Once upon a time, in a city where the bells still rang for festivals no one could remember, there lived a beggar with a hunger that could not be filled.
No one knew his name, and he asked for none. He had no home but the temple steps, no bed but the warm stone, and he had sat there since longer than the city was old. The eldest priest swore the beggar had been on those steps when he himself was a boy, unchanged, already hungry. The city kept careful record of every birth and every burial inside its walls, yet no book held a single line for him, no arrival, no naming, no account of where he had come from. He simply was, as steady as the bells, as patient as the stone.
Those who passed him did not give him coins. They gave him sorrows.
A widow knelt one grey morning and spoke her grief to him, the long illness, the last rattling breath, the cold and empty side of the bed, and he swallowed it whole, and she rose lighter than she had been in years, blinking up at a sun she could no longer remember crying beneath. A soldier gave him the faces of the men he had killed, and walked away whistling. A mother gave him the daughter she had buried, and went home to a house that no longer ached, to a small empty room whose smallness she no longer understood.
And the beggar, for his part, was grateful. Every sorrow he swallowed became his to keep. He remembered the widow's husband more truly than the widow ever had, the exact weight of the man's hand, the joke he had told too many times. He remembered the soldier's dead as if he had loved each one. He held the mother's daughter whole and perfect inside himself, a child no one left in the world would remember now, save the one who carried her. He marveled at how he filled with lives, a thousand lives, each one a small bright jewel he need never set down.
But sorrow is a small coin, and the hunger grew greedy for larger ones.
And with each thing he ate, he grew hungrier, not full.
For this was the secret price of what he was, and he came to understand it only slowly, and too late. He had eaten so much of the world that he could no longer find himself anywhere in it. On the rare night his belly was quiet, he would reach back through all those borrowed lives toward his own beginning, and he would find nothing there at all. Only the long dark, and the hunger, and the swallowing that never stopped. He had eaten that too, perhaps, long ago. Or perhaps there had never been anything to find.
Then came the year the city's god went wrong.
What it had been before, the records did not say and the priests would not. Only that the prayers began to be answered in cruel ways; that the temple light fell wrong; that to be loved by such a god had become worse than to be left alone. And the priests, who for a hundred years had stepped over the beggar on their own steps, came down at last and knelt to him.
They did not ask him to kill the god. No blade has ever touched a god, and none ever will. They asked him the one thing that could end one. They asked him to make the world forget it had ever been, to eat its name from every tongue, its face from every prayer, the temple from the memory of the very hill it stood on. And to eat, last of all, the god's own memory of being a god.
It is said the eating lasted seven days and seven nights, and that no one dared watch it. The beggar sat upon the steps and lifted his face to the sky and ate, and the god raged, for a god is only ever what it is remembered to be, and it felt itself thinning, page by page, prayer by prayer. It begged. It threatened. It offered him a name of his own, a true one, the one thing it knew he did not have, but the hunger does not bargain, it only takes, and it took even that and was hungrier after. By the eighth dawn the temple on the hill stood empty and meaningless, and not one soul in the city could say what it had been built for. The god was not dead. A god cannot die. But it was forgotten, which is the same quiet wearing a kinder face.
And the people were free.
And then, looking at their freedom, they understood at last what had sat on their temple steps all these long years. A thing that had eaten a god. A hunger that could take anything at all, your grief, your name, the face of your own living child, the years you were proudest of, and leave you walking away lighter and emptier and glad, never once knowing you had been robbed. They had fed it their sorrows for hundreds of years and called it mercy. Now they looked at the thinning pages of their own selves, and they were afraid.
The hunting began at twilight, with the easy cruelty that comes only from those who have been saved against their will. They came with torches and with chains, these people whose burdens he had carried, and they came not to kill a monster but to cage the thing that had freed them, as if it were his hunger, and not their own giving, that had emptied them.
The nameless beggar fled the city as the last light failed. He carried inside him every sorrow it had ever paid him to swallow, every face, every forgotten year, every life the city had given away so it would not have to hold them, the fullest creature in all the world, and the most hollow, for not one of those countless lives was his own. He had remembered being everyone. He had never once been someone. And where his brother of the older tale fled scattering light behind him into the dark, this one went the other way, the road behind him simply went dark as he passed, as if the night itself had been swallowed and would not be given back.
The man survived, and still he was hungry.
And his hunger, never changed.
Why? A second story, no, a second and a third. Why now?
Adam sat on the rubble, Zeren beside him reading too. He'd felt it this time, the book, Kaiser's book, changing in his hands. He'd opened it, and to his surprise found two new stories where there had been none. He had just finished the first.
"Adam, what does this mean? You said this book was left to you by Kaiser. How can stories just appear like this? What's the trigger, and what does this one mean?" Zeren asked, lost.
"That's not all," Adam said, turning the page. "There's a second one. Two appeared at once."
Once upon a time, in a kingdom where every man was certain he was good, there lived a boy who knew he was meant for more.
He gave his bread to those who had none. He spoke for the beaten when no one else would. When he saw a wrong, it burned in him like a coal that would not cool, and he could not rest until the wrong was made right. The people loved him for it. The boy with the burning heart, they called him, and he carried their love as proof of a thing he had always quietly known, that he saw more clearly than other men, that where they only guessed at right and wrong, he simply knew.
And because he knew, he began to climb.
He climbed first by small kindnesses, and the people lifted him for them. Then by judgments, for he was asked, more and more, to say who was in the right, and his word was so sure and so clean that men stopped weighing things for themselves and brought them to him instead. He settled their quarrels. He named their villains. And each time he named one, the crowd felt the warm relief of being told, at last and for certain, who deserved their hate. He was never unsure. That was his gift.
There came a year of plague, and he ordered the sick quarter burned, the living together with the dying, for the good of all the rest. The kingdom wept, and obeyed, and in time agreed that it had been wise. There came men who spoke against him, and he had them silenced, for a lie is a kind of poison and he was the kingdom's healer, and the people, who had heard those men with their own ears, found after a while that they could not remember what the men had said, only that such men had deserved it. Each thing he did was just.
With every rung, fewer things in the world could tell him no. The men who might have argued were gone, or won over, or afraid. The books that might have corrected him were copied out again to match what he already believed. And a man who is never told he is wrong loses, slowly, the power to ever be right, for to truly know a thing, you must be able to be mistaken in it, and he was rising past the reach of mistakes. He climbed toward perfect certainty and did not feel it curdle, one step below the top, into a perfect blindness wearing certainty's face.
In time a true and ancient evil rose against the kingdom, a darkness that ruled from a black tower and fed on the misery of all beneath it. The people were afraid, and they looked to the boy with the burning heart, who was a boy no longer but something the priests had begun, very carefully, to call by a higher name. He went up against the darkness certain as he had always been, certain that of all the souls in the world, only his was clean enough to stand in that place and take no stain from it.
The struggle lasted seven days and seven nights, and on the eighth dawn the black tower stood empty and the darkness was thrown down, and the kingdom was saved. The people poured into the streets to weep their thanks. And it was in the middle of their weeping that a cold thing settled over them, slow, like the shadow of a cloud they could not find in the sky.
The darkness in the tower had been a cruel master, but it had been a master that could be hated, fought, one day perhaps even overthrown, for it had never once claimed to be good. It knew what it was. It could be wrong.
What stood now in its place could not.
They were not afraid of the darkness he had thrown down.
They were afraid of the god who had saved them.
In the old tales, when the people came at last to fear the thing that had saved them, they took up their torches and their chains and drove it out into the dark. They tried, with this one too. The torches were lit. The words of rebellion were half-spoken in cellars and back rooms.
And then they died in the throats that spoke them. For to raise a hand against him now, a man would first have to believe that the man was wrong, and there was no longer any place left in the world to stand and believe such a thing. He had become the very line by which right and wrong were drawn. The cellars went quiet. The torches went cold and were put away. And the people knelt, and could no longer tell whether the thing they felt as they knelt was love or was terror, because in the shadow of a god the two feel exactly the same.
So he did not flee into the wild places, as the others had. He had nowhere he needed to flee. By then the kingdom's books, which had once held the name of a boy with a burning heart, held it no longer, only the god, as though he had never been born at all, as though there had never been some small and mortal thing that climbed. He remained. He was worshipped. He was perfectly certain. And he was alone in the way that only a thing at the very top can be, no one left above him to say well done, and no one beside him at all.
He had wanted, his whole life, only to be right. And he was given the one kind of rightness a god is allowed: the kind that can never be checked, never be questioned, never once be known to be wrong, and is, in the end, not rightness at all.
Only height.
And his certainty never changed. It could not. There was nothing left anywhere that could change it.