═•●•═ Myth Au: Till Death ═•●•═

There was smoke.

She recognizes the heady spice of it flooding her senses and pulling her into the hazy film that lingered in the air of the temple. Faint footsteps do little to interrupt the chorus of chanting that echoes off the stone walls, and her polite ‘excuse me’s and gentle touches on the arm are paid little mind as she works her way through the crowd towards her parents. They had been invited after all. She can see them across the room towards the central dais, lower down than the priest and yet still prominent. Their eyes are caught on the elder’s upturned hand above yet another pile of offerings laid bare on the cold marble of the altar. Some lesser god, she can’t remember who.

“Pardon me,” she whispers yet again to another villager in her way. The miller; they recognize each other as he steps aside.

“Anisah?” his voice is low and tucked under his breath as she tries to pass. “Little late for the ceremony, don’t you think?”

Anisah shoots the miller a rueful smile. “There will be another. I’ll make that one, I promise.”

He laughs, turns his gaze back to the altar and the elder. From here, she can see the lines in his face, the sadness in his eyes, and hear the tired edge to his voice. Just the other week, he had gotten word that one of his sons had been taken in the conflict. The young man hadn’t even been a soldier, simply on an errand for his father’s business and yet still he had been caught in the crossfire of a war seemingly fought for only conflict’s sake. “Hopefully this will be the one that sticks, yes?”

“Yes.” she nods, and finds she means it. Whatever harvest god or local deity they had dredged up this week to try and appeal to, she hoped they were enough to defend the village from further pain like the kind that weighed so heavy on this man. Whatever she had been pushing through to her parents to tell them can wait. Instead, she stands next to this man whose hands are shaking as he holds them in prayer and finds herself gazing at the altar of plain offerings; different than last week, different than the week before that, lesser and lesser as the weeks pass and their assets shrink from the conflict. Time after time they had prayed to deities who hadn’t carried enough power to do anything for them. Who hadn’t been enough to save even a single son of a miller.

‘Enough.’ she thinks to herself as her hand reaches for the ones clasped next to her. Calloused hands so similar to her own father’s grip back almost painfully.

‘Enough.’ Anisah thinks again. Around her, chanting fills the high ceilings of the temple. Voices around her plead with powers only marginally higher than herself and she knows against the miller's hopes that whatever god this might be, it will be little more than sand between their village and the cresting wave of violence that sweeps their nation.


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Later, after the ceremony, she doesn’t remember what she had intended to ask her parents. The thought is lost under the tide of so many others; thoughts of her friends, her family, her village, and the war that creeps ever closer to their borders. She loses herself to the monotony of preparing the next day’s goods and the easy motion of kneading.

Over and over: turn, fold, turn fold, turn, fold, chime. Chime?

Her parents shouldn’t be back yet. She had escaped early from the ceremony the moment she could as those things had a way of lingering far past the concluding rites. Elders would linger in the same manner they would a funeral, caught in the somber riptide of a hope too faint to be believed by anyone less than desperate. And yet, there were so many desperate people stuck there. All of them offered the same platitudes to each other; that this would be the time, this would be the one, that they were protected by this… whatever they had dredged up this time. She hated to admit it to anyone else lest she sound bitter about the whole thing, but they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to protective deities.

‘But,’ she thinks as she steps back from the table. ‘There was someone here. May as well see what they wanted.’

She steps from the back of their low-ceilinged kitchen into the equally low-ceilinged front of the shop. Her mother had taken great pride in creating a warm, inviting atmosphere within the bakery and even now, the smile that comes to Anisah’s face isn’t faked. She enjoys being here, feels comforted by the familiar surroundings. Her eyes catch on the person that must have caused the chime to open, and her smile falters only slightly.

‘Tall’, is the first thing that comes to mind, as well as one of the only. It’s strange; she can see the man’s form, knows that he is large and dark, and yet any features she might have picked out remain hazy and elusive as if they just aren’t registering in her mind. He moves to their little display with a grace she might consider inhuman and points to the baklava with one finger that looks as though it had been stained in pitch and rot. The realization of just what this might be escapes her in the moment, but later that night, it will hit her with the electric chill of ice water slipping through her veins.

This is a god.

Now though, she merely follows his finger. “Baklava? It’s fresh, my mother’s recipe. Would you like some?”

She has the distinct impression of dark green eyes looking her over. Whether it was two or a greater number, she couldn’t say, but something sticks in her head that feels adjacent to a nod.

“Alright, I'll grab some for you.”

Her head hurts. It had begun as a faint twinge when she had first seen the stranger, but now something feels like it’s pressing hard against her skull and behind her eyes. There’s ozone in the air as she grabs a few slices of the sticky dessert, petrichor and wet moss as she tucks them away into enough paper wrapping that the sugar syrup doesn’t seep through. The whole encounter feels nauseating in a way she can’t explain. “Anything else?” she says around the lump in her throat.

The silence feels like a no. Wordlessly, whatever this is (as she was less sure of it being a man with every second that rolled by) gingerly picks up the package. Its other hand reaches out, opens, and a handful of coins come tumbling out. Even at a cursory glance, it's more than needed for the little treat, but when she looks back up again, whatever it was is somehow gone without a second ring of the chime.

“Huh.” It seems appropriate at the moment.

Looking down at the little pile of coins again, she spies something delicately placed on top that hadn’t been there before. Between her fingers, it’s a long stripe of dark black, but in the light, it shimmers in a myriad of colors. Anisah smiles before tucking the feather behind her ear.

She had always loved crows.


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She asks about it the next day when one of the elders comes in their shop for their usual breakfast. The god that they had petitioned the other day, what had it been?

“A harvest god.” the elder sighs around their mug of tea. Anisah frowns as she sets a plate of sweetly spiced breads in front of them with a small thud of ceramic on wood. “Small, but hopefully enough to protect us for a little while. Why, I have…” they pause to take a slow sip of tea. “I have high hopes for this one.”

It doesn’t do much to answer… any of her questions really. Crows don’t feel like symbols of harvest gods, though perhaps tangentially, scarecrows and what not. “And when you petition them, do they normally, say, show up? In town?” She asks as casually as she can. The question isn’t even fully in the air before the elder chuckles quietly.

“Oh, heavens no, dear.” Their tone is like one would use to chide a small child. It grates along Anisah’s nerves. “We ask them, and if they’re generous enough, they grant our request. It’s not proper for those as high as them to walk among us.”

‘Bull.’ Anisah thinks as she leaves the elder to their tea and bread. ‘Whatever it was had bought her baklava. It was in her family shop the previous day, she knows it was.’

“Suppose if they had business in a place though…” she can hear the elder musing quietly as they pick up a little mound of sweetly glazed bread. “Perhaps War walks among the conflict, Chaos on the fringes. Death amongst the ruins.”

“Little morbid today, zaeim.” Anisah calls from the counter. The elder laughs.

“Habibti, you’re the one that asked! Let the elderly muse, I have so little time left with which to impart my wisdom.”

She leans over the counter with a sly smile. “You have a very low bar for what counts as wisdom.” The elder points a finger at her.

“You just wait! One day the crows will take me, and then you’ll miss all this wisdom you ignored.”

That stops her. Her smile fades into a confused frown. “Crows?”

“Yes, crows, are you deaf? I swear, the youth, unwilling to use your ears. I’m saying the crows will take me as they do any of the recently departed. I always saw your eyes glazing over during lessons, now I know you truly had not absorbed much of anything. I’ll have to talk to your parents about remedials, truly shameful, the idea of a young woman your age in class with the young ones -”

Anisah chose to ignore the elder’s continued tirade, lost in thoughts of gods of death and dark winged birds. An idea forms, one that would no doubt earn her more than a disapproving lecture from the elder in her shop. So quietly, Anisah kneads dough and lets the low hum of the elder’s words wash over her.

She’s making baklava.


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It wasn’t very often that she found her way out here. Not anyone did anymore, as the god that was said to reside here, while powerful, held no love in the eyes of her villagers. A beast of feather and rot, he spoke in the stolen last breaths and dying gasps of those he tore from their mortal body. She had heard that he was an immense size yet moved silently among them to trace phantom claws against the delicate lines of their throat, eagerly waiting for the day he would snatch the life from a person’s lungs. They claimed him greedy and impatient, and called him cruel when a child would pass unexplained in the night while they slept. A selfish thief in the way he stole their people from them even when they were disengaged from the conflict.

And yet.

Her feet move quietly over the soft loam beneath her. The path here was soft, lined in vibrantly green moss and plush like the finest feather stuffed pillows. Hardly a sound echoes through the space around her save for the odd flutter of crimson red leaf as it broke and fell from a higher up branch to land at the base of bone white trees. They jut from the earth in rows of skeletal sentinels, like a strange spine of some great creature made more stark and severe against the vibrantly decaying foliage that topped them. It’s his season now, all the better for her current task.

The shrine tucked away and almost hidden under leaf litter and layers of moss was a humble structure. She was sure it had been built ages ago with the way the corners were left to crumble, but he had never seemed to take offense to the decay. ‘It’s rather fitting’ she thinks as she raises a calloused hand to brush against the cracked stone. ‘A decaying shine to the god of death.’. What would happen in hundreds more years when it wore down to nothing? Would others be built, or would the memory of what once was be seeped into this place? Questions for elders far wiser than she. Her purpose remains a bit more immediate.

Kneeling, the hem of her dress tucked underneath her, she set her offerings upon what little surface isn’t covered in moss: a dark feather, iridescent in color and gifted so generously nights before; a single bone, though from what or whom she hadn’t the slightest idea; and a single square of baklava wrapped in patterned cloth. Her regulars had seemed to enjoy it enough, perhaps a god might find it agreeable. At least, she hopes; in her one acquaintance with the god, it was the only thing he had shown a preference for. Seeking an audience with a divine being wasn’t exactly a science, and to seek one with one as cloaked in power and age as Death even less so. As far as she was aware, such contact hadn’t been attempted in her generation.

Folding her hands together, she bows her head against the cool stone.

“Oh divine patron. I seek an audience with you if you would be, well, agreeable. I’ve brought offerings, I hope you’re in the mood for baklava.” She pauses, gathering herself. “God, what had the rites been? Something, something, great and powerful. Please?”

Quiet fills the air around her.

Anisah feels the presence before she sees it. One moment, she was sure she was alone. The next, there was something large filling the space. Breath comes to her a little sharper, the chill of it biting into her lungs on each inhale. Something sickly sweet and wet smelling settles heavy over the area in the time it takes her to scramble back on the worn rocks below her.

The first thing that she notices are sharp tipped claws. Hanging from a hand at eye level, they look to be carved from the smoothest dark rock and blend impossibly into the fuzzy, fetid dark rot covering the curve of the beast's forearm. The way they curl and click against one another is enchanting, the sound they make like a violent wind chime echoing the song of a fall breeze touched too soon by winter chill. She wonders how sharp they might be. How many bodies they had torn through. What they might feel like pressed against the pad of her finger.

The second thing she notices is the silence.

Standing there in front of her, bending close to pick the large square pastry that now seemed so small in his hands, Death remains quiet. Nothing she had dredged up in what little texts they had on this particular deity had prepared her for one so unbothered by a lack of words between them. He had been summoned, yet he simply seemed content to lean back on the large crumbling structure with a sticky pastry in his hand. She didn’t really know what to make of him.

“Hello?” she said. Her voice came out a timid whisper.

The beast of a deity looked down towards her over his little square of baklava. Having each eye focused on her made her feel so much smaller than she already is, but she had come here with a purpose. It’s that purpose that makes her step a little closer and bow with a touch more confidence than she feels.

“I was hoping you could help me.”

That catches his attention. The decorative metal in his mess of hair jingles in a strange sort of discordant song as his head tilts in a silent question. His expression seems almost confused, as though he hadn’t been expecting her to say much of anything else past the offering.

“You see, my village, well. There’s a war. We need protection. The elders, they keep petitioning deities but nothing works. They’re all too small to do anything. I figured…” her resolve drops for just a moment before she steels herself again. “I wanted to ask you.”

She watches the deity’s mouth open and close as he considered the proposition. Gently, the hand holding the pastry sets it aside on the crumbled shrine as a second set of arms tucked neatly under the first pull themselves forward from the rich dark of the feathered mantle draped over his shoulders. Claws clack as he moves his hands through motions she recognizes from some of the elders and those in her village that have trouble hearing; unfortunately, she had never quite taken the time to become fluent.

“I’m sorry, I don’t…” she looks sheepish as she tracked his movements. There’s an otherworldly grace to them that she finds at odds with her knowledge of this particular god. “I know ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and a couple different ones for pastries…”

Death looks down at her. She winces and looks away, embarrassed for only a moment before a quiet, ragged voice scrapes through the silence.

“Why me?”

Anisah stares back for a moment, not entirely convinced that the voice she heard was more than stray leaves against the old stone under her feet. The question hits her like a cold breeze and for a moment, her hands reach up to pull nonexistent furs closer to ward off the chill that stabs past her skin to settle in her bones. If she’s being honest with herself, she’s not entirely sure why this particular god had been the one that she’d decided to petition. Death is hardly loved the way any of the others are; feared but never favored like War could be among soldiers and politicians. Death remains unknowable, unfathomable, and unflinchingly impartial in all matters. She looks up at his form flickering in front of the backdrop of leaves, into the many eyes that seemed a touch more curious than annoyed and takes a leap of faith.

Truth.

“I’m not entirely sure.”

She watches his head tilt like a bird. “You’re not sure?”

“Well, you’re the only option we have left. All they petition now are small harvest gods, tiny things that, no offense, do us no good. My community is dying, as you would know, and more will die if nothing is done. I just… I wanted to try the last option we had.”

“And what would you have me do?” His head stays tilted; his green eyes trained unblinking on her.

“Help us. I’ll take whatever assistance you’re willing to give.”

“Nothing more? Nothing personal? ‘Anything I'm willing to give’ is a horribly vague request. I don't think you have much idea what you’re asking for.”

She looked up at him then, still unsure of how this meeting was going, but a quick flash of blue from her side causes her eyes to quickly flick towards it. One of his hands is ringed in soft, neon blue in a pattern half formed and waiting to truly flare. She had heard of a god that lingered at the edge of important deals and bindings, waiting patiently for a moment to snap them closed. He would take them to tuck away wherever such things were kept and force the two parties together in an oath near impossible to break. The sight gave her hope, gave her fire to fuel her purpose here.

“Just the safety of my people. I will work with you to end this war, and you will do everything you can to keep my people safe from the violence. You can still take them when their natural time comes of course, I know some rather old codgers that must be a bit past their date.” She grumbled the last of it, hopefully low enough that he couldn’t have heard.

As soon as she says it though, she feels a shift above her. Crows that she hadn’t noticed coming in now crowd the branches above, and all of them open their mouths in a flutter of cackling caws. Wings flap in a discordant flutter, all of them together sounding more akin to an ocean wave than any kind of bird. She watches them for a long moment, unsure as to why they were here now, before motion from the old god in front of her draws her eyes back. One dark hand covers his mouth and his eyes are crinkled in something she recognizes but can hardly believe she was seeing.

He was laughing.

“Fine.” The birds cackle one last time before they fall silent. Their laughter is replaced by his creaking words. “Fine, I hadn’t come expecting anything like this, but…” he holds out a hand. The neon blue crackles like lightning across his fingers. Gone is the soft glow from before; now, the light snaps like a dog ready to strike. Her own hand is sure as she grabs his, her only thought at the contact, ‘Oh. It’s soft’.

Just as quickly as the light burned and snapped at her own hand, it was gone. She shakes the invisible remnants off her and towards the stone beneath her. It was always a strange business, dealing with gods, but she could have sworn that there had been none of the softly fading opalescence on the town elder’s hand with every new pact and summon. With the fading comes the realization that she has no idea how to talk to this nearly-eldest god standing three times her height and still chewing on the tiny squares of baklava.

“Do you have a name?”

He looks down at the question, expression clear on his face. The question feels almost silly in its banality, but she can think of little else to fill the quiet. That, and she can’t just keep calling him Lord Death.

“What may I call you?”

“Anything you like.”

She considers. “Samael.”

She watches the name settle over him, something monumental tucked into a moment as mundane as another leaf falling to the ground.

“Samael then.”

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She had meant to take him back with her to her village, but it had seemed as though the god had had other plans. Walking alongside him now, she struggles to keep up with his long strides through the leaf littered forest floor.

“I’m sorry, but the village is the opposite way.”

“Mm.” he hums back at her. Her face falls into a frown. Elder god or no, the vagaries were getting to be a touch frustrating. Leaves around them flutter upwards as he folds himself in half beside her, his gait more similar now to some massive cat. Certainly strange, she thinks as she watches muscle shift and snap. “If you are to fight for me, you best do so properly.”

Anisah feels the indignation rise in her. “I can fight just fine.”

“You can fight.” His head tips, moss falling from matted clumps of hair and feathers.

“Thank you.”

“Not well.”

The huff escapes her louder than she had meant it to. Her hands knew a blade, knew what one felt like in her hands as she cut into straw dummies with the rest of her village. If she hadn’t yet felt the weight of a life in her hands, what of it? Violence was violence, same as any other. A sword in a dummy and a sword in a person was still the same sword.

“I fight the same as any in my village.”

“Not well.” he repeats.

She would swat him were they any more familiar. As it is, her hand stills at her side, aches from the restraint. “Well,” she draws out the word, takes it back from him. “What would you have me do?”

Death, now Samael, stills next to her. Above them, crows watch from branches eternally losing their shade, all eerily quiet. “I wish to honor our pact. This is what I’m willing to give.”

The hand that slams into the ground beneath them shudders the earth and staggers Anisah into a stumble. It's only through a grace she normally lacks that she keeps herself upright to watch Death’s dark hand disappear into the dirt and debris. Violently, he claws his way down; if she were to guess, she’d say he stops at about the depth of a grave before he looks just a touch satisfied. Slower now, as though clutching something delicate, he withdraws the hand from the hole. Clawed fingers curl around dark, rusted steel.

“This is for you.”

He holds the sword out. As it is, it's more a long strip of long faded metal. She can see where time has chipped away at the edge and rendered it long useless for any sort of fighting. How this piece of… well, shit, could be useful in any sense to her is beyond her imagination. Any rolling pin from her bakery would have suited her needs better. Regardless, it's a gift from a god. And with one such as Death, she finds herself trusting his expertise.

She takes it.

There’s warmth against her palm as her fingers wrap tight around the grip, something just enough to chase away the lingering chill of Death. Dirt caking the worn leather grip flakes away, the rust evaporating as she gives an experimental swing. Lighter, that’s what she’s noticed. The sword feels lighter in her hand as it cuts through the air. No longer is it the heavy clump of metal and cracked gems, but a sleek, ebony blade. It’s edge rivals that of any masterwork weapon she’s seen crafted by the blacksmiths of her village and it's with a half-delighted sense of wonder that she pulls it close to peer more clearly into the various scrolling adornments that make up the pommel and handles. Any thanks she may have feel insignificant in the reality of such a fine gift, but to offer anything otherwise feels even worse.

“Thank you, truly.” Her eyes catch his. “Where did you even get this?”

“A monster is allowed claws.” He says. “I just have a more preferred set.”

Her own reply is thoughtful as she continues to examine the blade. “You’re not a monster.”

Death shakes his head and sits back on legs still catlike, settling his mishmash of limbs in positions more comfortable. “When is a monster not a monster?”

It’s not truly a riddle, but Anisah hums as if in thought. Thought isn’t necessarily a lie; there is truly quite a bit to think about. Her head is crowded with images of swords pulled from dust, of her village back where she left it, of bread to bake and sweets to fry, of old gods and now what makes a deity of death more than a beast.

She doesn’t have very many answers.


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It only occurs to her when they reach the edge of the village that an elder god such as Samael is rather… noticeable amongst mortals. He still towers over her as he lopes along at her side on legs that can’t quite seem to figure out if they’re more suited to walk on two or four, wings shifting ever so slightly as they trail behind them both on the ground like he can’t quite be bothered to pick them up. If an unknowable form such as himself were to simply walk into her home village, she imagines the god would suddenly be a bit too busy with his own domain to concentrate on their real purpose.

“Can we stop?”

Samael stops.

“Fantastic.” She looks through the dappled light of the edge of the tree line towards the first line of homes at the boundary of her village. The evening is fading, painting the top of buildings and neighbors in magnificent warm hues. Anisah looks out over well-maintained gardens and small children, sighs, and decides to simply just barrel into possible offense of an god. “You cannot enter the town looking the way you do.”

“Ah.” Sam tilts his head, the metal tied around ropes of matted hair and moss jingling. “You would prefer me look like you.”

“Is that possible? You did look different when you visited me, so I assume you can at least change your form.”

“It is. However, I have not ever… looked mortal. I find it difficult.”

“So we’ll just try some things out. You don’t have to look too far off, just…” she considers. “Mortal. Here.” She circles him, looks the mass of him up and down. “Obviously you would be tall. Dark like me, long hair- may I touch?” she stops her hand just as it reaches out from a thick chunk of hair.

Sam nods, sinks a little lower to better allow her. “You may.”

“You should keep the gold. Adds a little nobility.” Her thumb traces over the embossed designs on a particularly large golden bead. Its beautiful, she thinks: images of birds in flight, of delicate feathers, and intricate eyes. It doesn’t escape her that she’s most likely the only mortal to ever know the pattern on the gold in Deaths’s hair. “You could say, oh, that you’re a general come into town. I could braid your hair.”

“What do generals wear?” Sam’s eyes blink at her, his tone light and curious. “I’ve only ever seen them when their attire is more ruined.”

“Armor. Fine robes. Can you do different clothing?” Sam nods at her question. “Great. Lets say… gold and deep purple, almost black. And a sword.”

“I dislike swords.”

“Something else then. But it needs to be ornate. Would you,” she steps back from him, allows him space. “Would you like me to turn around while you change?”

That same avian cackling from before comes from higher up, though softer this time. “If you would like. Mortals enjoy surprises, do they not?”

“They do, on occasion.” She smiles ruefully as she stares up at a large crow above her. A gorgeous bird, glossy feathers, color shifting in the light as the light slowly fades from day into night. It feels apt, in a way. Death was something considered close to carrion as well, and yet up close, he was no more monster than anything else she had encountered. Perhaps the word was more… uncared for. His hair was matted, but that was nothing a brush and oil couldn’t work out. His form was covered in feather and moss, but that could be lovely in the way a quiet forest was lovely. A few extra features, but those were no less natural to him than her eyes and limbs were to her. A little care, and-

“You may look if you like. Am I palatable now?”

His voice is different. His voice is different, and she can do little more than stare at the now-a-man god in her midst. Hair now smoothly curled hangs over his shoulders nearly longer than she wears hers and down the darkly polished armor covering him. The beads are still there, smaller and more numerous now that a majority of them are no longer hidden by a wild mane of forest debris. Skin dark as the earth beneath them, eyes green and flecked through with that same gold, and robes the rich purple of nobility; he stands in front of her now as the finest looking man she’s ever seen in her life.

“Anisah?” his head tilts to the side when the silence goes on just a bit too long. “Is it not correct?”

That snaps her out of it. “No! No, no, it’s… it’s perfect. Absolutely perfect. I was just surprised is all.”

Sam preens. On any other bird, the soft smile and straightening out of his posture might have been some puff of feathers and a smug squawk. “A surprise.” He nods to himself, seemingly pleased. “Mortals enjoy surprises.”

“On occasion, bird.”

The nickname slips out of her faster than she can close her mouth and oh, how she wishes she could take the word back. Death stares at her as if trying to puzzle something monumental out, as though every ounce of cosmic knowledge and every unknowable moment he’s spent alive has now culminated into answering for himself why this impertinent mortal has referred to him as ‘bird’. Anisah stares back, biting her lip, but standing tall with the half-baked remembrance that theirs is a binding deal and he cannot kill her for a simple slip of the tongue.

“Ah.” Sam eventually hums. “A nickname. Bird.” The word is rolled over, said slow and thoughtful like he’s still deciding if he likes it. “It fits. Motherhood says such things on occasion to me, says I should ‘involve myself in the customs of mortals’ more often. That it helps to learn what comforts them so as to not frighten them.” He shakes his head. “I’ve no need to be anything to them. I just am.” That crow above them squawks again in a harsh chuckle, but this time, Sam echoes it quietly. “Bird.”

“I don’t think it could hurt to learn a few things, especially now. You must pass as human even if generals are allowed a bit more leeway for eccentricity.”

“Like what?”

“What to pass as human? Well…” she considers. The core of what makes her human isn’t something she often thinks about, and with the question now posed and a god waiting for an answer, she finds herself fumbling for something to say that sounds even vaguely intelligent. But what? What could she tell this god, this imposing figure standing in front of her that he has not yet heard? Death deals in mortality day in and day out, there must be…

Death. She had forgotten. Death stands in front of her with his experiences limited only to the final moments of a human life. He has seen only morning, only grief, perhaps more violence than her whole village will ever see. It’s a little revelation that has her smiling sadly; he has never experienced the opposite end.

“I’ll show you once we get there. For now, you’re doing fine.”


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She treats him to baklava.

It’s really all she can think of to start. Fresh from her parents shop after a barrage of questions about the (‘very attractive’, her mother had murmured to her while Sam was distracted) man at her side, the baklava rests in a little napkin as Sam holds it and picks off bits to eat as they walk.

“It seems like so much more now.” He murmurs after another bite of sticky pastry.

“It’s because you’re small now, bird.” She laughs. “Hold here, I need to grab something. I’ll be only a moment.” Sam watches her disappear into the brightly colored fabric that covers a nearby shop’s door, finds a nearby bench to sit, and waits.

It’s certainly… interesting, he thinks. This village is the same as it had been when he arrived that first time, lured in by the scent of something sweet and the impending cloud of war that hung over every city these days, and yet now? Now the streets are crowded. There are shopkeepers moving from stall to person, shouting things with enticing goods in their hands. There are workers with the tools of their trade slung over their backs, laughing amongst themselves as they stop into a restaurant for an evening meal. Lanterns flare alive as they’re lit to ward off the evening’s dark, and mothers herd their children in wild little groups between lines of flickering lights. He watches them curiously; they laugh so bright, scream in what takes him a moment to identify as joy, cry and run and bounce from each other to their mother and back again. It reminds him of the way his crows sometimes interact with each other.

“Little birds,” he hums quietly to himself.

“They are, aren’t they?”

The voice at his side isn’t Anisah, but its recognizable all the same. Motherhood wears the same face as always; her hair done back in a braid with frazzled little flyaways escaping the neat line of it, robes long and comfortable, sleeves tied up with cord. She settles next to him, and he passes one of the pastry squares her direction in silent offering. “Oh, thank you. Haven’t had this in ages.” She smiles delighted at the little treat before breaking it apart with the same care he had been. “I also haven’t seen you in what seems like ages, Death.”

“I’ve acquired another name, if you like.”

“Oh yes please. What is it?”

“Samael. A mortal gave it to me.”

Her gaze goes from amused to something more searching. There are a million questions there all wrapped up in eyes tipped in lines from an excess of joy, and he figures he may as well answer one of them. “I’m in a pact.” He raises the hand not holding his pastries. Afterimages of blue flare in the evening light, the effect no more noticeable than any cluster of fireflies.  Sam hears more than sees the soft noise of surprise from her as he takes another bite of baklava.

“Samael, that’s-“ she pauses, reconsiders her thought. “I hadn’t thought you entered into pacts.”

“I normally don’t. But this one… this one intrigued me. She wants to keep this village safe, summoned me with honest intention and humble gifts. There’s no pretension here nor ill intent and I find…”

“Samael!” Anisah’s voice this time, smiling as she exits the shop with richly purple and gold ribbons in her hand. “I did promise to braid all that hair!”

“I find I enjoy a bit of honest attention.” Sam continues his thought even as Anisah navigates the crowd toward them. “I don’t think I’ve ever had mortals treat me as anything other than Death.”

“And she treats you as though you were a man.” Karen nods.

“It has been less than a day and yet she buys me trinkets I could have easily made myself should she have asked. I don’t think it even occurred to her to do so. Anisah,” He shuffles closer to Karen as the woman in question draws close. “This is-“

“A friend of Samael’s.” Karen finishes for him and holds out a hand. “Karen, Motherhood, whichever you prefer.”

With only a slight hesitation, Anisah takes the god’s hand in her own. “Anisah, my lady. It is truly a pleasure. The blessings you’ve given us have been monumental in their worth.”

“Oh, a charmer, Samael!” Karen’s laugh is bright, echoed in the joyful giggles of a new mother and her tiny child across the plaza. “Keep her.”

“I intend to follow through on the pact, yes.”

“So literal, bird. It’s a phrase. Now turn for me and let me put these ribbons to good use. It’s been ages since I’ve braided hair this lovely.”


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In the end, it’s hardly a trial to convince the town that Samael is some general from the front lines looking for volunteers. His bearing, his regality, the dark smudges of kohl Anisah had smudged around his eyes at the last moment made it easy for even the town elders to look past Sam’s oddities and into what they wanted to believe he was: someone capable and there to help. They saw in him the war at their doorstep, yes, but also one who they could trust to see them through it. Sons and daughters alike found swords not yet rusted over to raise in solidarity and in the in between moments where Anisah was off to say goodbye to her family, he had a chance to wonder.

What exactly was he doing here?

The immediate answer was easy. He was here to assist Anisah, to see this war through with her and her village on the other side safe and whole. But beyond that, beyond the deal, what had prompted him to come down and accept the deal? The more he looks into it, the more he finds that he cannot say why he’s done this. He’s changed himself for a mortal at her behest, and he’s entering into a war with a very clear side which goes against every rule that he’s ever held dear to himself. It should feel wrong. It should feel like he’s committing some grave error that must be immediately corrected and yet he cannot truly find it in himself to care. Is it wrong?

‘No,´ says a voice not his and yet not entirely unfamiliar in his mind. “You should go. Indulge a little, join your siblings.”

“They’re not my siblings.” He murmurs aloud. They may have sprung fully formed together at near the same time, but they were no more kin to him than he to an ant.

“You deny what you are. So interesting this new direction you’re taking.” This time he catches pale eyes in the dark, watching. Of course. Sam huffs.

“Be gone. You have no business here.”

“I don’t think a monster has much authority on what I should and should not be doing.” That voice, obvious now, fades from his mind and into the air in front of him as Chaos steps out from nothing. “Where is your current master? Are you left aimless without the little mortal?”

“I’ve no time for your jabs. You know your talents are useless here.” Sam waves a hand. “I know there are far more interesting places for you to be than here. War craves your company more and more these days, why not bother them instead of myself?”

Chaos takes a long moment to drag his pale eyes slowly over Death’s near form. Every inch is seemingly scrutinized, and the expression he makes at the end seems mildly unimpressed. “I’m trying something new, surely you understand. It seems to be the age for that. No, War is doing what they’re meant to do, I’ve no need to visit and lightly correct them back into their domain like I do with you. You’ve strayed, Death.”

“I’ve strayed? Quiet instruction isn’t your purview either, don’t lecture me on the value of a domain-“

“I’m simply worried for you.” Chaos paces a circle around him with his hands folded behind his back like some posture perfect high advisor. Sam hates the look of him, hates the way he dredges up the feeling from the forgotten wreck of whatever heart he might have once had. Dark fingers tighten around the long staff at his side, his divine weapon hidden in simple dark grained wood. “Worried for what you may become. Mortals are so impressionable, their forms not as guarded. What are you letting in without even realizing? You invite temptation into a domain that is supposedly impartial.” He sighs. “Even now, you seem to favor this one little town. Protection? From Death? Do you even realize what that woman has conned you into?”

“Enough!” Sam turns on the man with teeth bared. This close, he can see fully the pale nothingness in Chao’s eyes, how they seem almost clear in the flickering torchlight. Chaos never flinches. “Enough. You will leave this place, go back to your games and half cooked excuses for misery and you will leave me to my own business. Understood?”

“Understood, Death, understood.” Chaos takes a step back. “I care for your wellbeing, you know this.”

“Care somewhere else.”

“Already so testy.”  His voice fades back into mere thoughts as Chaos takes a step back into the hidden expanse of his own domain. “Do be careful about this.”

He’s gone then. Sam huffs annoyed at the warning in his absence. Chaos may be gone, but he always tends to linger long after like some persistent fungus, words left to rattle around in the skulls of those he deigns talk to.

“Insufferable.” Sam says to no one. Chaos had had the nerve to sound smug. Always smug, always plotting; he wants the deity no where near the mortal he’s made a pact with. Chaos had no place near him and yet seemed fascinated by him and all others who took watch other the grimmer sounding domains. Looms like a vulture he does, Sam thinks as he strides towards where he knows the volunteers will be gathered. Where he will rally them with Anisah’s help, give them weapons he knows will not break and armor that will carry them as far as they are willing to go. He will pack them under dark tents like the crows that take shelter under his wings in rain, and he will curse them with the knowledge of what blood looks like when it is spilled. It seems a fair trade, he thinks. Protection for a curse. A blessing in exchange for a pain that will not scar them physically, but scar them nonetheless.

He takes them to the front, teaches them the violent edge of his domain, and watches as they cut down anyone who would see them harm. He watches Anisah charge into battle at the head of it all with the sword he gifted her in hand. She leads soldiers as though she had been born to do it, tempers their pain in the nights after combat with soothing words and cups of tea. She is more to them than just a general. Anisah becomes a friend, a confidant, someone to lean on in times of distress and Sam is left to watch all this unfold from a distance.

It's a curious thing. Curious, all of this is so curious to him. It’s a thousand new things all wrapped up and played out in the distance. He watches it all and waits patiently to understand.


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He had known that sooner or later, entrenched in the conflict as they had become, that this would happen. Sam is at their front as his undying soldiers march on, Anisah at his side with ebony sword in hand. There’s a shift; the sky crackles with lightning across a blood red sky, and Samael knows exactly who’s domain they have all crossed into.

War cut a sharp figure, even at a distance. They stand tall and resolute behind swathes of soldiers, uncaring of who they stood behind so long as they pushed forward. Their hair a choppy mess of blood soaked black, their eyes a cold grey ringed in faint green, they look towards the pair of them with a sharp toothed glee.

"Brother! And here I thought you were too good for us. What brings you to join us degenerates in my glorious domain?" They step forward, hooved feet picking past the dead and dying, not caring for a little viscera between the toes.

"Business, War. I told you not to call me that."

"Oh, chatty. And this new form, what's the occasion?" They draw near to circle around Sam. This close, War comes only to Sam's shoulders, though it's certainly not a height to mock. "Let me guess…" Their eyes catch Anisah. Thin lips curl into a sly smile. "I didn't realize you had it in you. All those ignored invitations to parties, all that insistence of duty, and yet here you are. Rearranging bone for a mortal. You're just. Like. Us." They click their forked tongue with each word.

Sam’s answering scowl is cold. "No one is like you. Not even the other two."

"Come now!” War jumps back with a ringing laugh onto the torso of a cooling corpse. The movements are dance-like, merry like a court jester with the coiled power of a big cat. “I'm just having a little fun, brother. We're created for a purpose, you're grouped in with the rest of us for a reason. Let loose a little. Shake the stick out of your ass.” Their gaze is piercing past the smile that doesn’t quite meet their eyes. Sam watches their fingers tighten around the long, thin blade at their side. “You might find that you like it.”

“I’ve no need for the violence that you find so much joy in.” One large iridescent wing flares wide to tuck the mortal back behind him. “If you could restrain yourself for a moment and call all this off, I may finally find something pleasant about you to enjoy.”

“Oh, mortals enjoy me plenty. There’s a tide to ride, don’t you know? Something brewing, something changing, something shifting. The other two understand just as well as I, you’re the only one who hasn’t quite caught the drift.”

“Something shifting?”

“You’re oblivious, but not that oblivious. All we’re missing is you, brother! Don’t you feel restrained as you are now? Same old, same old?” They tilt their head, sharp horizontal pupils staring at the two of them. “Don’t you want to see what they’re afraid of?”

“I’ve no need for any of the games you, Chaos, and the others play. I’m here on business.” an echo reverberates through the word, underlining it with a thinning patience. War simply grins that too sharp smile. Unknowable, they’re all unknowable, and War’s teeth cage something far worse inside than their chosen domain.

“Just because you cannot see the pieces doesn’t mean you’re not playing, brother.”


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He had brought them all back, safe as promised. It had taken feathers from him, his wings now a tattered mess of patchwork moss and viscera as they knitted themselves back together, but the pact remains whole and unbroken. Anisah had taken each of her soldiers with the care of a friend and neighbor, and he was left here on the outskirts to tend his own wounds out of sight. No one could kill a god, especially not himself. It was a rule they all knew, one they all held as the one immutable fact of their many nebulous existences.

A god cannot bleed.

A god cannot truly die.

Certainly they can tear at each other, Sam thinks as he pulls out feathers too damaged to be anything but in the way for others trying to grow back. They all tore at each other like petulant children when one will butts up against another. But to make a god bleed? To manage to pull the essence of what kept them together to the surface and let it drip discarded down to the mortal earth? To kill any one of them?

Unthinkable. ‘You could.’ Unthinkable.

War has rattled him. War and Chaos and all their terrible pawns flit across his thoughts like the flies that bother the horses. Dark hands tear another feather from the wing draped over his shoulder a little harder than needed, but he cannot feel it past the racing thoughts in his head. His head raises then as he tosses away the latest feather to let it rot against the earth, and he can see her some distance away between the tents. Head bowed low as she talks to one of their men, Anisah is ringed in flickering torchlight with the sword he had gifted her still clutched in her hand.

He… He couldn’t identify the feeling settling in his chest, tucked away behind the bone white cage of his ribs. It had come unbidden to him at some point, the whole of it unfurling like some great beast of claw and fang emerging from a den after a long winter. It had waited, ever-present, until the spring heat could thaw it from its slumber. The dark tips of his own clawed hand curled over the spot mortals might keep a heart. It felt… warm. He felt warm. Great beast that he was, the thaw finally seemed to come. With it…

No. No, he wasn’t supposed to be feeling whatever this may be. His lip curled in displeasure, sharply pointed fangs baring as he growled low at some unseen foe. No, this was wrong. Some trick perhaps, some, some… his fingers tug and dig into the flesh underneath them hard enough to draw the thick, black ichor that he kept inside. Green eyes flick down to watch it drip slowly under his nails and down into the thick pelts and armor he wore. It wasn’t the bright fleeting red of mortals, so why? Why was he plagued with this incessant new feeling that insisted on crawling up his throat and stealing the air from nonexistent lungs whenever Anisah walked close? Anisah with her kind smile, with her burning resolve, with her determination to solve a problem others were too coward to face? That long hair all tied away in braids and buns; he could almost feel it fall like water between his fingers as he ran a gentle hand through. Dark on dark, it would wind past claw and bone as he traced soft patterns over her skin; his hand set against the curve of her hip, pulling her in -

His hand pulls back as if burnt. His eyes are wide. What…? What had that been? Where had that come from? It was cloying, whatever it was; worked its way up to his throat to choke him with a sweet sort of suffocation. Breath that came so seldom now escaped him in slow, shuddering gasps. Feathers settle from how they had puffed up in muted shock leaving him here in stiff and silent confusion with the cold dread of uncertainty seeping into his bones. This...this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. None of it. He’d never had a reason to dredge up such a mortal concept as feeling; it was anathema to any sort of notion of fairness, of impartiality in his work, in his divine purpose of pulling souls from those that had passed on.

All of this, all this because of one simple mortal. One soul has him undone. Massive, now half feathered wings curl tighter and drape over his shoulder in a dark, iridescent waterfall. He needs to remove himself from this.

‘I had told you, beast. You wear their form, you carry their weakness. What is the harm of… indulging in all of it?’

Sam cannot do this now, cannot deal with pale eyes and paler skin taunting him from a place folded away and unreachable. He rises from where he had been sitting, intent of going anywhere but where he had been.

‘Your siblings have.’ “Not my siblings.” ‘They’ve freed themselves from what shackles had been imposed when they were made.’ “We have rules for a reason!” ‘You don’t have to. You hold yourself so tightly. War, Pestilence, Famine. Death is the only one still clinging to something so outdated as impartiality, and even then, your hold is getting rather… lax.”

“It’s a contract!” he whirls, teeth sharp and bared at nothing. Dark wings flare wide, the bones of them visible past dripping rot and crusting moss covering wounds. “Just because you cannot understand the concept of your word being worth something doesn’t make it my. Problem.”

‘Your justifications for this most recent era are getting rather thin. When has any other god asked anything of you other than your domain? When have you ever been wanted as something more? You’re Death, dearest beast.” It’s a mistake to stand still while Chaos circles, Sam knows this. And yet. And yet he does, breathing harsh and angry, stoked into stillness by the fury threatening to bubble out of him by this god’s taunts. He feels the faint trace of fingertips under his chin too late, the static nothingness and soft pressure pulling his gaze down to look into silver eyes and a self-satisfied smile.

“Act like it.”

His world narrows to a pinprick. Roaring blood, pounding in his ears, chill to his bones as the shock settles in like a wave blanketing the shore. The feeling fades, sucking back into the earth to leave the chasming, yawning expanse of only his anger bare and raw. It arced hot like a fresh wound rubbed raw. It punched deep as though he had been speared by his own weapon, rang through his mind like a horrid, offkey choir of the violently deceased.

And this. This is why they had warned him. Whoever ‘they’ were in the beginning when the world was new and the energy crackling between them was raw and unpolished.

“You are not to feel.” he murmurs now. How different he had looked then, how different everything had been new. “Lest you’re swept into their passions.” ‘Passions’, he thinks now, form so different in the present age though intent bleeds into his core to crack open the lock tooth and claw had been tucked neatly behind.

“Passions.” Teeth click sharp as his jaw snaps shut. The word seems so small now in the harsh echo of violence ringing in his ears. He had kept his word, he thinks as green eyes narrow at the still moving corpses in front of him and past the fading form of Chaos. He had been the one always controlled, never bending or breaking, always the steady one. Always, always, always.

Dark nails dig into soft palms as his fingers curl tight and draw trails of dark ichor that drip into already blood-soaked fields. Always. Always the one.

Always contained.

The secret keeper was allowed anger and annoyance. He had been one of the first to discover the passions of the mortal world, perhaps because of his domain.

War was allowed pleasure in their violence.

Fortune danced his way through lust and joy, Motherhood took pride in each little child.

Others were allowed and yet he? Stuck. Drowning now thanks to his inhuman restraint and swept away in the mortal feeling of want cresting over him like some inevitable tide. And it… he takes a shuddering breath. The feathered ruff around his neck ruffles with the motion.

It feels… his eyes close. His body is still in spite of the chaos around him. There was an urgency, but this? He could slow to savor this. The rough hewn bark of his staff presses its pattern against the pads of his now pitch dark fingers. It feels… good. It all feels good. The screams, the scent of blood mixing with the wet petrichor hovering in the air, the pained voices around him, the almost overwhelming feeling of being in the epicenter of a tragedy, of being on the cusp of something himself…

One step further. Throw himself in with the rest, drink in the rich intoxicating power inherent in the more gruesome edge of his domain… The blade of his weapon flashes as it catches the bright edge of soft lighting overhead. He leans forward toward the carnage, heavy feet dragging claws through the dirt. Something not of him (though familiar: pale hair, pale skin, pale eyes the color of nothing at all) leans heavy, whispers intoxicating promises of pleasure through puddles of spilled blood and spread chaos and he… all he would have to do is give in.

‘Give in.’

He wants to giv-

“Samael.”

A voice catches him. Gold in his hair chimes as he turns, soft imitations of the fighting further on. There in the doorway is Anisah, her silhouette framed in the curtains of the tent behind her. His thoughts are broken and caught under the sharp knife of surprise. Quiet hangs between them. Caught as he is in the crosshairs of her concern, he can do little but stand as life in the camp goes on, most settling in for the night as the sounds of fighting wane in the distance. He can see their tents, the soft glow of a handful of lanterns lighting those of the still awake. Anisah shouldn't be one of them, should still be recovering even though he knows their pact protects her. And yet.

The silence lasts a touch too long. Anisah sighs. “You should join me for tea.” she says, her voice firm. His eyes meet hers and hold. That same cresting want surges again to curl around his heart like a cat contended.

He feels. He wants.

He steps forward towards her. The adornments in his hair glitter in the low torchlight; less now an imitation of steel on steel, more something indulgent. The slight pressure on his arm is no longer his own nails digging deep, but a concerned hand lightly guiding him as he ducks beneath the fabric doorway. Her calloused fingers are something to be savored as his body registers the soft touch and revels in the drag as she walks away further into the tent.

“Not many knowingly invite one of us in for something so trivial as tea.” His voice is a low murmur as he follows her. It's cozy here, as cozy as a military tent can be; bits of comfort are tucked away between troop movements and weapons. The sword he had gifted her is there, laid out on a side table. His eyes catch sight of it as she breezes past to fetch her tea set.

“And yet I am. I find a warm cup calms the nerves.”

“Nerves?” he blinks. “What makes you believe I am suffering from… nerves?” Nerves were a profoundly human affliction, he didn’t-

“Yes, nerves.” Anisah turns, her hands busy with two cups of tea freshly poured. “The pacing outside gave it away. Now sit, you old bird.”

He grumbles as he sits. “Old bird.” he scoffs, sipping his tea. Something must show on his face. Anisah smiles smugly.

“Good, yeah? It’s a blend from home. I would have eventually recommended it to you if you weren’t so stuck on that spice blend.”

“I can’t have preferences?”

“Of course you may. I’m simply saying it may be worth branching out every so often.”

He sighs instead of responding. This night is already so strange, he hardly needs life lessons from this mortal.

“So what then?” Anisah asks after a quiet moment. “What’s eating you so much that you’re pacing outside my tent?”

His response is quick. “Nothing of importance.”

She’s even quicker with a glare. “That’s bull and we both know it.” From the moment we’ve met, you’ve been nothing but placidly indifferent to most everything. I know I'm simply some… some pact-bound mortal you’re semi-obligated to keep watch over, but I had considered us friends enough. You could tell me if you like.”

Large hands curl a little tighter around the delicate ceramic cup. In his mind, there’s a voice screaming protests to her claim that she’s ‘simply anything’. “You’re not… I’m not bothered. I’m perfectly fine.” Her eyes narrow. He sighs. “Fine. I’m bothered. But it’s hardly anything of importance. Nothing to bother you with.”

“What if I want to be bothered? Feelings are worth something, especially if they’re not letting you rest.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” The honesty slips from him with her offered sincerity. Anisah’s eyes across from him pin him patiently as he gathers the words. “I don’t imagine it would make much sense.”

“I find I possess a bit more imagination than the average person.”

“And still.” Sam shakes his head. “Fine then. I find myself in the precarious position of… feeling.”

“Feeling…?” Anisah prompts.

Sam shakes his head. “No, that’s it.”

“Just… feeling? In general?”

“Mm.” he nods.

“Well,” she starts slow, as if explaining something to someone infinitely younger than himself. “Feeling isn’t necessarily something to stress yourself over.”

“It is when you’re supposedly impartial in these sorts of matters. I’ve no… animosity towards the practice.” He waves a hand as if brushing any concerns aside. “No, I’ve just… it’s hard to explain."

Anisah sips her tea across from him. “Try me.”

And try he does. “It’s like a burning. Here.” His hand settles over his chest where his nails had earlier settled.

“A burning?”

“Mm. That’s as close as I can get. Like…” He tilts his head, thinking. “Something clawing at me from the inside.”

“Clawing at you.”

“Yes. It’s in my chest, stealing my breath, I can’t think sometimes past just… the ache of it. Gods don’t bleed, but it certainly feels as though I must be from the inside. I feel anger, joy, a need to simply tear something apart at times but there’s that one,” he sighs in his chair, sets the cup of tea on the table in from of him and leans back. “There’s one I cannot name. And it only seems to shift into something more bearable when I’m, well. When I’m around you.”

“Does it now?”

Her gaze is appraising as she looks at him over the table. It’s considering, yes, but there’s something else there that he cannot quite place but warms him regardless. Just her focus on him is enough to steal a bit of nonexistent breath from him, enough to draw his focus like a moth to a light. Brown eyes catch green, the depth of them enough to keep him in his seat as she rises to circle the table. He had thought more recently of her hand against him, and now? Now he no longer has to wonder. Her fingers are indeed soft when they trace up the soft dark of his near mortal form, the gentle trail of them leaving a path that lingers almost electric against his skin. The feeling of it clogs his thoughts, scatters them like a strong breeze to leaves; it's immense, it's nothing at all, it's a sky painted over with stars and the soft warmth of a single lit candle all folding together and choking him from the inside out.

“This is… similar.” Is the most he can manage.

“Oh, is it?” Her expression is almost purposefully vague, but Sam can see just the smallest hint of a smile creep onto her face. “I think I may have an idea of what plagues you then.”

“...Oh?”

“Yes.” It is most certainly a smile on her face as her fingers come to cradle underneath his chin, her body leaned over him and in space no mortal has ever dared to enter willingly. “Because I dare say I’ve been having the same problem recently.”

If he believed her touch was soft, it has nothing on the gentle press of her lips to his. It was hardly strange in practice; he had seen many embraces of the sort in the fading moments before he was able to take a soul, many goodbyes, more tears and desperation than whatever this is. This though, this is something far sweeter. His hands ache to hold her as if they’ve never known any other purpose; a moment later, he finds the decision made for him when she melts against him. Her own hand, previously gentle, guides his against her hip with an almost impatient insistence before carding through the thick hair at the nape of his neck.

“I think,” Sam hums as they break apart. “I think I like this very much.” Anisah grins at him, impossibly fond in the flickering torch light, the camp quiet around them. Sam decides he’s never seen anything more lovely. Never felt anything as lovely, never craved the soft weight of anything quite as much as Anisah over his thighs. The whole of it is a balm to the sharp lash of what had occupied him so much earlier, like mint on a hot summer day. He revels in the satisfaction of it, sighing as he leans back further into the chair. This must be it, he thinks with his hand held over the curve of her hip, this must be what he had felt and craved and nearly carved from his own chest.

Anisah rolls her hips over his. He reevaluates.

“Gods above.”

“Good?”

She knows it’s good. Her smile is sly, as though Sam’s the one caught. He supposes he is in this instance, pinned underneath Anisah as she moves.

“Of course, of course, this…” She cuts him off there with her mouth over his, unbothered by the teeth he can’t bring himself to smooth. Smaller hands push at him, fell him easier than they have any right to, and he finds them both tipped out from the chair as he tumbles back from the enormity of it all.

“Samael, are you alright-”

“Please, please don’t stop. Whatever this is.” He’s grabbing at her as she pulls away to check on him, his fingers tangling with hers in a hurried sort of desperation. What he wants, what he needs, it all tangles together in a half-formed thought that begins and ends with her on top of him. This is it; this is what he had been on the precipice of. How he had lived without this strangling the breath from him is a mystery he’ll unravel after. “Anisah, please.”

“Calm, bird, calm.” Her thumb slides over his cheek, just enough to pull him back. The light from the lanterns around them coats her in their soft glow. She’s radiant when she smiles down at him and for a moment, the light doesn’t hurt. “I’ll take care of you, alright?”

Sam believes in nothing more at that moment. He nods.

“Oh, you lovely man.” Anisah’s fingers trace up his chest, the look in her eyes far more adoring than any worshiper he had ever managed to acquire. Her hand gentle around his throat, his permission implicit in the action, she leans in once more to stoke what had been gentle into passions suited to warm night air and the fevered press of skin on skin.


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Her troops find her later with the other general draped over her shoulder, his long hair and cape trailing behind while she reads aloud troop movements. They watch Anisah pause, watch the general’s hand come up to mark off a new position, watch her turn her cheek so he can press a soft kiss there before she shoves him off with a laugh.

“Damn it.” One of them sighs. Their hand is already going to a side pouch where they keep their coins. “Someone let requisitions know the betting pool is over.”


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They both lose track of the number of battles. Day after day, month after month, the conflict drags on with no end in sight. War grows more powerful with each passing conflict and each new corpse added to the battlefield altar they were worshipped upon, Chaos stays whispering on the fringes, and Death... Death finds a soft kind of peace in the nights between each new battle. They had decided to make no secret of their affection for the other. He was free to crawl into her tent night after night and indulge in the sweet satisfaction of another's company; though it was more often Anisah pulling him out of view of the others, guiding his hands until he caught on, and catching a little death before running out onto a field with her tunic half undone and a god smiling fondly after her as he smoothed over anything out of place. It becomes as routine as they know, a strange sort of comfortable living.

He should have known it would one day go to shit.

The sky is red, War has snuck around him when his attention was caught somewhere else, and Anisah is speared on the end of their blade. She hardly even makes any noise as it happens, just the briefest huff of surprised and the soft thud of a dropped sword, but Sam whips towards her all the same.

He understands now. With the static smell of ozone and wet earth in the air around him, he knows. Whoever had seen fit to make him had known. He was a monster. Monsters cannot be loved, monsters cannot love; lest they become something else entirely.

He is something else entirely.

He has thoughts for little else as he watches Anisah sink to her knees on the blood soaked field below her. She’s sputtering, choking on breaths clotted through with red, and the pact burns dangerously neon blue on his arms. He doesn’t need it to. His vision is already clouding red with a heat and anger that floods him; he’s pushing forward through the crowd that stands between him and Anisah, him and War with her blood on their sword. A clawed hand rises, clutches around nothing. Around him, the bodies of soldiers closing in stumble and fall as though a string holding them upright has been severed.

‘Cattle,’ he thinks, power locked away now flooding his veins. He breathes it, shakes with it, burns from the fire and poison that sings through his veins. ‘Cattle, pawns, nothing, nothing, nothing like her.’ Green eyes lock dangerously on the similar pair caught on him across the line of now corpses between them.

“Brother! Had I known all it would have taken was this-!”

They don’t get much more out before the crushing weight of a long blade meets their own with a blow that splits the air around them. War’s cloven feet dig into soft earth to better hold their own. ‘A masochist, a drunkard, a disgrace’, Sam thinks past the clouded rage in his own head. Bone shifts, just as War had accused him of earlier, and yes, he thinks. Yes, he would shift bone for this mortal. He would change for her, he would be whatever she needed in whatever moment, damn the pact. This was for his mortal lying on the ground, the mortal that had served him tea in the late night hours, the woman he had held as she chased both their pleasure with a sly smile on her face, the women that had taken the heart he hadn’t even known he had.

For Anisah.

‘For Anisah,’ he thinks with his teeth bared in a snarl. The ground around them cracks and shudders as he bears down, twists his body, and slams a clawed heel into War’s armor. It cracks like bone does, enough to send the twisted deity flying across the battlefield. Good. Let them learn why it was better he didn’t indulge. Let them all know that this was a hill he was willing to fight on, willing to let them die on. Massive dark wings flare as he follows the god crashing through the rubble of the battlefield, their hooves trying and failing to catch onto anything that would stop them faster. Sam watches them thrust their sword into the ground in a desperate bid for a slower stop.

“What, all that for a mortal?” War rises to their feet with their hand gripping the hilt of their sword. Sam stops with a heavy impact of his own feet at the foot of the jagged trench War left in their wake. “You, who couldn’t be assed to bother with the rest of us, you do all this for her?” The hand not holding the sword motions back past him, towards her, towards Anisah.

Gods were not meant to tear at each other’s throats. They fade with the tide of mortal worship and need, yes, but there was little that could truly sever them from this plane or the next. Theirs was a strong case of unconditional immortality, blood and ichor kept tight and unspoilt just where it should be. Sam’s hand (large, black, brutal, slicked with rot and reeking of the recently deceased; nearer than he had ever dared pull back the neat veneer of monster and civility to the unknowable, eldritch core of him) reaches for War’s, twists it back and away from Anisah. He watches the fiendish’s deity’s expression fade to one of pale, drained horror.

It is then he registers that his fingers are wet.

Gold drips from where his claws meet War’s thin wrists. Where they dig in. Thick and undeniable liquid trails in thin lines down the curve of his fingers down to the dirt; the sheen of it stands out bright against the faded dust beneath them.

“I’m bleeding.” War says, quiet like a rabbit realizing its position between the razor’s edge of a predator’s jaws.

“So you are.” Sam murmurs in the quiet wonder of a wolf remembering its own teeth.

“You shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“And yet here we are.” Sam’s hand pushes the wrist back further. The feeling of bone breaking under his grasp is becoming more and more familiar with each passing moment. The fact that this is a deity he’s undoing doesn’t seem to register as very important. “And I can. It is strange, yes?”

War crumbles as Sam moves forward, their knees giving out under the pressure of the sudden threat of mortality. The world around them buckles as well, air shifting and cracking with the weight of the unthinkable, with the panic of those in the plane above. Something about their rules had been broken with unthinkable ease. They could feel the rush of a hundred different gods scrambling to right what had been shattered and one at the center of it all purring contentedly like a cat well fed. War chokes on a breath as pain shakes its way up through their core, settles like an ache they’ve never had.

Sam’s grip tightens. The blade at the end of his staff shimmers in the low evening light and War knows. The air around them both is thick and fetid and War knows. Their grip around their sword goes lax, the metal rusts where it hits the ground, and War knows that there is nothing between them and the same end they leave for soldiers and civilians alike.

‘You’re Death.’ The voice in Sam’s head purrs, enticing and revolting in equal measures. Chaos sounds like he’s at the edge of this last domino in his plans, the last thing to finally fall. Death must break so that the world may break, cracked open and bleeding like the god he has pinned by the wrist. Death falls, and the mortals worship only Chaos in the broken waste left behind. Four deities he’s led here, four keys to the end of it all. The apocalypse. One last push and he finally has it.

‘Act like it.’

Sam raises the scythe, choking on his anger. A hundred different gods all reach out to stop the path of the blade, but it’s one mortal voice that cuts through the haze in his mind.

“Samael!”

Anisah is there. She’s limping towards him, clutching the wound at her side and oh, he had been so very stupid to not pull her into his arms immediately. The sound the scythe makes when it hits ground is quiet, no more than a dropped wooden spoon in the wake of the tremendous flutter of wings that closes the distance between himself and Anisah. War is forgotten in an instant, the din of metal on metal around them nothing but a soft hum to him as he rushes to meet her more than halfway. Whatever string that had been keeping him up is cut the moment he draws near, and Anisah collapses into his arms not a moment after his knees hit the ground.

She’s laughing.

She’s bleeding against the fine fabrics she had helped pick out with hands twined in hair she had braided and face against a chest she had slept on top of a hundred nights over, and she’s laughing. Its high and hysterical and choked with tears, the relief of a soul now safe. Anisah clings to him, clings to Death, and Sam cannot imagine a moment without her by his side. How close he had come to losing her to his anger, to petty squabbles between gods, to everything. Never again.

“Marry me.” He says against her hair. His fingers idly trace the space on hers where mortals would put a ring.

“Hell of a time, bird.” Anisah says through winded giggles and choked sobs. “But I suppose that could be… agreeable.”

“I’ll take agreeable.” His hand moves over her finger one last time and when he pulls back, there is a ring. Finely crafted gold shaped from one of the beads now missing in his hair and inlaid with stars stolen from the sky. The inlay flickers neon blue in the light as their pact moves from palm to metal. Sam gathers up his now fiancé into his arms and lets her nod off as the magic of their agreement pulls her back together.

“Could take it back when I’m not dying.” He hears her mumble sleepily. It pulls a smile from him.

“You may ask anything of me when you’re more put together.”

“Ooo, flirty…”

“Horrible creature.” He flicks her head gently as she drifts off fully with a smile.


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Unheard, Chaos screams. Clerics of the god go mad overnight, left in shrieking agony as their thoughts melt together in a cacophony of static and distorted images. He pulls their minds into the unfettered horror of his own faraway domain, leaves them scattered and lost in their pain to ease his own frustration at the loss of thousands of years of planning. They’re nothing more than decoration by the time he is finished with them, raving half dead shells left still and silent with the arcane knowledge of Chaos’s true nature.

‘Well,’ he thinks when the livid anger leaves him long enough to think clearly, ‘We can try again. But this time, no one will be left alive to worship anyone.’


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Sam takes War’s right arm. Severs it at the shoulder, lets them bleed long enough in the dirt to let the consequences of their actions truly sink in. War will live thanks to Medicine, but they will never have their arm back, and will have to take the time to learn their violent craft again. There is time for life once more, time for rebuilding and little joys that had been lost in the surging tide of destruction War had brought to their world. Thousands of weddings pull Harmony into the fold to lay hands over those joined in matrimony, Motherhood bounces each new baby with tender care and weaves delicate blessings into the blankets they’re wrapped in, Fortune dances his way through every town and every ship spreading gold and raucous laughter wherever he goes. Hidden Knowledge cleans up the wreckage of what once was, tucking away ruins and lost civilizations until the day they can once again be uncovered and known. Medicine works the hardest of all with his strong hands and kind heart, pulling those mortals that made it through away from Death and towards the joys and delights of a life still lived.

Sam is happy to leave them to it, he thinks as he dances hand in hand with his wife in the middle of some festival in some town he never knew the name of, only that it was home to Anisah. She pushes baklava at him, same as always, and he accepts every gift with a smile of his own.

The mortal world knows peace once more.


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The cottage Sam builds for them in the vast forest that is his domain is everything she had dreamed of. So many nights she had laid tucked safe in his arms, her hand sweeping across the thin ceiling of their now shared tent describing a future past the violence they had found themselves in, her words painting the most beautiful picture of long held hopes and dreams. She had talked of warm ovens and pastries, of little hands tugging at her skirts, of chickens out back and a large family to come home to. Then, it had seemed such a faraway thing. Everyday her vision had been clouded with the sharp lines of blades and blood; there had been no room for soft things.

But here?

Sam catches her when she leaps for his neck, his hands cradled underneath to hold her effortlessly as she laughs disbelievingly against him. “Sam, it's… it's perfect. All of it, how did you…?”

His answering smile is more than proud, soft in a way probably only she had ever truly seen. “I listened. You haven’t even seen the inside, ya ‘amar.”

“I don’t need to. I know it's going to be perfect.”

“I could have gotten the furniture wrong.”

Her laugh echoes through the brightly colored forest he carries her across. Anisah looks entirely too smug for someone draped in another’s arms; she carries herself more like some contented cat having got exactly the prize she had wanted. “Oh? And what will you do if I find some grievance to hold against the furniture?”

“Build it again.” Sam tucks his smile against her collarbones, in the swathes of hair braided and draped there. “Build it as many times as it takes to get it right.”

“You romantic old bird.”


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Years later, evening light filters in as the sun sets past the horizon. Sam sits resplendent on a couch that has already seen so much wear, four little children draped over him. His wings are spread behind him like a blanket not yet folded and for the first time in a very long time, he feels at peace with himself. Not a monster, not man, hardly a god; at this moment he is simply Samael, father of five and husband to Anisah.

It washes over him then; this is what he wants to be most. For the first time in as long as he can recall, he finds himself truly content.

It feels like something worth keeping.

.
.
.

He needs to keep it.


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“Her?” Alex’s voice huffs in disbelief. “You wish to do what with her?”

“Bring her here.” Sam’s voice is steady and his gaze not cowed by the look of pitying amusement Alex gives him, much like one would give a much younger god. They stand in the grand hall of the gods; everything is too bright and too white and their voices carry too far for this conversation to be anywhere near private. Sam hates the space with a passion.

“And do what? Make her one of us? Be a little pet for you to keep?”

The venom seeps into his tone despite his efforts. He knows Alex does this only to get under his skin and harvest misery for his own sustenance. He’s frightfully good at his job though; a few words and Sam can feel the sharp press of razored teeth curled back into a snarl. Alex preens at the display.

“And there you are. One little moral causes you to hide behind a carefully crafted facade, but there’s the god we know.” he steps forward. “Teeth and claws, feathers and rot. Death.” he clicks at him. Sam’s green eyes track him as he moves, teeth still bared in a scowl. “What a precedent to set for a mortal. Any little thing that catches our favor, we just… pluck them from their lives and set them amongst us? Here?”

“It’s not-”

“Wise?” Alex cuts him off. “Yes, I agree.”

“That isn’t what I was going to say and you know it.”

“Did I? Lazarus, be a dear. What was he going to say?”

Lost and forbidden knowledge, known locally as Lazarus, gives them both a look as he passes. “My purview is knowledge, not thoughts. Do not call me ‘dear’.”

His protests go unacknowledged as Alex continues on, his glare withering. “So you would pick a… mortal. Something so dispensable. Really, I had thought even a monster such as yourself would have at least a hair more sense than a common beast, but it seems as though I’m wrong. Rare, but it does happen.”

“I am a god same as you.” The words are bitten back, caged behind teeth begging for a taste of the elder god in front of him.

The smile that curls across pale, thin lips lacks humor to anyone but the face wearing it, the whole of it somehow more condescending than before. “Hardly the same, dear rot. You may wear our trappings and play at our motions, but a beast dressed in finery is still a beast all the same. Do tell, what makes a monster more than a monster? It certainly isn’t divinity.” His hands hang at his sides as he shrugs. Sam would see them ripped from him. For all that Chaos has done to his family, he would see him torn limb from limb.

“Brother, please…” The identical man at his side is softer, wears their face better for the kindness he carries. His objection matters little to his twin, but Harmony had always at least tried to curb Chaos’s more destructive tendencies. “Don’t do this.”

Alex snorts. “Please, Larry. Someone has to.”

“No one has to. You’re simply relishing in this-”

Larry’s sentence fades with Alex’s raised hand. “I am simply being pragmatic. A precedent will be set. There would be nothing stopping the others from bringing any fragile mortal into our midst. Can you imagine Kazimir flooding these halls with every paramour that he gets too fond of? Gabriel and his many worshippers?”

“He goes by Molly now.”

Alex ignores him. “Face it, Samael-” he sneers the name Anisah had gifted him, and Sam would see him rot for it, “- she is not to be one of us. She can play at the trappings just as well as you, but you’ll eventually see her off the same as any other mortal.”

Sam’s hands shake. His hands shake as the dark black of his domain creeps silently up the length of them, drawn by the sudden yawning panic that rips him open chest to throat. He will have to take her. He will have to take his wife. They will not grant this, and he will have to take her.

“Samael, wait-!” Harmony calls for him, but it comes too late. He already stalks back the way he came, ignoring the way the too bright surroundings feel suddenly too small.

Black feathers swallow him. He will have to take his wife. His vision splits. His hand will trace the length of her throat. Teeth break the soft skin of his lips. He will know the weight of her soul.

He cannot. He cannot. He cannot.


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“Old bird?”

Anisah’s voice is quiet where she stands at the front door. She knew he had come home hours ago, but had not come back in. The children’s laughter had echoed out the door, and still he had not come. They were older now but still young in the way demigods stay for years upon years, all still settling into domains Sam has promised her that they have. Little godlings. She huffs a laugh. Little godlings and yet all she can see are clumsy fingers kneading too hard at bread and scrubbing flour into the rich jewel tones of the apron tied over her dress. She has seen them trip over leaves trying to chase after their father more than she has seen anything divine come from them.

“Samael?” She tries again. Still no answer. Anisah huffs as she steps into the bright leaf litter that fills Sam’s domain. “I had thought we left the vagaries back at the shine I found you at.”

Silence. Hundreds of eyes peer back at her as she looks above her into the forever fading treetops, but none of the black birds there will give away their master. None save… there.

Amongst the crowd of them is one her middle daughter had tied a bright ribbon too one afternoon when she had decided she was fonder of it rather than its hundreds of identical siblings. When she looks next at this one, it shifts only slightly, but the glossy black of its beak points in a way she trusts is the correct one.

Her footsteps are soft as she works her way along a path left untouched. Halfway through, she finds she recognizes the steps, her feet stopping to kick away leaves from moss covered stone. There’s hardly anything left of the old structure when she finally comes upon it, but still she climbs steps nearly smooth with age to the man sitting cross legged atop the still standing shrine.

She throws a hand up. “Help me up?”

No hesitation. A dark hand grips hers and pulls. She settles herself uninvited into the man’s lap and Sam pulls her closer still.

He’s shaking, she notices. The arms around her tremble as if chilled, as if squeezing her tighter will pull some fragment of warmth out of her and into him. Sam has never minded the cold though, so it's with a slow sort of dread that she realizes that this man, this god, trembles out of fear. Fear of what though, she cannot imagine.

“Samael,” she starts. Gentle, soft, like a loud noise will startle this bird to flight. “What’s the matter?”

He’s quiet for a long time. Anisah knows that he’s never been one to say heavy things lightly, so she waits for him to choose his words. Waits for him to turn them over in his mind, weigh them with the same care he would a soul. She feels him squeeze her tighter and knows he has found what he wishes to say.

“I will lose you.”

“Oh, bird, oh,” she turns finally to catch the start of tears before he buries them against her hair. “Sam, ya rouhi, oh.” His face is in her hands soon enough. She knows, has known for a time that her family will outlive her several times over and into forever, but it seems like most things, the weight of a revelation hits an old god slower. She is mortal, he is not. It's a simple fact.

“I will lose you, ya ‘amar.”

It’s not fair, she thinks. “You will, bird, you will. But,” her thumbs trace across cheeks wet with pale golden tears. “There is no one I would rather see last.”

“I would rather you didn’t go at all.” He presses into her hand, closes his eyes.

“But such a handsome face to send me off?” Anisah smiles when Sam chokes out a laugh. A pathetic laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. “You will send me off so gentle. You’ll take these hands,” she threads her fingers between his still shaking fingers and brings them to her lips to kiss, “And hold me so gently. I won’t feel a single thing and you know what?”

“What?” His reply is so soft, lost between tears and the palm of her hand still cradling his face.

“I’ll be happy knowing I was so loved by my husband. I will have had years with a family I love deeply.”

“I would prefer you stay. Motherhood has offered-”

“And I will decline. I’m mortal, Samael.”

“You are a legend. There have been exceptions, others that have been hidden away in stars and constellations for only astronomers to find. You deserve to stay, you should stay. There are gods on your side prepared to argue for it, prepared to give you-“

“Samael.”

“Chaos cannot have the final say here, you’ve done more than enough to be admitted into our ranks! A new god isn’t so uncommon, and with what Karen is prepared to give you could-“

“Sam.”

“You could stay with us, stay with the children, stay with me. Our pantheon would be better with you in it, ya ‘amar, would be stronger for having you. It’s the choice that makes the most sense, and-“

“Bird.”

“Anisah.” Death pleads. “Please.”

Its nearly enough. Anisah feels herself crack at the desperation in his eyes and in the way he holds her, feels the line of tension that pulls him taught with worry and a sadness that could sink nations if he were to let it. She thinks of her children left with only a grieving father and kept hidden from those that would see them used for something closer to what many think their father indulges in. She thinks of the friends she has made, of Motherhood and her monumental offer. She looks at the man in front of her and knows that if she is the one to deny this power, if she is the precedent, Samael will never allow another the same. Anisah looks at the grief already cut deep into the lines of her husband’s face, runs her hands back through his curls, and pulls him in to a gentle kiss. This close, she can’t tell whose tears are who’s.

“I cannot stay, old bird. You know that.”

“Do I?”

“You do. You do, ya rouhi, my husband, you do-“

This time is Sam that kisses her first, Sam that reaches out to wipe away the tears that line her cheeks. It’s Sam’s lips that find the corner of her mouth but its her that pulls him in, her hands gripping the back of his neck in a way that would be painfully tight were he human. It’s desperate, this kiss, as though they are parting now rather than some nebulous time in the future. Grief has her fisting her hands in Sam’s shirt while fear pushes Sam to pull her tighter against him with still shaking hands.

“I don’t want to leave you.” She says when they finally break. Her hands work through his curls and braids, winding them around her fingers and letting them slip between the gaps between knuckles. “But I have to, Sam. I have to.”

Her husband’s sigh is shaky as he leans his head against hers, his voice quiet like the leaves that fall here. “I know, Anisah. I know. I had hope that…” he pauses, closes his eyes as the words slip away. “I just had hope.” They sit like that, quiet, for long enough that Anisah knows the kids will start to worry soon if they aren’t back.

“I don’t want you to mourn forever, bird.” Her hands pull out of his hair, run gently over his shoulders and stop there. “I love you. I want you to be happy.”

“And I you. But I do not think I will be happy for a long time after.”

“Not forever, though.”

“If you ask it of me?” Sam looks at her with a watery smile. “Then no, not forever.”

Blue flares between both their hands, a kindness hidden away between interlaced fingers as the god that tied them together for the first-time ties them together yet again. ‘Till death do you part,’ the mortals say. But Death is more sentimental than any let on, a closely held secret known to only a few. He does not truly break the bonds between those that love one another, but keeps the memory of them safe and tucked away in little things, hides them in objects and feelings and places for those that mourn to find. Anisah would have this god happy in her absence, so he sees no reason that mortals should not know his wife’s kindness. Anisah wants him happy eventually.

For her, he will teach the world how to heal.


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“When is a monster not a monster?”

Anisah’s smile is soft like morning sun, her hand against his face gentle as if she were afraid he would break. Maybe he will. It certainly feels that way; every ounce of him bleeds for her, can’t she see the gaping wound she’s leaving in her wake? Sword calloused fingers trace across his cheek. A thumb wipes away tears he hadn’t realized fell. He knows what is coming, aches with the knowledge that his domain grants him and yet he can’t accept that this is the last breath of the wife he’s come to cherish enough to risk breaking their world for. Anisah smiles at him, and it takes everything he is to remain silent at her side.

“When it is loved.”


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A mortal passes.

The planes shake.

A husband grieves.


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Sam knows he’s been gone too long. He can feel the buildup of souls he refuses to take like an itch deep in his bones, yet he can’t bring himself to go. He waits, day after day in the forest for the crunch of leaves, for the quiet comfort of Motherhood, the light golden jingle of Fortune, or even the chill grace of Forbidden Knowledge. In the end, it's none of these that find him; it’s Harmony.

The forest is dark now. The aspens still stand stark white and straight, eyes now shot through with black lines of rot. Scores of them are felled and cracked clean through the middle, covered in leaves that have long lost their color and under soft swaths of moss. Nothing thrives here now. Long has it lost its liminal nature and tipped securely into the finality of his domain, changed itself just as he had changed because of her. He supposes its fitting, the dark and fetid stench of rot surrounding him. Feet tipped in the razored claws of the crows that clutter the branches above him pick through the marshy ground, his staff tipped in dark steel throwing what little light there is. It's here that he feels more than hears the approach of soft footsteps picking their way towards the towering shrine he’s settled on.

“I’ve no need for your platitudes.” Choked with grief as he is, he doesn’t bother to hide the growl that snaps through his words. “Harmony.” He could spit the name. “Pathetic. None of the others could be bothered?”

“They had asked me. I was, ah, more than happy to help.” Sam doesn’t turn, but he can imagine the pale god wringing his hands just for something to do with them. Always had that sort of air, a nervous chord constantly shot through him from having to undo the damage his brother caused. Pitiful, Sam thinks as the ire rises up in him. After spending so long drowning in his grief, the rolling wave of frustrated anger brands him, chokes him with fire like a swallowed poison. It’s because of them that his wife is gone, that he has to hide away his children. Because of gods like them that he’s left here with a new domain like some horrible joke. Fatherhood, he thinks.

His jaw clenches near uncomfortably as he whirls around towards the man, staff tipped in the dangerously sharp bladed edge of his scythe.

Larry’s eyes are wide above the blade tipped against his throat. He knows more than most, knows that the blade could sunder him in ways no other mortal or immortal weapon ever could. Death was called ‘beast’ for a reason in their circles; they were afraid. Larry himself had never used the name, but in this moment, he could certainly understand the fear.

The blade pulls a little closer. Golden ichor drains in a thin trail down the perfectly pale line of his neck.

“Please.” Larry’s hands are raised, sincerity dripping from his voice. “I had only wished to talk, to see how you were doing. We’re all worried about you.”

“All of you?”

“Well, ah, most of us. To be truthful. You know how my… brother is. He’s down in the ashes, doing whatever he does.”

At least he’s honest. Sam’s glare lasts a touch longer before his hold of the weapon relaxes, the blade fading back into nothing but a faint glimmer in the right light. There’s little of it here in the dark of his domain, here in the buried home he had shared with Anisah. He knows he stands over the kitchen now, knows that despite the dirt, moss, and leaves, the interior is just as they had left it when she had died. “What would you even say?”

“I would say…” Larry’s steps are unsure as he inches closer, more from the uneven ground than any sort of fear. “I would say that I think she deserved to stay. That she would have made a wonderful addition.” Sam huffs at his words, the whole of them empty save the unflinching sincerity Larry laces them with.

“Hollow words.”

“But true nonetheless.”

“She is,” he pauses, flinches, “Was a legendary figure in her own right. There should have been no objection to her becoming one of us.”

“No, I certainly argued for it with a score of others, but in the end, there was just, ah, an opposition…”

“Wouldn’t have mattered.” He sits, the whole of him settling like a ship long since sunk. “She hadn’t wanted it.”

That seems to give Larry pause. “She… hadn’t?”

“For the same reasons Alex hadn’t. Had almost been harder to hear them from her than from him.” Sam sighs. So long he had carried the weight of his station and his grief, he aches with it now. Pulled by the gravity of it, he finally snaps into a tired sort of resignation and pats the ground next to him. They’re above the living room now. Perhaps even the couch. If it wouldn’t shatter what was left of his composure, he might bury a hand and see just which memory’s grave he sat above. “I was certainly more willing to listen to her than I was him.”

Harmony sinks into the space at his side with far less grace. “It always hurts to see a loved one pass.”

“You’re telling me this?” Green eyes side eye the man beside him incredulously.

“I understand it might be a bit of an overstep, and please tell me if it is, but I, well…” Larry wrings his hands in his lap. There are flowers slowly spouting from the patch of moss he’s sitting on; pale fingers reach out for a small white bloom. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the other end of that loss. I wanted to offer sympathy.”

“Sympathy.”

“Yes, I… It’s a mortal practice. To not let others grieve alone when someone dear to them has passed? I was voted the vanguard, but Karen and the others are worried about you, Samael. You’ve tucked yourself away and haven’t let anyone else in, both metaphorically and well, literally.”

“You found your way in.”

“I was let in.” Larry corrects. Sam’s head whips up.

“Who-“ he can feel the feathers on him rise in equal parts panic and irritation, feel the dark rot begin to blacken his fingertips and carve them back into something inhuman and sharp. In that moment, he regrets letting his blade drop from the pale god’s neck.

“I did, baba.”

Qadira stands at the edge of the clearing, her dark hand set against a pale aspen tree. It had hurt to look at her in the early days, spitting image of her mother that she is, but she stands now robed in her father’s dark violet and burnished gold. Her domain had settled recently; records of those souls deceased and soon to be deceased were all organized under her watchful eyes and careful hands. There were books enough in her glade for even Lazarus to bristle with a bit of jealously.

“I’m tired of seeing you shutting yourself away. We’re all tired of it.” Her steps are silent as she moves towards them both. “If letting Harmony into your domain against your wishes was what it took, then punish me. But I do not regret my actions.”

“She had no ill will, truly. I was outside already and she just, ah, answered the door as it were. We just want to see you happy, Samael. If not today, then eventually.”

Sam snorts. Happy, he thinks. There was no point in feeling any longer. His children would adapt and fall into their domains with her grace, his associates would fall back into patterns learned before this newest form, and he… Well. He could go back to what he knew best, what was comfortable. Become only Death once again rather than this mishmash of domains and roles and feelings-

Pain lances up his arm as his vision whites out in a wash of neon blue. He chokes on it, aches with it, feels it burn him from the inside out before it fades back to where it had begun: the spaces between his fingers. There, unknown to him until now, sits tiny lines of fading blue script outlining an accidental contract he had made in a moment of blinding grief. The marks are so small, he thinks, why are they so small…

They’re his wife’s hands. Slim fingered, sword calloused hands. The blue sits on his skin where her fingers would lace through his own time and time again, where she would thread their hands together and smile up at him like she knew something he did not. He hadn’t assumed… of course she knew, she always had the sharper eyes, she-

Sam collapses.

He folds in on himself with the long-suppressed agony of a loved one lost, lets Harmony catch him as he falls. He can feel the rest of his family that were hiding at the edges finally come out and surround him, each of them tucking themselves wherever they can fit like the little birds they are. He has been neglecting them, he realizes. Blind again by emotion that still felt foreign, he had forgotten that while he had lost a wife, his children had lost a mother. They had been just as lost as he.

He tugs them closer, falls back with tears in his eyes and his five children and one awkward god flopped on top of him, and thinks that perhaps it is time to truly live up to the domain he had claimed in secret. Perhaps, as he feels some of the anger and grief wash out of him with the tears finally shed and close comfort of the family he loves, perhaps he could do this.

Perhaps he could learn to be happy.

'For Anisah," he thinks, and pulls his children closer.

For Anisah.