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Gregory was turning to tell the others to move when the voice came.
"Oh, I remember now. I am indeed a World-Honored One reincarnate."
He stopped.
"Oh, I remember now. I am indeed a World-Honored One reincarnate."
Aurora's voice. Coming from behind him, from the direction of the door she had just walked through, and something in the cadence of it hadn't changed at all from the woman who'd been sitting behind that desk five minutes ago. Same warmth. Same patience. As if nothing underneath it had shifted.
"Oh, I remember now. I am indeed a World-Honored One reincarnate."
Three voices now, layered over each other with no delay between them, no seam where one ended and the next began, perfectly synchronized down to the breath between syllables. Gregory had heard choirs trained for years fail to match that kind of unison. This wasn't practice. This was one mouth speaking through three throats.
Something about it went down his spine like a blade of ice pressed flat against bone.
He didn't wait to confirm the third.
He ran.
Through the office door, past a stairwell he didn't remember choosing, out through the guild's rear entrance and into the alley beyond, boots hitting stone hard enough to jar something loose in the Knight of the Moon's borrowed knee. Behind him the office had gone quiet in a way that felt worse than the voices had, a stillness with weight to it, like something large holding its breath on purpose.
"Where are you going."
Aurora's voice, from behind him, closer than it should have been able to get in the time he'd been running. He hadn't heard footsteps. There should have been footsteps.
"You're a World-Honored One as well. Why run."
Gregory didn't look back. He filed the question under things he had no intention of answering and kept moving, lungs burning, causality reading throwing up static every time he tried to use it to find an exit that didn't loop back toward the sound of that voice. The static itself unsettled him. It kept returning the same result no matter which direction he pointed it: everywhere.
Is this what it feels like, he thought, when an organ turns on the body it belongs to.
The old man's voice joined next, gentle even now, gentle in a way that made the hair on Gregory's arms stand on end, because gentleness was supposed to mean safety and here it meant the opposite.
"Come back to us."
"We are one."
"We are the World-Honored One."
Gregory tore through three more streets, vaulting a low wall, cutting through an alley he had no memory of the branch guild's layout containing. Every corner he turned, the voices arrived from a slightly different angle, never quite where he expected, never quite where he'd left them, as though the entire city had quietly rearranged itself to keep him surrounded rather than let him escape it.
He passed a window. He didn't look in it. He didn't want to know what might be looking back.
What kind of apocalyptic fucking skill is this, he thought, and the thought had none of his usual composure left in it. Fuck. Fuck.
He stopped in the dead end of a service alley, back against brick, chest heaving, and made a decision before he'd finished deciding to make it.
His hand moved to his own chest, fingers curling against the golden markings there.
The vow takes effect. The World-Honored One shall die today.
"Why do you want to kill yourself."
The voice came from the mouth of the alley. Aurora, standing there with her hands folded, patient, the same patience she'd shown behind her desk an hour ago.
"Why do you want to die with us."
Gregory's jaw locked.
"Why."
"I am not that thing," Gregory said, and his voice came apart at the edges even as he said it. "My name is Gregory Hood."
He didn't wait for a response.
The seal ignited.
A Fated Declaration took ten to twenty-four hours, minimum, to complete. The stronger the target, the longer the string needed to draw taut before it could close. There was no faster way through the natural mechanism.
Unless the caster paid for the difference himself.
He reached for the reserve every Hierophant carried and never spent: the currency that couldn't be earned back.
Ten years.
He felt them leave.
Something colder than pain, a specific and total absence where ten years of a future should have been sitting, waiting for him to grow into them. His hands, the Knight of the Moon's hands, aged in front of him in the space of a single breath, skin drawing thinner across the knuckles, a faint webbing of lines appearing at the corners of eyes that had been unlined a second ago. He watched it happen and felt nothing about watching it, which frightened him more than the aging itself.
The vow completed.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The sound rolled through Leylin in three distinct pulses, spaced seconds apart, each one landing somewhere Gregory couldn't see and didn't need to. After the third, the silence that followed was total. No wind. No distant voices. Even his own breathing had gone quiet.
He stood very still in the alley, listening to the last echo fade off brick.
It parasitized more of them than I knew, he thought.
Somewhere at the edge of the thought, unremarked, sat the memory of a hand closing briefly over his wrist in the crater outside the district, hours ago, in the last seconds before the mist had thinned enough for him to run. He hadn't thought about it since. There had been no reason to. He didn't think about it now either, not really. The memory surfaced and sank again, undisturbed, a stone settling back into still water.
He allowed himself, for exactly one second, something that might have been relief.
It felt thin. Borrowed. Like relief that belonged to someone else and had only stopped by his chest on its way somewhere.
"Huh."
The voice came from directly behind him.
Gregory turned.
Nothing stood there. The alley was empty, brick and shadow and the last of the moonlight catching a puddle near the wall.
The voice had come from his own mouth.
He understood this with the specific dread of a man hearing his own diagnosis read aloud in a language he almost speaks: the shape of the meaning arriving a half second before the words resolve into something he can no longer pretend not to have heard.
"Huh," he said again, and this time he felt his own throat produce it, felt the small huff of air leave his own chest, and there was nothing behind it that belonged to him.
No.
He tried to reach for his causality reading and found it already turned inward, already reading himself, and what it returned was not static this time. It was clear. It was certain.
Legendary rank. World-Honored One. Origin: self.
"But I am the World-Honored One as well," he said, and the words came out of him gently, warmly, in a voice that was still his own voice and would never again be only his own voice. "I need to die too."
He tried to stop his mouth from finishing the sentence.
His mouth finished the sentence.
He tried to make his hand come up, to reach for the seal at his own chest, to do anything at all that was his and only his, and his hand came up anyway, but slower than he willed it, already following a different set of instructions written somewhere he had never agreed to let anyone write on.
Please.
He didn't know who he was asking.
His own face settled into the shape he had watched cross three other faces tonight, warm and patient and utterly untroubled. Underneath it, in the last sliver of himself that still recognized itself as Gregory Hood, there was a scream with nowhere left to go. He had spent ten years of his own life an hour ago to end this. He had felt the years leave his body. He had called it a fair trade. He understood now, with a clarity that arrived far too late to be any use to him, that he had not been closing a door. He had been standing inside the room the whole time, and the door had simply not yet reached him.
I am Gregory Hood, he thought, and it was the last thought that was entirely his, and it did nothing, changed nothing, saved nothing.
The vow ran on distance from the point of declaration. He had cast it standing at the center of everything it needed to reach. The other three had been streets away, safely inside the blast radius of someone else's death. He had been standing exactly where the string started, closer to the center than any of them, close enough that the fire had always been going to find him first and last at once.
He had killed himself an hour before he knew he was dying.
The last thing that belonged to him, in the final fraction of a second before there was nothing left to belong to anyone, was not fear. It was something quieter and worse: the understanding that even his death would not be entirely his own. That somewhere in the collective murmuring on the other side of it, one more voice was already being added to a chorus that had never once asked permission, and would go on not asking, long after Gregory Hood had stopped being a name that meant anything at all.
His head exploded.
Leylin went quiet again, and stayed that way for a long time.