Saturn's Arc

Chapter 10 of 4

Saturn fixed the glowing rune in his mind and turned toward the gate. But a green light bloomed at the treeline first. A goddess made of moss and roots stepped from the dark, flowers in her hair, her eyes two points of pale fire. Gaia. She had fought the rot in the north and won. Saturn knew her name from the dragon's stories. She stopped at the ring of pale fire and looked at him without fear. "You found the drain," she said. "The dead light goes down. I have felt it pulling at the earth for years." "Then you know where it leads," Saturn said. "The earth is forgetting itself. Slow, then all at once." Gaia touched the gate. One vine crept from her hand into the stone. "The one who made the dead light feeds on that forgetting. You cannot kill a thing that eats being forgotten. The gods tried to forget you, Saturn. It did not kill you. It made you." Saturn went still. He understood her then. The demiurge was not a creature waiting below. It was the act of forgetting itself, grown teeth. He had chased a shadow because the shadow had no body to find. "I was unmade the same way," he said. "The gods agreed to forget me. That is how the demiurge works. It made Lilith bait. It made Malacaww. It planned all of this to wake me, and to wake worse." Deep in Hermit's Passage, far behind them, the sleeping song faltered. Saturn felt it like a dropped stitch. Malacaww stirred. His time bled faster now. Lilith came to his side, torch burning with small fairy flames. "You cannot fight a drain with despair," she said. "You feed it. Every despair you give it, it swallows." Saturn looked at the glowing rune, then at Gaia, then at the bone-pale cage that hung forgotten near the gate's base, ribs wired shut, built long ago to bind darkness. An answer formed. "Then I will not fight it," he said. "I am despair. I am what the forgetting makes. If it swallows me, I go inside it. And what is inside a thing can be remembered." Gaia's light flickered. "If you go down the drain, you do not come back." "I am not asking to come back." Saturn turned to Lilith. "You are awake. That is what I came for. The rest was never mine to keep." A fiddle note cut the air. Rollesio stood at the treeline with his bow raised, an elegant carved fiddle under his chin, its runes catching the firelight. He had followed from the passage. "The pipe is spent," he said. "But this is older. It sleeps gods. It will hold the lion while you work." He drew the bow. A low note rolled out, heavy as fog. Far off, Malacaww's stirring went quiet again. Saturn stepped to the gate and breathed the glowing rune into the stone, as the dragon had shown. The pale fire bent toward him. The dead light far below leaned up to meet its maker. Saturn poured himself in. Not as a weapon. As a gift. All his despair, all his truth, every drop the gods had tried to forget, down the drain and into the knot of cold light at the center. The drain could swallow despair. It could not swallow being remembered. Saturn filled the dead light with himself until there was no room left for forgetting. The cold seed cracked. Light that was no light tore apart. The pulling stopped. Across the broken lands, the rot had no drain to run down, and it began to die for good. Gaia's eyes burned brighter. She pressed both hands to the ground. "It is letting go," she whispered. "The earth remembers itself." Grass pushed through the gray. The gate's pale fire guttered out. The rune went dark. The way to the demiurge closed because the demiurge was gone, eaten from the inside by the one thing it could never digest. Lilith stood at the dark gate with her small fairy torch. Saturn was not beside her. He was inside the broken dead light, part of the end of forgetting, woven into every root Gaia felt wake beneath her feet. Rollesio lowered the fiddle. Deep in the passage, Malacaww slept on, his trap unsprung forever, his maker undone. Lilith lifted the torch and found no grave to mourn at. There was only green coming up through the gray, and in every living thing that could remember, a god of despair who had finally been given a place that could not be forgotten. She set the torch in the gate's dead frame and walked home through the waking forest, carrying his truth, which was the only part of him that had ever wanted to stay.