The Burning 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.

And he was right—she should have known better than to put her fate in the hands of people more powerful than she. She should have learned, many times over, that everyone she pledged her faith to would inevitably use and abuse her.

Then Riga threw his head back and laughed. His cackle was a horrible thing, so like Nezha’s, and so gleefully cruel.

Could she punish these girls for wanting to survive?

“It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.

You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal.

Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.