I Never Knew Daylight Could Be So Violent
Art credit to Xi Zhang
The Gods didn’t dream because they never had anything to long for.
At least, that’s what everyone had always been told. The Gods were of utmost importance, with their holy names only whispered into the air at temples and behind closed doors, were above dreams because they knew all. Knowledge and power came to them with nothing but a snap of fingers, a fluttering of eyelashes. Things that mortals would never even dream of doing came to them too easily, like child’s play—but then again, it was often said that mortals were like children, foolish and fumbling through life.
They controlled everything; they had arms that held up the sky, as cerulean and weighty as it was, eyes that watched over all and saw everything that was unbelieving about mortals, and a presence that outweighed and challenged any mortals who somehow thought that they were better than the ones who had created the world they inhabited. They controlled all, and they knew all, and if they didn’t, the proper sacrifice or sacrilege would loosen up a lesser god’s or a nymph’s lips no problem.
So, the Gods didn’t dream. And that was that. There was just one little problem.
The Gods had not always been that. Some Gods had chosen that path—more so, they had been selected, seen as fragile mortals, humans, but with potential, but with grit and steel-cold bones and nothing else waiting for them in the realm of the breathing. They had been children with ice in their veins, determination in their hearts, ready to do whatever it took to ascend—to be like those respectful, reverent Gods, all-knowing and wise.
These mortals, with their ice veins and determined, aching hearts, still were just human. They were flesh and bone, bloodied in the way they grew up, the poorest of the poor, the most hunger-stricken of the downtrodden, but they still held fantasies of grandeur and happy endings. They still had dreams.
Maybe that’s why that God—the nymphs would whisper lazily to each other, their emerald skin beaming, ruby-red eyes glowing as they swamped gossip around—the God of Pestilence has been in such a rotten mood. A mortal, even gone evil is still a mortal, isn’t it so?
Could it be the fact that the God of Pestilence used to be nothing but a mere mortal, a boy with open eyes and blemished, strawberry freckled skin from days in the fields on those sunny days with no shelter? Or was it something else entirely? Was it the secret, which really wasn’t one, that Gods were just as flawed as humans? That for their big talk of hundreds of partners, homes all across the globe, never a heart left bleeding, all they really wanted was to love and to be loved?
The God of Pestilence did dream. Long, contemplative dreams that would wring him dry every time he passed through that realm of dreams and then slowly, painfully, back to his own. The God dreamed of meadows so lush and complete that you could settle down there for the night, of dandelions brushing by your fingers, rare and beautiful. Of a child with a smile that felt like a gift, a pinky-finger enveloping his own to cement the promise he knew he already had.
He dreamt of his old name—not the name specifically, but the way it sounded, the way people’s lips would wrap around the syllables. It was a comfort to remember the simpler times when he wasn’t a God at all. He was just a boy, trying to stay one for as long as he could, trying to avoid the future that awaited lonely boys like him, a future that had already been decided for him.
He dreamt of his current name too. But it wasn’t of the title or how mortals would say it only in the direst and horrific times, with their loved ones on sick beds, on the brink of death, begging for his mercy. It was instead how they said it. The only person who knew him, both when he was a young boy living in the country, jangly limbs and eyes still looking up to find the wonder in the stars and the moon, and when he grew up, was chosen, was made to be someone he still didn’t know how to be.
Luo Xing, Arnaya would say. Wake up.
-
He was the God of disease, pestilence, to be exact. Of fatal and rotting disease living in his veins and his being. The ability to ravage an entire village, to destroy a family’s bloodline, to punish those who had been flippant existed just at his fingertips. In a way,
Luo Xing could blame the celestial beings, those who were now his peers, for this too. They made me like this, he used to think, while he was in training, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But other options were better and easier, that didn’t involve death and limp, decaying bodies as far as the eye could see.
Luo Xing chose his path; he decided to be the God of Pestilence. Because he knew exactly who he was. He knew what had compounded in him through the process of living and parts of him dying and his very essence of self fighting for survival almost every moment. Luo Xing had come to acquainted with death, with disease, came to like the way that it was so sure and so exact in his part in the world. And even now, that’s all he ever wanted. To have a place in the world, be it good or bad.
It was for that exact same reason that Luo Xing’s journey to the small and lushly green village of Mydiyaz made him want to crawl out of his skin. Mydiyaz was everything that the God of Pestilence wasn’t, warm with the sun just peeking over the horizon and homely as the villagers with worn but friendly faces would bow towards him, even though he was the last God that deserved any of their kindness. Mydiyaz was the last thing that should have reminded him of his home, the Death Ridge, sandy and dry with trees filled with crab apples.
Maybe it reminded him of something else; another home in another life when he was just a boy and nothing else. But flawed nostalgia and distant memories weren’t what Luo Xing was here to focus on, not in the slightest.
Even though Luo Xing’s job mainly was that of a minor nomadic God, what with his children taking care of most of his work for him, it was tradition for him to visit a small village every few decades and bless them the rare safety from disease as well as resolve any and all ailments that the people were blighted with. It was a balance that the Gods before him reached. For a lifetime of hurt, do one good thing, one kindness. And if you were one of the kinder gods, you had to do cruelty, as well.
The idea of some of those Gods that Luo Xing, those that had deemed themselves as kind and giving, as good, being forced to take a life or maim a lover or take a tiny child away from their protective parents’ arms stirred something satisfactory in him. Those gracious Gods, thinking that simply granting a blessing made them better than Luo
Xing, would fall to their knees the day they were forced to be bad and watch as the very people they blessed fell prey to their twisted destiny.
Luo Xing hoped it awakened something in them. He hoped that something dark and gruesome settled in them, that the blood staining their fingertips would stay and protrude and infect until there was nothing left. Until they were just as rotten and sickly as he was. Then, they’d know. Maybe then, they’d understand it.
Maybe he was going too far with that, though. It’s not like no one ever understood. After all, there was always one person who understood Luo Xing—for all his slyness and bitterness and open-mouthed sarcasm and the evil he knew ran between the crevices of his heart. Even though Luo Xing had not had them in millennia, if he had ever had them at all, he knew that they were the one person, the one God, who tried to memorize all of him, not avoiding his sickly parts but embracing them.
If he indulges himself—a moment of weakness, he can still see their eyes looking right at him and his hair tucked behind his ears by deft fingers, every move measured and sure. He can still hear their kind words, not slurred at him as an insult but rather as an insistence for the man, caught between God and mortal, to be compassionate towards himself.
Luo Xing never saw truth in any of it, but how they looked as they spoke made him want to believe, made him want to be loved. Be loved by them. But that could never be, and that certainly never was.
-
The next day when Luo Xing opened his eyes, he knew that Arnaya had arrived.
Despite how different they were and how many people thought it was odd that they were friends, both Luo Xing and Arnaya had been close as could be when they were both training to be Gods, even though they wanted to be vastly different ones. Luo Xing was all brutal precision, a detailed and systematic sequence of shot after shot, every hit vital and poisonous to the very touch.
Arnaya, on the other hand, focused on the life around them. They would touch their fingers to the ground and feel connected to all plains of life that had ever existed. Arnaya would sustain that life, that holiness and beautiful harmony in their fingertips, using it to spread small facets of what life was made out of all around. Sometimes, Luo Xing would allow himself the guilty pleasure of watching Arnaya at work, having to force his gaze away from them at times.
Many people said that it was ironic that Luo Xing and Arnaya were together—one the bad and the other the good. It used to strike him as rotten to be seen that way, but that was before he realized that for the good to flourish, they needed the bad. And at that time, he was willing to do anything, be anything, as long as that meant Arnaya would stay themself.
The general consensus had always been that Luo Xing and Arnaya were like poles, separate but always attracting the other. Wherever Arnaya would go, Luo Xing would follow and vice-versa. People found them almost endearing, their affection for each other pure in a way that made most tolerate Luo Xing due to their respect for Arnaya but most of them, if not anyone at all, didn’t know the extent of their bond.
No one knew about their meeting as children with worn limbs in the fields, working for their keep in the form of food and water. And they certainly didn’t know about the time where Luo Xing had been punished by the matron, kept without sustenance, and Arnaya sneaked into his room with the best piece of bread and the first drink of water. Luo Xing still remembered how it had felt a miracle, like someone had come to save him after all this while, except this time, they would stay.
The last day they spent there, in the fields, as mortals and children, Luo Xing remembers picking up a thick and dark red ribbon left behind by some luckier children who got to run their way to school. The colour enchanted him, made him smile and think of Arnaya with their dark scarlet hair, almost looking like the cherries that he wanted to pick but never could.
No one would ever know that was the thing that bonded them, that Luo Xing had wrapped the red ribbon around his pinky finger and then looped it around Arnaya’s. He couldn’t have known. He had no idea of knowing that soon that ribbon would turn
into the red string of fate and that fate would have it no other way than for them to be together, always. They had not chosen each other as Gods, but rather as foolish children who thought they understood the world, despite knowing nothing and the world teaching them that. Still, they loved each other.
That had always been true until their training was over and the reality of being Gods set in. The good complemented the bad, and the bad did so the good, but they could never exist together, not in the way they had both grown to know and desire for. And not even the Red String of Fate , the string of soulmates, of lovers, of best friends, could stop what the Gods had set forth.
But, maybe the universe had lent them a window, in its’ cruel, unfair way. Because when I said I wanted one of the kind gods to suffer, Luo Xing thought, his limbs, usually static, struck with panic and dread, as he leapt to where he knew his legs would take him, I didn’t mean Arnaya. Never Arnaya. It was moments like these where Luo Xing wanted to grapple with fate, wanted to take every bit of cruelness that existed within him, every foul thing that festered and maim them with his very own hands.
That’s what the Gods called killing someone like a mortal, with nothing but brashness and impulsivity and that is what Luo Xing bled to do, above all else.
He never thought that he would be cruel for any reason that wasn’t his own. He never wanted to involve anyone else in his awfulness, in his reign of terror, and soon enough, he would regret it all—thinking of them, how vicious it all was. The idea of protecting only worked if you had a pure heart, good intentions. Luo Xing was too ruined to be a protector, but nevertheless.
Regardless. Luo Xing needed to be good enough, just this once, to be able to save Arnaya. His Arnaya, through the years they had known each other, even in the ones they didn’t remember. Arnaya had always stayed despite the distance, despite almost forgetting their face. It was always going to be them.
Luo Xing found them sooner than he had expected. Arnaya was kneeling down against the edge of a lake situated nearly on the outskirts of Mydiyaz. Even as a God himself, Arnaya’s glow intimidated, and the very presence of it was so heavy that it got to his
heart, the one he thought was only feeble now. Their hair was no longer red, beaming a lighter shade of brown now, but Luo Xing would be remiss not to notice the red streaks in it, airier than what he had remembered, for the fact that it wasn’t colour in their hair, but blood shading it—blood a shade lighter than Luo Xing had come to know it as.
That of a child’s.
Luo Xing tried not to think about them as children, as young as this child might have been. He tried to push away thoughts of him waking up one day only to find Arnaya’s body bloody and limp, soon to be pushed off to the small mortuary where they kept the unclaimed bodies, to be buried in a small grave, no prayers murmured and no grace to be given. Despite the times that he maimed families without a thought of consequence or grief, he silently prays that for Arnaya’s sake, this child went with people mourning them, with a family who had loved them so dearly.
Luo Xing moved closer, and he felt his vision tear apart the edges even more; from the blood staining their fingers and tracing the edges of their neck, to the light shade of cardinal red polluting the river, which was the same as the blood that was still all over Arnaya’s body. Their body was shaking, hands trembling as they cast their bloody fingers into the ground, searching for something real, something that wasn’t just all red and barren with the truth of what they had done.
How was Luo Xing supposed to start? How do you start a conversation with the person you hadn’t been granted the right to see in millennia, who you have missed so ardently? How do you begin to say hello to someone you have missed so much in your body but always stayed close to in soul?
“I can sense you’re there, you know?” Arnaya spoke, and Luo Xing only felt a slight tremor of fear at the cadence of their voice, still so sure, despite their body curling onto itself.
Suddenly, Arnaya raises their hand, balls it into a fist and loosens it, only to show a dark red string wrapped around their finger, proving long and silken even though the last time Luo Xing had seen it, it was before he was rotten or was hung dry by the world for being too weak and small, too useless in a world that decided your worth by what you
could do for them. For some reason, he had thought that his string would look different after everything he had been through and everything he had done. But no, it looked the same, the colour of the string as dark and cherry-red as he remembered the ribbon being, although it was a distant memory.
“Even your fellow Gods don’t believe in this.” Luo Xing manages to say, his throat raw and lips bit down, raising his finger feebly to show his identical red string, “I didn’t expect you to either.” It was like an old memory, talking about the Gods they used to train with; how they would flock around Arnaya, their leader and sneer at Luo Xing, someone they all decided was the lesser God. It was still jarring to see how different they all were and how they and Arnaya were now allies, rather than them laughing at them with Luo Xing, hands over their mouths like teenagers.
The God moves closer to Arnaya, watching their body unfold bit by bit, their guard coming down, and he watches as their blood-soaked fingers wrap around each other. Arnaya smirked, lips still trembling. It was like watching a perfectly done painting fall apart, like a hero falling from grace. He thinks of the pilgrimage, of the worship done in Arnaya’s name and wonders if the same sentiment would be applied if they saw them like this—so flawed, so inexplicably human. “I thought you were supposed to be the faithless one.”
“Who said I wasn’t?” Luo Xing tries to summon cockiness in his voice but fails, close enough to Arnaya that trying to say anything else would be poisonous and too close to the horrors that were reflected in their eyes. He drops down next to the bed of the river with them, keeping his watchful eye on Arnaya as they stare up at the pitch-black night sky with only the presence of luminous stars keeping their face in Luo Xing’s view.
Silence spills out between them, and he swears that he could taste the bitterness on his tongue, waiting for Arnaya to move or say anything at all. It tasted like dark chocolate, something protruding into his mouth, like an unwelcome invasion. “Do you know,” they start, their voice rough like static, uneven like it too, “that they made me kill the person like a mortal? No using my abilities, no quick, painless death. They asked me to make sure that blood was shed.”
“It’s true.” Arnaya continues when Luo Xing takes a beat too long to answer, words lost on his tongue, eyes entirely centred and focused on Arnaya, as they raise their fingers up to look at them intensely and continue. “They gave me a knife and instructions, and they listed it in steps. Told me all about the little girl’s life I’d be taking. Her name was Emiko, and she was being taken care of by her two older sisters and an aunt. Their family was an unorthodox one, with no parents. But they were happy and healthy, and the house was full of love. And you…”
“And I had just been there.” Luo Xing finishes bitterly, the words turning to acid in his mouth. He remembers now the tiny household that he couldn’t find because they were so far away from the village. The aunt had smiled apologetically when the God finally found them, offering up dumplings and tea, which Luo Xing had accepted after blessing the household. He remembered the young girl, barely old enough to know anything, yet she was so wide-eyed with love and curiosity.
Something constricted in his throat—what had his blessing meant if that child had been fated to be killed?
Arnaya looks at him properly for the first time, and Luo Xing can finally remember the shade of their eyes, oak brown, deep and soulful. The nights he had agonized wondering about it, beating himself up for forgetting it, but how could he when it was Arnaya when they were as present and iridescent as he remembered, even while in agony. Even when grappling with something they never had any intention to do.
“They ordered me to kill her,” Arnaya starts again, still looking right at Luo Xing, like they wanted the truth of what Arnaya did out in the open, to the ears of the only sinner they trusted. “They ordered me to kill her in front of her family, to make sure I had it on my hands.”
To be a sinner is to understand the brutality that murder and anguish could bring, so who else to make you feel better about your own than someone worse than you? You go to confession, and you confess reverently, and even though you want forgiveness, though that’s the goal, you still yearn for something else—to be seen. To be looked at and said, you are not bad cause I am just like you and isn’t that strange and wonderful?
People use sinners to feel better about themselves, take up their space and then discard when the time is right when they finally feel better about themselves.
It is more than that to Arnaya, though. Luo Xing could always understand them more, always felt more of them than others could, so he knew that it was not confessing to a sinner, not a swap of gruesome stories but rather them asking Luo Xing: Do you still love me, now that I have become just a little bit more like yourself? Do you still want me now that I am no longer good?
If only Arnaya could actually ask the question so that Luo Xing could say, Yes, yes, yes and take them in, finally say that there is some sort of belonging that they could find each other, after so long. He could see their chest heave up and down, eyes jolting around in an almost electric way. And so he pushes his hands to rest on their chest, willing them to calm, to believe that they are safe. And slowly, Arnaya forces the last instructions out of their mouth—“They commanded me to carve out Emiko’s heart.”
“I was supposed to kill her and carve out her heart, bury it in the family’s garden and leave. They didn’t even tell me what I should do with her body, didn’t teach me how to cope with the look of grief and static in all of their eyes.” Arnaya’s voice breaks just a little bit, and they look down, looking like they wanted to push down into their grief and find a home there, if not anything else.
Luo Xing moves his hands from their chest up to the slope of their neck and whispers a platitude, something that seemed so familiar and undeniably comforting in nature. “Tell me the rest,” he murmurs right into Arnaya’s skin, the words marking them like a promise. “Tell me everything.”
Arnaya’s breath heaved, and then the words came out—“I couldn’t do it. I didn’t carve out her heart because I didn’t understand what would have been the use. She was dead, and maiming a young girl wouldn’t help anyone in the end. And so I left her alone, ran away from that house and now….”
“And now, you can’t feel the earth.” The realization dawned on Luo Xing with horror, slowly moving up his fingers to caress the sides of their cheeks. Arnaya, the talented one, the bright, shining one, who had always had complete and supreme control over their
abilities, was now rendered with nothing but useless immortality, virtually a mortal. Arnaya was no longer the God of anything, and everything that they ever were, or ever wanted to have, was gone.
Something solid settled into Luo Xing, and he withdrew his hands from Arnaya’s face and down to grasp their hands, still soft and wet with blood. He looked up at the horizon, still dark as can be with a hollowed out mass of black above them but felt an inevitable change swelling the air, the winds of change, the cycle of life levitating. “Come home with me.”
And without Arnaya’s response, he continued, “I have a cottage here, about 15 minutes away. You can learn how to walk,” He said, almost teasing yet still sincere. “No one will come to check on me, and so no one will know you’re there. Come home,” he said with more conviction, eyes blazing into them now. “You’ll get clean and a good meal, and you’ll be safe. We’ll forage for our meals. We can be—”
“Mortals.” Arnaya finished with a shy smile on their face, despite themself. “We can be human again.” They intertwined their fingers with Luo Xing’s and pressed their lips against his knuckles. “Let’s go back home. Like old times.”
And like always, Luo Xing listened, and they followed each other, fingers intertwined, their red strings brushing up against each other, the desire that it had always reverberated finally silent, holding onto each other like they were such fickle kids again, and everything was simple once more.