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It surprises her that the god looks kind.
Gods are not kind and this one is no different, no matter how it looks. Somiri would have no reason to exist in a world of benevolent gods. Those like her, who turned to death and devouring for a purpose, would not have the wounds that drove them to it, and those like the rest, who craved power and eternal life at the cost of all else…
They would either not exist or have never come to exist as they are, at least. A kinder world would have no somiri.
It kneels beside her, its soft cream-colored robes soaking up blood and grime, and gently places an obsidian hand over the worst of her wounds. She expects the touch to be cold but the god's skin is warm and strangely soft against her chest. From her slumped position, she sees the little veins of gold threaded through the black.
Its face is strange. It looks more like a river stone worried into the vague shape of a human face over time than anything else. She would think it was a mask but it moves like flesh.
“You’re dying,” the god tells her. She knows that, of course, but fear sprouts in her chest at hearing it.
The god stares at her for a long moment, quiet and warm and still in the way water could be, like an undisturbed lake. It sees it, she knows. The blood of its kin runs inside her. She hasn’t been a somiri for long but she’s assisted in the death of three gods and gotten her portion of their flesh as a reward.
She is terrified that the god will leave. Will decide she’s not worth helping and abandon her to die all alone.
It’s a relief when it instead says, “I can ease your suffering. You will go to the dream beyond this world, untouched by pain.”
"My family," she says, quickly. Pain roughens her voice to an unsteady rasp, covering any suspicion the rush of words might otherwise cause. "Please. If you could do me one favor after I've passed…"
How the god has lived this long, she does not know. It nods, gentle as a spring day, tender as a mother holding her child.
Her heart clenches, hate burning bright. This is the right decision. The years have been hard and she has fallen far below the woman she used to be but she has a purpose and she will see it done.
"A letter," she continues. Fumbling a blood-slicked hand for the opening of the tied-on pocket on her left. She can't quite get her hand in despite the size of the opening and her frustration flares to rival her hate until the god gently pushes it aside, reaching in for the letter.
"A letter," it repeats, softly. There is sorrow there, running like the great underground rivers of the dry plains to the south, the ones that you feel rushing beneath your feet far before you hear their muffled roar. It feels just as unnatural, not artificial exactly but subtly wrong, as if its existence is an error that has slipped past creation.
She wets her dry lips, spit stinging her tongue and copper blooming across her tongue. She means to tell it to check the address, to ensure it knows where it needs to be delivered, but there's no need. It flips over the sealed letter on its own, reading the writing there.
The writing doesn't matter, at least not the words themselves. Perhaps her husband and two oldest still live there, in the house she'd built in preparation for courting her beloved. It was tradition in the taiga. An adult interested in courting a partner built a home to impress them, filled it with every luxury and pretty trinket they could scrap together, then courted them at the peak of spring. The festival that took place then was called Flower's Folly and if a pair remained together until the festival's return the next year, they'd ensured their love wasn't made from the same sort of warm weather curse that caused foolish bucks to lock antlers and slowly starve alongside their rival, caught in one another's hold by their own fault.
They'd had four children together, then three when the second renounced mundane bonds and carved out their eyes, swearing the sacred oath of recordkeepers. Then the youngest had taken ill and the doctors could do nothing aside from slow the creep towards the end.
She'd left to cross the mountains to the east to bring back something, anything. A doctor who would help, a miracle cure, a witch who could use their secret knowledge and heal her son.
But when she returned, he was dead. Stolen away from her, lulled from the world by the same god knelt beside her on the filthy ground. She hadn't stayed long after that. Even the house she'd built with all her hopes and dreams for the future felt like an enemy, whispering that she no longer belonged here nor anywhere else.
The curse wasn't in the words but the ink with which they were written.
The god tenses as the curse takes hold, fingers spasming as if to drop it, but it's too late. It gives a low, wounded sound, soft as spring rain, and blood blooms across its cream robes to mimic her own injuries.
It shudders, the letter finally falling into the mud. Then it collapses onto its side, curled around its wounds as if it can shield itself from their harm that way.
"What did you do?" it asks, voice too gentle for the accusation. "I only wanted to show you what kindness I could."
There's no need to hide her hurt and anger any longer. It distorts her face. She knows she must look as inhuman as that thing lying across from her, inexpressive stone face watching her for its answer.
"What haven't you done?" she asks, all venom and nettle-sting to hide what's underneath. "Surely you've existed long enough to deserve this for more reason than one. Why should I give you one reason and one reason alone?"
"Because humans drown in their care for themselves and die of thirst from their shallow care for others. I can see you drowning. How could I not? You've all been the same for as long as I've been what I've become. None of you care who you drown alongside you."
That serene softness to the god's voice raises the small hairs of the back on her neck, utterly eerie given the clear disdain the words themselves carry.
It unsettles her, she thinks, enough that she stumbles beneath the uncanny weight alongside the pain and fear of her looming death. "You killed my son."
Silence as the god regards her. Silence as she stares back at its eyeless gaze, bristled like the little wild cats that lived in the trees in the taiga and crept into towns under the cover of night to scavenge what food they could.
Then, "Ah. I remember, yes."
She doesn't speak. Her heart threatens to beat its way free from her throat and she realizes, with horror, she's waiting for an apology. For the reassurance that the god at least regrets taking her little one from her when she'd returned just two days too late with a new treatment that might have cured him.
And she shatters when it asks, "That's all? The both of us will die because you haven't learned to grieve a child you'd lost long before I eased his suffering?"
Shatters into glass and splinters and a loathing stronger than any she's ever known. Stronger than the hate she's cradled in the darkest parts of her heart, living alongside dusty memories of a little boy with her husband's eyes who clung to her skirts while his sisters climbed trees and who brought home any injured creature he found and begged her to fix it again.
Everything hurts as she crawls towards the god, close enough to sink her nails into its skin. That strange softness sinks boneless beneath her fingers, threatening to split like dough but somehow remaining intact. It gives no sign of pain beyond that of its curse-bound injury. Still, she crawls closer yet, her fist crashing too weak against the soft stone of its face. Her teeth sink into its shoulder, desperately trying to tear it apart but it yields to the point of invulnerability, returning into place with no sign of harm as soon as she exhausts herself and lies panting on the ground beside it.
"Are you done now?" it asks. "I would offer my sympathy for the loss of your son under ordinary circumstances, but…" The words catch strange in its throat for a moment, choking it. Then, even as anything, "…but I don't think you deserve that. In another world… but no. In this one, you're all the worst parts of your humanity and I will take what comfort I can in my death that at least I can watch you succumb to your own poison."
"Fuck you!" she spits. Breaks, cries, over and over, "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!"
The god watches her, dispassionate yet kind, a gentle disdain she hates herself for taking some small comfort in.
When her words dry up, leaving her sobbing softly, cheek sunken in mud that reeks of blood and animal shit, the god speaks again. "Do you think you would have saved him? You were not there when I came, I remember. All there was were two half-grown daughters weeping and a father who'd grown numb with grief and resignation. And the boy, of course. Eaten up by fever, whispering nonsense to ghosts. His breath smelled of hunger and he told me he could neither eat nor drink because it hurt too much to do either."
A pause before the god continues. "He tried anyway when I asked it of him. I eased his pain enough for him to manage a bit but nothing stayed. Even his sick smelled like death. It seemed the kindest thing to end that suffering."
When she'd returned, she'd gotten little detail on how far his illness had progressed. Her husband was only relieved, for their son to have found peace and for his wife to be returned to him, and she'd flinched beneath her family's touch, like their hugs and gentle reassurances pressed bruises into her skin. She'd wanted to ask how they could be happy, how even her teary-eyed daughters seemed as if a weight was lifted from them, when all that was left of their brother was his ashes waiting to be scattered once Harvest's Blood returned and their people gathered to lay rest to the dead.
She hadn't stayed that long. She'd tried but it all had ached too much, to think how she'd been so close and still failed. To remember how his ashes had still been warm from the pyre when she'd felt them.
It hurts to know that he likely would have died either way but that she won't ever know that now. She won't ever know if he was beyond saving or not.
"I don't know," she whispers. "I hoped. But I didn't know then and I won't ever know now."
"And your daughters, your husband. Once the two of us die here, will they have any idea what's become of you?"
She squeezes her eyes shut. "No. It thought it better for them to think… to think anything else. If they think of me at all these days. Better not to open wounds that have had years to heal."
"Idiot." The god sighs, exhausted. "Was there a real letter then, in what you used to damn me?"
"Yes." Written for herself and herself alone. The slight chance it would be found and sent had given her the peace she'd needed to go through with her place.
"Then they'll likely receive it," it tells her. Her eyes open, watch a face that tells nothing but which the sight of softens the edges of all the jaggedness inside her. "One of my kind will come to investigate my passing. Even if the elements destroy it or beasts carry it away, the spirit of it will remain and my kin will know to see it to your family, for my sake if nothing else."
"Gods aren't kind."
It's the truth, though it feels more like a life raft as she clings to it now.
"Most of us are not," it agrees. "Beyond the ones you've forced into the prettiest of our cages. Why would we have kindness for you when you ruined and enslaved us? Should we be thankful that you remembered to burn incense in our shrines and scatter flower petals for us for a time, while we were made less than people for your whims until you decided the shapes you bound us to were not to your liking and we deserved death for it?"
She averts her eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course not," the tranquility in its voice wavers, an almost imperceivable ripple, before returning to still serenity. "When have humans cared about their gods beyond what petty blessings we might give you? Whether granted by us or torn from us with your teeth, who cares why the gods are what they are?"
"Hate us for becoming somiri, but how did we wrong you by making you our gods? For centuries, you were the most precious things in our world."
"For centuries," it repeats, quietly, "I've been nothing but the God of Soft and Sleep. The agony of the dying, even your agony now, even before you tied my death to yours, hurts like nothing else I remember from before. I can only run from it or ease it in the only way you've given me. And where will I run where there is no sickness or pain? I cannot heal. I can only suffer the misery or bring it to an end. You didn't want me to, no. But the blood of one of the few of us who could is within you, did you know? The God of Growth and Renewal, my sister, who wanted this fate no more than any of us did. And you hunted her and killed her and ate whatever scraps of her the rest of the dogs that hunted alongside you left for you."
She does not know which of the three it's speaking of. She never learned which of the gods she killed was which, only listened to know what weaknesses they might have once she was certain it was not the god across from her now.
She does not apologize for the death of its sister or its other siblings, just like it had not apologized for the death of her son, but she feels sick as the word repeats in her mind. Sister . Of course, she'd grown up knowing that such god was sister to such god, that such god was husband or child or lover or such, but those were human conceptions, ways to humanize the inhuman.
Except, perhaps not.
It continues speaking, condemning her and all humankind alongside her, its disgust soft as a lamb. "For centuries, I've no longer felt anything other than what humans deemed necessary. I miss anger the most. I felt it often before. It burned bright and familiar. I quarreled with my siblings and laughed as it flamed higher, I used it to push me to do more, try more, to find joy just beyond its reach. None of me burns, now. I haven't laughed since either. I cannot raise my voice above this whisper because how can the God of Soft and Sleep do something so disruptive?"
She curls her knees up, making herself smaller, ever as she snarls, "Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?"
"No," it says. "I no longer expect such things from humans. I do not know who created your kind because it was not mine, but neither of us can escape the limitations of our making."
She weeps. She has always known there was no true satisfaction to be found in the path she'd chosen but this bitterness is too much to bear.
The god looks towards the darkened sky. A hand slips beneath its robes and returns stained not in red but a dark, glittered gold. Weak and shaking, it raises the hand above its face. The gold seems to shimmer in the air, casting a barely there glow. Some drips down the marble of its arm and some splatters soundlessly against its stone face.
"It's nearly dawn," it says. "Do you think I can bleed out enough of what I am to have a taste of what I once was one last time? I would like that."
Blinking back tears, she joins it in watching the sky. Far on the horizon, she sees the first traces of dawn. The sky was a sea, dark and endless, but the bravest fish that swam within its depths heralded all the others to fill it with light and color and scattered its golden scales as a sign of hope while they all returned to rest.
Bravery in sunlight, hope in darkness. That was what she'd been taught growing up, to watch for the first and final sweep of translucent gold fins to know when to embrace courage and when to hold hope close to her chest.
"I hope so," she says.
"Thank you," the god replies.
They lay there, side by side, bleeding out into the mud. They keep one another quiet company as the sky brightens overheard.
There is no more need for bravery, though perhaps hope will do them better. As the last traces of dark are chased from the sky, they've long since followed alongside it.
Two bodies, a god and its hunter, a mother and her heartache, grow cold together beneath the blushing morning sky. The last of them that remains in the world below is a shared wish for a kinder world than the one they had both known.