Caine's Law (65 page)

Rule Three: fuck with my family or my friends, and you’re fucking with me. When in doubt, see Rule One.

Just so you know: my family and friends now includes everybody who isn’t you.

So.

Any fucking questions?

This story is about what happened after the end of the world.

The end of the world had passed unmarked by most who lived in those days. How could they notice? The sun still shone yellow and hot, the winds still blew from thunderstorm to blizzard and back again, the silver moon still sailed across a starlit sky. There were fish in the sea, cattle in the fields, birds in the air, deepwood glens still rustling with the dry-leaf laughter of the fey, mountain mines ringing with the steely chime of stonebender tools, treetoppers fluttering and ogres growling and dragons slumbering in forgotten lairs.

For a long time, the only people who knew the world had ended were certain clever men and clever women whose lives were devoted to knowing clever things of this nature, and even they weren’t certain; the end of the world was a serious matter, and they didn’t want to be wrong.

One of the ways in which they were clever was in the naming of things. They were very concerned with comprehending what they named, to ensure the name they gave it was the name it should have. They knew that names are masks, but they also knew masks can reveal truth that might otherwise remain occult. The names we give to things channel how we think of them, and because the end of the world began small and subtle and slow to burgeon—despite being locally dramatic—at first they called it by the wrong name.

They called it the True Assumption of Ma’elKoth.

The Age of Gods had lasted five hundred years, from the Feral Rebellion—when the human gods overpowered the combined might of the Folk of Home, and set humanity free—until the Deomachy, when Jereth of Tyrnall, called the Godslaughterer, rose up against his gods and those of all humanity, and his brother Jantho, called the Ironhand, crafted
the Covenant of Pirichanthe to bind the human gods beyond the walls of time, and together these brothers ushered in the Age of Man.

The Age of Man lasted also five hundred years, until Ma’elKoth—who Himself once had been, briefly, a man—became a god and took all Home to be His Body and worked His Will upon it, and thereby rent the Cov–enant that had been Jantho Ironhand’s greatest work. The Age of Man was over, and the world it had shaped was gone forever.

This is the story of how the end of the world gave birth to the Age of Caine.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

M
ATTHEW
S
TOVER
believes that nearly everything
worth knowing about his life can be found in his books.