And perhaps it was even simpler than that. I needed to eat and drink and pass waste now. That meant I could starve and thirst, and that my intestines and other organs were actually necessary. If I damaged them, they might not grow back.

What would be the most exciting way to commit suicide?

Because I did not want to die an old man. Kahl had gotten that much right. If I had to die, I would die as myself — as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child. I had blazed bright in my life. What was wrong with blazing in death, too?

Before I reached middle age, I decided. Surely I could think of something interesting by then.

On that heartening note, I finally slept.

I stoing?ht="0em"od on a cliff outside the city, gazing upon the wonder that was Sky-in-Shadow and the looming, spreading green of the World Tree.

“Hello, Brother.”

I turned, blinking, though I was not really surprised. When the first mortal creatures grew the first brains that did more than pump hearts and think of meat, my brother Nsana had found fulfillment in the random, spitting interstices of their sleeping thoughts. He had been a wanderer before that, my closest playmate, wild and free like me. But sad, somehow. Empty. Until the dreams of mortals filled his soul.

I smiled at him, understanding at last the sorrow he must have felt in those long empty years before the settling of his nature.

“So this is the proof of it,” I said. I had pockets for the moment, so I slipped my hands into them. My voice was higher pitched; I was a boy again. In dreams, at least, I was still myself.

Nsana smiled, strolling toward me along a path of flowers that stirred without wind. For a moment his truest shape flickered before me: faceless, the color of glass, reflecting our surroundings through the distorting lenses of limbs and belly and the gentle featureless curve of his face. Then he filled in with detail and colors, though not those of a mortal. He did nothing like mortals if he could help it. So he had chosen skin like fine fabric, unbleached damask in swirling raised patterns, with hair like the darkest of red wine frozen in midsplash. His irises were the banded amber of polished, petrified wood — beautiful, but unnerving, like the eyes of a serpent.

“The proof of what?” he asked, stopping before me. His voice was light, teasing, as if it had been only a day since we’d seen each other and not an aeon.

“My mortality,” I said. “I wouldn’t have seen you otherwise.” I smiled, but I knew he would hear the truth in my voice. He had abandoned me for mortalkind, after all. I’d gotten over it; I was a big boy. But I would not pretend it hadn’t happened.

Nsana let out a little sigh and walked past me, stopping on the edge of a cliff. “Gods can dream, too, Sieh. You could have found me here anytime.”

“I hate dreaming.” I scuffed the ground with a foot.

“I know.” He put his hands on his hips, his expression frankly admiring as he gazed over the dreamscape I’d created. This one was not merely a memory, as my dream of the gods’ realm had been. “A shame, too. You do it so well.”

“I don’t do anything. It’s a dream.”

“Of course you do. It comes from you, after all. All of this” — he gestured expansively around us, and the dreamscape rippled with the passage of his hands —“is you. Even the fact that you let me come here is your doing, because you certainly never allowed it before.” He lowered his arms and looked at me. “Not even during the years you spent as an Arameri slave.”

I sighed, tired, even asleep. “I don’t want to think right now, Nsa. Please.”

“You never want to think, you silly ave?sighedboy.” Nsana came over, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pulling me close. I put up a token resistance, but he knew it was token, and after a moment I sighed and let my head rest on his chest. Then it was not his chest — it was his shoulder — because suddenly I was taller than him and not a child anymore. When I lifted my head in surprise, Nsana let out a long sigh and cupped my face in his hands so that he could kiss me. He did not share himself with me that way because there was no point; I already stood encompassed within him, and he within me. But I did remember other kisses, and other existences, when innocence and dreams had been two halves of the same coin. Back then, I’d thought we would spend the rest of eternity together.

The dreamscape changed around us. When we parted, Nsana sighed, the fabric patterns of his face shifting into new lines. They hinted at words, but meant nothing.

“You’re not a child anymore, Sieh,” he said. “Time to grow up now.”