Sometimes he got pick-pocketed. He saw no other explanation. Stehlen robbed him.
He laughed, a mirthless chuckle tinged with fear.
At least it’s Stehlen. She’d never figure out what the little carvings were and if she did, she’d use them to kill her friends. This might make it more difficult to find and kill her after, but he knew she’d come looking for him once she murdered her friends. Sometimes the most unpredictable people were the most predictable.
Not what he planned, but not a complete failure of his plans either.
Morgen noticed his Reflection, Nacht, face stained and bloody, watching from a nearby store window. The window was spotlessly clean.
The end of everything you work for begins with one small mistake, said Nacht. You learned more than lies, deception, and manipulation from Wichtig.
Morgen turned away.
You learned some of his overconfidence too.
He left it behind, feeling its blue eyes—identical to his own—on his back. Its words followed after him. One small mistake. Why did I bring the carvings to the meeting? He knew Stehlen was going be there and he knew better than to ignore the unassuming thief.
Another filthy Reflection watched from another glinting store window. You know the answer, it said as he passed.
“Horse shite,” swore Morgen, grimacing at his crude language. He learned too much from his friends; they tainted everything he was meant to be. He wanted to return to the Geborene church at the heart of the city and torture Konig for his failures.
Ahead, he saw another Reflection, clothed in torn rags, and it bowed in mockery. You want to fail, Nacht said as he passed, shoulders hunched.
From every window on both sides of the street, Nacht followed his progress. A thousand voices whispered and he tried to shut them out. His chest ached where Bedeckt slid the knife between his ribs to puncture his heart. It was a moment of mercy and, much as Morgen didn’t want to believe it, a moment of self-sacrifice for the old warrior.
Again he heard Bedeckt’s burnt voice, the dry rasp of cooked lungs. ‘It’s on the list. I don’t kill children.’ The big man pleaded, begging Morgen for some other path.
Morgen pushed Bedeckt into betraying what little honour the man possessed. The warrior slipped a knife into Morgen’s heart to save him from an Afterdeath of servitude to either Erbrechen the Slaver, or Gehirn, the Hassebrand who burned them both.
“I don’t want to fail,” said Morgen, defying his Reflection.
Have you ever noticed, said Nacht from another spotless window, how you still refer to them as friends?
Noting the dried blood staining his hands again, Morgen picked at it, peeling away flakes and letting them fall in his wake like a litter of dead roses at a wedding. It didn’t matter that the blood wasn’t real, that it was nothing more than a manifestation of his own guilt. It didn’t matter that the blood always returned. His hands must be clean. If just for an instant.
They weren’t.
Morgen transitioned from the Afterdeath to the world of life and basked in the perfection of the streets, the white of his priests’ livery, so bright as to be near blinding. Here, in the land of the living, the towering wall around Selbsthass stood complete. For whatever reason, time in the Afterdeath moved differently. While two weeks passed there since his death, near a decade passed in life. Another small surprise for his friends to discover.
He watched his people pass, unaware their god stood among them. Seeing a man bent with age, hands shaking with palsy, begging in the shadows of an alleyway, Morgen went to investigate. The beggar stunk of sweat and sour breath. He sullied Morgen’s perfect street with his existence.
I’ll have my priests remove the man. He’d order them to kill the vagrant should he return to befoul Selbsthass.
Turning away, Morgen walked the streets, returning to the church of the Geborene Damonen. He passed the priests guarding the entrance, remaining hidden from their sight. This ancient church, rumoured to have been built before the Menschheit Letzte Imperium, before humanity came to these lands, had changed in the last decade, shifting to meet the desire of the god now inhabiting its walls. The hallways, once bent and twisted, shrinking and growing seemingly at random, were now straight and true. Its walls, impossible monoliths of stone, once dark and stained from thousands of years under sun and rain and snow, had faded to a pale grey. Someday they’d be white. In the many basements, the accoutrements of countless dead religions lay piled in long abandoned catacombs. Statues of forgotten gods haunted rooms men had not seen in generations. Even Morgen, the latest god in residence, hadn’t seen the church in its entirety. There were rooms—entire sub-basements—which scared him, terrified the little boy he still in truth remained.
Changing your flesh changes nothing.