Free InkStains January by John Urbancik

country. There, it had been glory
and warmth year round, and his people had marched far in every
direction to conquer in his name. There’d been women, endless
feasts, music – he missed the music most.
    Another night, he might’ve escaped his misery
by finding a band at any bar or club. It didn’t matter if they
worshipped blues, soul, country, or rap, so long as they were loud
and earnest. But this night, the coldest of the year – of his life,
which had indeed been a long one – the whole city had shut down.
The snow fell harshly and heavily, the wind was relentless, the
windows fought a losing battle to keep the cold outside.
    It didn’t help, not having heat.
    The window – his basement apartment had only
one – had frosted over, inside as well as out. There were laws, he
thought, that should’ve keep his lights on at a time like this.
    Once upon a time, there had been sacrifices,
volcanoes and storytellers, oracles and fortune tellers, dancing
girls, and so much music. He could almost, even now, hear one of
those ancient rhythms. It made him smile, though the smile cracked
his brittle skin and hurt.
    He didn’t used to feel pain.
    He should have been dead. Old gods went away
and died, or were overthrown, vanquished, destroyed, obliterated.
Strengths faded with time. Immortality was a myth.
    Yet he had survived so many thousands of
years, soldiering for a time, leading bandits, hiding amongst
Visigoths and barbarians and crusaders, but time proved unkind.
    There were no other gods as old as he. Death,
in its mercy, took them all.
    Now this last old god shivered and waited for
a mercy that refused to come.
    He’d had his time. He’d wasted it. He never
understood the ways of Change, except in the forms of music. Music
always changed and grew. It was an area of expertise, of explicit
joy.
    Definitely, in this tiny broken apartment,
enveloped by a living, breathing freeze, he heard sounds he had not
heard in thousands of years. It wasn’t much, three instruments only
– a string, a wind, and a drum – but they were, as far as he was
concerned, the original instruments, and they played the very first
song.
    Long ago, he had heard this song in temples
and shrines and palaces. He had danced with mortals and goddesses
alike, drinking wine and gorging themselves on the flesh of their
lovers.
    He opened his eyes. He’d been drifting, near
to sleep, lulled by so impossible and familiar a song. It did not
come from inside his head.
    He roused himself, no easy task. He shed the
blanket. His skin crackled. The blood in his veins, with
reluctance, began to move.
    It didn’t come from outside, but
upstairs.
    He left his apartment, climbed the stairs out
of the basement, through the ground floor and up two more flights,
following the sound to a door that stood slightly ajar. Inside,
there was music but also laughter, conversation, the smells of
roasting meats and cheese and drink.
    He was an old man now, he moved slowly and
deliberately, but he had always been a god, and that’s how he
entered the apartment.
    The party goers looked at him. The music
stopped. All sounds ceased. There were ghosts among the kids –
everyone was but a child by comparison, but the ghosts were as old
as the god. They slipped between the children, the three musicians
and all the others, whispering unintelligibly in their dead
language.
    “ What’s this?” he demanded,
in the way of gods.
    “ A celebration,” one of the
ghosts said, though it used the voice of one of the modern
bodies.
    But the god could see the bodies of today
were in a state of fear.
    “ Who are you?” the god
asked.
    “ Your ghosts.”
    “ I’ve never dealt in ghosts
and spirits.”
    “ Yet we have dealt in you.
Now dance and sing and drink and love while you can.”
    The music started up again. The old god lost
himself in the rhythms and the ghosts and the memories. He knew he
was finally dying. It deserved a celebration. The ghosts slipped in
and out of the