"And now it's time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am

another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the word

bones —

it's time for afternoon, them white-blank architectures.

No, veil. Nothing. It's time

for you to forgive me: I was forced to eat valises

that wouldn't close by themselves —

that was just a dream, good morning:

regurgitate the stars and the soot."

― Ana Bozicevic, A Kind of Headless Guilt Emerges

The sky - dark.

No stars tonight, and the forests fell silent.

By morning, the people of Elinvier knew for certain.

There were few left alive who remembered the last death of a god, when Ukhohliwe had drowned in the soil below the manumission bell on the northernmost edge of the world. But if there was one thing the people of this realm knew, it was rituals of death and how best to mourn.

Rather than stars, the night was lit by the bonfires struck in every village and every town, on every farm and every mountain. Even here, high on the mountain, the light reached and soaked into the heather and macchia, honey-gold and darting as a snake's tongue, and the smog hung and choked, thick like a noose, dense like treacle, and from it was wrought a woman, soft as the smoke from which she claimed her shape, her hair and lips as red as the fire that had birthed her. Anthe was music in a form that was half-human; she wore songsheets as her rustling skirt and violin strings banded about her biceps as might a warrior woman wear her steel brassard, her wild red hair twitching like a living thing threatening to take dance.

"I thought I might find you here," she said. She had a lower voice than most would think to expect - when the villagers found musical girls to portray her in their plays and rituals down in the mundane world of humanity, they had sweet voices, voices like an ajaeng, like a piccolo balalaika, like a dulcet tinwhistle. No, Anthe sounded as though she had torn her vocal chords from her throat as a child and replaced them with bits of broken glass, a husky voice tired from smoke, from late nights, from singing notes beyond her natural capacity. But there was poetry behind her voice - poetry could be revelation, revolution, but in this moment it was comfort and nostalgia, swans and leaves and moths and apples sweetening in the dark. "The edge of the world."

"If only."

Jedan didn't quite turn his head towards her and when Anthe tilted her head it was obvious that the smoke was eroding her, the pale edges of her skin indistinguishable from the clouds of incense that billowed behind them and eclipsed the mountains; she was not quite concrete, not quite tenable, and the paint-chipped hand that she extended towards her old kinsman was translucent and barely-there.

"Oh," she said. "We'll cut your strings yet, wanderer."

He did not speak, and Anthe released her grip on the world, whatever little bit of energy she had expended to keeping herself whole and humanly shaped, and was lost to the wind once more, buffeted about the flowers and the trees, a flash of bronze where her violin strings had been. And then, just as Ilargi forced herself from the storm, Anthe came forth from the smoke once more - this time, directly in front of the wandering god, forcing him to take a step back and to meet the diminutive goddess's clever russet eyes.

She flicked a glance over her shoulder, and saw upon what he gazed - not the horizon, but a small village at its edge, nestled between cliff and precipice, spider lilies sprouting along the paths towards a graveyard more populated than the town which served as its patron. "A choice made, have you?"

"Have you?"

"I'm decisive." Anthe smiled. "Decisive as... a drumbeat. Amaterasu. Her name means shining over heaven, and you know that names are poetry distilled into sparse syllables."

He knew.

"And the others?"

"Oh, Arvoh always has his eyes on someone, and Buxiu likes to waste no time."

Jedan's gaze was thoughtful, and he directed it once more towards the rough-hewn edge of the cliff. "Can you remember your Selection?"

"Hardly at all. It is as smoke in my memories - the more you grasp, the more it twists and turns and escapes. But I am old. I am ancient." Anthe seemed to enjoy that thought, of being ancient, of being unknowable, of wearing bones that had belonged to the ground centuries and centuries ago, of wearing a skin that should have been gathering dust. "I remember hers, though."

"Lysha's?"

"Mmm. I didn't think she'd do it, you know. I had my money on that other girl, the tall one, green-eyed..."

"The Fade's. Meregidi."

"Meregidi the tracker. I don't know. I never thought that you had the eye for godhood, Jedan, and I won't apologise for thinking so. I didn't think that you would win your Selection and I didn't think that your candidate would win hers and yet..."

And yet Lysha had chased the stars from sunrise to sunset for aeons, and worn the moonlight in her hair like a silver brooch, and hunted animals that had no right to exist by worldly laws, and died only hours ago though she had been born before any human alive on earth had drawn their first breath.

"Yes," Jedan said. "She was a darkhorse."

"And Yla will ensure she is cared for below the earth." Anthe shrugged. The songsheets whispered a rhyme to the sky. Around her pale arms and throat, words folded and unfolded themselves in black ink, flitting, fleeting glimpses of poetry and prayers composed and wiped clean within a single instant. "The others are waiting for you, Jedan. They'll cut your heartstrings, if I'm not kind enough to."

"I'll be glad of it."

"And you'll make your choice?"

"My girl won the last time. I intend to ensure she wins again."

"What use has the wanderer for the wilds?"

Jedan turned his brown eyes - human, Anthe thought, they were human, warm and mundane and not-kind but not-cruel, merely and utterly human - to meet hers. And he met hers, and wondered if she knew who had murdered Lysha. If she knew where the poison lay, what intent had lain behind it, what exactly Jedan would do to the throat of the perpetrator should he by chance lay hands upon it. He wondered these things, but allowed none of them his voice. He half-thought he had no voice to give it life. "None at all. But I trust my own intentions more than any other's - including yours."

"None taken," Anthe said, and quirked a red, red smile. "Oh, do me a favour, Jedan. Choose your girl and then follow the smoke. Drink and dance and sing awhile. You're well able to mask yourself - and there are plenty of pretty ladies and handsome men burning flowers in the villages tonight. Funerals are for the living, and we so rarely take the opportunity to live."

"Go and I shall follow," was the wry reply, and with those words Anthe was stolen by the smoke once more, a faint tinge of red writhing and wreathing across the mountaintops, leaving behind the haze of heat and the scent of autumn crocus and meadow saffron hanging in the cold evening air.

Closing date for submissions is next Wednesday, 19th April 2017. If you have reserved a place, please do not forget to submit or to PM me giving up your place! Sorry for the delay...