The Burning God

He knew full well what he’d done. In that moment he was complete and aware, reconciled with his past, and fully in control. And he’d chosen to save her.

“I received both these scars from men I thought I loved,” Rin said. “One is dead now. One will be. I understand how humiliation feels. Keep your secrets if you want. But there’s nothing you can say that will make me think any less of you.

submerge the world in chaos, and forge her authority from the broken pieces.

So tell Vaisra he might as well lop my head off, because then he could at least use it for decoration.

They think you’re just like Jinzha. And they wouldn’t put you in charge of their dirigibles if you sank to your knees and begged.

She’d come to the New City with two of the most powerful shamans in Nikara history, beings from myths and legends, and here they were paying obeisance to a false god.

The west does not conceive of this war as a material struggle,” she said. “This is about contesting interpretations of divinity. They imagine that because they obey the Divine Architect, they can crush us like ants. We’ve just proven them wrong. We’ll do it again.”

Of course no one answered. Her voice, thin and reedy, faded without echo into the frigid air.

But she screamed it again, and then again, and then again. It felt so good to say that she’d survived, that she’d fucking finally come out on top, that she didn’t even care that she was screaming to corpses.

“Don’t go to those grottoes, Nezha.” He sounded very tired then. “Don’t take on the burden of an entire nation. It’s too heavy. And you aren’t strong enough.”

He didn’t just terrorize with brute force. He terrorized with pure, overwhelming power. He’d probed her memory for the one person she’d once thought so intimidatingly strong that she couldn’t help but obey—no, longed to obey, because fear and love were really just opposite sides of the same coin.