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The thing is that Niki doesn’t remember the beginning of the universe anymore, but she used to- and that’s just how it always is, isn’t it? Used to know star-secrets and void-words, used to shape galaxies and raise and burn servers on a whim, used to be a god- used to, used to, used to. Her glory days are long over, and she’ll never again know why.
She is only bitter about it the first few times she opens her eyes to grass and trees and the stars she hung. It is puzzling, for a moment; she is different now. There is cold in her throat where fire once burned and warmth behind her ribs that once held the void itself.
Nihachu, Nihachu, calls her own ghost, and the name hums with old power no one knows how to use.
So she takes a breath (and isn’t that new?) and walks among mortals as if she is one. She takes a name that is not a god’s, takes a name that does not bleed from her mouth and her eyes and tear at the minds of her companions, and she learns how to bake.
Domestic, she thinks wryly. It is warm and it is gentle and all the things she never has been, and it reminds her of crafting stars in the cold and endless void. Of making something real from dust and chaos, and if the children that play in the street smile when she hands them a slice of warm bread- well.
Perhaps there is something to being gentle.
And if some days she finds herself in the wild open fields of the young world, because all the worlds are young still, and she remembers the fire and light and the sheer joy of the beginning, well- no one is there to see her cry.
No one is there to see her howl and rage, and no one is there to see the shadow of forgotten wings and tied jaws and electricity break in the sky above.
And so she breathes, and bakes, and loves and rages and dies. And dies, and dies, and dies.
But Lady Death’s hold on her is weak, and each and every time, she wakes.
There are still shrines to her, she learns, temples and orders- though fewer and fewer as time goes on. Nihachu no longer responds to her acolytes’ prayers, no longer sings of blazes and vengeance and razed earths.
She enters a temple only once. Stands in its grand hall and simply breathes in what she used to be. It’s something else, to be here- to know it as a place that should respond to her, that should snap and jump at her presence, but feel it only still. There is no connection, because though she is still worshipped here, she is not any longer a god.
Here is how it goes: one day, on the day her last sequestered acolyte hidden in the far corner of a forgotten world lets go and succumbs to the void, she blinks open her eyes and does not remember the god Nihachu.
But she remembers the assassin, and the blacksmith, and the baker, and the traveller. She remembers living and breathing, again and again and again, and she remembers avenging and bringing fire even with a beating heart in her chest and no wings at her back. So she rises, wanders in search of the nearest town, and glances at the stars with only a distant ache in her chest.
(And if she knows- and she knows , deep in her bones and her mind and her soul that was not made to be mortal, that there is something she has forgotten, something she has lost that will not come back- well.
There’s nothing to be done. No one will ever see her cry.)
Time goes on as it did before. The days of Niki’s history slip away from her as fast as she lives them, and there is nothing to be done for it. No one else remembers as much as she does, anyway. No one else remembers lives upon lives and certainly no one else remembers dying.
So it’s quiet. And then there’s Eret.
And they are something else, something foreign come to this town she has settled in, something bringing cold winds and the taste of metal in the air and a biting familiarity in their strangeness.
To the villagers they are naught but another traveler passing through. But Niki keeps a hawk’s-gaze locked on their bowed shoulders and hiked hood and follows them all the way to the inn. They sit in the back of the tavern on its ground floor, half-cast in shadow but dark glasses over their eyes anyway.
An inexplicable spite grips her. She may be an avenger of sorts, when the time calls for it, but she’s not resentful- and this stranger has done nothing to her nor her neighbors.
But they are trespassing, something in her growls.
They are doing no such thing, she growls back. The tavern is an open space, they’re allowed to be there.
Trespasser, it snarls. Trespasser on my land on my grounds foreigner thinks they can take my people under my protection -
And: pause. Rewind. Back up.
Niki takes a deep breath and, despite all of her instincts screaming at her to stay, slips out of the tavern unnoticed by the stranger who’s spun up this strange- territorialism in her.
She goes home. She closes the bakery early and sends the sole employee, her teenage cashier, home for the night without explanation. With enough distance between her and the stranger, her emotions have settled down and she’s left bone tired.
Out of habit she takes careful stock of the bakery’s cabinets before trailing upstairs and crashing in bed. The sun’s not even quite down yet, and she’s not even sure if she’ll be able to fall asleep, but there’s little else she thinks she could do.
A breath in, a breath out. It shakes dry in her chest as she stares at the ceiling.
Something’s different now, she thinks. Something is not the same as it always has been as long as she remembers- every life until they fade into the haze of too much time. Something’s been knocked out of place, and the precarious stack of half-truths and forgotten memories she balances upon is about to come crumbling down.
So when the stranger appears at her door the next morning and holds her gaze with milk-white eyes and calls her Nihachu, she cannot find it in herself to be surprised.
There is a sword on her belt, right next to a pouch of spices and her sewing kit, and she unsheathes it as she hauls the stranger inside and slams the door behind them.
They raise their hands in surrender when she rests her blade against their throat. “I’m not an enemy,” they say. “I’m not. I promise.”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” she snarls.
“I had to,” they say. “I was told Nihachu had retreated here-”
“What do you care for a village baker?”
But here’s the truth: she has not named herself Nihachu in this life, not once. In old lives, sometimes, she would use it as a pseudonym, an adopted title to cast herself in the shadow of the vanished god. Why, why, why- she used to know, she thinks. It escapes her these days.
“A village baker,” they hum. “Is that what you have been pretending you are?”
She snorts, and does not give away the twisting in her heart. “What do you think I am, then?”
“Nihachu,” they say simply. “You are as you have always been. Come home, please.”
Suddenly, the strength in Niki’s arms fail. Her shoulders drop, and her sword falls to her side. She sighs, the rattle in her chest still lingering from a winter cold.
She gets sick so much more than usual, this time around.
“You believe me someone I’m not,” she says quietly. Her voice cracks at the end, and she clears her throat. “I don’t know you. Maybe I used to, but it’s been… it’s been so long.”
They are not breathing. Niki isn’t sure how she can tell, but bitterness chokes up in her throat and she is one thing and they are something else, and there is nothing she can do about it anymore, and she doesn’t even know why.
“You really don’t know,” they whisper, at last, marvelling at all of her inadequacies.
“I have died so many times.” She swallows. “I am not what I used to be.”
The stranger bows their head. “We have failed you. We believed you had retreated, seeking solitude. I couldn’t have imagined… I am sorry, Nihachu.”
Gather yourself, Niki, she thinks.
“You have not wronged me,” she sighs at last. “You have nothing to apologize for, stranger. Nothing that I have any right to forgive you for.”
They almost seem to- flinch, except they don’t physically move one muscle. Niki charges onward. “The person you knew is long gone, I think, whoever she was. My name is Niki.”
A pause. “I am called Eret, as I always was. I… I came here looking for someone I used to know, and whom I would like to know again. May we- start over? I would like to know you. Niki.”
(And here is the thing: maybe the person she used to be would have denied them. Turned them away at the door and sent them into the night from whence they came. They are cut from the same cloth, she and regret, but vengeance needs no friends; only sisters-in-arms, and fire, and courage.
But a baker is quite a bit different from vengeance. A small village’s baker, even one quite older than she looks, has never been one to deny another her companionship.)
And so she smiles; and so she welcomes Eret into her home; and so a page turns in the history books into a new story again.
.
The air is thin here, in the first godhome, just thin enough that Niki with her mortal lungs is panting and panting, and animal panic rises in her throat even as familiarity older than her tamps it down.
Suddenly Eret’s hand brushes her shoulder. When she doesn’t lean away, they press firmer. She focuses on it, focuses on the touch that is at once cold to the skin and warm as the sun.
It is said that mortals cannot see the godhome for what it truly is. That their minds cannot comprehend it in all its glory. Niki wonders what the place is to Eret, as she takes in the buildings of shimmering white quartz and ink-black obsidian. There is no wood, she notices. Only stone and stone and stone.
Have you been here since you left? Eret asks, their words less sound than impression, a ripple of consciousness across the fabric of time. It aches. Niki shakes her head.
“I’m not a god anymore,” she says. “I don’t belong here.”
“Oh.”
They don’t apologize. There’s nothing to apologize for.
“Why have you brought me here?” Niki asks. Eret tips their head, looks just past her, doesn’t meet her gaze. There’s a long pause.
“There’s something I’d like you to see,” they hum at last. “Something I’d like you to know, that belonged and belongs to you, should you wish to claim it.”
It is a sword.
It is beautiful.
Curved at just the angle Niki prefers, balanced and cut to her height, shimmering with godforged enchantments and humming with power. Fire flickers in the reflection of its blade. It seems to call out to her, to sing with the return of its wielder. It is her sword, her symbol, her grace.
It is everything she is not.
“Foolish found it some time ago, brought it back because it reminded him of yours,” Eret says, and Niki realizes she’s subconsciously approached its pedestal. The blade’s song is dizzying this close, almost overpowering. “I knew the moment I saw it it was yours. That’s why I started looking for you- you’d never let it fall out of reach, not unless something terrible had happened.”
“And something terrible had happened,” Niki murmurs.
“Yes.”
She runs her fingers across the blade, just a brush, barely even contact. It takes all the self-control she has not to reach out and take it by the hilt, to claim it her own. Destiny is thick in the air. This decision will name her for the rest of her life.
She turns away.
The blade’s song does not die, behind her, but it dims, and her throat feels cold in a way it hasn’t in lifetimes. Eret’s eyes flash behind their glasses, and Niki can’t say whether it’s shock or something else. Something unnamable.
“Take me back, Eret,” she says without meeting their gaze. They do.
Niki lives. The memory of her sword hums in her chest, sometimes, when the night is cold and the stars feel so far away.
Niki dies. On and on.
(Some time down the line, she makes her home in a land of gods and monsters. The children do not play in the streets, but she offers them warm bread anyway, and they smile despite themselves, despite the scars.
Sometimes it feels like all she can do. But there’s enough fire here.
The Angel is there, in the aftermath his dearest friend and his own son wrought, and Niki does her best not to revel in the taste of blood and betrayal on the wind. But though they have never been friends, there is a symmetry to them, and they both know that one day their feet will lead them from this city and out into the cold.
And then there is water, and then there is blood, and the truth: one of her own is dead, and the whole world will come to regret it.
“Take me to the godhome,” she demands of Technoblade, regardless of his protests. He does, and follows her through the maze of stone and quartz and obsidian, to the only building she knows and a sword that sings.
She does not hesitate this time. She claims her sword, and the fire burns against her mortal teeth and tongue and throat.
Nihachu, the blood god breathes, and she grins.)