"Everything had been turned on its head," Suisei said. "Before, they were merely alien. I hadn't realized the depths of their emotions."

I nodded along with him and summoned another handkerchief to wipe my face.

Though Susiei had managed to avoid sobbing this time around—though he had gotten misty-eyed—I'd broken down and cried. The Erboss-Tor's homesickness was in a league of its own.

"After that, however, I started to understand just how much there was to these beings. As astonishing as it was to me, I could not dismiss out of hand their claim that they understood the Sword. At the time, I even considered the possibility that, perhaps, in some way, they were… kin to it. I saw them as more than mere strangers, now. Were they from the Godhead? Or, a part of it?" He shook his head. "I didn't know, but… I could wonder."

"You took the words right out of my mouth," I said. "The Erboss-Tor have to be another faction of Angels."

He nodded. "Yes. I just wish I'd known about that possibility back then. The questions I could have asked them! But," he sighed, "there's no use in lamenting it."

Why down? Green-Eye asked. Why flat?

In the memory, Suisei couldn't see Green-Eye, nor the other Erboss-Tor that had chosen to accompany him. Instead, Suisei kept his face plastered to the floor in a ghastly dogeza. If he had any shred of dignity left, he felt he didn't deserve to have it.

"Forgive me Lord," he said, "for I have sinned." He said it again and again.

"Forgive me, my Lord, for I have sinned."

"Forgive me, my Lord, for I have sinned."

The breath coming out from the funnels on the Green-Eye's underside blew against Suisei's neck, fluttering his overcoat's collar. It was heavy-scented, wet, and earthy, yet still bitterly cold. Sounds bounced off the chamber's wall, tooted from the funnels on the upper side of Green-Eye's mantle.

Up.

Suisei lifted upright and positioned himself on his knees. He made the Bond-sign.

Do not understand, Green-Eye said.

Green-Eye stood close enough that Suisei could have reached out and touched one of its four lozenge-post legs. The other Erboss-Tor, however, kept their distance, lurking near the wall of the calligraphy chamber.

"The Sword is holy," Suisei explained. "It is of God."

What is god? Green-Eye asked.

Suisei licked his lips as he scrambled to figure out what to say.

"The greatest greatness," he said. "The beginning, the end. The All." Suisei looked at the Sword. "If you know the Sword, then you know God."

The lights swirling in Green-Eye's core turned all the way around, away from Suisei and toward Poet.

The two Erboss-Tor trumpeted in soft but busy dissonances. Suisei scoured every sound and movement for even a trace of meaning, not that he could find any.

Eventually, the core-light roved back to face him.

Sword is not God, Green-Eye said.

Suisei froze stiff. Just like that, the Erboss-Tor had shattered his worldview all over again.

In the memory, he spoke, and in the theater, I spoke, and our words were the same, as were our feelings and our impatient disbelief.

"What?" we said.

Sword is not God, Green-Eye repeated.

"I don't understand," Suisei said.

Another Erboss-Tor walked out from behind Green-Eye. Suisei recognized it as the one he called Giant, on account of being the largest Erboss-Tor he'd seen so far. Perhaps Giant was a warrior, or a scholar.

Erboss-Tor were god, Giant said, but no longer.

I wanted to pause the memory right then and there, but I was too disturbed and enthralled to dare stop it now.

"W-What…?" Suisei stammered in disbelief. "You?"

Once we were, but now we are not, Giant replied.

"H-How…?"

The lights in Green-Eye's core swirled around. A great sacrifice was made.

"But what about my faith? Are you the Angel? Were you?"

Unknown, Giant replied.

"Did you bring me here to punish me?" Suisei asked.

The creatures' core-lights briefly veered toward one another, and then turned back to Suisei.

We do not want to punish anyone, Giant said.

"Then why am I here," he asked, "if not for my sins?"

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Green-Eye's core-light gazed at the Sword. Because of the Sword.

"At this point," Suisei told me, "I no longer knew what to believe. I was… adrift."

"Then, tell me this," he asked them. "What is the Sword? What does it do?"

Their lights conferred with one another.

Resonance, they said. It resonates. It connects. Worldbridger. Waybringer. It is songstuff. It dreams and sings.

"Worldbridger?" Suisei asked.

You are not alone, Green-Eye said. No one is alone.

And Green-Eye meant it with kindness.

There are many worlds, Giant said. The Sword carries your world's kiss. It will help.

"Do you really believe it can send me home?" he asked them.

We believe, Green-Eye said. Yes. We believe.

"But what of the risk?" he asked. "What if I misuse it? What if—"

—Risk is always, Giant said. Choose. You must.

"Do you trust me?"

We wish to see, Green-Eye said. New wonder. New magic. New day begins.

Suisei wracked his head with his hands. "I don't understand. You said you couldn't do it! You said your people would die if you tried!"

That reason study Sword. First to understand, then to use and help. We do not know what we do not know.

"You were trying to help me?" Suisei asked. "All this time?"

Yes, Green-Eye said.

"Why?"

You suffer, Giant said. We help.

"Why?" he asked, again. "You have helped me again and again, and every time, I failed to repay you in kind. Why do I deserve your kindness?"

Colors dazzled through Green-Eye's nucleus.

Why not?

The emotions that wafted off the Erboss-Tor made Suisei's breath catch in his throat. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes.

For all their enigmas and unfathomable truths, there was no great plan at work inside their minds, no grand mission, no inscrutable intent, just a simple wish, almost crude in its naïvety.

Why help? Why not?

That was all.

Helping him had been as obvious to the Erboss-Tor as the ground beneath their lozenge-shaped legs. Yes, they were deeply homesick, but that was all. They had no guilt, no doubt, not even the slightest hint of jadedness, only the desire to try.

Green-Eye gently lowered the Sword to the floor with a wave of a tendril.

Take, it said. Then we will try.

To Suisei's astonishment, the aliens then left the room, save for Green-Eye who lingered at the entrance when Suisei asked, "Try what?"

The Erboss-Tor's core-light swerved around to face him.

To send you home, it said.

Then, with his stained, cracked body armor and the ragged, burnt overcoat draped on top of it like a agèd battle robe, Suisei Horosha grabbed the Sword's argent hilt.

I felt his fear. But, more than that, I felt the strange familiarity—Suisei's, not mine—that coiled up through his arm and invisibly blossomed all around him as he held the blade of God in his hand.

— — —

At last, the memory got to a point where it was no longer dropping bombs of revelation in my lap, and I felt comfortable pausing it and finally asking Suisei what the heck was going on!

I dismissed my box of Crownsleep Crush candies and turned to face him. "I'm sorry, but I—"

Suisei nodded in understanding. "—Take your time," he said. He scooped up some popcorn from his bowl and started to chew on it. The crackling sounds mirrored my thoughts.

I took extra care not to lose myself in yet another bout of obsessive theological pondering.

"Obviously," I said, "this is a lot to take in. I mean… Erboss-Tor claimed to be God."

Suisei swallowed his popcorn and then sipped his soft drink through the red bendy-straws I'd provided him.

"No," he said, "they claimed to have been God."

I groaned. "Does that distinction even matter right now? With everything I've got on my plate, grammatical tense is the least of my worries." I looked him in the eyes. "Just, tell me: what do you make of it? And, just to be clear," I added, "I don't mean what you thought about it back then." I gestured toward the memory, which was paused at a moment when Suisei was walking out of his room in the Erboss-Tor's city. "I mean, what do you make of it, here and now? Please, I'm desperate… just give me something to work with. Anything."

"Unless our worlds' theologies have diverged on the issue," Suisei said, "as far as I'm aware, the assertion that the Sword is not God is in complete agreement with orthodox Lassedile thought."

"Right," I nodded. "The Sword isn't God, but rather comes from God, just like the Angel and the Sun. Regardless, the Erboss-Tor claiming to have been God is fundamentally incompatible with any form of Lassedile doctrine."

"Don't get ahead of yourself," he told me.

"What?"

"You must realize there's a strong possibility that, when the Erboss-Tor said the Sword 'was not God', what they meant was that the Angel wasn't God. And, at the risk of spoiling the last leg of the story, I happen to agree with them."

"Guh…" I said, groaning again, harder, and louder than before. "I was afraid you were going to say that."

Suisei steepled his fingers. "For what it's worth, Genneth, I think the problem isn't with the Angel so much as it is with our idea of God. The existence of other realities and worlds already flies in the face of traditional theology. In my world, the discovery that the earth orbits around the sun shook Lassedicy to its roots. The destruction of Zid happened not long after that. For over a thousand years, we believed humanity and our world were the center of the universe, the crown jewels of all creation. Every aspect of our religion's thought was intertwined around that. Every facet of existence was imbued with a divinely ordained purpose. If even one piece of that artifice could be in doubt, the whole thing was worthless. The Angelic Doctors said as much."

I nodded. "As they did in my world."

"By the standards of the Church's founders, the falsification of the central role that mankind and the earth played in the divine plan was enough to prove the falsehood of our beliefs. If the earth is not the center of the universe, then neither is man, and so we are not the Angel's greatest creation, and all of the faith comes undone."

I looked him in the eyes. "Suisei… what happened to Lassedicy in your world, after the Sword triggered the destruction of Zid?"

I realized I'd never asked him for the details.

He smiled gently. "It continued, like it always had. Of course, many people left, including everyone who died in the disaster. But, just as I did in my own life, the faith adapted. The centrality of earth and mankind got demoted from a literal truth to a merely symbolic one."

I sputtered in disbelief. "That's ridiculous! Wars have been fought over such things! People have died, by the hundreds of thousands!"

"Some groups split off to form their own, small branches of the faith where they could adhere to their preferred flavor of orthodoxy. But, for the rest of us, we just carried on. My religious forebears held on to whatever beliefs they could still keep believing in, and quietly jettisoned the rest."

He looked up at the screen. "That's why I was able to accept what the Erboss-Tor told me. Everything changes, even God. That's the only constant." He nodded shakily. "Don't despair that you've lost what was dear to you, but look forward to finding it again in what the future brings."

My lips quivered. "Then… what is God? And what are the Angels?"

"I don't know," Suisei said, "though I would like to find out."

I clenched my fists, digging my fingernails into my palms. "I'm just going to make sense of all this as meaning that the Erboss-Tor used to be Angels, but somehow lost their powers," my expression dropped, "which, now that I think about it, is a terrifying thought."

Even if the fungus had killed Him, Kléothag was still a God, though I had to admit, at this point, what that even meant was up for debate. Still, no matter what you used as your working definition of godhood, I didn't want to begin to imagine the kinds of horrors that would be capable of stripping that godhood away.

Suisei raised an eyebrow. "If you don't mind me asking, I was under the impression you were an atheist, yourself."

"Agnostic, actually," I said.

He turned to face the theater screen. "Then brace yourself, Dr. Agnostic. There is still much more to come."

This was starting to feel really unnerving.

For my own sake—hoping it would distract me from my worries—I let the memory play again. Suisei resumed his narration.

"It turns out that while I was mucking about in the wasteland, struggling like a child to master my malfunctioning powers, the Erboss-Tor had been studying the Sword. And… their conclusions were absolutely correct."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.