Chapter Text
PART I: THE NIGHT LORD
The gods cannot hear unless they are spoken to.
All divine beings are born of silence. But one by one, as the mortals learn of them and speak their names in worship, in reverence, the gods can hear their prayers—and grant them.
The Land Queen was first. Mortals learned of her gentle embrace, of her love of all her children, of how she birthed them and nourished them, and they loved her in return. They begged her to keep them fed, to house them, to clothe them, to protect their mothers and their wives and their children. She took her form when she was first prayed to, and she was more than happy to hold the humans close to her bosom, safe and sound, humming a gentle lullaby as she rocked them to sleep with the turning of the world.
The Sun King was next. Bright and shining and warm, the keeper of the fire in the sky itself, they worshiped him in droves, asking for his blessings of temperate weather and fruitful harvests and light to keep the things that preyed in the darkness away. When he heard their prayers, he found his form, smiled, and spoke back to them, his lips moving and his chest thundering with the warmth of their love.
The gods had been there since the beginning of time, but they were silent, hidden, unknown—until the mortals took notice and gave them form and voices and names. One by one came all the others, lords and ladies of the rivers, the wind, the trees, the snow. Clouds and thunder, fire and lava, lightning and rain, all of them were revered. All of them were prayed to. All of them had words, bodies, a tangible, familiar image for the mortals to idolize.
But no one prayed to the Night Lord.
Fate was a cruel mistress. It was the only thing the gods were subject to, the only force they themselves didn’t understand, the only power older and stronger than they were. And for whatever reason, it had condemned him to isolation from the start.
Everyone was afraid of the dark.
The mortals wouldn’t speak to him.
All he heard was silence.
Nothing.
His world was painted in shades of black and white and grey, the colors of the starlight and the velvet night sky.
From the moment he opened his eyes and breathed himself into being, he was nameless, formless, hollow and void. He crept in the shadows, hid in the crepuscule, filled the dark spaces between all things. He was nothing. He was all that was unseen, all that was concealed, all that was unheard.
The animals that hunted in the night belonged to him, their eyes keen and sharp in the dark—like his. Wolves were his children, rats his pets, owls his companions. He walked with them in the quiet of their newborn world, shielding them with his cloak of darkness and watching over them during their nocturnal exploits, both curious and proud when they rent flesh, ripped throats, and crushed bones.
He was curious, too, about the others: the mortal humans who slept when his world was awake.
They weren’t his creatures. They were made for the daylight, the warmth, those children of the earth and the sun. He could see them sometimes before dawn broke, rising from their slumber at the barest rays of light just before he took his leave of their world to return to his celestial palace built in the void of the sky, nestled in the spaces between the stars. Or perhaps if they stayed up late, as they often did, he could watch them revel in the shadows of his night, cast long by the silvery flames of the fires they lit, lips and limbs eternally and ephemerally entwined in the dark.
Even though he was so often their refuge, none of them prayed to him. Not truly.
They worshiped each other, not the Night itself.
So still he could hear nothing.
But the other gods whispered of him, spoke the forbidden name they’d given him, and through their murmurs, the mortals caught wind—but they didn’t understand.
They were afraid.
They didn’t dare speak his name, for fear that he might hear them.
For fear that he might see them for what they truly were if he did.
From the moment the mortals were born, the Night Lord watched, but he couldn’t listen. He saw, but he couldn’t act. He was, but he couldn’t be.
For thousands of years he wandered, watching, waiting for a single person to pray to him. He observed the humans building communities, learning and growing, falling in love, creating families of their own. He studied them as they constructed towns and cities and countries, developed technology, created governments, crowned kings. They multiplied and grew, changed and evolved, became more complex. But there was always a constant, no matter where he traveled, and no matter what he saw.
There were always lovers.
The Night Lord found himself wondering what it might feel like to merge with another being, to meld together in the darkness, to connect with just one other. He’d never had such a thing before.
He was so deeply lonely.
No one saw him.
No one loved him.
Everyone else had someone who prayed to them, who revered them.
Just one.
He only needed one.
While the mortals grew in number, so did their religions, and so did their gods. More lords and ladies sprang into being—gods of farming, of commerce, of innovation, of learning, of art, of music—and they, too, found their forms and their voices as they were worshiped.
But still no one prayed to the Night Lord.
Perhaps it was because despite their fires, despite their candles, despite the gentle light of the stars he gave them, they were still afraid of the dark, even though he was nothing to be feared. What if he went into the light of day, like all the other gods? Would they trust him then? Was it that they couldn’t see him? He was the only one awake when the others were asleep—what was he missing out on?
He had to wonder.
One night, he stayed up until morning, sitting in the middle of a forest and waiting for the sunrise. When the first of its rays crested over the hill and through the trees, the Night Lord gasped. He’d never seen such an abundance of light before; the light of his stars was delicate and soft, like falling snow caught between dark, sweeping eyelashes. Now the world was awash in brightness, nearly blinding to his eyes so accustomed only to the velvet black of night, and he looked away from it, blinking from its harsh sting. But when he tilted his face, one of the rays broke through the trees and fell upon his being.
He learned something that day.
Fire.
The sun was made of fire.
It scorched him, split him open, would have burned him down to his bones—if he’d had any.
The Night Lord screamed inside himself, but he couldn’t hear it; he could only feel the vibrations of it in his dark, shadowed form, what little of it he had. He was wracked and writhing with pain, incredible, searing, unending pain from that cursed inferno of a sun. He crawled to a nearby hole in the ground and hid inside, weeping silver tears and shivering in pure agony at the gruesome, slashing burn he’d sustained while the light of the sun scorched the world, drawing his cloak of darkness around him to protect himself from the wretched day.
When the sun finally set, he emerged again in the twilight, safe and cool once more, soothed by the temperate air and the gentle light of his stars. The Night Lord crawled to a stream to look upon himself in the reflection of the water for the first time.
He could still feel the burn of day sinking into his form, still splitting him open, still searing into his soul.
He needed to assess the damage.
He needed to see.
The other gods who were worshiped had faces, mouths, hair, eyes, ears, all of them given the likeness of the mortals who adored them. All of them could take mortal form and walk disguised among their believers if they so desired.
The Night Lord had none of that, at least in the traditional sense. Looking back at him in the water was a swirling form of infinite velvet darkness, vaguely formed into the shape of a man. Two bright stars glittered out from his face in the place of eyes, silvery and spectacular and luminous. But where the ray of sunlight had touched him laid a gaping slice of the blackest black, a sinking void carved deep into his shifting, shadowed body, like a mountain split by a sudden earthquake revealing the virgin earth contained within. He lifted a dark limb and pressed at it, but seized silently again in agony at the part of himself that had been burned away and laid bare by the light of his opposite, a raw and horrifying hurt, a wound burst open to the world.
Never again did he try to walk in the light of day.
It took decades for the pain of the sun to fade. He would have healed faster if he’d had the power of prayers to lend him strength.
But he didn’t.
The Night Lord became desperate.
He had an idea.
Perhaps he wasn’t going about this the right way. Perhaps he should try to curry the mortals’ favor to change his reputation, to clear his sullied name. What other reason could there be that no one loved him?
So he used his power to help.
When a woman fled her husband in the night, covered in bruises and bleeding from his hands, the Night Lord threw his cloak over her shoulders so that her abuser couldn’t find her.
When forbidden lovers met in secret, he shielded them from the light of the stars, lengthened the shadows of their torches, blessed them with more darkness—and more time.
When children cried out in fear of some unknown terror, he caressed their cheeks and closed their eyes, soothing them into soft, peaceful slumber once more.
He loved the children most of all. They smelled like the world did when it was still new.
But it was all for naught.
The mortals didn’t notice. They didn’t know it was him. The Land Queen got the credit for shielding battered wives, the Lord of Flame for blessing and aiding lovers, the Lady of the Wind for rocking babies back to sleep.
No one seemed to think it was the Night himself.
They didn’t understand.
So the Night Lord tried to make it known that it was he who’d taken action—that it was he who’d done those things.
But when he bestowed gifts upon the mortals, they were rejected.
When he tried to grant them favor, he was ignored.
When he tried to show himself to them, they didn't see him for what he was. Instead, they ran screaming from his swirling shadows, from the depths of his darkness, terrified of what could lie within.
One day, he gave up.
He’d failed.
When the last mortal shielded his eyes and cowered in fear rather than face the dark, the Night Lord’s will finally shattered. His world had always been devoid of sound, but now even what little vibrancy the night and the stars gave it leached away in his despair, the stark black and white shades of the world dying and bleeding into shifting monotones of grey and nothing else.
Nothing else save for anything he touched.
Anything the Night Lord touched turned to corrupted darkness, withering and shriveling into rotten black ash, flaking to the ground, its light and life spent.
He was no longer simply Night.
He had become Death.
And all hope of being prayed to was lost for him now.
The Night Lord stared at the parts of him that had wrought such destruction and decay. He turned his eye next to the mortals who had slighted him, who had forsaken him, who had misunderstood him.
They weren’t perfect. They never had been, though the other gods didn’t seem to realize that. But the Night Lord? He could see it as clear as day.
Nearly everything sentient carried shadows within themselves, minor imperfections, niggling senses of doubt and anxiety and pettiness. This was normal. This was natural. It was the way of things. Just as everything carried a certain degree of light within it, so too did every being harbor a bit of shadowed darkness beneath their skin. He had it too, and so did the other gods, bestowed upon them in various degrees by Fate to balance the scales with the light.
The light, and the dark.
All things in harmony.
But over the years, some of those shadows in mortals twisted, deepened, degraded into something else: a darkness wholly unnatural, a concealed corruption of character that was growing ever blacker and spreading ever wider with every new generation of mortals. He saw the worst of humanity during the night, after all. When the most debased among them thought they could hide their deeds in the dark.
What those mortals hid inside themselves was an abomination of the shadows the Night Lord ruled.
The corruption had been present throughout time and had been stewing since the beginning of it, set free by the mortals’ actions and accumulating in the land itself.
Perhaps it was time to reveal how truly ugly it was.
The Night Lord decided to unleash what was lurking beneath their mortal forms—the darkness he knew to be in their own hearts. He decided to let it loose it upon the world, to rip the masks off of what the humans were hiding, to unveil the deep corruption of their true nature to the others.
And let them rot in the process.
He plunged his hands into the ground and bade his shadows twist throughout the roots of the earth. Farmland became fallow. Famine was hot on its heels, and when the people and the animals began to die off in droves, pestilence followed.
The Land Queen wept.
The Sun King wailed.
The other gods tried to reason with him, to convince him to stop.
But he could not hear them.
His world was still silent.
Their words died in deafness.
The Night Lord watched as beings suffered, divine and mortal alike, his heart hard and cold. When he’d retreated to the realm of the gods to watch from the sidelines as mortals built temples to his cousins, he’d also had to watch as everyone’s strength grew but his on the prayers they received. He watched their lips move while they laughed and talked to one another, wordless and soundless to his ears. He watched their joy and their merriment, their love and their warmth. But none of it was his.
Now it would be no one’s.
The Night Lord let the shadow of his own despair wash over the world, worm its way through the depths of mortal society, sink into the hearts of men.
If he would not be worshiped, then he would be truly feared.
He’d found power in the terror.
In the end, it hadn't taken much effort. Only a nudge.
Cities burned. Nations fell. Families starved. Animals sunk down to the ground to be reclaimed by the soil, their bones bleached and crumbling to dust. Rivers dried up and war broke out over the remaining resources, brother slaughtering brother, king slaughtering king, nations consuming nations.
As it turned out, he hadn’t needed to be the cause of death and decay at all.
The mortals were quite capable of tearing each other apart.
They were very good at bringing darkness upon themselves: it had been in them all along. All he’d done was reveal it, unveil the truth, sweep back the curtain of shadow concealing the cruelty in their hearts—and let their own corruption fester into the earth itself.
The other gods were mortified.
They exiled him.
Over time, he stopped caring.
Over time, the others forgot about him.
Over time, his loneliness grew.
Silence was all he knew.
Silence, and the dark.
Just one.
He’d only needed one person to have faith in him.
But instead, he had no one.
No one.
One day, the hopelessness of it all overtook him.
The Night Lord retreated to his sanctuary in the heavens, his celestial palace concealed amongst his stars. Once he’d laid in his bed and blocked out their gentle, soothing light, he pulled his cloak of darkness over his face, closed his eyes—
And dreamed.