Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (24 page)

I watch them, the crafters who sculpt mankind. The humans and the fae and the karkadann and pooka and the other intelligent species that are left to care for the worlds we create.

I watch them pull color and texture from the charged ether and shape eyes, noses, mouths. A skeleton and a body to fit over it. Hair, sometimes. I study their technique, and most are happy to let me do so. This is
our
world, after all.

I make some of my own. They’re not too different from animals.

For a time, this makes me happy, but my creations are puppets. I don’t sculpt their minds. I can’t breathe into them their souls. A crafted human is just a tree with different limbs and colors, something that won’t grow or learn until it feels the touch of a god.

Fyel makes plants on occasion. He helped me create a pine forest once, but he’s content to spend his time molding minerals and craters and mountains. Somehow he finds peace in them.

Somehow they all do.

I think I can do it.

I’ve lived so many Raean years. Five thousand more than Fyel. I’ve witnessed so many worlds, crafted so many things. Flown beneath countless gods.

I make him in the ether, the layer in between. I make him in a house of shadows I built far from my bungalow, a house surrounded with snow and clouds to make it blend in with the ether. I work little by little, careful in every piece I craft. I never work on him for too long, for Fyel will find me if I do. He always does. We are lahsts.

I want my creation to be tall and strong. I want him to be beautiful, with fiery hair and bright eyes. I craft each of his fingers, each of his toes. I thread every muscle and every layer of skin. I pull him from the ether and paint him as the artists of the worlds do, one stroke at a time.

When he’s finished, he makes me nervous.

I leave him for a time, floating in the ether, in a realm only I can find.

“What is wrong?” Fyel asks me as we lie in a thick bed of clover I coaxed from the salt flats of an unfinished world. We can touch them when they’re unfinished. This is one of the worlds that has rings in the sky—dozens of them. They fill a third of the heavens and shine brighter than the stars, strings of diamonds looping from horizon to horizon.

“Nothing,” I whisper.

Fyel sits up and studies me in the ringlight. “Why do you think I do not see it?”

I don’t meet his eyes.

He runs his fingers down the length of my folded wing. “Maire,” he says, his voice papery and pleading. “What can I
do
?”

One tear, then another, streak from my eyes down to my ears. “I don’t know.”

He pinches his lips together and looks away, first at my feet, then at the salt flats, then up at the rings.

“How do the gods make souls?”

I asked the question so quietly I didn’t think he would hear it, but he did, and his attention returns to me. “Souls? I do not know, Maire. I am not a god.”

“I’ve seen them,” I murmur, keeping my eyes on the rings, “when they come down to actuate a world. They’re silvery and they glitter, brighter than anything I’ve seen. They funnel down like stardust and seep into the skin—”

“Maire.”

“And then the bodies move, and they’re alive, and it’s
beautiful
.” A few more tears trace the path of the ones before them. “How does it work?”

Fyel shifts, raising his wings, and leans over to wipe one side of my tears with his thumb. “It works because they are gods,” he says, soft and paternal, feathery. “Because each of us is assigned our task, and that is theirs. They may wonder how we create what we do.”

“But they
can
create what we do.”

“Do you want to be a god?” It’s barely a question, and it carries no weight, no judgment. He knows the answer.

“No.” I say it anyway. “But why do they share souls with mankind?”

“Why do they share creation with us?”

I shake my head, trying not to be frustrated. I hate feeling this way. Angry.

But I’ve seen them do it. I’ve seen the gods reach deep,
deep
into the ether and pull from it light and lightness, wholeness. I’ve seen whole worlds awaken time and again.

I touch my stomach, one of the places that distinguishes me from mortal women. I feel for the scar of birth that doesn’t exist.

“Why would they create us to be alone?” I whisper.

Fyel takes my hand. “You will never be alone.”

In my house of shadow and snow he lies before me, a garment cut and stitched and ready to be worn.

I take a deep breath and reach into the ether, grasping as far into it as I can, thinking of light and glitter and souls.

I gather the threads and weave them together this way and that, creating patterns of beauty and complexity. Halfway through, the tapestry melts in my hands, turning into dark sludge without shape or purpose. It drops from my hands and fizzles back into the ether.

I reach again. Deep, deeper. I knot and loop the threads. I get a little further before they melt, before they dissipate.

I try again, and again, and again. How many Raean hours, days, and weeks I spend doing this, I’m not sure. Time is relative in our space.

But it happens. My tired fingers meticulously weave and sculpt a soul that shines, and I don’t think,
This is wrong. This is against my nature. This is breaking eternal law
. I think,
This is beautiful
.

I place the tapestry inside of him, and his chest fills with air. It passes through his nostrils, almost steady. In and out, in and out.

He opens his eyes and blinks, searching. His fingers twitch.

The silence breaks.

“What have you done?”

Fyel’s voice pierces my back with a thousand needles. I spin around. He’s unraveled part of my wall, my concealment. He’s witnessed this, and it’s as if I’m unraveling, too.

“I—”

His wings push him forward, his gamre eyes wide as they take in the man’s slow animation. “Gods in heaven, Maire. What have you
done
?”

“H-He’ll hear you,” I manage. Every muscle in my body winds tight, making it hard to speak, to breathe. “I . . . I did
it
, can’t you see?”

But Fyel is mortified, his face long and even paler than it should be, paler than the ether around us. He hovers backward as my creation sits up.

For a moment I forget Fyel, forget the sting of his eyes. “Can you hear me?” I ask the creature, whom I’ve fashioned in the shape of a human. I touch his knee. It’s cold, but he was only just born. It will warm.

“Mmmmmuh,” he groans. When he lifts his head, his bright eyes meet mine, and there is recognition in them. There is memorizing. There is knowing.

“Maire.” Fyel grabs the base of my wing and pulls me toward him, away from my creation. “Maire, this is wrong. So wrong. You have to unravel him!”

“But he’s alive!”

“Only
gods can make souls
!” he shouts, and it startles me. Fyel so seldom raises his voice.

“No.” I jerk away from him. “I did it, Fyel.
Look
at him! If mankind can do it and the gods can do it, surely we can! We’ve just never tried!”

He looks ready to cry. I don’t understand him. Why is he so upset with me?

“You do not know the consequences,” he says through gritted teeth.

“He is my
son
,” I snap.

“Guuuurrrrr,” my son says. He hasn’t learned language yet, but he will, in time. We all learn, in time.

“Here, slow now.” I take him by the elbows and help him upright. He totters, finding his balance, and then grins once he does.

I smile back at him, but he’s still cold under my fingers. Why hasn’t he warmed up?

I hear a soft snap, and one of his arms drops in his shoulder a few inches, making it longer than the other. It startles me. I flap my wings and hover back.

“That shouldn’t happen,” I murmur, feeling Fyel’s presence at my back. His physical form never worried me, for I’ve made them before. Everything I make is physical. Only physical.

“How does a soul interact with its host?” Fyel asks. There’s a strain to his voice, like his larynx is being pulled in opposite directions.

“I don’t know.”

“Then how can you
make
one, Maire?” he cries.

My son winces and grabs his head. I can only assume it’s in reaction to Fyel’s shouting. His hands dig into the orange curls, and his knees bend until they give out, and he collapses to the floor of the house.

“Stop, would you?” I snap at Fyel. “It’s all right,” I say soothingly, floating over to the new man. “Come on, let’s try again.”

I take his elbows and try to help him stand, but he hisses and slashes out at me with one arm, raking his nails over my collar. I gasp at the sting. Three slim cuts open on my red skin.

“Unravel him!” Fyel shouts. He would do it himself if he could; I have no doubt of that. He’s probably already tried, but my son is too complex to be unraveled by another crafter.

I turn on him, my lahst. “So he doesn’t work perfectly within the first minutes of his birth, and you want to kill him?”

Fyel scowls. “Do not call it ‘killing.’ It is not ‘killing,’ if the being is not alive.”

“How is he not
alive
?!”

The ether outside the house rumbles, not unlike the thunder of a storm on one of our worlds. Something has happened in the gods’ space.

My blood runs cold. Surely they don’t know. They couldn’t already know. I have a plan. A plan to hide him away, to raise him away from godly eyes. He can live on one of the worlds, and because I made his soul, he’ll always be able to see me when I descend from the ether to watch him.

I don’t have much time.

Fyel shakes his head and repeats his first, condemning words. “What have you done?”

The ether shakes. My son startles at the noise, wide eyed. He screams and leaps at me, wrapping his arms around me in a mix between an embrace and a stranglehold.

Fyel flings himself at him, grabbing his wrists and shoving him back. Though my son is larger, my lahst is stronger.

“Stop, he’s just confused! You’re scaring him!” I cry.
Because this can’t be wrong I did everything right he’s mine I want him to be mine why can’t he be mine?

Fyel releases him, but I hear it. Another snap, just like what happened with my son’s arm, but I can’t see it. I can’t see his body shift or change.

My heart grows heavy despite its hastened beat. The snap came from within. Did his soul break? Did I make a mistake?

“Maire!” Fyel cries out.

“M-M-M-M-M-Maire,” the creation stutters, his eyes crossed.

For a moment, my heart stops beating. I did it wrong. Gods, I did something wrong. This isn’t how he’s supposed to—

He rushes for me before I can fix him, before I can unravel the broken parts. There is fire in his eyes, and his hands stretch out like elastic talons.

I run.

I crash into the shadowy wall of my hideaway, half unraveling it as I do. Its pieces splinter around me and bite into my skin. The creature roars and zooms after me, navigating the ether unevenly. The ether shakes again, louder,
harder
. The gods are coming. The gods
know
.