Earth.
The god was turning to earth.
In an alcove within the shell of a cramped, old coal mine, white marble columns crested to an artificial ceiling. The floor was made of cracked ceramic tile smudged with clay and cross-hatched with roots as thick as forearms.
At one end of the Temple of Anamnesis was a tall man with long black hair. The rest of the small space and mineshaft beyond was teeming with charred flesh and bone that coagulated into a single mass.
The god of memory, of rosemary in funerary pyres, of songs and hymns sang toward the sky, was made of the faceless, formless flesh of the deceased. Its bodies decomposed into the earth that poked through the chipped marble. A crisp and sulfuric stench filled the room, more poignant than the very air the man breathed.
Forced to squint from the odor and tears that rheumed, the man looked around for any eyes in the mass, some indication that the god knew he was here.
“Burned in the fire,” came a gravelly voice that echoed from the dozen mouths scattered throughout.
The man winced at the sound.
“Eyes do not survive the swelter, Anastasius. We do not need them to remember.”
The man shuttered again at the quarry of refracting voices. “You—” his voice cracked. He tried again, “You suffered to get where you are. What’s the point of—”
“Anastasius.” The voice commanded silence. The man’s mouth shut with a snap.
From within the scattered piles of flesh, a single skeletal figure rose like a puppet on strings. Its flesh was loose on its body and darkened by a thick layer of soot. Its neck was bisected with stitches and a pair of mammalian ears sprouted from its eye sockets. The face was too distorted to identify any other features. “We hear you. Now come here.”
Anastasius took a slow step toward the central figure as it beckoned with a singed finger. He rekindled his dying anger. “You listen, you hear,” he said, tilting his head in distaste. “So you must have an idea of why I’m here. The past is shit! Yours, mine—Why remember?”
“Anastasius, every one of us has a start.” The voice slithered from mouth to mouth, forcing Anastasius to turn in tight circles to follow the sound. “To remember it is an honor, not a curse.”
“Seems like a curse,” Anastasius muttered, eyeing a dying nerve that was still wriggling.
“It is not,” said the god, succinctly. When Anastasius grimaced like he had a ready retort, they continued, “You’re not wrong, child. To recall can be overwhelming, but it is a worthy burden to carry.”
Anastasius turned back to the central figure. “I don’t care about being worthy! I care about—Well—I don’t want to care about anything! If you know why I’m here, why hesitate? Erase Nisha from my memory— Erase her from the tribe’s memory!” He threw a fist in front of his face to physically prevent a sob from breaching his lips.
“Everything reminds me of her. Everyone reminds me of her, constantly. I am tired of mourning. She's gone. There's nothing left of her to mourn but her memory. With that gone, I can continue going.”
There was a long pause, punctuated by Anastasius’ heavy breathing. He realized then that he had not told anyone of his request, never vocalizing it, so Anamnesis might not have known this was his goal.
The god drew closer to the boy, the slacken muscles of the body's face contorted to first pity, then concern. "Oh child. That... is not remembrance. You are the one torturing such memories into that malice you hate so much." The bodies surrounding Anastasius tilted away, the rotting and burning smell was replaced with funeral scents; calming, serene, flowery.
"That malice could overtake me. Again,” Anastasius said. “We wouldn't want a repeat of what happened last time."
The ears twitched irritably. "Nisha’s memory is important to you. Part of your being. And you want it gone? Are you doing this for the sake of us, or the sake of your own delusions?" The voice, while whisper-soft, still filled the questions with a venom of importance.
"A very smart little girl once said that delusion implies playful deception of the self. Am I deceiving myself, here and now, when I tell you I want to die?"
The body tilted its head. "Deceiving? Deceit implies intent.” The figure, too, deflated into the central mass and Anastasius felt the presence of the room dim a bit.
“Hey!” Anastasius grabbed at an exposed arm but the thing turned to rubble in his hand. "What’s the point of remembering if you won’t make a change?” he shouted.
From the flesh, the skeletal vessel arose once more, this time holding a large tome. They sighed. "You poor boy. Tarnishing your memories as such. Have you ever asked why we kept these bodies? Sulfuric mounds of rotten flesh? It’s because we always respected their place. Their beings."
The vessel rose into the air, hoisted by living roots speckled with fungi. The body’s blackened robes billowed away from a pair of decomposing legs. "We will give you what you want. To respect your wishes to disrespect your remembrance. But first, remember Her for me, won’t you?”
“Her?”
At once, he was back behind the itchy fabric blindfold that plagued him at night. He was back in the past.
He reached up with soft hands that were not his own to feel for the knot that kept the blindfold in place. It occurred to Anastasius, now transported into the body of his past life, that it had never been Asphyxia plaguing his dreams with these memories. It had always been Anamnesis.
Bastard.
The thought was a small thing, burrowed deep within the recesses of a brain that was no longer his. Anastasius was not himself anymore. This was just a memory.
It was then that he realized his feet were moving in fast, light steps. He felt like he was flying over the ground, though he knew this form was still human. Despite the rotundness of the body he possessed, he always felt like he was defying gravity, perhaps even floating above the ground.
He pranced up a set of uneven stone stairs this body knew by heart and his hands shoved open the double doors. The temperature grew colder as he lurched into a drafty throne room he recognized by scent. Like sweet, poisonous fungi. Like Asphyxia, goddess of death.
“Hello, my Reprieve,” called a familiarly deep and sultry voice from across the room. Anastasius pictured the goddess of death lounging across her pillowed throne with her white curls spread like an untidy halo around her sharp cheekbones.
“Good evening, Wife,” Anastasius’ lips said without his permission.
“Come here, my sweet Reprieve,” Asphyxia coaxed.
Anastasius did not want to go, but he wasn’t himself anymore, he was Reprieve.
Despite the blindfold, Reprieve grasped handfuls of a ground-length robe and ran across the uneven castle floor with ease. “My Lovely! My Wife!” Reprieve shouted, bouncing into Asphyxia’s waiting arms.
Reprieve was far smaller than the nine-foot goddess of death, so Asphyxia scooped Reprieve onto her lap.
Asphyxia crooned and pet the closely-shaved, silver head of hair like Reprieve—like Anastasius—was a mere toddler. “Reprieve, my love?” Asphyxia murmured.
“Yes?”
“I know you don’t like it here.” Asphyxia paused and lifted Reprieve’s chin with a taloned finger. “But you are my wife, and I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Reprieve’s eyes, like huge black rhinoceros beetles from her childhood on the Earth, did not need to see to feel Asphyxia’s gaze on her face. She could smell the salt of drying tears on her wife’s cheeks, and reached to wipe them away.
“Death is lonely,” Asphyxia continued. “I left my sanity with my mortal body, and the years I’ve spent here before you were like an eternity-long sentence. I feared it would never end.”
Reprieve nodded slowly. She was absorbing her wife’s words, but her mind was occupied by things she, herself, wanted to say.
“And the end is nice when it is with you.”
Reprieve chewed on her thoughts for a moment. She was not used to this sentimentality from the same woman who disposed of all Reprieve’s pleas to let her charges return to the Earth.
“I think…” Asphyxia continued after a pause. “That as long as you cling to the mortal plane like you do, you will never find solace in your duties.”
She’s telling me to let go of Earth.
Anastasius was thrust from the trance. He recalled the elixir that gave immortality to the gods. How easy it had been to stop drinking it. Weeks and weeks letting their body grow weaker. Until finally blood drained around the hilt of their own dagger. The glowing starlight turned redder and redder until it blotted her vision.
Asphyxia’s hand found the small of Reprieve’s back. “You value life to an extent that I do not.”
“I think—!” Reprieve began.
But before she could decide what she thought, Asphyxia continued, “And I admire you for that. I do. But you have to move on. Death means change. And reviving and reincarnating your charges does not give the Earth the chance to learn from that change. Revivification ensures the same mistakes are allowed to continue. Consequences become null.”
“You’re telling me to be more selective with my justice,” Reprieve murmured.
“I’m telling you that I love you. And without love there is no loss, without loss there is no strive for change, and without change there is no progression and no growth.”
Reprieve’s brow furrowed as she ruminated on this. “You’re ordering me to stop asking you to let my charges go back.”
Asphyxia laughed at that. “I’m requesting that you consider my words.”
“I will consider them, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy them.” Reprieve furrowed her brow.
“Of course, my Reprieve.”
When Anastasius returned to himself, he was still standing in front of the gargantuan form of the god of memory. Their vessel’s nose was tilted between the dusty pages of a thick tome. Their hands were crossed behind their back, but a quill pen scratched words into the leathery pages of its own accord.
The quill continued to scribble as the vessel’s head tilted up toward Anastasius and its ears swiveled. “You have made your decision,” they said.
“Yes,” Anastasius said, stiffly. Then, choosing his words slowly, he added, “I think I want to keep Nisha alive. In my memory. But I’m tired of the well-wishes and sympathies. I don’t want that. If I’m to remember her, I want to celebrate her life, not mourn her death.
I still want you to erase her from the minds of everyone in the tribe. Except me. Everyone except me.”
The stitches bisecting the vessel’s neck curled into a greasy, snaggle-toothed smile. “That, we can do.”
Anastasius returned to his tribe with a new sense of vigor. No more mourning, no more sympathies. He was pacified at the thought that he could keep Nisha, his night, alive through memory alone. This was a burden he was emphatic to share alone, by himself.
Anastasius’ pace quickened as he reached the edge of the main clearing. He trotted over to his own den that he shared with his sister, Jacalynn. He turned back into human form and pulled at the thread-bare curtain that blocked out most of the sun.
“Jacalynn?”
His sister was sitting cross-legged in human form facing the wall.
“I am back, Jacalynn,” he said, approaching cautiously. “Are you alright, Sunshine?”
He waved a hand between her eyes and the wall. Only then did life return to her blank face. “Hm?” She looked up with a curious tilt of her head. “Were you talking? I was thinking.”
“I just asked if you were okay. What did you do when I was gone?”
“You were gone?” She tilted her head the other way.
“Uh, Sunshine…” Anastasius knelt down in front of her and tucked a lock of brown to red hair behind her ear. “I was gone for three days.”
“How many days?”
“Three,” he said, anxiety growing like a weed within his stomach.
“Are you sure? I think I would remember something like that!”
Anastasius simply nodded, a frown etching canyons into his face.