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The residence of God is a tomb.
Within the Sanctuary of Surasthana, each point arches away from itself as though trying to escape death and rebirth. Whenever Kusanali follows their trajectories, she can never find where she once began. The shape of her prison is a navel; its resplendence drapes over itself many times over, trying vainly to describe the violence at its heart.
The chain that encases her maps out three points of her tiny prison. It touches the ajna, the manipura, and the muladhara, framing about her a sacred triangle.
Voices spill out from the Ley Lines at each point, murmuring truths far beyond her comprehension.
Yet Kusanali cannot look directly into the chakra. She must not.
The first and last time she did, touching her hands to the manipura, she glimpsed a hole in the side of creation;
She saw what the blind man calls looking out the back of his head;
She paid witness to a shattering of the Heavenly Principles, watching herself watching herself watching a void transform truth into pillars of salt
And the twisted sneer of a boy whose ribs formed a gaping maw of need.
Kabukimono’s hands are made for reparation. He takes what God has shattered and renders it whole once more, spooling out his own puppet’s threads for the work.
The curious kingfisher turns her head to regard him, seated primly atop a fallen, lichen-ravaged Aralia tree. To his right sits Katsuragi, diligently sharpening the Daitatara Nagamasa with an old whetstone. Soon, Kabukimono’s work will conclude, and he will present Katsuragi with his repaired zouri. Soon they will dance amidst the waters of Tataratsuna, attended by Electro Seelie sewing their courts from the Loom of Fate.
Soon, the heart of a precious friend will lie still in Kabukimono’s hands, gifted to him by a youkai more devil than man.
Soon his faith will be shattered.
– But before then:
The piercing rattle of the kingfisher draws his attention. He places aside his work, studying the bird from the corner of his eye. He knows not to meet her gaze; when the impulse rises, the golden feather at his breast grows hot in complaint. He will see the future if he looks at her directly;
She will show him a youkai more devil than man, the press of a curved beak in mockery’s kiss against a withered heart;
She will breach the present and drown him in every broken promise and stinging-nettle lie.
The kingfisher who is not a bird, but a great white tree, warden of knowledge and memory,
She calls.
And Kabukimono attends her with eyes diverted. She screams in absence of any bright plumage, her racket enough for Katsuragi to sprinkle laughter from on high.
It begins with the Sages. They anoint themselves with her leaves, plucking knowledge from her boughs and setting it upon their ears like a spring crown.
Then, the Akademiya’s elite. Then, the nobles. Then, nearly the entire kingdom, the prasad of her handed out to travellers passing through the gates of Sumeru City.
The books in the House of Daena grow disconsolate. The silverfish consume the knowledge left behind– but what is worst of all is the culture lost. She can feel collective memory fading out from the dreams she inhabits. Hands that should glide over the crowded margins, generations of effort and learning, idly drum the tables at Puspa Café.
Wisdom is meant to be shared. It is meant to prick the fingers and slake thirsty minds with the blood of effort. This is not how it should be.
‘It’s dying,’ she tells the manipura chakra, clutching her palms together. ‘A mind must be sharpened like a blade. I worry they grow dull, and…’
And how difficult it is, describing her plight. She does not care that it hurts. Each time someone uses an Akasha Terminal, the pads of her fingers jolt with pain. Kusanali has always been at the disposal of her people. That will be true of the one who succeeds her,
Along with the one who came before. (The Greater Lord, drowning in corrosive ink.)
‘Then you should petition your Shogun,’ tumbles forth the manipura’s voice. Sometimes he is jaded and curt; other times, such as this, he is guileless and innocent. To hear his voice at all is a priceless blessing.
‘I suppose I am the Shogun,’ she answers. ‘But there’s nothing I can do.’
‘How can that be?’ he scoffs. ‘You can’t be the Shogun if you’re powerless.’
Between her hands, Kusanali weaves loose cat’s cradles of analogies, peering into the bright green light of meaning. These are the words she uses for confused children in dreams:
‘Picture a kingdom,’ Kusanali begins gently, ‘With a great tree at its heart. Anyone can tap one of its massive roots and draw forth its power. But the tree can’t move. Its branches are not arms; all it has is its breath.’
The boy is silent for a long time. Shutting her eyes, Kusanali pictures the one who must sit across from her on the other side.
(His lavender veil, split by endless betrayals.
His tears, collecting as shards of iron in his hands.
His face is that of Greater Lord Rukkhadevata’s. Kusanali can picture nothing else. The portrait grows dark at its edges.)
‘So what are you?’ the boy demands. ‘A tree?’
They are all trees. Each individual moment of consciousness is a single leaf on a single branch of a massive organism, connected across time and distance by shared roots.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I must be God.’
‘So which God are you?’ Scaramouche taunts, wrapping the Harbinger’s cloak more tightly around himself.
The kingfisher turns her head to regard him, the space around her warped by the low blue lights of Chinju Forest. She has sat with him for hours, stretches of days, all while he whittled and hewed his body into a more masculine shape. When he bends at the waist, wood shavings roll out of his sleeves. He sets them alight when the fury strikes.
Her voice is not a scream, but the gentle gasp of hydrangeas after summer rain. It crackles with maturity and a weariness he has never heard from her before. ‘Do you know what they mean by the phrase, “god in the machine”?’
Scaramouche sniffs derisively. ‘No. Why should I?’ The sword in his hands is dull with rust. He does it no favours when he strikes at the ghostly trees, almost as if he is taunting it to break.
Which would shatter first– the Katsuragikiri Nagamasa? Or him?
‘I am that God,’ the kingfisher tells him. ‘The one who lives in the gaps. The one who must be forgotten.’
‘Then you shouldn’t speak. If you stay silent, then.’ He trails off. It tastes like the claymore’s flakes of rust have fallen on his tongue.
(If you stay quiet and do not move, no one will remember you.
In fact, no matter how much you wail and scream, breaking your arms against the temple door, you’ll be forgotten anyway.
Those who are inherently worthless slip fast out of history.)
‘Stupid puppet,’ squawks the cuckoo behind him. Scaramouche tightens. ‘Stupid boy! Forgettable boy!’
‘I see,’ chuckles the kingfisher. ‘That is your muladhara.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he sneers.
‘Ah. Perhaps that’s your fool? Or is it the queen?’
Frustrated, Scaramouche strikes out with his blade, swinging at the kingfisher. She doesn’t dive out of the way; she has no need to.
The cuckoo’s raucous laughter replaces his breath. Scaramouche sees the Electro Archon’s face. He sees his own.
He sees a trellis of poison ivy stretched taut around a fig branch, throttling it.
What he glimpses is his own lack of personhood, rice-paper skin stretched over a hollow drum.
Out of Collei’s mouth pours the sycophantic voice of the muladhara. No matter to what ends of the earth Kusanali escapes, she is forever framed by that sacred triangle.
‘How can you call yourself “God”?’ questions the Doctor. This is Collei’s dream. In her dream, her wrists and ankles are strapped to a metal slab of a table, a scalpel hanging over her open mouth like the Sword of Damocles. Her figure is hazy around the edges: her skin is blackened by Eleazar, and then cured; she wears the brown cloak of the curse-bearer, the sacrificial lamb with shards of divinity sewn into her skin.
She sparkles like the heat haze that sings atop the dunes of the Scarlet Sands, where a king once thought himself beyond the reach of heaven.
‘I am God,’ Kusanali answers, ‘Because that is what my people believe me to be.’
Behind her, the manipura chakra. Her hands are bound by white chains. She cannot save Collei from her nightmare, nor escape from this fracture in reality.
‘Would that not make the rest of us “God”?’ the Doctor suggests. He twists Collei’s mouth into a venomous smirk. ‘Across Teyvat, faith in the Fatui has grown considerably. At what point do we cease to be aberrations, and become objects of worship? Powerful beings of faith?’
The boy who speaks through the manipura would likely ask her the same thing. He has already asked it and gone unanswered; she has posed the same question to him, and received no reply. These things have happened and have yet to happen.
‘Is that how you see yourself?’ Kusanali asks. ‘Do you think you are “God”, Doctor?’
The Doctor laughs.
‘I am something better. You are something far worse.’
The scalpel falls into Collei’s throat. She screams.
The shadow of Apep sweeps over the walls of the verdant dome, a constant and lingering presence. Hat Guy would hesitate to call it a threat.
A Mad, powerless dragon is no greater threat than her believers.
‘Ceyx,’ she calls, her voice a rumble causing the floor to quake. ‘Where is your Alcyone? Your kingfisher: she is gone.’
‘Get your eyes checked,’ he taunts. ‘She’s right here.’ He has never walked without the kingfisher at his back. The cuckoo exalts now in the Devourer of Divinity, seated in her skin like a knife through the neck.
There it is, the cuckoo’s laughter. She says mildly, ‘How interesting. No matter how many times you’re betrayed, you continue to let others in. This is why the Electro Archon discarded you.’
Hat Guy grits his teeth. He can’t rip that truth from the earth, no matter how much he tears at the roots of Irminsul. The kingfisher returned his past to him in the form of a storybook.
They won’t ever let him escape.
‘What makes a God?’ she asks now, settling on his shoulder. She twists the world in the corner of his eye; nevertheless, Hat Guy is made stronger by the fact that she is there.
‘People make Gods,’ he replies, ‘And we can unmake them just as easily.’
Apep shrieks. Beneath her wails of pain scuttles the cuckoo’s delighted chuckling. Hat Guy calls Tulaytullah's Remembrance to his hands, meeting the veiled gaze of the dragon ready to breach the oasis.
He is speaking after his own destruction when he says, ‘Fall to your knees!’
And the cuckoo carries to him a voice from the beginning, his own syrupy confession: ‘I am nothing.’
The kingfisher rattles her own reply, but it is lost to the whirlwind of sand.
(‘You are so much more than God can be.’)
Greater Lord Kusanali presides over Scaramouche’s broken body. She is so unused to the dimensions of herself; she has made countless clumsy errors as she brings the pieces of the puppet back together with kintsugi, splashing him in molten metal.
The ache that is the muladhara says, ‘You are imbuing that corrupted vessel with your own godhood.’ The Doctor means it as an insult, as though peering at her work over her shoulder. ‘He is not worth saving.’
‘What makes a God?’ Kusanali asks instead, strings of gold gathered like string between her fingers. She levels the question at every point of the sacred triangle, even the ajna, where she usually sits. ‘What makes a person worth saving? Is it divinity that offers a chance at redemption?’
From across time, a toneless song–herself, scrubbed from the annals of history–responds from the ajna, ‘Every person shares a certain godhood. They all deserve second chances.’
The words of a broken boy from the manipura counter, ‘Nothing a God creates should be suffered. Everything touched by the Divine Principles should burn.’
Finally, the Doctor clicks his tongue. Greater Lord Kusanali feels him reverberate through her root chakra, twisted like chains around her once again. ‘Only that which can increase your own power is worthwhile.’
Their voices refract and bend around her like light. She is king, queen, and fool; she is the one restoring Scaramouche to wholeness, putting back the pieces of the one who would have gladly seen her destroyed.
‘A God,’ she says, ‘Is the wind that ripples through the leaves and stirs every stream.’
It is nothing, but everything. It can be more.
Pollen from the Great Tree settles on Wanderer's shoulders, yellowing his bared skin. It sinks into his pale woodgrain; though he does not sweat, the flora of Sumeru so easily sinks into his body.
In this quickly-collapsing universe, Niwa grins at him over the abundance of produce before them, picking up a ripe tomato. He quickly selects a pungent sack of coffee next, proffering it so that Wanderer might catch the full-body fragrance of the beans.
Seated on the end of a barge, the kingfisher interrogates his profile, trying to bend his eye to her. This is a timeless bubble of space just before sunrise where her words sharpen their knives.
All the time, the cuckoo pecks at Niwa’s geta. He groans at the intrusion, trying vainly to chase the bird away.
Wanderer murmurs, the breath of his voice scattering some of the pollen, ‘Gods are monuments in restless waters.’
‘What’s that?’ Niwa asks.
Shaking his head, Wanderer turns away.
‘Waters! Waters!’ diligently repeats the cuckoo.
And the kingfisher, she offers in her rattling cry:
‘Then we are the rocks on the shore, aren’t we?’
In the dark lies a room with two mirrors, refracting the light of a lone candle.
Nahida does not see herself in these mirrors. She does not hear her own voice return answers to her questions.
When she shuts her eyes, she sees a boy in lilac standing amidst an inferno of flame.
She asks the boy, ‘How did it start?’
His answer is like fermented honey: ‘This is what gods finally become.’
‘Alone?’
‘Strung together by fate.’
In the same dark, the same room, with the same mirrors,
Wanderer sees Greater Lord Rukkhadevata behind his eyelids.
He asks her, ‘How much of this is true?’
She replies with the bitterness of burnt offerings: ‘As much as you want to be.’
‘What are we?’
‘Gods. Friends. Family.’
Somewhere, a youkai laughs.
Somewhere else, the youkai ceases to be.