I was four years old the first time I touched a dying man and he got up again. My mother made me promise never to let anyone see. She was right about that. She was right about most things, and then she died, and the last thing she ever told me was a name I'd never heard. There's a fire in me. It's been there since before I was born, and it isn't mine, and it's killing me---three hundred years late and nineteen days fast. Only the Barons can teach me to control it. Fallen gods. The kind that eat girls like me to make the hunger stop. So I walked into Hell's Gate on my own feet and offered them a trade. The cold one claimed me. Called me 𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥. Never my name. The beautiful one wept gold and begged me not to let them love me. The silent one asked me what I wanted, and I didn't have an answer. And one of them was kind to me. Only one. From the first night. That's the one I should have been afraid of.

She made one mistake. He found out. Now she'll do anything to hold together the life she shattered.

Tom was nineteen when a goddess promised to save his dying mother. He believed her. His mother died waiting. Five years later, Ysva is standing on his porch, and she needs something from him. He asks if she takes milk. She is six thousand years old, luminous, and accustomed to being worshipped. He is twenty-five, going grey at the temples, and fresh out of things to feel where she's concerned. She took other lovers while he was in the next room. She laughed at him in front of her entire pantheon. She cursed him in a moment of temper and forgot she'd done it---he's felt it in his spine every day since. Now her kind is dying. Mortals have stopped giving themselves up as consorts, and Ysva is the reason the whole system cracked. To save it, she needs the one thing a goddess cannot take by force: his forgiveness, said out loud, where the world can hear it. Divine law leaves her one road. Three acts of mortal penance. Live as a human in his house for one turn of the moon. Confess every cruelty in front of his town. Attempt the impossible thing he names---and fail at it where everyone can see. She came expecting a desperate man, grateful she'd come back for him. She got a chipped mug, a dog that won't look at her, and a name tag that says EVE. The trouble is that she doesn't understand what she took. And she's about to find out. It's not forgiveness. It's a reckoning. 𝘎𝘰𝘥𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘨. She's about to learn the word was always a lie.

I was three days old the first time I saw Father Polycarp Okeke's hands shake. He was pouring holy water over my head. A drop fell into my eyes before the prayer began. I remember the cold. I remember his eyes refusing to meet mine. I remember my mother laughing in the front pew and a nun weeping at the back. I did not understand, at three days old, why a priest trembles over a baby. I understand now. I am eighteen years old. I have died three times. And tonight, I am walking up the hill to St. Anthony's Mission to ask Father Polycarp Okeke a question he has been waiting eighteen years for me to ask. But memory is a door that swings both ways. The letter waiting on my pillow when I came home this morning was written in my own handwriting, in handwriting that has been dead since 1962, and it says four words I cannot stop reading: 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨.

She married a ten-year-old king to save a kingdom that was already dying. No one told her why the kings of Eridug-Ki never live to grow old. No one told her what sleeps beneath the ziggurat, or what the god was promised, or why every crown is really a debt. She came south with a mission and a secret carved into her own skin, and she was the only one in the palace not lying about something. Then she fell in love with the one man she was never supposed to touch. And the marriage oath that binds her soul began, very quietly, to crack. A boy-king who hears the dead whisper through clay. A bastard who has spent ten years pretending to be no one. A sister doing terrible arithmetic with a city's worth of lives. A god that does not bless, 𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘴. Four people. One throne. Forty days until the night it all comes apart. They think they're saving the world. One of them is right. That's the problem. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘞𝘢𝘳𝘴 --- 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘖𝘯𝘦. 𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘦. 𝘗𝘪𝘵𝘤𝘩-𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘧𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘭, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵.