Goddess Rising

Leaving the city was easy. She encountered a few skirmishes, but none had yet turned as violent as the first altercation.

Stepping through the gates brought a great deal of relief. She took a few moments to note that being a potential war zone worried her more than she had expected. Then, she had to decide on her next steps.

For several minutes, she stood on the edge of the paved road, watching people leave the city; in groups and alone, with wagons or just the clothes on her back.

She felt sympathy for a particularly pitiful couple. They had two infants and another two toddlers packed into an open wagon in the tiny space left after it had been stuffed with all their belongings.

But she had little room to worry about others. Her own feelings still swirled around her, making the whole act of thinking difficult. She felt sick at the thought that Achi could be dead, but did she also feel glad because Tivelo would no longer hunt her? She struggled through the maze of worry, fear and guilt and settled on an easy plan. She needed to be certain that Achi was dead. All her plans hinged on that confirmation and lying was not beyond Garo.

Garo would be bringing the body to Igbotulo the next day, but she did not want to wait that long. Igbotulo was not his largest city. If it was coming there the next day, then it was currently being displayed somewhere else. If she found Garo, she would likely also find the body.

She began her search by transporting herself to the middle realm. As Achi had said, it was intuitive, but expensive. She felt her store of energy decline significantly. A rough estimate told her that she had lost about a tenth of it - nine years of life. She gritted her teeth and silently cursed Achi. He should have told her how expensive it would be. If it took that much to travel between realms, she would never again do it without a carriage.

Mindful of Tivelo’s presence, she had transported herself to a destination miles away from Garo’s palace. It was a make-shift town populated solely by merchants and workers who tended to the needs of Garo’s attendants. For privacy, she found a store room filled with barrels of wine and transported herself through its locked door. It, thankfully, cost less energy than the trip between realms.

To her delight, Garo’s palace was immediately within range of her senses. She could see the entire palace and a little bit of the land beyond. With such range, it would be inexplicable if all the deities were not constantly spying on each other.

The first thing she saw was the deities. They shone so brightly that no other sight registered to her for the first few moments. She focused on them until she could see their features. They were gathered in Garo’s throne room. His stone throne sat empty while they lounged in armchairs brought in for the purpose. They were all in different colors and patterns, but Garo had never cared for aesthetics.

He sat at the head of the group, lounging with all the confidence of a victorious warlord. Three more chairs formed a circle with his. Chalik, goddess of wealth, took one. She was a fair-skinned woman with soft features and straight black hair down to her hips. Beside her, there was Alogun, god of knowledge. He was everything Garo was not - thin, hairy, and smiling. He had been the first to leave Garo’s ill-fated feast. While the others conversed now, he inspected the room as if he was picking apart every piece of stone with his eyes. The last chair was empty.

The second thing Aria noticed was the bodies. They lay in the center of the group, contorted as if someone had carelessly thrown them there. The first was Achi, still in the clothing she had last seen him in. There was no life left in the body. Without touching him, she could feel the coldness of his skin and see the stiffness in his pose.

Something welled up in her, a feeling she could not identify. It could have been grief or guilt, but the only part of it she could name was a deep and pressing sadness.

By contrast, the other body did not evoke so much feeling. It was her own body, still wearing the white clothes she had been forced into before her hearing. Strangely, it did not seem to be dead. It was breathing, its eyes were open, and its skin was warm, but it did not move. Besides the occasional blink, it simply lay on its side, staring uncomprehendingly at the Alogun’s foot. It was surreal seeing her body from the outside.

Alogun interrupted the wait. “I think it safe to conclude that Evera will not be here.”

“Of course she isn’t,” Chalik said. “Not since Garo botched this so spectacularly. If I were as bright as her, I would be at home too.”

Alogun chuckled. “And you would now be at war with Garo.”

“Fighting him might be better than fighting Tivelo.”

Alogun cast a sidelong glance at Garo and made a face. Then, he turned his face to one wall as if staring through it. Then, he gave a sniff. “I rank Garo as more dangerous right now.”

Aria followed the wall he had glanced at, past a series of rooms and out into the open world. There, she saw the scene she had missed. A wooden beam had been planted into the ground in front of Garo’s palace. At its top, another wooden beam had been attached horizontally to the first and sharpened to a point, a point that was sticking out of Tivelo’s chest.

The god hung there quietly, breathing with painful, labored huffs. Any mortal in such a position should have been dead, but he was god. His eyes were open and, unlike her body’s, they were aware. Despite the horrible position, he did not appear to be in any pain. No, actually, he did not appear to notice the pain. His gaze was fixed on something distant and invisible. His body simply hung there, as if he could not or did not care to control it. There were no attempts to ease his suffering, none of the tiny movements and adjustments that, while futile, a suffering person should have attempted. He either did not notice or did not care about his punishment. It could have been due to grief or actual mental damage. Aria could not tell and did not particularly care.

It surprised her that she felt no pleasure from seeing Tivelo brought low. In fact, she felt anger. She had suffered, but he hung limply as if being staked was no more concerning than being served cold soup. She wished him more suffering than he was currently experiencing. If Garo and his friends left, and Tivelo begged and bribed her with all his possessions, she would not cut him down. She would find him a chair to sit on and set the stake on fire.

At the foot of his pole, bodies littered the ground, blood pooling from each one. Aria guessed that they were Tivelo’s attendants and the guess was immediately confirmed. She found the two priestesses who had bathed her, lying side by side, having bled out from their necks. She found the sarcastic doorkeeper in another place, executed in exactly the same way. Werri’s head was in the middle of the carnage, separated from his body by a few feet.

The scene was horrifying, but not surprising. Executing enemies was an honored tradition in Garo’s service. The shocking part was that a large number of the victims were children. It was barbaric. In all her training, no one had ever suggested killing children. War was war, but there were rules. Foolishly, she had thought those rules were Garo’s but now, knowing how he drew power from death, she knew better. Executing captives, teaching warriors to never surrender, and sending children to the trials, those had nothing to do with strength. They were meant to spill more blood for Garo’s benefit.

A thought struck her like an arrow. Tivelo had predicted Achi’s death. He would have expected Garo to attack. He could have planned to send the attendants away. Perhaps he had plans to survive the attack, himself. And all those plans might have come to fruition if Achi had died at the expected time. If she had not ruined the plan. If she had kissed Achi. Perhaps, all the blood soaking the dirt out there, and all the guilt that accompanied it, belonged to her.

The thought filled her mind, driving out everything else, and yet proved impossible to digest, like a bucket of water poured into a bowl, spilling over the sides and escaping your attempt to manage it. There was no room for all her defenses - that she had not intended this outcome, that they had kept secrets from her. There was only a stunningly dense ball of guilt, so great that it seemed to grow with every attempt to understand it. Like a piece of fruit too large to swallow, or a mountain so big, the more of it you comprehended, the more there was to see.

She had killed hundreds of attendants, but she could not have. How do you kill so many without seeing the knife?