AfterLife
Chapter 2
--L--
Lyr watched the wasteland before him, its bleak gray surface punctuated here and there by varying shades of darker or lighter gray: the forms of the other death gods. Behind them were the blackened peaks of rock that formed the boundary of their world, and the solitary hill that was home to the perpetually-dying Orchard with its dead apples.
From his vantage point beneath the crags of the King of Death's throne, Lyr's midnight-blue eyes could take in nearly everything. Not that there was much to take in.
He dug his black toes into the ground absently and then decided to visit the Orchard. He had never been very fond of the other death gods, and it looked as if no one else were presently looking for the thin, little fruit that occasionally appeared on the trees. He padded silently across the valley floor, leaving dusty gray footprints behind him.
The death gods were always sitting, huddled in tiny groups around stone basins, playing games that Lyr had never bothered to learn. He would rather spend the time alone, preferring his own company, because the other death gods had a certain habit of boring him to no end. Lyr made his way around their small groups of three or four, slowly winding his way across the valley.
The small, mostly-black death god had almost walked to the trail leading to the Orchard entirely without incident, when Epranbaye looked up from a game to stare at him. Lyr had to stop, and briefly raise a ghostly white hand in greeting. Epranbaye was probably Lyr's favorite death god, being similarly anti-social.
Epranbaye nodded his smooth, gray head in greeting, and Lyr continued towards the Orchard. He stayed on the exact middle of the trail, keeping his bare feet from the rocky edges, as was his habit.
After slowly walking back and forth up switchback after switchback, Lyr found himself passing the first apple tree. It was a stunted, twisted, gray thing, but for some reason it was comforting at the same time. Lyr supposed that he liked the Orchard, and not simply because if offered him a refuge from most of the other death gods. He turned off the trail, and wandered among the contorted trees, looking for apples not because he wanted to eat one, but simply because he wanted to find one.
Lyr knew that the other death gods found him strange, but he did not mind. He trailed his white hands across the branches of a particularly dry tree, and bits of its bark flaked off. He immediately sat, bringing his knees up to his chest and leaning against the tree. Lyr inspected his hand, and saw that indeed there were pieces of the bark speckling his palm and long, spindly fingers. But they were difficult to find. It was the same as any other thing in this world. Once anything was put against a different background, both it and the background seemed to fade into the same color, and it was always gray.
He blew the bits off of him, wondering if at some point, his blue eyes would also fade into gray pits in the sockets of his gray, not pale white, face. And then his hands would also be gray, and not pale white nearly to his elbows. He examined the contrast of skin color on his forearms. White on his hands, blacker than the deepest night on everywhere else, except, he knew, his face.
Though exactly what "night" was, Lyr could not quite recall. He shrugged to himself, and then stood, realizing that the matter probably was, like everything else, not very interesting.
Lyr wandered for some time through the Orchard, taking small delight in finding not one, but two apples. He picked the second one, and then hid it, under a small layer of gray dirt. Perhaps some day he would come back for the little apple, but perhaps not. Or maybe another death god would find it first, and eat it, despite the dirt. He smiled to himself at the thought, imagining Kinddara rubbing his bandaged hands all over the apple, obsessively cleaning the thing before putting it into his mouth. The apples tasted like sand anyway, so Lyr did not know why a little dirt would hurt the taste at all. In fact, maybe the apples would improve with the dirt.
Lyr eventually left the Orchard, and carefully walked down the many switchbacks to the valley below. He was bored again, and debated the idea of telling Kinddara that somewhere in the Orchard was a buried apple. Perhaps he might tell the death god that the apple was somehow special?
But no. Lyr sighed, feeling the inexplicable sense of… something… as it restrained him from pulling such a cruel joke.
Instead, he decided it was probably time to learn one of the games. They seemed to occupy the other death gods enough. Perhaps he would gamble with the apple he had hidden away. Though Lyr was not quite sure he knew exactly where the apple was now. But it did not matter.
Lyr approached Epranbaye's game, and after exchanging the same greeting as before, he set himself to watching the game with the intention of learning it.
Midora and Deridovely, the other players, ignored him. But this was normal and Lyr did not want to talk to them anyway. Besides, Midora and Deridovely were death gods of high rank not known for their empathy, and Lyr did not want to be on the receiving end of either of their stares.
"Go on, Epranbaye," jeered Midora, and Lyr got the distinct impression that Epranbaye was losing. The quiet death god simply scooped up his tiny carved bones and then dropped them into the bowl. Lyr knew enough to know that the particular order and placement of the bones when they landed determined the winner of the round.
After a few rounds, Deridovely laughed triumphantly and asked for the winnings. Midora challenged them to another game, with higher stakes this time—three decades. Lyr did not move, and the others accepted Midora's challenge.
Towards the end of Midora's game, Lyr was confident that he understood most of the rules. This information he had gained by watching these two games would be good enough to play, but Lyr always wanted to be good enough to win.
Therefore, he waited, and he watched.
Deridovely tossed the bones into the bowl, and then sighed in defeat. Midora's previous throw had beaten Deridovely's. Epranbaye nodded, keeping to his usual silence. Suddenly Midora looked up.
"Kei, you wanna join our game?" she asked, her large eyes flashing across their small crowd to the newcomer.
The tall death god made of bones and loose, worn clothing looked around at them disinterestedly. The green gems in his goggles almost gleamed. "No thanks. Why don't you ask Lyr?" he offered, his tone precisely polite.
The three gamblers turned to stare at Lyr—something he did not particularly like. But Kei was not the kind to understand Lyr's perspective on other death gods. Kei was, despite seeming to be somewhat of a loner himself, well-liked and even admired among the death gods.
Lyr shook his head in response to the death gods watching him. "I can't. I don't know how to play this game," he said quietly. It was a lie, but not a big one. And no one would think to call him on this lie, because he had only just learned the basics, and no one would care if he lied or not.
Midora, Deridovely, and Epranbaye went back to their game, but Lyr's attention was suddenly caught on Kei. The skeletal god was staring at Lyr as if he had never seen him or anything like him before. Lyr blinked his wide blue eyes…once… and Kei recovered.
"I'll teach you, Lyr," Kei said, his reddish eyes brightening. "Come with me." He shifted his weight, letting Lyr know he was about to leave and offering the smaller death god a chance to follow.
"Thank you," Lyr replied, nodding. Kei turned and Lyr followed him, a dark shadow trailing softly in the wake of the death god's long strides.
Kei continued walking until they had reached the outskirts of the valley. Here and there among the gray crags of rock were dark chains and abandoned pieces of metal, rusted with blood. Red to brown to gray then fading away….
Kei abruptly turned, his scythe-guitar clattering against the thinly covered bones on his back. The light in the pits of his eye sockets was burning very brightly. Lyr stopped suddenly, mid-step, and then put his foot back down on the ground, further back from the death god than he had originally intended.
"How did you get here?" the larger god demanded, his eyes flashing.
Lyr blinked, and forced his mind to contemplate the god's words, rather than his harsh body language. How… did he… get… here? Lyr forced his mind to wrap around the question, realizing as he did so that some kind of concept was missing.
He doubted that Kei would be satisfied with the answer of "walking," or "I followed you." He strained his mind, grasping for the correct answer. The "here" that Kei was referring to was not this space on the edge of the valley, where the two of them were standing. It meant something larger than that… something that encompassed not only this side of the valley, and the other side of the valley, but the Orchard and the rocky hills surrounding it and them and the entire realm of the death gods.
But if that were here, then where was there? And to suggest that there was a way to get here meant that there was indeed a there, as well as…
Lyr struggled as his mind attempted to shut down on him. There was something… something that he had… understood. But this implied that he had once before understood something that now he did not. That there was a before… what was a before? Lyr's thoughts were slipping away, fluid and ephemeral, being borne away into some dismal grayness that was keeping him locked here, inside the here, inside the single, all-encompassing now, and suddenly Lyr knew—he knew—that he wanted to be free.
Lyr stared down at his black toes, searching for the sharp contrast between them and the gray dirt beneath them. Lyr was not gray, not yet. He would not become a gray prisoner of the here and now, even if all he had on his side was his strength of will.
Lyr's mind suddenly blazed like the sun that he had never seen, driving back tendrils of the hazy smoke and thickened fog from his mind. He would not lose, and he would understand all that he wished. There would no longer be things he could not understand, concepts he could not analyze, or puzzles he could not solve. The importance of all the things that had seemed unimportant would return. There was sudden clarity within Lyr now, and he was free, at least internally, from the oppressing gray. Thinking was easy, though he had not understood that it had been hard before. It was like taking a deep breath of fresh air when he had not even realized that the air he had been breathing was stale and dry. He returned to Kei's strange question, and allowed himself to consider it.
He was here, in the realm of the death gods.
There had been a time when he had not been here.
But Lyr did not remember not being among the death gods.
So his answer to Kei was quite simple.
"I don't know," Lyr replied to the larger death god. He looked sideways at Kei, and asked a question of his own. If it were possible for Kei to think of things like here and there, then perhaps the truth was that he already knew the answer. "How did you get here?" Lyr asked, curious.
Kei's response took much longer than Lyr had anticipated. But he did not mind, and stood patiently, waiting until Kei's skeletal jaw opened once more. "I was here first… but you weren't always here." Kei's speech was careful, as if he had to concentrate on the specific meaning of each word. "Where did you come from?"
Lyr considered this next question, enjoying the freedom at which he could put his mind to it. Here meant the death gods' realm, and there was someplace of where. But there were probably multiple places of there, and Lyr would have to have, at least originally, come from only one there, or Kei would never have asked him about where. And Kei, he had been here first… so he probably did not know much about there. Either Kei had never been to there, or he had forgotten what there was like. Obviously the other death god was quite curious, though in an angry fashion, about there or perhaps the rest of where. But his anger… that only meant that to Kei, this discussion was important. And Lyr agreed, if only because he felt that speaking to someone who found questions and answers important was something in and of itself important.
"I don't know," Lyr answered truthfully. "Did you come from someplace else? Were you always here?"
"Yes, of course!" Kei yelled, though in truth the volume of his voice was not much higher. It was the tight, tense pose of his arms and the wild glow to his eyes that made it a yell. Lyr wondered why Kei was still angry despite Lyr answering every question thus far with truth, and even contributing his own questions to the discussion. "When did you get here?" Kei asked suddenly, and then his anger seemed to suddenly deflate.
"When…?" Lyr echoed, plunging back into the abstract freedom of his mind. He searched for the answer to when… looking among the lingering wisps of grayness for something that could relate to now or before.
There were other things, deeply hidden things, that his consciousness raced past in the investigation within his head. The brownish-yellow tinge of old grass… deep chimes of the church bells… Lyr did not know exactly what was in his mind, but there was something there, still partially veiled by the fog. The cool, wet tingle of rain dripping down his face… the soft scent of sugar flitted in and out of his grasp as the fog swirled in his mind. Each moment that was retained within his mind was swiftly recovered by the grayness, but Lyr could not find any reason to hold onto those strange feelings and suggestions of something too large for him to even attempt to comprehend right now. Fingers tapping on white keys… complete darkness with pinpricks of white light…. Lyr could only search for the knowledge of when, instinctively understanding that if he tried to find the answers to everything at once, even knowledge of here and know would slide away into unimportance and a vague awareness.
Suddenly, he found what he was looking for. Lyr seized the tip of the idea, and followed it back to the concept, relishing in his victory against the gray world in and around him. He pulled the knowledge free of the grayness, and hoarded it. The fog coalesced into the deeper portions of his mind, as if waiting for his next venture into the gray recesses of his own mind.
For Lyr, when was part of the now and the before. These concepts belonged within a larger concept, which should rightfully be called Time. But what did when really mean, especially when applied to Kei's question? What was Kei looking for in the answer to that question?
Lyr supposed that Time was, in essence, what passed as one did things.
Therefore Kei was wondering what things Lyr had done.
So Lyr's answer was again simple.
"I walked with you to this spot," he began, chronicling the events of his life from this moment backwards, "I watched two games, I walked from the Orchard, I walked to the Orchard, I was standing on the other side of the valley." Lyr paused, and realized that, according to he could consciously bring to mind, nothing had happened to him before then. He peered over at Kei, wondering what the large death god would do with this information. "I have had that much time."
"But what about before that?" Kei yelled angrily, moving forward. Lyr tried to jump back, startled, but Kei's skeletal fingers gripped the skin on his shoulders, holding too tightly. Lyr was so shocked that he did not try to defend himself or remove himself from the large death god's grasp as Kei lifted him into the air and shook him roughly. The larger death god's bony body rattled with the movement, the guitar-scythe on his back swinging back and forth in time with Lyr's feet. Kei's eyes flashed into a dangerous red.
This display of temper; it made no sense. Such an act was meant to threaten… but threatening a death god was completely pointless. Lyr had nothing to fear… ever.
With that thought, Lyr calmed down considerably, and even wondered why he had been startled and shocked in the first place. He answered Kei's question, his soft voice the same monotone as before. "I don't know."
Lyr knew that Kei would not like his answer, but he had no other to give. It appeared as if Kei did not understand that Lyr had given him the only answers possible. Perhaps Kei was still floundering in the gray fog that had hindered Lyr until Kei had asked him a question. Perhaps he needed Lyr to ask him to the think about things closely. On second thought, perhaps Lyr should not ask, but simply hint so he could avoid Kei's temper. Although Kei's behavior was in no way dangerous (though Lyr was not exactly sure what "dangerous" would even mean), it made Lyr uncomfortable and he wished to avoid physical contact with the dry, white bones of the other death god. The finger bones were pinching him, and although it did not hurt (Lyr did not really understand the concept of "hurt" either), he seemed to instinctively dislike the feeling of being held aloft by Kei.
Fortunately, the other god reined in his anger and in one slow, controlled motion set Lyr back on the ground. His voice, when it returned, had the same quality of his movements. It was tense and controlled, with a hint of anger barely in check. "Do you know Ryuk?"
"Everyone knows Ryuk, Kei," Lyr answered, deliberately using Kei's name to make a point. He and Kei had never spoken to each other or seen each other before this conversation. It seemed odd to have to remind Kei of the simple fact that every death god knew every other death god. On the other hand, perhaps Kei had meant to make a certain distinction. Lyr knew that he had never actually been in the presence of Ryuk, and he would obviously know if he had. Ryuk was the outcast among the gods, a towering black figure with eerie yellow and red eyes, silver charms dangling from his ears and belt… he was something that was hard to mistake for anyone else. "But I have never seen him."
Lyr watched Kei, trying to gauge his reaction to the response. Had Lyr been correct in guessing that Kei meant to ask if Lyr had ever spoken to or seen Ryuk? And if not… was Kei somehow very different from the other death gods? Did Kei have to learn every death god's name and face and habits as he met them? Lyr could not fathom how difficult such a task would be, nor what it would be like to see someone he did not know and had not always known. His mind grappled with the immensity of such a task, and he wondered how long it would take. But no, Kei must have the knowledge, just as Lyr did, because the first thing he had said in Lyr's presence had been, "Why don't you ask Lyr?"
But what if a death god did not have knowledge of another? Was it even possible? And if so, then how long would it take to know everyone? And what kind of answer would suffice to answer that question? How long would it take? Lyr was puzzled for a moment, considering the question. Time must be more than simply the things one has done. This conversation with Kei, it was simply one event, one thing Lyr was doing, but it seemed to take more time than other things Lyr had done, like, for example, walking with Kei to the place where they were currently standing. His dark blue eyes glanced over at the ancient, rusted chains and the tall death god standing across from him, wondering what else Time needed for him to be able to completely understand it.
Kei appeared to be deep in thought, but he lifted his head and looked over at Lyr after a short while. "I think I have met him only once. But I would like to again." There was no trace of anger anymore, only a profound honesty and slight curiosity.
Lyr blinked.
Kei was unsure if he had met the Death God. Did this mean that Kei had a faulty memory? Not necessarily. Lyr looked around, the calm gray of the dirt, the sky, the distant rocks reminding him of the oppressive mist of gray inside his own mind. He looked down at his toes, once again reassured by the contrast of the black against the gray. And then he looked at Kei, who was staring at something that was not in front of him nor very far away. Which meant that Kei seemed to be concentrating on something inside of him.
It seemed to be very much like they were both lost in their own thoughts. Upon inspection, Lyr found his thoughts were not so much a jungle or a thick forest as they were a hazy cloudbank. It was as if Lyr's conscious self were lost in a swirling, overcast sky, occasionally running into sunny spaces and sometimes alpine hillsides, without even knowing which way was up. Lyr felt very lost indeed, each metaphor an allusion to something he could only vaguely comprehend if he did not inspect it too closely. He could hardly follow his own thoughts, and it seemed as if the harder he tried to reach a conclusion, the further from the answer he went, until he could not even remember what he had been trying to discover. The grayness was sending him in circles of varying lengths and diameters.
Lyr gave up for a moment, and stopped the dizzying quest to explore the outer (or were they inner?) reaches of his mind. He realized that he must have been standing there for quite some time… for some Time… and he tried to follow that line of thought back into the fog, hoping to trace it to the enormous concept of which he had really only scratched the surface.
The small death god closed his eyes for a moment, and felt a feeling similar to floating. He was not exactly focusing on the knowledge he was interested in, instead peering at the hazy shape of the concept from the corner of his mind's eye. And with this peripheral vision, he began to make out the outline. He opened his blue eyes, hoping that the physical act of seeing would help trick whatever was in his own mind that kept him from understanding.
Yes, Time was a large concept, and it involved the things one had done. But if was more than that. It always moved at the same pace, although it was difficult to understand exactly how it moved, because it never seemed to quite move. Lyr began a separate train of thought, while his subconscious continued to ponder the problem of Time.
Why did Kei mention Ryuk? Ryuk was an outcast by his own choice as much as he was because most gods disliked him. Kei was nearly the complete opposite, and other gods preferred his company to that of nearly anyone else.
It was the physical objects concerned with Time that moved. But Time actually seemed to be subjective. Lyr was almost certain that when he was thinking deeply, he did not notice that Time moved at all.
Lyr watched Kei for a moment, seeing the glint of the bejeweled goggles on his head and the dull, chalky gleam of his bones. His eyes were small red lights, and seemed to be very dim in the dark shadows of his eye sockets. What could he possibly have in common with Ryuk?
Nonetheless, Time always moved, not relative to the beholder, which meant that there had to be some kind of objective way to feel it. No, not feel it. Understand it, perhaps, or even… measure it?
Yet, they did have something in common after all. Neither Ryuk nor Kei were run-of-the-mill death gods. Each possessed some kind of quality that held them apart from the others; in Kei's case, it was his inherent charisma, in Ryuk's, it was the opposite. But there must be something more than that….
Measuring time? There was a word that was used to describe this; Deridovely had used it to describe the stakes of the second game: decades. But decades had no meaning to Lyr, it was simply a word, meant to convey some kind of price, meaningful only to those who were too lazy to write down names in their notebooks.
Why was Ryuk important to Kei? That was the question that Lyr should have been asking from the beginning. A meeting between Kei and Ryuk… what would they have talked about? What had Kei learned from looking into those red and yellow eyes, that he had not already known?
If the measurement of Time known as decades was not meaningful, then it fell to Lyr to make his own measurement. But how could one death god, one individual, be responsible for an objective measurement that could only be witnessed in a subjective manner?
Lyr looked away from the tall, skeletal death god in front of him, surveying the dismal, gray world. On the far side of the valley, the barren tops of the apple trees were barely visible against the sky. Ryuk was addicted to the apples, wasn't he…. But Kei was not the type to be concerned with Ryuk's addiction. They would have talked about something else, something meaningful.
Perhaps the key to understanding and measuring Time was that the responsibility fell not to a single death god. Perhaps… with Kei's help, Lyr could find a way to obtain true knowledge of Time? If Lyr and Kei could compare their own relative experiences of the passing of time, then they might discover some secret or formula that would be the mechanism for measuring time.
Again, Lyr wondered what significance Ryuk held. Kei might have asked why Ryuk preferred to be considered an outcast, because Kei seemed to want to know those sorts of things… Or rather, Kei might have asked when Ryuk had become an outcast, or when Ryuk had first come to the world of the death gods…. Lyr felt a surge of triumph. He was certain that Kei's meeting with Ryuk had contained some kind of discussion or allusion to Time.
And Time was a concept that Lyr was going to uncover. He was going to find out what Time meant in a physical manner. He was going to measure Time. He simply needed Kei's help. And to get Kei's help, he would have to get Kei's interest.
Lyr stared at Kei, who was still not paying him any attention. Kei was so still, he almost blended in with his surroundings, reminding Lyr of a skeletal apple tree, slowly fading into the background….
Suddenly, Lyr's mind was no longer split. Kei's relationship with Ryuk derived some kind of meaning from when, before, how long, after, now, then, and all of those other words…. What had previously been two separate ideas converged, and Lyr was left standing on the dusty gray dirt, his dark blue eyes staring across the small space to Kei's lanky form.
"I think that it would take me longer to walk to the Orchard than it would for you to walk to the Orchard," Lyr said carefully, deciding that such an act would best exemplify both the subjective and objective aspects of time in a physical context.
If he and Kei were to each walk to the Orchard, they would arrive at the same spot from the same spot traveling the same distance and the same route. But they would not arrived at the same time, given that they each traveled at their own normal pace. He looked down, twisting to see his own footprints leading to where he stood. He had certainly taken more steps and moved faster than usual to keep up with Kei when he had followed the death god out to this spot.
"That…" Lyr began slowly, his blue eyes following the footsteps back towards the valley and the crowds of death gods gambling away their lives and the lives of humans. "That is time."
He turned back to look at Kei, and the taller death god was staring at him with an expression Lyr recognized as the one Kei had, for a brief moment, shown when Lyr first spoke to him. The one that meant Kei viewed Lyr as someone he had never known.
"You're not going to teach me the game, are you?" Lyr asked, a slight smile curving across his lips. For some reason, he was pleased to see Kei look a little startled.
Then Kei's features slid into a somewhat predatory smile. "No, I'm not. But I'll teach you something else." Kei hesitated for a moment, and then continued as if he had decided something. "We're going to the Orchard."
Lyr nodded, smiling. He looked to the Orchard for a moment, and then turned back to Kei. The other death god had already started moving towards the Orchard, taking long strides. Lyr scurried to catch up. Although he wanted to show Kei his experiment, he knew that the larger god had something in mind, and was horribly impatient. Lyr had best follow him quickly, and save the time-measuring experiment for later.
Dusty clouds lingered in the gray air as Lyr's black feet pattered across the ground, following Kei's skeletal specter towards the claw-like spires of the apple trees.
--L--
"No, thank you," Lyr declined the proffered apple. He had already passed it when he had visited the Orchard earlier, and he still had no desire to eat the tiny, wrinkled fruit.
"Why not?" Kei asked, still holding the apple towards him with a bony hand. The apple was a shade darker, slightly closer to gray than Kei's fingers.
Lyr wondered what Kei was trying to get at. They both knew that neither were interested in eating apples, and were not inclined to become addicted like some of the other death gods. "They don't taste very good." Lyr kept his answer succinct.
"Have you ever eaten one?" Kei continued his interrogation, and Lyr thought he was finally on the verge of understanding why he had started it.
Kei was interested in time as a physical property; he wanted to understand the past. Kei wanted to know what things had already, actually, really happened, rather than things that simply seemed to have happened.
"No," Lyr answered. This was the distinction Kei was looking for, between the have done and the have not done. If Lyr's suspicion were correct, then Kei's next question would be…
"Then how do you know?" Kei's smooth tenor rippled beneath the dusty gray branches, exactly as Lyr imagined it would.
"Everyone knows," Lyr answered quickly, his mind continuing to anticipate Kei's questions. He was formulating responses before Kei even began the questions, quick slivers of thought dipping into the fog and jetting out before getting caught.
"If they taste bad and everyone knows this, then why do some death gods eat apples?" Kei asked, his words coming faster as he became more impatient.
"I suppose they don't mind the taste," Lyr responded instantly. He felt the edges of a smile on his white lips, and found himself staring at Kei with a feeling of something like pleasure. He watched as the larger death god tensed as if he were about to move violently. He did not, but it was obvious the god did not like how the interrogation was proceeding. Kei did not like to be out-thought, apparently. Or did he simply think that Lyr was giving him oversimplified answers?
"Does this apple look right?" Kei tried, his voice taking on a demanding quality. The question made Lyr pause.
Now what was that supposed to mean? What would a "wrong" apple look like? Kei held the apple towards him, so its gray, slightly-peeling surface oozed rather than reflected the dim light around them. The apple seemed perfectly normal to Lyr, and seemed to behave in a normal, apple-y way. He could see nothing wrong with it, so it had to look right.
"Yes." He nodded.
"Why?" Kei continued eagerly. He seemed to lean in a little bit, the tattered edges of his clothing swaying slightly. What did this have to do with Kei's interest in what actually happened? Lyr was curious as to how this related.
He considered Kei's question. He knew Kei was not going to be satisfied of the simple answer that "it was not wrong." If Lyr used that as his answer, then Kei would simply ask him what made an apple wrong, and their conversation might travel in that circular way for infinity. (Infinity, yet another word to add to his growing list of things related to time. He filed it away and continued to focus on Kei's question.) The apple was gray, like everything else. It was a part of the landscape, but it also seemed to embody whatever it was that made their world the way it was.
Lyr saw the small, withered, apple as a pathetic metaphor for their existence. They were tiny, shrunken existences sprouting from a shriveled, dead tree of… something. Lyr pushed his imagination further, following the metaphor. They were graying, fading beings, plucked from a long-dead, ancient tree of… knowledge.
Lyr knew instinctively that this concept was important. So he pretended it was not. There was something dangerous in that information, something that the gray world was desperately protecting. Now was not the time to delve into it.
He quickly refocused on the apple. The apple was a tiny, shrunken fruit that sprouted from a shriveled, dead tree. Which meant that the apple looked...
"It looks dead," Lyr told Kei. His words rang with the certain finality and confidence found only in truth. And Lyr wondered why he had never really known that the apples were dead before. He avoided thinking about it, and instead acted like he had known this all along.
Kei grinned. "If this apple is dead," he began, his voice growing in volume and flair, "then what does an apple that is alive look like?"
Lyr sent his mind to find the knowledge of the live apple, and was suddenly swallowed by the fog. He forced himself to look down, to watch his toes, to stare hard and concentrate on the clear black edges, but this time the dust from his walk to the Orchard was still clinging to his feet, turning them into a lighter black, fading them into pale, making them gray… Lyr's eyes unfocused, and he realized he was staring inward, into a pool of gray mist. His conscious self was trying to catch up with the fastest flickerings of his thought, and he had already been swallowed by the fog.
This time, he did not know if it would let him go. A small part of him wondered what he was doing, personifying the fog with a malicious intent, or any intent at all. Yet he felt like the fog knew things. It knew that there was something he was purposefully avoiding, but only so he could analyze it later. It knew that he was trying not to think about the apple tree, and the dead tree of knowledge, the apple tree of death….
Lyr felt the grayness tighten, oppressive and dulling, across his mind….
Lyr blinked, and for that instant, he relinquished all thought.
The tiny death god opened his eyes, the tall, skeletal figure of Kei and the narrow, twisting structures of the trees imprinting slowly on his retinas. The ground was a tone slightly darker than the sky, and Kei was holding a normal, dead apple in his hand.
"I don't know," Lyr responded, keeping his mind in strict control. Kei had asked about something he called "live apples" but Lyr had no idea what they would look like.
"Why not?" Kei asked, his voice taking on a desperate note. Lyr forced his mind not to go any further than it was supposed to. He needed to think simple thoughts and give simple answers. He needed to stop being so confrontational with the fog, or at this rate, it would win. Now was the time to retreat a short distance.
"I don't think that is something everybody knows," Lyr answered, hedging around the real one he wanted to give.
"I know," Kei replied. He appeared to be somewhat distressed, but was losing his drive.
Lyr could not help himself. Perhaps there was a way to get what he wanted without taking on the fog directly. "What does an apple that is alive look like?" Lyr asked innocently, keeping his mind on the same wavelength as his voice.
Lyr suppressed the feeling of triumph as Kei opened his mouth to respond immediately. "It's red and ripe, round and… juicy," the large god said, hesitating and dropping his voice to whisper before reaching the last word. Lyr was nodding with him, pretending that he was not subconsciously laughing at the fog as it withered away from a tiny portion of his mind.
"You are right," Lyr said, smiling as his consciousness brushed feathery-light against this new knowledge. The fog seemed to be unconcerned with knowledge that came from another death god. "And I think they are sweet," Lyr continued thoughtfully, easing his mind away from the subject before the fog could catch him taking more than he was supposed to.
Kei suddenly froze with his red eyes directed at Lyr. "How do you know?" he demanded, but this time his tenor oozed control.
"You told me…" Lyr said, trailing off and pretending with all his might that Kei had indeed told him that. "How do you know?" he asked, hoping Kei could give him a very good answer.
"No, I mean about the apples being sweet," Kei hinted loudly, leaning closer.
"It only makes sense," Lyr stated defensively, wondering if it truly did.
"No, it doesn't! None of this makes sense! Why do death gods eat apples?!" Kei yelled, this time taking a full step closer, apparently fueled by his emotions. Was that how Kei managed to fight against the fog? Sheer willpower and fierce emotions?
"They are addictive." Lyr knew the simple statement would continue to rile Kei, which was now precisely the point.
"You're missing my point!" Kei held out the apple and shook it as if the pitiful fruit were the one at fault. "Why do we begin eating them in the first place?!"
Lyr seized on the chance to channel Kei's anger into something potentially useful. "You tell me," he said, keeping his voice a careful—and apparently irritating—monotone. "You were always here."
"No I wasn't!" Kei replied angrily, and then suddenly paused. His words sunk into the silence between them.
Lyr's eyes opened a fraction wider. Kei had not always been here like had said? Kei had lied? Or what seemed far more probable, Kei had not known that he had not always been here.
"I think there was a time when none of us were here." Kei's voice was low, and quiet, but it still managed to echo around them.
"How many times do you think you could have walked to…" Lyr began, eager to get back to the subject of measuring time. He glanced around the Orchard and to the valley down below where crowds of death gods were gambling. His dark blue eyes came to rest on a rocky crag on the far side of the valley, and he continued his sentence as he pointed at it with a white finger. "…that rock and back between now and the time when there was no one?"
"I'm not sure," Kei responded, following Lyr's gaze and the direction his finger was pointing regardless. "I have always seen others here."
Lyr paused a moment, clearing his mind carefully lest the fog return. After a moment, he spoke. "Then you were probably not the first here." If Lyr had arrived after Kei, then they probably all had arrived at different times, meaning that there had to be someone else who was here first. He let his mind drift over the idea, pretending that it had no real meaning or importance.
"Then where were we before now?" Kei asked, although Lyr was not paying him very much attention.
"I think the King of Death was the first one here," Lyr stated, staring out over the valley, towards the towering pile of rocks, embedded here and there with minute, rusted scythes and bloodied chains. The throne of the King of Death. He refocused his eyes on Kei, and answered his question. "Maybe we just weren't before." It was a possibility. But as he said it, Lyr felt that it was wrong.
"But you can't just get something from nothing," Kei retorted, throwing his arms into the air angrily.
That was easy enough to say, Lyr mused. But if Kei were right to assume that something could not come from nothing, then he was really posing a much larger question to the tiny, black god.
"Where else is there?" Lyr watched Kei very closely as the skeletal god abruptly stopped his frustrated gesturing. Though this was not the real question that Lyr wanted. Perhaps in time, he would ask Kei not where else, but what else. The real root of the problem, Lyr gently realized, was that second question. The root of all of their problems.
For Lyr, and probably for Kei as well, there were things unknown that should be known, and things known that should not be known.
Lyr had not known about before and after, here and there, but he should have known. At the same time, now that he knew, he was aware that he was not supposed to know those concepts.
Lyr knew about dead apples... and knew he should know, but also was not supposed to know about red, round, juicy, sweet apples.
Lyr did not know about what else there was, and was quite sure that he was not supposed to find out.
His eyes were drawn, almost magnetically, towards Kei's fiery red ones. The god suddenly seemed taller, more imposing, his face darker, although in truth nothing had changed. Kei lowered his pale gray jawbone into a wide, sharp smile, and uttered three words.
"The Human Realm."
--L--
Thanks for reading despite the terribly long wait. Writers' block is a... well, I'm sure many of you know. I hope you thought it was worth the wait. Please review, and don't forget to read anja-chan's chapter. And if you just read hers, I hope you reviewed it too. We appreciate you, readers!
