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But he does find her, and he does approach her. She sits at the end of the walkway in front of her home on stilts, her legs draped over the edge, her feet making the water quiver.

To his surprise, she doesn’t object when he settles beside her and dunks his feet into the glossy pool, wetting the hem of his pants. Tonight isn’t a night to squabble. Not after what they just did to Wonder.

Dragonflies zip across the horizon, streaking the vista with lines of silver.

Envy deplores the crusts of blood caked into his fingernails. It matches the red of Sorrow’s own digits.

Why did he come here?

Although he fancies his house, replete with sumptuous sofas, sewing materials, and barrels containing bolts of cloth, he hadn’t wanted to go there.

His refuge had presented a second option, with its hollows and candles and waterfall enclave, which he’d discovered on that fateful day Sorrow first spoke to him.

But oddly, neither had he gone there. No, he has come here.

Rather than isolation, he prefers to face the memory of Wonder’s screams with the female beside him.

“Perhaps immortals have no less free will than humans,” he says.

Sorrow shrugs. “Guess we’ll find out.”

He nods, but then evicts the quandary from his mind. It’s almost time for the class’s transit into the human realm. They’ll be stationed apart, in different areas of the world, wherever their root emotions are needed—which is to say, everywhere.

In the near future, Envy shall be targeting mortals plagued by putrid fits of jealousy, the grittiness of competition, and the oily slip of vengeance. Perhaps there will be plenty of individuals to distract him from the things he has seen and done here. Or perhaps not.

Envy bumps Sorrow’s shoulder with his own. “Will you miss me?”

She snorts and turns to him, as if he’s an idiot. Nevertheless, his breath stalls before she answers, “Get lost, pretty god.”

To which his heart clenches in a frightening way.

***

Sorrow

So he does get lost. As does she.

Sorrow and Envy leave the Peaks for the mortal realm. She serves as she’s been taught to, striking the endless clusterfuck of humans infested by sadness.

Years pass. Decades pass.

More than a century passes.

They see each other only during trips back home every ten years, for an intermission of rest. Rarely do they speak to one another, other than to exchange unpleasantries. Love, and Anger, and Wonder, and Envy, and Sorrow each have their stories, but none of them seem keen to share as much. Maybe they all have memories they’d like to forget, and an eternity to try.

Always, they resume their posts in the mortal realm. One year on a minefield, a young soldier writhes in pain and wails for his sister while a tide of blood courses from his stomach. Sorrow can’t be everywhere at once. There are so many bodies, so many mouths roaring amidst the smoke, and entrails, and barbed wire, but her speed can’t oblige.

Sorrow doesn’t reach the boy in time. When his eyes glaze over, she kneels beside him, hacking up bile and weeping. She longs to pet his head and apologize for not being there to ease his torment. But as an immortal, her invisible hand only swims through his matted, clumped, lice-infested hair. So she pretends, stroking his forehead and choking out that she’s sorry.

The stench of decay is overwhelming, as are the shrieks of artillery and the whistles of explosives. When she’s done sobbing, she remembers that first cut she’d made, when Wonder was punished.

Grabbing the soldier’s knife—because deities can make contact with inanimate objects of this world—she presses the tip into her arm, just above the first scar.

When blood bubbles to the surface, she stops crying.

In fact, she stops for good. Because nothing that happens from here on could ever be worth as many tears as this. Nothing.

***