Dread ruled my world. I knew this scene, knew it intimately and instantly. It wasn’t that I, myself, had ever been here before. How could I? This dream felt old and most importantly it was not mine. But it felt like mine, and I would bet on the fact that Annie would be feeling the exact same way.

Dreams are not linear things, but this one made sense to me. This was not a new experience, not for the woman whose mind it had originated from. I wondered if I was blind. The absence of light was total. But as soon as I wondered, I knew it wasn’t true.

Buried. I had been buried. Blindly my fingers scrabbled on the hard, splintered wood above me. I’d already worn the ends of them bloody, and ripped out the nails in sheer desperation. My throat ached from screaming, so hoarse that I had finally given up, given in. I was trapped in the dark, in a box. They had buried me alive. But why? What had I done to deserve such a fate. What had any of us done? Oh gods.

It only took a moment, a stray thought that wasn’t my own. It was like a trigger, and suddenly my eyes were burning. Filled with ash, and smoke and tears. Everything was burning. They were burning. I was trapped, unable to look away, unable to truly comprehend what I was seeing. I knew I was screaming, fighting, but there was nothing but a dead hum in my ears. My eyes clouded, and I was back in the dark and my lungs were on fire. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I was dying. I would die, I would die in the dark with my lungs screaming for air and there was nothing I could do.

Annie wrenched her hand back from mine and suddenly I could see again. It was lucky that I had just placed a hand on the sleeping woman, and hadn’t tried to hold her hand. I’d left bloody half-moons on both my hands from where my nails had bitten in, deep. I could still smell the reek of burning flesh in my nose. Annie stumbled away from the bed, and fell to her knees in a corner. I listened to her vomit. It felt like I was numb and on fire at the same time. Like I had touched a livewire, and insisted on holding on. Every part of me hummed even through my horror. We had died, together and yet totally alone at the same time. I had to just sit and breathe for a moment, terrified that at any moment my lungs would close up and I would be dying once again. But it felt amazing and that made me more nauseous than anything else.

There was no way that she was human. That baffled me more than anything. Everything about Six screamed “normal”. No one had ever said anything to the contrary. But how, how could anyone hold that much power in such a tiny, fragile body? I had watched her die, felt her die. From the inside. There had been no near miss, no “and then someone opened the box” to make it all better, to make it just a horrible, terrible memory. There had been dread, and incredible fear. A howling void of sadness and anger. And then nothing.

Annie was crying in the corner, arms wrapped around herself.

“I’m so sorry,” she moaned, rocking back and forth. “I didn’t even think.”

I was so confused, so pumped up on adrenaline and power that I couldn’t think straight.

“You knew that would happen?”

“No, no no no.” She looked up at me, her face streaked with tears. “I didn’t know. I didn’t think it would do that, I thought it would just be what you did to me. If I knew you could see things like that I wouldn’t have asked.”

I went to her, lowered myself down shakily onto the floor beside her. She crawled to me, and laid her head against my arm. Even though she was terrified still, touching her made me a little bit calmer. I didn’t want to hurt her further by prying, but I had to ask.

“That was a memory, wasn’t it Annie? Not just a bad dream?”

Annie nodded, far too rapidly.

“She died, didn’t she? Did Six die, Annie?”

That set her off. She wailed, and pushed her fists into her face, whole body shaking. I should have been more tactful. She had experienced the same thing as me, lived through the same horror. Not just seen it either, but actively lived it.

“Annie, ’m sorry.”

I opened my mouth to say it, but someone beat me to it. For a moment Annie looked like she had seen a ghost, all the colour drained from her face. Then she was on her feet, and at the bedside in an instant. I followed her, and Six smiled up at us, an incredibly sad smile that was still pinched at the corners with pain. She looked like she was still teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. Annie threw herself at the woman, hands like little birds.

“It’s an old memory, not one you should have ever had to see.”

It felt like I was totally out of step, and the furore of pure feeling within me didn’t help. All I could do was listen to Annie sob in what felt like a fog. Six groaned, a tiny, uncomfortable noise.

“Fucking hurts, Annie. Please stop.”

My mouth felt dry. Annie plopped back down in her seat, face streaked with tears. She was a wet mess of raw emotion.

“That happened, didn’t it?”

Those strange mismatched eyes turned on me then. She regarded me for a moment in silence, as if deliberating on her answer.

“‘Spose you can say that. Though not recently. Didn’t think you could do something like that. Would have been more careful if I knew.” Her voice was croaky, and her tone dry and flat. The strange accent Six had gave her voice an odd sing-song quality, but in that moment all of that was gone. She sounded more foreign than ever.

My eyes narrowed.

“Thought you knew everything.”

Her grin was sudden, almost violent. There was a hard edge to her in that moment that gave me pause. She had always been prickly, yes, but I would not have said there was any steel to her. Not until now.

“Not exactly a skill that is dime a dozen now, is it? You can eat feelings. Damn good thing you haven’t tried it before now. I’d have knocked you on your ass.”

That I did not question. She may have been tiny - I could have tucked her underneath my armpit with plenty of room to spare - but somehow I thought she’d manage it. I still sizzled with the power that had leapt between us. It made my teeth ache and my fingers tremble. Swathed in blankets and bandages she looked frail and tiny. She looked human. But Six could not possibly be anything but Other. Not packing that sort of punch.

“What are you anyway? I know it’s rude to ask, but fuck.”

Gunnr considered me levelly, even as Annie fussed around her, tucking in blankets and fluffing pillows. There was a queer sort of stillness to her. I’d seen vampires do something similar before, the really old ones. They occasionally forgot to ‘human’ and just stopped. If I couldn’t see her chest rise and fall, ever so slightly, I would have pegged her as undead. I wasn’t sure she was going to answer me, at least not until Annie hummed and scooted onto the bed beside the other woman. Six’s gaze turned to her, even as Annie squeezed an unbandaged bit of arm reassuringly. When she spoke, it was more to Annie than it was to me.

“I seem to get recognised less and less these days. Guess it’s a mercy of sorts. ‘M what they call God Touched, though different folk have different names for us.”

Something sparked inside me at those two little words, something that I couldn’t quite decipher. It seemed important, like I should know what she meant. I didn’t have the foggiest what a God Touched was though, and I wasn’t exactly a babe. I had been, as they say, around the block a time or two. Whatever it was, it wasn’t common.

“Which is?”

She made a face at me then, and all the stillness fled from her. Annie giggled wetly, still a little teary, and motioned for me to sit. Once she was satisfied that I was settled, Sux began reluctantly. I had the feeling that this was not something that she relished explaining.

“We were something that the gods devised during the Sundering. They were pulling the world apart with their bickering. A way of settling their differences without all the plagues and disasters.” The face she pulled then was one of distaste, and I got the feeling that Six was not exactly fond of the manner of her making. “A personal puppet of sorts, someone to do the smiting on their behalf.”

These God Touched sounded like they should be horrifyingly powerful. But everything about Six was so normal, so human. At least until I had touched her.

“You don’t look like the smiting type, if I’m honest.”

Her smile was sudden, and genuine. A complete departure from the hesitation and distaste she had shown me.

“’M not, at least on paper. Very few of us are. You see the gods gave themselves a restriction - they could only give us one gift. To make things fair. So smiting effectiveness usually comes down to just how sneaky and imaginative your god happens to be.” Annie passed the small woman a glass of water and she sipped gratefully, pausing in her explanation. “Most gods are a bit boring, you see. They settle on things like ‘super strength’ or ‘superior healing’. Which is just dandy, until someone shoots you in the ass or slits your throat in the middle of the night. Because that is all that those God Touched have to protect themselves.”

I had to admit, the idea of being able to punch through walls only to be felled by a common cold sounded galling.

“After a while, they started to get more imaginative with their wording.”

I could not help but pry further. I had never heard of something like this, something where the “rules” of what made someone Other could be so lax. Vampires and fey and all their ilk - even me - worked within rigid parameters. You know exactly what they were capable of, what they could, and could not do. From what I could understand of these God Touched, they could be anything.

“And what imaginative perk did your god give to you?”

Her lips quirked again, but there was a bitterness to her when she spoke.

“My god is a god of dead things. Everything he ever touched, died. He got lonely.”

That made my mouth go dry. A god of dead things. There was only one of those, at least within Esarian myth. Beyond the seas, who knew? But then Six did not look like she was from beyond the seas. She had the smallness and paleness of someone who hailed from one of the islands - Seviv or Sache it was hard to tell. She sounded like neither, and both at the same time, her accent both alien and familiar.

The only god we had that dealt with the dead was Umbra, lord of the dying. One of the most fearsome and prominent deities amongst a throng of savage, vengeful gods. I would never have thought of such a being as lonely.

“His wish was to have one child, one creation, who would never leave him.” She shrugged, and her chin dropped, breaking eye contact suddenly. There was a stiffness to her that spoke of pain, and I wondered for a moment what sort of relationship a god could have with a human. Undoubtedly it was not an easy one. “So into me, he breathed a gift of undying.”

My throat was so dry. I could not speak, could not utter a sound. Her words had stolen all my breath and turned my tongue to stone. A gift of undying. I had expected something simple, perhaps a gift of unusual strength or very good luck. Something, anything else. For a moment, it felt like I was in the ground again, my lungs struggling to pull in air that just wasn’t there anymore. No one had saved her. She had died, but couldn’t. Having experienced it first hand, that seemed like a far more terrible fate. To die without being able to die. To have no reprieve from the panicked struggle to breath, to live. I was too frightened at that moment to ask how long she had been in that box. It was just too cruel.

“How did you get out?”

I hoped for her sake it had not been as long an ordeal as I feared.

“Umbra sent his little minions to dig me up. I never understood the stigma attached to what I was as a child, not until then.”

I could feel my hands shaking, a terrible vicious quake that I could not pull under control.

“Why?”

The way my voice broke on the word was embarrassing. I should be stronger than this. But in those moments, sitting beside a creature that was the very definition of a true immortal, having seen and felt firsthand the pain that went with such a dubious honor, I could not help but feel weak.

“Why’d they bury me?” Her head tilted, chin tapping against her chest. She hummed, an old little tuneless sound. “People can be fickle. They find things to hold onto. Beliefs. Superstitions. Things were bad when I was born. It takes time for things to grow, for wounds rent in the very earth to heal. People starve, and begin to turn on those who appear to do better than themselves. Folk know of the Other, the creatures that inhabit their world that are not humans. They decide that the Other is the core of their problems.”

She shrugged then, a small, helpless movement. “I was Other enough for my village to turn on me. I had no power to stop them doing so. So they buried me, and they burned -”

Six’s voice gave out suddenly, and that odd stillness returned to her. She sat, fixated on her own hands where they curled in her lap.

“It matters little now. It was a long time ago.”

There was a finality to the way she said it. Like it brooked no argument. It simply was.

“‘m really tired, Annie. Please, let me rest.”