The Plight of Bored Gods

The One who Plays the Game

Laila

26 years old

The Shore

Wicked Fate. She takes and she takes. It's time someone takes back.

For the first time in her life, the corpse in Laila's arms belonged to a child. An infant. Stillborn. Not hers.

Back when her mother was alive, she used to warn Laila about Creature Death. It was one of Lady Fate's many pets—an ugly, carnivorous bird with glass talons who smelt sickly sweet. He swooped down on the weak and carried them into the wind. The howls on the sea at night— those were the souls being lifted up, up, up.

She always hated her mother's stories—the way she told them with a conviction touched by wonder as if admiring Wicked Fate for her cunning. Laila never said as much aloud, but she believed it was her mother's love of those stories that tangled them so completely in Wicked Fate's net.

The wind lashed the waves into an angry roar that drowned out the crying mother back on the shore. Laila, waist-deep in the sea and shivering, kept an eye on the horizon where the red tongue of dawn was bound to lick the sea. It couldn't happen soon enough. She'd been standing in the icy cold long enough to go from aching to numb.

Oh yes, she did favorers for people— her people— Thu-Solm people. And often the favors, like creating possibilities for a red sailed ship to sell goods by starlight, paid well enough to keep her pockets full through the winter. That didn't change that passing on the dead wasn't among her usual skill sets. Unfortunately, the mother was distraught, had scarcely a word of Asmelen's twisting tongue to work with, and she held true to the ways of the Islands. Once rumors told her that Laila possessed a burial garb, there became no one else in all the mountains who the mother saw fit to perform.

It was a simple red shift, loosely fitted with two golden clasps securing a train down her back and reminiscent of Sirronina fashion. It was one of her favorite finds. Or it had been. She spotted it on a merchant ship about to set sail down the coast to the port of one plains town or other. The red had caught her. Maybe it reminded her of her mother. It didn't belong in some dusty storage crate among bejeweled goblets and golden plates and it didn't belong to whatever royal was going to display it on a wall as part of their collection. She took it. Regretted it.

Laila brooded over that fateful impulse while clutching the dead infant, swaddled in the stiff, heavy remnants of a rust-colored sail. She was tempted to pull back the corner and see his face. The first time she held a newborn he had screamed as if cursing her for the world he'd be forced to endure. I know. Now shut up, she had told him and clucked her tongue until he found his first drink. She had a vision of pulling back the sail and being met with the milky eyes of death. If she did, they might see the living boy in her memory and Fate might send her bird to collect him.

Best leave the dead to rest.

The sun finally showed itself, illuminating a bloody path through the jagged waves. Laila was too cold to be comforted by the scant warmth it brought. She took a deep, chattering breath. It had been a long time since she used her birth tongue. She didn't know if her lips remembered the sounds.

She lowered the bundle into the slate-gray sea, her silk a red cloud about her.

"Mehi Solm," she whispered. Be strong

"Mehi Raier." Be clever.

"Mehi Duurel." Be brave.

She hoped the little one would find rest and that Fate's ugly bird wouldn't snatch the soul from the waves, but doubted it.