"That's because I don't know." He just - sighs, a raggedly shuddering thing, and rubs his face with his hand. It's less a kneel, now, than a relaxed slouch on the floor.
"I don't regret letting you make your own choices. There's a reason I didn't take it back, when I took those limits away, and there's a reason I'm not doing it now."
He considers that, for a second, before realising: "No. If this was you just - lashing out, tearing things apart for the sake of it, that would be different. The first reason is that you can't figure out how to be a god of vengeance if you aren't able to act as on, and the second is that I trust you."
Not do do what Zerxus would, but to at least follow a code of his own.
"He tried to fight back. And that was right. It was what I would tell my own people. Even when the force that comes for you is overwhelming, making them hurt for it. When they come to bury you, make them bring their own shovels. Make them nail your coffin shut." And sleep in fear of the sound of splintering, is how that prayer-commandment would end. Kahl will not sleep in fear, and he is also not the agent of a Empire acting only out of hunger for power. But it's the spirit of the thing.
"I could have...simply not allowed it, not permitted his blows to touch me, but it hurt more to do that. To be untouchable. It made me weaker. Vengeance is never a safe path, even when it is worth it. It should touch you. He made thorns of his bones and I decided it was worth it, to let them tear me and eat him anyway. That made me strong. Choosing, and committing to my course. "
In at least one very strange way, being a god - or at least Kahl's kind of god, untethered from worshippers, built on the foundation of only their own behavior - is not unlike being a paladin, except nobody tells you in advance what the oath is.
He can't help imagining it - he knows violence too well, in all its forms - and he doesn't bother repressing the grimace even as he nods in understanding. Pained, but not exactly disapproving.
The gift of being mortal is the freedom of choosing any oath you wish or none at all, and that isn't something he can give to Kahl.
Instead: "Do you think that should that be one of your commandments?"
Kahl frowns, but in puzzlement, more than displeasure. He's quiet for what feels like a long time.
"I don't regret summoning the maelstrom, even thought I both failed and died. It's not about the cost. It's about the need to act despite the cost. Revenge may bring regret, but only in those who, having taken their revenge, then turn away from it in their heart. It if had been rash and ill-planned, and bothered them not at all and won them all your sympathy, I would regret doing it so poorly. If they were so hurt, and you chose them, and abjured me, I would be hurt, and angry,"
Angry beyond words or worlds, hurt far beyond the initial hurt of helplessly watching Zerxus be devoured -
"But I would not regret. Why should I regret, and wish to have held myself back, for one proved faithless?"
No. So.
"I would regret failing to hurt them. And there are things which might have happened before, for which I might have chosen differently. But having come to the crux, I do not think there is any consequence, nor any conduct of theirs, which would have me regret succeeding."
"There was nothing left of her but her world," he says quietly, which is not a yes, and not a no, but is honest. "What did she care about Yeine, about the power? Nothing. But her love for the world, for all her children, was the same love that flinched in her, from strangling me at my birth."
More than anything else, it is the weakness, the selfishness of that mercy for which he will never forgive her.
"There were many paths. I could have slain only Sieh, whom she did love. One death, against all my centuries of torment, against the only corner of her heart I could reach. Small enough to starve on. But even if I did, what then? He was still beloved of Yeine and Nahadoth. There would be no place in her world for me, not ever." And he had hated it for that, hated them all.
"That's why he wants to tear the world apart, too." Because they love it; because they chose it.
"You have a more legitimate grievance than he does." To say the least, and the wry understatement is clear in his voice. "And none of the obligation he abandoned, or the leverage he could have used. But in the end, you would still be condemning thousands of people - including the lost and abandoned - who had nothing to do with your suffering. How much collateral damage is too much?"
Kahl was backed into a corner, and Zerxus can't guarantee anything that would have changed that, had he not woken up outside the limits of his mother's world. What's important, now, is understanding what he does going forward, in the realms he chooses for himself.
"It isn't the same. It isn't the same because they're still alive to hurt." So much of Asmodeus's spite is just petty jealousy; Kahl is jealous, but his jealousy lives in bitter sadness more than anger. He doesn't know how to untangle it, but he knows it's different.
Asmodeus, in fairness, sometimes does hurt them directly too. But he hates the world more than he hates them, and not as the only corner of their hearts he can reach.
"Not one of them was ever kind to me." His voice cracks. "Not one of them except Sieh." Who parleyed his moment of vague would-be-brotherly concern into a mask to hide his final treachery.
Kahl scowls, a mixed-up miserable pout of an expression, even as he leans forward to grab Zerxus's hand. For a moment, it's his hand, smaller, warm and strong and dry, gripping tight. Then it's a bright orange scorpion filling Zerxus's palm. Then the butcherbird, black and white with its brutal wedge of a beak, too big to really be held that way, claws digging into the heel of Zerxus's thumb.
He's never flinched from Kahl's sharp edges, and he's not about to start now; his hand is steady as stone as he cradles the bird to his chest.
"I'm angry at them, too. I wish I could tell them how badly they failed you, and how they sewed their own destruction with it." He doesn't envy Sieh, put in that final position, but he can judge him for walking there. "He should have tried to pull you back. He owed you so much more than he ever gave you."
"It was not in his nature, to love his own death," Kahl chokes. It is not given to birds to cry, so the sound of it stays knotted in his throat. He felt - for a moment, briefly, he thought - he had heard Sieh's cry, when Yeine and Nahadoth together reached to unmake him. He had seen the way Sieh sagged, when they failed, in what looked so much like relief. But then he had done it anyway, done it himself.
It was not possible, he tells himself, for Sieh to love him, because if it were possible, then the sting of betrayal would only be that much sharper. Adults, dramatic, existential, obsessed with legacy, will often love their dooms. Children, almost never. Whether they wish to grow up or wish to delay it, children still wish to live. And when they don't - that, too, is the ruin of childhood.
"And what did Yeine and Nahadoth owe me? Nothing. Sieh was their child, as I was not, and they owed him their protection, their bitter loving fury. They would never have ceased hunting me. That's why it's different. Because Asmodeus could live, if he set aside his hatred. Even if he were not forgiven, he would not be hunted down. If they had both the means and the will to execute him, they would have done it already. Therefore, at least one is lacking."
"You were more than that." It's quietly fierce; not quite an argument, just another layer of truth. "I know it isn't fair, to blame a child for being selfish. But I don't have to be fair to him."
(Sometimes, championing one person can mean failing another. Maybe he has to make his peace with that.)
"You're right, that Asmodeus has options you didn't." The sheer weariness in his voice speaks to how often he's advocated for them in vain. "But if you did see another way, if you were able to find allies that could have helped you without all of that destruction - would you have taken it?"
"If I say it matters, that I wanted to live, then it matters that he wanted to live." Kahl is not the god of justice, or fairness. He knows there is no such thing. But there is a childish fierceness in him that cares about it anyway, some of the time, the fierce bitter sulk of well it should be, before the swelling fury of a response that cannot ever be fair, one way or the other, that substitutes the more attainable poetic for the impossible proportionate.
Even already mortal, elderly, doomed. Even too late, Kahl will allow that it matters, that Sieh wanted to live. That he had the right. He had been selfless, in the end, saving the world from Kahl even though it would not save himself. But surely wanting live helped steel him for the blow. It's easier to imagine himself hated than simply loved insufficiently, once again, that Sieh chose the world over him just as Enefa chose Sieh.
He turns back into the teenager, a shameless gangly heap in Zerxus's lap, with none of the self-conscious aloofness a better socialized teenager would have.
"I don't know," he admits, soft and sad, into Zerxus's shoulder. "Maybe. It would have depended on...when I found them. Once I had committed to the plan, it would have been very hard to turn back. But I looked. There was a time I looked for them. I looked for a century."
Not so long, for a god. But a long time for a lonely child, finally free, watching the wide vivid world from hiding, still alone.
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"I can't tell if you're telling me you regret it or not."
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"I don't regret letting you make your own choices. There's a reason I didn't take it back, when I took those limits away, and there's a reason I'm not doing it now."
And yet.
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Not do do what Zerxus would, but to at least follow a code of his own.
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"I could have...simply not allowed it, not permitted his blows to touch me, but it hurt more to do that. To be untouchable. It made me weaker. Vengeance is never a safe path, even when it is worth it. It should touch you. He made thorns of his bones and I decided it was worth it, to let them tear me and eat him anyway. That made me strong. Choosing, and committing to my course. "
In at least one very strange way, being a god - or at least Kahl's kind of god, untethered from worshippers, built on the foundation of only their own behavior - is not unlike being a paladin, except nobody tells you in advance what the oath is.
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The gift of being mortal is the freedom of choosing any oath you wish or none at all, and that isn't something he can give to Kahl.
Instead: "Do you think that should that be one of your commandments?"
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He should have asked Sarenrae how long it took, what it was like. She would have given him an honest answer.
"Do you know what would have made you regret it?"
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"I don't regret summoning the maelstrom, even thought I both failed and died. It's not about the cost. It's about the need to act despite the cost. Revenge may bring regret, but only in those who, having taken their revenge, then turn away from it in their heart. It if had been rash and ill-planned, and bothered them not at all and won them all your sympathy, I would regret doing it so poorly. If they were so hurt, and you chose them, and abjured me, I would be hurt, and angry,"
Angry beyond words or worlds, hurt far beyond the initial hurt of helplessly watching Zerxus be devoured -
"But I would not regret. Why should I regret, and wish to have held myself back, for one proved faithless?"
No. So.
"I would regret failing to hurt them. And there are things which might have happened before, for which I might have chosen differently. But having come to the crux, I do not think there is any consequence, nor any conduct of theirs, which would have me regret succeeding."
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He stops himself from asking if there was anything he could have done, to lead to a different choice. What's done is done.
"Was the maelstrom the only path to vengeance?" This time, he does have his own thoughts.
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More than anything else, it is the weakness, the selfishness of that mercy for which he will never forgive her.
"There were many paths. I could have slain only Sieh, whom she did love. One death, against all my centuries of torment, against the only corner of her heart I could reach. Small enough to starve on. But even if I did, what then? He was still beloved of Yeine and Nahadoth. There would be no place in her world for me, not ever." And he had hated it for that, hated them all.
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"You have a more legitimate grievance than he does." To say the least, and the wry understatement is clear in his voice. "And none of the obligation he abandoned, or the leverage he could have used. But in the end, you would still be condemning thousands of people - including the lost and abandoned - who had nothing to do with your suffering. How much collateral damage is too much?"
Kahl was backed into a corner, and Zerxus can't guarantee anything that would have changed that, had he not woken up outside the limits of his mother's world. What's important, now, is understanding what he does going forward, in the realms he chooses for himself.
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Asmodeus, in fairness, sometimes does hurt them directly too. But he hates the world more than he hates them, and not as the only corner of their hearts he can reach.
"Not one of them was ever kind to me." His voice cracks. "Not one of them except Sieh." Who parleyed his moment of vague would-be-brotherly concern into a mask to hide his final treachery.
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"I'm angry at them, too. I wish I could tell them how badly they failed you, and how they sewed their own destruction with it." He doesn't envy Sieh, put in that final position, but he can judge him for walking there. "He should have tried to pull you back. He owed you so much more than he ever gave you."
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It was not possible, he tells himself, for Sieh to love him, because if it were possible, then the sting of betrayal would only be that much sharper. Adults, dramatic, existential, obsessed with legacy, will often love their dooms. Children, almost never. Whether they wish to grow up or wish to delay it, children still wish to live. And when they don't - that, too, is the ruin of childhood.
"And what did Yeine and Nahadoth owe me? Nothing. Sieh was their child, as I was not, and they owed him their protection, their bitter loving fury. They would never have ceased hunting me. That's why it's different. Because Asmodeus could live, if he set aside his hatred. Even if he were not forgiven, he would not be hunted down. If they had both the means and the will to execute him, they would have done it already. Therefore, at least one is lacking."
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(Sometimes, championing one person can mean failing another. Maybe he has to make his peace with that.)
"You're right, that Asmodeus has options you didn't." The sheer weariness in his voice speaks to how often he's advocated for them in vain. "But if you did see another way, if you were able to find allies that could have helped you without all of that destruction - would you have taken it?"
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Even already mortal, elderly, doomed. Even too late, Kahl will allow that it matters, that Sieh wanted to live. That he had the right. He had been selfless, in the end, saving the world from Kahl even though it would not save himself. But surely wanting live helped steel him for the blow. It's easier to imagine himself hated than simply loved insufficiently, once again, that Sieh chose the world over him just as Enefa chose Sieh.
He turns back into the teenager, a shameless gangly heap in Zerxus's lap, with none of the self-conscious aloofness a better socialized teenager would have.
"I don't know," he admits, soft and sad, into Zerxus's shoulder. "Maybe. It would have depended on...when I found them. Once I had committed to the plan, it would have been very hard to turn back. But I looked. There was a time I looked for them. I looked for a century."
Not so long, for a god. But a long time for a lonely child, finally free, watching the wide vivid world from hiding, still alone.