"Oh, the road, the road
All you who sing the praises of dust and bones,
Places that she takes us, the choice was ours -
We wanted much more than our fathers
While our mothers said their prayers."

― Brian Fallon

Ekaitza Neska Hezur's grandfather still spoke with awed reverence about the moment he saw a god die.

"I thought it was a falling star," he would say, very softly. His voice was brimstone and granite, hoarse from a life's overuse of haxixa and strained like a string played too many times. It was not the most beautiful voice, but it was almost hypnotic in its persuasive, addictive quality. Those who heard one word stayed to hear a second, and then a third, and then, almost before they knew what was happening, they had been drawn into the story like a rockling on a ribbon. The rhythm of his accented voice belonged to that lilt-and-keen half-dead language of the kasbahs and the wastes, and though it was not a song he was spinning, the captivation was much the same.

And oh, was the old man a performer when he wanted to be. His eyes would widen minutely, and he would raise a hand to point to the sky, as though to trace the route the dead god's corpse had taken along the horizon, his gaze lost to the past. "He fell from the sky like his wings had been ripped from him, shedding feathers and sparks in his wake, flames swallowing him whole as he tumbled..." And for a brief, blissful, beautiful moment, he would appear totally lost to the here and now, and the audience would permit themselves to get lost in the memory as well, and for a moment there would be silence, even here in the heart of Villananzanj.

"I have never seen anything so beautiful," he would add, and that was Ekaitza's cue to start picking pockets.

Thaelab solas ematen zaukanean ari, gogo emak tkvens shvilebs, she thought. While the fox is chatting to you, keep an eye on your children.

If there was one thing the old man knew how to do faultlessly, she thought, it was how to distract mausebi.

He wasn't her real grandfather, of course, though most people tended to think all nomads looked enough alike that the lie was softly spoken and easily believed. They shared the same sable hair and sard skin, hands worn to callouses by a lifetime spent gripping ropes and toiling the land. They even had the same way of telling mistruths, eyes narrowing as though squinting into the sun, and hands hanging loosely by their sides. She had worked with him over seven winters as a younger girl, when the ribbons of the sky grew treacherous with verglas and even the girl who would become the silkjinn shied from the dire dives her older self would relish. She had never known a time when the fall was not a part of her as inextricable as her lungs or her liver, but it was difficult to attract mausebi to the marketplace in the cold dark of December and when the time came for Ekaitza Neska Hezur to make a fatal miscalculation, she would rather it was in front of as many watching eyes as possible.

They did so relish the prospect of broken bones and brimmed blood, the mausebi. Ekaitza could not remember ever learning what that word meant - it was easy to imagine that she had been born knowing it, just as she had always known that she was tximeleta, which was its opposite. It separated the us from them, the mice on the ground from the butterflies in the air. It was, she thought, a nice word for marks. For targets. For rubes, if she was being honest. But it had another, subtler meaning. It was a child treading water out of their depth, a boy afraid of heights stepping out onto a ribbon, a man who could not speak the language haggling at a stall, a character in a play ignorant of the fact his death was imminent because the script had decreed it so. It was someone who did not know what had happened, what was happening, what was to happen.

And waking up in the palace of Elinvier, very far away from the comforting chaos of Villananzanj, Ekaitza could not help but feel like she had found her place among the mausebi.

There was a mark on the back of her hand, she saw, formed of a set of shallow, narrow wounds accompanied with the dull throb of pain that told her they were freshly inflicted. It was almost elegant in its barbarity, she thought, a kind of artistry in its appearance, sort of beautiful if she allowed herself to forget the wince of pain that accompanied each curl of her fingers. It was the shape of an eye, she saw now, shaped almost like one of the hamsas that would be sold in the marketplace of Villananzanj as an amulet against evil. It was all overlapping lines and curves, its curled red edges stark against her dark skin. Was this, she wondered, a mark of the god who had chosen her, or a mark possessed by all of the Selection?

Because she had no doubt that she had been drafted into the Selection.

It had been a lie, of course. That story about the dead god. There had been not a single bit of truth to it. A beautiful lie beautifully told, which Ekaitza didn't imagine constituted a lie at all, if you stopped to think about it. But the last dead god had been long before Ekaitza's time. The last Selection had been long before her time.

She couldn't say she knew what to expect.

Even as she sat up in the unfamiliar bed, noting absently that she was still clad in her usual uniform of hood-and-ribbons-and-boots, Ekaitza could not help but reach for a sabre which was no longer there. Her pockets were empty, the daggers she hid in her boots spirited away. Not even the needles she used to keep her hair bound back in the worst of the heat had vanished. Without her edges and her sharp points, Ekaitza felt like the ribbon anchoring her to the empyrean had just been abruptly cut. She was in freefall now. The Selection? She had never wanted to be a part of the Selection.

What use had Ekaitza Neska Hezur for the gods? What use had the gods for Ekaitza Neska Hezur?

She ached for the familiar cool of knives in her hands.

Arrotz-herri, otso-herri, she thought grimly.

A foreign land is a land of wolves.

"Hello?"

Marzanna Petrova had never been so glad to hear a single word spoken. It hung plaintively in the air like an orphaned note of song, but it was the first sign of another human being that Marzanna had glimpsed or heard in the long few minutes that had passed since she had awoken in a strange room, in what felt like a very strange building, what felt like very far away from home. The crest of the royal family was everywhere; if Marzanna had not acutely guessed as much, it would have been obvious with a few looks around exactly where she was.

She hadn't been sure if she had dreamed the visit of the wanderer. No, that wasn't right - she knew she had only dreamed it, but she had not been certain if it was a figment of her mind or the true divine voice of a god whispering to her in her sleep. The clarity and precision of the vision could not be denied, of course; Marzanna herself did not think she was capable of dreaming such vivid colours, such beautiful images. And Jedan's voice had been indescribable, a strange lost music drawn through time from ancient ages long past.

He had given her a choice. Marzanna had always been very fond of choosing.

And now here she was. She had awoken from the dream slowly, rising to consciousness as though through water, and found herself lying fully-dressed in a bed that was not her own, made up with silk sheets and velvet throws in rich, deep, dark browns and purples. Jedan's sort of colours, she thought absently, and she had looked around the room and had seen that the entire room was so decorated, with the kind of traditional hard-wood furniture that characterised the western reaches of the kingdom. Jedan tended not to have temples like the other deities did, hewn in marble and wrought in gold - he spent too much time on the road for such vanity - so his followers often erected roadside shrines to the travelling god, fashioned from whatever ribbons and wood and granite they could spare. There was such a shrine on the balcony of the room, the little scraps of white fabric attached to the top-most strut fluttering in an invisible breeze like a flag waving in surrender. Marzanna had gone to the glass door of the balcony, and found it locked.

She felt trapped. Marzanna had never been very fond of having choices taken from her.

"Anyone?" The other girl spoke again, her voice sweet, and this time Marzanna was able to follow it around the corner to find the girl who had spoken it. She was, as Marzanna had expected her to be, quite beautiful - gods tended to like beauty, the old stories always said, and this girl was gorgeous enough that a girl less confident than Marzanna might have felt a little self-conscious standing next to her. Her skin was sienna and pale umber, her hair taupe and kobicha, her eyes the deepest, richest chocolate brown that Marzanna could remember glimpsing. She was tall and slim and dressed in the garb of a girl from the midlands, albeit a wealthy one at that - long, layered fabrics in floral colours, a veritable bouquet of cloth that brought to mind the swathes of material with which temples of Arvoh tended to be draped to create an atmosphere of secrecy, albeit in much brighter shades. The silver pendant of a rose, hung on a slender chain, glittered lazily from around her throat. Not unlike Marzanna's own style of dress, although of course Marzanna tended towards much more muted tones. Nonetheless, it was clear that this girl came from a similar background: higher caste, midlands, more educated than not. Tattoos snaked her arms, disappearing under the short sleeves of her dress. It was impossible to see how much of her skin was taken up with them. Somehow, that comforted Marzanna. It was a foolish thought, but she had been half-convinced she might have been the only member of the Selected so marked with ink.

Clearly she and this girl shared some similarities. Certainly, she looked almost as relieved to see Marzanna as Marzanna felt to glimpse her.

"I was beginning to think I might be all alone in the world," she said, with a slight smile, and Marzanna noted that even her smile was bright.

"I'm always happy to prove someone wrong," Marzanna replied, and extended a hand to the other girl, because it seemed a polite thing to do. As she did so, she noticed for the first time the ring that had appeared on her thumb, out of nowhere. She had never seen such a piece of jewellery before, though she could not deny it was strangely beautiful in its simplicity: not quite perfectly round, hewn slightly misshapenly, and made of a slightly rough, grey material that she realised after a moment was bone. A gift from Jedan? She didn't have time to wonder. "Marzanna."

"Annora," was the reply, and the two girls shook hands. Annora's wrist was bound in a circlet of string, Marzanna noted, a tight woven bracelet fraying slightly as though plaited in a rush, each thread a subtly different shade of red. It was so entirely incongruous with the rest of the girl's elegant mien that Marzanna guessed it was something of an analogue to the bone ring that now sat between knuckles on Marzanna's right hand. Annora caught Marzanna looking, and nodded, almost shyly.

"A gift," she said simply.

"From your god?"

Something flitted across her eyes at those words, something Marzanna did not have time to decipher, for Annora simply shook her head demurely and said, "I've concluded as much."

There was a silence, which stretched for a long moment, as though both girls were waiting for the other to sacrifice the name of the god that had selected them to accept eternity, and unwilling to speak until the other had. And then, as the quiet threatened to swallow them whole, both girls seemed to realise the folly of this particular stratagem - Marzanna doubted very much it was meant to be a secret, and even if it was, it wasn't a secret she was particularly interested in keeping. She raised her hand and wiggled her thumb. "I guess that means this is from Jedan," she said wryly.

Annora looked appreciative, and seemed to understand immediately. "Toamn," she replied, pronouncing the word precisely with a shyness that suggested she was slightly out of practise with such casual conversation, especially one executed in regard to something as momentous as the Selection. And then, with a hint of self-deprecation that made Marzanna think they might get along, she added, "The Fade alone knows why. I'm hardly the hearth-side type."

"What need have gods for reasons?" These words belonged to a stranger, and Marzanna and Annora turned in concert to see who the voice belonged to. The girl who approached could have been formed of pure distilled sunlight, so bright and warm seemed her strawberry-blonde hair, so smooth and golden her skin, so bright and clear her cerulean eyes. She was shorter than the others, but slender, with the tiniest waist Marzanna had ever seen. Her nose and cheekbones were spattered with freckles, as though scattered there with an artful throw. Another beautiful girl to add to the gods' selected collection. She moved with some degree of confidence, which seemed to falter slightly as she drew closer to Marzanna and Annora.

"I'm sure they didn't pull our names out of hats," Marzanna replied, her tone more brusque than not. The newcomer was dressed like a girl from the coast - her pale dress was more like a chemise, so light the shift and so sparse the fabric. And she was barefoot, Marzanna saw, her legs and arms bare and unblemished, her hair still slightly damp at the roots as though she had walked here from the ocean without stopping to dress. "I'm sure there's some rhyme or reason to our Selection."

"I wouldn't presume to wonder," the other girl replied, and then offered Marzanna a sweet half-smile. "My name is Dej."As she moved her head to greet each girl, the wan light of the corridor glinted off the pale silver necklace that was her only apparent accessory, a long thin chain upon which the pendant of a lotus hung loosely, spinning lazily in the hollow of her throat. Annora seemed almost transfixed by the sheen of the necklace, her gaze hardly moving from it as Dej spoke. "It's lovely to meet you two."

Marzanna nodded. "Yes," she agreed shortly, and glanced between her two new companions. "Any sign of the others?"

It was just beginning to sink in that this was really, truly, the beginning of the Selection. Eternity yawned abruptly before her, wide and unknown and unknowable, and the idea of meeting the other girls that were meant to become gods suddenly unnerved her more than she could ever articulate. Only one of them could ascend to the level of godhood, and yet here three of them stood, blood and bone and breath, ageing and and withering and dying a little with every moment that passed, mortal and human.

Three of them, and if Marzanna was to be blunt, not a single special thing shared between them. They were human.

Dej gestured. "I think there's four of us on this corridor," she said, "at least, there's four rooms... but the other one is empty."

That seemed to distract Annora from the necklace. She arched an eyebrow, but said nothing for a long moment, until the moment Dej seemed tempted to speak again: "I can hear voices."

And so she could, and so Marzanna could, if she strained a little, if she really listened. Muffled, she noted, and stepping further down the corridor she saw that the hall in which the three girls stood was only a little alcove, and if one took a few steps further along the space abruptly opened up into a large landing circled by golden railings, which overlooked a wide, airy anteroom. A beautiful gold-and-sapphire chandelier overhung the entire scene, which Marzanna saw now consisted of a small group of girls - another three members of the Selected, she thought, clustered tightly together as she and Annora and Dej had been, though seeming not quite as friendly towards one another, looking at the walls and the ceilings and the busts that lined the space rather than at their companions.

"After you," were Annora's soft, wry words, and, laughing lightly under her breath, Marzanna did as she was told. Dej trailed behind them, her eyes darting about wildly to take everything in, as the three girls descended the wide marble steps to join the others. Each must have been taken as she was, Marzanna thought, because here was a girl dressed as though to perform with the visage of a skull painted upon her face and a lace fan hanging from her fingers, and here was a girl with little flecks of clay still clinging to her skirts and to her fingertips with dancing shoes still on her feet, and here was a girl with dark eye-shadow and kohl smeared around sightless eyes, as though only just awoken from sleep. They made a motley group, Marzanna thought, and all the stranger when Marzanna and the others joined them, for she realised that except for their ages and the beauty of the features, she could not imagine that they shared a single quality between them.

Could there be a goddess among their number? Someone worthy of the title... the power?

"Six," Dej said softly. "Where are the other four?"

Annora seemed on the threshold of speech when a wooden door under the stairs, quite ordinary in appearance, suddenly swung open and a man stepped through. He was dressed quite simply, although to Marzanna's eyes his wealth was obvious in the fine quality of the shirt and shoes, the glint of gold at his cuffs, and the way he carried himself as he walked towards the assembled group of girls. "Good evening, ladies. May I extend our warmest welcome, on behalf of my family, our household, and all of Elinvier."

He stopped about five feet away from the girls, and Marzanna abruptly recognised the worn, weary features of the king. The king. She almost wouldn't have known him, without his usual garb of furs and silks and crown. The man that stood in front of her could easily have been one of her father's colleagues, war-worn and whiskey-wearied. Certainly, he did not smile.

"It is meet that you have arrived so soon," he added, and gestured to the door through which he had just appeared. "Dinner is fresh served, and your fellows approach. Allow me to show you to the dining hall, so that you may get to know one another before They come."

No one had to ask who they were, but it was only the blind girl who was bold enough to ask a question when none had been courted. "You mean to say the gods themselves will be present tonight?"

To his credit, Marzanna thought, Adam took this interruption in stride when most men of his position might have rankled. "That is not mine to say," he said simply.

"When shall we have occasion to meet them?"

A note of irritation this time. "That is not mine to say."

The blind girl seemed poised to speak once more, but was quelled by the girl with the skull makeup beside her, who silenced her with a light touch on her arm, the warning apparent.

Marzanna seemed the next bravest among them. She curtsied to the king as neatly as she could, the old etiquette lessons that had been half-forgotten making a reappearance when they mattered most. "Your majesty," she said simply. "We would be honoured to dine with you this evening. We thank you."

He inclined his head. "No thanks is necessary," he replied simply, and gestured to the door. "Please, allow me to follow."

Dej moved forward with a quickness, hooking her fingers around the elbow of the girl with the dancing shoes, and giving her a quick look that said forgive my impudence. She was easily forgiven; they moved forward as a single unit, and then the girl with the skull makeup and the blind girl followed them, going two by two like something for a myth. Marzanna glanced to Annora, but her words died on her lips when she saw where the other midlands girl had trained her gaze.

For standing at the balcony overlooking the antechamber, leaning his forearms on the golden railing, looking for the briefest moment like an ordinary stranger glancing casually down, was a man with dark skin and curly hair and - "Buxiu," Annora breathed, barely a whisper - and the unmistakeable golden-eyed gaze of a god.

That has to be some kind of a record for slow updating - I'm really sorry if anyone has lost interest in this story, or believed it was abandoned! Updates are gonna be slow for the next few weeks, and then I hope to get into a routine of weekly updates. My deepest apologies again for my long absence.

Obviously I would love to hear what you thought of this chapter, whether I am accurately portraying your characters and what you want to see happen next. I have included a list of the characters which appeared in this chapter, as not all of them was named - if they were mentioned earlier in the story, or if it was stated which god was selecting them, I have also included that information.

I hope you enjoyed reading! Please read and review.

Much love xoxo

In this chapter (in order of appearance)
Ekaitza Neska Hezur, selected by Ilargi
Marzanna Petrova, selected by Jedan
Annora Valennon, selected by Toamn
Dej Salajane
Andromeda Nalick
María Kurukafa
Amaterasu Min, selected by Anthe