Chapter 132#

Of Things Past · VI#

— When an outsider comes to Jonah, something terrible will happen.

The wind spun in eddies through the streets, lifting ash into a haze that drifted across the hills and finally dissolved into the endless sky above.

The visitor rose and walked back to the road he had come by. He had arrived alone; he left the same way. But the road was now lined with the dead.

The entire world faded behind him into a pale golden blur.

The dead, the living, those still struggling, those still crying out — one gust of wind and they became streams of light, following that stranger into the silence of the Eternal Night.

A shattered butterfly wing tumbled past Anfei on the wind.

He reached out. The wing came to rest in his palm. Beneath the charred black edges, the brilliant patterned markings could still just be made out.

In the wind’s keening, the cocoon-monsters’ screams rose again. They wanted to replay every moment of that day — to interrogate the soul of the person before them with the most frenzied and despairing fury they possessed.

More than that — with hatred accumulated over ten thousand years, they wanted to punish him, to torment him, to kill him!

And yet —

The vision shuddered, lurching close to collapse again and again, unable to sustain itself.

“Have you forgotten? It has been too long.” Anfei gathered the butterfly wing in his palm, his voice still as thin and emptied of emotion as ever.

When he opened his fingers again, the wing became a living butterfly, light and whole, and fluttered free: “But I still remember.”

The butterfly flew into the distance. The scene around them shifted quietly.

Landenwollen. A beautiful land.

Through a stretch of dense forest, ahead stood a grand circular altar of great stone — still new. This was still Mount Jonah, the site where the townspeople held their ritual day, though how many epochs ago this scene was, there was no way of knowing. And Mount Jonah was not yet that sheer cliff face; it was a truly tall and continuous mountain range.

As Yu Feichen and Anfei walked forward, two figures came toward them from the other direction. One was the same visitor who had once come to the Butterfly People’s world — the master of Landenwollen.

How many years had passed in the Eternal Night was impossible to say. He still had the same golden hair and white robes, the same cold and detached bearing, the same untouchable air. But he was somewhat older than when he had destroyed the Butterfly People’s kingdom — the shadow of the future chief god was already faintly visible in him.

The other person walked slightly behind and to his side. This person’s features left no impression the moment your eyes moved away — not because Yu Feichen had poor memory for faces, but because anyone would experience the same. This was the Painter.

The tour guide’s gossip had once mentioned the Painter’s unusual appearance. As the god of art, creation, and inspiration, the Painter could have fashioned himself a face of exquisite beauty, but had chosen not to. He wanted to be a blank canvas — in soul and in appearance alike — because only a blank canvas could reflect all inspiration without obstruction.

Yu Feichen recognized the Painter.

So by now the chief god was finally no longer alone. The moment he registered this, a hollow sensation rose unexpectedly in Yu Feichen’s chest — a vague, formless ache like something slowly unraveling, as though this were somehow his own failing.

On the other side, it was the Painter who spoke first.

“This will be the most perfect land in all the Eternal Night,” he said. “But why have you only now considered giving Landenwollen its people?”

The chief god said: “The time has come.”

“What time?” A faint note of puzzlement entered the Painter’s voice.

The chief god did not answer. The sky was frozen at the last second before dawn. At the foot of the cliff, all things were just beginning; the chief god stood before the altar, cold wind surging around him, light and dark still undivided — like the creation scenes described in ancient legend.

Gods so rarely let feeling show; the chief god’s soul was like ice frozen for a thousand years. But in this moment, as fingertips passed over the altar’s solemn and ancient surface, something faint appeared in those eyes — the smallest trace of a smile. Like the first light of dawn crossing snow.

— As though this moment had been waited for across ten thousand years.

The hand withdrew. The chief god cut open his own finger.

Blood dripped from the tip, spread across the altar, and vanished almost immediately — as if passing through the altar toward some unknowable place beyond.

Simultaneously, a change rose through the land of Landenwollen that the eye could not perceive, only instinct could feel.

One drop. Then another.

The Painter didn’t know what the chief god was doing. He only watched.

Silently, from the dim and formless sky above, ten thousand streams of light descended.

The light scattered and fell like snow, and looking up felt like watching every star in the world drift down at once.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” the Painter said, “but this is beautiful.”

The first point of light touched down on the land of Landenwollen’s northwest — a crystalline, translucent snowfield. In the instant the light met the ground, countless human forms coalesced out of nothing across that expanse.

On a snowfield that had held no life since its creation, there were suddenly living beings.

The people stood on the snow staring blankly at one another as if waking from a long dream, and then, a moment later, embraced with wild, disbelieving joy.

“You created life.” The Painter’s eyes went wide; the excitement in his voice was undisguised. “You created lives like ours?”

Then he gazed into the distance and his brow slowly furrowed. “No — that’s wrong. They… I’ve seen them before.”

— They were from the world the chief god had just left. That place had also been a snowfield. After a campaign ended and the course of that world was turned, it had been absorbed into the chief god’s domain. A fragment disappeared from the Eternal Night; the divine realm expanded by one measure.

And these people were those who had died in the chaos and bloodshed of that war.

Understanding broke across the Painter’s face. “Not creation,” he said softly, “but — resurrection?”

At the same moment, Yu Feichen, watching all this from outside, heard Anfei speak.

“I once had nothing,” the young man’s voice said, unhurried and quiet, “until this day, when I finally gained enough power in the Eternal Night.” A pause. “Resurrection — the first divine authority I ever commanded.”

People said: the gods are all-knowing, the gods are all-powerful.

Then surely calling the already-dead back from the shadow of death was a matter of little effort.

The blood continued to fall.

Light kissed the earth of Landenwollen. Each point of light was the spirit of an entire world’s dead. On this day, in this rite of resurrection, they crossed the river between death and life and returned to the world of the living. They had struggled and died — and now, as if waking from a dream, they found themselves standing on land not unlike what they had once known, though they could not understand why they had come.

This resurrection rite, witnessed by only two, continued for a long time.

Light fell without number. The vast and wide expanse of Landenwollen received its first people.

The Painter had once not understood why the chief god had built a place like Landenwollen. Now, all at once, he knew.

He watched the chief god’s profile with something close to fascination — an expression that was difficult to name. The Painter must have received a staggering inspiration in that moment, for his eyes said that his soul was trembling.

“I have followed you here along a path where everything I drew from you was about sin and punishment,” the Painter said softly. “But just now, for one moment, I saw love and beauty — enough to begin a thousand new paintings.”

All things were coming into being; people were returning to life; the chief god was in the midst of the rite; the Painter was talking about his paintings. Perhaps that was what artists were.

Yu Feichen was watching Landenwollen.

As time moved on, people continued to be resurrected in an unbroken stream — yet he could see that the further it went, the longer each resurrection required, and the more strength the chief god expended.

His attention returned to Anfei. He found that Anfei’s gaze had not moved from the altar.

The people being resurrected were wrapped in joy. But Anfei’s eyes held nothing but deep stillness.

Celebration and grief — like opposite ends of the world.

If the resurrection had been complete, there would be no explaining the Butterfly People’s current state. What had happened next?

Anfei’s fingers, still holding his, quietly tightened.

Many epochs had passed since then. He had already let go of so much of the past and had never revisited any of this.

But now that the mist of time had been pulled back by the spirits of the dead, he found that these memories were as clear as if they had just occurred.

— Along with the feeling from that day: emptier than despair.

Before the altar, the chief god’s wrist gave the faintest tremor. A sign of too much spent.

A longer wound was opened; more blood was drawn into the altar; streams of light fell at the foot of Mount Jonah.

A young Butterfly Person opened his eyes. He stood blinking at the world around him.

He had died. He remembered. Fire had swallowed his homeland and everyone in it.

The visitor — that outsider had caused all of it. The chill that memory brought ran from his feet to the top of his skull. He had watched with his own eyes as the man fired three arrows of flame into the heart of the Butterfly People’s city. And that man had said to him — thank you for your hospitality.

Then what was happening now?

A few streaks of light passed, and more people appeared beside him. The Butterfly People looked at one another and recognized each other, their wings quivering. They spoke quickly of the terrible fire, of the suffering they had endured, of this inexplicable resurrection.

The young Butterfly Person listened, all the while casting a lost, frightened look around him.

Then — a blurred flash of white-gold at the edge of his vision. That color was carved too deep in his heart to mistake. He forced every measure of focus he had until, at last, he made out a solitary, elevated silhouette on the distant summit.

Fear seized his chest.

Strong instinct told him — that was the one.

He began to shake, staring fixedly at that distant figure.

On the summit before the altar, the chief god seemed to sense something. His eyes met the young Butterfly Person’s for a moment across the distance.

The mountain wind keened; since the beginning of time, wind had echoed through the world in just this way.

In the space of that single glance, the wheel of fate turned one quiet notch forward.

The resurrection stopped.

A faint bewilderment appeared in the chief god’s eyes. He raised his right hand, opened a cross-cut at his wrist, and let the blood run — but the altar no longer absorbed it.

As if understanding something, the chief god pressed his fingers back to the altar’s surface, sinking them into the pooled blood. Slowly, with absolute resolve, he closed his eyes — and with terrible force drove the blood into the altar against all resistance.

Another Butterfly Person came back to life at the foot of the mountain. But this one’s wings were almost gone, only a small remnant remaining, the edges tinged with charred black.

Then a second. A third.

At first it was only the wings that changed. Then came stranger alterations in the other limbs.

And then… what appeared could no longer be called a person at all.

Within a mass of churning black vapor, distorted limbs and organs tangled and twisted together.

The Painter murmured: “…Stop… stop this!”

But the chief god seemed to no longer hear him.

The Painter rushed forward and, gritting his teeth, wrenched the chief god’s fingers from the altar by force.

The chief god’s eyes snapped open. He looked at what lay below on the mountain.

He looked at his own palm: “…Why.”

“Your power is gone,” the Painter said. “You need to rest. We can come back when you’ve recovered.”

The god’s gaze remained fixed on the disfigured Butterfly People below. He seemed to be looking at something unimaginably terrible in the void.

He shook his head: “It isn’t the power.”

Slowly, he pressed his fingers to the altar once more.

This time, even his outline had begun to fade.

The Painter’s eyes went wide: “No—”

New streams of light finally appeared again above Mount Jonah.

This time, they dissolved quietly in midair into drifting ash. One breath of wind and they scattered.

In the moment the ash dispersed, something died in the god as well. He closed his eyes and exhaled softly, as though enduring violent pain.

The Painter had seen the chief god injured before — no wound, however severe, had ever stirred the slightest ripple of emotion in those features. Never, until today.

He reached out in alarm and caught the god’s body, asking again and again: “What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?”

“What’s wrong?” Yu Feichen asked.

Anfei looked into his eyes for a long moment without speaking.

“You couldn’t bring any more of them back. Could you.”

The grief in Anfei’s eyes finally became real in a way that could be seen. Yu Feichen reached out and wiped away the tear that had fallen on his cheek.

The god in the vision smiled, and even the smile was cold.

The Anfei before him could let his eyes go red.

This is the third time you have cried in front of me, Yu Feichen thought.

“I once made a vow: that all who died because of me would be resurrected, and all who died for me would return.” Anfei lifted his face to look at him. “On that day, having finally commanded the power of resurrection, I believed… that from then on I could fulfill every promise I had ever made. It was only then that I learned resurrection had a boundary that could not be crossed. Not a boundary of power — of time. Beyond that line, the power that has dispersed will never reconvene, and those who have died will never return to life.”

“Afterward, I named the length of that boundary an epoch.”