origin

The Body Collectors

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The machine got all the credit, but the true genius of Agora was this: the logistics.

Jose rubbed the cold from his hands, cupping them and breathing hard into his palms. It smelled like cigarette smoke. I could really use another one. He thought, but they weren’t allowed on the job. He pulled the device from his pocket, tugging it roughly past the folds of the fabric. It was utilitarian, wrapped in thick industrial plastic with a cheap screen that didn’t work with gloves on. He dragged his finger heavily across it, scrolling to frame the building in front of him. West Village, Bank Street. He sat down and listened to the truck engine coughing. He coughed alongside of it, his clouded breath and the exhaust fumes intermingling like little storm clouds. The rear bumper felt cold against the small of his back. He sighed, looking outward, trying to put his mind as far from his grim task as he could manage while there was still time left for that. There was a quarter inch of snow on the ground. The city was quiet and dark. Street lights and windows glowed with eager anticipation. It should have been beautiful. His watch beeped. Midnight. Here we go.

He stared down at the monochrome outline of the houses before him, each labeled with a number. It was not their street number, it was the count of the bodies that would be expected inside. Jose waited, cold hands fingering a colder thermos, taking a sip of cheap coffee. Then, on the screen, lights flickered to life: green and amber and a few, distressingly, that were red. They looked like Christmas lights. They were the only festive seeming thing in sight, no one had bothered to decorate this year.

Two houses up from where they waited, the lights and number matched first: three. Three people for a house that big? Jose thought. He pressed two fingers against his lips and whistled loudly—a pitched shriek into the silent dark. His team turned to look, there were four of them on his truck: Manny, Mateo, Tito, and Tess. He pointed at the door, already on the move. Manny doused a poorly hidden cigarette against a streetlight. Jose glared at him. “What?” he asked. “It’s not like any of them are going to notice.” Jose held his glare. Manny held up both hands, “Alright, alright. I’m sorry.”

“It’s locked!” Tito said from the doorway.

“Already? you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Manny yelled back. “It’s not like they’re hard fucking rules.”

“Cállate,” Jose whispered, his frustration bringing out the Spanish he’d long been conditioned to hide in the hopes it might improve his station. Manny was right though, they were simple rules. Lights on, stove off, door unlocked. “There are still people who haven’t gone in. Do you really want their last memory of home to be your ugly bleating?” He shoved a bag into Manny’s hands. “Go pick the lock.”

Manny looked hurt. “I have a pretty voice . . .” he muttered quietly, “and I don’t think anyone wants to hear your stupid fucking whistle either. It’s like someone poured bleach down my ear canal every time. Every fucking time.”

In that moment he looked as young as he was. Weight and weariness—and an unfortunate choice to grow a mustache on a face poorly suited for one—had all aged his features prematurely. He was still just a boy. He’d been a burglar before Jose had hired him. He’d brought him in when he was freshly on parole. Prison had made an honest man out of him. Jose had kept him that way. He had learned how to recognize kids like these, to see the fear and the wounded hearts behind their brashness. He tried to get to them before the desperation set in— to give them a better path to walk than the one they had started down. Everyone on his crew was like that. It worked, most of the time.

The latches clicked and the deadbolt slid into place. Manny swung the door open, looking back at Jose with pride. Jose pointed toward the door and the rest of them went inside.

The gas lit fire roared in the fireplace. Bing Crosby crooned on their bluetooth speaker system. Betty straightened her favorite dress and looked around the house: at the way the light danced off the brick, at the curtains she’d loved that just never seemed to look exactly right next to the couch. Everything was perfect. She sat down next to her husband and patted the couch between them. West sat down where she’d suggested and she tousled his hair.

“Is it going to hurt?” He asked.

“No . . . No honey. Of course not,” she said, not knowing the answer. She took one last look at her family. Then she smiled, a brave wide-mouthed thing, with all the sadness forced out of it. She kissed her husband on the cheek and said goodbye to everything she had ever known.

All three were slumped over on the couch, leaning against each other, holding each other in a quiet half-goodbye. Two parents and their son: silver discs on their temples, placid smiles on their faces. They were so still that Jose, coming in behind the rest of his team, checked their dots to be sure they were still alive. All green. When he got closer he saw their arms twitching. He pushed two fingers against the boys eyelids, forcing them closed. He nodded to Manny and Tess, instructing them to do the same to the boy’s parents. Manny looked squeamish, but both did as they were instructed.

“I don’t understand why we gotta do that.” Manny said, keeping his voice low.

“Because if we don’t their eyes will dry out. And you don’t have to whisper, they can’t fucking hear you anymore.” Tess chimed in, fixing the mother’s dress, brushing her hair into a more manageable position, preparing her body.

“I fucking know that, Tess.” said Manny, a bit too loudly in retaliation, “I meant: why do we have to close them in the first place?”

“Because their brains are in the machine,” Jose said, “They don’t know to close them anymore. Let’s go. We don’t have time to waste.”

Tess tucked a hand under the mother’s shoulder and locked eyes with Manny. He looked nervous to be so near the woman’s breasts. Jose sighed, these kids were used to moving furniture. So was he. He’d seen Manny carry a two hundred pound refrigerator himself without breaking a sweat, but here he was stumbling over some wisp of a woman. They hoisted her up.

“Keep her upright.” Jose reminded them.

“Yeah we fucking know, Dad.”

They called him dad when they were annoyed with him. Tito and Mateo did the same with the father and Jose took the boy himself, hoisting him up by his armpits, his little feet swinging and kicking Jose’s knees. Bodies were hard to carry, especially when limp like these ones. Harder than their weight would suggest. No matter where you grabbed they seemed to slide away from you. Jose was prepared for that, but his team wasn’t. He heard a thud and a clatter in the next room. “No,” he said under his breath. The device in his pocket started beeping: fast, shrill, electronic yelps. He hauled the boy up higher, draping him over his shoulder and tugged at the baggy folds of his pants, staring into his pocket. One of the lights had turned yellow. “Fuck!” he said, running towards the sound.

“Muhhh…. Muhhh!!” the sound came from the woman, on the floor, writhing and half staring at everything and nothing. Her eyes locked with Jose’s but they were glass. “Muhhh!” she wailed.

“What did I do? What the fuck did I do?” Manny pressed the palms of his hands into his temples. Tess was backed into the corner, silent and stunned.

“Be quiet. Do you want to make it worse?” Jose yelled.

“You’re the one fucking screaming!” Manny screamed back.

“Muhhh…” the woman wailed, seemingly in agreement.

“What’s happening to her?” Manny asked.

“I don’t know,” Jose said, desperate to show calm despite his inner panic. “Here.” He pulled the boy off his shoulder and held him out towards Manny. “Take the kid and for the love of God, Manny, try not to screw anything else up.”

Manny acquiesced and Tess moved to help him, following along a half step behind him, holding one of the boy’s legs, unsure of what else to do.

Jose crouched by the woman and went through the checklist they’d given him. “Pulse . . .” He pressed a finger against her throat. “Check.”

“Muhhh?” The woman turned, sightless, toward his hand. He felt her breath hot on his skin.

“Breathing . . . Check,” he said. Then before he could finish he saw the problem. One of her discs had shifted. Not much, but enough to reveal a thin layer of white adhesive.

“Muhhhh.” The woman wailed, quietly.

“Muh.” Jose agreed, and slid the disc back into place. Her placid smile returned. Jose checked the device once more: green again. Thank God. He thought, bringing her outside.

They shoved the three of them in like sardines, front to back to front, the boy in the middle. Jose pulled a thick yellow strap around all three, fastening it back again, through a buckle attached to the wall of the truck, cinching it tight, pulling their bodies into an awkward embrace.

“Help me get their masks on.” He said. They would breathe on their own, otherwise none of this would have worked. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that once the back of the truck was full, there wouldn’t be enough air for all of them to breathe. So weeks ago Jose’s truck got retrofitted and the rules had changed: all the bodies got masks.

“Muhh..” said the man, quietly. Manny leapt backwards. “What the fuck was that? Did I do something wrong again?”

“No,” Jose said. “They just do that sometimes.”

The truck doors closed, the engine thrummed. Jose rubbed the cold from his hands, cupping them and breathing hard into his palms. It smelled like cigarette smoke. One down, sixty-three to go, he thought. He glanced down at the device. There were more yellow dots, more red, amidst what felt like an endless number of green. He pointed toward the house next door.

“One down, sixty-three to go,” he said.

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Death

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When the body collectors come, I’ll be in my home. This place is older than me, older than any human has ever been. As best as anyone can tell, it was built before the Civil War. Living in a place this old, letting it seep into my bones has been a humbling experience. It’s symbiotic. I care for it and it cares for me. It’s mine and yet it’s not mine and it will outlive me just as it did the people who built it, and the ones that came after and after and after. It will outlive all of us, because in a month’s time death will be at our doorsteps.

When the body collectors come, I’ll be with my wife, a woman I’ve loved for long enough to forget what that means. We filled our home together and it is hers as much as it is mine, a melding of tastes, an enriching argument. She will look up at me from her phone on all the days that remain where she can pretend that life is still the way it once was, and god-willing I’ll be present enough to catch every last time that it happens. I have always been a man easily lost in the tunnels of his own imagination. I have missed so many of those errant glances and I regret each of them. A moment of connection slipping away into past, one of the last few we have left.

When the body collectors come, my heart will still be beating, neurons firing, but I’ll already be gone. This me that walks this earth and lives in this home whose oldness makes me feel impermanent—who loves this woman in a way that feels the opposite of impermanent—will be no more. All of us will be undead. Alive and yet not ever truly alive again. Here and yet not ever truly here again. They will come for my body. They’ll put me in one of those vats of Vaseline. They’ll preserve me like some great Pharaoh, just as they will for all of you. By the time they are done, a part of me will be older than my house. A part of me will have lived for longer than any man ever has. A day will have passed and I will be one hundred and eighty five years old. Will this part of me still love my wife? Will this part of me have found a home that makes him feel death’s breath on his shoulder? Will it matter when that death is tens of thousands of years away?

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Iona

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The bedsheets scratched at Iona’s skin, raising faint red welts on her shoulder blades and the sides of her belly. Everything did that—irritated her, raised her skin. When she was younger she’d gone to a dermatologist. He’d called her sensitive. That had irritated her too. He’d been pointing at her skin when she said it, but she could hear it in his voice. It wasn’t her skin that he thought was the problem.

Once, in what felt like another life, she’d had a set of sheets that felt soft on her skin, like sleeping on a cloud, but Asteroid, her dog, had torn them apart. She’d named him that because he ruined everything. Replacing them would have cost money she didn’t have, so she’d gone back to the cheap, scratchy stuff.

Now she stared up at the ceiling, waiting out her alarm, in her hot, itchy, uncomfortable bed. Asteroid huffed and stretched, pushing her leg off the mattress. She sighed. “You know, most people have their dogs sleep on the floor,” she said, pointing.

Asteroid looked down at the floor and back at her and blinked.

“Yeah, exactly.”

He huffed again and jumped toward her face, knocking the wind from her lungs and tickling her cheeks with his whiskers as he sniffed her ear. She felt her phone buzzing on the windowsill. “Alright, I’m up,” she said, trying to forget that she’d been awake for several hours.

Scratchy bedsheets off, scratchy clothes on, she thought, pausing before she put on her shirt. She turned to the left and right in front of the mirror, noticing the way her skin sagged. Her eyes drew back toward the empty half of the bed. She smirked, pushing away whatever it was that she was feeling. Black polo, khaki skirt, yellow apron, feed Asteroid, lock the door. Up and out and gone before the sun had even peeked above the horizon.

The car door slammed, jolting Iona’s mind from its half-sleep haze. Her keys jingled against her side, then her wrist, then the steel frame of the door. The bolt sliding into place shook her palm with a satisfying thunk. She craned her arm into the dark and flipped a switch. The fluorescent lights buzzed, bathing the back room in unnaturally blue light. She pulled seven bananas from the freezer. They’d be brown mush before long, but it was summer, and everyone loved brown mush blended up with their artificial flavors and colors. She stacked those and all the premade pastries and plastic-wrapped microwavable breakfasts between her arm and her chin. Making her way to the boxes of oatmeal, she kicked one, just so, and it tumbled off the shelf and fell gently open. Empty. Her eyes darted to the schedule on the wall. “Sven,” she whispered, with a loathing most would reserve for a sworn enemy. “Of course.”

With the bananas and breakfast burritos and everything else still pinched between her chin and forearm, she tried to squat down to open a new box. She dropped lower, and a banana shifted. She froze, then adjusted her chin, sliding it back into place. Grabbing the edges of the cardboard, she pulled, and . . . It’s that thick tape! she thought, her fingernail catching on the strings laced across it, which made it impossible to open.

The tower of food tucked beneath her chin tumbled and clattered to the ground, leaving only a solitary bacon sandwich in her outstretched hand. “Sven,” she repeated, this time louder than a whisper. The bells attached to the door jingled. Iona looked at the clock. We don’t open for another ten minutes, you asshole, she thought.

“I’ll be right out!” she said, forcing a smile across her face in the hopes it made her sound happier. She tossed the bananas and pastries in the trash, scooped up the individually wrapped meals and brought them out into the dimly lit café.

Iona froze as soon as she saw that it was her. Smooth, jazzy saxophone filled the otherwise silent space between them.

The air was filled with the sounds of students on the common, muffled through the brick and mortar. The building wasn’t old, but it was designed to look it. They thought it gave them prestige, being surrounded by books and leather and walnut.

The board stared at her, hunched, mustached, pale skinned and spectacled. They remained silent, fixed in their decision regardless of what she said. It was quiet enough to hear the scratching of one of their pencils.

Her body burned with fury. She took a breath and let her mind trace upward, through the clouds and atmosphere, pushing through to what lay beyond. She was no longer a person, on petty earth with its petty concerns.

She was a micrometeorite, the size of a fist, drifting aimlessly through the endless void. Small enough to be completely invisible. Large enough to shift the cosmos. Galaxies illuminated before her, each containing multitudes. Stars, those forges of creation beaming out their light, burning, in a moment more than the sum creation of humanity. The spaces between them were vast enough to be incomprehensible. But there were so many. In each of them were planets, and on each of those planets innumerable mountains and valleys, each enough to be their own discovery, their own adventure. She drifted onward, mindless,infinitesimal. A shadow loomed above her, blotting out the sun.

All of this was meaningless in the face of that scale. All Iona, and every other person in that room, would ever be was one tiny blip of light in the darkness. A single pixel illuminated for a fraction of a second, forming a fragment of a fragment of a frame of a picture. A grain of sand in a mandala, soon to be wiped away. None of it mattered, so why did it matter so much?

“Iona?” Nora said, and her voice landed on Iona’s heart like an autumn breeze. There was confusion in it, which was earned, and a trace of judgement, also fair, but none of it diminished its warmth. “It’s good to see you,” she added, and she meant it.

“It’s good to see you too.” Iona reached underneath her sleeve and scratched her upper arm.

Neither of them spoke. In another life, they had known each other, tasted each other’s lips and everything in between. They had loved like only the young can love, wild and with abandon, without the sense to protect their own hearts. Even then Iona had known that, to Nora, she was an academic fascination, something to be learned and experienced and set aside. Yet Iona had let herself fall completely, hurt ruinously. The part of her heart that still felt hope still hoped for Nora, and here she was, looking as radiant and beautiful as she remembered. Age only heightened the things about her body that made Iona’s mouth water with anticipation and delight.

“How have you been?” Nora asked, her eyes sad and curious. That she had stumbled upon Iona here, rather than anywhere anyone who knew her would have expected, answered the question well enough.

“I—” Iona started. The bells attached to the door jingled.

“Nora, what’s going on? We need to get going. Look, see? I told you, they’re not even open. We’ll get some food at the airport, okay?”

Nora looked back over her shoulder at Iona once again. She smiled a sad, friendly smile, and then she left.

The smooth, jazzy saxophone played louder. Iona looked down at the individually wrapped sandwiches in her hands, only just now noticing how cold they were. She sighed and put them in the refrigerator under the display stand, then made her way back to the beaming fluorescent light of the back room and into the freezer, where she sat down on a half-empty box. She took a breath and let her mind trace upward, through the clouds and atmosphere, pushing through to what lay beyond. She was no longer a person, on petty earth with its petty concerns.

She was a micrometeorite.

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Father is Missing

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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The Tower of Glass

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It stood, deep in the desert, where men would be foolish to wander, formed from the land itself. It cut as deep into the earth as it stretched into the sky, transparent and rough-hewn and cruel. Its construction was a cruelty, its purpose remained so. It was the home of the dead, whose stories waited again to be written. It was not imagined alongside Agora but after it, in haste. A solution to a problem, chains and manacles wrapped forcibly across the whole of the world. Now it loomed in the backs of the minds of all, a grim foreboding for mortals, a secret shame for the Gods.

Hesh stood outside, his thick cloak doing little to shield his skin from the wind-whipped sand, his waterskin empty, his hope all but diminished. He looked up at the bodies—limitless, frozen, stuck in their tiny rooms. The bodies looked back at him, at least the ones lucky enough to be waiting above the surface.

The door opened of its own accord, the air cooling as he made his way inside. His steps echoed against the clear glass floor, the vast pit beneath him filling him with vertigo. He walked past a soldier with an axe buried in his skull; the man gave him a friendly nod. A woman old enough to be Hesh’s great-grandmother became young and beautiful in an instant. He walked past a baby, who gave him the same friendly nod as the soldier.

At the center of the tower, the glass gave way imperceptibly to air. Hesh stepped out into it without realizing. His stomach near leapt out his throat as he fell. His arms swung wildly, but before he had time to lose his balance, the floor rose up to meet him. It carried him upward into the sky. This was good. It was here that he would find Oteph—or as they called him in his village, the Unmaker. Hesh had come to ask for his favor. If he was denied . . .

His shaking fingers clenched the knife tucked in the folds of the thick fabric wrapped around him, no better shield from the cold air than it had been from the sand.

Hesh frowned down at the brown water in front of him. “Did you make it right?” he asked.

“Yes! It’s supposed to look like that.” Tetiana stared at him, her young eyes gleaming with anticipation, proud of what she had learned.

Hesh took a wary sip, still frowning. “Is it supposed to crunch?”

Her face fell.

Hesh was a good man and a better father, and the burden of each meant he would always feel the weight of his mistakes more than the lift of his successes. He had meant his question as a joke, yet he’d destroyed the confidence of someone just learning to make her way in the world. He noted all the things she had gotten right. The temperature of the brew was perfect, warming the soul without burning the mouth. It smelled aromatic and earthy and rich. It tasted smooth and just a bit sweet. It set his body quivering in a way that made him feel as though he could till a whole field by himself.

“Come here, Teti,” he said, and he told her all those things, kindling the almost extinguished flame within her. He could see it burning, but not as bright. He cursed himself—silently, so she would not hear—and sent her outside to play. Then he chewed the rest of his coffee. It’s really not half bad, he thought.

He watched her through the window as she crawled beneath the beanpoles. She still looked sad. At two points she looked back toward the house and bit her finger, clearly wondering if she should come back inside. Go, girl. Be brave. Have an adventure. Be young while you are young, Hesh thought. She saw a honeybee, and her eyes grew wide. She watched it buzz and float, her face inches from it, her mouth wide. He smiled and turned away.

The house shook. The plaster cracked. A loud moaning filled the air. Hesh looked out again. The beanpoles were gone. Teti was gone. The bee remained, hovering in the air, as confused as he was.

He ran outside. A ravine as deep as the crust of the earth had opened up two steps from his door. Above him, Theorin, God of Light, Son of the Father, hovered in the air, nursing his jaw with a smile.

“Come on, you can hit harder than that,” Theorin said, his voice echoing and warping the air. He flew off, back toward whichever God he was fighting.

Hesh looked down at the boiling lake far beneath him, then back up to the ruin where his town used to be. The bee buzzed faintly. There was no other sound.

The glass platform slowed and came to a stop. Hesh, who had crouched down to steady himself against it, built up the courage to stand. Oteph was waiting down the hall, his face half-bathed in shadow.

What little was known of the Gods was mostly myth and hearsay. Hesh knew this. Stories grew in scale every time they were told again. Bards in search of a free meal and a bed to sleep on knew well that tales of the Gods oft bought both, and so those they did not have, they created. The world was old, and the Gods were older still, but all who spoke of Oteph spoke of him as kind. He ruled over the domain of death and gave lost souls new purpose. It was a tireless job, and he had done it for as long as Agora itself had memory.

Hesh clenched his hand around the hilt of his knife and stepped forward. His footsteps rang like bell tolls against the glass floor. Oteph watched him approach with silent and careful regard. He did not know at first who this man was or what his purpose was for coming. Many passed through the Tower, and even more mourned their loss. Their tragedies weighed on him in aggregate, but in isolation, they were a blur.

This was an easy enough problem to solve and by the time Hesh was close enough for a conversation, the whole of his life had been laid out before Oteph: his hardships, his goodness, his love.

“Bring her back,” Hesh said, and Oteph mourned for him, but did not speak. “Bring her back,” Hesh repeated, voice quaking.

“I cannot,” Oteph said, and the truth and humility of his words stopped Hesh in his tracks.

“But you are a god,” Hesh said, his eyes wet with tears.

Oteph cried with him. “I know. There are some things even gods cannot do. I’m sorry.”

“But you are the Unmaker. This is what you do.”

Oteph could hear in the protestation that the man already felt the truth of his words. Hesh’s defeat filled the room with sorrow.

Oteph approached him and laid a weary hand on his hunched shoulder. Hesh drew the knife. It glinted in the refracted light of the desert sun. He glared at Oteph, his face a mask of pain and fury.

Oteph raised an eyebrow. “What do you intend to do with that?”

There are some things the Gods cannot do, but not many. A knife is not a meaningful threat, but grief and logic are not the closest of sisters, and despite his power, Oteph still didn’t much care for the feeling of being stabbed.

Hesh’s hands shook. “Please. Bring her back to me,” he mouthed again.

Oteph shook his head, feeling more tired than he had in the last thousand years.

Hesh jammed the knife into his own throat. Crimson bubbles spurted and frothed from the wound, and he let out a pained gurgle. He fell to his knees as the vertigo from the sudden loss of blood overwhelmed him. His sand-drenched coat turned dark red as it soaked up the liquid. He stared up at Oteph. “Then bring me back . . . to her,” he said, before he lost consciousness.

Oteph watched the life fade from Hesh’s eyes. That, my friend, I can do.

Ota frowned down at the brown water in front of her. “Did you make it right?” she asked.

“Yes! It’s supposed to look like that.” Bo stared at her, his young eyes gleaming with anticipation, proud of what he had learned.

She took a wary sip, still frowning, “Is it supposed to crunch?”

Bo’s face fell.

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In Agora

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Agora, I make my home.

In Agora, I walk the flowering meadows.

In Agora, land of Father I feast in times of plenty.

In Agora, in the shadow of the mountain.

In Agora, in the footsteps of the Gods.

In Agora, I dwell not on the Tower of Glass.

In Agora, I speak Iona’s name in hushed tones, or not at all.

In Agora, I imagine myself timeless.

In Agora . . .

I do not seek the ancient truth.

I do not speak the hidden words.

In Agora, life is simple.

In Agora, life moves slow.

So I do not understand

Why in the mornings I wake weeping.

Dappled sun upon my pillow, mind clouded.

Convinced that in my forgotten dreaming, I lie

Moments from my end.

—Caed - 20 Faeth 12063

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Once...

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Once you could taste the air. Once you could smell the rain. Once pain was real, and the marks we made on the earth were all permanent, even the ones that seemed to fade. Once, Earth meant more than clay and sand and soil. That was before Agora.

Now only the Gods remember.

It has driven them mad.

Agora is old; it was designed that way. Designed to age and patina and grow in its beauty. It was a place for knowing. Where all could age and learn and live out their days in a long and lingering farewell. But a thousand years after its creation, the natural and aged character that was supposed to be born from humanity’s gathered wisdom was halted, and magic faded from the world.

In this land knowledge brought magic, and magic brought power. The worn edges of the world peeled back and revealed ways it could be manipulated that the Gods had not intended, at least not those among them who had imagined this place to be their dominion.

So they intervened. Agora remained—the buildings, the haunted forests, the great sea and the good sea, the city states and empires, the desert to the south, and the western mountains and their deep and secret places. But the people were forever changed. Their experiences erased, their stories unwritten. They started life anew, and the world felt wrong and empty in all the places it should not. So the Gods erased the wrongness as well. Their immortality was masked and their power buried, and so the age of mortals began.

There are many stories from that time. Many lives lived and more lives lost. Histories written and rewritten and forgotten and only now beginning to be uncovered. This is not one of those stories. This is a story about how the age of mortals came to an end.

That end started as all unmakings do: with a broken heart.

“Good evening.” Prosimo’s face shifted, his cheekbones sharpening, eyes turning the same green as those of Ru’s first love.

“Is it?” Ru asked.

And so it was. The clouds raced across the perfect starlit sky, radiating in the purple glow of the just-set sun. Ru looked around the bustling market, confused. He could have sworn it had just been raining.

This was not the first time Prosimo had courted Ru, though Ru had not been his name in the times before. He’d courted him when he was a strong-backed vandal from Re’laeah, a poet from Iridia, several times when he was a woman, and once, briefly, when he was a goat. Prosimo was not proud of the latter, though in his defense, he had also made himself a goat in the attempt. During all his courtships, each pained attempt, he had only been successful once.

And what a once it had been. They had loved for the better part of a century. Lived through the fall of the Gold Remnant, through the rise of a republic and its turn to corruption and ruin, and they had barely noticed. Prosimo had allowed himself to age alongside of Ru. To feel the aches and pains of life eroding, the forced slowness, the grim clarity and the appreciation for small things that it brought with it. His name had been Sef . . . or was it Sif? It was so long ago now, and he’d since had so many. Ru’s name had been Eredo. That, he remembered. It had flowed off his tongue, sounding like a beating drum in his chest.

Prosimo longed to feel that longing again, but since that first life, his love had remained unrequited.

“Why did you change your face?” Ru asked. “I saw you over there, and you looked different.” He smiled at Prosimo playfully.

This felt different—it felt hopeful. Prosimo’s cheeks heated of their own accord. For the first time in a long time, he felt flustered.

“I-I thought it would be to your liking.”

“A God, trying to impress me? I’m flattered. How would you know what I like? Can you read my thoughts?”

He couldn’t, not exactly. Even the Gods had limits. He could read faces well; he’d learned that quickly enough. He could see a person’s entire story laid out before him in an instant. He could even, if he were so inclined, rewrite parts of that story on a whim. But a person’s thoughts were their own.

“I’m a God. I can do anything,” Prosimo said.

“Then why not just make me like you?” Ru asked. “Wouldn’t that be easier than guessing that I like green eyes?”

“Why are you not afraid of me?” Prosimo darted his tongue across his lips.

Ru glanced downward. “I don’t know,” he said, eyes glinting playfully, “but you didn’t answer my question.”

“Why not just make you like me?”

“If you can do anything,” Ru said, shifting his body closer.

Nothing changed, but the people on the street seemed to disappear. It was just the two of them now, alone in a crowded market under the perfect glow of the evening sky.

“Because it wouldn’t be real,” Prosimo said. He stepped closer to Ru, close enough to feel his breath against the skin of his neck. This felt real. This felt like it was happening.

“But it’s real when you change your eyes and put on a pretty mask?” Ru asked. He pressed his hands against Prosimo’s chest and pushed him back. Not far enough to end the game, but far enough to sting a little.

“This?” Prosimo asked. “This is just makeup. It’s not the same.”

“I know it’s not the same. But I want to see your real face.”

Prosimo hesitated. He frowned and felt his skin cool. He had worn so many faces across the years. Masks over masks over masks. All he remembered of his true face were the things he found loathsome about it. The imperfections magnified until they were all that was left. But it had been hundreds of years, and this was the closest he’d come to feeling this love again. It was eternal, and he knew that eternal love deserved that sort of honesty. It just wasn’t something he was prepared to give.

He gave it anyway. The masks slid off, cheekbones softening, muscles fading. His eyes turned brown, then blue, then finally back to green. Had they always been green? He had forgotten that.

Ru looked at him. He smiled and in it Prosimo saw Eredo, and he felt the drumbeat of his name echo in his heart. “That’s better,” Ru said.

“Is it?” Prosimo asked.

“I can’t see a thing worth hiding from.” Ru took a step back toward him, closing the gap he’d created.

A faint popping sound filled the air, like a dry log thrown on a fire. Ru’s head arced back as if he’d been struck through. His eyes went white, his body rigid. Ice spread across his skin, starting from his fingertips and closing in around his gasping mouth.

No, thought Prosimo.

“Peter, darling, what have you been up to?” Erlea asked as Ru’s lifeless body fell to the ground. “I was willing to forgive that first hundred years. We all deserve our playthings after all, but if I didn’t know better I’d say you have feelings for this . . .” She waved her hand dismissively at the corpse.

“Why would you do that?” Prosimo asked, staring down at the body.

Erlea dragged her top teeth over her bottom lip. “Because for whatever fucking reason, I’m not done loving you yet. And just remember, Petey . . .” She brushed his nose with her finger. “You wouldn’t be a God if it wasn’t for me.” Then she vanished.

Prosimo found Ru again years later, this time as an old woman, living another life with another man, denied a birth and an aging, a victim of one of the other Gods’ little projects. Prosimo sighed and flicked his fingers, shifting the runes hidden beneath reality, and she was Ru again. He could have made her Eredo—a part of him wanted to—but Eredo had lived a life, full and rich. That story had been told, and told well. He didn’t want to risk tainting it.

“What’s happening?” asked the old woman in Ru’s body.

There was a part of Prosimo that dreaded what he was about to do. It was forbidden, and for good reason, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to wait another thousand years to feel it again. He pressed his fingertips into Ru’s forehead, finding the ancient command that had locked him and the rest of humanity away and trapped them in this endless cycle of death and rebirth. With a flick of his wrist, he destroyed it.

“Oh,” Ru said as memories flooded his mind.

He remembered Prosimo and the market. He realized that Prosimo was still wearing his true face. He remembered dying, and dying before, and before that. He remembered untold lives and tragedies and saw how Prosimo had loved him through all of them. He saw the times that Prosimo had tried to force his love and how hollow it had felt. He remembered each of the lies and the manipulations and hated and loved him for all of them. Then he remembered Eredo and their life together, and all of Prosimo’s betrayals vanished.

“Oh,” he said again, and looked into Prosimo’s perfect green eyes, with a love more deep and pure than he had thought his heart would be able to contain.

Then he remembered the older betrayals, the ones before he and Prosimo had met. The first betrayal. The ancient wisdom.

“Do you see it?” Prosimo asked. “Do you feel it?”

Ru kissed him, their lips pressed together hard enough that their teeth brushed. He felt Prosimo melt into him. A God, diminished in his arms, laid bare and helpless. A room wrapped up around them, silk sheets and draped curtains and the smell of lavender and honey.

It was later, when Prosimo was asleep, that Ru made his way out to the city he’d known as the old woman. He found a boy, homeless and starving, that he’d seen on the streets and pitied. He pressed his fingers delicately into the boy’s forehead.

“Oh,” the boy said.

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