Shades in Shadow

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“When I am free,” he said, “I will choose who shapes me.”

“But…” I frowned. “That isn’t freedom.”

“At the dawn of reality I was myself. There was nothing and no one else to influence me—only the Maelstrom that had given birth to me, and it did not care. I tore open my flesh and spilled out the substance of what became your realm: matter and energy and cold black blood. I devoured my own mind and reveled in the novelty of pain.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. I swallowed hard and tried to will them away, but abruptly the hands returned, lifting my chin. Fingers stroked my eyes shut, brushing the tears away.

“When I am free, I will choose,” he said again, whispering, very close.

—The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, chapter 22: “Such Rage”

Nahadoth

wants.

Want is a thing. Nahadoth has never lost the habit of attempting to classify things, because things were once so difficult to understand. At the beginning. Time is a thing, too; Nahadoth knows this now, has accepted the conceptualization of beginningness and endingness and whereness and whoness because these are all things that make life more interesting, though it is also interesting to discard them. Whatness, however, is always hard. Nahadoth is everything, after all.

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