Chapter 39: The God Who Watches
In the space between divine and mortal, where only the oldest of things can reach, Aethel watched.
Her exile was not a place. It was a condition, a severing that left her present everywhere and nowhere, aware and incapable. She had spent a thousand mortal years in it before Jonathan. She was spending the time after the sanctum differently.
She was thinking.
This was not her typical mode. Exile for Aethel had been, from the beginning, a furnace, her rage its fuel, her hunger its heat. She had not examined the rage. She had simply sustained it.
The sanctum had changed that.
When the wards had reached through Jonathan and found her seed and isolated it, when she had felt the seed reshape itself around his interior rather than hers, she had screamed with all the fury of a god denied. And then the scream had died, and what was left was something she had not felt in a very long time.
Surprise.
She looked at what he had done. Not what he had used. What he had done. He had walked into the binding place of the divine court, alone, and told the wards the complete truth about himself, and the wards had believed him, and she had been separated from her own instrument by nothing more sophisticated than honesty.
She turned this over.
She had chosen him for his desperation. For his love, which she had read as a lever. For his intelligence, which she had intended as a tool. She had not chosen him for this, this precise, patient, unperformative capacity to simply be what he was without apology or embellishment.
She had not thought to look for that.
She watched him walk through the city. She watched him sit in a Guild outpost and talk to the pink haired investigator without strategy, just truth. She watched his face.
She watched the investigator's face too.
The human complexity of it was not something Aethel had ever found interesting. She had seduced gods. She had reduced divine beings to trembling devotees. Mortal attachment had always struck her as small, the limited, clinging thing that brief lives built because they could not sustain anything larger.
She watched the investigator look at Jonathan in that anteroom.
She watched Jonathan not look back in exactly the way that meant he was aware of being looked at.
Something moved in her that she did not immediately identify. It was not contempt. It was not hunger. It was something older than both, a recognition that reached back past the exile, past the corruption, past the court, all the way back to the very beginning of what she had once been. Before the need to be seen had curdled into the need to be worshipped.
She pulled her awareness back.
She did not want to look at this feeling directly. It was very old and she did not trust it.
But she turned away from him more slowly than she had intended.
In the distance of her exile, she thought:
He is going to be remarkable.
And then, because she was Aethel:
Which means he is going to be a problem.
She began to plan.
But the planning felt, for the first time in a very long time, less like hunger and more like interest.
She noted this. She filed it away under things she would not think about yet.
She went back to planning.