“Are you happy with where you are? Are you satisfied with what you have made of your life?” Kalokin’s mask held a casual, relaxed look currently, but Shou sensed a deeper edge to this question.

It struck her then that Kalokin seemed like the type who liked playing games, and if so, it felt like he was winning this one. She could have asked about the afterlife, or heaven or hell, or religion, but she’d asked about a cup of coffee. To buy herself time to think, she quoted a phrase she’d heard a friend use. “It would be a shame to be satisfied. The world needs us to chase our dreams.”

Kalokin’s bemused expression returned as he leaned forwards. “An interesting and rather involved philosophical statement, for a dancer who may well be at the highest point in her career. Is that an original quote? You used a different accent for it, so I somehow doubt it is.”

She chuckled and nodded. “It’s something an old friend of mine would say to me, it’s from a videogame, I think.” Her smile turned bittersweet for a moment. That had been a simpler time. “Honestly? Yes and no. It was always my dream to be a ballet dancer. To float along the stage, to hear the roar of applause, but… well, you know how people say that you should never meet your heroes? The same thing goes for dreams. I could never have imagined how… political the dance scene is. The kind of bullshit jockeying dancers need to do to garner favor with stage directors. That pits us against each other, and the other dancers embrace it. They’re like mosquitoes, constantly looking to steal drops of blood from each other, to gain a tiny advantage or shill on someone else. I know several of them have tried to fuck their way into a role, and that some of them succeeded. I somehow managed to get a lead role without that though, and I killed that performance well enough that I’ve been the stage star ever since, and they hate that I don’t stoop to their level. So, in short, my co-workers hate me and my boss treats me like a delicate piece of meat.”

She did smile after this tirade though, doing a small twirl on her way to the sofa. “Oh, but the fans. I can give a girl a hair tie and she’ll cherish it for live. I can sign a pair of ballet slippers, and give someone the strength and determination to keep chasing their dreams. I can make an entire audience feel whatever emotion I want from the stage, and once I’m off of it, I can make people ecstatic just by stopping to talk to them. My favorite thing is when someone recognizes me in public, without my stage costume or makeup, and I get to talk to them about their life. They usually try to buy me lunch, but I insist on picking up the bill.”

Kalokin chuckled, sitting down on nothing, floating about eye level with her. “It sounds like you walk a fine line between being a humble star and being an egomaniac. I can empathize with the feeling.”

She laughed and threw a pillow at him, forgetting for the moment that this was some cosmic entity of unfathomable power. “Hush you! I don’t go singing my glory and demanding people worship my skill! I just… I acknowledge the kind of effect I can have on people with a simple conversation. I like to make people happy, I like to entertain. That doesn’t change simply because I step off the stage.”

Kalokin nodded, smiling casually. “You have a good heart. I’m no dancer, but performers use my illusions to add life to their shows, and so I can appreciate the love of the stage and the roar of the crowds.”

It struck her then that she knew terribly little about the wireframe mannequin floating across from her, but she’d already made up her mind about her next question; it would be irresponsible for her to ask about anything else. “Okay, so my turn for a question. Religion. The Soul. Afterlife. Tell me about it.” He stared at her, and she sighed before rephrasing it as a proper question. “Which religion has it right? What happens when we die?”

Kalokin’s face was briefly replaced with a large red X as a buzzing noise ensued. “Can’t answer that one. None of us Stráž actually remember our own creation, much less the origin of realty. Personally, I’m monotheistic, just because I think that only a single entity could design a reality this… cohesive? I mean, if my siblings and I were tasked with making a new reality, it would be significantly messier than this one because we’d never agree on anything. As to life after death, all I know is that one exists. After death, but before they vanish, most souls report seeing a figure we call ‘the pale shepherd’ who guides them to the afterlife. None of the Stráž can see it, and no mortal who follows it has ever returned. As to the nature of the soul, that’s a question of science, not religion, if you would like to ask about it. I’ll let you ask again, since I couldn’t answer that one.”

Well, they’d said that souls were used to cast magic, and he’d confirmed that they persisted after mortal death, which answered that question well enough for her. “Actually, I’d like to ask about you. What exactly are you?”

“Me individually, or was that a plural ‘you’ to ask about us?”

“You, plural. You called yourself the Strashz, I think? What are you? Where do you come from? You’re significantly more casual than any legend of gods that I’ve ever heard of, I can’t imagine Zeus making someone breakfast.”

He nodded. “It’s pronounced Stráž, but that was a good attempt. As I mentioned, we don’t remember being born. The oldest memories we have though, are of us being worshipped as gods. We ruled the entire world, albeit with different faces, and we ruled with an iron grip. I may be a gambling man, but I’d wager that every legend of divinity can be traced back to us, in some way.” He paused, thinking about where to begin.

“So, there are four of us, five if you count Nikolak and I separately. Shelandra, Ghozumel, Bhalxash, and I. Each of us have… spheres of influence, I suppose you might call them. Correlated elements, pieces of the world that we call our own. At it’s most basic, we each started as the master of a different primal form of energy: Shelandra uses fire and heat, Ghozumel manipulates gravity and kinetic, Bhalxash controls anything Electromagnetic, and I suppose you’ve heard that I cast light magic, usually in the form of illusions.” He gestured to the ‘body’ he was currently using. “We don’t physically exist… we’re beings of pure soul energy, the fabled Mana of legend. We can project that energy downwards into the physical plane to manifest as physical beings, but we have to ‘tie up’ power to keep the manifestation. It’s mentally taxing and it limits the scope of magic we can do so we usually only do it to talk. Nonverbal communication is a fascinating field of study, it’s an integral part of any language. Even then, I don’t even bother half the time; it’s easier for me to conjure a convincing illusion of a manifestation than it is to actually manifest. You didn’t notice, but I stopped physically existing the moment I set down that mug of coffee.”

Shou nodded, tilting her head now and staring at him to see if there was some telltale sign that he was fibbing, or that he didn’t exist. “But… wait! The pillow I threw at you.” The pillow vanished from his hands, and appeared on the floor behind him. Or, rather, the illusion faded, and she could see where it had flown right through him. “Oh. You’re good at that.”

He nodded, grinning, but before he could continue she cut him off. “But wait, you said that you used to be worshipped as gods, implying that you’re not anymore? What changed? And if you’re not a god, what are you now?”

He sighed, but such was a part of her question, and he’d expected that she would get side tracked. “It’s a long story, but in short, we tried to control too much. We grew more stringent in our demands, of appeasement and tribute, and whole civilizations slowly just… tried to leave us behind.”

There was sorrow on his mask now, and… shame? It certainly looked like it. “So, we did what gods did to blasphemers. We smote them. We mounted grand steeds and rode out as the incarnations of Violence, Famine, Plague, and Madness; the four horsemen of apocalypse. We crushed humanity beneath our proverbial heels and ushered in an age of darkness. If my understanding of your histories is right, you literally called it ‘the dark ages’ because there are precious few records of what actually happened to cause the great bronze age collapse.”

“That’s…” Shou didn’t have words. If he was telling the truth, they caused the deaths of untold millions… she suddenly found herself afraid, and wondered how insignificant she was in his eyes.

“Atrocious? Unthinkable? Unforgivable? You can say it. Every person who learns the details agrees. We conquered the entire world, all except the Inghan. They refused to bend the knee, despite the horrors we unleashed upon them. We destroyed their very way of life; not a single scroll exists from their golden age. Not a single relic, nor monument, nor artifact. We all but erased them from history, but the majority of them refused to worship such evil beings. And then something changed.”

He stopped there, long enough for Shou to sigh and lean forwards. “What? What changed! You can’t just end a story like that?” He shrugged, flashing that red X again.

“We don’t know. There’s a gap in all our memories there, as if whatever changed us didn’t want us to know how it happened. This ties into my faith, as I’d like to think whatever god exists personally reached down and… adjusted our mindset. What we remember is that when we woke up. We were… different. Remorseful. Compassionate. We understood that human life was to be cherished, we understood the scope and magnitude of what we’d done wrong, and we wept.” He chuckled, voice shifting to be more imposing, as if he was quoting scripture somewhere. “And the tears of the broken gods fell upon the Inghan people as sacred Mana. Their resilience was rewarded with strength, so that as the rest of the world fell to darkness, they alone retained the ability to control mana, to control the very energies of life itself.”

“And that’s why magic is apparently common in Ingha, when it’s nothing but a legend everywhere else?”

He nodded. “Part of it. We looked back down and saw the Inghan as the only people who refused to worship our past, evil selves. We saw that, one and all, they would die before they begged for mercy or aid. The rest of the world had appeased us. They were in shambles, but they could rebuild. The Inghan couldn’t. They’d lost too much. So we rebuilt their nation for them. We stayed in Ingha, forever after, in servile positions. We gave blessings, pieces of our souls strong enough to imbue entire bloodlines with magic, and so they rebuilt their world with our power.”

“Ghozumal’s strength built cities and plowed fields. Shelandra’s fires heated stoves and smithies alike. I became a lorekeeper and teacher; one of the reasons performers are sacred to me is that my first blessings went to a group of traveling performers, who used wordplay and stagecraft both to lift broken spirits and to rekindle a love of language. Bhalxash, through an interesting chain of events best saved for another day, became a medical figurehead, developing medicines, surgical techniques, and health standards. In atonement for what we did to them, and as a reward for their steadfast hearts, we will happily spend an eternity supporting and guiding, but never again controlling the Inghan people. That is what it means to be Stráž, a word that literally translates as both guardian and servant.”

“I suppose that makes sense…” told and untold atrocities aside, the dark ages were literally thousands of years ago, and somehow the image of conqueror just didn’t match the easygoing ghost she’d been talking with. A morbid curiosity overtook her then, and she acted on it. “Which horseman were you?”

“I beg your pardon?” His mask shifted to confusion, tinged with displeasure.

“Violence, Famine, Plague, and Madness… which of the four horsemen were you?” Only after the words left her mouth did she remember the shame he’d seemed to feel when recounting it. “I mean, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to… I understand if that’s a sore subject.”

“No, the casual near-genocide of an entire planet doesn’t bother me at all.” His voice was sharp, hard like a bucket of broken glass. “Truthfully I didn’t exist then. What I have recounted to you, was told to me secondhand. Nikolak was, and still is, the embodiment of madness. The other three won’t talk about it, but they think that her insanity was so great that it could not be cured, and rather than fix her mind, her soul was simply sheared in two. The soul contains two parts, the spark of intelligence, and the shroud of emotion. Her spark was cast into an abyss, to be forgotten forever, but her shroud needed guidance to keep from wreaking havoc, and so I was created to keep her in check. I am, as you might say, an artificial intelligence, on a meta-physical scale.”

Shou opened her mouth to press the issue but he cut her off. “You’ve pursued that question far enough, and I’ve told you far more than you deserved. Take it and be content, and do not use your next question to ask about my past… either mine or Nikolaks.”