I can undo the damage I did killing the boy.
Too late, Bedeckt saw how broken the child was, how damaged by his experiences. Morgen, the Geborene godling, was dangerously insane.
The boy thinks he can make the world perfect and clean. And he was willing to drown the world in war and blood to make it so.
I played my part in making him what he is. He’d make it right.
Morgen had his obsession with cleanliness before meeting Bedeckt. But Bedeckt and his group of deranged criminal friends taught the lad darker truths. They taught him lies and distrust. They showed him the effectiveness of violence. He witnessed their broken interaction and learned from it.
We poisoned him.
Now, Morgen’s perfect world had no place for Bedeckt, no place for his friends.
And I…I killed him.
He never should have strayed from his list of things he wouldn’t do. He remembered sliding Stehlen’s knife into Morgen’s chest. The boy had been tortured and burned and Bedeckt told himself it was a mercy, that he was killing the lad to free him from pain. But the truth was he planned on using the boy-god once in the Afterdeath. Knowing he too was dying, Bedeckt saw how the future would play out. He killed the boy for purely selfish reasons and damned himself to a hellish Afterdeath. Not everyone suffered the same fate—there were special Afterdeaths for people like him.
Dying and existing in a flat world of grey death showed him the truth. His choices, all the vicious choices of his life, led him there.
And new choices, different choices, would take him somewhere else. The first step was escaping his past, and Wichtig and Stehlen were a part of that. He left them behind. Madness and violence followed them everywhere.
Maybe redemption lay beyond his reach, but if he undid the damage done in killing Morgen, in straying from his list, perhaps the next time he died he might find himself in another Afterdeath. He was an old man. Death was never far off.
The Afterdeath, defined by the Warrior’s Credo—those whom you slay must serve—gave Bedeckt control over the boy. He couldn’t do it. Using and harming children was on his list and straying from that list got him killed. Straying from that list started everything. He wouldn’t do it again.
In leaving the Afterdeath and returning to life, Bedeckt lost all control over the boy. There was nothing but Bedeckt’s mad plan to curb the lad’s obsession. If Morgen saw the future, all bets were off. If he knew Bedeckt returned to life intent on stopping his quest to remake the world, he would turn the might of the Geborene church against him.
You give yourself too much credit.
Even with the Mirrorist’s help, Bedeckt wasn’t sure if he could stop Morgen. Only Zukunft’s insistence she saw a future where the godling was defeated—and her promise her Reflection would lead him there—gave Bedeckt any hope.
Bedeckt smacked himself in the forehead. I am such an idiot. “Shite.”
“What?” Zukunft asked.
“You just told me you couldn’t see past the moment we left the Afterdeath.”
“So?”
“In the Afterdeath you promised you’d show me how to stop Morgen.”
“So?”
“You lied. You have no idea—”
“No.” Zukunft stared at the blood pooling on the floor, watching it spread toward her. “She told me she knows how.”
She again. “But—”
“I believe her.”
A Mirrorist should know better than to trust Reflections. Just as the manifestations of a Doppelgangist or Mehrere inevitably turned on their creator in a bid to become real, a Mirrorist’s Reflections were equally dangerous.
It was too damned late for second guessing. This girl and her delusion were his only chance.
Bedeckt thought it over. If Morgen saw the future, he would have left more than three Wütend waiting for them. Mirrorists always said the future wasn’t fixed. Perhaps Morgen put these men here to cover one possible eventuality. I suppose we could have come through any large mirror. The boy-god probably had people stationed at mirrors all over the city. Why didn’t he break all the mirrors but one, thereby controlling where we appeared? Bedeckt couldn’t answer that. Were the Geborene priests nothing more than a coincidence? Maybe they lived here. Three Wütend living together? It seemed unlikely.
Her legs no longer exposed, Bedeckt could once again look at Zukunft. In the Afterdeath, her eyes were lifeless and grey. Now green shot with shards of gold and rust, they peered at him through a curtain of dark hair. She watched him watching her. Heart shaped lips quirked in the slightest hint of a knowing smile.
“Yes?” she asked, lifting a dark eyebrow.
“Where should we go? How long before Morgen sends Stehlen and Wichtig after us?”
“The plan,” she said, “and perhaps you’ve forgotten because you’re a senile old bastard, was for me to use that mirror to see the next couple of days.” She nodded at the broken frame and shattered glass littering the floor.
“And?”