Page 56 of The Concubine King
“Were there really two suns before you made one into the moon?”he tried.
“Yes,” was all Kiaro answered.
“No moon at all… I can’t imagine.”He shook his head in awe.“What was it like, having no darkness?”
Kiaro turned sharply to him, then looked away without answering.Ethyr didn’t know why.
He bit his lip, knowing he should have shut his mouth after that.Why risk angering a god?But after wandering a bit farther, he gave in to his other burning curiosity."There’s a tapestry in my room, showing the story of you humiliating that noble.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Kiaro said.
“You arrived at a party he was hosting and challenged him,” Ethyr explained tentatively.“I always wondered… why did you do it?”
“Do I need a reason?”Kiaro replied brusquely.
“I… I guess not.”But most of Kiaro’s legends, when he was messing around with humans, involved a comeuppance of some kind.This one had always stood out to Ethyr as incompatible with the others.
Ethyr didn’t expect anything more than that, but then Kiaro said, softly, “The party… it was a celebration of the day the last wild god fell.”
Ethyr looked curiously at him.“…So?”
Kiaro kept his face turned away and didn’t reply.Ethyr opened his mouth before thinking better, and closed it again.He didn’t know why he’d thought he’d get anything like an answer out of him.
The silent, desecrated city was more eerie than the palace.Though the buildings were broken walls and dust, the streets were clear and easy to walk through.
“What happened here?”Ethyr asked, the question slipping out before he realized he was saying it out loud.
“It is not what happened here, it is what mortals think happened here.”
Ethyr turned an unimpressed face to Kiaro.The god, amazingly, almost seemed to smile, but the quirk of his lips stilled so quickly that Ethyr wasn’t sure if he imagined it.
“They believe the Gods’ War happened here,” he explained further.
“Didn’t it?”Ethyr asked, baffled.After the flood that had wiped out the entire northern half of the continent, the civilized gods chased the wild gods back to the gods’ realm, where they battled one thousand long nights before the civilized gods emerged triumphant.
“No,” Kiaro replied.
“Where did it happen, then?”Ethyr asked.Kiaro didn’t answer.Ethyr wasn’t any closer to figuring out why he answered some questions and not others.Fickleness?
“So it’s all in ruins because of the Gods’ War?”Ethyr asked.“Which didn’t really happen?”
“It happened,” Kiaro corrected him quietly.“Just not the way humans were told.”
“Told by who?”Ethyr asked, confused.
“Us,” Kiaro said.
“What really happened, then?”he boldly prodded.Kiaro, again, remained quiet.
Ethyr doubted he would get the truth from Kiaro.All of this could have been a lie too, for all he knew.Hewasthe god of deception, after all.
Ethyr stopped walking and Kiaro did too.“Seems it’s all the same, then,” Ethyr said, shrugging with his arms.“It’s all just destroyed.Is there a point to going further?”
Kiaro looked pensive, his gaze casting down, then up past Ethyr’s head.“It’s not all destroyed.It’s not all like this.”
“It isn’t?”Ethyr asked.
“Would you like to see something different?”Kiaro asked.Ethyr blinked at him, surprised he was offering.
