Chapter Text
Phainon had not known much of men before his fall.
He had often walked the earth he carried and listened to the singing of the trees, the gentle conversation of the river spring, the silence of the darkness underfoot calling his name. He had met no man, then, for he had not wished to. Men were made of folly, not of clay. They were made of flesh and bone and blood, and did not think as he did, and could not live as he did. They died, and he lived.
He oft wondered as he walked the earth, as the dove sang hymns to him, as all the grass bent to his touch; whether all men could see the root of all their problems were men themselves. Not men as they are born - boys and girls and all the rest, as fresh and new to the world as a seed settled in its bed of dirt, dropped by the blackbird which carried the branch in its hooked beak. Rather, men as they are made by other men. He had cared for them still, as they were his children, as all of the great world was. But he did not greet them. He did not heed their prayers.
Now he knows men as cruel, but fickle. They die, as he lives. They change, and he does not; but they do not change much. For each human acts as though they are God of their body, as though the earth they tread can be bought and conquered and named as theirs.
Each man acts as though they are the God of Phainon’s body, too. What he thinks is nothing. He is theirs, to command, to steer, to own and to make. He is. This is how it must be.
And so Phainon had not been confused by the first taking. When he had fallen by arrow and found naked in a new vessel made of strange flesh and golden blood, and been dressed, long hair braided with dead flowers he mourned like a child, hands draped in golden bracelets that ached for their home in the earth. He knew what men wanted, from beauty and from youth. He was God, but he was not fool.
To own the divine was to use it for man’s most clear desire. To use it for its body. To use it as though it were thing. Why else would they own a God, if not to take it, if not to make it please them? What else could the fallen immortal do, if not eternally satiate the man that it serves?
The God-Kings of Sak-Kahn-Ko were God-Kings not for any divine power they brought to their people, but for another reason. They owned Phainon. They were King of a God. They were God-Of-Kings, King-Of-Gods, God-King.
The first time had been as every other time after. Phainon had stood before the God-King in his bedchambers. The woven curtains had fluttered in the deadened air, barring the stars from his touch. The incense rose thick and cloying, the mosaic floor and ceiling and walls patterned with square glass tiles in the shape of a thousand suns obscured by its mist. He could not grasp the moonlight, that shadowed corpse of his mother, for it was no longer his to hold.
“You are mine,” the God-King had said. Aged as humans were, with streaks of grey in his curly hair, with wrinkles as the footsteps of a raven by his eyes. His voice was gravelly as the war he had raged against the last slivers of divine. He had won by name and trickery alone. He had won himself the last God.
“I am yours,” Phainon had said. His words were soft, and empty, and kind, though he did not wish them to be.
“And your name? I have asked it before. But I must know it for the oath.”
“I am Khaslana. World-Bearer. God of all Things. Fragment of Divine. But you may call me what you please.”
The God-King had studied him with eyes like the storm. “I will name you, then, instead. You will be Phai-non. Bringer of Heavenly Light. God of the God-Kings. And you will be mine, and my sons, and his sons. You will bring prosperity to Sak-Kahn-Ko, to my family, and to myself, for now until the end of time itself. This will be your only duty. This will be your purpose.”
“I… am Phainon, Bringer of Heavenly Light. God of God-Kings. And I am yours.”
And the oath had etched itself there into his skin in the shape of the sun he could no longer see. A mark of his fall. A promise - to live when all others died. To know the world as it forgot him. To suffer, while all else ceased.
The first God-Kings’ hand had come to his cheek in awe, in great purpose. It had touched what it now owned. It had marvelled at its softness.
“I will take you, now,” he had said with much reverence. “For you are beautiful, and you are mine.”
And the God-King had kissed him gently on the mouth. As a flower petal crushed underfoot, Phainon had bent to the touch, though he had not liked it.
“Will you bleed?” asked the first God-King, there against his lips.
Phainon had stared at him, unfeeling, unthinking. “Do you wish me to bleed?”
“...I do.”
“Then I will bleed.”
And so Phainon was not his name, but neither was his body his, or his divinity, or his being or feeling or doing. He was nothing. He was what they pleased.
He was Phainon, as he was the God-King’s.
Golden slivers of light stained the wool-woven bedsheet he was taken on. He had stared at the ceiling. He had not spoken as he was worshipped the only way men knew how; by stealing from the earth, by taking what was not his. Inside, though he was now full, was empty, too. He was alone. He was the last.
For once there had been so many of them. Dozens, hundreds. And he was a fragment, a piece of a web so large it could not be measured, and each had a duty, and they did their duty with love, and longing, and gentle care.
Oh how he mourned them, the brothers and sisters he has lost to time and war and memory. It was a mercy too great for him to bear; to know, at least, they rest when he did not. Sometimes, as the breeze swept through the weeping willow as he is led to the God-King’s quarters, rushing past the walled garden with the orange tree he can sometimes see but never go, he used to hear them in the wind. They would sigh, for him. They lamented his suffering.
He does not hear them anymore. For he has stopped suffering. To suffer would be to exist in any meaningful way - to know happiness, as an end to pain. And he feels neither of those fickle human feelings. He is nothing, as he is divine.
Such divine beings had each been made from the clay of the earth, from the breath of the sun, shaped by their heavenly mothers, moulded in their image and more. And each had sought, so desperately, to create. To make a world with which to love. They were many. They were all.
Sky and Ocean and Earth and Flame. Romance, and Reason, and Trickery and Strife. Death, and Law, and Time, and Passage. Everything they made, crumbled. Everything they loved, gone.
Until he had been made, of the same clay and sun as they, and he had been what they could not.
World-Bearer.
Once, he had been World-Bearer. Now, he was prisoner to that which he once carried. Now the world bore him; and the world was cruel, and silent, and spoke no more to him, though he did not listen anyway. What good were the words of the world when he had once been them? What good were the cries of a Godless land if he was no more God than they?
Once he had dreaded each new God-King. Now he speaks not, as he is dressed this time in blood-red silk and rubies, and his hair is let free to his waist, and his eyes are rimmed in black kohl. Is this the third, or the fourth? He has already lost count, for he saw no seasons in the two rooms he knew. For time did not pass to the caged.
The new God-King looks upon him with glee. He is lucky to have made twenty-five before his father died. Now, for his age, he can fill out the God-King’s clothes, his beaded tunic, his great cloak of sap-yellow and green.
“And it is mine?” he asks the servants by his side. His Sun-Crown of beads and gold frame his face like cobwebs.
“It is yours,” they say, as they know.
“I am yours,” Phainon says, as he knows.
That is all a God-King needs to hear when it looks upon what it owns.
Mine, they must think, with something akin to wonder. All theirs to take. All theirs to know.
Very occasionally, Phainon sees another room; the throne room. A grand hall of mosaics and columns and wide open ceiling in all the deep rich colours of purple gemstone and obsidian glass. Its arched walls reached open to the heavens but cannot touch them, for the God they seek kneels before them.
A display of power wrought when Phainon was presented to the court, paraded every few decades to an always shifting mirage of faces exchanged with each God-King’s death and birth anew; look upon what the God-King owns. See, for the good of all of Sak-Kahn-Ko, the divinity he claims each night, and know it is true, and right, and the heavens acknowledgement for their ruler. And there he would meet them sometimes before they became God-King; the sons of sons, the ones who would take him when they came to rule. They would tug their fathers sleeve, and lean in to whisper, “Will it always be so beautiful?” and the God-King will answer, as his father did, and his father before, “Always. And it will one day be yours.”
None of them need to be taught why he is owned. It must be written into law, by now, though Phainon knows not of what men write at the bedside he must kneel at, glowing softly as a lamp, lighting mortals with his divinity.
This God-King dies, and another God-King lives. Was this the eighth or the ninth? They dress him as they always do. The servants do not meet his gaze as they bathe him in oils and petals, shave his skin smooth and drape him about in white linen and heavy golden jewellery set with thousands of squared jewels, settling it into the divot of his neck, winding ribbons of it about his legs. Phainon does not need them to lead him to the chambers though they insist. He knows the way. It is the only way he ever goes. The only journey he is permitted; there, and back.
He used to be so free. He used to run. He used to fly.
“Beautiful,” this God-King had said to the servants and waiting eunuchs, staring up at Phainon’s face. “It is so beautiful, it hurts.”
“Thank you, your Grace,” Phainon says.
The God-King had blinked, and then laughed, still joyous as a child's song. “Oh, it speaks beautifully, too! What wonder it is, to be God-King! Have it chained to my bed. I must keep it close to me. I must make it mine!”
“I do not need to be chained, your Grace,” he had said gently. “Wherever you want me to stay, I will. I cannot go anywhere without your permission, for I am yours.”
The God-King’s eyes had shone as a rainbow split by the sun. He had taken Phainon there, bent over the bed, hitching his dress up in amateurish abandon. He had marvelled at how his God bled golden too.
And afterwards the God-King had lay atop him, panting, face reddened by his pleasure.
“Can I chain you despite your obedience?” he had asked, as though the thought had returned to him anew.
Phainon had looked at him, and felt nothing. “If the God-King wishes to chain me, he may do so. My body is his to do as he pleases.”
It had arrived at Phainon's chambers by weeksend, delivered to the one quiet room he sat in on a singular silk pillow, day after day as he waited to be called upon by a tongueless eunuch. It was settled in velvet golden as his blood, but the shackles themselves were iron, blackened by fresh soot. When they had closed around his neck and wrists, they had been cold, and dead, and the God-King had called them beautiful.
It was many years before they were removed. The God-King, dying as all men always were, had brought his hand up to the collar and traced it as he had for so many years. He had smiled, and said, “You were mine.”
And he dies in Phainon’s arms, and Phainon feels nothing at all.
In matters of the body he learns fast, as Gods are tend to do. How one makes one’s face contort, how one hums or sings or calls in pleasure; or how one groans, how one sifts the great horror of the emptiness inside them to cry out, or shake, or beg. It mattered little, to Phainon, which God the God-King wished to take; willing or unwilling, pleased or in pain.
At the end of each taking, they say, “You are mine,”
“I am yours,” he says, and he knows it is true.
But sometimes the God-Kings wished to exercise their power in ways greater than their mortal hand could shape of their own accord. Greater than a shackle and chain, greater than a show to a court. How else might they mould their God, how might they stamp their mark on a being who would outlive them all?
That is what the young God-King before him considers one evening, a week after he had been crowned. Was this the twentieth? The twenty-first? There was a cruel glint in his eye as the spark of flint against axe when he held Phainon’s waist tight in his bed and coveted the same air as the divine.
“You will do as I say, no matter what?” he asks, breathless and awed.
Phainon stares at the nothing between them. “I must. I cannot disobey.”
“If I… told you to crawl around like a dog?”
Phainon remains impassive. “I would do so, your Majesty.”
“If I… If I told you to strip naked, and run about the halls, and offer yourself to every soldier and courtier?”
Phainon does not flinch. “I would do so, your Majesty.”
“Would you bleed for them too?”
“If the God-King wishes me to.”
“And… and if I forbade you from speaking?” he asks, quite happily.
“I would not speak again, until your son, or his son, or his son allowed it of me.”
The God-King considers this. For him, the decision is lifelong. For Phainon, it will only be a lifetime. A lifetime is nothing. For the trees grow as they must, the rain falls as it must, the world moves as it must.
And he stays. He does not grow. He does not fall. He does not move.
“I forbid you, then,” says the God-King, and looks quite proud of his power, when all Phainon does is lower his head in submission and wait for the next command.
Phainon did not speak for one hundred years. Though he cannot count the days anymore - what mattered in the sun rising, if he could not see it? What mattered in the changing seasons, if he could not feel it? - the air he breathed was stagnant. Not even the weeping willow cried for him anymore.
But, eventually, as all humans do, one wants something different. A son of a son of a son, who looks upon the God he owns, and asks his manservant, “Can it speak?”
“The Annals say it can, your Grace, though it was forbidden some time ago by your great grandfather.”
“Oh,” the God-King says. Barely more than eighteen, he had yet to fill out his armour, and when he waves his hand about it is all in an arrogant teenage huff. “Well it can speak. I wish to hear it. Go on, God. Say something.”
It takes a moment for Phainon to work the words from within him. So long has it been, so used to his own silence he has grown, that they taste strange on his tongue, stagnant as the palace around him.
“I am yours, your Majesty,” he says. Though it has been decades, his voice, at least, sings as it always does; like pealing bells, like the call of the bird, the chime of honeysuckle and the sigh of the wind. The voice of a God made to please humans.
And this God-King is so very pleased by this sound, he demands Phainon say it again, and again, and again.
“In the God-King’s name, I thought it was mute my whole childhood!” he had laughed in joy. “How silly my great grandfather must have been - for how wonderful it is, to hear a well-trained God bow to me! You are quite obedient, to not speak for a century.”
“I am the God-Kings. I do as they command.”
“Will it hurt you? When will I take you?” The God-King asks, as he prepares to take Phainon how his father and grandfather and all those before had. He does not look worried at the thought of pain. He looks hungry.
“If the God-King wants it to hurt, it can hurt,” Phainon says.
“You do not lie?”
“I cannot lie.”
The God-King considers this for some time. “Can I hurt you in other ways, too?”
“In whatever way you please,” Phainon reassures him, as he has many God-Kings before. “You are the God-King, and I am yours and immortal both.”
“You truly will not die?”
“I cannot die.”
And so there is a hand around his neck as he is taken this time, and Phainon cries, and whimpers, and the God-King loves it so much he lasts hardly any time at all. Phainon is glad of it, this God-King’s weakness in bed. It means he has to feel his body shaking a little less. It means forever seems shorter, for it is over for now. For he has been filled, and taken, and owned, and now the God-King sleeps.
That is how the God-King takes him for five decades, at least. Suffocating. Breathless. And Phainon stares at the ceiling, and cries when he must, and chokes when he must, and begs and pleads when he must. When the God-King wants it, when he wishes to see a divine being shed tears beneath him.
And there is nothing left in him. Nothing at all.
Once, the God-King almost dies.
Or his son does. The God-King dies many times; but never his son.
Each God-King has one son. Never daughters, unless to consorts. Never more sons, unless the same. Some, once, said this was a curse. How might a God-King cement his alliances, if he had no extra sons or daughters to marry off?
It was simple, really. The God-King gives their God to the one who wants them. For a single night, they can own a God too.
Phainon does not remember when it first happened; only that it does happen, that it must happen. That sometimes he makes a different trip, his feet walking over cobbled glass stones, to a room for a guest.
“You are owned,” the strange man - a foreign prince from foreign lands - might say, hair pale as wheat-stalks, pinkish like the sole of a foot.
“I am owned,” Phainon says where he kneels. He meets this man's eye and does not look away. He feels nothing, as he must.
“And you are mine?”
“Tonight, I am yours.”
In this, Phainon does not mind. Those who he is given to as a gift are often kind. They go gentle with the God they hold, for they have never held a God before, and it is an honour to do so, and they fear Phainon might break. Might shatter as fired clay in their hands. Might splinter into pieces scattered to a wind that no longer knew his name.
So Phainon will guide them through it - what to do, when one owns a God for a night. And he feels worshipped, for a moment, though it is not true reverence. It is false prophecy. It is desire for the divine.
But one morning, he wakes to a man at his door and it is no stranger he must serve. It is the God-King himself, fretting and angry. He demands Phainon come to his aid. Demands the God put to use what he can as he had so many times before.
The boy lies in his cot; a great bed, fit for many men, but which Phainon calls a cot, for all men are children until they are God-Kings. The child is pale. Sickly. Large circles paint swathes of purple under his eyes. When he coughs, blood speckles his napkin like stars.
“Please, God of the God-King, Phainon, Bringer of Heavenly Light. Please heal my son. He is all I have.”
“You have me,” Phainon says.
The God-King moans in despair. “You are what I own. He is what I have made. My own flesh and blood. My child. Did you not have children, once? Don’t all Gods?”
“The world was my child,” Phainon says, for it is truth.
“Then-then use the world, use it to heal my son. Use all of it, every power you have. I will do anything.”
And Phainon could do it. So easily, he could.
He does not want to. This is wrong. He has failed in his duty of being kept; for he thinks, for he has an opinion.
But the God-King takes this denial as confirmation that Phainon is not powerful enough, that he does not have what he needs.
“Oh, you cannot do it, can you?” he laments in his grief. “What can I give you, what do you need? I will do anything. Please. You held me the night he was born, so I could not hear the cries of his dying mother. Then you held him, as I bid farewell to her. He tried to nurse from you. You must feel for him too. Save him how you could not my wife. Please.”
The child had been so small in his arms. Piercing cry warbling as a swallow, mouth open and seeking teat. If Phainon were permitted, he would have fed the little thing from his own breast. He was given no such permission, and his ribs ached when the God-King came and took the babe away.
One day this child would be God-King, and would own him as his father, and speak the same words as him too. He would not have kindness, or empathy, or love as a man could. He would own the owned. He must.
“I will set you free,” the God-King says. Even the servants gasp, clutching their drawing mitts to their chests, fawning about each other in terror. A free God! What might become of their God-King then?
Phainon looks at him. “You will not,” he says. This is the only truth.
“I- I will,” the God-King waivers, but stands firm. “I will. The moment he is well, I will give you your freedom.”
“You will not,” Phainon repeats.
The child coughs again. His chest heaves. The smell of urine stains the air thick, and the handmaidens rush to wipe the vomit which dribbles from his panting mouth.
If this child died, what might happen to him? Would the God-King have another? Would Phainon be free?
This child would die. Or, this child would live, and then die another day as God-King, not as child.
Phainon steps forward. The room hushes, drawing back in terrible fear and awe at the thought of the divine.
Phainon kneels by bedside, as he has for many God-Kings. He reaches out a hand. It glows like a dying star; fractured gold slipping through his immortal mask, fragments of the divine mapping his body in a great web, as though he is glass, as though he is the porcelain others feared would break.
His fingers slip gently over the boy's clammy forehead. A brush of his thumb soothes the skin - burning hot, hot enough to be dead by morning, hot enough to hurt the mind. There is something terribly wrong with his lungs. They are not as they should be; and they never will be again, for this is not illness, but a fault of his birth. Phainon does not tell the God-King this. Phainon simply breathes.
Nothing happens, really. The world sighs. Far away, Phainon can hear it all; the murmur of the forest stream, the call of the morning dove and the whisper of the treetops, the draw of the ocean and the blossom of the rose. He is the world, and the world is him. He bears it all, though there is nothing to bear. He owns it all, though he is the one owned.
Phainon drops his hand.
The boy sleeps, now, though his skin is brown and healthy, apples of his cheeks tinged with a newborn shine. His hair; greasy, limp, now curls as the God-King’s did, framing his face like he is the one divine. No longer does he cough - and if he did, it would be clear, each breath like looking through glass. His cheeks are not sunken, his eyes not hollow, and when he hums in his dreams, it is like he sings for joy.
The God-King cries. Phainon sees men cry little, and is curious, perhaps, to watch the man who burns cities he wishes to conquer and hits his God until he bleeds clutching his child with such delight, stroking his head and rocking his body as though he were babe.
“Thank you, Phainon, Bringer of Heavenly Light, God of the God-Kings. You have given me life. You have saved my child with your divine power!”
The God-King does not see, of course, when Phainon curls up alone on the cold floor in his caged room after. He sees not the slivers of silk and bandage darken with big brown-purple clots of human blood that he coughs up from his lungs. He sees not the chill, the jewelled sweat about his pale face, the shake of his hands as the remnants of divine still kept in his strange mortal body burn through the illness of a human boy he bore instead.
And that God-King, of course, also does not set him free.
The guilt eats the ageing man alive each time he takes Phainon, each time he uses that which he promised the world once again.
“You understand, do you not?” the old man says many years after his promise, as his breath rattles in his lungs, grasping Phainon’s waist in bed. “I know you understand. Why I could not do it. It is better this way, isn’t it?”
“I am yours,” Phainon says, for this is the only truth.
And when the God-King dies, and the child he saved becomes him; he stands, in the same room as ever, and looks Phainon up and down, dressed in white as a mourning dove, and asks the same question as all.
“It is mine?”
The God-King often had many wives. Some even took husbands - though always wives first. Always women, to be given the child the God promised them. Phainon sees little of the wives unless the God-King made them watch his taking. Most of them did not do so. They understood as well as he - it was not nice for a partner to watch their husband take the thing he owned, the thing that would always be more beautiful than any human who lived or died.
But sometimes the wives would come to him instead. Was this the thirtieth, or thirty-first? Phainon did not know. She bursts through his gilded golden door in a flurry of red silks, sour face pinched tight, tears beading in her eyes. She was only twenty, Phainon thinks when it happens, as he sat on the floor staring at nothing, waiting to be called. She was a young wife, though she was God-Queen, and Empress of All Things, and her husband must have been forty or fifty by now.
“Every night, he has spent with you, as he has for almost a year,” she laments, and she is angry, and she is scared. “Every night! It is ridiculous! It is absurd!”
“I know of no time passing, your Grace. I belong to him, and he may use me when he pleases.”
His sleeves follow her arms as the moon did the sun. The heavy pearls strung from her ears and neck clatter. They once belonged to the sea. “But you do know! You count. You must count them, the days. They must be unbearable to you. They are unbearable to me! I must be pregnant, soon, or they will have me ousted - but he does not wish to take me, only you!”
Phainon makes no expression. Unreadable. Empty. “It is not unbearable, your Grace. It simply is. It must be.”
The woman throws her hands in the air, and then brings them to her temples. Massaging out the problems of having a God-King as a husband who preferred to bed his God.
“If it would help her Grace, I am her husbands, as I am hers,” he says, perfectly measured. “I can serve her too, if he gives his word.”
“I do not wish for you to serve me with the mouth you wrap around my husband's cock every night.”
“I need not pleasure you sexually, your Grace. You may hit me, or whip me, or burn me. I shall heal by morning; or not at all, if you wish to see the marks you leave.”
At that, the wife stills. Stands straight, suddenly, and regards him coldly, though a little unsure. “You would allow this?”
“I allow nothing, your Grace. But your husband may. I am his.”
The next day, he is called, as he is every night, to the God-King’s bedchambers.
“He has given me permission,” the God-Queen says, new fire flickering in her amber gaze, snake-skin whip wound tight in her white-knuckled grasp. On the bed sits the God-King. He is naked, already pleasuring himself. “Do not heal. I wish him to see what I have done to his precious God.”
Phainon nods, obedient and unfeeling, and lets his robes drop, and turns to face the bed and the God-King, and there he kneels neatly on the floor.
Afterwards, the God-Queen is exhausted. Golden blood runs in rivulets down his torn back and seeps into the marble floor. It rejoices, for it has been sent home.
She massages her shoulder with a grimace, though she still smiles wide, though her heaving chest reveals the joy she felt hurting what could not fight back.
And so Phainon holds out his hand, and watches the cracks in his fingertips glow.
“I can heal your pain, your Grace,” he says quietly. “For I am the God-Kings. For I am yours.”
The God-King, that evening, raked his hands all through the lashed wounds, and delighted in the writhing of his body - while he took his wife as though she was him, and murmured Phainon’s name as a prayer.
Phainon's shoulder aches for days. He ignores it.
“Surely you must hate us,” the God-Queen says one evening. The whip in her hand shimmers golden already. She breathes heavily, for she had hurt him for many hours, and she was ageing, and her body was tired. How many years had it been? It must have been a long time. Her hair was stormy grey as the sea, now. Her face wrinkled and old. She had given birth to one son many years ago. He would be the next God-King to own him.
“I cannot hate, your Grace,” Phainon says.
“But if you could. You would hate us. You would hate me. I have only ever hurt you, though you never hurt me.”
Phainon says nothing.
“I am yours,” he replies eventually, and turns back to the bed in his kneel. The whip strikes again. He feels nothing at all.
And this wife is not the first or the last to feel ire for Phainon's existence. After all, sometimes the God-Kings would love him more than any wife or husband or consort.
It happened often. Phainon was not a human partner. One with family ties, friendships or loyalty. He could not have those things, nor did he care too. All of existence, for him, was being as another's, as it had been for many, many centuries.
A thing who does not object; who does not grow annoyed, or cannot reject one's touch; a thing for pain and pleasure both, who makes no sound or moans one's name sweet and divine, who cannot say no; a thing of perpetual youth, constant beauty, and a thing who could carry no babe or get sick or die; this is the true desire of a God-King. For one is both God and King, when one owns another. No wife or husband or consort or friend can be as Phainon is; empty, and entirely theirs. And being theirs meant being favoured.
Once, the God-King of some centuries ago - perhaps the thirteenth or fourteenth in number - had cared so little for the etiquette of wife and consort and God that he had simply ordered Phainon to stay in his bed for he loved to look at his God so much. A grand bed was the bed of God-Kings. Large enough for many men; but not large enough that a life in it was much of a life at all. Though Phainon felt nothing for his command, and the time passed in an infinite blink of an eye - it had still been difficult, perhaps, to lie still and unmoving for years on end, rolling over only to be taken when another pleased.
When that God-King married, Phainon remained in bed beside them on their wedding night, still as a star, staring at the ceiling. When that God-King took others; Phainon remained there. Staring at nothing. Thinking nothing. Waiting, only waiting, to be next used. That God-King had told Phainon many times that he loved him. Phainon had never replied.
So, too, did some wish to curry his favour. What might it be; to have the beautiful one love them back? To have the God, the last God, adore them too?
Phainon ate little, only what he was given and when, for a God could live on the world, if they wished; though it quenched little the gnawing hunger inside him. He would not complain. It would get him nothing.
And so another, many centuries ago now, had liked to feed him as a human. Sent great feasts to Phainon's room fit for many men, given to half of one. He would smile softly that evening, as that God-King liked, and agree; yes, he was his, and only his. Yes, he would remember him and his kindness forever.
No, a God could not love; but they could be owned. And Phainon was owned, and full, and so terribly his.
That had been enough for the God-King, who would thrust a few more times, jolting Phainon's body before filling him up.
Phainon had no care for the other gifts showered on him either. The embroidered clothes, the faceted jewellery laid with gemstones, worth more than the Sun-Crown of the God-King or the great Sun-Palace itself. They were self-serving gifts, for they were items Phainon was meant to wear to see his owner to bed each evening. They meant little to him. A God could not care for the things in the world, if he was a thing amongst them too.
But still, sometimes he would smile; especially if the God-King was young and unsure of his place, or old and slow to his thoughts. He would thank the man who owned him as he ran his fingers over the velvet that caged such a gift. He would delight over his gifts, with the grace of a being who would never die.
“Thank you, your Majesty,” he says to the thirty-eighth God-King, and forces his smile to be soft, and gentle, and wills his cheeks reddened too. “No one has loved me as you, and I am sure no one ever will again.”
The God-King smiles to himself, proud. He had pleased his God. Though Phainon was owned - at least he was a merciful owner. At least he was one the God could love.
“You will not forget me.” He speaks it like a statement, though it is a question wrapped in surety. “Though you will live forever - to you, I will live forever too, for you loved me, for you were mine.”
A hand had come to Phainon’s cheek, and given him no time to reply. “You are so beautiful,” the God-King had breathed. “No one can know you as I. To lay eyes upon you, that first night… I knew why we are God-Kings. I knew we were divine too.”
Phainon stares at him. He does not speak. He is touched as though he is marble. As though he is unfeeling. Stone, to men, had never felt anything at all.
But he feels it all as he bends over when the kissing grows heavy and hot. He grasps the silks to muffle his pain, for his taking always hurt. It did not need to, but Phainon made it so. He gave himself this, at least. A human feeling he cared not to truly know, but which reminded himself that he did his duty.
“Say it,” the God-King mumbles moments later, rutting into his body, sweaty and pot-bellied and limp hair stuck to his face. “Tell it to me, like the first time.”
“I am yours,” Phainon would say. “And I am nothing at all.”
“And you love me?”
“And I love you, God-King. I will not forget you.”
The next day, Phainon lies in the God-Kings bed in the morning, as the man still inside him turns cold. Another dead. He had not mourned him. He could not. He had already forgotten his name, and he was nothing at all.
By the next weeksend he was dressed for his next owner; to be taken after the grand coronation straight to his chambers as always. All the beads and faceted stones of his sleeves weigh his arms down heavy to the floor, as though he bears the world once more.
“It is mine?” the new god king asks, stroking the stubble on his chin, freshly twenty one.
“It is yours,” the servants would say, and lower their heads in submission.
“I am yours,” Phainon would say, as he always had.
And Phainon stares at the ceiling as he had the night before, as he had so many nights before, and sees nothing before him. He tilts his hips as he is taken. He moans as he is owned. He lets the God-King believe that he bleeds for he is fresh and new and all his to have.
He lets the God-King believe that he is willing. That he is transformed. That he honours his taking, that it is holy, that it is divine.
The hands of every man before him stain his neck and waist and hips and back. They are written into his skin. He will never be clean.
The thirty-ninth God-King asks if he wants this. The lantern light paints his face young and insecure. He wrings his hands in nerves when Phainon is first presented to him.
“I cannot… well, I am God-King, you see. I know you have served our family for millennia, o’divine Bringer of Heavenly Light, but I must ask. Do you want this?”
“I want what you want me to, God-King.” Phainon steps forward, takes the other’s smooth, ring-adorned hands in his own, where he gathers them to his chest, and presses them into his still-beating heart. “Do you want me to want you tonight?”
“No. No, that is not my question.” The God-King’s voice waivers. He did not sound like a God-King at all. “Do we… are you unwilling? Has my family… taken you, these thousands of years, without consent?”
“I cannot consent,” Phainon reassures him. “This is my duty. As divine, one does not say yes or no to duty. It simply is.”
“You do not lie?”
“I cannot lie.”
This eases the thirty-ninth God-King. To know, in his heart, that the God they kept is not forced or unwilling or, heavens and great earth forbid, raped each night in the name of their pleasure.
Phainon kisses him back. Phainon moves his body in tandem. Phainon moans, and sings, and calls out to this God-King - of course this is his place, and of course this place is loved by the divine. What purpose does Phainon serve if not to please his God-King?
When that God-King dies, when he grows sick and tired deep in his bones, and he asks Phainon to hold him into death and stroke his hair and pet his cheek, Phainon stares at the ceiling as the man in his arm shudders his last breath.
For a moment, for an infinitely small sliver of forever - as this God-King stops living, and the next has yet to be crowned - Phainon thinks, to himself, that the answer is no. He is not willing. Once, he cared for men as his children. He still does, though they hurt him and take him and bend him to their will. They are born good, and they die good, though they make Phainon suffer in between.
But if Phainon were given a choice, a choice where he could bear the world and not serve, where all the river and mountain and bird and fish could live forever without his captivity, then he would take it. He would escape from the never-ending cycle. He would be free.
But it is not to be so. It is not possible for these things to co-exist - freedom, and duty. So he banishes this thought to the deepest, darkest channels of his mind. He holds his arms out to be bathed and dressed and adorned in gold. And he is given, as he always is, to the next.
“It is mine?” says the new God-King, fresh-faced at twenty-two.
“It is yours,” the servants say, as they always have.
“I am yours,” Phainon says, as he must.
The forty-seventh God-King of Sak-Kahn-Ko is a kind man.
When Phainon was seen by the one who owned him, he must glow. It was not exhausting. There was no power behind it. It simply was; for it was as he - a divine showing of the old power that once made his body from the clay of the world, and gave life to it through breath from the sun.
Does it tire the sun to shine as she did? No. The sun was his mother, as he was mother to the world.
And so his skin would shimmer, slightly, as though firelight caught the edge of a jewel, or sunlight broke through the clouds. Just enough so that a man could read by his light. Just enough so that all who saw him always knew; fragments of the divine still existed, and they were owned by men.
So he glows as he is taken. The forty-sixth God-King loves how he shines, and has him dressed in silver, like a star, and all the embroidery weighs his great sleeves down where they stroke the floor, and all his shoulders are free from the dress as he walks the hallway barefoot to the God-King’s chambers so everyone might see the golden mark of his skin. The binding that keeps him. The seal that has him a pet.
Not a pet, he thinks. Humans fed their pets, and stroked them, and trusted them to hunt or run or play or speak. He was not a pet. He simply was. It mattered little that the God-King shared his mark, that it always appeared on his skin the first time his virgin flesh touched Phainon’s, that all the divinity left of the world would draw a sun and its rays on the God-King’s neck, and mark it owner of God, and owner of World.
And Phainon owns nothing.
He is nothing, he thinks, as he lights the way for those who think him willing, who care so little for what a captured God might feel that they convince themselves he wants this too.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
It has been so long, now. He misses the sun, though he would never truly think it.
So when a God-King is kind, that is the only time Phainon really notices. For it drags him, horrifically, a little closer to existence once again. Reminds him that once, he, too, had known what it was to be. Dampens his shine, pours iron into the cracks of his vessel, draws out the inevitability of his servitude that little bit more.
And yet God-King Kar-Tam-So is kind insomuch as he does not seek to hide away what he is or what he must be. To Phainon, he is owner. He is world. And this world does not seek to hurt him more than he can take, or steal from him what he no longer has left to give. He does not lavish gifts on his God, nor make his God love him. He takes what is his, no more, no less. This is true kindness, to Phainon. This is mercy. This is the forty-seventh God-King Phainon has served.
Perhaps it had to do with his age. His father had died young, the one who loved to dress him as a star, who so often held him gently, who laughed with true joy as Phainon told him he was owned. Phainon had not minded when he was taken by that God-King, though he did not care for him. He had died far away from the Sun-Palace that had caged Phainon for millennia. Phainon had heard his passing in the sigh of the wind, in the tears of the earth, in the singing of the sky. The God-King is dead, they say with a smile. Mother is free to return.
But Phainon will never be free again. He had been given, as he always is, to the next. Kar-Tam-So. At only eleven, even Phainon had looked upon the boy, half his size with a mop of curls hiding his rounded face, and thought it strange to be owned by such a child.
Still, the babe wipes his reddened eyes and puffs up his chest, and says as his father, “You are mine.”
“Yes, little God-King. I am yours.”
“And… what… what does one do with a God?” the boy asks, unsure. “I have asked the servants. They will not tell me. They say I will know when it is time. So what will I know?”
Phainon says as he always has, “The God-King may do with me whatever he wishes.”
“What did my father do, though?”
“Take me, as a man should. But… you are not yet a man. He also had me listen to his troubles. Do you have troubles, God-King?”
The child's lip had wobbled. “No. I am God-King. I feel only strength.”
But Phainon had known, as all children, that the boy before him missed his father. After all, the God-Queen had passed a week after childbirth. The God-King was all the family Kar-Tam-So had.
So Phainon knelt on the floor and offered the young God-King his cheek. “You may use your strength, then. For it is right for a God-King to hurt their God.”
“But you will hate me, for causing you pain,” the God-King says, though he holds his own hand in anticipation.
“I cannot hate. I can only serve.”
“You tell the truth?”
“I cannot lie.”
The God-King had sniffled. He looked as though he could not believe it. “Really?’
And so Phainon had taken the God-Kings hand, and flattened it with his fingers, and drawn it sharply across his own cheek.
“See?” Phainon had said, as the young God-King gasped in wonder. “It is my duty, and I am only yours."
Kar-Tam-So had needed no more instruction. His golden rings had torn gashes in Phainon’s jaw, and the pain had blossomed as pleasure on his rounded, young face, as a sunflower turned to the sun.
It was Kar-Tam-So’s favourite pastime as he grew. He had shoes made, with capped toes, so he might kick Phainon’s ribs and hear them break. He had special rings forged with pointed tips, so he might watch the cracks in Phainon’s skin bleed gold and shine as molten metal.
And it calmed him. It had helped him grow.
And when the little God-King Kar-Tam-So had cried after every violent act, arrogant smile faltering into sobbing, Phainon had held him. Gently, as a mother held their son, and wiped his tears from his eyes while he wailed for his dead father, and told the little God-King that one day, he would rule the world as all men did.
And when he came of age truly, the God-King had taken Phainon as he must.
Kar-Tam-So had leaned their foreheads together the first time he had kissed his God. His eyes had glittered as the stars forbidden to the last fragment of divine.
“Do you want it?” he had asked in wonder.
“Do you want me to want it?” Phainon had replied.
Kar-Tam-So had nodded, a little breathless, as he held the waist of the God that held him while he grew up, as his fingertips kneaded flesh that now could comfort him another way. “Yes. I… want you to want me, though I hurt you.”
Phainon had understood. Then he had smiled. It was a soft thing. A gentle thing. It was not willing, though it appeared so.
“Then I want you, God-King Kar-Tam-So,” he had said, and let his fingertips ghost a curl on the human's head, come around to cup his face and stroke his cheek. “Take me here in the bed that was your fathers, and fathers father, and all those before. For I am Phainon, Bringer of Heavenly Light, God of the God-King, and I am yours.”
And all had been right when the sheets had stained golden. And all had been well, when Phainon acted willing, when he acted owned.
So God-King Kar-Tam-So is kind, but he is also cruel. The scholars say this makes him a leader. His men say this makes him a man. Phainon thinks this makes him human.
They know not of when the doors close to his bedchamber after a night of courtly duty, and he turns like a whirlwind to Phainon’s kneeling form where he had been instructed to wait for the day, and his flattened palm strikes the God sharply across the cheek.
It was not anger Kar-Tam-So showed him now he had grown into a young man of twenty-eight or nine or seven. Rather, it was the joy of a boy playing with his toys. The wonder of a man who could strike a God and suffer no harm, who had used his God for all of his life to write his troubles on immortal skin and watch them fade away.
“You would let me do this forever, wouldn’t you?” he asks, though he knows the answer.
“I let no one, your Majesty. I take, for I must.”
“And why must you take?”
“I am yours, as I was your fathers, and your fathers father, and his and beyond. And when you have sons, and sons of sons, and thereafter, I will be theirs too.”
“You are not like them, all my men-in-waiting and lords and ladies alike. I need not train you to listen, or force you to obey.” A hand, gentle, comes to Phainon’s temple, to part his hair and let it fall down his back how Kar-Tam-So liked; pretty as a woman, free as a girl. “You are loyal to me, in no way they ever might be. That is true, is it not?”
“I am yours,” Phainon says, for he cannot say what he thinks - that he will never be loyal to any man, for they come and go too soon. When Kar-Tam-So is bones and dust ground into the silence of the earth, he will be here, facing a God-King who no longer looks like him at all, being taken by a mortal who believes himself God.
Something is different. Though everything is the same as it always is, as it has been for years and decades and centuries and more - though he cannot hear the birdsong, or the river’s call, or the forests whisper or the sun's love - the time passes without him. He is trapped and they are not. He is the world, though he no longer knows it.
Yet Phainon knew something was different, for he was given more clothes. They did not need to take his measurements. He had never changed, and never would. But he was made to wear them to see if they might fit anyway. To stand before the God-King Kar-Tam-So as the servants dressed him and stripped him and dressed him and stripped him. The God-King sat, picking from a great feast of grapes and wine and fig-plum pudding, lounging in his breech-cloth, commenting on how each fit his God’s body.
“I like this one. What is this one, again?”
“This is a dress in the style of the Tangshi Alliance, your Majesty.”
A silk wrap, pressed tight around his body and held by a large and wide belt. It was washed with a thousand perfectly embroidered cherry blossoms, and white stalk cranes fluttered on the sleeves. The collar felt like metal. The bodice like stone.
“And this one?” the God-King continues, when Phainon has been redressed in a seals-pelt, fish-netting falling down his arms as a cloak, the twine tied with seashells at the bottom.
“The Gaullics, your Majesty, from the West. We have taken some liberties with the shape to better accentuate its body.”
The God-King hums, pleased, and waves on to the next. The air tastes like stone. It smells like sex, like sweat; for Phainon had been used on his waking, and he would be used again when the dress-up was done.
The God-King and the servants speak of what will happen, these next few months as spring bleeds into a summer; neither of which Phainon will know or taste or see or care for.
All of the heirs to each burgeoning Kingdom of the mapped world, any who considers themselves worthy, will gather here in Sak-Kahn-Ko for half a year of feasting, celebration; and, in the end, they will all pledge their fealty to the God-King themselves - if they did not wish their homes to be razed to the ground, of course. It was a ceremony Sak-Kahn-Ko used to honour every fifty years, though it had fallen out of fashion some centuries ago. Now Kar-Tam-So would bring it back to remind all he was God-King - and, more likely, Phainon thinks, staring at the empty bed, to find the best alliance for his future wife.
There will be twelve of them. Twelve Princes, twelve heirs. All shall dine with each other the first night, then every two weeks after. And after they have eaten and drank their fill each of the waning nights, Phainon will be taken before them in the traditional clothing of their homes.
To own Phainon, in each of these outfits, was entertainment. It was also power. It was the God-Kings will. Who would challenge the God-King who can dress a God in one’s own clothes, and take it before each future heir to lands near and far?
“-and this one is from Castrum Kremnos, your Majesty.”
Phainon stands, oddly naked in strange gold. The cloak thrown over his shoulder was barely a dress at all. A skirt, woven river reed with leather strands and hung against his thighs, glittered with golden coins. His hair, long as it was, is piled into a great scarf; his chest, free and painted with strange swirling patterns in crimson-moon red.
Kar-Tam-So’s nose wrinkles. He surveys this outfit for a long time before declaring it shall be the last one Phainon wears, the pinnacle of his guests and feasting alike.
“It is about time those Kremnoans learned. A warlord is no match for the one who owns a God.”
The God-King tells the servants, then, to redress him in the Tangshi outfit, and leave him on his bed, for he wished to take his God in such pretty clothes but had another attendance first.
Phainon kneels on the bed staring at nothing for hours before his God-King returns, stiff in that bodice of stone and silk. He does not think, after so many centuries of serving. He cannot.
They arrive with much fanfare some weeks after the fittings. Phainon is told, by the slivers of breeze that find themselves into the grand tiled throne room of a million colours, that their arrivals are as royal as they. Dozens upon dozens of horses, carriages carried by men and oxen alike, whole legions stationed in leather tents atop the sprawling mountain tops that stretched far across all of Sak-Kahn-Ko. They sing songs in their giant parades, they blow horns and play instruments, with those who witness such grandeur said even fall to their knees in wonder at all the Princes of the mapped world coming to the Sun-Palace there where the mountains meet the sky.
Phainon, of course, sees none of this. He is dressed in beads and jewels the colour of the God-King, forest green and river blue and brilliant, sun-bright yellow, and he kneels by the God-King’s throne, and he waits with his hands on his knees, counting the emeralds laid into his rings.
Kar-Tam-So had yet to take a wife. Long had the God-Kings of Sak-Kahn-Ko grown picky with their personal partners. Of course they might take as many consorts as they pleased, men and women and all those between from all manner of places besides - but the God-Queen would be Mother of the God-King only, Empress of All Things, and bearer of Heavenly Light. She could be chosen when the God-King was older, when he had spent some years warring and being pleased by the God in his bed come evenings touch, and when the God-King knew which alliance he best wished to strengthen with his marriage. And so Phainon waited alone at the feet of the God-King with no Queen standing by his side. He wears a crown - a tiara, a diadem of thatched gold. It is shaped like a collar, and heavy as a bruise.
They enter, each of the twelve Princes, with as much pomp as they had arrived. The Gaullics tear through the latticed doors with a dozen chanting soldiers in two neat lines, slamming their bone spears on the ground, slapping their naked chests with fur-wrapped fists. Their Prince is tall, and rounded in the belly and face, and his pale pinkish skin is the colour of unripe peach.
The Tangshi alliance come bearing gifts, towers of jade which shimmered in the sunlight, and all their men and women wear their hair shaved about the top and scraped into ponytails black as ravens night. Their Prince is short and handsome and quite young, with an all-seeing, sharpened gaze, and he wears a tunic wrapped three times about his body that folds as he bows.
The rest blur together. The Hellenoi's come in white cloth that drapes their body as a bandage, and they bring with them turtle-shell bowls and a Prince who limps on one leg with a snake-headed cane. The Kemeti wear loincloths beaded with alligators and iris flowers, and their Prince wears a wig made of wool, woven into a flower behind her unsmiling face - for though she was born woman, Phainon knew Kemeti did not care for the bodies of their Royalty, and called them all Princes besides.
They all look to Phainon first with awe, then with hunger. They marvel at the only sliver of divine that exists, the only one to have existed for longer than even some of their homes have known their names. Phainon weathers each stare with an unfeeling, unmoving body. He is nothing. He is the God-King’s. And they covet this power, they bend to it unthinking, and Kar-Tam-So’s shoulders grow wider with pride each passing hour of these displays. He even comes, quite happily, to pet Phainon’s head as though he is dog. To stroke the fall of his white hair before his crown, to hum to himself of how mighty he is, how worthy of being God-King after all.
The final man is dressed in the same gold as the sun.
His entourage is the smallest of them all, and seems to care little for displays of power or wealth. A dozen or so loyal soldiers march forwards and line the courtroom holding large flat great-swords and wearing bronze helmets and horse-hair plumes. Both the men and women wear no covering about their top half, and their rippling muscles are printed with swirls of red in flicks of flame and concentric diamonds.
So, too, does their Prince enter quietly, accompanied only by one other man at his side. He wears the same woven reed skirt Phainon was fitted in, and the huge sword at his belt is sheathed in a yew-wood hold carved with the head of a lion. Curly yellow hair is pulled from his face with a red scarf, the golden coins hanging from its embroidered edge clattering like stones when he moved - as did his whole body creak with the great metal boots he wore, the red cloak that brushed the ground, the bare torso that glittered like bronze, the great necklace that sparkled with sapphire and gold. He seemed not annoyed by the sound of his movement. He seemed not to care for it at all.
“Welcome, Crown Prince Mydeimos of Castrum Kremnos,” says the God-King, as he has said to each Prince who had come before him.
Crown Prince Mydeimos of Castrum Kremnos bows once, stiffly at the neck - a clear sign of disrespect that has the crowd muttering displeasantries at the savagery of Kremnoan dogs. Phainon thinks the man looks not like a dog; but like the lion of his swords sheath, proud and unyielding and quite beautiful in his bare faced way.
The man does not speak as the others had when he looks to Phainon - turning to their contingent with hushed whispers and awe at the first and only God they would ever see. He is silent, gruff face surveying the last of the Gods with intense thought.
And he does not look away - but he does not stare, how the others might, with lust and fascination. He does not look to Phainon like he wishes to see the God bend over and kiss the God-King’s foot, or declare how owned he was.
He looks, if anything, strangely concerned, gaze fluttering over the bruises which always blossomed like plum flowers on Phainon's skin. He could heal them, but Kar-Tam-So did not want him too. So the golden man before them retains his handsome stature as his brow knits together into a frown, and he places a hand on his manservant's arm.
They speak not. But the manservant waves his hand about, brings two hands together and then apart. Then the man - the Crown Prince - shakes his head. Rattles his fingers above his temple, the coins of his scarf tinkling, then slices down with his palm. The manservant sighs. He motions to Phainon, and then clasps about his wrists.
Were they making words with his hands, instead of speaking them? Phainon had never seen such a thing. Humans were loud, and men the loudest of them.
Eventually, the manservant turns to Kar-Tam-So, and speaks on behalf of his Prince.
“The Crown Prince wishes to know how long the God has been with you,” asks the manservant. He was short, and lean, and had a scholarly face with an athlete's body.
God-King Kar-Tam-So smiles, all teeth. “You may tell the Crown Prince that it has been in my family's possession for centuries. As far back as the fall of the Gods, as far back as Sak-Kahn-Ko has existed. Perhaps two thousand years, now, though it is hard for mortal men to count such lengths.”
The manservant uses his hands to convey this information, and the Crown Prince, at that, looks surprised - perhaps even alarmed - and pushes his hands up and out, then draws them around in two sharp circles, before landing on his heart.
“The Crown Prince wishes to know what one does with a God for two thousand years."
Kar-Tam-So laughs, now. “Whatever one wishes, my dear Mydeimos. It is entirely loyal to me, for it must be. Disobedience is foreign to it. It has no opinion, other than the desire to be owned.”
A hand tilts Phainon’s chin up, and Phainon lets himself be joined in a deep kiss, all bite. Kar-Tam-So devours him, and all the court clutch their high-stitched collars in awe, and all the earth cries for how unwanted it is. Yet Phainon makes no move against it, nor does he join its movement. He lets himself be led in every regard.
He expects, now, the golden Prince before them to relax. To see what was before him as what it was. Inevitable, unchanging, and wonderful for men.
What Phainon meets when he returns, lips tingling and face blank, is fury.
He knows fury well, in men. He is the object of it. He is the release.
Not this man. This Prince stares upon Kar-Tam-So with such terrible anger the earth might shake and open and devour him alive on his throne.
Phainon knows it might, for he is the earth, and it all turns over and over inside him, suddenly, all the weight of the ground beneath his feet, all the boulder and rock and dirt stretching into endlessness below. He is their hatred eternal. He is all the power the world can hold and more. One day, he will bear the world with anger, and spite, and fury, and rage-
Phainon blinks. He ignores what he cannot control, what means little to him.
Anger is not his. It cannot be. It will not be.
When the Crown Prince leaves, led by the court eunuchs in their blocked sandals to the grand chambers each Prince would stay in, Phainon remains unmoving.
“Can I take you here?” the God-King asks Phainon. The servants busy about the hallway, scraping up the flower petals that had fallen from the Prince of D’amoks’um great headdress. “The Annals speak of it. How some God-Kings would take you before their Court.”
“Yes,” Phainon says, and he answers both questions. “For I am yours.”
He counts the petals on the floor as they are swept away. His body rolls, moved up and down by the grip at his waist that is sure to bruise his softened mortal skin. He holds the sides of the throne to stay upright.
And all who watch do so in honour; what divine sight they behold, the God of the God-King exactly where it should be.
It is a few days before their first feasting. Phainon serves his God-King each night as he must, dressed in fine cotton and silk, walking barefoot the only journey he makes. In the deadened air he smells springtime, though he will not know it himself.
It happens in the great court room, though now the balcony columns are strung with lush grape vines and ivy, and the vast night sky above them is streaked with purple and blue and rose-bush white. Though the braziers burn bright yellow flames from the salted-wood cast into their coal, Phainon is the one who glows brightest, standing by the God-King’s throned chair, staring at the feast he cannot eat.
For they are Princes, all about the table seem to know the common tongue. And though they have been summoned to bow to the God-King of Sak-Kahn-Ko, they know it really as a matter of avarice, of a show of envy, of a parade of wealth. So they each dress elaborate, and take turns telling the stories of how they traversed such dangerous lands to find the Sun-Palace in the sky, and they tell stories of their great families and greater dynasties, and speak at length of the wealth each of them know at home.
The God-King is much pleased by this gathering. Phainon knows, for he smiles that sharpened, pinched smile, and waves about his goblet filled with plum-dark wine, and laughs at all manner of stories as though he has commissioned the words himself. When they speak, sometimes the Prince's gazes slip from the God-King’s to stare at the glowing God by his side. The God-King likes this greater. His shoulders grow wider. His laugh burrows deeper. He is God-King, and he owns a God.
The Crown Prince of Castrum Kremnos speaks eventually, though he makes no sound at all. He tells a short story of how his father and sister and nieces and nephew said farewell to him covered in mud, for they had been playing in the paddied wheat fields come the heavy rain usual for this time of year in his home, and tracked it all through their palace in their haste.
This story is not actually spoken by him, of course. It is told through his manservant, who stands by his side as Phainon did the God-King, and gives Mydeimos’ signed words to them all with careful precision.
This story, though the rest of the table laugh, does not make Kar-Tam-So happy.
“Do all Kremnoans play in mud for fun?” he asks, as though he already has victory with his words.
The manservant conveys this, sour look on his face. Mydeimos of Castrum Kremnos almost smiles, lips pressed together in a line, and he replies with his hands too.
“The Crown Prince says that it is better to know the earth, rather than hide from it in palaces made of stone in the sky.”
The God King does not reply to this. Most of the audience stare into their cups, and hide their laughter with a sip of wine. It is not a slight worthy of being called out at all, but the God-King is not happy, and picks at his teeth with the pheasant bone he had gnawed clean.
But eventually, they are all heavy with food and good wine too. Kar-Tam-So sets down his cup, and gestures to Phainon, silent and shimmering at his side.
“I am sure you are all curious of my God by now.”
The man closest to the God-King himself, the Prince of the Tangshi Alliance, leans forwards with much verve. “The eunuchs said you took him in the throne room after we all arrived. You left us out, your Grace, though we are new guests. Some hospitality Sak-Kahn-Ko has.”
The God-King’s laugh is bellied, and hearty, and much pleased. “Well, now I do not. Come, Phainon. Let us show my guests what it means to own a God.”
Phainon steps forward to stand before them all. With a wave of his hand, God-King Kar-Tam-So gives his command. Phainon takes to his belt, the sash of embroidered fig-leaves and orchid branch, and it falls. The audience gasp as the thickened fabric of his great dress pools on the floor beneath him, as he stands there naked and unmoving as stone. Just as the goblets stretched around the grand feasting table; he too shimmers in the light, for he is the light itself. It fractures through the sun etched into his neck, peeks through the circle about his chest, gleams through the cracks in his human skin.
“Look upon it, my new friends. Its beauty never diminishes, for it is undying.”
The D’amoks’um Prince leans forward in rapture as he speaks. “It has lived forever?”
“Indeed. They say it was God of all things. Now, it is mine, as it has always been my fathers and fathers before. It is Phainon, Bringer of Heavenly Light, God of the God-King.”
Kar-tam-so nods once, and Phainon turns, scraping his hair to his shoulder so they might see it better; the sun, etched in his skin as a brand.
“This is the promise. The binding it keeps; it is ours. It cannot leave. It cannot disobey. Nor can it turn its Godly wiles on us, and make us suffer with the divine. But it would not seek to; for my father, and his father, and every father before that trained it very well. It is devoted to us entirely. It is ours. We are God-Kings.”
All about the table mutter of training a God. What wonder! No wonder they were a God-King!
Kar-tam-so draws his high beaded collar away from his neck; and now the feasting crowd truly shudders in awe at the sun that matches his God.
When a God-King first takes him, that is when it happens. When Phainon's skin touches his next owner; it sparks, it glitters as the sun Phainon no longer sees, carves itself into the man that will one day be dust.
A hand comes to Phainon’s face and grasps it. Worn rough by years of the sword Kar-Tam-So had practised but never mastered, they feel like mountains to Phainon, and like nothing at all.
“You are mine,” says Kar-Tam-So.
“I am yours,” Phainon replies.
They fawn about themselves with the sound of his voice; compelled, by the divine, to listen and love and honour it.
“It is beautiful.”
“It is divine.”
“It is obedient.”
“It is yours.”
All these things Phainon is, though he does not let the clamouring words reach him. He is far away, in an open world that still knows his name. He is not kept.
A hand kneads the soft roundness of his mortal body, there at the tops of his thighs and curve of his ass. When Kar-Tam-So slaps such tender skin, the Prince of Kemet clutches her golden looped necklace, and the Prince of Gaullica barks like a dog.
“Go on, God of the God Kings. As you are taught.”
Phainon steps once. Twice. As much as he is permitted to move; until he stands before them all at the head of the great feasting table. Without a command - for he knows this, now, what is required of him - he bends over, sliding his hands along the edges of the table, giving himself up to another.
The table clinks as he is taken. The Princes clamour to look. To watch the power of the act; of a human, entering a submissive God. The lantern light flickers shadows over the faces of all that will be dead long before Phainon ever stops serving men just like them. His own glow shimmers with each snap of hips against his. All these men believe themselves the writers of history. They are only the page it is written on.
Two thousand years of owning nothing at all, not even his body, not even his thoughts or his time or his name. Phainon knows this well, and feels nothing about it anymore.
But one does not look at him. One does not seek to see; the power of taking. It is not rape, for the God cannot object. It is not love-making, for a God feels no love and never will.
It is. It must be. For Phainon bears the world, though it has forgotten him. For Phainon is World-Bearer, before he is God of God-Kings.
Yet the Crown Prince of Castrum Kremnos does not look to Phainon’s taking. He looks, stormy–faced as a great rolling cloud, directly into his wine cup as the table jostles about him. He looks angry, and he looks sad, and these emotions seem one and the same to this Mydeimos, which is curious for a human to see and even more curious for a God.
And when Phainon has been filled and must stand, naked and now used before them all as the feast draws closed, and stare at the bolted door to the Sun-Palace unknowing what is on the other side - it is Mydeimos who leaves first, pushing from his seat and storming from the room. He does not look back, though the God-King and the other Princes mock him. He faces only forwards when he walks.