Her brown eyes twinkled in the sunlight as she studied me. “Who are you? I can tell from your clothes that you’re not Quog Bedu or Zwai Clan. And everyone knows you don’t walk Gelecek’s streets of glass and dung without shoes.” She pointed to my bare feet.
I grew frustrated with her questions and reached out for her head. With one touch, she would fall to dust within hours and would trouble me with her words no more. But a heavy man waddled out of the house. He carried a large cleaver, and his bare chest was covered in sweat and blood.
Instantly, I made myself as transparent as the sky.
“Come inside, Agna!” the man shouted. “Mollai is coming to bless our house!”
“Papa, we have a visitor!” she replied. “A stranger from the desert!”
“You can play with your toys later!” the man said.
The girl turned and saw I had vanished. She furrowed her brow and looked deeply disturbed. “But … he was just here!” she said.
A plump woman covered in offal shoved the man out of the doorway. She wiped bloody hands on her apron and thrust them to her hips. “Get inside now, Agna, or you’ll wish you were never born!”
The girl stood quickly, scanned the desert for me once more, then ran inside.
No thing of form had ever seen me and lived, let alone begged answers of me! As the smoke fluttered from the chimney, I comforted myself in the knowledge that one day my brothers and I would return to erase her city from existence.
I flew back to the Jeen in silence.
Years passed like dripping molasses, and I forgot about the singing girl. My brothers and I trod through the crystal kingdom of Aphelia, whose walls had stood for ten millennia, whose conquests were heralded in a thousand tongues. No one would remember its name.
We touched the port city of Mesach, built within the Pine Barrens beside the salty river Do. It disappeared as if it never were. We sundered Allia, Blömsnu, Cintak, Ektu El. Traders, on the way to a sundered city, would suddenly forget why they had ventured out into the harsh desert with overburdened camels. Cities vanished from minds, too.
How many walls fell under our hands, I could not count. But always, ambitious men built new ones. They raised towers of stone and wrapped domes with hammered gold. They adorned palaces with jewels and paved streets with tar and glass. Caravans traveled across inhospitable wastes to deliver mortar, wheat, and wine. After a time, a new city breathed under the stars as if it had existed for all eternity. I began to see these cities not as a thousand separate entities, but the organs of a much larger creature whose severed limbs always grew back.
One night, as I wandered the Jeen under the bright and nervous stars, I heard the girl’s song again:
I followed her song across abyssal landscapes made gray by the pregnant moon, until I came to her far-off house in the city of Gelecek. I saw movement in a window, and I crept up to it, conscious not to take human form or to touch her house, lest it fall to ashes.
Agna sat upright in bed. In the years since I had seen her, she had grown inches. Now she had the body of a young woman, though she still had the face of a girl. She leaned into the pallid moonlight as she scrawled on parchment. Her small voice hummed a few bars, then she crossed out a word and replaced it with another. She hummed again and the notes brought me back ages. I recalled cities I had conquered and forgotten: the star- shaped city of Gelf with its bejeweled ivory columns; the ziggurats of Phalantine and its perfumed gardens; Karad and its herds of black giraffes.
I had no words to describe the feelings her songs evoked in me. I needed to listen until I understood what I felt.
“I thought I dreamt you all those years ago,” she whispered. “But here you are.” She was staring at me through the window frame.
I found myself in human form, though not by my own will. Her song had oddly drawn me into flesh. “You remember me?” I said.
“How could I forget? You vanished like smoke! And you smell like the deep desert,” she said. “Like a spent campfire. Like ash. Who are you?”
“I have no name.”
“But
“I am dissolution. I am nothing.”
“What do you want with me?”
“Your songs,” I said. “They fill me with memories of forgotten places. They make me feel … I cannot describe it. Sing one again!” I demanded.
“Leave!” she whispered to me. “Father has killed thieves before!”
“Please,” I begged. “Sing another! Sing one now!”
“Agna!” a man bellowed. “If you’re using one of my candles again, I swear, I’ll beat you back to Kalagia!”
Agna mumbled a response, pretending to be asleep. Then she whispered to me, “Go away! I don’t know who you are, but don’t come back!”
In the far corner, a sphere of light blossomed around a candle. In the lambent flicker frowned the sweaty face of her father. He stepped toward us, and I backed away from the window into darkness.
“Is this how you repay me for training you?” her father said. “I told you not to use the candles!”
“But, I didn’t, Papa!” she said.
“Don’t lie to me, Agna! I smell soot!”
“I swear, it wasn’t me! There was a man! A stranger from the—”
He lifted a heavy belt from a chair and beat her with it. I watched from a distance and listened to the desert swallow her screams. When he had finished beating her, he said, “Go to sleep, Agna. You have to be up early for work. I expect you at Posterity Hill before first prayer.”
As he blew out the candle, she whimpered her acknowledgment.
I wanted to hear her sing again, but this was not the place. Then I recalled her father’s words, “Posterity Hill,” a place of men, and in the darkness I had an idea.
I traveled to the wastes beyond the Jeen, where the white sands breathe in irregular tides. Deep within a mammoth cleft of stone, I begged the demon Atleiu to craft me a suit of human flesh. In return, I promised her the only thing I could—destruction. She agreed and proceeded to cut skin from one of her human slaves, tempering it with the hoarfrost of the north and the iron stones that fall from the sky.
Whereas before, anything I touched turned to dust within hours, now—while encased in Atleiu’s suit—I could walk among men without destroying them. I could follow Agna anywhere she went. I could touch and be touched.
The sun was rising hot and huge in the east when I reached the first stone of Gelecek’s streets. I worried that Atleiu’s suit might fail. I took a tentative step with my sandaled foot onto stone. Always, when I decimated cities, I felt the ecstatic rush of annihilation. I sensed none of that now; the stone remained a stone.
“Posterity Hill?” I asked a bearded vendor, and he pointed with an arthritic hand deep into the city.
I weaved through a collection of low stone buildings. Clothing and bedding swayed from lines strung above me. People hurried past with satchels tossed over backs or barrows thrust before them. I smelled uncooked animal
