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The Gods were not dead. Not yet. But they likely wished they were.
It was like watching a tennis match, if tennis were a blood sport capable of inciting a civil war. It didn’t seem to matter that they were all technically on the same side.
Twoforths was decisively not a modernist. He was, in fact, so far entrenched in the past he was virtually buried six feet under. Although regretfully, Vlad mused, only metaphorically.
The siege at Bhalein—to use what Vlad believed to be the technical military terminology—had been an unmitigated clusterfuck.
“Good Gods alive, undead, and those merely sleeping.”
Vlad, who had been alive for some four hundred years and change, abruptly forgot how to swallow and inhaled his coffee instead. “You did what?”
“It’s exactly the same; you’re just an intolerable snob,” Vlad replied. Lounged sideways across the chair normally reserved for his father, Vlad had managed to achieve the sort of languid sprawl only used by cats and other paradoxical creatures capable of existing both as a liquid and solid matter all at once. Taking
The place appeared to have been a windmill in a past life, the exterior repaired and patched together with spare scraps of metal. At the very top, a giant metal contraption that looked like a weathervane but clearly was not hung motionless in the breeze. Nathan squinted up at it. “Is that a lightning rod?” He followed a thick tangle of wires down from the roof to… “Are those graves?” Pulling Nathan onward, Vlad told him, “Don’t worry about it!” It was only when they were outside a sturdy door which had definitely had a pitchfork embedded in it at some point, Vlad finally let go of Nathan’s
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“Word of advice, lad: don’t go drinking with the dead. They’ve got nothing left to live for.”
“The woods may or may not be haunted. Okay, they are definitely haunted,” he said with a defensive shrug when Nathan continued to stare. “But they’re harmless, I swear. I used to take Riya for walks in them when she was a child, and she claims to have been only very mildly scarred for life.”
It was all just so frustratingly simple. The government needed to stop levying crippling taxes on the lower classes, they needed to stop waging wars they couldn’t win, and they needed to focus their efforts on relief aid. It was plain as day. They needed to just… do the right thing. The problem was, they just kept choosing to do the wrong thing, over and over, and then they had the audacity to act surprised when the working classes kept finding novel ways to liberate the ruling classes of their heads.
His entire unlife might be a disaster with the world falling apart besides, but at least he could be well-groomed.
The prickling heat under his skin spread to his chest when Nathan laughed, the sound making his heart do alarming things. You stop that, he scolded it. We didn’t die four hundred years ago for you to suddenly remember how to work now.
The phrase ‘Nevrond First’ was one Vlad had come to dread over the last few decades. It sounded fine in theory. But what men like Twoforths meant by such things rarely involved caring for the actual citizens of Nevrond. It was an empty utterance: a means of snuffing out dissent while appealing to the primordial hive mind of society that remembered, once upon a time, when the dark was ancient and deep that humans survived by banding together to keep the campfires burning throughout the night.
I walk this earth alone, tending a garden of bones.
