Aili chose to have her talk with Dore in the early morning, since the village was mostly asleep and she could focus more or less completely on the conversation. It felt weird to be able to contact him without moving from her spot or even checking that he wasn’t busy with something else. But she couldn't wait too much, or the monks would have talked to him first.

“Good morning,” she said, making the air vibrate in the point where the borders of their territories were the closest, to the point she could feel a faint trace of his viss.

“Have you talked to the monks?” was his immediate answer, buzzing with anxiety.

“Yes. I've told them of your suspicions about Vizena.”

“Something's going on. Suimer’s inhabitants are leaving the village a lot more often, now,” he continued. “And they call their god Zeles, not Vizena.”

“Interesting," she said, mentally cursing Zeles. “You can tell them that yourself when they’ll come down to talk to you.”

A bit of his viss escaped its bounds in the spike of nervousness that followed.

“Why?”

“They don't have a shard to deactivate Vizena with, so they'll ask you to attack her.” She kept her tone as cheerful as she could without making it mocking. “It's your chance.”

“Chance…” he repeated, clearly unsure about what she meant.

“To prove yourself! They deactivated you because they thought you helped Koidan escape, and you were worried they would suspect you again if you told them about Vizena. Well, if you attack her and help the monks bring her back under their control, they will be convinced of your innocence. Although…”

She trailed off, letting him ponder her words.

“What?” he asked after an instant of silence.

“Although,” she reprised, her voice now thoughtful and uncertain. “It might be a set-up. Nevermind, it's too risky. Don't attack.”

“Why? Obeying to the monks is my duty.”

“I know, but it was a monk to frame you as a traitor. They could have organized everything to destroy you once and for all, since you were the one noticing that Vizena has apparently been replaced by my predecessor.”

“It wasn't a monk to tell everyone I was a traitor. I know it was one of the inhabitants of your village. They've told me that when they awakened me.”

“Yes, but a monk must have examined them to make sure they weren't lying. It must have been someone trusted, maybe even multiple people. And they lied to frame you as a traitor.”

“Why would they? I was just tending to my village, I didn't see anything suspicious.”

“Tilau is the only place bordering with the forest, the only way out from the mountain. They needed you asleep in case they were discovered. It's easier to escape the monks than an awake god.”

“That's why you think they want to hurt me again?”

“Yes. They didn't succeed in taking you out of the picture permanently, so they'll probably try again. This seems the best chance to have you destroyed while making it look like it was just an accident.”

“You seem sure this Zeles is capable of destroying me. I have enough viss to last me a while, I don't think he does. And Lorin will be attacking him too, the monks will try to distract him…”

He sounded a bit unsure, but still not swayed by her words.

“If he's not particularly powerful, how did he manage to replace Vizena, then?”

He shut up and didn't answer, but the peripheral buzzing of his energies revealed that he was pondering the question.

“If they managed to destroy and replace a god once, they could do it twice,” Aili added. “If this traitor monk, or monks, is trusted enough to have you shut down, they could find a way to tell Lorin not to attack, or even deactivate her. Then you'd be alone against Zeles, with much lower odds of victory.”

“Then what do I do? I can't refuse to attack, they'll punish me.”

“There's no need for you to refuse. You can just pretend to try and tell them that you failed, they have no way to check.”

“I… I don't know. I really don't know.”

Aili refrained from insisting. The fact he’d asked her what to do meant he believed her a bit, or at least he thought her explanation made sense. As with Lorin, she didn’t need him to be completely convinced, just confused and overwhelmed. Enough to make him hesitate, maybe hold back in a crucial moment.

“Think about it,” she added. “There's no hurry to take a decision until after they contact you, and it might take some more days.”

There was no answer, so she decided to change topic.

“I’ve heard you're the famous Ludunus. I've read your ‘Treatise on Hereditary Traits’ when I was still a monk, it was one of the most fascinating reads I ever had.”

“Yes, that's... That was me,” he seemed to cheer up a bit as he spoke. “It's still a passion of mine, even if not as important as being a deity.”

“How did you find out about hereditary traits in the first place?”

“I was part of the group of scholars that was studying the viss’s property of intensity, particularly of human viss. I found similarities between the information contained in people's viss and the one in their closest ancestors, like parents, grandparents and so on. I decided to focus on that phenomenon, thought that it was interesting and kept going.”

“And how far back can these similarities go?”

“Forever, potentially. Every creature is linked to the ones who generated it, that are chained to the ones that generated them, and so on.”

“Until we get to the first humans, right? The ones who were created by the gods, the actual ones. Would they have information related to the gods too, or…”

“It's impossible to say. I only managed to go some generations back thanks to the small number of corpses that were buried and not burned in ancient times. They still had some small traces of viss left in them, but it didn't give me many details about their ancestors.”

“But you wrote of how animal people were born in ancient times. It must have happened before the villages were built, right?”

“There's no need to go that far, most of the animal people's families we have around the mountain are fairly recent, three to four centuries old. A lot of families have also disappeared or reverted back to being humans without traits, since they were getting their viss from animals that couldn't be found around the mountain.”

By his intonation, Aili expected him to elaborate further, but he seemed suddenly hesitant, as if he'd realized he had revealed too much.

“I’ve never heard something so interesting.” She was glad she was genuinely enthusiastic about it and didn’t need to pretend. “How did you find out about that?”

“It's all in the books,” he said quickly, with a tone that suggested he wanted to close the conversation there.

“I… I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like I don't believe you, but I've looked for this kind of information before and I haven't found books that go far back enough on the history of the mountain, and nothing on what happened before.”

“Maybe you didn't look well enough.”

Aili retreated a bit to hide her irritation.

“Could you give me some titles?” she asked. “I’ll ask the monks to consult them the next time they come down to talk to me.”

“So this is what you were after the whole time, right?” Dore said. “You didn't care about helping me, you only wanted to get information no one else would give you. You can stop pretending now, because I won't tell you anything. I won't betray the monks, even if some of them want to destroy me.”

“Yes, of course. Sorry if I gave you the impression I only wanted to talk to you for this reason.”

He didn't answer. She waited a bit longer, then resigned to the fact that the discussion was over.

She observed the village from above as it awakened. Despite having done everything to protect Zeles and fend off the monks, Dore’s remark about only being interested in extracting information from him had bitten deep. All of her interactions with the inhabitants were based on a lie, and she constantly had to act as if she wasn't gossiping with them at the market just a few months before. And then there were the monks and Dore, where she actually had to think about how to best deceive them. She feared having to do that with Zeles too, if he kept disregarding her plans and advice. Which only reduced her social circle to one person.

She glanced inside the prison and found him sitting at the table in the center of his room, looking out at the sea through the window despite the early hour.

She'd decided to move the prison to a different building after Loriem had complained about hearing the constant ticking of the clocktower. He'd been put in a cell with a wall made of vertical bars, an exact copy of the monks' village setup. There wasn't space and privacy, which didn’t make sense since there was a god checking from above that the prisoner wouldn't escape and they only needed to rely on guards when it was time to bring him food.

So she'd decided to build two large rooms inside an abandoned warehouse, with a fenced garden to take a walk in the morning and afternoon. The doors were locked and the windows couldn't be opened or easily broken. One of them was covered by a grate instead of glass and faced the internal side of the warehouse, where a guard was sitting behind a desk at all times. But at least the prisoners had a decent amount of space and a bit of privacy.

Rabam lived in the adjacent room. His door was always open, but he didn't get out to walk during the day because the monks could spot him.

Aili softly knocked with her wind on the wall of wood to announce her presence.

“How is it going?” she asked.

Rabam broke out of his calm gazing to gave her a short laugh.

“As well as you can expect,” he answered, suddenly lowering his voice.

Loriem could hear a bit, after all, if he stood close enough to the grate that faced the inside of the warehouse. At that moment, he was only sleeping on his bed, the loud snoring echoing in the empty half of the building.

“I don't know how he can sleep,” Rabam whispered. “I can barely do that, and I only had a secondary role in Mili's death. Compared to him, at least.”

“Rabam, it wasn't in any way your…”

“I smelled fried eggs the other day,” he interrupted her. “Does he have a pan in there? I thought he wasn’t allowed to touch pans anymore.”

“You have every right to be angry at him, but living in this constant state of anger will hurt you too, in the long run. I have enough time to build a new house now, wouldn't you prefer…”

“No. The monks would wonder who you built it for.”

“You could calculate a blind spot between the other buildings.”

He shook his head.

“If they come down here and see it, they'll wonder why it isn't visible from above. They still don't trust you, we should avoid any suspicious move.”

“So you'll stay here indefinitely? Punish yourself like this because it's easier to pretend that Milvia’s death was your fault instead of facing the fact that you couldn't have done anything to prevent it?”

He passed a hand on the rough surface of the table, eyes cast down.

“Are you at least carving?”

“I don't trust myself with a knife, right now.”

Aili felt again the need to insist: that he should move somewhere else, that he was inflicting himself additional suffering on top of the one that already stained his viss, that he had nothing to prove and a lot to heal. She held back, knowing it would be just another fruitless conversation.

She paced on her pedestal, looking for another solution. She could send him out to live with Zeles instead, and only return to her periodically to check whether there were letters to deliver or plans to carry out. But then she'd be truly and completely alone, not to mention unable to act quickly enough.

The alternative was to make sure the monks trusted her, then build him a house. She already had a half-formed plan to gain their trust, but she feared it would either succeed and have Zeles deactivated, or fail so spectacularly that the monks would have realized she had never wanted them to succeed in the first place.

At least she could distract Rabam a bit.

“There's a plan I was thinking about. I need your input of ex-sentinel.”

He shrugged.

“Sure, I have nothing else to do.”

“Point out any flaws you find, no matter how small. First of all, I'll ask to speak with a prior…”