Free The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin

understand.” So he looked into my eyes and made me know what he and Yeine had come to realize in the eight years since everything had gone wrong.
    There is a line between god and mortal that has nothing to do with immortality. It is
material
: a matter of substance, composition,flexibility. This was what ultimately made the demons weaker than us, though some of them had all our power: they could cross this line, become godstuff, but it took great effort, and they could not do it for long. It was not their natural state. Other mortals could not cross the line at all. They were locked to their flesh, aging as it aged, drawing strength from its strength and growing weak with its failure. They could not shape it or the world around them, save with the crude power of their hands and wits.
    The problem, Nahadoth willed me to know, was that I was no longer quite like a god. The substance of me was somewhere between godstuff and mortality — but I was becoming more mortal as time passed. I could still shape myself if I wished, as I had done when I arrived as the cat. But it would not go easily. There might be pain, damage to my flesh, permanent distortion. And there would come a day, perhaps today, perhaps another, when I would no longer be able to shape myself at all. If I tried then, I would die.
    I stared at him and felt truly afraid.
    “What are you saying?” I whispered, though he had said nothing. Mortal figure of speech. “Naha, what are you saying?”
    “You are becoming mortal.”
    I was breathing harder. I had not willed myself to breathe harder. Or tremble, or sweat, or grow larger, or mature into manhood. My body was doing all that on its own. My body: alien, tainted, out of control.
    “I’m going to die,” I said. My mouth was dry. “Naha, growing older defies my nature. If I stay like this, if I keep aging, if I
trip and fall
hard enough, I’ll die the way mortals do.”
    “We will find a way to heal you —”
    My fists clenched.
“Don’t lie to me!”
    Naha’s mask cracked, replaced by sorrow. I remembered ten million nights in his lap, begging him for stories. His beautiful lies, I had called them. He had held me and told me of wonders real and imagined, and I had been so happy to never grow up. So that he could keep lying to me forever.
    “You will grow older,” he said. “As you leave childhood behind, you will grow weaker. You will begin to require sustenance and rest as mortals do, and your awareness of things beyond mortal senses will fade. You will become … fragile. And, yes, if nothing is done, you will die.”
    I could not bear the softness of his voice, no matter how hard the words. He was always so soft, always yielding, always tolerant of change. I did not want him to tolerate this.
    I threw off the blanket and got to my feet — awkwardly, as my limbs were longer than I was used to and I had too much hair — and stumbled over to Shahar’s windows. I put my hands on the glass and leaned on it with all my weight. Mortals rarely did this, I had observed during my centuries in Sky. Even though they knew that Sky’s glass was reinforced by magic and inhumanly precise engineering, they could not rid themselves of the fear that just once, the glass might break or the pane come loose. I braced my feet and shoved. I needed
something
in my presence to be unmoving and strong.
    Something touched my shoulder and I turned fast, irrationally aching for hard sunset eyes and harder brown arms and brick-wall flexibility. But it was only the mortal, Shahar. I glaredat her, furious that she wasn’t who I wanted, and thought of batting her aside. It was somehow her fault this had happened to me. Maybe killing her would free me.
    If she had looked at me with compassion or pity, I would have done it. There was none of that in her face, though — just resentment and reluctance, nothing at all comforting. She was Arameri. That wasn’t something they did.
    Itempas had failed me, but Itempas’s chosen had