them, forcing them out, inviting them in. Gravity dragging them from weightlessness, down, down toward an earth that must, in the finish, reclaim us all. The source abandoned, amniotic warmth left behind. Cold air on bloody skin, noises too sharp and real, new eyes closed tight against awful brightness, the violence of their becoming. A severing, stripping them from their core, cutting them off from all they’d known and leaving them alone, alight, alive.
A howl spilling from their virgin throats.
And then?
And then, the shelter of strong arms. The cushion of a warm breast. The perfect joy of her kiss upon their fevered brow and the promise that all would be well in the end.
“Mother?” they asked.
“I love you, my son.”
The many were one.
Burning in the eyes of the sun.
Beginning anew what was undone.
The many were one.
THE MANY
ARE
ONE.
CHAPTER 48
TITHE
The sky was as gray as the moment you realize you can never go home again.
Anais walked on water so still it was like polished stone, like glass, like ice beneath his bare and burning feet. It stretched as far as he could see, flawless and endless.
His mother walked to his left. Beautiful and terrible. But though she’d tried to, he wouldn’t allow her to hold his hand. He was angry with her, you see. At her meddling and machinations. Though her visitation to the little imperator’s dreams had proved the spur to prick the Chosen’s skin, to have her embrace the destiny that was hers, he was keenly aware of how badly it all could have gone wrong. And of the tithe that had been paid for his rebirth.
His mother carried her scales instead, black gloves up to her elbows, dripping on the eternity at their feet, like blood from an open wrist. Niah’s gown was black also, strung with a billion tiny points of light. Her eyes were as dark as her prison had been, and her smile was vengeance, one thousand years wide.
Across the infinite gray, he waited for them.
Father.
He was clad all in white. Tall as mountains. But Aa didn’t burn so bright as Anais remembered. His three eyes, red and yellow and blue, were all closed now. His radiance dimmed. The dark about them swelled, his mother looming at his shoulders, black as the truedark skies gleaming below the gables of heaven.
The Moon’s sisters stood arrayed about their father. Tsana wreathed in flame and Trelene shrouded in waves and Nalipse wearing only the wind, Keph sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. They watched him approach with unveiled malice, but he could see they feared him. He could see why. His domain was the sky, after all. Higher than all of them.
Perhaps that was why they had hated him.
“Husband,” Niah said.
“Wife,” Aa replied.
“Sisters,” Anais nodded.
“Brother,” they bowed, each in turn.
They stood in silence as long as years. A millennium of suffering and rage and sorrow between them. And finally, the Moon turned to the Suns. Though his three eyes were closed, Anais knew Aa saw him. The Everseeing saw everything, after all.
“Father,” he said.
The reply came then, like a knife in the dawn.
“You are no son of mine.”
It hurt to hear him say it. Even after all these centuries. The wrongness of it was total—to be loathed by the one who should have loved you best. The silence grew deafening, the Moon’s mind filled with a thousand If Onlys and Why Couldn’t Yous.
They were futile and he knew it. But even gods bleed.
Anais looked downward, saw himself reflected in the mirrored stone/glass/ice at his feet. His form shivered and shifted like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from his shoulders, the top of his crown, as if he were a candle burning. On his forehead, a circle was scribed. And like a looking glass, that circle caught the light from his father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance pale and bright. He hesitated then, even then, wondering at all that might have been.
But standing at his back, he saw a figure cut from the darkness.
A girl.
Pale skin and long dark hair draped over her shoulders and eyes of burning black. Fierce and brave and quick and clever. He knew her then. What she’d sacrificed. What she’d lost. He knew that unlike his own sisters, she’d loved her brother with all she had to give. And most of all, he knew her name.
Mia.
She put her hands on his shoulders and leaned close. His mother frowned as the girl spoke, lips brushing featherlight against his ear. Her