacre wall. I sat down against it and propped my arms on my knees.
And, quite predictably, things went very bad, very fast.
“This cannot be,” Nahadoth said again, and I knew his anger by the way the little chamber suddenly dimmed despite the bright morning sunlight filtering through its glass ceiling. Only the chamber dimmed, however, rather than the whole sky. Clever Yeine, planning for her brothers’ tempers. If only I had not been trapped in the chamber with them.
Nahadoth stepped toward Itempas, his aura weaving itself darker and thinner, becoming a glow that no mortal eyes should have been able to see by any law of nature—but of course he defied such laws, so the blackness was plain to all.
“You have always been a coward, Tempa,” he said. The words skittered around the chamber’s walls, darting, striking in echoes. “You pressed for the demons’ slaughter. You fled this realm after the War and kept our children away, leaving us to deal with the mess. Shall I believe you now when you say you cannot help my son?”
I waited for the explosion of Itempas’s fury and all the usual to follow. They would fight, and Yeine would do as Enefa had always done and keep their battle contained, and only when they were both exhausted would she try to reason with them.
I was so tired of this. So tired of all of it.
But the surprise was mine. Itempas shook his head slowly. “I would do no less than my best by our child, Naha.” Only the faintest of emphasis on our, I noticed, where once he would have made a show of possession. He did not look at me, but he didn’t have to. Every word that Itempas spoke had meaning, often in multiple layers. He knew, as I did, that his claim on me was precarious at best.
I frowned at him, wondering at this newfound humility; it did not at all seem like the Tempa I knew. Nor did his calm in the face of Nahadoth’s accusation. Nahadoth frowned at this, too, more in suspicion than surprise.
And then something else unexpected happened: Yeine stepped forward, looking at Nahadoth with annoyance. “This serves no purpose,” she snapped. “We did not come here to rehash old grievances.” And then, before Nahadoth could flare at her, she touched his arm. “Look to our son, Naha.”