Chapter VIII

  The Ashi’man

  The sun had set. The light of the stars was halfhearted and remote. Still, it was enough to navigate the beach effectively. Vito dragged the boat ashore, then turned to Thing.

  “So, what do we do, to summon them I mean?”

  Thing’s eyes were on the bones, moving from skeleton to skeleton, looking for something.

  “Look for sigils, ‘kay?” it said, “we need to find twenty.”

  Vito turned to Cor and told him what it had said.

  Cor nodded, just once, and began to circle one rib at a time, examining them from every side. Vito did the same, sometimes crouching to dig a piece out, resting against the hard leather sleeve over his right arm, hoping to find a sigil beneath.

  Thing saw him doing this, and said,

  “You don’t have to do that! They’ll be visible.”

  Vito got to his feet, and the search continued. Another minute or so passed before he noticed something: a carving at about eye-level. It wasn’t too large, about the size of Vito’s hand, scrawled on the side of a rib eroded by the wind. It seemed to depict a droplet, its image cut into the bone with thick, uneven lines.

  “Think I found one!” Vito called out.

  Cor and Thing came to him. It was strange seeing Thing walking on its new legs, its scarf and long burgundy hair bobbing with its stride.

  “I got this,” said Thing, approaching the sigil. When it was close enough to touch, Thing stretched out its hand and lightly began feeling the air around the sigil, getting closer and closer with each swoop of its hand. After three near-misses, Thing placed its palm on the symbol, and it began to glow with a dull, yet lustrous light.

  “What does it mean? Is this what the spirit language looks like written?” Vito asked.

  Thing shook its head with a giggle. “Nope! It’s supposed to be liquid metal! Mercury, to be exact.” It began to look around for the other sigils. “It’s a symbol for what you call ‘the Metal Gods’.”

  Vito told Cor what Thing had said.

  Cor seemed excited.

  “Oh really, so we’ll see the symbol of my gods here too, the Dragon Pantheon?”

  Thing answered simply, “yup!”

  “Cool!” said Cor after Vito translated Thing’s answer for him.

  Vito knew the Metal Gods to be one of the twenty pantheons worshipped by the people of Bangye-Rua and Remex. However, the fact that the symbol was here at the Great Whale Grave, being used officially by the Ashi’man as their method of summoning, seemed to suggest that, counter to what his mother believed, human-conceived distinctions between the spirits might accurately describe them. The possibility immediately intrigued him. As the three of them continued to look for more sigils, Vito asked,

  “Are the pantheons real, Thing? I mean do the spirits really think of themselves as a member of the ‘Man’a’, or the ‘Ashi’man’, or the ‘Metal Pantheon’?”

  He felt his stomach sink as he realized that he may well have offended Cor with that question, asking if the pantheons were real.

  “No offense Cor…”

  Cor seemed to be hardly paying attention.

  “No worries,” he said with a smile.

  Vito smiled back.

  “Well that’s a funny story actually!” said Thing, following Cor to a sigil he had found, a scrawled depiction of a crashing wave. It placed its hand upon it, and it began to sparkle the color of sage.

  The spirit told a story as Cor and Vito led it to sigil after sigil, carved in the likeness of the elements.

  “When humans first started grouping the spirits into the twenty pantheons for worship, each group of spirits affected formed their own discussion group to figure out what to do about it! Ancient, powerful spirits though… not really known for having lightning-fast conversations, and besides, they’re always so busy with controlling the elements, ordering the world, wielding fantastic cosmic power, you know, boring stuff, that these meetings would go on for days, and they’d have to keep having recesses to attend to their duties. Eventually these became weekly meetups, where the great spirits would spy on the humans, talk about their similarities and differences with one another, and generally shoot the breeze about current events. Over time, the issue began coming up again of what to do about the pantheons. But by then, everyone was starting to enjoy each other’s company and chatting together, so they didn’t really want to do anything about it. So… they kinda just let it slide.”

  “And they must have carved these sigils after that happened,” Vito added.

  “Yup!” said Thing.

  As Thing touched the sixteenth symbol, a lightning bolt, the spirit answered the other part of Vito’s question.

  “Oh, and the ‘Ashi’man’ and ‘Man’a’? I use those words. I think they’re useful, you know? Quickly tells you who’s somebody, and who’s a zero. I’ve heard a few other spirits use them too, but most don’t really. The old spirits especially. I don’t even think the Ashi’man know what they mean.”

  Vito spotted a shark fin some way out in the Westward Strait, and admired it for a second as Thing finished what it was saying. When it sank beneath the waves once more, he asked,

  “Who do you consider to be the Ashi’man?”

  Thing snorted, slowly lowering his hand onto a scrimshaw image of a snowflake.

  “Just because most people don’t use the names doesn’t mean there isn’t a hierarchy, Little Goat! Ask any spirit: ‘if you had to choose a group of spirits to be what the humans call the Ashi’man’, they’d all make the same fifteen to twenty picks. Some spirits are more powerful than others, even if you guys group them both as the same thing, so its not like there’s a huge pool to pick from. There’s levels and stuff— but everyone knows who’s in charge. Arbiter’s the ultra head honcho.”

  This corroborated Vito’s own knowledge: most people he had spoken with about religion considered Arbiter to be the preserver of balance between all other spirits: a counselor of sorts, between the gods. Thing had presented Arbiter as simply the most powerful, and thus most dominant spirit, but Thing had a tendency to present things in an unusual way, so Vito surmised that some inferences on his part would be wise.

  Vito interpreted what he had heard thusly: the spirits did not have formal rankings, but some kind of complicated informal system did exist. Power, wisdom, or some other metric differentiated about twenty spirits from all the rest, as the leaders of their kind. These were the beings that Vito would call the Ashi’man. The position of the Man’a were more unclear, and Vito suspected that the category was mostly of human invention, unlike the category of Ashi’man, which seemed to exist amongst the spirits in at least some form. The answer to whether or not the spirits’ categorizations were man-made was, essentially, that it was more complicated than that.

  Especially so, since the spirits were apparently aware of how humans grouped them, and some spirits had even been indirectly made to corporate and form friend groups by humans.

  Thinking through this brought Vito to consider the fragility of many of the systems of the world that he had, until this moment, thought of as unshakable. The spirits controlled the elements. If humans could control the spirits, then humans could wield the power of gods. At one time, there were no pantheons. There still weren’t, at least not in the way many followers believed, but coteries of spirits did exist, as a result of human interference

  These groupings, at least from the perspective of the pre-pantheon spirits, were totally arbitrary, chosen by humans who likely had little to no contact with the beings that they were redefining. What ripple effects could this have had on Remex, on reality itself? The spirits ordered the world, as Thing had said. If they were not immune to change, what could he be certain of? Could anything be relied upon longterm?

  It was an unsettling thought, to be sure. He was left with larger questions.

  Vito’s mind was on other things, and of the remaining four sigils, three were found by Cor, one by Thing, and zero by him.

  “Got ‘em all!” Thing said, as the last sigil, a flaming skull, began to radiate a pale purple light.

  The skeletons upon the beach began to rattle and shake all around them, and the pebbles set to quaking.

  Vito, Cor, and Thing stood together within the chest cavity of one of the huge skeletons. The night sky above seemed to brighten from black to dark grey, and the form of the Bad Moon faded slightly. The ancient skeletons seemed to Vito as if they were shifting arrangement. Seeming random when they had arrived, now they looked to have been marshaled at the behest of an inaudible command, and formed a ring: an amphitheater around the body in which the trio stood.

  Ghostly images began to appear, shimmering like mirages. At first there were a few dozen, then perhaps fifty, then a hundred, then more. The beings became too numerous to count easily. As their images became clear, Vito could see many who amused him, and just as many who terrified him.

  There was a bear which had the dimensions of a man, and fur green with moss, wearing a bandana around its head. There was a little blue-skinned fairy with the mantle of an ocean ray, and a glowing heart visible through her semi-transparent skin. There was an old, surly man with a long golden beard, who sat on a floating cloud with a sheaf of grain thrown over his shoulder. These and more were pleasing to Vito’s eye in some capacity: they were not overtly hostile-looking at the very least.

  But there were an equal number of others truly terrifying to behold. There was a red, serpentine dragon with glowing yellow eyes, whose form was so long that its tail extended farther than Vito could see, with thousands of oars extending from its body like a centipede. There was a shadow cast along the ground, its eyes lit by blue candles. Its form was unnaturally distinct for a shadow, and Vito could see that it resembled a mutilated child, or perhaps a flayed man. There was a ten-foot-tall, blue-scaled creature with horns like an ox, and a snout like a wolf, and two tiny, close-set eyes fogged like frosted glass. It carried something dripping in its left hand, but Vito didn’t dare look its way, since it seemed to be looking his.

  In the center of the gathering, about ten paces from where Thing, Cor, and Vito stood, was the clear focal point of all of the gathered spirits’ attention.

  There stood a figure that Vito recognized without even so much as a second thought. A few of the other spirits looked vaguely familiar to him, but this one he knew by name the instant he laid eyes upon it. It had shown up in nearly every depiction of the spirits he had ever seen, its likeness woven into countless designs— from the cervid animals depicted on Cor’s shirt, to the weathervane on top of his home. This was the greatest of the Ashi’man, perhaps the greatest of all the spirits— Arbiter, keeper of the balance.

  It was a great white deer, but the size of a moose, with fur the same shade as the bone which littered its surrounds. Its hooves were ebony wood, and ran with veins of smoldering embers that heated the pebbles beneath to a dull red. Its body was muscular like a horse, and its neck was thick, supporting a stocky, short-snouted head. Two small fangs hung from its upper lip, and its eyes were completely black. No light reflected from them, not even from the stars. Its antlers rose nearly straight from the crown of its head, and each shone brightly in blue-green brilliance, such that their prominence outshined the very constellations hugging the borders of the sky. Their appearance was instantly engraved in Vito’s mind as Arbiter’s personal emblem, the crown of bright antlers against the grey night.

  Vito did nothing, allowing Arbiter to direct their interaction. But neither Arbiter, nor any of the other spirits, made any move. A minute passed. All simply waited, and stared.

  “What are they doing?” Vito whispered to Thing.

  “They’re waiting for He who Gouged the Oceans,” Thing whispered back, never taking its eyes off the crowd of spirits around them. “This is more spirits than I was expecting, looks like it’s not just the Ashi’man here, but the Man’a too! It’s a full court…”

  Vito was more shocked by Thing’s first statement than its second.

  “I thought you said that He who Gouged the Oceans fell out of the world?”

  “He did, but he’s still technically the leader of the Ashi’man. Even if he’s missing and Arbiter is the real leader now, they still wait for him every time they meet, out of respect.”

  “Wait, He who Gouged the Oceans was the leader of the Ashi’man?” Vito looked to the spirits surrounding them, wondering if they could hear him.

  Cor saw the dragon with the oars for arms, and gave it a quick salute with two fingers, as though he were greeting a friend on the street.

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  Thing was looking around at the spirits. It seemed nervous as it said, “oh yeah! He who Gouged the Oceans is the most powerful spirit to ever exist, he oversaw the entire ocean! Of course he was the leader of the Ashi’man!”

  “I thought Arbiter was the most powerful spirit?”

  Thing shook its head distractedly,

  “No, Arbiter is the wisest, not the strongest. There are plenty of spirits stronger than Aribter. No one was ever stronger than He who Gouged the Oceans though, that’s pretty much as strong as you can be.”

  Vito nodded, taking in the situation around them— they were at the center of a circle of spirit-gods, all silent for their missing comrade. It was heartening to know that the spirits could care for one another in this way. It gave him hope for his relationship with Thing. He turned to look at the little blue spirit, only to see that it was still distressed.

  “Is something wrong? Why are there more of them than you expected?”

  Thing shook its head again, “I don’t know why everyone’s shown up, I mean a full house… you only see this level of gathering for something super important.”

  “Well, a spirit losing their memories seems important.”

  Thing sighed, clearly exasperated. “No. I mean this happens once in like a long time. Like a thousand years long. They don’t gather like this unless a decision affecting the entire world needs to be made!”

  Vito’s brow furrowed. This did not bode well for whatever Thing’s vision had entailed.

  Five minutes had passed, and the the spirits still observed their silence. Just as Vito was about to ask Thing how long this would go on, Arbiter spoke. His words boomed like thunder, and were as immutable as the horizon, as impassive as the sun.

  “WHAT IS NEEDED,” it said. It spoke in such perfect monotone that the fact that it was asking a question was not immediately clear.

  Cor swallowed, and straightened himself when the lord of the spirits spoke.

  “AND WHY DID YOU BRING HUMANS,” added Arbiter.

  Thing started shaking, and tapped Vito on the shoulder, whispering to him,

  “I didn’t think there’d be this many! Can— can you talk to them?”

  “What?!”

  “Pleeease! They’re all looking at me!”

  Vito could see that Thing was sweating, and made a quick decision so as not to keep Arbiter waiting.

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  Without waiting for an answer from Thing, Vito turned towards the two bright horns. Cor could see what was happening and shot him a thumbs up. Vito appreciated that. He felt Thing’s hand slip into his, and grasped it tightly. He knew that this was important to it, and that it was putting its trust in him. In the time that Vito and Thing had been talking, Arbiter shifted its hooves, and seemed to be growing restless.

  “IS THIS ABOUT THE END OF WORLD AGAIN.”

  Its words hardly registered for Vito, who was more concerned with speaking in just the right way, so as not to offend the Ashi’man and suffer what would undoubtedly be a horrible fate.

  Arbiter was so big, that Vito felt that if he didn’t yell, there was little chance the tall, alabaster deity would even hear him.

  “We’re here to help Thing! It lost its memories, so we’re trying to find who took them! Do you know??”

  Vito had tried to remain composed as he shouted, but upon realizing what Arbiter had just said, he suddenly blurted out,

  “Wait, the end of the world??”

  Arbiter didn’t seem to mind.

  “AH, THIS HUMAN IS A SPIRIT–TALKER. WHAT THING ARE YOU REFERRING TO, SPIRIT–TALKER.”

  “What did you say about the end of the world?!” Vito asked. It felt now as if the two of them were having different conversations. Arbiter, to Vito’s surprise, conceded for the time being, addressing his question before its own.

  “LAST TIME YOU CAME HERE,” it indicated Thing with a nod of its head, “YOU WERE BLATHERING NONSENSE ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE.”

  Vito felt his heart start pounding. The end of the world? The apocalypse? Thing had said that a group of people might be in danger, but Vito didn’t think that had meant every person in the entire world! Thing evidently felt the same way, frantically wiping its forehead with its left hand, and fidgeting with its right. It did not seem to like the large crowd nor the direness of the situation which was now being discussed.

  Vito couldn’t think of what to say. He began to stutter. As he was sure they’d be destroyed for annoying the spirit-gods, Cor came to the rescue. He hadn’t been able to understand anything Arbiter had said, but through the context of what Vito had been saying, he had kept somewhat apprised.

  “Great Arbiter, we’re trying to help this spirit, Thing,” he pointed to Thing, “because it lost its memories. Do its memories relate to this end of the world in some way?”

  He said it so casually, “the end of the world”, as if they were discussing a trivial matter. He didn’t seem affected by the situation in the slightest. He turned to Vito with his big smile, asking:

  “Can you translate for me?”

  Vito nodded, and the three of them faced Arbiter together, Thing and Vito locked hand-in-hand. Arbiter lowered its head slightly, and while the movement would have been threatening from a normal deer or moose, from Arbiter, it was somehow comforting.

  “I CAN SEE THAT THERE IS SOME CONFUSION. I WILL RECTIFY IT.” Arbiter pawed the pebbles, deforming some with the heat of its hooves.

  “I DO NOT KNOW WHY YOU ARE CALLING THAT SPIRIT ‘THING’, BUT THAT IS NOT ITS NAME.” Arbiter then turned to address Thing,

  “THREE DAYS A GO, YOU SUMMONED US ALL HERE, SHOUTING INSANE RAMBLINGS ABOUT A CRAZED VISION, WHICH PURPORTED THAT THE WORLD WOULD END ON THE LAST DAY OF THIS YEAR.” Arbiter shook its head.

  “WE ATTEMPTED TO CORRECT YOU, BUT YOU WOULD NOT LISTEN. MADDENED, YOU WENT EVER ON OF HOW ‘THE WORLD WOULD BE CONSUMED IN A TIDE OF FLESH’.”

  Arbiter’s eyes narrowed, and it blew a puff of smoke from its nostrils.

  “THERE IS NO SUCH COMING DISASTER. WE TRIED TO TELL YOU THIS, BUT YOU COULD NOT SEE REASON.”

  Vito stood with Cor, relaying to him what Arbiter was saying. He felt more calm at Arbiter’s words— that the apocalypse wasn’t going to happen. When Arbiter had finished, Vito was once again ready to speak, but Thing interrupted him.

  Unclasping their hands, and pushing past both him and Cor, the blue spirit looked angry. In anger, it seemed to have forgotten its fear.

  “Arbiter, mister, somebody’s really got you mixed up big time! I am Thing! That IS my name: Thing! T-H-I-N-G Thing! Whoever told you that I’m not is lying, ‘cause—”

  Its tone was hostile and condescending, and Vito feared for his life, should this continue. He tugged on Thing’s shoulder, trying to get it to stop, but Thing just brushed him off and stepped out of the giant rib cage, leaving Cor and Vito behind.

  “Don’t think that tone he’s takin is leading us anywhere good…” Cor whispered to him.

  Vito watched Thing continue to abuse Arbiter, shouting that “he’d have to be a fool to believe some poser”, and that “he was the one true Thing!”, and his mood changed from fearful to sad. It was almost pitiful how attached Thing was to its name, how desperately it defended its identity and imagined reputation from usurpers. He felt terribly for it, while all the while knowing that it was all nothing but a fantasy— one that Arbiter was almost certainly about to dispossess it of.

  He wondered why Thing did this, why it was so adamant that it really was itself, why it felt so compelled to posses a continuity of person. Thing couldn’t tolerate even the slightest notion that it wasn’t itself, that anyone else could even dream of being it. Its compulsion to protect its identity was to the point of delusion— to the point that, even confronted by the god of the spirits, the being that Thing itself had described as the wisest of them all, it could not believe for a second that it was wrong.

  Thing had lost its memory. Was it so hard to believe that it might have forgotten its name? Vito could imagine a rival spirit stealing Thing’s memories and then telling it when it woke up that its name was simply “Thing”, as a sort of cruel joke, or some other form of humiliation. Spirits usually had names which described their function in some way: Envy, Grandfather Oak, Arbiter, He who Gouged the Oceans, and many others. “Thing”, just didn’t sound right, and Vito had known this the instant he heard the name. The fact that Thing couldn’t see this, or as Vito was now beginning to suspect, refused to acknowledge it, was absurd.

  Still, he did not believe that Thing was a bad or wicked spirit at heart. His intuition told him that something very bad had happened to Thing, that it had been hurt in some way. Hurt badly. Thing behaved more like a child acting out than a cruel adult exercising abuse. Much like what his mother had told him about the spirits, Vito didn’t believe that Thing even had the maturity to understand cruelty or evil.

  It had asked him for something in return for getting him out of the Spiritwood because it was selfish. It had refused to give him a pronoun to call it because it was not mature enough to approach the subject. It had refused to help him paddle across the Westward Strait because it was lazy, and because it wanted something in return. All of this congealed into a single conclusion in Vito’s mind: “Thing is a child”.

  Throughout Thing’s temper tantrum, Cor had tried to get a word in, interrupt Thing, or get its attention, but was ignored each and every time by both Thing and Arbiter. When Thing had finished its tirade, Arbiter’s only response to it was:

  “NO.”

  “But—” Thing began again, but Arbiter interrupted before it got far.

  “SILENCE. WHY ARE YOU TAKING ON THE TITLE OF ‘THING’.” The leader of the spirits had a suspicious look in its eyes, as if it had learned something distressing from what Thing had said.

  Vito suspected that Thing was acting strangely in the view of Arbiter, who probably knew it before it had lost its memories.

  “No! Were you even listening? I’m the real Thing, that’s my name!”

  Arbiter narrowed its eyes.

  “EVERY SPIRIT HAS A TITLE WHICH IT GOES BY, AND A TRUE NAME KNOWN ONLY TO ITSELF, TO ITS LORD, AND TO ME.”

  Thing looked around uncomfortably.

  “SURELY YOU KNEW THIS ALREADY.” Arbiter approached Thing.

  Vito explained what was going on to Cor. It was clear to both of them that Thing had not known this.

  “TELL ME, ‘THING’, WHAT ARE YOU THE SPIRIT OF.” Arbiter began to circle Thing, the latter’s sweat becoming more and more prominent.

  “I’m the spirit of space!”

  “WRONG.”

  Vito gasped.

  “How?” Was all Cor could think to say when Vito told him of the discrepancy.

  “TELL ME WHAT SPIRIT YOU SERVE.”

  “You, Arbiter!”

  “ALL SPIRITS SERVE ME INDIRECTLY. WHOSE DOMAIN DO YOU FALL UNDER.”

  “But I— you!”

  It was painful to see, Thing unable to answer each question in turn, questions that both Vito and Cor knew a spirit should be able to answer easily. All the same, they dared not intervene, both for their own safety as well as Thing’s.

  “WRONG. TELL ME WHAT TITLE YOU WERE KNOWN BY WHEN YOU STOOD BEFORE US BUT THREE DAYS AGO.”

  Thing didn’t say anything. Its upper lip began to quiver.

  Arbiter had completed its circle around Thing, and stood directly before it once more.

  “ALL THESE THINGS COULD BE FORGOTTEN, THOUGH UNLIKELY. THERE IS ONE THING WHICH CANNOT. TELL ME YOUR TRUE NAME. YOU MAY WHISPER IT TO ME, SO THEY DO NOT HEAR,” it indicated Cor and Vito.

  Thing’s voice was trembling as it spoke, pitiful beneath the unerring power of Arbiter’s own. The contrast between the two was painful, Thing small, Arbiter massive, Thing clearly on the verge of tears, and Arbiter with pitch black eyes that Vito imagined had never shed a single one in all the ages of the world. As Thing spoke, Vito began to feel protective of it.

  “I’m Thing…”

  “YOU ARE NOT. YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN WHO YOU ARE, AND YOU HAVE LOST THE GREAT PURPOSE WHICH WAS GIVEN TO YOU. YOU ARE NOT HALF THE SPIRIT I REMEMBER. YOUR SHAPE HAS DIMINISHED, AND WITH IT YOURSELF.”

  Thing began to weep, but Arbiter continued,

  “WHAT AR E YOU NOW: A CHILD IN A SPIRIT’S SKIN, A CHARLATAN WITH A KING’S CLOTHES. YOU DISGUST ME.”

  Cor watched with brows knit tight, and turned to Vito so he could translate.

  But Vito was too angry to do so. He couldn’t take this anymore. Before he could stop himself, he shouted at Arbiter,

  “Leave it alone! It didn’t do anything wrong! It lost its memories! It wasn’t Thing’s choice!”

  Arbiter turned from Thing to Vito, but did not betray any emotion. Many of the spirits surrounding them made exclamations, some gasped, some snarled, and a few laughed.

  “Uh, Vito, I don’t know—” Cor started, but Arbiter spoke over him, drowning out his words in its infinite monotone:

  “IMPOSSIBLE. A SPIRIT CARRIES ITS NAME ALWAYS AND FOREVER, IN ITS VERY BEING. A SPIRIT WHO HAS ABANDONED ITS NAME DOES SO BY CHOICE, AND IS IN DISSENT WITH THE NATURAL ORDER.”

  “Thing’s trying to find out who took its memories so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else, and stop the end of the world! You should help instead of yelling at it!”

  Vito couldn’t believe he was saying these things to Arbiter, greatest of the spirits— but what the lord of the spirits was saying was unfair, such that he couldn’t remain quiet. The image of small Thing and massive Arbiter was acute enough to continue to motivate him. How Arbiter was treating Thing was wrong.

  “NOT A BAD POINT, IF THERE WERE SUCH AN APOCALYPSE. THERE IS NOT.”

  “How do you know?!”

  Suddenly, another voice rose from amongst the gathered spirits. Vito could see where it came from, a tangle of roots emerging from the earth, and at the center, the wooden face of an old man. While he did not recognize the spirit’s form, he knew its voice instantly:

  “ARBITER, ALLOW ME TO EAT THIS INSUFFERABLE HUMAN, FOR IT DISRESPECTS US SO.” It was Grandfather Oak. Vito was so sick of the spirits at that moment, so angry at Grandfather Oak and Arbiter for their arrogance, that he called back immediately:

  “You’d think a spirit wouldn’t need a second try!”

  “WHY YOU!” One of the roots lunged towards Vito, but before it could reach him, Arbiter and Thing both stepped between him and it, preparing to block the tendril, which recoiled itself upon seeing their response as if from fire.

  “OAK... A ONCE–GREAT SPIRIT ABANDONS ITS NAME, AND ALL YOU CAN THINK OF IS YOUR PETTY FEUD WITH A HUMAN CHILD. TRULY EMBARRASSING.”

  “BUT—” began Grandfather Oak.

  “WE DO NOT ATTACK OUR GUESTS. YOU MAY GO.”

  As other woodland spirits near Grandfather Oak began to laugh, the tree spirit retreated from the crowd, disappearing as soon as it left the beach. When Arbiter turned back to Vito, the boy didn’t know what to say.

  Thing quickly turned back to the spirits without acknowledging what it had done, how it had moved to protect Vito.

  There was silence for a moment, as Thing nervously looked from Arbiter to the crowd and back again. Cor gulped. Arbiter seemed to be waiting for something. Its head moved from Thing to Vito. It seemed to be considering Thing’s action of protection for Vito. All Vito himself could do was stare.

  “I KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT THIS VISION WILL NOT COME TRUE. WE HAVE NO FURTHER INTEREST IN THIS MATTER. ‘THING’ IS NO LONGER ONE OF US AND SHALL NOT ATTEMPT TO SUMMON US AGAIN.”

  At this, Thing burst into tears, falling to its knees and covering its face. Cor went to it at once, encircling it with his strong arms and petting its shoulders.

  Arbiter had only mentioned the end of the world, but Vito knew that its words “we have no further interest in this matter”, addressed Thing’s lost memories as well. The Ashi’man wouldn’t help them, that had become clear.

  “IN RESPECT FOR YOUR BOND MADE EVIDENT THIS DAY, I WILL PERMIT ‘THING’ TO KEEP ITS POWER AND TRAVEL WITH YOU, FOR IT IS NO THING BUT A MINUSCULE FACSIMILE OF ITS FORMER SELF,” and with that, Arbiter turned from Vito, and all the spirits surrounding them vanished.

  But before the wisest itself could disappear, Vito called after it, remembering what Thing had told him about the unusual size of this gathering:

  “Why’d you bring so many spirits here— just to watch you make my friend cry?”

  Arbiter froze at hearing this, and Vito feared that he’d finally pushed his luck too far.

  Then, as if the world had gone mad, he heard Arbiter, lord of the spirits, let out a great laugh. It was a terrifying sound, like the crackling of burning wood mixed with the swaying of bamboo.

  “AH, SO I SEE YOU ARE THE CLEVER SORT OF HUMAN.” Arbiter paused,

  “TELL ME YOUR NAME, SPIRIT–TALKER.”

  He hesitated, “Vito.”

  Arbiter made no response. It kept still, with its back turned to him. Then it shimmered like a mirage, and just as the other spirits had disappeared, so too did it.