Three (The Godslayer Cycle Book 3) (21 page)

“Awakening?”  Nathaniel found the word a strange thing to mention amidst talk of incest.

Maribel stopped, pulling slightly away from her son.  “Oh,” she said simply.  “That's right.  We have not ever spoken of an awakening, have we?”  When Nathaniel shook his head, she continued.

“Lendus is our patron God, Nathan.  Have you never wondered why he is also called the Guardian of the Grail?”

Nathaniel reflected back upon his mother's teachings growing up.  “The grail represents fertility, in the natural order,” the man heard himself recite.  “The grail receives life and holds it until it is ready to release its bounty to the world.”

Maribel smiled proudly.  “Yes.  It means that Lendus is a God of fertility, and the faithful who come into their puberty rely upon the servants of Lendus to guide them into their adult lives.  At the age of fourteen years, a man or woman will seek out a priest or priestess to undergo a year's ritual.  It is a tradition called an awakening.  In that time, the young man or woman learns of their changing bodies and explores what it is to become sexual creatures capable of reproduction.”

Nathaniel felt deeply uncomfortable at the suggestion.  “You lie with these people?  As a priestess of Lendus, you lay with young men for a year?”

“Not for a year, Nathan,” corrected Maribel.  “The ceremony is very private, done in solitude with no one else about to interfere.  It involves mediation, learning the feel of their maturing body and yes, at the end, an act of copulation with the priest or priestess.  But there is no lust nor love in this, save to the Gods for their wisdom.  It brings young people nobly into the maturity of their bodies, and makes them better to go forth to become positive mates to their future spouses.”

Nathaniel tried his best to digest what his mother spoke of, but it still was not something he could completely wrap his mind around.  He did know his mother's faith called upon her as a sexual creature. He knew that before he was born, she would participate in a ceremony of fertility under each full moon. Knowing what he did of her, imagining that other aspects of her sexuality would be part of her faith was not so great a leap of logic.  And yet...

“And how many have you been with in this fashion?”  Nathaniel regretted the question as soon as it had been uttered.  Even to his own ear, it sounded petulant and judgmental.

“Not as many as one of my ancestors might have,” confessed Maribel.  “A dozen perhaps in my time.  Olric most recently.”

“Aliban's son?!”  Again, the man regretted the harshness of his words.  Olric
had
said Maribel had been guiding him.  But the thought of his brother-in-law lying with his mother...

“Of course.  He is a sweet young man.  He has so little of his father in him.  He came to me to help him with his foresight, but when his time came for awakening, he had embraced Lendus' ways and agreed to undergo the ritual.”

Again, Nathaniel could not escape the logic of his mother's words.  He wanted so much to ask for more details of this dalliance, but instead he heard himself ask, “So why do you mention this in hand with Aliban's incestuous plans for Mari?”

Maribel smiled.  “You call her 'Mari'.  You did love her, didn't you?”  The woman pulled herself back to the question at hand.  “Because there is no one left to have taken you through the ritual, Nathan.  On your fourteenth nameday, you would begin the awakening with me.”  She looked up to her son again.  “Which I can plainly see never even began, because I was not there.”

Nathaniel was troubled over that thought, but he was left little time to dwell on it.  All of a sudden, Maribel released her hold and stepped clear of her son.  “We are here,” she said.  Startled, Nathaniel looked around to see that the pair had indeed arrived at the outskirts of Oaken Wood.  “And this is where I leave you for now.”

Nathaniel looked imploringly at his mother.  “Can't you come with me?  It is not even midday yet...”

“Nathan, I have a younger version of you to think of,” chided the man's mother.  “I will be bringing him with me on the morrow.  I need to plan for your nameday, after all.  It is only a few short weeks away.”

Nathaniel's heart leaped into his throat. 
Tomorrow - Mother will die tomorrow.

Maribel's face took on a troubled look.  “So that's it then,” she said simply, clearly reading meaning in Nathaniel's own face.  “Please, say no more about it.”  The woman gave a heavy sigh, swallowing hard.  “I hope that I can see you once more before...”  But she said no more, just turned and walked away.

Every instinct Nathaniel had urged him to chase after the woman, to confess all he knew and to beg of her not to come into town.  He needed her safe, needed her to survive.  After having such peace at how nobly his mother accepted her fate, his heart now bled profusely at the pain of the loss yet to come.

The man could not say how long he stood in that place, watching to where his mother's back had vanished amidst the trees at the edge of town.  She had gone back to her home with the knowledge that this would be her last evening with her child.  Her
true
child, the one who belonged in this time.  Could her own pain be any greater than his own, even if she only knew of the when and not the how?

Finally, Nathaniel forced his legs to move, turning him about and beginning a slow trek back to the Wyrm's Fang.  His mind clouded over with choices made and unmade, so much so that he barely registered his surroundings.  Before he realized it, he had arrived at the entry to the tavern.  Yet as his foot fell upon the first step, he realized he was not ready to enter. 

The man was not ready to be around anyone else yet - he needed time to gather himself.  His emotions were raw, his heart chafed.  He could have gone directly to his room, but to do so he would have needed to pass through the common room.  And he could not bare to walk past anyone else who might seek to intrude upon his misery.

Nathaniel turned around and walked away from the Wyrm's Fang, his steps taking him in no direction in particular.  There certainly was no great maze of streets in Oaken Wood - truth be told, there was only one.  But there were spaces between buildings, places as a much younger child he had run to play games of hiding with other children.  And now he desperately felt the nostalgic need to see these places of innocent abandon again.

The man had only just stepped away from the main street between two buildings when a great force suddenly hit him solidly from behind.  He fell to the ground, barely registering that he had been attacked.  His mind struggled between his memories and what happened around him.  As he felt his body strike the ground, his awareness only half existed in his current situation.

“You should have known better than to speak, you fool,” came a woman's voice from behind the man.  “You have a place in this world, and it is beneath the heel of any God who deems you worthy of his or her attention.”

Nathaniel recognized the voice dimly, a new anger rising in his chest.  A fist gripped a handful of his hair and pulled his head back sharply as a boot dug into his back. 

“Perhaps you have convinced others that you are some poor wretch, deserving their pity for some imagined brain fever, but we both know better than that, don't we?”  Nathaniel could hear the scowl in Erias' voice, her words dripping with venom.  “You fairly reek of Old God magic.  You think I would not have caught the stench of your cancer the moment I saw you?”

Nathaniel thought to reach for his sword, but his face was slammed mercilessly into the ground.

“But you're more than just some pitiful priest in hiding, aren't you?”  The priestess' voice broke through the murk of Nathaniel's barely conscious mind.  “You know things.  How do you know what you do?  How do you know anything about purgings?”

“Let me up,” Nathaniel managed, the copper taste of blood on his tongue.  “Let me up, and I'll show you.”  Again, the man found his face buried into the ground, choking him with the dirt he was forced to breathe.

“Keep doing that,” scolded the priestess, “and he won't have a mouth to answer with.”

“Better he have no mouth,” came an unfamiliar voice, “than he use it to speak more lies.”

Nathaniel's head was forcibly twisted to the side, to where he could see Erias squating beside him, her robes hitched up to keep them out of the dirt. What might have been a beautiful face under any other circumstance held such darkness at this moment that the woman appeared more a demon than human. 

“Who are you?” 

When Nathaniel said nothing, something solid collided with the side of his face.

“Your name?”

“You know who I am,” Nathaniel said, his eyes burning as he glared at the priestess.

“Who you
really
are,” scolded the priestess.  “You are not the Lendus witch's child, and you're not some lost brainless sod.  So who
are
you?”

Nathaniel laughed, blood flecking from his mouth as he did so.  “You don't really want to know.”

“Oh, I really do,” urged the priestess, leaning closer to the man's face.

The fallen man lifted his head, a smile leering across his face.  “The Pantheon isn't dead.” He could feel his chest rattle with fluid as he laughed again.  “They're alive and we're killing off your Gods one by one!”

The woman's face balked, her eyes growing wide with shock.  “What madness...”  The woman stood up, her robes falling back to the ground from where she had pulled them into her lap.  Without warning,  her foot collided with Nathaniel's nose, stars bursting out of a sudden darkness creeping over his vision.

“Charlatan or madman,” the man heard as he faded into oblivion, “his body will burn all the same.”

Enuchek sat in silence.  Her demesne, unlike those of other Gods, lacked any real substance - like her dominion of mystery, her surroundings were in a constant state of being discovered.  Mystery was a concept of something perplexing becoming understood.  Before there was unknown; after there would be knowledge.  But the mystery was the point at which the bridge between the two existed. 

Many people misunderstood this aspect of mystery.  Too many confused mystery with the unknown, but the realm of the unseen was more Belask's realm of influence than Enuchek's.  Mystery was more in the quest for discovery, not the perpetual state of unknowing.  It was a fine point - but it certainly distinguished those who were truly faithful from those who only made empty affectations.

Normally, the Goddess would be wandering through the miasma of shifting understandings that comprised the totality of her realm, reveling in those of her faith who set out to expose mysteries for what they were, those who brought issues which had been undiscovered to light.  But this day, she was not.  A disturbance within her realm of influence had left her unsettled - and as time had progressed from its first discovery several weeks previous, it had only compounded upon itself.  Now the feeling of wrongness was so pervasive, that it dominated the Goddess' focus entirely.

Yet in spite of how much she obsessed, Enuchek was still unable to identify the element that had left her so unsettled.  She sat in perfect stillness, allowing nothing to distract her - and still she failed to identify the imperfection within her dominion.

Something had happened, some discovery had been made.  And yet, whatever it was remained mercurial, still unknown.  It was if the discovery would fall back into the realm of the unknown, only to appear as a new discovery over and again.
But
how could something be continuously rediscovered? How could something mysterious be exposed, disappear, then be revealed again?  How could it do so time and again over a period of weeks?

Worse, this anomaly seemed temporal in nature - moving about in
time
.  Each resurgence had the appearance of being out of sync with the next.  It was mostly a feeling, since the Goddess could not find the exact cause of the ripples through her dominion, but the feeling remained persistent.  And if anything had been learned in her centuries of existence, the more a factor repeated, the more likely it pointed towards something
true
.

However, the mystery that remained hidden was not what had Enuchek the most unsettled at this moment in time.  It was where the mystery had most recently left an impression - or, more specifically, who might have actually been involved.  And if he
was
involved, the Trickster might be up to worse things than anyone could imagine.

Months ago, Ankor had come to a gathering of the Lesser Powers of the New Order.  He had professed to a plan to eliminate the Greater Powers and to give rise to the dominance of those Gods deemed to be insignificant in the larger cosmic scale of things.  It was a grand plan - and it seemed to have a chance of success.  So far, three of the Greater Powers had fallen, and Ankor was full of promises that the rest would soon follow. 

Yet if the God of Mischief were keeping something so catastrophic as this anomaly from his fellow conspirators in the Lesser Powers - something he could somehow mask from the Goddess of Mysteries...  Well,
that
did not bode well for
anyone
.

Centuries ago, when the Gods had come together to form the New Order, they had been forty-eight. There had been a plan then - to overcome those who had come before, the self-named Pantheon.  They were the lost brethren, seeking to live out the ambitions of their mother - to undo the usurpers who had taken the realms of mortals for themselves.  They had needed to be many then - and they had needed structure to accomplish their goal.  But with the Pantheon all-but gone from the world, the divisions that had seemed so reasonable at the outset had begun to become symbols of status, a wholly unacceptable position for those labeled as Lesser Powers - who had been just as instrumental in deposing the Old Gods as any of those gathered as Greater Powers.

Ankor had used this rancorous disquiet amongst the Lesser Powers against them.  Their egos had been used to encourage the Lesser Powers to be silent of what Ankor was about - because the end result was that the Greater Powers would die, and the Lesser Powers would be able to assume control over their dominions.  And yet...

Whatever the Trickster was about, it was hidden - even from Enuchek.  And if there was something powerful enough to be hidden from the Goddess of Mysteries, then it could only be seen as a threat - one which the Lesser Powers were being left in the dark about.

The most recent disturbance had been in a small community that bordered the Wildelands, the territory from which the New Order had originally advanced.  It would have been far more disturbing if the incidents had all originated from this same locality, but the fact that the singular events had been progressively moving in that direction - and now with the discovery that one of the most recent incidents had manifested in the same community that Ankor's influence could be felt from... 

It all left Enuchek disturbed.  And being disturbed, it left the Goddess uncertain on how to address the problem. On one hand, Ankor's presence in this small town might be completely coincidental.  And if that were the case, if she reported this infraction to the Lesser Powers, it could undo any real work the Trickster might be about.  On the other hand though, if this was part of some underhanded scheme - something the God was
so
well known for - it could prove devastating.  After all, if the God of Mischief were sincere in his plans to undo the Greater Powers, why would he keep this mystery from her eyes?

Logic suggested that at the very least she should summon Ankor and put him to the question.  Yet there were disadvantages to this line of thought, as well.  If he were genuinely dedicated to keeping this element secret, her letting him know of her discovery only gave him the opportunity to hide whatever he was doing better.  And if she journeyed there herself, she placed herself at his mercy.  There had been rumors amongst the Greater Powers that Ankor was behind the deaths of the three deceased Gods - and if the Trickster could be believed, he certainly had a hand in the deeds.  Not directly perhaps - it was difficult to imagine that Ankor had the power to actually slay another God - yet he had admitted to being somehow behind the fall of Galentine and Kelvor.

What if the Trickster were more than just the lure to the trap, however?  What if he
was
the trap?

Six days had passed since Enuchek had become aware of the convergence of this mysterious hidden mystery appearing within the community where Ankor's presence had been so persistent.  In that time, she had sensed the disturbance in three other locations - but as was consistent in its manifestations, all of these other appearances felt out of time, not quite in sync with each other.  Worse, if there were such a thing as a freshness for the flavor of these events, they all smelled
older
than the manifestation in the small town known as Oaken Wood.

And in all that time, Ankor had not left.  It was like he was waiting...

“You are looking for a great pattern,” came a voice from the Goddess' side, “and so you miss the smaller patterns altogether.”

Enuchek should not have been startled - her divine awareness should have sensed another deity's manifestation before it occurred.  Yet if any other Goddess could accomplish this, Enuchek was not surprised that it would be Belask.  The visitor manifested herself as a dark skinned woman, her robes an ethereal non-substance that seemed to shed color rather than be an absence of any.

“I suppose it makes sense that you would be sensing the same disturbance as I have.  What do you know of this?” asked the Goddess of Mystery.

The Goddess of the Unseen shrugged lightly.  “Likely as little as you.  Something unknown that is exposed then hidden again before it can be identified.  Or, in my case, it leaves my realm of the unseen before even I can see it for what it is - likely because it is not something rooted in the normal path of time.

“Yet I can see you are searching for a larger pattern,” added the other Goddess.  “You miss that these instances appear in pairs - disappearing from one place to appear in another.  By looking for a great pattern, you miss the smaller ones.”

Enuchek had to acknowledge that the other Goddess had summed up the issue well.  But also,
how
Belask had presented it raised a possibility in her mind.  “Could this be Shadow Elves at work?  Or perhaps some other cosmic power?”

“Unlikely.  The Elves have moved across time without so much as a ripple for longer than any know. It hardly seems their forte to be so...  sloppy now.”  Belask stepped forward, turning her back slightly to her host.  “As for someone even greater than the Elves, it would be even less likely for the same reason.”

“What do the Greater Powers suppose it is?”

The Goddess of the Unseen turned her head, the raising of her eyebrow the only evidence that she felt anything about what she had just heard.  “What makes you believe the other Gods even care?”

Belask raised her hand, a ball of shadow swirling in the air just above her fingertips.  “Ankor has been busy, but I do not believe he is actually
behind
any of this.  He is more an opportunist than any real threat.”

Enuchek felt a sudden need for caution. 
Had Belask uncovered Ankor's rebellion?

“The other Gods focus on recent events entirely too much,” the visiting Goddess continued.  “I had believed that settling the conflict over whether the Trickster had actually slain his betters would have removed him from the focus of the others.  But of course, instead of seeing reason, too many became affronted by being proven wrong instead.”

“I...  I do not follow,” confessed Enuchek.

Belask turned to face her host, clasping her hand closed and dispelling her small demonstration of power.  “My apologies.  You wouldn't be privy to the Greater Gods' debate.  I sent Corus and Praelis after the truth regarding Ankor's involvement in the death of Galentine and Kelvor.  Praelis confirmed that Ankor's memory cleared the Trickster of wrongdoing.  But there were those so convinced of his guilt, that they have not completely abandoned the effort to hold Ankor accountable.  Even when faced with incontestable facts, Galanor is still driving Orlicia and Anlar to rebel against the will of the others.”

“They move against Ankor?”

“Not yet,” said the visitor.  “But I fear soon.  They cannot accept that Ankor did not somehow fool the Goddess of Memory.  So they seek to make war against the Trickster to remove his threat before he can slay more of them.”

“But Ankor did not kill the others?  Any of them?”

Belask shrugged again.  “Of Imery, none can say for certain - but there's no evidence suggesting Ankor was anywhere near that tragedy.  But according to Praelis, Ankor did witness the fall of the other two.  Two mortals possessing unknown and unseeable powers struck and slew the Gods.”

Enuchek hissed in a breath of air.  “The Godslayer rumors are true?”

“Not as the old tale speaks, no.  But there do appear to be mortals possessing the power, yes.  If Praelis is speaking true, Ankor saw it with his own eyes.”

The Goddess of Mystery dwelled on this for a moment.  “What does any of this have to do with me then, Belask?  It is not exactly within your nature to speak for the sound of your voice alone.”

A wisp of a smile played across the other Goddess' face.  “Of all the Gods, you and I are the closest aligned, Enuchek.  Corus exists on the opposite side of things to myself, yet your dominion straddles the bridge between ours.  This makes you the only other God who is sensitive enough to feel the incursion upon time as I have.  For you, it must feel like a mystery that is in a perpetual sense of undiscovery, while for me, it feels as if it is fluttering back and forth between my own realm and yours.”

“With that logic, should not Corus also be feeling it?”

“Certainly,” agreed Belask.  “And if he were not involved in the political infighting of the Greater Powers, he might even pay heed to it.  But as it stands, no other is as disturbed by this aberration as you and I.”

“What are you suggesting?” laughed Enuchek.  “An allegiance?  Between Greater and Lesser Powers?”

“Precisely that,” agreed the dark Goddess.  “I am well aware that your Lesser brethren feel disenchanted with how you are shunned by the Greaters, but you must know that I have ever held myself apart from my fellows on this.  I still recall a time when we were all equals, suckling on our mother's teats.  I do not see the division the others do. You are my sister, Enuchek, and there is no better time to remind you of this than when a crisis looms over our shared dominions.”

The Goddess of Mystery leaned forward in her chair.  “You would share confidences with me then? Swear to work with me and to share nothing of your discovery with anyone else without our mutual agreement?”

The other Goddess was plainly aware of what was being asked of her.  “I give oath,” she said simply.

Enuchek sat back in satisfaction.  She knew well enough she had Belask's word, but she still wished to hear the other Goddess make the capitulation.  “You must say the words, Belask.  Working beside Ankor has taught us all the disadvantage of relying on  less.”