There was a split second of vacuum when Shahar Arameri died.
There always was, when a person died. A hair’s breadth of a moment when the soul vanished away to whatever hell or heaven was its due, and there was nothing quite like it to fill the space. If Yeine listened, she could hear them all around, like an eternal pitter-patter of rain throughout the universe. Likewise was the constant soft melody of souls being born.
This soul, though. This split second of nothingness was longer than usual, as if what was gone was something more than a mere soul, and it was going farther away. That was what caught her attention.
So she was looking when the next important thing vanished, the sun housed in Shahar’s necklace. It was a simple thing, leather and marbles, far too simple for even a fallen Arameri, but it bore the wear of time and love.
(Yeine would have inhaled sharply, had there been the time for it. En. She had forgotten, in her grief; she had not thought to look for it. None of them had. Sieh would have been so disappointed.)
The sun whipped off with the glee of a child’s bouncing ball, across not just time and space but reality. It vanished from where Yeine could sense it before she so much as blinked. It left a plain yellow marble, as dull as any other mortal toy, and an echo of warmth to match the cooling corpse of Shahar Arameri.
This was enough chaos, enough disorder, that she did not need to call. Even suns that were once bouncing balls did not usually move through realities. Itempas was tightly controlled, as was his nature; the shadows flickered for Nahadoth, even though none of the Three manifested physically.
“This is the right path,” said Itempas. It was a statement of fact, with the burning of a thousand suns beneath it. He reached for her hand. “This is how it should happen.”
“So he’s alive,” said Nahadoth, and for the sake of the mortal world around them, he, too, stayed calm. Elsewhere, star systems broke free of gravity’s constraints to dance with wonder and joy. “He’s grown up, but he’s alive.”
She, too, reached for Yeine’s hand, and spoke as exactly as the oldest parent in the universe. “We should visit. Through the gods’ realm, maybe-” He gestured vaguely, the walls between realities little more than roadblocks to the embodiment of chaos with loss beginning to heal in her heart. “We can just look. We can send the rest of the orrery.”
Yeine held them both tightly. The goddess of life and death, she understood a little more; once mortal, she knew perhaps even more than that. “We should give the three of them time to settle in, first. It would be rude to barge in before they’ve made even some planets of their own.”
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