Diablo had no mouth left to scream with, so he screamed with the walls. The orb was smaller than a fist and smoother than any stone. From the outside it swallowed light. From the inside, it was all Diablo had. He pressed against the curved dark and found no seam, no hinge, no crack he could pry. His other half, Creusus, had stuffed him in here after their fight in the stone hall. One punch, then another, then a hundred, until Diablo's body came apart like wet ash. Now what was left of him lived in a shell the size of a plum. He remembered being whole. A knight's sword, a thousand years ago, a bright line of pain, and then two of him. One half had walked off wearing his face and forgotten everything. That half had grown into Creusus. That half had won. Diablo turned the memory over and over. The hate warmed him. It was the only warm thing in the orb. He took shape again out of that heat. Not a body, not really. A silhouette. A hunched black thing with a jagged crown of hair and a mouth that showed teeth without needing lips. He looked down at himself and laughed a dry laugh. A void shape. Fine. A void shape could still want things. He pressed a hand to the inside of the shell. The dark pushed back. He pressed harder. A thin gold line opened under his palm, no wider than a hair. Light bled through from somewhere outside. He heard, for a moment, the muffled sound of Creusus breathing. Creusus was carrying the orb. Of course he was. He would keep it close, the fool, because he thought he had won. Diablo dragged his hand along the inner curve. More gold lines followed, spidering out from the first. Cracks. Not enough to break. Enough to see by. Enough to listen. He put his ear to the shell. He heard footsteps on stone. A market, maybe. A woman laughing. Creusus saying something short and quiet to a stranger. A plan settled into Diablo like a cold stone dropping into a well. He could not break the orb from inside. Not yet. But he could feed the cracks. He could push his hate through them, thin as smoke, and find someone out there with a body worth taking. Someone stronger than the one Creusus had stolen. Someone with weight in the world. He pressed both hands flat against the shell and began to push. The gold lines brightened. A single black thread of him slipped through the largest crack and out into the air on the other side. Somewhere beyond the orb, Creusus stopped walking. Diablo smiled with his teeth.

The black thread of Diablo slipped back into the orb with a snap. The gold cracks on the inside of the shell dimmed. Diablo staggered in his void shape and pressed a hand to the curved dark. Creusus had felt him. Creusus had pushed back. Whatever power Creusus had stolen from him, he was using it now to seal the very cracks Diablo had opened. Diablo bared his teeth at the shell. He would try again. He always tried again. He fed the hate into his hands and pushed. Nothing happened. He pushed harder. A single gold line brightened, then faded. The orb drank his effort like dry sand drank rain. Somewhere outside, Creusus exhaled, and the last of the crack closed. Diablo sank to the floor of his cell, if a cell the size of a plum had a floor. To keep from going out entirely, he did what he had done every day since the stone hall. He told himself the old stories. He needed the heat of them to stay alive. He remembered a village he had walked through once, whole and terrible. He remembered the mother who had begged him for her child's life on a road of black mud. He remembered the exact pitch of her voice. He had used it to laugh. He remembered a city he had turned against itself with a single whisper in the right ear, and how the streets had smelled after. He reached for the next story and found something wrong with it. The mother's face came back too clearly. Not as a trophy. As a face. Her hands had been small and red from work. The child had been asleep against her shoulder, unaware. Diablo had killed them both without slowing his step. He tried to push the memory away. It stayed. Another came behind it. A boy he had burned inside a barn. An old man he had made kneel in his own doorway. A girl who had run and not been fast enough. He had used these deaths as kindling for a thousand years. Now the kindling looked back at him. He curled his black hands into fists. "No," he said. His voice was thin inside the shell. "No. These are mine. I earned them." But he saw them. He saw the mother. He saw the child. He saw every face he had passed over on his way to being feared. The hate was still there. Under the hate, for the first time in a thousand years, something else moved. A small, cold weight in his chest that had not been there yesterday. Outside the orb, Creusus began to walk again. The shell rocked with his stride. Diablo pressed his forehead to the dark and did not push. He listened to his rival's footsteps and understood, with a fury that shook him, that he could no longer light himself on the old fires. He would need a new fuel. He did not yet know what.

Diablo sat with his forehead against the shell and listened to Creusus walk. The old fires would not light. The mother's face stayed. The child's small hand stayed. He needed fuel, and he could not find it in what he had done. He looked at his hands instead. Black. Thin. His. The orb was small, but it was his. Creusus had sealed the outside. He had not sealed the inside. Diablo pressed his palm flat to the curved dark. He pushed inward instead of out. The shell held. The space behind his hand did not. It gave, the way a held breath gives when you finally let it go. He fed it what he had. Not hate. Will. He wanted a room. A room appeared, small and grey, with a floor under his feet. He wanted a sky. A low grey sky closed over him. He wanted ground that could hold weight. Ground rose to meet his step. He laughed once, and the sound stayed in the room with him. He had a room. Inside the plum-sized dark, he had a room the size of a country. He made a river next. He made a hill above it. He made a tree on the hill because he remembered trees. He pulled a piece of himself off his own arm to do it. The piece went into the tree and stayed there, green. He understood then. He took his soul in both hands and broke it. Not in half. Into pieces too many to count. He kept the largest piece for the thing that stood on the hill and watched. The rest he scattered. One piece became a woman drawing water. One became a boy running behind a dog. One became an old man mending a net. One became the dog. One became a fish under the net. Thousands. He made them and set them down and let them walk. Time moved the way he told it to. He told it to move fast. Children he had placed at a river grew old and died and their grandchildren built a town on the same bank. He watched a language form. He watched a god get named after him and then forgotten and then named again. When he was bored, he sent a plague. When he was hungry, he pulled a piece of himself back out of a farmer and ate it. The farmer fell in a field and the wheat kept growing. Diablo grew stronger. Every death fed the piece on the hill. He did this for what felt like a million years. When he lifted his head again, he was not thin. He was full. He had made his own kindling. He had made his own fire. He stood on the hill inside the orb and looked at the shell above his grey sky and understood he was no longer starving. Creusus, outside, kept walking. He did not know what he was carrying.

Diablo stood on the hill and watched his world run. The river below moved because he told it to. The town on the bank grew because he told it to. He was full now, and full meant hungry in a new way. He walked down the hill into the town. The people did not see him as a man. They saw a shape in the sky above the roofs, a black nothing with a jaw. They fell on their faces in the dust. A woman pushed her son forward and pressed his head to the ground. A priest in grey lifted a knife. "Feed me," Diablo said, and his voice came out of every wall. They fed him. They built a stone house at the center of the town and called it his. They killed a goat on the step, then a bull, then a man who had stolen bread. Each death came up the hill to him as a small warm thing he swallowed. He grew. He let them make a book about him. He let them draw his shape on their doors. He watched a boy grow into a soldier who killed for him and died old in a bed, whispering his name. The whisper came up the hill and Diablo took it in like water. He made the religion spread. He seeded prophets in far towns. He staged floods so the survivors would thank him. He sent a plague and then a cure and let them call the cure his mercy. He recreated a war he remembered from the outside world, the one where a city on a hill burned for six days. He burned this one for seven. Every death fed him. Every prayer fed him. He was no longer the piece on the hill. He was the sky over the country. He was the ground under the town. He was the goat on the step before the knife came down.

Diablo was the sky. He was the river. He was the knife on the step and the throat under the knife. He had won his internal world so completely that he had stopped being a man inside it. There was no Diablo standing on the hill anymore. There was only the world, and the world was him. That was the problem. He remembered the plan. Push himself through the cracks as smoke. Slip out into the hand that carried the orb. But there was no self left to push. A sky cannot squeeze through a crack. A ground cannot leak. He had grown too large for his own door. He searched the world for a piece of himself he could still hold. He passed over the priests. He passed over the soldiers. He found the priest-warrior who had fed him a thousand souls and died at thirty-five in a bed of bone. Malachai. The strongest scrap of him. The part he had poured the most into. Diablo pulled himself in from the sky. He pulled himself up from the ground. He gathered every prayer and every death back toward one shape. It hurt in a way nothing had hurt before. He was cutting the world off his own back. Trees went grey. The river stopped. The town on the bank fell quiet as its god left it. He poured the whole gathered mass into Malachai's dead body on the hill. The body opened its eyes. The bones under the skeletal robe cracked and reset. Diablo stood up inside it and felt fingers again. Ten of them. He flexed a hand. He had a hand. "Master," said the mouth, in Malachai's voice, before Diablo pushed the voice down and made it his own. "Quiet." Above him, close and enormous, was the inside wall of the orb. It had been the sky a moment ago. Now it was just a shell, thin as a plum skin from this side, streaked with the gold cracks Creusus had sealed and resealed. Diablo raised Malachai's fist. He put every scrap he had left behind the blow. The world he had built for a million years, the worship, the wars, the goat on the step — all of it went into one punch. The shell broke. Light came in like water into a hold. The orb split around him. He felt the hand that had been carrying it flinch open. He felt air, real air, cold and wide, for the first time in an age. He fell out onto stone in a body that was his now. Malachai's chest heaved with breath Diablo had not asked it to take. Somewhere above him, a voice he knew too well began to shout. Creusus had heard the orb break. Diablo pushed the borrowed body up onto its knees, and ran.