It had been a long time since I'd played. Too long. I was forgetting who I was amid all this worrying. Better to leave the worry behind, stop caring about what mattered, and do what felt good. Like all children, I was easy to seduce.

There's no way for you to speak as we do, no. But there are other ways to convey information besides speech and writing. Hand signs, body language" - they glanced at each other and I pointed at them - "meaningful looks! What do you think magic is? Communication We gods call to reality, and reality responds. Some of that is because we made it and it is like limbs, the outflow of our souls, we and existence are one and the same, but the rest..."

You have a choice." I lifted my gaze to the shifting firmament above. The gradient - night to day, day to night - did not change at a constant rate. Only mortals thought of the sky as a reliable, predictable thing. We gods had to live with Nahadoth and Intempas; we knew better. "You can accept yourself, take control of your nature, make it what you want to be. Just because you're the god of vengeance doesn't mean you have to be some brooding cliché, forever cackling to yourself and totting up to what you owe to whom. Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strenght in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete."

We've never needed such things, Ahad. If we want a mortal, we appear somewhere and point at one, and the mortal gives us what we want."

"You know, Sieh, it's all right that you haven't paid attention to the world. But you really shouldn't talk as though you have."

The universe is a living, breathing thing. Time, too. It moves, though not as mortals imagine. It is restless, twitchy. Mortals don't notice because mortals are restless and twitchy, too. God's notice, but we learn to ignore these things early on, the same way mortal newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without hearbeats. Yet suddenly I notice everything. The slow, aeons-deep inhalation of the stars. The cracle of the sun's power agains this planet's veil of life. The minute scratching of mites too small to see on Shahar's pristine white skin. The lazy, buzzy jolt of hours and days and centuries.

And for all of Us, mother meant different things. For me it was a soft breast, cold fingers, the voice of a god with two faces - Naha, Yeine - whispering words of love. For Shahar it was fear and hope and cold eyes warming, fleetingly, with approval, and a single hug that would reverberate within her soul for the rest of her life. For Deka - ah, my Deka. For Deka, mother meant Shahar, a fierce little girl standing between him and the world. It meant a child-godling with old, tired eyes, who had nevertheless taken the trouble to smile kindly at him, and stroke his hair, and help him be strong.