Silas

Silas is beautiful the way statues are beautiful—"all sharp angles and perfect proportions, as if someone had taken the ideal of masculine beauty and refined it past the point where human flesh could contain it." Silver hair catches lamplight like spun moonbeams; his eyes shift like liquid sunset, amber to gold, or reflect like oil on water, "reflecting everything and revealing nothing." His features never quite settle: now sharp and lovely, now ancient and wise, now something that hurts to look upon directly. He leans in doorways as if he owns the concept of ownership. He examines his nails with theatrical boredom, and his nails are claws.

He is the god the anthology's showcase names simply "The Trickster God," and the guide's own history records his part in the age's ending: while other gods hunted mortals and the First Gods kept their distance, Silas watched and waited, and then offered a grieving village woman named Astrid Ravenscroft his own divine blood. From that gift came the Bloodmarked—mortals who could kill gods—and the first thread of the war that followed. His blood, he explains, has "certain properties"; where it touches an animal, the animal becomes one of the Beastborn. What it does to a human being who drinks it rather than merely touching it was, until Astrid, an open question.

His name, spoken in the villages, is passed "from mouth to ear like a contagion that might spread if spoken too loudly": Silas. The Trickster. The one who appears in moments of crisis to offer solutions that always come with prices no sane person would pay. He insists his gifts have no price. He also insists that a world so unbalanced will seek its own correction—and he seems, always, delighted at the prospect.

Silas is theatrical, patient, and precise. He performs offense with a hand pressed to his chest; he laughs like silver bells; he reads a mortal's guilt at a glance—"That's the look of guilt. Someone did something they shouldn't have done"—and presses on the exact places where love, helplessness and grief meet. He claims to be honest about the one thing the other gods lie about: that he is embracing chaos on purpose. "Stagnation is death," he says. "Sometimes you have to burn the disease out to save the patient."

Silas's power is a god's power worn casually: he is wherever he wishes to be, in daylight as easily as dark, and he can vanish between one heartbeat and the next. But the gift that changes the world is not a display of force. It is a line drawn across his own forearm with one razor nail, and blood "darker, richer, with depths that seemed to hold starlight and shadow in equal measure."

Silas is absent from the chapter of The Divine War that is online, and present in everything that follows it. The guide's history page states what is public: that he warned the gods in their Hall that an unbalanced world would correct itself, and that when they refused to act, "he made the correction himself." The shape of that correction—whom he visited, what he offered, and what he told heaven afterward—is the rest of the tale.

Silas belongs to no one. He mocks the First Gods on their crystalline thrones and calls himself a Wild God to a grieving woman; he offers the same gift to a man who says no and a woman who says yes, and seems equally entertained by both. "You know," he tells a mortal, "there's something almost endearing about how mortals convince themselves that horseshoes simply... leap from their moorings of their own accord."