Maker of Fire

Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

I got dressed and spent most of the day sitting on the window sill, staring out at the houses of rich Cosm. The events of the last ten days had turned my world upside down and now I had to deal with it. Kayseo had come and gone with the midday meal. I ate none of it. I had no appetite again. The thought of food left me feeling a bit sick.

Some time in the middle of the afternoon, between the fifth and sixth bells, the monster queen arrived. I did not stop looking out the window when she arrived and sat on the bed facing me.

"Asgotl tells me you've been brooding all day," she held out the wax tablet. "What are your thoughts."

I took the tablet and stylus and wrote: "I need to leave. I need to find a new home before the cold season."

"You have alternatives," the Queen pointed out. "You can stay here at the shrine and work on regaining your voice. You can stay just long enough to learn Fosk writing or you could stay at my villa and learn your letters there. You could move to my villa and stay as long as you might like, though in that case, I would barter room and board for steel."

"You want steel?" I wrote. "The price of steel is the emancipation of all Coyn in Foskos."

"I can't do that," the Queen said in a profoundly sad voice. "I free and protect my own Coyn, but I can't abolish centuries of this kingdom's culture. I don't have the power."

I smoothed the wax back down with the blunt end of the stylus. Then I wrote: "Can't or won't?"

"I never asked to be queen," she snapped. "Do you think I like this? I hate this. I hate what some, but not all, do to the Coyn. Do you think I haven't tried to make the treatment of the Coyn better?"

"Then why have you failed?" I wrote in the face of her growing anger. In my anger, I ignored my stomach tying itself in knots. "To tolerate an evil government without changing it or leaving it is to be complicit."

"What would you have me do?" she shouted, losing her temper. "I have no faction. I have no powerful family to back me up. I have no army. I can't create a movement or an army with your powerless Coyn who have no magic to fight back against magic users. And trying to get the Cosm to change is laughably naive. Why would anyone with the power of magic walk away from a system that benefits them? They have no incentive to change."

"Then leave. At least don't support the evil by remaining."

"I can not. The gods of this world have accepted me as their avatar until another is born to replace me." She got up and started to pace up and down the room, her mouth in a grimace and her brows in a frown. "I am tied to the great crystal at the Shrine of Tiki until then. If I go too far from the shrine, I will weaken and die. I am stuck with no options whatsoever." She stopped and thought for a moment. "That's what I have been told, though I have never actually asked the gods if that is true."

I found it hard to swallow that gods would communicate directly with anyone, given the apparent lack of divine agency in my previous life.

"Get your shoes on," she ordered in anger, every inch a haughty queen. "I am taking you to the Crystal Shrine of Tiki."

---

Emily, Crystal Shrine of Tiki

The Crystal Shrine of Tiki was a great round structure built out of shaped basalt blocks with what looked like pumice bricks for the dome. It commanded the top of a dormant basalt volcano next to the upper Salt River. Eight half-circle structures jutted out from the great circular shape of the main shrine.

Asgotl flew in through an opening in the shrine's dome. There were four of these, all open to the air. I was surprised that the temperature inside was like one of those perfect sunny days in San Diego. The magic of the place always kept the temperature perfect and any precipitation out.

The crystal itself was a giant quartz crystal bigger than I was tall: six-sided with the usual pyramidal cap, rising out of a pegmatitic boulder that belonged in a museum, with huge k-spar, book mica, black tourmaline, pyrope garnets, smaller quartz, and pyrite crystals.

A circle of seats ringed the crystal in the middle of the domed circular room, at least twice as big as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. One of those seats looked like a throne. On one side of the throne was a table with two chairs. On the other side, there was a gong. The rest of the seats were stools and benches.

The Queen hopped off Asgotl while I worked to unstrap myself. I was happy the trip was over since I was feeling cold, despite being huddled inside a Cosm-sized flying cloak. Those big sheepskin coats and leggings the Cosm wore on their flying beasts were not just for show. Flying with the Queen was uncomfortable since she spent the ride glowering with anger the entire time.

The Queen rang the gong and sat down on the throne. A silver-haired Cosm woman dressed in blue and yellow robes came running in. She looked about 30 to my eyes. She bowed deeply to the Queen, "Great One, your coming was unexpected."

"This will be a questioning, Foyuna," the queen replied. "Please record it."

"You will, Great One." She then turned and looked at me getting ready to slide off Asgotl's back. "You must be Emily." She smiled at me, "can I help you down?" She didn't wait for an answer but lifted me off the saddle and placed me on the bench to the right of the table.

"Let us begin," the Queen said, impatient and still angry.

"No need to trance, Jane darling," said the Coyn-sized man in a tiki mask, Hawaiian shirt, and Bermuda shorts. "Let's just skip all the mumbo-jumbo today since Emily doesn't have any magic and this is more for her benefit than yours." He had appeared right next to me, startling the crap out of me. Where his eyes should have been, there was just an intense red glow. It was spooky.

"Oh?" he sounded pleased. "You like the eye effect, Emily? I'll keep it then."

Oh great. This world had a tiki god with a warped sense of humor as one of its deities? And he's reading my mind? I was feeling like I had just fallen into an uncanny valley of Trader Vic's meets isekai light novel, though nothing about this hell hole of a world felt much like a light novel to me.

"Yes, I can understand why you would feel this way," he said to me. "It has a lot to do with how gods look at reality versus how short-lived beings experience reality. It can't be helped at the moment, so please put up with it for now. There will be a good result if the three of you deliver."

"The three of us?" Aylem asked, looking much less queen-like at the moment.

"You, Emily, and the whale," Tiki said in a cheerful voice. "You, Jane, are the substance. You, [snippet of whale song], are the energy. And you, Emily, are the catalyst. Well, maybe that's not the best analogy, but it will do for now. I'm supposed to be an inscrutable god so let's leave it at that."

"What?" Aylem and Asgotl said in unison.

"All I want from you three is to change the world," Tiki remarked.

"Jane, what you were told about perishing if you travel too far from the shrine is something someone made up a few centuries ago. It's a whale of a lie. Trust me, I wouldn't blubber about that though I might spout off from time to time."

I couldn't believe it: a tiki god in a tacky Hawaiian shirt cracking bad whale puns? What sort of god was this? It didn't look very god-like to me.

"Would you prefer a burning bush instead," Tiki snickered. "Seriously, that's just not my style. Oh, before I go," he reached out and touched the left side of my head, just forward of my ear. "Happy world conquering! I'll be watching!"

Tiki vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Three other people, if you count griffins, shared the experience with me. If they had not, I might have considered it a waking dream or a hallucination. Where he touched me on the side of the head itched. I scratched the spot gingerly since it was just below the divot in my skull from my old head injury.

A sharp stabbing pain smashed through my head and I screamed with the only sound I could make, which was close to a soft "a" in English. It was worse than any of the migraines I had in my previous life. When it finally let up, I found myself on the floor, curled up in a fetal ball clutching my head, tears streaming out of my eyes. Now that the major pain input was fading, I realized my right side, from my shoulder to my hip, really hurt. I must have fallen off the bench, which looked to be just over a meter high by Earth measures.

Just what did that accursed god do to me? Then I gasped as the knowledge unfolded in my brain. Inscrutable, ineffable, and totally absurd! It was not what I expected as a divine revelation. I could only conclude that the tiki god was a prankster since I couldn't fathom why he just gifted me with instructions on how to make a 20th-century laxative from scratch.

Granted, phenolphthalein is really useful stuff and it would improve the science of making soap in this backward excuse of what passed for civilization. It's one of the best of all the chemical indicators and goes through several distinct color changes indicative of different pH levels. It's what every high school chemistry student once used for titration before the world got too paranoid to let students use real chemicals in school.

But why? Why did a god just gift me with such a strange thing? Could it be I was meant to miraculously cure someone of deadly constipation? Phenolphthalein was once the main ingredient in Ex-Lax, sold for years in the Americas as a laxative. That was phenolphthalein's other big use, at least before some health kooks went off the deep end and got it pulled from the marketplace as a suspected carcinogen after a century of use.

So this is what passed as revelation in this world? No ten commandments. None of Daniel's writing on the wall or Pharoah's dream of the fat and skinny cows. No moment of enlightenment like Buddha under the bodhi tree. I was given a divine revelation, and it was a recipe for a pH indicator and over-the-counter poo-poo medicine.

I started laughing at the absurdity, which given the damage to my speech centers in my brain, probably sounded horrific to those who could still talk. Then I couldn't stop. My head hurt, my side hurt, and I couldn't stop laughing. My mind must have been out of phase with the rest of reality since I can remember people trying to speak to me but nothing they said had any meaning. It was just all noise to me as I continued to laugh so hard that it was painful to breathe.

I have no memory of the Queen casting the charm of deep sleep on me.

---

Asgotl, Crystal Shrine of Tiki

I watched in horror as the little god in the wood mask and funny shirt reached out to touch the little Coyn on the head. Then he said something about world conquest and vanished. The little one scratched the spot. Then she clutched her head with both hands, screamed, and fell off the bench onto the floor.

The scream was shocking since I did not know she could make a sound. It was just a long "AAAAAAAAAAAH" sound which soon digressed to whimpering. By the time we had all rushed over to her side, she was panting with tears running out of her eyes.

"Emily," Aylem ran to a kneeling stop beside her, "are you alright? What did he do to you? Emily?" Aylem shook her by the shoulder. "Emily, can you hear me?"

The little one did not even seem to see us, her unfocused eyes looking somewhere unworldly. Then she started to laugh. Hysterical, manic laughter that went on and on and on.

"Emily," Aylem shook a little harder, "snap out it. Come back to us. Emily!" After one or two minutes of this, Aylem reached out and put Emily to sleep. I could tell that my mistress had entered an evaluation trance for a moment from that funny look in her eyes. Then she was back.

"Some head pain," Aylem cataloged, "bruising up and down her right side and abnormal brain activity." She sighed. "I can only hope she returns to some semblance of reason when she wakes up. Foyuna, did you manage to make of record of all that?"

"Yes, at least all the spoken parts." She shook her head. "Tiki is not a straightforward god. You should both stay here until she wakes up. I need to know what Tiki did to her."

"But that could take days," Aylem protested.

"Yes, it could," Foyuna stated it as a fact. "The length of time is irrelevant. She's been touched by a god. You know what that means. You of all people know what that means. I will make arrangements for you and her to stay. How many places do I need to send messages?"

"This is most inconvenient," Aylem groused.

"Have you ever met a convenient god?" Foyuna smiled a perfect innocent smile.

"I'm going to ignore that question," Aylem took out a handkerchief and wiped the little one's face of its tears. She then picked Emily up with great care, "is there somewhere she can rest other than the floor?"

"I'm sure there's a guest chamber that's made up. So, I need to send one message to the palace and another to the Healing Shrine of Mugash?" Foyuna grabbed her tablet and stylus from the desk and then ran for the door to the outer chambers. Opening it, she turned to me with an apology written all over her face: "Sorry, Asgotl, old friend. I'll send someone with lots of your favorite goodies for dinner. Do you want to sleep here or at the mount residence?"