In the deepest of night when everyone was asleep.
Siomopess descended to the surface, treading upon the parched earth.
Today, as always, lives that had perished on the dried-up earth came into his view.
However, in the place where death had vanished, half of them still couldn’t even stop breathing and remained breathing even as they became dried, twisted corpses.
His brow furrowed involuntarily at the horrific sight that was unbearable to witness.
Had Henelion not anticipated this sight? He knew that reason had been swallowed by emotion and that he wasn’t in his right mind, but this was excessive. The god of wisdom he had swallowed had become not his head but his heart. It was scraping away the reason within him, becoming his heart and moving so that he, driven by his emotions, couldn’t make rational choices.
And only Henelion and his children didn’t know this fact.
‘The situation is much more serious. More than I thought.’
But that wasn’t something for him to interfere with. He had other things he needed to do.
Relying on the shadows to avoid being noticed by the gods, what he found as he moved his steps were two intricately crafted crow statues.
A few days ago, he had secretly commissioned both the blacksmith god and the god of art to create them.
“You’ll have to stay like this for a while.”
Siomopess whispered toward a small bundle and then whispered toward the two souls he pulled out from within.
They were the souls of his younger siblings that he had hidden from Henelion, who had not only ignored and insulted their authority but had also severed the natural order of the world.
At the sight of the crow statues, the two small souls trembled as they emitted light.
As if they were protesting that he would dare put them in there.
“I have no choice. This is the way to survive. So that Henelion won’t find you. Stay hidden as much as possible.”
Despite the two souls’ protests, Siomopess wordlessly placed their souls inside the crow statues.
A bright light flowed out from the statues where the two souls had entered.
Colorful, sweet, and ecstatic lights began to silently dye the statues. And finally, the moment that light went out.
“Caw?”
“Caaw?”
And the intricate statues that contained the gods’ souls moved like living beings.
“Caaaw! Caaaaaw!”
The two siblings who had literally become crows flapped their wings.
Though they were more beautiful than any other birds, Lyriet and Lyutios, who had nonetheless become mere creatures, were horrified.
“……I know you’re shocked. But this was the only way to bring you here.”
Insomnia, which is the antithesis of sleep—to put Lyriet’s body, which had accepted that breath, to sleep, the only method was to extract the soul.
Even if he put her back to sleep, he didn’t know what Henelion might do again. Then it was right to hide the souls in this way, separating body and soul so that he couldn’t do anything.
If there’s no soul in the body, he won’t be able to wake them, so even Henelion won’t be able to do anything.
“Stay quiet like this for now. If possible, stay close to things with energy that Henelion would dislike. Wander at night, or stay close to darkness even during the day.”
However, Siomopess’s arbitrary action without consulting them even once was enough to provoke his siblings’ defiance.
“Caw! Caaw! Caw-caw-caw-caw!”
“Sorry, and let’s stay apart for now. It’ll be safer if you hide among real crows.”
“Caaaaaaw! Caaaw! Caaaaaw!”
As expected, they protested roughly toward him with incomprehensible sounds and stabbed at his body with their sharp beaks. After venting their anger for a while like that, they flew off somewhere far in the sky as if they were done.
He watched his siblings disappearing into the darkness with a worried gaze, and once their figures vanished, he turned his gaze to the barren earth.
The grass was withering, and beasts with nothing but skin and bones wandered searching for food. Some were already eating the corpses of their dead companions to survive.
“……Pitiful and pathetic things.”
The creatures that simply couldn’t die yet still wanted to live and kept living were both admirable and pitiful. The fortunate thing was that as the god of death, he could quickly give them rest.
If he hadn’t put Lyriet and Lyutios’s bodies to sleep, he couldn’t have even done this much. Henelion was pathetic for trying to satisfy his own greed by blocking even death, which might be a blessing for these creatures.
‘He definitely wasn’t like this in the past.’
In the past, he recalled Henelion who had proudly declared toward him that he would make this surface beautiful.
Back then, the bright and intelligent him was quite pleasing to Siomopess.
Was even that pure era ultimately useless in the face of power? Or was it because emotion had devoured reason?
‘A great god cannot be one for a lifetime. Like the sun setting and the moon rising, they change.’
He remembered a story his parents had told long ago. They said that someday he would defy even death.
To think that would actually come true. With a bitter smile, he began walking again. To find the god who had put the wind of death into this earth.
* * *
Atop a cliff where waves surged.
Seianes was looking up at the sky without the slightest movement.
He had walked diligently in the eastward direction that Eurysis had mentioned.
However, despite reaching the edge of the world, Abrisius was nowhere to be seen in the end.
“My child, why aren’t you here?”
He felt absurd at himself for continuously walking eastward. Seianes, who laughed loudly in his seat with a sense of futility, glanced at the distant sea.
Could it be.
‘My child, is Abrisius not in this world?’
Was that why she told him to go east—to tell him that? The worst assumption came to mind and messily turned his head inside out.
If what he would naturally come to know was the fact that Abrisius wasn’t there?
“No, that can’t be.”
Seianes, who couldn’t accept that fact, shook his head. Right, that’s absurd. He tried to shake off the ominous thought, telling himself that Eurysis wouldn’t do that, but.
‘Could it really not be so?’
If it were her, it wouldn’t be strange for her to give him enlightenment in this way. Perhaps this ominous thought he was feeling now might be the correct answer—such worries only sprouted up gradually.
Holding complex thoughts, he closed his eyes for a moment, listening to the sound of the fiercely crashing waves.
As if proving that he had shed many tears all the way here, Seianes’s tears had hardened to form a sharp gravel field.
And with a splashing sound, the sound of gravel being stepped on was heard.
Ah, was that Seianes’s lingering attachment?
No, to be precise, it was Siomopess who had carried it on his back and come.
Seianes’s brow furrowed at the intensified smell of death. It poured oil on his already troubled mind. The death that appeared before him seemed like a death sentence for his child.
“……Do you have something to say to come here? Is there someone dead here?”
Seianes asked sharply toward the death that had come to the clifftop by the sea where there wasn’t a single corpse.
“……I came because I have something to say to you, who has thrown away your duty and responsibility.”
Siomopess stood before the god whose will had been broken and who was on the verge of becoming one with the earth at the edge of the world.
The appearance of having lost even the sense of responsibility and pride in caring for the earth as the god of earth. It was utterly pathetic. Couldn’t he see the catastrophe unfolding on the earth right now?
“I heard what you’re looking for.”
Siomopess didn’t ask why he was immersed in sorrow.
Instead, he decided to reveal what he had heard. The story he had heard from the lingering attachment that had been giggling behind his shadow.
“I’ll grant one of the things you want. Seianes, please grant my request.”
“Do you truly know what I’m looking for when you say that?”
“Of course I know. I swear upon Zeyaom.”
A vow made before the World Tree that encompasses the underground, surface, and heavens. That was a statement made by staking everything as a god.
Did he really know?
Seianes’s pupils dilated and then shook rapidly.
The hope of being able to find Abrisius. At the same time, the question of how Siomopess knew of that child’s existence.
Except for Eurysis, there was no one among the gods on the surface who knew of his existence.
Though there was much to interrogate, Seianes remained silent.
He wanted to meet Abrisius. He wanted to meet him again and hold that child.
However, he didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t carelessly find witnesses or even ask, so he had been searching this land alone all by himself.
But Siomopess knew about that child. Rather than interrogating how he knew, finding out where he was was more important.
“And I have no intention of telling anyone else about this. If you grant my request, I’ll promise to keep silent about both the child’s location and any stories about the child.”
“Child……?”
When the story of the child came up, Seianes, who had been drooping, sprang up. His heart dropped with a thud, and at the same time, complexity mixed with hope and anxiety settled in Seianes’s eyes.
Siomopess really knew where Abrisius, his child, was.
“Then tell me. How can I find my child?”
Indeed, hoping that the single ray of hope found in desperation wasn’t a rotten rope, he asked calmly.
“As you swore upon Zeyaom, I also swear. If your request is something I can grant, I will grant it as well. But please tell me where my child is.”
“You can do it. To be precise, you might be the only one who can do it.”
Finishing his words, Siomopess looked up at the sky. Above it, the river that the dead cross stretched out long. Though death had disappeared now and souls were wandering. That too would soon stop.
His siblings, whose souls and bodies had been separated, would soon truly fall into sleep. And then life would circulate again.
Of course, when he learns of this fact, Henelion will move again. Before that, he had to hide his siblings’ bodies.
Very deeply so that Henelion couldn’t see them.
“When you look at the night sky, it’s incredibly beautiful. A river flows in the sky, and my younger siblings sleep there and play the role of giving rest to the dead. Well, the circumstances are complicated to explain, but recently there’s been a problem with reincarnation itself. So my request is this. Split the land in half. And tear the sky.”
“……What?”
Did he hear wrong?
At Siomopess’s words, bewilderment spread across Seianes’s face. Split the land and tear the sky?
“What are you talking about right now?”
“Your father tends to avoid the night. It’s probably because he’s reminded of Ircadeon. So if the two divided lands have different day and night from each other, I can hide my siblings away from your father’s sight.”
That wasn’t as simple a matter as it sounded. The earth was clearly Seianes’s domain, so it didn’t matter much. But the sky was a separate issue.
What would his sister Eradiа, who governs the sky, say? She might get angry at her younger brother who dared to split the land and tear even the sky on his own.
Looking at the river flowing through the sky, he let out a helpless sigh.
“……But. There’s no other way, is there?”
Once a vow has been made upon the sacred World Tree Zeyaom, it must be kept. If he could find his child, what couldn’t he do?
“It’ll be over quickly, so please wait just a moment.”
Was this what Eurysis meant when she said if he went east, he would naturally come to know?
He couldn’t know, but even if it was a slim probability, if he could meet Abrisius, Seianes could do anything.
