a large ring. Setting it down, she stepped into the ring and sat down, cross-legged.
Tophet was on his feet, and the blind attendant had somehow lost her sense of things, had forgotten him. His true face glared at her over the golden mask. As Soter had described, it was a gruesome war of expressions, a horrible roiling, writhing coil of slaughtered features.
“Dyauspitar was home to a priesthood,” she continued, “dedicated to the god Dyaus, who had once been a celebrated sky god, until a collective of demigods struck him down for his excesses and drove him into the sea. That span, according to legend, was built along the spine of Dyaus, which kept the waters shallow there. The truth is, the ousted god embraced his submarine exile and gave himself a new name: Oceanus.
“I doubt you knew that, but it hardly matters, for this tale doesn’t concern him anyway.”
“You will stop now, storyteller.”
She stared at his terrible face and replied, “I think I will begin now.” She pushed back the cowl, caught the thong in her hair, and unwound it. Then she clutched the mask and dragged it from her face.
At the sight of her, Tophet sat down upon his throne again. From behind the gold mask his voice emerged: “I don’t have to stay for this.”
“You can’t leave. You’ve breathed in my dust, and you’ll stay put now for the story you’ve ensured no one could know.” She gathered another handful of coral dust.
“Leandra.” His voice cracked.
The name cut her and angrily she flung the dust at him, but when she spoke, her voice was calm and controlled. “On Dyauspitar when a child reached the end of his childhood he endured a ritual of passage where his soul was removed for three days from his body and for three days he lay dead while his soul entered an animal selected by a class of priests known as enchanters. And when the spirit of the boy was put back in his body, it was mixed with that animal spirit and he was a man. This was the ritual of manhood and it had gone on since Dyaus fell. It was so perilous that the priests who could perform it were few.
“Our story concerns one of them, whose name was Auuenau. He’d come to the order early, an orphan, and his training had begun well before he was ready to pass through that ritual. He was better versed in the mysteries of the enchanters than most of his elders. He knew, for instance, that one member of his brotherhood guarded a cache of scrolls containing the secrets of Dyaus, which had been found floating upon the water after he fell. In them were secrets of life and death and eternity. Had the archivists of the fabled Library of Shadowbridge known of its existence, they would have taken the cache from Dyauspitar to protect the world. Even the gods of Edgeworld would never have bestowed such knowledge upon any mortal, else risk the destruction of the world.
“Auuenau coveted the hidden knowledge, and for years he collected hints, clues, and inadvertent comments that knit together to lead him to the scrolls. They were concealed in a rough stone kist in the order’s ossuary.
“He was careful to present his interest in the ossuary as an expression of reverence. He tended to the bones of his forebears. One by one, however, he removed the scrolls, replacing each with a blank, until he had them all. He hid them in the cistern inside his house.
“The house was filled with seashells and coral and desiccated sea creatures that he’d collected, some shells so large that it took two hands to lift them. He shared the small house with an apprentice under his tutelage, and out of fear of discovery he had to limit his examination of the scrolls to the times when the apprentice was absent. Thus he read with the intention of memorizing every detail of every spell and ritual. In those texts he found the source of the enchanters’ power to remove the soul at puberty. The grander shape of the simple rituals he had learned was explicated, and soon enough he had the means to expand upon the limited powers granted the enchanters—to cleave body and soul completely, achieving true immortality. No one can say what might have happened if he had accomplished this as he intended, unhindered. Unnoticed.
“On Dyauspitar when the monsoon arrived, everyone retreated to their houses and remained inside until the