No mortal, and probably no god, could comprehend Hado’s life.
I like being an orogene, Daddy, she says. His eyes widen. This is a terrible things that she is saying. It is a terrible thing that she loves herself.
Stolid, no-meat-on-Fridays Catholics. Aislyn’s strongest memory of them is Grammy telling her how she should dress and carry herself if she wanted a good husband.
Everyone breaks, if torture goes on long enough. The mind bears the unbearable by going elsewhere.
What can orogeny do against something like that? Keep her breathing, maybe. But breathing doesn’t always mean living, and maybe... maybe genocide doesn’t always leave bodies.
Remember, too, that the Earth does not fully understand us. It looks upon human beings and sees short-lived, fragile creatures, puzzlingly detached in substance and awareness from the planet on which their lives depend, who do not understand the harm they tried to do – perhaps because they are so short-lived and fragile and detached.
Let me say only that these vehicles float a few inches off the ground. No animals draw them. No steam or chemical fuels them. Should something, a pet or child perhaps, pass underneath, it will temporarily cease to exist, then resume on the other side, with no interruption of velocity or awareness. No one thinks of this as death.
And if one tendril has turned a nosy, racist white woman into a conduit for disembodied existential evil, he doesn’t want to see what infected NYPD will become.
But your ’mest is in there doing Evil Earth knows what, and I’m basically asking you if it’s okay to kill her, because that’s about where I am right now.
Psychotic breaks must be hell on inner ear balance.
Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.
So this being – whom we shall call Nahadoth because that is a pretty name, and whom we shall label male for the sake of convenience if not completeness – promptly set out to create an existence, which he did by going mad and tearing himself apart.
This new one – who has always and only been male – named himself Bright Itempas, because he was an arrogant, self-absorbed son of a demon even then.
Even the smallest act of peace is a blessing upon the world.
He has come to seduce the god of seduction, and oh, has he come prepared.
He has made his fellow citizens happier, and there is no finer virtue by the customs of this gentle, rich land.
I have a son of my flesh already, and I have a woman who loves me and wants me, but they’re both half-wild. They flee into the desert whenever I try to love them back. If I were a less confident man, I might become concerned.
I will tear the whole world apart if they ever hurt us again.″ But we would still be hurt, she thinks.
What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else. As soon as those people left, the paralysis ended.
In the wake of that, Sunandi could do nothing but allow a moment of proper Gujaareen silence. There was something to the custom, she had decided some years ago, of letting a brief passage of time cleanse the air, after dangerous words and thoughts had tainted it.