The eyes of the gods are clear red stars. Without the rust-fog the metal scaffolds on which they sit rise unobstructed and can be definitively identified in their new clarity as curved fingers disappearing into the navy-crushed night. In their palm sits the desert and its silver and gold, and in the desert the priest casts the shovel aside. It peels from his hands with a sucking sound and is taken by the gushing river as it swirls past in great swathes and is seen no more. He walks to where his briefcase sits half-buried in the wet ground and picks it up. Then he moves to the horse and squats down by its panting head and does not touch its mane softly, the way he wants to. Instead he says, "let's go."
The horse says, "okay."
They prop the horse up so that on the side with its broken leg it is leaning on the priest. Together, a strange and shuffling shadow in the darkness, they shamble slowly down to the sloping grave and lower each other into the ground. As they re-enter the earth the desert before them and its droning song disappear so that there is only above them a dome of violet blue pierced through with red eyes and the sound of water moving over the earth as it trips down to them in shining strings. In the darkness the horse and priest are luminous, silver and gold, and the horse presses itself to the earthen walls so that it can stand and lowers its ancient eyes to the priest. The priest is not used to starting their conversations and the horse does not know what to say. Finally, the priest speaks.
"You didn't come from a grave," he says, accusatory.
"I didn't have to," says the horse.
"We've always had to," the priest replies. "That's the part I don't get. I didn't put it together until the Bull-Demon King, and then it all made sense. 'If he will show himself anywhere tonight,' she said. If I had died you would have had to intervene. I should've known sooner. But I saw your stable, and you were there before I buried you. If you had killed your gray mare and buried it there and risen from her grave there would have been signs."
"I didn't have to," the horse says again, and sighs. "I figured it out. You did too, in your seventh."
In his sixth life the priest had discovered what happened to humans who bit deep enough to draw blood. In the seventh he had allowed the knowledge to change him. Consequently, he has not known what happens to humans who eat his blood since his eighth. Among his deaths, the seventh has always been the one he savors least.
"You bled out," the horse explains when it does not look like the priest will respond. "Rather than let a demon eat you—than let them take whatever parts they wanted—you emptied yourself, and in your final moments you held the word close and took it with you." He nods to the undiluted gold that radiates from the priest's shoulder. "If we are really envoys and messengers, by nature vessels to be filled, then it stands to reason that when we end ourselves we can choose what we give up and what we take with us."
"To take what we can carry," says the priest slowly. "You planned this all out beforehand?"
"No. I didn't expect it." The horse slumps against the wall, his pale form half-eaten by the dirt. "When I emptied myself, like you, I held my gray mare close in my final moments. And when I came back she was with me, the same way the word was with you. So I didn't need a grave at all. The appropriate number of hours passed and I returned and when I came back, it was in the place where she was standing in my own backyard. I surfaced inside her."
"And then you watched me bury you," says the priest, "and you lied to me."
They watch each other in silence again. Seams of water trickle down like sand in a glass. Above them a star wavers uncertainly in the silence, then lopes down past the lip of the grave and exits stage right.
