recalled the Ambassador for the Angel of Death trying to put a name to me, and wondered precisely what she saw when she looked at me. When she looked at me with her life-and-death seeing eyes, and struggled to place me in a world that, to her, consisted of only two kinds of people. The ones to be spared, and the ones to be condemned.
And yet she had bothered to consider the shape of my life, rather than its mere black-or-white implications; surely she did not normally care to mull over the gray areas of a person's life. The gray areas were not the business she was in.
But they seemed very much to be the business I was in. It was gray, gray, gray – sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, sometimes an adamant stuck-in-stubborn-stone gray, sometimes (more lately) a confused haze-gray.
I am Avante, I thought, hoping more would come, that it would follow having just needed to be prompted. Sometimes, you only need to anchor a starting point, and the rest will follow, there all along but in need of being centered.
But nothing else came. Nothing except the watermark-gray imprint of that tentative identity on my abyssal-gray soul;
I am Avante.
I am Avante.
I am Avante...
*
In the end, quite unexpectedly, it was Tanen who came to me. Two days later, after he returned from his afternoon visit to the city, he found me in the garden. I looked up from my work at the blur of someone approaching, faltering when I saw who it was. He did not look precisely fond of the idea of speaking to me, but something came laden on his lips all the same.
"There's something I want to show you," he said, and my mind wondered vainly over what it could be.
"Alright," I said at last, simply enough.
It was a start.
"It's in the city," he elaborated.
It was inevitable that his mention of discovering something in the city brought a certain Ravine and the relating treachery within its domain to mind, but he could be referencing a million different discoveries, so I shooed the thought to the back of my mind.
"Now?" I asked, when he didn't volunteer anything further.
"It could be gone, tomorrow."
That was fair enough. I chucked the dirty carrot I had unearthed into my bucket and wiped my hands on the fabric of my skirt. Rising, I gestured to the road that commenced at the edge of the field. "Lead the way."
Leaving the rest of my task for later, I followed Tanen into the city. He retained his silence the whole way; only when he had picked his way over the rubble to the spot he intended to show me did he speak up again.
"There," he said, gesturing to the base of one of the heaps of debris. "At the base."
I followed his indication, at first finding nothing. All the rubble ran together into one big jumble. Was there one piece that was more notable than the others?
Then I saw it. A great clawed hand protruding from the rubble. Fortunately it had the appearance of being very limp, very dead – for it by no means appeared altogether human. It had a greenish hue to it, and the joints were a little bit larger, the hand itself callused almost to a scaly extent. And, of course, there was the most obvious difference of claw replacing nail – disgusting gray claws about half as long as a given finger. But it was the similarity in shape and apparent function that suggested this was no paw, either. It was very much a hand.
I had never seen something quite like this before, and so I regarded it with due bemusement, and admittedly a little wariness to boot.
"What is it?" Tanen asked, rather bluntly.
I considered a moment before treading forward to do the deed he had obviously invited me along for. It was such a disgruntling thought, contriving to touch that hand, but a second survey confirmed it was surely not attached to any live creature. Surely nothing buried under so much rubble could still be alive to any extent.
I knelt beside the hand, considering the muscle of the open palm, the idle, reaching fingers. Then I stole myself against the eerie squeamishness that I felt and reached slowly to touch it. My fingertips brushed the wrist of the thing first, stiff and cold and chalky, and then I moved them up over the palm to twine my fingers with the creature's, gently clasping its hand.
A look into the creature's soul flashed