Tandavi looks at him, and mildly the silver boy endures her gaze, accustomed to having eyes on the tips of his bones, the muted glimmer of his hair. From her, the sensation breeds a little less resentment – she searches not for weakness but for something else. He cannot fathom what. He only just managed to evade her first question but another quickly takes its place, this one more difficult. Caneo hesitates, mulling over the words.

        What was he thinking of? Why does she even care to know? What will the knowledge give her, this strange flame-kissed girl with the voice like midnight and the warm black eyes? Caneo lifts his own eyes and watches her, wondering. His smile fades, and showing through it a bleak, solemn mask rests over the lean curves of his face. “Where I should go,” he says at last. And it resembles truth; his hooves wander on their own even if they might, in this place, pause to rest. “It gets boring,” he adds, as if the revelation matters less than it does, “wandering around on my own.” And he might go and make a home within the Basin, but in some deep place his heart lacks the knowledge even to begin that task, to be anything but outside. He moves; he has always moved. And he has always done so alone.

        He changes the subject quickly enough. Delight blooms openly across her face after his compliment, and secretly Caneo preens, himself shining more brightly in the warm light of her smile. Her laughter is a dark sound, heavy and yet fluttering like the wings of birds. “Burning man?” she parrots the words, and for a moment Caneo wonders if he misspoke. He doesn’t mind her laughter, really, but he wonders what inspired it.

        Without warning the girl moves, and instinct drives him back a half-step, head up, blue eyes flashing with a brief, sharp warning. But she only watches him some more, and he stares back, a question hanging on his features, vague and yet unasked. She must want something but her questions are all about him, about small, unimportant things, and wariness clamors like the awful screech of an alarm bell against the insides of his brain. “Why did you seek the Sun God?” Such a simple question, but it strikes his ears and rattles all the way down, and he hesitates and for an instant quivers, as if touched by some strange cold, some ghost of memory far better left in peace.

        Caneo turns to blink over one shoulder, peering at the place he left. “That’s who he was?” he asks, his voice lighter than it should be, shaken by a sort of airy laughter. In the back of his mind an older voice rumbles, deep and merciless as chains across the ground. There are no gods in this world, boy. And he laughs, because he can do nothing else – because it seems absurd he should have crawled to this place and found it so wondrous long after he’d given up on wonder, on beauty, on everything he ought to hold still dear within his heart.

        Caneo snorts and turns back to Tandavi. “Are you sure?” He has always thought of god as an awful frightening thing, the implacable creep of death, the sharp scent of blood and the prick of horn against throat. He has always seen the sun as a distant, unkind thing, not capable of mirth or joviality, not capable of anything like thought. She must be lying – but she says it with such quiet candor, as if her question is the interesting thing and not her assumption.

        Caneo quiets by degrees. He wonders, bemused, if he should have been more polite. But he can hardly fathom speaking to a god and coming back alive. It burns like absinthe in his brain, and makes him look down on Tandavi with a strange mix of pity and mirth. “I wanted to see what would happen,” he tells her, honest for the first time. Why does anyone approach a god? To die, he would have said before. He doesn’t understand; this place defies him like some awful puzzle and he watches it unfurl with incredulity.

        “Why?” Caneo adds, made bold by his outburst, candid now as fire simmers somewhere in the cold depths of his veins. “Why did you seek him out?” She knew what she was doing; and maybe she can tell him what he should ever want with a god, when gods have never touched him before, and ever been content to sit back watching as he wandered back and forth across this ugly world.