The afterlife has no temperature. There is no hunger, no thirst, no pain — and Atem, who finished everything he had to finish, has no complaint to make. Then the sky splits open, and a living man comes down through it with sweat on his skin.
The dead live under one law: the heart must balance against the feather of truth. A heart that has come to want something grows heavy, and a heavy heart cannot stay. Atem knows exactly what he is putting on the scales every time Seto Kaiba prises another hole in the world and carries his own heat into paradise.
Three parts, from the far side of the door to a kitchen at three in the morning. What a body keeps a record of, what a calendar is actually for, and why fear might be something a person acquires rather than something he loses.
This is a translation of an original work.
Original Title: 死者の目
Original Author: 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
01 The Sun That Does Not Burn
In the land of the dead, the concept of temperature does not exist.
To put it precisely, there is neither excess nor lack. In the afterlife it is always the moment before harvest, the river always on the eve of its flood, the wind always blowing at a strength pleasant against the skin. Neither hot nor cold, no thirst and no hunger. The dead have need of nothing, and temperature was no exception.
There was light. A sun rises in the sky, crosses the day, and sets. But that sun holds none of the burning heat of the one in the living world. It brings no sweat to the forehead, it does not sting the skin, it only lights the world.
In life he had been called the son of the sun god. The sun he had looked up at from the throne whited out his vision if he looked at it directly. It bore down and bore down, thinning the river, scorching the ground and the people without mercy.
That is what a god is, properly speaking. Against that, the sun here is gentle. It burns no one.
At first there was no doubt about calling this place paradise. His father was here, and Mahad was here. Mana ran about, the priests stood in their rows, and everything that had to be done had been done.
With those he had to part from, he had already finished parting.
Had finished, he supposed. The dead have one duty only. It is to be here, and Atem had believed he was discharging that duty well. Set against three thousand years of being sealed away, he had even thought eternity short.
He remembers the day the sky split clearly. There is no calendar in the land of the dead, but there is something close to one. That day became the boundary line between before and after.
A pale blue fissure ran across the zenith like lightning, and an object no one had ever seen prised open the seam between dimensions by force and came down. The wrath of the gods, surely — the dead stirred and murmured.
Atem alone was calm. Along the outline of the figure that stepped down, the air was warping. For a moment he took it for a heat shimmer. It was the first shape of heat he had seen in the afterlife.
There was no need to challenge him and ask who he was. If there were a dead man who could forget that walk, he would be better off dying a second time.
"I've come to settle this."
No greeting, no account of how, no remark on a situation very nearly a miracle. Addressed to someone who had gone silently a year and a little more ago, this was presumably the only form of address available to this man.
Of the contents of the Duel, no account will be attempted. That was not something for anyone's later record.
If only one thing were to be set down, though——facing each other across the board was enough to tell. The man was hot. Breath mixed into the voice that declared his attacks, and sweat ran down his skin.
Atem looked at his own fingers. They were not cold. There was no temperature, no heat. Until something to compare them with appeared, he had not even noticed the absence.
It was settled. How it came out belongs to the two of them alone. Atem had no intention of telling anyone.
Seto said it on his way back to the craft, without turning round.
"Next time."
When the fissure closed, the sky went back to its original bright blue. The place where the man had stood seemed to remember the heat for a while. Atem tried standing there barefoot. Against the soles of his feet there was a faint warmth.
It was the first foreign body ever brought into the land of the dead.
Until it had gone completely cold, he could not move from the spot.
The paradise that came after lost its taste, a little at a time.
The bread filled him as it always had, but filling was all it did. Somewhere along the way he had begun looking for a sensation of good taste that had no business existing here.
The wind was as pleasant as it had always been, but he had gone and noticed that this was only his tracing over a memory that wind is a pleasant thing.
The absence of pain became a pain. Looking at the full river, he thought for the first time that this was a river which stayed on the eve of its flood and would never overflow.
That was what a completed paradise meant.
His father asked nothing. The dead, it seems, do not step into one another's completion. Only Mana said, once, that the King had been looking at nothing but the sky lately.
Atem did not deny it. Because he knew that the dead grow bad at lying. Because the dead have no need to lie, either.
The man came again and again.
The craft was improved with every visit, and the stays lengthened a little at a time. They Duelled, and sometimes they did not Duel, and they tried walking side by side through the afterlife. The sound of a living man's shoes on earth seemed unlike the footsteps of any of the dead. It had weight, and it had speed. It was, he thought, very like the sound of something that needs things.
The man talked about the living world. About Mokuba, about the company, about new technology, about the sounds of living that their onetime friends were making, each along his own road.
There is no news of change in the land of the dead. News is a product of time, and time is not something needed here.
Atem listened to all of it as though he were being beaten down on by sunlight. Once he had learnt that piling on questions would fill a few more minutes of the stay with words, he had gone and got better at asking, too. There are things one acquires after dying, he thought.
Once he came down with his hair still damp. There had been a sudden rain, the man said. He had apparently been outside until the moment before he boarded the craft.
No rain falls in the afterlife. The river is full, there is harvest, and so there is no need for any more of it to fall. Listening to him talk, Atem watched that hair drying.
Water from the living world, taken by a wind without temperature, going. He found, for some reason, that he grudged it. Where in all the world had there ever been a king who grudged a little rainwater?
And with every visit there was a little change in Seto.
In the afterlife no one changes. Precisely because of that, change settled and piled only on this man. The length of his hair, the way he pitched his voice, what he was working on. Atem took to counting such things.
Once, only once, he asked what the man was paying to come here.
"Money."
Not an answer, but the answer of not answering. He understands, though. What creaks each time a dimension is prised open cannot possibly be the craft alone.
A living man's time is, one might say, fuel — which is to say, a thing to be burnt. Every time he comes, this man stokes himself to get this far.
The dead have eternity and the living have only what is left, and yet he pours what is left into a rift in the sky.
At the end of one of the visits, to the man standing with a half-closed fissure at his back, Atem says it.
"Kaiba. Don't come here any more."
"I refuse."
It was immediate.
As always, there was not even the appearance of thought.
"A dead man has no right to decide a living man's schedule."
"Every time you come, this place gets colder."
Atem went on. He could hear his own voice hardening. "I was satisfied. I did not know what it was to lack anything. Not until you brought heat in here. This is paradise. And yet now, after you have gone home, it looks like nothing but a place without temperature. The wind, the river, the bread, all of it. You are coming here to break my eternity."
Seto listened without cutting in.
"I know."
"…You knew."
"From the beginning."
"From the start, then."
"You went silently, and silently you completed yourself. Whose permission did you get to be satisfied. I have not accepted it. Not your death, not your acceptance, not your paradise. Settling it, for me, is not beating my opponent. It is breaking my opponent's completion."
The pale blue light of the fissure edged the man's outline.
Atem nearly laughed.
In all his time as King of the Dead in the Underworld, he had never had so arrogant a mourner. To leave heat behind in place of an offering, and to break an eternity in place of a prayer.
"Next time."
The man said it and vanished into the rift. That day alone, the usual parting shot had the shape of a promise.
Mahad came afterwards.
The magician who had died and still had not stopped serving took one look at the King's face and saw all of it with a magician's eyes.
"My King. Your heart has grown heavy."
A dead man's heart must balance against the feather of truth. That was the one law of this country. A heart without desire is light, and that is the condition for being here. A heart that has come to know desire grows heavy.
No one reproaches it. Because there is no need to reproach it. One who loses the balance simply becomes unable to go on being here. Paradise is the country of the completed, and desire is the proof of incompletion.
Atem remembered the day he had been weighed. The heart set on the pan balanced against the feather without the slightest difference. It was the heart of one who had left nothing behind him unfinished.
That lightness he now found, just very slightly, something like a shame. That it had not been the lightness of a man who had finished what he had to do, but the lightness of a man who had not yet grudged the loss of anything.
"There is a way to set it down."
Mahad said it quietly. He did not say what would be set down. Because there was no need to say it.
If he forgot the heat, the heart would return to its former lightness. Still in the afterlife, he would come once again to be filled by bread, to receive the wind as pleasant, to feel eternity short.
"I will think about it."
He said it, but the dead are bad at lying.
Mahad bowed deeply and said nothing further. With the same bow of loyalty as three thousand years ago, he tacitly allowed his master's weight.
There is no calendar. But he knew the day the sky would next split. Atem waited in the middle of the Field of Reeds, looking up.
Waiting is not an act the dead perform. To wait is to desire a future, and it is done because it is needed.
He could tell that the dead passing by were watching him dubiously, and even so it did not matter.
The heart is heavy. Even so, it was certainly his own, the heart of a dead man. As when he had got his name back, something he was supposed to have let go of was beginning to have an outline again.
The first fissure runs across the zenith. Pale blue light, and then air beginning to warp.
——The heat is coming.
Under a sun that does not burn, the dead man took a step towards the heat.
02 The Burn
The rift is not yet fully open. Atem stood in the middle of the Field of Reeds, watching the sky.
The zenith splits, pale blue light falls, the craft comes down. Seto, stepping down into the warping air, noticed him within a few steps and stopped.
"…You were waiting."
"Yes."
The dead are bad at lying. Stay a long while with no need to lie and you forget how lying is even done.
Seto started to say something and stopped. Instead he seemed to be observing him a little longer than usual. The eyes of a researcher whose hypothesis has been borne out. The same as when he talked about developing new technology.
Atem did not ask what that look meant. To ask would shorten the distance to the answer.
He had not yet decided how to shorten it.
That day they did not Duel. They walked through the afterlife. The man talked about the living world, and Atem, as ever, listened as though he were being beaten down on by sunlight.
When the talk broke off——which of them let it break off, he does not know——Atem reached out.
It was not an action taken after thinking. Had he thought about it, it might have taken something like three thousand years.
Seto's wrist.
The moment he touched it, it burned.
It was something there was no word for but pain. The first heat and the first pain since he had died.
He knew that a living body runs at around thirty-six degrees Celsius. But to fingers that hold no temperature, it was no different at all from molten metal. Heat that reached the bone. As a reflex, withdrawing is the correct response. And yet Atem's fingers did not withdraw.
Seto did not move. He did not shake the hand off, he did not grip back, he only stopped walking and let himself be held.
The pulse went on carrying into the fingers that touched it. It was fast. Ahead of his face, the pulse was answering.
"It burns."
Atem murmured it.
"…Is that a dead man's impression."
"A dead man's impression."
Even so, Atem did not let go.
"It hurts. I am surprised. That hurting should be this…"
The words did not continue. This — this what. In the vocabulary of the dead there was no word at all to fill in what came after.
In the vocabulary of the living there might be one. The moment he wanted to find out, it was as good as an admission.
"Kaiba."
"What."
Having started, Atem closed his mouth again.
His tongue remembered nothing but orders.
Come. Go. It is permitted. It is forbidden.
The words of a king all run downwards. That was so three thousand years ago. It is so after death as well. Even when he told this man not to come here any more, he had been giving an order. Orders were safe. Refused, he would only be refused while still a king.
To ask — the moment you ask, you have taken the king off.
"Your hand — lend it."
He tried saying it, and even so the ending came out as an order. It was the last plate of the barrier.
Seto was silent for a moment, and then says it, looking thoroughly put out.
"You're late."
"…Late?"
"I waited three years. The design is finished."
It was a businesslike voice. Even this man, he thought, has a voice that is too businesslike.
"You'll need a vessel. A body that can take the mass of your soul. The theory is done. Three years to implement. Five at the outside."
"Do you think I can wait."
"You're a man who waited out an eternity, aren't you."
"Eternity was short. The few years since I came to know you are longer."
Seto did not answer.
But Atem knew that way of answering by not answering, because he had learnt it from this man.
"Until then, don't come."
"I refuse."
Immediate again.
"Every time you come, you stoke yourself. Stoke three years' worth and—"
"A dead man does not calculate my fuel consumption."
Seto pulled his hand free. Then, as though it were a piece of administrative procedure, he took hold of Atem's wrist himself.
"—"
"Get burned. Enough that you won't forget."
It was as though the heat were being written into the bone.
The memory of the dead is complete. Colour, voice, the sound of reeds rubbing together — once it passes through, it is preserved for ever.
Only heat could not be preserved.
The memory of heat gone cold is nothing but information, and a thing merely known has no temperature. However many times he tried to replay the feel of the wrist being seized, the temperature went out of it each time. So there was nothing to do but wait.
For the next rift.
For the next burn.
This is what is called thirst, Atem remembered. The word the people of the Nile know best, and he had forgotten it for a very long time after dying.
Each time the rift opened, Atem tied a single knot in a reed. There is no calendar in the land of the dead. Because there is no need for one. One who comes to need it has no choice but to make his own.
The knots increased a little at a time. Counting them, he thought: a calendar was never the movement of the heavenly bodies after all. It was having something to wait for.
That man was my calendar.
Paradise had entirely lost its taste by now. That was as it should be. The outline of the missing place had the shape of what he wanted.
It was the night before the weighing that his father called for him.
Akhenamkhanen did not say much. Because the dead do not step into one another's completion. His father kept that courtesy to the last, and then, at the parting, broke it exactly once.
"You have died twice for someone's sake. Next you will live for someone's sake, I expect. It looks like the same thing and it is nothing like it. Dying is done once, but living is every day. Prepare yourself."
It was a quiet voice.
Mana wept, and tried to smile, and in the end wept again.
Mahad followed him to the boundary without a word and made the same bow as three thousand years ago. Only, it was not the bow of one who serves. It was the bow of one who sees another off.
The hall of the weighing was the same as on the first day.
The pan and the feather, and the scales.
Atem watched his own heart being set on it. At the first weighing the needle had not stirred in the slightest. The perfect lightness of one who leaves nothing behind unfinished.
This time, it tipped.
Without hesitation the pan sank, the feather rose, and the balance did not come back.
A heart that had learnt desire. A heart that had remembered thirst. A heart carrying the mark of a burn.
By the standard of this paradise, that was a failure.
The god of scribes wrote something down. Not a charge — a permit to depart.
Atem was not ashamed of his own sinking heart. If anything, it was that perfect lightness which now came back to him as the slightly lonelier thing.
The lightness only a man who grudges nothing can hold. That had not been purity. It had only been that no one had burned him yet.
The rift opens.
Into the pale blue light the craft comes down. The first heat shimmer in three years——by the calendar of the living world, he was told afterwards. The man standing on the ramp had changed only very slightly. The hand held out was much the same, too.
"The vessel is finished. Whether it moves is a gamble."
Seto said it.
"Bad odds?"
"Thirty percent."
Atem laughed. It was, he thought, the most human-faced laugh he had managed since dying.
"Good enough."
He took the hand. It burned, of course. To the bone. This time he had left the withdrawing reflex itself behind in the fire. For the man he was now, it was not correct.
Beyond the rift was the colour of the living world.
The sun that does not burn was setting at his back.
Atem did not look round.
The first time, he had not looked round in order to go home.
This time there was no longer any reason anywhere to look away.
He goes to be burned.
03 Flesh and Blood
He cut his finger on the edge of a card.
It was while he was shuffling the bare deck, before swapping them into sleeves.
A thin line of blood welled up in the shallowly parted skin.
Ahead of the pain, Atem was looking at the colour.
"What are you doing."
Seto, who had been looking down at a tablet on the other side of the desk, raises his head. Atem held the finger up to show him.
"It bled."
"And what of it."
"No. I just thought — so it does come out."
Atem laughed a little.
Seto said nothing, took a box of bandages out of a drawer and tossed it over. There is a box of bandages kept as standard in the desk of the president of KaibaCorp. Atem did not ask the slightly odd reason for it.
It might be a remnant of when Mokuba was small, or it might be a more recent provision, for someone. To ask would fix one reason or the other in place.
A year has passed since he obtained this body and came back to this side.
About how he came back, there is not a little that can be told, and there is little that ought to be told.
Put the course of it into words and every word, he thought, would surely become a little untrue. Only the outcome is certain. A body that fills when it eats, that gets a morning when it sleeps, that hurts and bleeds when it is cut.
There is a shadow, there is heat, there is pain.
The cut on his finger closed by the next day, and after several more had become a thin line. It was the first scar of the new life. Atem looked at it now and then.
However much of the memory of three thousand years ago he carries, it has no weight, and yet this line, less than a centimetre long, is certainly there on the skin.
Memory fades. Scars remain. A body is a device for recording, he thought, rather late in the day.
The man he had once been had a tomb from the moment he was born. That is what a king is. The address he would have after death was settled before he ever sat on the throne.
As a child he had once seen the Valley of the Kings under construction from a distance. Pointing at the dark mouths being bored into the rock face, one of the priests said that in time it would be his house.
Even after he became King, Shimon had said that he was drawing up meticulous plans and designing it.
These things were not threats. They were offered as blessings.
Death was not a distant appointment but just on the other side of a thin veil. Every morning's prayers were offered to the dead, and the calendar counted flood and rebirth.
Half of a king's duty was perhaps preparation for dying properly.
That is why he had not been afraid, he understands now. No one fears a journey whose destination is settled.
The Atem of now has no tomb, and his destination is written nowhere.
The check-ups were fixed at every three months. Because it was a body without precedent, they would take data, Seto said.
Electrodes attached in a white room, Atem looked at the ceiling. A waveform runs across the monitor. A line regular, and yet, looked at closely, wavering slightly.
"You are health itself. Astonishingly normal."
So the doctor said.
"Will this body age normally?"
"On the data, it will."
Age normally. The words took the shape of reassurance and carried something else entirely. In the car on the way back, Atem put a hand to his chest. The beat came through even the clothes.
This will stop one day, he thought. When, he does not know. But it will.
That waveform resembled a prophecy.
From that night he began to hear the sound of his heart. To be precise, what had been sounding all along became audible. Sink an ear into the pillow in a quiet bedroom and a regular sound resounds.
He could well have taken it as proof of being alive, but what Atem thought was the reverse. A sound that goes on sounding until it stops. A clock with no face.
Once he had noticed the sound, he no longer knew how to turn it off.
The changes increased quietly.
At crossings he took to measuring the speed of cars. Even on a green light, he follows a turning car with his eyes before stepping out. On stairs he checks where the handrail is. On rainy days he looks at the sheen of the road surface. Each of them a matter of an instant, and none of them, surely, noticeable to anyone.
There was exactly one man who noticed.
When the jet on an overseas business trip hit turbulence, Atem's fingers were gripping the armrest. For the short while until the shaking settled, Seto did not lift his eyes from his documents.
That, already, was the proof that he had seen.
After that the travel schedule shifted slightly. There were fewer late-night flights, and cars were arranged earlier. Seto said nothing, and Atem said nothing. The consideration in the silence was welcome, and in exactly the same measure hard to bear.
Because it let him know that his own alteration was definite enough to show up in another person's schedule.
The monthly Duel was something like a ritual or a rite between the two of them. Not only win and loss — the development of it, all of it, gets recorded.
That day Atem could see the winning line. Few cards left in the deck; draw the one he was after and it would punch straight through the board. The probability, roughly thirty percent. For the man he had once been, a number he would have stepped into without hesitation. Fate was a thing to be drawn to oneself, and probability was an excuse for those who flinch.
Atem played a different card. He shored up the field, chose the war of attrition, and three turns later was pushed over and lost.
But Seto did not have a winner's face.
"What was that."
"A loss is a loss."
"That is not what I am talking about."
Without even clearing the field, Seto went on, looking straight at Atem.
"The option of going for the draw was in front of you."
"It was thirty percent."
"You were the man who drew that thirty percent."
Atem had no words to give back. So the flinching has come this far at last, he thought. Even into the place he had believed was the domain of the soul.
Seto did not push in any further, but the sound of him squaring the cards seemed harder than usual.
The sleepless nights had gone on for about two months.
He was drinking water in the kitchen at three in the morning when there were footsteps. Seto stood beside him without a word and poured water into his own glass.
Not pressing for an answer was this man's way, these last few years. He sets the silence down like a chair and leaves it to the other person whether to sit.
And that leaving-it-to-him goes on for a very long time. No more of this — Atem gave up hiding it and decided to sit.
"Kaiba. I have become a coward."
Seto kept silent until the swaying of the water's surface settled.
"I had never feared death. At sixteen I was sealed away, name and all. That was less a death than a thing placed in trust. I only handed over what I had decided to hand over, exactly as decided. Then I slept three thousand years, did what had to be done, and went through the door. That time too I did not look round. That was not an ending but a return. The first death had a purpose, and the second death had a destination. There was no gap anywhere for fear to get in."
"Is that so. I was not there, though."
Seto's voice was flat.
Atem shut his mouth for a moment. The man who had vanished without settling it, and the man who had not been told. Both of them knew what that absence meant, each from his own angle.
"…That was—"
"Never mind. Go on."
In a voice that was not finished with it, Seto nevertheless urged him on.
"Now I cut a finger on the edge of a piece of paper and I look at the colour of the blood too long. I count the sound of my heart. I check the cars at crossings and look for the handrail on the stairs. In a Duel I step back from thirty percent. I, who was a king, who was one of the dead. At this late hour."
Atem hunted for words once. In the end he did not find any, and chose the shortest one.
"I am afraid of dying."
Said aloud, it was a simpler set of words than he had thought. And for exactly as much as it was unadorned, it was real.
Seto drains his water before he says it.
"Obviously."
Atem raised his head.
"Fear is not a defect. It is a calculation. It increases in proportion to the total quantity of what you have to lose. The you of three thousand years ago had nothing but things to hand over. Name, throne, life. Every one of them was there from the start in order to be offered up. The you of now has things you would grudge losing. So you fear. That is all there is to it."
"Do not put it so simply."
"Because it is simple. You have not regressed. You have acquired something. The standard human equipment of having things you do not want to lose."
Seto looked at him.
"Equipment a king has no use for."
"But you are no longer a king. Here, no one demands a way of dying from you. Nor a way of living. Whatever you grudge, all of it is yours."
The voice was quiet.
Atem was looking at the surface of the water in his glass. The water, its swaying settled, is reflecting the kitchen's dim light.
"…Have you ever thought something was frightening."
Having asked, he thought it a foolish question. Because there is no way this man would admit to fear. But Seto did not laugh.
"I am the man who did not accept your death. A death the world had settled as over, the absence of a man who vanished without a word — I went on rejecting it alone. To the point of opening a hole in the dimensions. If we are counting years served in cowardice, I have more than you."
Cowardice.
At that word, Atem looked at Seto, still taken aback. Somehow pulling himself together, he opens his mouth.
"Wh— who in the world calls that cowardice."
"It is a question of what you call it. Refusing to accept a loss. Because it is frightening enough that you do not want to accept it. The same thing — I call it obsession and you call it cowardice. The contents are identical."
Seto stood up.
"…Kaiba."
"What."
"That, in you, is what I always—"
He started and stopped. Put into words, every word comes out a little short. He did not want a lie. Atem swallowed the rest of it and drank the water that was left instead. Seto did not press. He had the face of a man for whom only the outcome is certain.
A few days later he was handed a bundle of documents in the office. It was a draft of the medium-term business plan. While Atem turned the pages, Seto was looking out of the window.
In the column for five years out he found his own name. Printed there as a matter of course, as supervisor of a new division.
"Kaiba, this is five years from now."
"You can read, can't you."
"You know what they say — talk about the future and the demons laugh."
"Let them laugh. The future is not something you believe in. It is something you book. Whoever fills in the slot wins."
Seto did not even turn round.
Atem took up a fountain pen. He writes his own name in the approval field. A name that had once vanished from this world, next to a date five years out.
For the few seconds until the ink dried, Atem looked at it. To have his own name inscribed somewhere that is not an epitaph — come to think of it, was this not the first time?
Seto glanced at the finished document and took it back without a word.
In the next Duel the same position came. Few cards left in the deck, one card that would go through if he drew it, and the probability of drawing it was under thirty percent.
His fingers touch the deck. The sound of his heart resounds. A sound that goes on sounding until it stops, a clock with no face.
Atem closed his eyes just once, and then drew the card.
What the card he drew was is left in the record. It is never spoken of.
Only this was certain: that Seto's mood that night was good enough to show in how little he said, and that the sound of the cards being put away was soft.
In the darkness of the bedroom, Atem touched the wrist beside him. Inside it there is a regular sound. A little slower than his own, perhaps. Two clocks are marking time, slightly out of step. Which of them stops first is written nowhere.
"Count them and you will not be able to sleep."
Seto said it with his eyes still closed.
"Is that the voice of experience?"
"A year and a little more. Every night."
Atem laughed shortly. That he could laugh surprised him a little.
The fear has not gone. It is surely not the sort of thing that goes.
The heart will sound tomorrow too, and one day it will stop. Wounds will increase, and some of them will become marks. To meet the morning while carrying that, it seems, is what people call living.
It had taken three thousand years, and Atem is only now learning the rudiments of it. The first page of a life with no tomb, of a journey whose destination is written nowhere.
With a fingertip he traces the faded scar. A wound almost invisible now. But certainly there. The first record inscribed on this body. Of the day he began to learn losing, and grudging the loss.
The breathing beside him deepened, and Atem stopped counting and closed his eyes.
The two sounds went on sounding. Slightly out of step.
It was a frightening sound, and, with the same strength, a sound that was certain.
In Japanese there is a saying: talk about next year and the demons will laugh at you. Making plans too far ahead is asking to be mocked by things that know better. Chapter 3 turns on it, and on the answer Seto gives it.
The weighing of the heart is from the Book of the Dead. The heart is set against the feather of Maat — truth, or right order — and must balance. A heart made heavy by what it wants does not pass. Everything the afterlife does in this story follows from that one rule.
