The air of the upper world felt colder than it ever had before. Shin leaned against a stone, trying to catch his breath and feeling the icy air burn his lungs.
Did I really just do that?
It had happened just the way the two gods had told him it would: their little squirrel familiar had teased and taunted the guardian god until he had run after it, and Shin had slipped through the opening it had been guarding and descended into the darkness. And beyond the darkness, there had been...
No, I can't think about that. Mortal eyes weren't meant to see the realms of eternity. It had made his senses reel just to be there. His eyes had been dazzled by the glittering surroundings, and had balked at registering the shapes of the spirits who dwelled there. The air down there had made his head swim - it was too pure, too rich for lungs accustomed to the thin air of the high mountains. It had been beautiful, and it terrified him, and he had a feeling that even if he somehow distinguished himself enough later in life that Aurite offered him the chance to dwell there forever, Shin would find himself asking politely to be sent to the Land of the Peaceful Dead instead. Or to the Accursed Dead, for that matter. Anything but that again.
But he had the stone now. It rested in his hands, warm and somehow not like stone at all. It pulsed gently, as if it were a living thing with breath and a heartbeat. It felt alive. How could something that was as hard as stone still feel like flesh? It still glowed with its own strange, fiery light. The longer he gazed into it, the more he seemed to be able to make out intricate patterns in the way its glow pulsed and shifted. Watching them soothed him, somehow, so he continued watching until his heartbeat began to sync to its rhythms and he started to feel better.
What can I do with this, I wonder? Luna and Sol had promised him that the stone had power, but they hadn't explained in any sort of detail how to use it. Still, they had seemed confident that he could work it out.
So go on, Shin. Prove you're the artist you always knew you were.
He turned his head this way and that, searching for inspiration. A glimmer of gold caught his eye. Of course - the axe. He'd carried it tucked under one arm while he made his escape, preferring to carry his new treasure with both hands. Now it was leaning against the side of the mountain just as he was. He contemplated it.
Part of being an artist was being able to pick out patterns. Good art involved good composition, knowing how to put the right things in the right places so your pattern was neither too busy nor contained too much blank space. Perhaps that was where he ought to start. If he was going to use this stone, he was going to need to have the right pattern to use it in. So, how did you convince a magic stone to let you rewrite your reality?
Thoughtfully, he set down the stone on a patch of moss, then picked up the axe again. It buzzed against his hand, as if it disapproved of what he was doing. He ignored it. Instead, he looked around until he found a boulder that was about the right size for what he wanted. With a swift, decisive stroke, he drove the blade several inches into the top of the stone. Another stroke from the other direction, and he'd severed a chunk out of the top. Very carefully, he used the blade of the axe to pry the section out and send it rolling down the slope of the mountain. Now his boulder had a crude hollow in the top, about the size and depth of his mother's best cooking pot. It was also, not coincidentally, about the size of the stone. Shin set the axe aside with some relief and reached instead for the golden stone.
"Be part of this world now," he told it, and jammed it into the hollow.
It went in with a hollow boom like a dungeon door being slammed. The earth shuddered from the impact, and several small stones shook loose. Shin felt the stone slot into place as if it were his own heart being shoved into the hollow. He screamed as he felt himself being wrenched open by the force. For a moment, he was no longer himself. He was every stone, every tuft of grass, every animal and bird, every stray breeze, everyone but himself.
Then he fell backwards and landed on his rear with a thump that jarred him back to his senses. He lay there for a moment, seeing stars.
I am getting tired of this, he thought vaguely, as his heart set to racing again.
But the giddiness soon passed. Within a few breaths, he was able to sit up and look around. Nothing around him seemed to have changed, but at the same time, everything felt... different. Shin had the oddest feeling that the world around him was holding its breath, watching silently as it waited for orders.
A breeze blew past him, and he shivered.
"I wish it were warmer," he muttered, half to himself. "Or that I'd brought a better coat."
There was a flump, and a coat fell out of the air in front of him. It was quite a nice coat, made of leather and fur, just the sort of thing one wanted on a day this cold. But even as Shin had that thought, he realized that the air playing around him was no longer cold, but gently warm.
"Huh," he said thoughtfully. He picked up the sleeve of the coat. It had weight and substance in his hand, and smelled like new leather ought to smell. He looked up at the sky.
"I wish it was snowing pink snow," he said. After a split-second of cogitation, he added, "Warm pink snow."
The sky did something peculiar. Suddenly it was full of mauve clouds, and tiny pink snowflakes like flower petals were drifting all around him, as warm as the wind that played around him but somehow not melting. Shin scooped a handful of them up and pressed them in his fingers. They stuck together, the way snow usually did. He threw them at the wall, and they went splat in the way a good snowball should.
Shin took a breath and let it out again slowly.
"Okay," he said, "I think I can do this."
I've never had to go this way before.
The thought struck Akoya disagreeably. He had always cherished a certain sense of superiority. Even at his lowest ebb, there had always been some part of him that had felt rather proud that at least he was failing more spectacularly than anyone else ever had. And why shouldn't he feel superior? He was the great god Pearlite, most beautiful being in existence. Even as a mortal, he had been so lovely that practically everyone on earth, in the heavens, and in the underworlds had been coveting him. He had courted and won what were arguably the two most desirable men in existence: Sulfur, whose wealth was beyond legendary, and Vesta, who was the literal embodiment of desirability. He was welcome everywhere, from the pinnacle of the Palace of the Gods to the darkest depths of the Land of the Accursed Dead. When his powers were at their height, he was one of the most powerful of the gods, capable of almost anything. When he had first left his mortal life behind, Sulfur himself had gathered his soul and delivered it to the Heavenly City personally.
All of which explained why he had never been forced to walk down one of these pestilential hallways.
Akoya wasn't technically a death god, but you couldn't hang around Io for this long without picking up a few things. He knew, for example, that there was a lot that could happen to a soul once it became detached from its body. Most of them turned immediately towards the nearest path to the underworld and headed for the Place of Judgment, where they would await Aurite's verdict. Some of them were collected. Sometimes they were lucky, and the collection was done by one of the celestial gods who had taken a shine to them and decided to take them on as an attendant. Most of the time, they were collected by one of the underworld gods whose job it was to gather up lost souls and guide them to their next stop. Very occasionally, a soul would slip past everyone's notice and wander the world as ghosts until someone found them and helped them move on. That was one of Io's favorite chores. He did so love to collect things, after all. Then, too, there were the ones that managed to slip into a dead body - their own or someone else's - and wander the world as a remnant, and that was one job Akoya was happy he never had to deal with. But the point was, Akoya had been one of the lucky ones. When he had died, it had been with Sulfur right there beside him to make sure everything went smoothly. He'd never had to blunder around trying to find his way down to the underworld, and he didn't much appreciate needing to blunder his way out.
"Ouch," he complained, as he paused to rub his stubbed toe. "I just walked into a wall."
"Well, don't do that," said Ryuu.
"I didn't do it on purpose," Akoya groused. "Why is it so dark? We're not supposed to need light. We're gods."
"It's an underworld thing," said Ryuu. "Stop complaining, okay? It doesn't help."
"Neither does yelling at me," Akoya retorted.
He turned to glare at the place he'd last heard Ryuu's voice. Akoya was willing to admit that he loved Ryuu dearly, but there were still times when he got on a person's nerves.
We're too alike, that's the problem. We need Io to mediate between us...
He sighed. "I"m sorry. I'm just..."
"I know," said Ryuu's voice, quiet in the dark. "I'm scared too."
"I just... I don't know what we'd do without him."
"Me either," said Ryuu. "So we're not going to let anything happen to him."
Akoya sighed again and started moving. "It has happened. That's the problem."
Ryuu didn't have an answer to that. They started walking again. After a moment, Akoya felt warm fingers touching his.
"Here," said Ryuu. "I"ve been this way a few times before. I know the way better."
Akoya closed his hand around Ryuu's and gave it a gentle squeeze. He hated to admit it, but he felt a little bit better.
"How long do you think it will take?" he asked. "To get to the exit, I mean."
"Probably not long," said Ryuu. "It just feels long because it's so dark. I know what you mean, though. I like the dark but this is kind of ridiculous."
"Perhaps I'll have a word with Io when he gets back," said Akoya. "See if he'll let me rearrange things a little. Give the newly dead a properly solemn welcome - something with a little more dignity than stubbing their toes in the dark."
"Souls don't have toes," said Ryuu automatically. Then he added, "But that doesn't mean Io won't let you do it. He really is a sentimental old softy, underneath it all."
"I've noticed," said Akoya. "Sometimes I really do envy you for having had so much more time with him than I have."
"Right from the beginning," said Ryuu softly. "From the very beginning."
"Tell me about it," said Akoya.
There was quiet for a moment, as Ryuu gathered his thoughts.
"I remember being born," said Ryuu dreamily. "I came out of a fire, did you know that? It was a forge-fire. Some guy was trying to impress a woman, and he got the idea of making something and giving it to her, because he wanted her to like him, you know? And, I mean, it wasn't much of a forge fire because these people hadn't figured out much about metallurgy and stuff, but he figured it out for her. And that was where Io and I came from - me from the fire and Io from the earth he crafted the metal from."
Akoya closed his eyes, trying to imagine it: this long-ago innovator, trying to invent something no one had ever invented before, trying to win over a woman with style instead of strength, and from out of those fires of passion had come something that would change the world forever...
"So there we were," said Ryuu. "And we were just standing there looking at each other and kind of going 'wow, look at this thing that's happening in front of us, this is really amazing'. And then Io was like, 'I wonder if we could make something like this happen again,' and I said I bet I could, and then we were off."
"And nothing has been the same since," Akoya murmured.
"It just keeps getting better," said Ryuu. "That's one thing that bugs me about Kinshiro. He's always wanting everything to stay the same. He doesn't like it when the status quo changes."
"Funny, when you think about it," Akoya murmured. "He was so happy to see mortals changed into humans."
"Yeah, he's okay with it once you've proven that the changes you've made are good ones," said Ryuu, "but it's getting him to agree things ought to change in the first place that's the problem. Seems to me, we could use a little more change around here. Have you noticed? In the old days, things used to change all the time. People were inventing fire and the wheel and the slingshot and all sorts of nifty stuff. But how much has changed from the time you were born until now?"
Akoya thought about that. A lot of people had been born and died, a few small towns had become large cities and a few large cities had become small towns. Kingdoms rose and fell. And yet... now that he thought about it, Ryuu was right. When it came to technology and culture, things seemed to move very slowly, if they changed at all. Things went in and out of fashion in the usual cycles, but it was rare to see anything truly new and innovative.
"The biggest new thing I can think of," said Akoya thoughtfully, "is that talkative little fellow who invented the newspaper. That was clever."
"I have some thoughts about that," said Ryuu. "You remember what happened just before, right?"
"How could I forget?" Akoya replied. He had fought in the Chaos War. He'd gone toe to toe with Chaos himself, and that wasn't a thing anyone forgot in a hurry. For one thing, Chaos had cut off a large chunk of his hair. Akoya didn't easily forgive people who messed with his hair.
"Right, then," said Ryuu. "In the beginning, there was Chaos. That's what all the holy books say, and the people who were there tell me it's true. So what if that's what it was? What if there was still a sort of... aura of chaos still sticking to things, back when everything was new and shiny? What if that was what made it possible for things to change so rapidly? I mean, Chaos isn't necessarily evil. It's a creative force, too, not just a destructive one."
"And you think the reason this new idea came into being was because Chaos had been so close to that place on earth?" said Akoya thoughtfully. "That could be. It makes a certain amount of sense, but I don't think it's worth letting him out again to test the hypothesis. While he might be a creative force in theory, in practice I think he may be rather more in favor of destroying the things already here before he makes new ones."
"You could be right about that," Ryuu agreed. "And if that's how he feels, I sure don't see any way of stopping him."
"Anyway, I don't see why changing things is necessary," said Akoya. "Things have been ticking along quite nicely for a long time now, and everyone seems happy. Why rock the boat?"
"That's a point of view," Ryuu agreed. "Anyway, it looks like somebody has decided to do some boat-rocking with or without Chaos's help."
"Can we push them overboard and drown them?" Akoya asked.
"If you can do it, be my guest," said Ryuu. "Me, I favor setting them on fire. I'm good at setting things on fire."
It sounded like lighthearted banter, and if Akoya had known him any less well, he might have been a little reassured. As it was, he was actually becoming slightly more worried. It wasn't like Ryuu to go this long without indulging in casual flirtation. The fact that he was abstaining meant he was worried. Akoya wasn't used to his lighthearted husband being worried about anything. Io was usually the one who did their worrying for them.
"I think I see light up ahead," said Akoya, trying to lift the mood. "Does that mean we're almost there?"
"We're almost there," Ryuu agreed, and Akoya heard his footsteps pick up their pace. The two of them hurried together towards the light at the end of the tunnel.
What they found was a disgruntled-looking gate guardian, shifting from foot to foot as though he really didn't want to be there to meet them.
"I don't know how it happened," he told them.
"How what happened?" asked Akoya. Ryuu fell back a little, letting him take the lead. Akoya might be the god of spring, but he could still do icy hauteur better than Ryuu could.
"I'm not sure," said the guardian. "I was just standing here guarding the door like always, and suddenly this little imp ran up and started climbing all over me, and when it dashed off I chased after it. I was only gone a few seconds, honest."
"You left the gate?" Akoya asked.
"Only for a few seconds!"
"You left. The gate."
"I didn't think anything was going to happen!" the guardian protested. "I've stood in front of this gate for over a hundred years and nothing more dangerous than a mountain goat has come this way. Only now..."
"Did you catch the demon, at least?" Ryuu asked.
"No, it got away," said the guardian. "But just look - look over there!"
He pointed. Akoya peered. There was a ridge of stone blocking most of his view, but above it, he could see what looked like the pinnacle of a tower, or perhaps the spire of a temple.
"It looks like a city," he remarked.
"Yes," said the guardian, "but it wasn't there this morning."
Akoya and Ryuu exchanged glances.
"Well," said Akoya, "that sounds like something we ought to look into, doesn't it?" He glanced at the gate guardian. "You're off the hook for now, but don't think I won't be telling Sulfur about this later."
The two of them vanished and reappeared on top of the rocks, where they could get a better view. They stared a moment, taking it all in. Then Ryuu turned to give Akoya a look.
"Well?" he asked. "Anything you'd like to tell me?"
"Don't blame this on me," said Akoya tartly. "Do you really think I'd design a tower like that?"
Ryuu shrugged. "Looks fine to me."
"Well, it's not. Just look at those windows. Those are Meridan Empire arches, but the window designs are pure Archadian. And that zigzag design running around the edges of the walls and doors? I think that's meant to be a Corrick tribal design, but they've gotten the angles all wrong. And don't even ask me about the tower roofs. I have no idea what the designer was thinking there."
"I stand corrected," said Ryuu. "So what you're saying is that this tower is architecture by someone who doesn't know a thing about architecture."
"No," said Akoya thoughtfully. "More like someone who has heard of architecture in bits and pieces but has never had the chance to learn it any organized setting. Certainly none of my subjects would ever create something so gauche. And yet..." He closed his eyes, testing the area with senses beyond the normal human five. "And yet, I think this is one of mine. How irritating. I shall have stern words with him."
"I'll enjoy seeing that," said Ryuu. "Let's go find him and tell him all about it."
They bounded down from the ridge of rock and began dashing over the fields of stone and scrub at a pace that was half running and half simply flowing over the terrain the way wind or water might. The further they went, the more signs they found that something around here wasn't quite right. A little streamlet contained a number of colorful tropical fish, their jewel-like scales vivid against the gray and brown landscape. Most of them were already dead or dying, unable to survive so far from their warm salty seas. A few colorful flowers peeked out among the more commonplace weeds. Akoya could feel the ache of them as they struggled to bloom out of season. Most of them were of no breed he had ever seen or heard of before, more like a child's drawing of flowers brought to life than any real flower. Some of them were all petals, with no pistil or stamen or any way of making any more flowers. Akoya clucked his tongue at the waste.
"Hey," said Ryuu, stopping and staring. "Did you see that?"
Akoya paused too. "What? I didn't see anything. I was looking at the flowers."
"Well, you'd better look at the sky. I think that sheep had wings."
Akoya scanned the air warily, already raising a hand in an attempt to protect his hair from anything that might fall on it as a result of flying sheep. He couldn't see anything, but he could definitely hear a few distressed "baas" off in the distance.
"Let's keep going," he said. He found himself hoping that their quarry would be waiting for them somewhere indoors.
Whoever is doing this, they haven't thought it through at all. They're just creating whatever they think of, without stopping to consider if it makes any sense or how it all fits together. That's no artistic principle I ever taught anyone!
A little further on, they came to a road. Akoya prodded it cautiously with a foot. The road was striped red and white, and was slightly sticky.
"Peppermint?" Ryuu said aloud. "Who makes roads out of peppermint?"
"People who aren't worried about it melting," said Akoya. "Don't you see what's going on here? Someone has taken Io's crystal and they're trying to use it to impress their will on the world, just as he impressed himself on the underworld. Only... it can't work. They're human."
Ryuu grimaced. "Oh. I hadn't thought of that. Well, this is likely to get messy, isn't it?"
Akoya nodded grimly. The thing about gods was that they tended to be rather set in their ways. They changed slowly when they changed at all, and even then it was normally a matter of degree rather than kind. For example, Kinshiro deciding that there was a place in a well-ordered universe for a quiet after-dinner drink was mostly just a matter of him deciding that something that helped people relax and bond with each other contributed to the overall harmonious running of society, not his suddenly deciding that wanton drunkenness was a good idea. You would never see one of the craft gods abruptly deciding that they were bored with blacksmithing or woodworking, or whatever it was they did, and deciding to become a god of music or generosity instead. Their specialties were their selves, and to give up whatever it was they did would destroy them.
Humans, on the other hand, were changeable creatures. They grew, they discovered new interests, they fell in and out of love, they developed unsuspected talents. A woman who spent half her life cooking and cleaning and tending her children could discover one day that she had a knack for chemical formulae and become an alchemist or greenwitch without fundamentally changing her nature. For a human to assume the role of god took a certain kind of person - someone like Akoya or Arima who was so single-minded that giving up all that potential to change was no great hardship. It had been much harder on Atsushi, and he was good at what he did, and had lots of friends helping guide him through the process of giving up his humanity.
But whoever was doing this had forced themselves into the role of god of this particular patch of land without any guidance or training, and probably not a lot of warning as to what was going to happen to him when he tried. He was tearing this place apart, and he was probably going to end by splitting himself into fragments along with it.
"Well," said Ryuu, after a moment of contemplation, "I guess that means we'll be getting our rock back, one way or another. Nasty way to go, though."
"Yes," said Akoya slowly. An unpleasant thought was beginning to arise in his mind. "It is a very nasty thing to happen to someone. Ryuu, does it seem to you that there has been an awful lot of thievery going on around here these days? First Fate's axe, now this. It's almost as thought someone were gathering these things... perhaps for some purpose..."
Ryuu looked at Akoya speculatively. "I thought we agreed that this was a human's doing, though."
"How did a human manage it, though?" Akoya said. "Think about it. Somehow, whoever did this must have known how to get into the underworld without being detected, must have known the stone was there, must have had some way to chip off a piece... I know precious stones almost as well as Io does, and that keystone is harder than diamond. No ordinary mortal man with a hammer and chisel could have taken off a chunk of it, not if they chipped from now until the end of time. But what if someone put him up to it? Someone who has already put someone up to stealing Fate's axe, and who therefore had a handy cutting tool all ready and waiting?"
"That's no good, though," said Ryuu. "Why would they just let their patsy keep the stone for himself? The way I heard it, they got that axe off of poor Katari pretty darn fast."
"They might do it," said Akoya, "if they knew he was likely to blow himself to bits in pretty short order."
"You might just be on to something," said Ryuu. He frowned in thought for a moment, then brightened. "Do you think he still has the axe on him?"
"That's a possibility," said Akoya, also perking up. "If we hurry, we could get it and the stone back before any more harm can be done."
"Then let's not waste any more time around here," said Ryuu. He started hurrying up the path. "Ugh, it's sticky."
"The least of our worries, dear." Akoya let himself shift into a shape that was comfortable for him, that of a swirl of flower petals borne on a cool spring breeze. Ryuu, not to be outdone, became a streak of reddish flame, skimming above the candy path and leaving a melted trail in his wake.
They reappeared at the heart of what could have been, by some definitions, a city. It had a lot of buildings, at any rate. Akoya turned in a slow circle as he absorbed the sight. The houses and shops around him were all made of something glittery, pale blue, and semitransparent. It looked very much as though someone had decided that arctic ice was a suitable building material. Akoya thought it might have been, if the weather had been behaving normally. He was very sensitive to seasonal changes, and every fiber of his being was telling him that this was meant to be a cold place, not a warm one. The fact that someone had decided they wanted to have it both ways annoyed him. He turned in a slow circle, contemplating his surroundings.
"It's kind of pretty," said Ryuu, "if you like the ice castle look."
"Mm," said Akoya thoughtfully. "It's also a bit repetitive."
Ryuu blinked. "Come again?"
"Take a closer look," said Akoya. "Look at the buildings further down the street and compare them to the ones in front of us."
"Huh?" said Ryuu, and then, "Oh!"
Akoya nodded. The buildings in front of them, taken individually, each seemed to have their own character. If Akoya tilted his head just so, he could barely see the shapes of the buildings they had once been before someone with godly ambitions got hold of them. Those were simple, serviceable houses and shops - nothing he would have been excited about, but nothing to be ashamed of either. But he could also see that the original town had been tiny, only a single street with maybe a dozen houses and half as many shops. This was a city with hundreds of buildings... nearly all of which were patterned after that same set of original structures.
"Someone," he observed, "is either not very creative or being very lazy."
"Does it make a difference?" Ryuu asked.
Akoya shrugged. "No, but it irks me. If someone is going to go stealing things from our consort, they could at least do him the honor of making good use of what they steal. The more I look at this, the more I think we have found someone whose ambition outstrips his abilities."
"Well, let's find him and sort him out," said Ryuu.
He began turning this way and that as well. Akoya copied his example, trying to find the source of whatever was causing this weirdness. There were people nearby, he could see, but all of them were wandering around murmuring in awe and no small amount of fear. Akoya could guess that these were people for whom nothing interesting ever really happened, and they were hardly taking this change in environment well.
If I were a human who thought he were a god, where would I go?
Well, he technically was a human who thought he was a god. His friends did keep telling him that gods were just ideas that thought they could be people, so what was so odd about being a person who thought he was a slightly different kind of person? It gave him a useful perspective on this sort of thing.
"The temple," he said.
Ryuu turned to look in the direction Akoya was looking. "You're probably right about that one. Do you want to just blow it up with him in it? Because I bet this blue stuff would melt." He raised one hand, a fireball already burning there.
"And risk damaging Io's stone? Are you out of your mind?"
Ryuu winced. "Good point. Okay, we do this the hard way."
They wove their way through the sparse crowd of frightened onlookers. Akoya felt sorry for them. They were clearly terrified and wanted to go home, except that home was what they had become terrified of.
When I find this fellow, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind!
They reached the temple. It was the focal point of the spire they had seen in the distance, and it was no more to Akoya's liking now that they were seeing it up close. He had a lot of experience with temples by now. His own great temple in Lightflower was obviously his favorite, but he had to admit that some of the others were pleasant as well. This one struck him as wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the architecture. He hesitated on the brink of going up the steps.
"Something wrong?" Ryuu asked.
"I have... a bad feeling," said Akoya.
Ryuu frowned. "Is this a general sort of bad feeling, or a professional bad feeling?"
"I"m not sure," Akoya admitted. He was not himself prescient - the only ones among the gods who had any sort of gift for predicting the future were Fate, Chance, and Cerulean - but he was the god of new beginnings, and he could usually tell when something bad was about to happen when it was in his immediate future. "There's something here we don't know that we should. I think we should think about this a little more..."
"We don't have time," Ryuu insisted. "Io needs us."
Raising his fireball high, he stalked towards the front doors of the temple and pressed his burning hand against them. They melted into sizzling water and steam.
The inside of the temple was dark. It shouldn't have been dark - there were any number of windows, all apparently made of something that might have been stained glass and might have been some sort of tinted ice. Nevertheless, the inside was shadowy, and Ryuu paused a moment to get his bearings. Akoya scampered to follow him, straining to see through the dark. At the far end of the temple, he could pick out something that was out of place: a flicker of orange and gold, resting on something that might have been an altar. There was something moving nearby.
Akoya had a sudden, gut level sense of No, not good, run!, and then it was too late. Light flared up inside the temple, blue and cold and repellant. At the center of that glow was a man. At some point in history, he had probably been reasonably nice-looking. Not handsome, but pleasant, in a mild, shaggy-haired, scholarly sort of way. Akoya could still get that sense from him, even beneath all the glamour.
But it was so hard to see through the glamour when the surface was so shiny. The man they saw before them now was a man of ice and snow, with perfect white skin and glittering hair, and eyes like two dark sapphires. He was glaring at them irritably.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, and his voice, at least, was still human. Apparently he could change the way everything around him looked, but he hadn't figured out how to change the way they sounded.
"You stole something," said Ryuu. "We want it back."
"Well, you can't have it!" the man replied. "I need it more than you do!"
"That's a matter of opinion," Ryuu muttered.
"Please," said Akoya, feeling the sensation that someone needed to pour oil on these troubled waters. "You don't understand. We need that stone. Sulfur is dying. If you don't give it back to us, it will mean the end of him and the end of his level of the underworld as well."
And it might mean the end of us, Akoya thought. How long would he and Ryuu want to live if Io was dead? And Ryuu was the god of pleasure. What would happen to a race of gods who faded away when they grew too miserable if the living avatar of enjoyment disappeared?
Is this what those two wanted when they set this up? To trigger a domino effect like that? If that was true, he'd dedicate his last days to hunting them and dragging them down with him.
"I don't care," the man muttered sullenly. "What do I care about the afterlife when I'm miserable now?"
"Well, maybe we can help with that," said Ryuu persuasively. "I'm good at making people not miserable. That's what gods are for. Why not give us back that stone and let us see what we can do to make things better for you?"
"No. You've had your chance," the man snapped. "Now it's my turn, and I don't need you anymore. I can make this world do whatever I want. I'm a god now!"
"No you aren't," said Akoya, more sharply than he'd intended. "Trust me, I know how it works. I've seen a few humans becoming gods before, myself included, and the rules say this isn't how it works."
The snow-man's grin was manic. "Then I'll make it so that isn't the rule anymore. I can do anything I want!"
"You don't understand!" said Ryuu. "Some rules you can't change!"
"Shut up!" the snow-man barked. He made an impatient gesture with one hand, and Ryuu's mouth snapped shut. Akoya blinked. It was hard to say which of them looked more surprised. The snow-man stared down at his hands, then at Ryuu, then back at his hands. Akoya's get out of here now instinct grew even stronger. He began edging towards the door.
"Stop... right... there," said the snow-man.
Akoya felt his feet rooted to the floor. The snow-man grinned.
"Well," he said, "I guess I really am the god here now."
Ryuu looked horrified. Akoya just rolled his eyes in exasperation.
"I told you so."
