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By the time Waidwen wakes in the field, dawn is staining the sky, and he is no longer only himself.
He can feel Eothas through every part of him. There is nothing left untouched, unknown. Everything is still exactly where it was yesterday morning, every fight he's ever picked, all his anger at his lot, and it's not that he's so far removed from it that he doesn't understand those fights, that anger. It's just that he's no longer that man, and he's not sure who he is.
He isn't Eothas, but he's part of Eothas, and he is so much vaster than he was.
Waidwen is grappling with the sensation when he feels Eothas, the bulk of Eothas that cannot fit in one man's body with him, as a presence. It's no vision like yesterday, but they don't need that now to talk. Eothas feels like the first warm moments after a cold night. It would have been tempting, at one point in his life, for Waidwen to lean into that warmth. He isn't sure which him doesn't need it: is it Waidwen-who-was with his anger, or Waidwen-that-is who already carries the dawn's light in his chest?
It doesn't really matter.
He said they would do this as partners, or they wouldn't do it at all. He intends to keep his word. He takes up his sickle from where it fell from his hand. It would be a pretty image to see himself there in Eothas's tool, the stars at his brow and the light spilling from his eyes, but it's only an old sickle and not so fine as to show a reflection. Instead, he will see his changed face in the little tin mirror his mother left behind, which he has always polished with the same dull devotion he gave the gods, when he goes home for nearly the last time.
Others will not see it until the right time, but Waidwen will. Waidwen will know what he is now, before his mortal husk is shucked.
It is Eothas who asks, "Where do we begin?"
***
People who knew Waidwen see he is changed. Strangers feel the purpose that extends from him, too much to be contained by one mortal body, though they still see him as only a man. Many doubt him, or doubt his message, but enough listen in the square. He comes back, day after day, and preaches on the corruption of the governor and the need for Readceran freedom. He calls the blight a divine punishment, which it is not, but he's discussed strategy with Eothas. They are together a god-and-man, and they'll use all the tools at their disposal to rebuild this empire.
Waidwen draws the ire of the guard and the governor's men, as he knew he must. He is falsely accused of anything they think will discredit him, no matter how far fetched. He is sentenced to be whipped immediately and is thrown down in the square, chained.
There was already a crowd gathered to hear him speak. It grows. Parents shield their childrens' eyes, but they don't leave. The faithful he has already collected pray, cry, whisper and shout words in support.
He is whipped.
It should hurt, but it doesn't. Waidwen feels the lash, but a whip cannot hurt a god. Where it opens his skin, dawn's light spills out, and he is seen.
Shouts, gasps, cries, exultant laughter, and a bureaucrat calling for the whipping to stop. That man is confused and scared, and Waidwen is suddenly so much larger of a problem than a vorlas farmer gone mad with despair.
They - Waidwen and Eothas, the intersection of them, both and not quite either - demand the punishment continue, and it does. When he speaks as a god, it is hard to defy him, and there must be this sacrifice of Waidwen-who-was. It is not enough to be changed; people must see the change so they trust it.
Each lash pares away the old self. They strip away his mortal flesh and a god spills out.
He does not ever describe the sensation of becoming. He describes what has been: he spends the rest of his short life talking about Eothas appearing to him in the Vorlas and his physical transformation into this shape between a god and man.
He doesn't describe what it felt like. He would struggle to, if he tried.
It doesn't hurt to be whipped, and it doesn't hurt to feel the unseen mantle of power and purpose weighing on his shoulders. It is odd but not uncomfortable to shed his splitting skin.
But he also wouldn't say it feels good.
It just feels right, like pulling a rock out of his boot or a splinter from his finger. It's the first clear breath after coughing water out of his lungs. It's the moment pain stops and things begin to feel right.
He erupts in light. He is the promise that hard work will lead to reward, and he will see his people freed and rewarded. He is the piece of Eothas that understands it is kith who work the field, not himself, not the gods. He is the whole of Waidwen who understands it is men and women who work the fields, not lords and governers and kings an ocean away. He burns with purpose.
They all see the stars on his brow, a divine crown. The chains that held him melt and pool to the ground in glowing puddles, and they do not burn him, though the dirt itself steams. There is still some left of Waidwen-who-was in the color of his skin, his hair, but people see the shape of his new self. Soon enough, those last pieces will be gone, and he will be all shining and new.
His father's eyes are gone from his face. He does not mourn his father's eyes any more than he mourned the man himself.
He steps through the molten chains, leaving footprints to harden in the square, and the guards will not lift a hand to stop him. The governor's men are too scared, so far out of their depth when faced with a god in flesh. Waidwen walks away from the village square with followers, those already faithful and those newly turned.
He walks the fields, and the vorlas thrives. The crop springs up at his feet as if there was never a blight. Roots take hold. Prickly stems push out of the ground so quickly they creak, and small leaves unfurl, bright green and growing, darkening as they reach maturity. The fields rustle as if in a great wind, and it is only the sound of the plants themselves becoming. Pink-red flowers blossom, shed clinging purple pollen, shrivel, and then seeds hang to be collected with the harvest, for the next season.
The hard work of kith is rewarded. They call it the Miracle of the Verdant Vorlas, and they call him a saint.
St. Waidwen doesn't care what they call him. He makes for the capitol and the imperial governor, his following growing in his wake. There, St. Waidwen frees his people from Aedyr, sheds what is physically left of Waidwen-who-was, and becomes a being of light.
Waidwen had been angry, after a lifetime of his father and struggling crops and seeing the credit for his work go to anyone but himself. St. Waidwen still feels that anger, but it's more distant, and it heels to him. Waidwen had lashed out, picked fights, but St. Waidwen plans.
***
St. Waidwen becomes Divine King Waidwen. He strikes down unjust churches, which are most of them, and drives priests like his father tried to be out of Readceras. Dyrwood rises to face him, unable to cope with the wave of immigrants he sends them, and St. Waidwen does not stand down. He gathers and leads armies of his faithful, and he goes to war.
It turns out he's very good at war.
In the quiet hours, when St. Waidwen sleeps or pretends that he sleep, in tents on the campaign or captured forts or wherever he may find himself, they talk, or else they sit in overlapping silence, and St. Waidwen thinks.
St. Waidwen traces the lines in who he is. He can see so clearly the parts of himself that belong to Waidwen-who-was, but it is harder to draw the lines on what is Eothas. All of him is Eothas, as all of him is Waidwen, but he cannot see the whole of Eothas. He can look at a feeling and trace it to a drunken fight, to a cold dawn on a lake shore, but he cannot trace it to anything of Eothas. There are things he knows and feelings he has, and he can't find where they stem from.
He is as much Eothas as he is Waidwen, but he is not all of Eothas. He does not know all of Eothas.
A few times, he imagines what it would be like to go back to being Waidwen-who-was. What would it feel like to go back to being a single man, when you have been a man-and-god? What would Waidwen-who-was think of Waidwen-that-is? What sense would he be able to make of Eothas's presence in every part of his being, in his soul and mind and body?
Could he comprehend this feeling of multitude, or would it be like grasping at a dream, the broad feelings staying, but the details slipping away?
He does not know. He does not know if it's possible to go back, and he doesn't want to go back. But he does wonder, a few times.
He thinks his soul might be so changed, it won't find its way back to the Wheel, and he doesn't care.
It's not a loss of faith to question, but building its walls higher. He chose to be this, and he has to think about what this is to continue making that choice.
Eothas lets him wonder. Sometimes Eothas holds himself apart, and sometimes Eothas is there, the larger presence of all of him and not just the piece that sits in St. Waidwen, but Eothas never demands his every thought. Eothas guides his thoughts, because St. Waidwen is Eothas, but the great Eothas that exists outside the walls of this mortal body lets St. Waidwen keep them and share them by his own will.
***
It is different for Eothas. Waidwen can hold no secrets from Eothas, but Eothas can hold them from Waidwen.
Waidwen does not ever know the entirety of the truth, and he does not know his death is coming.
Eothas does.
All of Waidwen is Eothas's, but only a fraction of Eothas is Waidwen's. The mismatch between a god and a kith is too large. What is one soul in the face of thousands? Eothas is too vast for Waidwen to understand, and Eothas despairs of that fact. It would be so much easier, if the gods were built like kith, for Eothas to create the change the world needs.
If the gods were built like kith, he would not have to do this, and he would not be able to lie to Waidwen like this. They would overlap evenly, be equal parts of each other, instead of St. Waidwen being such a small piece of Eothas but all of Waidwen. They could know each other fully.
Eothas loves Waidwen, but he is such a small thing.
Eothas despairs to let Waidwen walk to their shared-but-not death, and Waidwen surprises him. Eothas had not realized he could be surprised like that, when he holds all of Waidwen's life within himself, and he takes it as a sign that he has made, is making the right choice.
Waidwen understands that the kith's first duty is to themselves, that Dyrwood is rising up against a god as they once rose against a king, and Waidwen does not need Eothas. There is hope for them all in those things: the kith might rise past the need for his kind.
They will be a martyr, but Waidwen will pay the higher price. St. Waidwen has succeeded at so much, and Eothas has succeeded in uniting these kith against a god, and Eothas does not know what he will do, when he survives what kills Waidwen.
He supposes he will have time to think about it while he watches what comes next.
(That small part of him that stays, that part of the Daystars as close to kith as any of their kind can be, stays for grief - and love. Eothas is sad to see it lost, less because he has lost a part of himself and more because Waidwen deserves a greater honor. Waidwen always deserved far more than Eothas could give him.)