Chapter 283: "Is this... hunger?"

Alias looked down at his ruined silks, then back at Theo, who was watching him with a mixture of pity and interest.

"Rich?" Alias repeated, the word feeling clunky. "I suppose I have... resources. But I have no luggage. And I do not know what it means to be ’mogged’."

Theo snorted, nearly choking on a piece of bread. "Mogged. Robbed. Cleaned out. You’re wandering around the Southern District looking like a literal diamond, and you don’t even have a bag? You’re lucky I was the one who ran past you and not the guys from the Red Alley. They would’ve stripped those clothes off you before you could blink."

Theo took another aggressive bite of the bread, then paused, looking at Alias’s pale, sweat-slicked face. The stranger looked genuinely dazed. He didn’t look like a pampered noble looking for a thrill; he looked like a creature that had just been birthed into the world ten minutes ago. Everything seemed new to him.

"You’re weird, Moon-boy," Theo muttered, tearing off a chunk of the bread—the soft part from the middle—and tossing it toward Alias. "Here. Eat. You look like you’re about to see the Great Spirit, and not in the good way."

Alias caught the bread instinctively. It was warm, smelling of yeast and the baker’s woodsmoke. He stared at it. In the heavens, he didn’t consume matter; he simply existed. This was a direct interaction with the cycle of life he and Norx had authored. He brought the piece to his lips and took a hesitant bite.

Then, his eyes widened.

The texture was rough, the taste salty and earthy. It was a sensory explosion that no scroll could have ever described. As the nutrients hit his tongue, he felt a strange, dull ache in his stomach, one he didn’t even understand, begin to subside.

"Is this... hunger?" Alias asked softly, looking at the bread in awe.

"No, it’s a birthday cake," Theo said sarcastically, though his blue eyes softened slightly. "Yes, it’s hunger. You’re human, aren’t you? Or at least you’ve got a stomach. If you don’t put things in it, it hurts. Basic stuff."

Alias’s reaction made Theo genuinely curious if he really came from the moon, because how could he ask a question like that? Well, it was either that or a noble who had been fed every hour of the day that he did not understand what hunger meant.

Good for him, I guess.

Theo thought, devoid of the kind of envy and jealousy that kids his age who were suffering would have.

Alias swallowed the bite, feeling the weight of it settle in his gut. "It is... a very demanding sensation," he remarked.

"Tell me about it," Theo grunted. He leaned his head back against the mud-brick wall, closing his eyes. "That’s why I’m a thief. My sister, Maya... she’s small. She can’t handle the ’demanding sensation’ as well as I can. The Church tells us that the Architect made the world this way so we’d learn the value of hard work. I think the Architect is just a jerk who’s never had a stomach cramp."

Alias flinched. The bread suddenly felt very heavy in his hand. Hearing his own logic thrown back at him by a boy sitting in the dirt changed the perspective entirely. It wasn’t a ’logical equation for trade’ to Theo; it was a cruel joke.

"Maybe he just didn’t know," Alias whispered, his silver hair falling over his face as he looked at the ground. "Maybe he didn’t realize how much it would hurt."

"Must be nice to be that ignorant," Theo replied, opening one blue eye to look at Alias. "Anyway, what’s your name? I can’t keep calling you Moon-boy, even if it fits."

Alias hesitated. He couldn’t say his true name; it was a vibration that would shatter the mud walls around them. He thought of the label the Light would eventually give him—the placeholder for a god who didn’t want to be found.

"Alias," he said. "You can call me Alias."

"Alias, huh? Sounds fake," Theo said with a shrug, pushing himself up from the dirt. He tucked the remaining half of the loaf into a cloth wrap at his waist. "Well, ’Alias,’ since you’re clearly going to get murdered if I leave you here, you’d better come with me. My place isn’t fancy, but it’s out of the sun. And I want to know where you got that silk. Maybe I can sell a sleeve of it, and we can eat meat for once."

Alias nodded and stood up, his legs feeling a bit more stable now that he had rested and had some bread in him. He followed Theo out of the alley, his heart doing that strange, fast thumping again, but this time, not because he had run a marathon and was breathless.

There is just so much to learn, even from a little boy.

He thought, the expression on his pale face warm and settled.

The heat hadn’t let up. If anything, the sun felt more aggressive now that they were moving out of the deep shadows of the marketplace. It hung directly overhead, a blinding gold coin that seemed to be trying to bake the very life out of the earth.

’This heat, I definitely have to do something about it when I get back,’

Alias thought, using the back of his hand to rub off the sweat on his chin again.

High above, invisible to the mortal eye, a spark of violet light flickered. Norx was still watching, his red eyes narrowed as he saw the Architect of the world follow a mortal boy into the slums, leaving his divine scrolls far behind.

"You’re learning the wrong lessons, Alias,"

Norx’s voice whispered through the celestial winds, unheard by the two below.

"You were supposed to see their struggle... do not join it."

Norx began to wonder if he had given the wrong advice, to let Alias feel the things humans feel firsthand. He had a hunch, a bad one, that he was going to regret it, and he was starting to see why. He just hoped he could destroy that hunch before it became a reality.