The rest of the birthing was hard work, but painless. Dziko and Terra sprinkled water over the clay to soften it and kneaded the flesh together until there was no way to separate his riverbed brown from her sunset orange. Then they divided the babyflesh into two equal pieces, soon to be their children.

I am an ugly thing of flesh and stone. My eyes, like glittering points of quartz, peer out from beneath the ridges, dark as coal, that protrude from my cheeks and forehead. I am my father’s son, poisoned by the same rituals that have turned his flesh to rock and that have already begun to do the same to me.