The laughter lingered long after Coyote had gone.
It clung to the riverbank like ash. It slid between collapsed beams, slithered into cracked doorframes, rattled the iron chimes Marius's men had hammered to thresholds. The laugh had no throat now, but it didn't need one. The air itself remembered, and the city breathed it whether it wanted to or not.
The Seeker lay on his back, ribs aching, lungs rasping. The scar glowed faint under his shirt—not fire, not lantern, only coal refusing to die.
Nakamura sat beside him, pistol across his knees, back straight though exhaustion gnawed at his bones. Blood painted one side of his temple. He hadn't slept, not since the vault, not since Kali, not since gods started feasting on each other in plain daylight. His eyes swept shadows the way hunters scan treelines.
When the Seeker stirred, Nakamura's shoulders eased a fraction. He masked it by checking the pistol's chamber.
The silence after laughter was worse than the sound itself. It was theatre-silence: scenery being moved in the dark, audience holding its breath, every soul knowing the next act would be crueler.
⸻
The war had not ended. It had only worn a new mask.
Odin's wolves abandoned the clouds and prowled the avenues, jaws stuffed with lightning. They chewed flesh and storm in equal measure. Where they passed, bodies blackened, curled into grotesque statues mid-prayer.
Aztec suns blistered the plazas. One ballooned enormous, cracked, and collapsed inward, dragging worshippers into its furnace. Another fizzled, leaving a pit filled with molten stone. Priests shouted at each other, accusing rival bloodlines of impurity, while the dead smoked at their feet.
Tangaroa's tide drowned the lower wards. Water surged waist-deep, carrying idols, chairs, dolls. Children floated clinging to broken shrines. Priests followed, chanting that drowning was salvation, though their own robes tangled and dragged them under.
Above all, Thoth scribbled hieroglyphs in sky-fire. Each glowed hot enough to sear retinas, then crumbled before the sentence was complete. The god wrote faster, frantic, ink of light spilling across clouds, words undone by the very air. His ibis cry split the atmosphere like a book ripping endlessly.
⸻
The Seeker and Nakamura wandered through the theatre of collapse.
At one square, refugees shouted three names of power at once—Odin, Amaterasu, Quetzalcoatl. Their voices braided into a strangled chant. A little girl screamed, covering her ears. Her mother kept praying.
At a market, relic-stalls collapsed into chaos. Vendors hawked raven feathers as foresight, jars of lightning as protection, "holy ash" as cure. Buyers drew blades. Blood ran in grooves between cobblestones. A woman stabbed her neighbor for a shard of lantern glass, pressed it to her chest, and swore it glowed. It didn't. Her blood made it shine.
Nakamura dragged the Seeker on, curses clipped and bitter. "You want to gape at this mess? Then write it later. Move now, live now."
But the Seeker's fingers twitched like insects. Words pressed his throat raw. He muttered without permission: "One flame, nine truths… silence that laughs…"
Nakamura spun him, shook him once. "Stop. If truth is a joke, don't give them another punchline. Survive."
The Seeker's eyes burned fever-bright. "Silence is part of the joke. If I don't write, the gods will write me instead."
⸻
They found the Lantern Keepers in ruin.
Vaults gaped like ribcages, lanterns smashed into puddles of oil. Scrolls tumbled in the wind, phrases too torn to fit together again. Some Keepers huddled amid wreckage, burning what they had guarded for centuries. Their mouths shaped their motto as if it were confession: Better a shrouded flame than a world in ashes.
Others lurched forward, thrusting scraps into the Seeker's hands: a hymn to a drowned god, a map inked in a dead tongue, a prophecy cut mid-line. Their nails drew blood.
One elder fell at his feet, robe soaked red. His grip on the Seeker's wrist was desperate iron. "If you live—" He choked. "Remember… not all flames are meant to be hidden."
He died still clutching. Nakamura pried his hand loose.
Around them, the Keepers dissolved. Some slit their throats with lantern shards. Others surrendered to rival cults. A few sat cross-legged in the flames and did not rise.
The order ended without trumpet or mourning.
⸻
The Seeker began to write.
There was no parchment. So he used wall plaster, ledger scraps, soot-slick stone. He scrawled with charcoal, with ash, with his own torn nails.
The joke is the truth. The truth is the fracture.
The flame hides. The flame devours. Both are worship.
Gods are beams. Beams collapse. Broken is holy.
Kali dances in the wound. Amaterasu closes the curtain. Coyote laughs between teeth.
His scar pulsed with every line. To bystanders, it looked like divine dictation. To Nakamura, it looked like a friend unraveling into madness.
And people came. Always, they came.
A mother pressed her baby's head to the words smeared on stone. A boy carved a phrase into his arm with a nail. A priest tore a scrap away, shrieking "heresy," only to be beaten bloody by others hungry for fragments.
A woman painted his lines on her skirt and walked the streets reciting them as prophecy. A chant grew around her.
A gang of youths graffitied his words and charged coins to see them. A trader sold a scrap with goat meat, swearing both carried blessing.
Children skipped and sang: "The flame hides, the flame devours," turning it into playground cadence.
In alleys, drunks roared his fragments like tavern songs. In temples, priests argued, their voices cracking into violence before meaning could settle.
Already, doctrines sprouted like weeds in ruins. Already, contradiction birthed certainty.
Nakamura loomed over him, fists trembling. "Do you hear them? You've damned us. Every line you scrawl will be twisted. You've given them new chains."
The Seeker's hand did not stop. "Better fragments than silence. Ashes scatter."
⸻
The sky mirrored his frenzy.
Odin's wolves vanished, leaving only ravens circling ruins. Aztec suns sputtered dark, temples hollow shells. Tangaroa's flood receded, brine streaking streets. Thoth's final glyph flickered, trembling, then dissolved into dust.
And then—faintly—the horizon lightened. Not dawn. Not return. Only gray twilight, enough to stumble by, not to live by.
The Seeker's chalk dropped. His scar dimmed to ember.
He looked at words smeared across wall and stone. Already they were stolen, copied, misread. Already they belonged to everyone but him.
Nakamura crouched beside him, voice raw. "You've doomed us. They'll twist every fragment into doctrine. They'll worship you while they kill in your name."
The Seeker's lips twitched weary. "Then let them. A man can be erased. Ashes scatter."
He collapsed into soot. The scar flickered once, twice, then dulled. Whether extinguished or only hidden, none could tell.
⸻
The words did not wait.
Scraps blew into the river, carried like lanterns loosed by unsteady hands. Refugees fished them from the water, pressed them to lips, copied them onto cloth and skin.
A boy used one scrap to wrap bread. His sister slapped him for sacrilege. He laughed, crumbs falling.
Two priests screamed over a phrase—one swearing it confirmed his god, the other swearing it condemned. Their congregations clashed before either side finished.
Children daubed phrases on alley walls with mud. A drunk sang them in tavern tune until the whole street joined.
A dying woman swallowed a fragment, believing it medicine. She smiled with blood on her teeth.
A merchant sealed scraps in clay jars, to be buried and sold as relics centuries hence.
The Seeker's words no longer belonged to him. They belonged to hunger, rumor, hope.
Above, faint through smoke, Coyote's laughter returned. Not cruel now—pleased, as if the punchline had landed precisely.
The city trembled beneath twilight. Survivors blinked at the gray light, unsure whether apocalypse had ended or paused.
The Seeker was gone, or dreaming, or reduced to ash. But his words remained.
Fragments. Curses. Scriptures. Seeds.