Someone had to die at every race.
It helped that someone usually did.
There were plenty of racers at the bottom of the Domum Gorge.
And more still were joining the ranks, nostalgic for any worship of Mors.
The stampede, the crush of bodies was enough.
Someone would slip under the hundreds of thousands of pairs of feet.
Maybe someone would slam into the rock face when the path was too tight.
It would happen some way or another.
It saved the need for dramatically concocted deaths just to satisfy the requirement.
And the racers got to feel the nostalgia of serving Mors again.
It wasn’t quite the same.
Running through a dusty gorge wasn’t the same as running up and down the length of Mors’s body.
And running together wasn’t the same as running in a network, crisscrossing streams of servants desperate to capture all Mors’s concurrent trains of thought.
It wasn’t the same at all.
But it was the closest they could get to her until she revived.
The closest they could get to the curve of her spine.
And every death was a sacrifice they hoped would return her to them sooner.