Father Is Missing
It was mid spring, in the 13,428th year of his reign, that the Father of all Creation vanished. By this time, he was largely absent from the affairs of men, but not so absent that his disappearance went unnoticed. His leaving became the catalyst for an agelong battle of succession that brutalized all of humanity, but it started the way all things of such magnitude do: on a golf course.
Thwack.
The ball arched through the air, spinning and whistling as it flew a thousand yards and landed with a satisfying plonk right in the hole. It wasn’t the right hole. Theorin was teeing from the first and had eagled the fourth, interrupting some mortals, who didn’t seem especially enthused to be playing in the first place.
“I’ll never understand why, with the power to unmake and remake all of reality at your disposal, you still play this idiotic game,” Erlea said as she approached.
Thwack. Plonk
Theorin didn’t answer, just launched a ball in the direction of the eighteenth green and quietly celebrated another hole in one.
“You’re not even playing it right, you’re cheating. Where’s the fun in that?”
“Where’s the fun in anything?” Theorin asked.
“Fair point. But golf was boring even before everything else started to feel that way.”
“I don’t know. Back before everything, I liked the quiet. It was the only time I didn’t want to kill myself and everyone else.”
“Don’t joke like that,” Erlea said, looking concerned.
Thwack. Plonk.
She tugged on an errant lock of hair in front of her shoulder. She always did that when she was anxious. It had started to annoy Theorin around year 800, and it hadn’t stopped.
“Why are you here?” he asked, trying to move the conversation along. When she was like this, it usually took ages to get anything out of her. She’d stare and pull her hair and bite the corner of her lip and do anything other than say what was worrying her.
“I’m here because Father is missing,” she responded immediately, saying exactly what was worrying her.
“What do you mean missing?” Theorin said. “Ask Daemon.”
“I did. He’s not here.”
Theorin stared at her, annoyed and slack-jawed, rather than repeating his question. There was no stone in Agora under which Daemon could not see. Erlea or Theorin could, with a word, travel to any inch of this world in a breath. There was no “here” that mattered. Unless she meant . . .
“He’s not anywhere on Agora. He’s just gone.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m aware that it’s impossible, Theo. But that doesn’t make it not true. Check with Daemon yourself if you want. He’s not here.”
“Does that mean he . . .” Theorin trailed off. “Someone has to have actually died before. Not gone to the Tower of Glass, I mean, but really died. One of the mortals.”
“I’m sure thousands. Tens of thousands,” Erlea said. “There’s only so much that we can control. I just never paid any attention.”
“Me either.”
“Well, that’s not particularly surprising. You never paid attention to anything.”
The room was stifling hot. Theo’s father was pacing, commanding the room. He tugged at his collar, giving his evaporated sweat somewhere to escape to. Around them were a bunch of important people—businessmen, developers, lawyers, doctors. And Theo, who was only here because his father was here. He was too young to realize he didn’t belong, so he wore his station with brashness and no sense of humility. He leaned back in his chair, lifting the wheels off the ground, his shoes raining dirt onto the conference table.
“We have to get this right,” his father said.
Theo bit the skin on his fingers and tried to hide a nose-picking with a scratch of his chin. This was all supposed to be his someday, and now, thanks to some tragic coincidence of fate, it never would be. He would have everything and nothing.
A five-star general squeezed past him on his way to the bathroom. Theo didn’t move, pretending his mind was elsewhere, but it was not elsewhere. He was listening to everything, trying to find some thread he could tug on, some way to game a system that seemed engineered to keep him from the power to which he felt entitled.
Daemon confirmed what Erlea had said, and what he’d revealed had only deepened the mystery. Father had been healthy in the days before he’d vanished, so it was unlikely that he had died, and the last person of any importance to see him was . . .
“Me?” Theorin said. “But that was days ago. He was sulking by the lake.”
“Wait, what day is it?” Erlea asked.
“I don’t know, Fah? Who keeps track of the days? They’re for the mortals.”
“Not here, you idiot,” she said, slapping him, whisking his memory back to a room in a house in another world. The low thrum of a whirring fan. The muffled sound of their mother’s voice, behind the door. Erlea’s mischievous grin.
“Oh . . . oh!” Theorin looked up and mouthed out the math, pretending he didn’t already know the answer. “That would make sense. You don’t think he . . . ?”
“I don’t know. Do you?” Erlea asked.
They both looked down at the ground and then further, through it to the thirsting shadow that lay ever beneath, calling their names, urging them downward.
“I don’t know,” Theorin said.
There are places in Agora where only Gods may tread: the Tower of Glass, the Gilded Atrium, the Hall of Light. These are rules never uttered but near always heeded. The times that mortals have dared enter them were enshrined in legend, the few times those mortals had survived even more so.
Lou’s Lake is different. Father would have given anything for people to gather there, to breathe in through their noses the scentless eternal blossoms and be convinced they smelled of cherry. To see their reflections cast back by the still water. He could have forced them, but that was not his way. Father was one of three who held to the old ways, which made sense, as the old ways were his. He had built the lake to be cherished, to be seen and loved and held dear. None dared enter. It stayed forever frozen in perfect late spring, sullen like a cemetery.
She would have hated this, he thought, looking past the beach at his own reflection staring back at him. He looked the same as he always had, but he felt older. There was something about Agora that stretched him thin. Time did not heal the way it had before. He wondered if the mortals felt the same.
His mind toyed with an imagined light switch with true power. One flick of his finger, and he could be born anew, mind fresh and clean and empty. The thought made his heart flutter, but it would mean forgetting her, and imagining that still, after all these thousands of years, brought more pain than pleasure. Maybe just a single lifetime.
His heart raced, but . . . no. It still felt like betrayal.
“I was wondering if I’d find you here,” Theorin said, sitting down next to him.
“Hello Theo. It’s good to see you.” The words were said with warmth but felt like ice against Theorin’s skin.
“Is it?” he asked.
Father sighed. “No matter what has come between us, it will always be good to see you, son.” He drew his fingers into a claw and pulled them through the underside of his beard. “The sun would be rising now in the old world. Just as it is here. Do you find that the veil feels more thin when that is so?”
Theorin’s lip curled. “Since the day I saw it lurking beneath, the land here has felt paper-thin. You gave me mountains and fjords and the deep places, you built a place that I should love, but it all feels false. I fucking hate this magic. Infinite power in exchange for ever seeing that power’s futility? It hardly seems worth it.”
“Would you go back?” his father asked. “To the way it was before? If your vote—”
“There are more miles between ‘hardly’ and ’no longer’ than exist in this world,” Theorin said, masking well how tempted he had felt within that moment. He stood and dusted off his pants. “Why did you keep dust? You could have done with it what you did with mosquitoes.”
“There are mosquitoes, they’re just not here. I sent them all to Aotred,” Father said, a wry smirk glinting beneath his beard.
“Did you really?” Theorin asked, and they both burst into laughter.
Theorin looked away, out toward the lake, and imagined the heat of two suns upon his face. He looked down at his father, hunched and sad and small. Sighing, he placed his hands on the man’s shoulders. “I learned something new,” he said, lowering his face to his father’s ear and dropping his voice to a whisper. “I thought you might like to see.”
Then, Theorin pushed. Not with his hands, not toward the lake or to the ground, but through it. The veil parted and the shadow rose up to meet them.
“What are you doing?” Father asked. “. . . how?”
“Happy anniversary, Father. See you in three hundred years.”
Theorin pushed again, harder, and his father fell. The shadow took him, and he was gone, and the whole of the world felt the loss, though they did not understand it. A hidden thread severed, an emptiness overtook them. The flowers by the lake, still pink and perfect in their everblossom, seemed to wilt.
Theorin smiled. Three hundred years, he thought. It was both lifetimes and no time at all. Now the fun begins.