That night LoPa slept with my brothers. Akmuo and Medis held hands and LoPa curled round their bodies. Mother and HoPa held each other. My back was pressed to mother’s back and I listened.

  I just listened. For a long time.

  When I finally got up, I crept past my brothers and LoPa and out the open door, hurrying for Whaaloo.

  There was no dancing, no singing. The fireflies swarmed above Whaaloo who watched me approach, his eyes so black in the night.

  “Whaaloo waited for you,” Whaaloo’s voice wrapped round me like wind, muffling the sounds of the forest.

  “Are you leaving?” The words became tacky in my mouth and my eyes itched with tears.

  Whaaloo leaned back and opened its mouth. The fireflies poured into the glowing opening, disappearing. The clearing was darker. The moons hidden behind new clouds, and the stars passed no light to their sister Saol. Whaaloo closed its mouth with a monstrous smile and approached.

  Its gait creaking and cracking, like a tree learning to be human but afraid to go all the way. “A dragon comes.”

  I threw myself into its wooden body, throwing my arms round the shell. My arms scraped against the wood, but I held tight. I had grown and was now the same height as Whaaloo. “We’ll fight it. My mother will!”

  Whaaloo’s voice whispered like a breeze of winter, cold on my neck, “There’s no fighting a dragon, only running. Surviving.”

  I rubbed my tearful cheeks against its wooden body. It still stank of driftwood and rot. “I’m afraid.”

  Whaaloo’s three wooden hands and twenty-one fingers stroked my hair. The coarseness of them got caught repeatedly in my tight curls and we laughed, trying to remove his splintering fingers from my mass of curls.

  Whaaloo leaned back into the tree that had saved its life and I sat.

  “Where will you go?”

  Whaaloo clicked and its body whistled, “Where the wind blows.”

  I ripped grass from the clearing, “The wind blows everywhere.”

  “Whaaloo will go anywhere then. Anywhere without dragons.”

  “Will you come back?” Sobs cracked my question and Whaaloo jumped to my side, landing on its creaking knees before me. Without speaking, it pushed its forehead against mine and flooded me with sensations.

  Warmth. Comfort. Love.

  Whaaloo didn’t invade me, but only passed this on to me. It was telling me how precious I had become in its eyes. I wept and threw my arms round its neck, sobbing into its shell.

  “A friend of Whaaloo is a friend for all lives, no matter how many times we may someday die.”

  When I came back, LoPa woke.

  “Who’s there?”

  Startled and struggling to keep my voice from cracking, “I need to make water.”

  Either he was too tired or thought my voice was strained by sleepiness, he made no reaction, only stood, walked to me, took my hand, and walked me back outside.

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  I forced the shuddering from my body by biting down on my fingertips, still raw. I walked round to the back of our home and waited. LoPa remained by our door and hummed. It was a sad melody. One I hadn’t heard before. When I walked back round, I watched him.

  He rubbed his eyes and stared up at the sky. Clouds wandered past, hiding the moons above, but they shined behind those clouds. Stars lined the clouds as they drifted past. LoPa’s face was so sorrowful, like he had watched us all die. Glassy eyed and long faced, his melody struck me, digging deep. The loss of Whaaloo stung and LoPa’s sorrow tore the flesh from me.

  “What’s that?”

  LoPa turned to me, “Hm?”

  “The song.”

  “Oh,” he returned his gaze to the clouds. “Remember the story of how your mother met me?”

  I nodded but he wasn’t looking. “She asked you to come home.”

  He smiled, keeping his lips together, and it brought tears to my eyes, “Not at first. First she told me she was leaving and that we’d never see each other again. I was so sad. I wept that whole night and didn’t sleep. She told me she was leaving in the morning, so I met her at her horse and sang this song for her. It was a song written by my own tears as I wept beneath a sky just like this one. Or, there were fewer clouds. There are always fewer clouds out on the plains.”

  “Can I hear it?” My voice broke into tears that I struggled to hide.

  He came to me, “What’s wrong, little Lu?”

  “Everybody’s leaving!” The words burst from me as sounds smothered by tears. Somehow, LoPa understood.

  “We’ll always be together, little Lu. You and me and HoPa and Muo and Med and mother. We’ll be together forever.”

  “You and mother fought!”

  He sighed and held me tighter. “But we still love each other. We always will.”

  He cradled me out there in the warm summer night, humming the song he sang for my mother so many Twilights ago, under a foreign sky.

  When my tears stopped and I blinked away the blur of my eyes, LoPa carried me to the top of our home and set me on his lap. He pointed to the stars becoming visible as the clouds moved.

  “You see that, little Lu? Those five.” He drew it with his fingers until it was clear to me. Three running down in a straight line and two on either side of the center star. The center star was brighter than the others. Brighter than the other four combined. “Where I come from, we call that Todtor. It’s where all the dead end up. It’s where all the living come from. Inside of us, in our blood, is something else. Something we cannot see or touch. We call it Leb. Everyone and everything has Leb inside them. The gods have so much Leb it spills out and disrupts everything around them.

  “Remember the Angel? The Angel had so much Leb we could feel it from that far away. But even you and those screaming cicadas have Leb. We have more than the cicada because we’re bigger. Most people have the same amount of Leb, though. Our—I’m explaining this badly.” He laughed, a quiet little chime in the night.

  He cleared his throat, “We all have Leb but it’s not about size. It’s about love and power. Most people have about as much Leb as anyone else. But some people have more. Like your mother. She has so much Leb that the world bends to her will and people want to follow her. They want to be like her. When she speaks, everyone listens. Even those that hate her. It’s why First Mother and her don’t get along. But other people, like—do you remember Lapas? The man who lived over there?” He pointed towards Lapas’ empty home.

  I nodded, afraid I’d say too much or cry again.

  “Lapas was shallow with Leb. It made life hard for him. So he gave up. When the Deathwalkers come, they take our Leb and return it to Todtor. There, it mixes and melds with all the Leb of all those who have died and haven’t yet been born. But the thing about Leb, there’s only a certain amount. There never gets to be more or less. When someone dies, their Leb returns to Todtor. When someone’s born, the Leb travels all the way here to fill their blood. Lapas will live again someday, but he might be a cicada or a chicken or even a flower. Something that his Leb will fit into. Something that won’t fall apart or give up on life because it’s too empty. Or maybe someone’s Leb will carry Lapas’ Leb with it into a new human. A human like your mother. One so powerful and beautiful that she’s bursting with Leb. Sometimes, humans even become like gods. There’s so much Leb inside them that they become something new. They Ascend. They become something not quite human, but neither do they fit into the gods we know.”

  “When will we die?”

  LoPa pressed his face into my hair. “Not for a long time. Many Twilights from now.”

  “What are those stars?” I pointed to the newly revealed by passing clusters of clouds.

  LoPa stayed up with me until the first dawn, when I could barely keep my eyes open. He drew the constellations in the sky for me. He named them. He told me what they meant and who they represented.

  It was a beautiful night. A hard night. But it comforted me.

  LoPa was a good father.