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“You've changed.”
He'd found him overlooking the city, a tall man in simple, dark workman's clothes, a hood drawn over his head against the perpetual drizzle. He looked far from old – going by the lines on his face, Xa would have estimated him to be in his early thirties, but even now there was something about him that wasn't quite right for a mortal. Something more than, something left over from before.
“You should like that,” the man said eventually, when enough time had passed that Xa had been almost sure he'd get nothing but sullen, dismissive silence. Karan had always been good at that.
“You must hate it,” Xa replied and allowed a smile to twist his features. He wasn't even sure if he liked it. Change and transformation were his domain, his joy, his playground, but some things weren't meant to change. Some things were as eternal as the ground under their feet, as the sky above their heads, as the sun shining in it. And while it might have delighted him if the sky had turned yellow one day, as if the gods of the heavens had suddenly discovered their sense of humour, there was something unsettling about Death himself changing.
Karan turned his head now to look at him, and Xa took a startled step backwards when he saw his eyes. He couldn't have said what colour they had been before – he was tempted to say black, because everything around Karan tended towards darkness, or maybe the muddy brown he'd already liked to shroud himself in back then, but he wasn't sure – but they most certainly hadn't been green. The deep, vibrant green of a blooming forest, of moss when the spring rains started falling and didn't stop for weeks. It was so breathtakingly lively that Xa's own eyes mirrored the colour in delight.
“You must hate this,” he said again. A divine entity turned into its very opposite, like some cruel cosmic joke. It was as if someone had turned him into a stone statue.
Karan's new, human face was still a stoic mask, annoyingly hard to read, his eyes almost empty despite their vibrant colour.
“How did you find me?” he asked. His voice was rough and deep, quite similar actually to how it had sounded before, but somehow weaker, merely an echo of what he'd once been.
“You're a god.” Xa grinned. “It's hard for gods to hide.”
The sneer that rippled over Karan's face was disturbingly human. Apparently he had a much harder time these days keeping his face neutral.
“If you still think I'm a god, you're more insane than you're given credit for.”
“Well, you may not have any power anymore, or any influence, or your immortality.” He stopped cheerfully when his words earned him another glare. “But there's a certain something to a god that even a little trifle like dying doesn't do away with. At least not when you're not the one making sure death goes as planned. Your successor did a bit of a sloppy job with you, didn't he?”
No reaction this time. Wars between gods were as old as the world itself. They called themselves immortal and liked to pretend they were untouchable, but neither was true of course. They were petty and power-hungry and envious, and most of them had had millennia to stew about insignificant slights and serious insults. But nobody had ever touched Death himself. He was above the petty squabbling for power, he was the impartial ending that waited for all of them should they ever be foolish enough to get themselves killed. No one had ever been stupid or cocky or greedy enough to think that Death had to play by the same rules as the rest of them. Or maybe one didn't need to be any of those things, and all it had taken was one arrogant bastard to say, “why not?”
Back when it had happened, Xa had admired his audacity. Since then, he'd started accumulating his own number of petty slights to stew about, and the fact that Death had somehow survived getting killed was a very welcome opportunity. There were few things as beautiful as a convenient opportunity delivered right into his lap. He smiled.
“I mean, you are still here. Very much alive,” he said, his tone teasing simply because Karan hated to be teased.
“That doesn't explain how you found me.”
“Hmm, yes. I was surprised by how much you didn't want to be found,” Xa said. He made a step closer, fascinated by the way Karan's broad chest rose and fell with every breath. Most of them appeared as human as they could when they walked among mortals, and Xa had always enjoyed the trappings and wonders of his human form in every possible way. He loved to eat and drink and smoke and fight and fuck, he loved the sensations burning through his nerves. Karan, though, Karan had treated his physical form like an empty vessel, a skin to slip into, something he'd rarely bothered to fill with the appearance of life. Half the time he'd barely seemed to bother with making himself look entirely human – which might explain Xa's increasingly irritating inability to remember what colour his eyes had been, or his hair for that matter.
“I don't know what games you're playing this time, nor do I care to find out,” Karan said. “I know better than anyone how pointless it is to fight death when it comes to you.”
“But you're here. Whether you wanted to or not, you clearly kicked death in the teeth and got yourself a rebirth. You lost a bit of divinity on the way, but I'm sure something could be done about that.”
Karan gave him a thoughtful look. He'd never looked thoughtful before. He usually seemed like it, like a black cloud of brooding that hung around him in a maze of thoughts he didn't bother sharing with anyone, but before it hadn't been right there on his face, in his eyes.
He didn't bother with goodbyes, he didn't bother with explanations. Death, after all, had no use for such things, even when he wasn't Death anymore. He merely turned and left without even asking why Xa would want him back. They'd hardly been what you'd consider friends, not that he thought Karan was intimately familiar with the concept of friendship. But he'd been on friendlier terms with some of those he considered his brothers, while Xa saw himself more as the distantly related cousin nobody wanted to be held responsible for.
Fortunately, that meant that Xa was also very used to ignoring that he wasn't welcome.
*
Karan, as subtle in life as he had been as death, hadn't bothered to change his name. He'd added a last name for the sake of appearances, and his first name, while certainly one of the more unusual divine names parents gave their children, was hardly unacceptable among humans. Few people worshipped Death, in part because Karan had never shown any special interest in or favour to those who did. Other gods endowed their followers with favours or powers, they gave their priests healing hands or strengthened their warriors' swords in battle, they watched over the crops of those that prayed to them and over the inventions of those that left them sacrifices. Even Xa, who would have disapproved of an actual church in his name on general principle – churches came with hierarchies and regulations, with rules and commands, all things he would have wanted his priests to break just for the fun of it –, was happy enough to help along a bit of trickery and deception every now and then when some clever mortal came up with a cunning plan that he himself would have been proud of.
Once Xa knew where Karan was, knew for an actual fact that he was alive, that it wasn't only rumours and whispers and smoke, he had no trouble finding him again. A small cog and clock shop in one of the busiest crafters' streets in the city, hidden somewhat in a small building on a corner, only a few sample clocks ticking away in the shop window.
It was surprisingly bright inside when he stepped in, thanks to large overhead windows that let in what bit of sun made its way through the clouds. Karan was sitting on a wooden chair, long fingers painstakingly fiddling with minuscule gears. He'd have the patience for it, of course, a man who could wait decades and centuries to collect what he was owed.
“It's a bit on the nose, don't you think?” he asked when Karan made no move to look up or speak first.
Throughout the centuries, Xa had never actually figured out what made people recognise him, since he could rarely be bothered to keep the same face for more than a day, or the same voice. Maybe it was his tone, the rhythm of his words. Maybe gods simply recognised their own. Whatever the reason, when Karan finally raised his head, he looked far more annoyed than he would have been at any regular customer. He only glanced up from his work for a moment before his hands returned to it.
“I always liked the ticking,” he said.
Xa stopped short for a moment to look at him. It had never seemed to him that Karan liked much of anything. He couldn't quite decide if becoming a clockmaker because he liked the ticking showed a depressing lack of imagination or if it was delightfully eccentric. He barely entertained the possibility that Karan might be making a joke.
“It tends to get on my nerves,” Xa said and walked past the rows of ticking cog wheels. He brushed his fingers over some of them, the metal cold and smooth under his fingertips. “I really miss the time before humans invented these things. These days everything's ticking and tocking and everyone is besides themselves when you fiddle a little with a clock here and another one there.”
He liked the work, though. It had a certain beauty in its simplicity, smooth designs, straight edges and a clean efficiency, but the very nature of a cog wheel system gave it at least the appearance of just a hint of confusing chaos. He tapped a few times on one particularly pretty little watch, tap, tap, tap, until the ticking was just a fraction too fast.
“I can hear what you're doing,” Karan said.
“So you still don't have a sense of humour then.” Xa laughed and fixed the watch with a snap of his fingers. If he didn't, Karan would simply spend the next days fixing it manually, and chaos was so much less fun if you knew it'd lead to nothing but someone doing more mind-numbing work.
He stopped by the window that looked out onto the backyard, open despite the chilliness and the constant rain. On the window sill sat a raven, black wings folded, its eyes following Xa's progress through the workshop curiously. And now that he thought back of it, there'd been a raven in the trees a few days ago, too, when he'd first come to talk to Karan. They still were drawn to him, then. It had always seemed painfully unfair to Xa. Ravens were clever things, smart and playful and downright mischievous. It made little sense that it was Karan they'd always followed. Maybe he could blame humans and their stupid superstitions that black birds were a dark omen, a harbinger of death, but Karan had actually seemed to be fond of them. To Xa it seemed like a waste, to have the raven be anyone's symbol but his own. And because he was nothing if not petty, he'd decided he could do without an animal if he couldn't have the one he wanted.
Yet somehow he'd blindly assumed that the bird came with the powers, that wherever Karan's idiot of a successor was, he'd have a raven sitting on his shoulder. Maybe he did, but somehow it didn't seem likely. Surely the ravens had better taste than that.
Xa stopped in front of the raven, aware of Karan's heavy stare in his back. Its eyes were watching him with far more intelligence than the beast could possibly have. He conjured up a bauble from his pocket and offered it to the bird, who picked it at once or twice to see if it was food, then flew off with it. It was back only a minute later, beak and talons empty, and gave Xa an expectant look as if it wanted more.
Definitely too good for that gloomy crank.
*
“You know what rankled me when I found out you were alive?”
Another day, and he was feeding the raven with little chunks of meat, but it wasn't the bird he was watching. For a human, Karan had an impressive stillness about him, a quiet, calm certainty. But Xa had known him when he'd been silence itself, and to him Karan seemed to be in constant motion. The rise and fall of his chest, the slow rhythm of his lids, the way he wetted his lips every now and then. And his hands moved more often than not. Right now he was eating, with far less appetite than the bird that still stayed close to him. It was an odd sight. Karan looked like he hadn't entirely got used to it himself.
“I don't suppose you'd resist telling me,” he said after swallowing yet another small bite. He didn't quite look like he was tasting ash. He probably would have enjoyed ash more.
“Every century or other, I'd try to resurrect someone,” Xa continued without paying his complaints any heed. “I even stayed away from humans most of the time because I know how you are, but even with animals you never turned a blind eye.”
“Are you really complaining that I took death too seriously?” Karan's tone was dry as dust, but there was a spark in it that made Xa halt for a moment. He looked at him, those brilliant green eyes, the sharp nose, the pale simmer of blood under his skin. This was not a face Xa was ever bound to forget, and he had to keep himself from letting his eyes turn that same green again. He doubted Karan would have appreciated it, and he didn't want yet another conversation to end in silence.
“I'm complaining that you take everything too seriously, but in this specific case, yes,” he said. “And yet here you are. Dead and gone, or so everybody thought, defeated and ripped out of the fabric of the universe. You always said there was nothing after you. No heaven or hell, whatever mortals want to call it, no elysium, no hall of the warriors, no hallowed fields, no rebirth, no reincarnation. Only you.”
“Because that's the truth.” Karan's frown deepened as he looked down at the knife in his hand, idly staring at a crumb that clang to the blade. “Or it was when I made sure of it.”
“It's not the truth anymore, because you are disturbingly alive. Reborn, resurrected, risen from the earth, sprung up from a plant. Tell me how, and I'll leave you alone.”
In a way it was almost reassuring that Karan could look every bit as sceptical out of those living eyes as he had in the past. The raven picked up the last piece of meat and flew out of the window, wings beating the cool air, splattering a few drops of rain onto Xa's face. They ran over his cheeks, a bright gleam on his dark skin. Karan was many things, but stupid had never been one of them, gullible even less so, and it would have taken an exceptionally gullible man to believe a single promise that cascaded from Xa's smiling lips.
“Not reborn,” Karan still said. He may not have believed him, but he seemed less reluctant to talk than Xa would have expected. He only realised then that Karan was not merely tight-lipped because of a personal character flaw, but because he had no explanations to offer. “This body existed before me. This man did. Whatever remained alive of me woke up again in him.”
He tapped the knife against the bread, slowly, systematically, a steady rhythm. A nervous gesture where there shouldn't have been one.
Xa almost asked if whoever this man had been was still in there, but he knew better than that. Some gods preferred to inhabit mortal bodies over creating their own, some even made cults of it, had their followers offer themselves up in sacrifice and consider it the greatest honour to be chosen. No mortal could survive sharing their body with a god, the sheer force of even the lowest, weakest divine entity too much for a human mind to bear. If there had ever been another soul, another consciousness, another life in that body, it had been crushed the moment Karan had taken hold of his flesh.
“Shouldn't you approve of the balance?” Xa asked.
“A mortal life for whatever it is I am now?” Karan sneered. “There's no balance to that.”
“Neither is there to a mortal ripping himself into the very fabric of divinity.” It was a weak argument when mortals had made themselves gods before, but Death was not a god like any other. Death was eternal. Death was not subject to war and change – it was why Xa had been so damn tired of him for centuries.
“You still haven't told me what you want,” Karan said. He didn't insult either of them by reminding him of his empty, half-hearted promise to leave him alone. One thing Karan had always understood was that no thing could go against its very nature.
Xa smiled. The bloody raven had more curiosity in him than Karan on a good day, but here he finally was, asking the only question that mattered. He took his time to reply – stood from the window sill he'd balanced on, strolled through the room, broke and fixed a clock or three in passing simply for the sigh of annoyance it got him – a huff of breath from human lungs – let his skin turn a shade brighter until it was all but golden in the afternoon sun, and spread out his arms.
“Oh, I only want to restore you to your throne.”
*
Convincing Karan was like changing the tides.
“Why would you want that?” he'd asked. There had been nothing dramatic to it – if Xa had had things to his liking, the knife would have clattered to the wooden table or even to the floor, and maybe there would have been a gasp, widened eyes, anything. But the knife had been laid down on the table with barely a sound and the only sign of agitation he got was that Karan stood from his chair. His dark brown shirt tightened a bit around his shoulders when he turned to face the window, looking for Xa knew not what, knew not even if it was anything his human eyes could see at all or something beyond. He'd often wondered how Death saw the world, and if he could still see it that way. If there was at least a shred of his power left in him.
There was nothing dramatic to his words, no accusation, no reminder that since the dawn of time they had been – not enemies, but anathema, the opposite poles of a magnet. He deprived Xa of the opportunity to tell him just how much he had rejoiced at his death – at the poetry of it and the irony, at the visceral joy he'd felt at seeing the most unchangeable thing of all finally topple.
It hadn't lasted. Xa had a greater fondness for humans than many of his brethren, for their inventiveness, for their inconsistency, for their willingness to try everything at least once. It didn't mean they were suited for godhood, but even that had worked out at times. Justice herself had once been mortal and she was eternal proof that humans could manage to be every bit as eternally dull as any born god.
No, Srirar had made a mistake of an entirely different kind. Xa was quite willing to admit to a certain amount of hypocrisy when it came to how much he hated anyone trying to play games with him.
“Because I don't like him,” was all he said, whimsical and indifferent. After all, it hardly took more than that. There was no better explanation, and even if there had been one, he wouldn't have offered it.
“You don't like me.” Karan almost – no, he didn't smile, but the muscles in his jaw twitched just enough that it almost looked like he did. Xa had seen him smile before, just usually for no reason he could discern. If there was a sense of humour buried somewhere in him, even the god of trickery did not understand it.
“You never needed to be liked.”
You simply existed.
He realised only then that he'd grown quite loath to the idea of a world that did not have Karan in it. Mortality was a dreadfully brief, fleeting thing. For someone who'd never liked the permanence of death, the world's only reborn man dying seemed like a sinful waste.
Convincing Karan was like changing the tides, but Xa had played with the world itself since he'd stumbled out of chaos and brought some of it with him. And once Karan was convinced, he was once again as regular as the tides themselves, steady and determined, eating away at the rock of the world.
*
Like the tides, Karan was frustratingly patient. He was in no hurry to reclaim what was his when eternity was so close to his grasp, he preferred to take his time to plan. Xa appreciated a well executed scheme more than anyone, a long con where the target was nothing short of divinity itself, to be swindled out of the hands of one who fancied himself a god and had, at least for the time being, the power to back up his ambitions.
But he missed the rush of a quicker game, the tension of the last round of cards being played, of the last dice falling, and if he pulled out a piece in the pyramid of Karan's plan to make it topple to the ground faster, well, Karan should have understood better than anyone that no being could go against his nature, and Xa did not like to play by rules.
His fury was like a storm, dizzyingly alive in those green eyes, the usual tight control slipping from his fingers. There was a beauty to that like to a yellow sky, to see him change, of his own volition rather than by force. When strong fingers curled around Xa's throat and lifted him up from the ground, he laughed against the rough touch.
Karan had seemed like he wanted to say something, but instead he'd only looked at him, thoughtful and considering, his anger burning down to a steady amber, waiting. Then he let him go with a scoff and stepped away, turning his back on him.
Xa touched his throat gingerly – his human flesh smarted, a sensation he could have made irrelevant if he'd chosen to, but he quite liked the tingling in his nerve endings. What good was a body if it was not felt? He'd made the same argument to Karan more than once over the past months, with limited success. He'd got him to enjoy his meals, but he disliked wine. Smoke had held a surprising appeal to him – he'd drawn it in with his eyes half closed and his lips parted, and once it had filled his lungs, he'd smiled that almost-smile again. It hadn't been until much, much later that night that Karan had whispered that he could almost see the world as it truly was through the smoke. See it the way his eyes were meant to see it. Xa had tried to get him to explain what exactly he saw, but Karan had only shaken his head mutely. Not even a hint of mortal pleasure could make him much less tight-lipped, it seemed.
Xa had suggested women, too, and men, and then beasts just to see Karan's reaction. Seeing him roll his eyes at him like at a petulant child had been almost better than actually getting him to stumble into someone's bed.
Still caressing his own neck, retracing the heated spots on his skin where Karan's fingers had dug into it, Xa stepped closer to him.
“I'm merely going to skip the boring parts of our plan. You overestimate Srirar's patience, and his foresight.” He stopped just a step behind Karan. His current form was an inch taller than him and awarded him an easy view of Karan's neck, the asymmetrical way his hair curled at the back of it, the nubs of his spine, the light sheen of sweat on it. He leant in closer to breathe in deeply, letting his scent fill his lungs, then ran his fingertips over the back of his neck.
There was a minute flinch, barely more than a shudder of his skin, before he held still again. That same stillness born out of old habits, when his body had still been able to bend entirely to his will. Xa pressed his thumb into the hollow at the base of his skull.
“You're going to trick him, because it's what you do best,” Karan said quietly. He nodded, a simple acknowledgement of a simple fact, one he really should have seen coming earlier, if you asked Xa.
“He tricked you,” Xa replied, watching his breath play with the hair that curled around Karan's ear. “It seems like a fair trade.”
He squeezed his neck, felt the muscles underneath tense and relax minutely, the warmth of his body. He couldn't remember if Karan had been this warm when he'd been himself, and not for the first time he wondered if he'd never paid attention to it before or if his body had been too ephemeral back then to be anything at all.
“What do you need me for then? A distraction, to draw the eye away from your sleight of hand?” Karan sounded more interested than angry now, and he did not move away from Xa's touch. Goosebumps formed under Xa's fingertips, blood rushed under his skin, gave it a slightly darker tint in the half-light.
“Partly. But more than that, no Death at all would be too much chaos even for me.” He laughed at the irony of it. The thought had entertained him more than once, just like he'd always loved the idea of resurrection, but the truth of it was that the world tragically needed rules for his kind to break. Anyone could thrive in chaos if chaos was all there was. Without rules, there were no games, no tricks, no sleights of hand. And without Death, there were no rules.
He leant in closer, in the same moment that Karan half turned towards him, so close that the warm breath from his lips crept over Xa's face. There were a great many things he could have done then, and he'd considered most of them over the past months. It was the one thing he hadn't even got Karan to try – maybe it was too close to life itself. Or maybe it was the living, the mortals he hadn't wanted, and he would have said yes to a god.
There were a great many things Xa could have done, but he wanted none of them if they were nothing but mortal needs. He could have those any day, could have them from anyone, could play a million different games to get them. His lips barely brushed over Karan's cheekbone before he turned away again, and this time he was the one to leave without goodbye or explanation, without waiting for a reply. All beings were what their nature demanded of them, and Karan had always been good at letting nature run its course.
Even if, in this particular case, nature was Xa.
*
Gods were easy to find even when they weren't gods, but when they were, the world rippled around them, like waves around a rock on the shore. Just like most men could not read the sea and the waves, most mortals were ignorant to the movements of gods, to the trails they left. Most gods had their ways of covering their trail when they wanted to, but Death rarely bothered.
Xa had come looking for him in the little shop that had served him as a temporary home and found it not only abandoned, but empty, as if it had never existed. But there was a raven sitting on the low roof, black wings half spread as if waiting to take off – as if it had waited for him.
He let a coin dance between his fingers before he snipped it into the air, caught it, disappeared it into his pocket again. The raven crowed in disapproval and took off towards the edge of the city.
He found Karan on top of the same hill, clad in earthy brown, dark boots in the mud underneath his feet. It was raining again, soaking through hair and cloth and leather, as pervasive as if it wanted to sink through skin itself. Xa joined him, stepped so close that his shoulder brushed against Karan's. No warmth, but the touch was firm and heavy, and it took Xa a moment to realise that Karan had not only not pulled back, but shifted minutely towards him.
When he turned his head, the same face looked at Xa as in previous months – or not quite the same: it was paler, almost ashen, its contours seemed a little washed out, more like a quick chalk sketch than a painting. But his eyes were the same vibrant green they had most certainly not been the last time Xa had looked Death in the eye. He'd rarely known Karan to take a liking to anything that wasn't ravens or, apparently, clocks.
They were silent for a while, a comfortable, heavy silence while Xa listened to the rain and the lack of breathing from his companion, like it had been nothing but an idle habit he'd picked up for a few months and quickly forgotten again. They did not need to talk about what had happened, about plans executed and changed, about trickery and deception used to restore order in its most basic, primal sense. They did not need to talk about the fact that nobody should ever find out that Xa had given Karan a hand with his return to power and immortality. After all, they both had a reputation to maintain, and Xa could live with never having his name spoken in the same breath as the dearly departed – and in fact entirely dead – Srirar.
“You've changed,” he said eventually, a smile on his lips. Compared to before. To before before. As if life had rubbed off just a little bit on him.
“You should like that.” Karan didn't smile, but his eyes twinkled with something that might have been humour if one squinted at it hard enough.
“I do. Just don't make it a habit.”
That gleam in Karan's eyes remained when Xa leant in closer, closer still until his lips brushed over cold skin. Nothing about Karan's reaction indicated surprise, but then Karan understood him maybe better than Xa had ever given him credit for. His lips twitched a little in something that could have been a smile on anyone else.
“Is that what you want to be telling me right now?” Karan's lips were moving against his when he spoke, and Xa was almost sure that had been a joke. Or a bit of teasing at least. It was a good point, and one Xa had absolutely no intention of arguing with now. If Karan hadn't pulled back yet, he wasn't going to – nothing in the world could make Death moody or inconstant.
There was no warmth radiating from Karan's skin when Xa cupped his chin with one hand, no movement in Karan's chest when he splayed the other over it, but then some things were not meant to change. And some things, as always, could do with a little change, he thought and pressed his lips against Karan's again, a deeper kiss this time, like slipping into something dark and bottomless and, even if it were never to change again, endless to explore.