Strike the Zither by Joan He

Author:Joan He
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

* * *

I remember the days. The years—forty thousand, from the moment of my genesis to the moment I was cast out of the sky.

That’s right. The Masked Mother, empress of all deities, sealed my memories of being a god and banished me to the human world because I did something foolish. I did a lot of foolish things, now that I recall, but this particular incident involved a drunken bet with some other deity over who could stir up the strongest winds by … well, by flatulating over the edge of the sky.

Like I said, foolish. Thoughtless. Worse, Zephyr-as-a-real-god cared even less about the mortal peasants down below. It didn’t occur to her that her winds would cause a blight, and the blight a famine, one of many that had plagued Xin Bao’s reign.

When the Masked Mother’s guards came for me, Nadir pleaded that it was an accident. But humility was—is—not a strength of mine. I couldn’t be known as Zephyr the Accidental Murderer. So I confessed and awaited my punishment. No-good gods were allegedly chained to the Obelisk of Souls and struck repeatedly by lightning.

Instead, the Masked Mother took me farther down, past the storm clouds of the lower heavens.

Into the mortal realm.

We materialized in a tiny, dark room that smelled absolutely vile. I stayed back as the Masked Mother went forward. Two girls lay on a bedroll. Both were young, but one was slightly younger. Both were starved, but one was more dead than the other.

“Come back,” whispered the younger, less-dead girl. It was Ku. “Come back. Come back.” She stared at me all the while, as if she could see me. That was disconcerting. The qì of a god was supposed to be too pure for mortal eyes to detect.

Then I spotted the spirit between us. A mortal soul in the likeness of the girl who’d already departed. In human terms, a ghost. I could see her, and it seemed like the younger girl could too. Somehow. I wanted to ask the Masked Mother how. Maybe I’d have known, if I’d taken the time to educate myself on humans, like Nadir. Nadir loved humans, had once breathed life into her clay figurines and used them to populate the mortal world, back when it was young and still possible for gods to mold.

But obviously, I wasn’t anything like Nadir, and I never got the chance to ask.

“Behold a soul that you extinguished,” the Masked Mother said, looking down at the body of the dead girl and paying no mind to her lingering spirit. “Thousands more like her exist.” Yes, I got the message. The smell of the place was killing me. Was it too late to request the struck-by-lightning punishment? “Now you are to take her place.”

“Wait—what?”

The next thing I knew I was coming to, my powers as a god sealed away, forgotten with my identity. I had the girl’s—Qilin’s—identity instead, this fuzzy concept of parents long dead, the sharper concept of starvation in my stomach, and Ku.

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