She remembers it, sometimes. Usually the reminders are painless, but occasionally they take her as harshly as a gasp—and she clutches her ribs tightly between her elbows, trying to seem unbothered.

"Did you get stung?" Kazuma asks in concern.

"No," she says—and it's true.

She had been a young god—very young. Younger than all the rest of them, and still not fully accepted into heaven's ranks.

She had been an outsider. An immigrant.

"Even your name is unorthodox," they insisted. "Vaisravana—you don't sound like one of us."

Since heaven had acknowledged her only grudgingly, she did not care to spend her time there. She would rather spend it on earth, among the humans who happily worshipped and loved her. Even though they could not see her, she liked to hear them pray.

Although the few shinki she possessed loved her deathlessly, there was something even more precious and gossamer about the devotion of mortals. Sometimes she even stood right behind them, smiling as they prayed—but they never turned around. Maybe it was so precious to her because they never really knew if she listened, and they prayed anyway.

But, of course, she did listen.

She visited a small shrine that day. The few travelers she passed on the roadside didn't look at her. She knew they wouldn't.

"Gods are like the air," her first shinki, the one who had raised her, had always taught. "Invisible, yet necessary. You are a force to them—not a presence. Not a person."

The travelers on the roadside never looked at her—

Except for one.

A man…no. A boy.

He stopped. He looked at her. He was staring at her—directly into her face. And she had never been stared at before. Certainly not like this.

His mouth had fallen slightly open; the woven basket held on his elbows began to slip as his arms slackened. She felt a little cold from the shock of being seen. At once, she was terribly aware of her own body—every one of her features felt exposed to a degree beyond her comfort.

"What are you?" he asked. His voice was hoarse, and his hands, still holding the edges of the basket, shook slightly.

He was speaking to her. A human had seen her, and was now talking to her—not on the grounds of a shrine—not in prayer—but to her. And he expected her to answer.

"I,"—her voice sounded small and strange."I am—"

The rest of the sentence got lost on the way from her throat to her lips. She was supposed to be force—not a presence. Not a person.

"Am I dreaming?" he asked.

Somehow she knew she wasn't being called on to answer him.

She doesn't understand why it still pains her, even after all this time. It's not as though she hasn't survived worse.

Far, far worse.

He is beside her now. And that, really, was where they both wanted him to be.

"I am called Vaisravana," she said, hesitantly. It was the truth, but she wasn't sure what effect the truth would have on him.

He just kept staring at her. Overhead, a cloud skimmed across the sun, dappling the golden roadside with shade.

"The god?" he whispered, after a long silence. "You are—the god, Vaisravana?"

This, she could answer with complete certainty.

"Yes."

The basket hit the ground with a soft thump, and the boy's knees quickly followed. He did not bow further—his forehead never touched the ground at her feet. He only continued to look at her.

He drank in her appearance as though looking away from her face might kill him.

"Why are you doing that?" she asked him, still confused and uncomfortable.

"You are a god," he whispered, finally letting his eyes sink from her face. His shoulders drooped along with them. "I apologize for not realizing sooner—for not bowing—"

He had misunderstood.

"No—I meant, why did you look at me like that?"

She didn't imagine it when his forehead flushed deep red, or when the hands folded in front of his knees tensed visibly, knuckles whitening against the dirt.

"I shouldn't have. I'm sorry."

She catches that look from him, even now—though it is much, much more rare.

Sometimes, she thinks it may just be her imagination.

She found him again at one of her shrines, several years later.

He was taller, and his hair was longer and neatly tied up. He had a more angular chin, and wider shoulders. He did not see her at first.

"Vaisravana-sama," he breathed, into the air of her quiet shrine. "I only pray that you appear to me again. For just a moment—if it is not too much to ask."

She tapped his arm. Perhaps it was too sudden—he spun on one heel, eyes widening in panic and cheeks darkening with the realization that someone else had heard his private request.

"Hello," she said, after an odd, stretched pause.

"Let me help you," he begs. "You're hurting yourself."

"No, I'm not. Stop worrying, Kazuma."

He pauses, drawing a deep breath. He folds his hands behind his back, as though worried they might reach toward her if he doesn't keep a close eye on them.

"If you don't take caution for your own sake—then do it for those who rely on you," he says, quietly.

She gazes at him, her lips parted in slight surprise. He's looking at her earnestly—and then he gives a slight cough.

"If it's not too much to ask, Viina."

"Do you come here often?" she asked.

"Ever since I saw you," he responded instantly. "Before then, I never used to visit your shrines."

The god let out a quick, amused exhale at the bluntness of his admission. He realized what he had said one second later, and flushed up to his hairline. She wondered if all humans were so prone to embarrassment.

She opened her mouth, then shut it again. A half-formed thought had been catching the back of her tongue for several minutes now, without having the nerve to show itself completely.

He heard the short beginnings of a word from her, and looked up in curiosity.

"I do wonder," she began at last, "why you could see me so easily. I am a well-known god, it is true, but I have never been recognized on the street. It is still a complete mystery to me—our meeting."

She was staring down at her hands, but felt something against her face—not a touch. A glance. He was looking at her again, in the same way she remembered.

He was looking at her with all his soul.

"Who could not stare once they had seen you?" he asked her, a little breathlessly.

Part of her understood what he was trying to say. The rest was still ignorant. When she met his eyes again, she found herself stunned by the open longing there.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Every moment I don't spend looking at you is a moment I'm wasting."

Sometimes, she envies the Yatogami—though the sentiment is only faint—pushed to the back of her mind like a forgotten garment.

At least he and the human who chose him can own their happiness with honesty.

He decided to work without pay, maintaining her local shrines and devoting himself fully to the god only he could see. In addition to prayers, people began to leave packages of food and gifts for the strange, bookish young man who had so unpredictably devoted himself to the fearsome war god, Vaisravana.

She saw him only occasionally, whenever she had time. Her days were busier now, and the heavens were slowly—very, very slowly—beginning to overcome their prejudice toward her youth and foreignness.

But she appreciated visiting him. She liked his quiet intelligence. She liked their short, strange conversations. She found out so much about what humans were like through him—although, as she saw more of war, she began to think that he was the last remnant of an endangered breed.

She arrived at the shrine one night when it was raining hard. He was sheltered within, carefully tending a small fire while simultaneously trying to patch up a leak in the old roof.

"Aren't you cold?"

He looked down at her in surprise, and his face lit up. It always shook her—that intensity. She wondered, not for the first time, how much of his life he was sacrificing on her behalf.

"No, not cold. It's quite warm in here, actually, if you keep moving!"

He laughed. She did not.

"You don't want a real home?" she asked softly.

"Of course I do."

She swallowed. He finished dabbing the roof with the sealing putty, and looked down at her when she didn't respond.

"You could have one—if you left here," she said, hating the smallness of her voice, and how her breath trembled at the end of her words.

She was a god—not a person. She will always be a god—a sublime, beautiful, perfect being—but a devastation nonetheless.

"No, I couldn't."

His voice was serious, and he stepped down from the small stool to face her.

"I knew as soon as I saw you the first time. I just—I knew, deep down, you hated being invisible and alone."

She couldn't speak. She'd never felt this before—a strange heat behind her eyes, making them ache. She blinked rapidly, still listening to him.

"You are the most important thing that's ever happened to me. And, I—um,"—his voice suddenly rasped. A sharp cutoff in the midst of his quick, desperate words.

"—I—I adore you, Vaisravana-sama. You are all the home I could ever want."

Above them, the roof began to leak again: an orchestra of quiet, kissing drops against the shrine floor.

But still—

If a god touches a human, the human burns.

If a human touches a god, the god falls.

She didn't hear about it until long after it happened.

There had been an awful accident. An earthquake, right underneath one of her shrines. It had happened two seasons ago—a few weeks after the last time she visited her most ardent worshiper—

"Where?" she asked, mildly concerned. Hopefully there had been no supplicants leaving prayers for her there.

She hears where, and her blood stops in her veins.

Her shinki were all human once.

But there was only one she had ever met, before taking ownership of him.

The wreckage was still there, waiting for her. It was nothing more than a pile of old bones—the dead architecture of a rotten building.

"What happened?" she asked her lead shinki, trying to speak past the cold, hollow hurt right beneath her chest.

"An earthquake—as I said, my lady."

"No. I mean—was anyone here when it happened?"

"I don't know that. I am sorry, Vaisravana-sama."

She nodded slowly, just once.

"It is nothing, then. Let's go back."

Turning, she caught a glimpse of something white, through the tangle of rubble. It looked far too clean to exist in such a place. Her lead shinki stopped when he saw she wasn't following him anymore.

"My lady?"

She didn't answer, but walked quickly away, skirting the collapsed wood and metal to the other side—where someone was sitting.

He had his back to her, head leaning on one hand with his elbows propped on his knees. She knew the shape of his shoulders, the dejected tilt of his spine—and she knew he had died.

His spirit was uncorrupted, never leaving the hallowed shrine ground where its vessel had been broken.

She couldn't face him, knowing that she had been the indirect reason for his early, horrible departure from life.

But she also couldn't leave him there.

"You, with nowhere to go, and nowhere to return to…"

I only want him to be safe, she tells herself, pushing him farther from her. He needs to keep existing, as she flees the heavens. I can protect him—I can protect all of them, as she arms herself with a banished hafuri.

She will never let any of her children fall beneath the sorcerer again.

Which is why seeing Kazuma's face rising up to her—hearing his voice shout for her—is the worst thing she can imagine.

His memories erupted inside her head—of a short, tranquil life that should have met a late, peaceful end. She saw his family: small, and ordinary, and all with the same kind, intelligent eyes. She saw herself—she darted quickly past that memory, terrified at the burst of yearning that tugged on her lungs. She saw his years in the shrine—his quiet caretaking—and even quieter, the unvoiced truth of what he really wanted, and how it could never be allowed to happen.

And then—she saw the collapse, and how he was so alone in the crumbling building, so trapped—she saw the dust—thick, scratchy dust that obscured his vision and swirled down into his lungs until they blackened, and spasmed, and stopped.

He falls, after she pushes him.

Something breaks wide open inside her—and she nearly screams with the pain of her own rejection, felt only through the bond that links them. That hurt distracts her from the hundred other wounds she's carrying.

Until, finally, there is a thunderclap tremor—and the sun goes out—

Or her eyes—go out—

The shinki named Kazuma had the face and the voice of the person she knew. But he could never remember—he could never understand why his god sometimes looked at him like she was seeing someone else. Why sometimes it sounded like she wanted to call him by a different name, or say something to him about a conversation that had never really taken place between them.

He could never remember their life, or his death. She would remember for him.

That time—the few, lovely years of the human and the god he pledged himself to—would be immortalized with her.

She promised him that, in her heart. Maybe he would feel it all the same.

She falls.

It's so much quieter than she expected.

If she lands, she's already gone somewhere else, where there is no feeling. No memory. No guilt.

"You have to keep existing—even if I do not."