What is she like?
I was told—
she is a
melancholy soul.

She is like
the sun to the night;
a momentary gold.

A star when dimmed
by dawning light;
the flicker of
a candle blown.

- Lang Leav

"It's the work of a liar," Toamn said, bundling into knots the bloodied cloth that had been wrapped around Lysha's hands as she died. "I don't need to tell some of you that, I'm sure." The fire onto which he cast the cloth was fading, dancing as though to an uneven tune, somehow conspiring to make the space around it darker and to concentrate the shadows which flickered around it.

The gods assembled were dark-eyed and gaunt, as though they too had bled and died alongside the fallen Lysha. Himno's hands shook too much tonight to design the sky's constellations; Arvoh was never the most gregarious, but tonight he sat silently, his back to the stone torus which held aloft the marble pillar behind him and his forearm resting on his knees, silver winking at his fingers like something stolen. Toamn guarded the fire as might a dog and a carcass; Buxiu paced the bottom step, his brown eyes deep and dark in thought. They were as interlopers, meeting in the temple of a small mid-eastern town while its priest slept in the rotunda a dozen metres away and they were therefore for the most part silent.

"But it is, mark me - the work of a liar."

The gates of the temple swung open, buffeted by a winter gale which howled like a wounded, feral creature for a horrible moment through the eaves and arches of the space before settling and coalescing into the slender form of a young girl with hair like starlight and eyes like pitch. She spoke as though she had been present the entire time, with her eyebrow arched and a sardonic tone to her voice. "Everything is."

Arvoh smiled into his palm. His skin was still slightly blue and blackened where they had shook hands hours ago, a sweet wound like frostbite. "Bit of a nihilist streak in you tonight, snowflake?"

Ilargi moved like a girl much taller than she was, with long strides and a sway that caused ripples of firelight to shine through the individual strands of her hair. She ignored her rival's snarky register as she moved around the fire and stooped to take her grandfather's hand and kiss the bronze ring which glittered on his forefinger. "Every night, my darling. The bones of the world are decrepit."

"Any sign of him?" It was almost certain that Buxiu did not intend his voice to be quite to brusque and brisk when he spoke, but no one could blame him for sounding impatient; he still wore Lysha's blood on his fingers, on his cheekbones, in the hollow under his eye.

"The wanderer doesn't want to be found." Ilargi's voice was ice snapping underfoot. "I'll go again, but..."

The gates swung shut and locked once more, and the wind that had accompanied the goddess of bitter winter settled into complacency along with her hair and her dress again. She straightened as Toamn threw some more of the cloth on the fire. Only once she was poised against the fire once more was the longbow slung on her back apparent, the elegant shape of it incongruent and almost as tall as she. Ilargi pulled it from her back and broke the wooden weapon across her knee in a single violent gesture, tossing them onto the fire along with Lysha's death bandages, before moving clockwise around the blaze to stand between Arvoh and Himno, upon whose faces the shadows were writ large.

"He'll be fine. He'll be fine enough," Toamn said peaceably, stoking the fire in front of him with a long, slender iron poker, the end of it curled back upon itself like an old and crippled thing. "The hearth will call him home."

"Whimsy is all good and fine, Toamn, but when? We need to open and close this Selection as quickly as possible."

"Oh, I know. Until the Selection is concluded we are out of balance with the reins of the world let loose and the inherent chaos of the world may reign unchecked across the realm, yes, yes, Buxiu, I know." Toamn turned the iron poker in his hand and inspected the cinders and charcoal which painted patterns across its surface. "But an hour or seven will make no difference. Let him grieve."

"We're all grieving."

"It's not the same and you know it. Jedan still has strings on him. His tear ducts have yet to rust shut like ours."

Himno raised his ink-and-chalk hands to plead for peace. "And we wouldn't wish it any other way. Let us choose, and we can consult Jedan at a later date."

Arvoh flicked icy eyes towards Ilargi, whose teeth drew slowly across her lower lip as she thought pensively of the wager they had settled the previous evening. "Choose already?" Her words were husky, like she was whispering around broken glass, as though her voice were filtered through a haze of cigar smoke. "You haven't given us much time."

"Time is time. When you know, you know," Toamn counselled his granddaughter with a sly smile. "It's easy to pick a winner when you know what to look for."

Toamn had won the last few Selections, or rather, his nominations had; first choosing Gjsard, and before him Lysha, and even before her Ukhohliwe, who had lived and fallen as goddess of esoterism before the temple in which they stood had even recognized its own foundations or known the soil in which it stood. Ilargi had won the one before that, and Arvoh the one before that; the cycle went on, endless, until the threads of time had no meaning and dissipated into senselessness.

"Typically Lysha, though, wasn't it," Himno said thoughtfully. "Not even she wore a skin of humility, but the strictures she placed upon us - young, and beautiful?"

"Sounds like someone's bitter that they're neither," Ilargi snapped, the cold pulling tight like an icy noose for the briefest second before Toamn dispelled it with a wave of his iron poker.

"At peace, girl," the old man said gently.

"Yeah," Ilargi said. "She is. But that doesn't mean I'll let you... pronounce these pestilent speeches against her like that."

"It's an admirable quality," Toamn conceded. "But let your loyalty lie with the living rather than the dead."

Ilargi's dark eyes were unreadable as she folded her arms and stretched her long legs, looking more like some kind of spidery marionette suspended on the strings of something in the sky than a living, breathing girl. Arvoh was a mere glimmer of ice-blue eyes and pale skin beside her, less fully formed than a shadow. "Whose temple is this?"

"Mine," Buxiu replied mildly. Although he wore a brown jacket open over a snow-white shirt and a gold chain, a wolf-skin slung across his shoulders, his shadow wore something considerably longer, a forked smoking jacket and a hat over his cork-screw curls. He had his hands in his pockets, and sunlight staining his hair despite the gloom of half-night.

A half-smile. "You know what I mean, Bu."

"Aye. Cedar Valennon."

"And has Cedar Valennon a daughter?"

"Not anymore," Arvoh said softly, and Ilargi made a face.

"Then, alas! my search continues." She kicked away from the wall, stirring snowflakes like so many cherry blossom petals as she moved, and crossed through the fire as though it were not even there. "Don't forget to douse the fires tonight, boys. It is a cold and dark winter coming - and so few stars to illuminate the night." Ilargi's hair spun in an invisible wind as she turned, flicked her hand at Arvoh in a characteristically bitter gesture, and exploded into a cataclysm of grey moths the colour of dirty snow. They spun and fell in the wind for a few moments before disintegrating into fragments of ash in the space where she had stood, and with a slight smirk, Arvoh plucked one of their charcoal wings from his hair and crushed it between the tips of his fingers.

"Lovely girl, your granddaughter."

Toamn grinned, his white teeth stark and bright against his creased brown skin and his long, braided black hair. "She's a treasure."

Buxiu did not bother to hide his wry smile as he moved across the courtyard in Ilargi's wake, yanking the wolf-skin from his shoulders and throwing it into the fire to a puff of smoke. He shot the others significant looks, but did not slow his pace. "Seven days, then. And watch yourselves." As he walked, the threads of his form unraveling until he was a faded ghost, silhouetted against the wall, and then he was gone. Without a goodbye, as was his custom. Himno had pulled a smoldering branch from the fire and was tracing a map into the snow, scorching the spiral symbols into the snow with faraway eyes, and Toamn drew the cloak at his shoulders tighter around his shoulders as he stoked the coals again.

"Go, Arvoh," he told the younger god. "The grosbeak's right - dark and cold is to come. And if you have made a wager with the girl, fool that you are, you'll need all the time you have."

"You know about the wager?"

"I know that she hasn't forgiven you for the last loss, or the dozen before that, or the hundred that proceeded it."

"It almost seems as though she keeps a grudge." Arvoh fixed his eyes on the golden light that filled and swallowed the window pane of the tower behind the temple, a stone construction that shouldn't have lain harmoniously with the rest of the marble architecture - the elegant columns and wide arches and straight, clean lines. It was a space that suited Buxiu, he thought - severe.

"She gets a taste for things."

Like immortality? Arvoh could still remember Ilargi's Selection. There had never been any doubt - no other had stood a chance against such a storm. Her eyes had been brown then - a pale, tawny kind of a brown, close to gold. Afterwards, they had turned stygian, like ink had been poured into them, like a rot had taken over them from within.

In Arvoh's mind, Ilargi still had gold eyes.

"As do you," the old man noted. "And yet, you have yet to make your choice. I would have believed your selection obvious."

"No," Arvoh said. "I've learnt my mistakes, old man, and I've watched our brothers and sisters make theirs. The obvious choice... would have been the wrong one. But you. You have a candidate in mind."

Toamn's eyes widened. "Something like that."

"And Lysha? Her murderer?"

"Liars are like snakes." Toamn bared his teeth in the smile that followed. "They'll hide and slip through the shadows, quiet as you please, but eventually... you'll hear them rattling."