"Sit," Vane said. "This is not a short story, and it is not one you’ll want to hear standing."
Nathan didn’t sit. Vane didn’t press it.
"You were told about the war of the gods," the mage began. "Every child is. The war that broke the sky, brought magic to the world, birthed the beasts. The version the temples teach is a children’s rhyme with the truth cut out of it." He laced his fingers. "Here is what was cut.
"In that war, there were four gods the rest feared above all others. And of those four, one stood alone at the top. The god every other god feared to name."
Vane’s voice dropped.
"Erebus. The God of Death."
The lamps in the underground room seemed to burn a little lower.
"He did not fight the way the others fought, with storms and fire and armies of the faithful. Erebus had an army of the dead. Undead soldiers, forged by his own hand, and I do not mean shambling corpses. His knights held power to rival demigods. The greatest of them pressed against the realm of the gods themselves. Dead things, boy, that could kill divinity."
Nathan had gone very still.
"The other gods feared him enough to unite against him. More than once. They failed. Every alliance broke against him, and every god who fell to him was not merely killed. Erebus claimed their souls, and unmade their divine planes behind them. Whole heavens, gone. By the war’s height he had swallowed gods the way his knights swallowed armies, and there was no power left that could stand before him."
Vane paused.
"And then he was beaten. Not by a god. By one of his own."
The room tilted under Nathan’s feet.
"The story that came out of the dark, and no one living knows how it came out at all, was this: his most faithful servant, the first and greatest of his knights, turned on him. Fought him alone, in the heart of his own domain, and won."
’What?’
Nathan’s breath had stopped somewhere in his chest.
The endless black where stars had died. The throne that spoke from every direction. The knight walking forward alone with his brothers’ blood drying on his blade. He had watched it ten thousand times behind his own eyelids, every night of his life, the battle, the falling, the warm light, the face he never reached.
’That’s my dream. He’s telling me my dream.’
’It was never a dream.’
His pulse was hammering in the scar across his throat. Vane, watching him with those flat grey eyes, noted the change in his face and said nothing about it.
"The fight destroyed worlds," the mage continued. "Whole worlds, boy, caught in the wake of it. When it ended, Erebus was gone, truly gone, in a way gods were not supposed to be able to go. And the knight who did it died with his victory. Bled out his existence in the ruin of his master’s domain, and the surviving gods felt the death of Death itself, and do you know what they felt alongside it?"
Nathan couldn’t speak.
"Terror," Vane said. "Not relief. Terror. Because a soul like that does not simply end. Souls return. Souls find doors. And the gods who had cowered from Erebus for an age understood that somewhere, somehow, someday, that power might come back through one of them. So they made sure it never could."
He rose and walked slowly along the shelf of old books.
"That is the true origin of the ritual. Not a gift. Not the gods’ pity for struggling mankind, whatever the temples sing. The awakening ceremony is a net. Every child in every land, marched before an altar at sixteen, made to stand in the light where the gods can look at them. And the crowns of the world were given one standing instruction, older than any kingdom that carries it out." His finger stopped on a spine. "If the God of Death ever marks a soul, kill it. At once. Quietly. Burn the body, bury the name, and tell whatever lie keeps the district calm.
"The God of Darkness was his closest companion in that war, the only one who stood beside him to the end. So my god’s mark carries the same sentence, for the crime of loyalty two hundred years old." Vane’s mouth curved without humor. "You and I were dead the moment the light touched us, boy. The king didn’t decide your death. He inherited it. It was written before your grandfather’s grandfather drew breath, by gods so afraid of one dead soldier that they turned every temple in the world into a trap."
Silence.
Nathan stood in the middle of it, and the words went through him and kept going through him, and something in his chest was cracking under them like ice under weight.
Not the king’s fear. Not a mad ruler’s cruelty. A standing order. A procedure. His whole life had been a name on a list written centuries before he was born. The men in his bedroom hadn’t even been sent because of anything he was or did. They’d been sent because a light turned dark over an altar, and somewhere a rule two hundred years old ticked over like a clock, and the machine did what the machine was built to do.
His mother had died for a filing instruction.
She’d stood in that hallway with a dish towel in her hand, and her throat had been cut, and her body had been thrown in the wilderness like refuse, because gods he had never met were frightened of a soldier who died before this kingdom existed. And then the machine had kept ticking, and told her neighbors her own son did it, so the lanes she’d walked her whole gentle life would remember her as a monster’s mother.
She had wanted him marked so the empire would protect him.
The empire had killed her by procedure.
His hands were shaking. He looked down at them and they didn’t stop, and the cold that lived under his ribs was rising, and for once he didn’t push it down. The lamps in the room guttered. Kira, beside him, took a slow step back, her eyes wide, and even Vane straightened where he stood.
"So that was it," Nathan said. His voice came out low, and wrong, and it scraped through the scar on his throat like something dragged over gravel. "That was why."
He lifted his head, and his eyes were burning.
"Was that why they took my mom from me? For a story? For a dead god’s ghost story, two hundred years old?" His voice was climbing, cracking, all of it coming up at once, the hallway and the grave he’d dug with his hands and the guards in Jerry’s street and every hour of every day since the light went dark. "She never hurt anyone in her whole life! She just wanted me to have a future, and they, they cut her down in her own house and threw her away like garbage and blamed ME, and it wasn’t even about me, it was NEVER about me, it was about something that died before any of us were BORN—"
The shaking spread up his arms.
"Was THAT why they took everything I had?!"