“What happened?” he asked in broken Noreelan, nodding toward the south.

And Ramus knew at last why the Fallen God had spared him. Because like any corrupt thing, it had its pride, and its ego, and it wanted its story told.

Ramus closed his eyes and fought hard against the words balancing on his lips.

“Kang Kang,” he spat, and then he groaned and thought, I will not tell your tale. There might be a thousand more “what happened”s', but I will not tell.

“Kang Kang?”

Ramus's eyes went wide and he sat up straight. “I will not tell your story!”

The wanderer stood and backed away, evidently less certain now of his appraisal of this man.

“I will not!” Ramus shouted again. The Fallen God could become infamous, or it could fade away in time.

“Kang Kang!” one of the wanderer's children shouted, and she and her little brother started singing that terrible name, back and forth as though they could make their own stories, given time.

“No!” Ramus roared. If I tell it they will follow, they will search, and however far it has gone, one day it might be found again. And he whispered, “I am the greatest Voyager.”

He pulled the small knife he had kept, grasped his tongue in his left hand and with one hard slice took it off.

_____

THE WANDERERS WERE kinder than most. They did their best to stop the bleeding and tend him as a fever took hold. It burned through him, scorching his skin and branding his mind with memories he did not want. When he woke from the fever there was a weight in his head once again, a familiar pain growing hotter and heavier, and his right eye was bleeding. He nodded his thanks and went on his way.

The wanderers watched him go. Ramus knew that they wondered about the story he could not tell.

He passed the standing stones and entered the forests, and here he set a fire. It was easy to burn his journal; it was incomplete and inaccurate, and as he tore out the pages and fed them to the flames he smiled at some of the foolishness written there. The parchment pages, old and new, should be next . . . but he held them in his hands for a while.

These were the last of their kind. Everything else was gone, swallowed in the turmoil of the fallen Great Divide. Blood and saliva dripped from his ruined mouth onto the uppermost page, staining the image of the God that Ramus had always known was fallen, and he closed his eyes.

He dropped the parchment pages onto the fire. When he looked again the only part left was the drawing of the God, dampened by his blood and spit. But soon even that burned away to nothing.