20. Then Tintar
THEN: TINTAR
Fear creaked and scraped from beneath his gray robes, pulling his skeletal body close to Brother Air, to the constellation that danced on the wind.
“Why do you no longer taste good? Why do you taste like ash and smoke?” And the fate’s tongue lapped outward again, grazing the shining, dancing dots of light, but then the thin, white skin around his mouth wrinkled in disgust. The fate’s tongue retracted into his mouth, and then he screamed.
“It burns! My king, the zephyr has scorched me! My tongue! I burn!”
The fates all began to clamor amongst each other.
Fear swiped out his many-fingered hand through the shape made of stars, but the stars remained and his hand did not catch flame. Only his tongue had, the smoke seeping out of the gaps in his teeth and out from his small, hole-like nostrils. “How did you burn me? How!”
“What you taste,” answered the little god, the fourth star, the one we call our brother, “is their hearts and minds and swiftness. My gift to my babes is an open heart and a curious mind. The broad heart is not tempted by Greed’s dangled offering.
It does not understand what Hate preaches.
The explorative mind does not want to own so much that it goes to war to keep its ownership.
And I have given them strength that is not a strength you know, of might, of power, as you call it.
I have made them clever and fast, cunning and resourceful.
These are immeasurable things, fate. You cannot break them. Not even you.”
Fear choked on a laugh. “You have yet to see me in my full power. I am behind every fate’s force but that of our king.
Fear is the almighty bringer of doom. I destroy the most beautiful things by simply telling a little being that what they cannot understand they must destroy.
It is so easy. And I do it over and over and over. It never fails. I never fail.”
Air hovered closer to Fear, barely visible, like a glimmer out of the corner of one’s vision.
And then that god spoke their final words to the fates.
“I see what you do. I gave them the best of me. It is their choice how they respond to your call. When the wind in the woods and the flame in the night meet, you will find your efforts thwarted. There will always be zephyrs, and there will always be torches. When the magic of zephyrs and torches come together, a thing of flare and flash, you will lose your greatest power, no matter how thickly it flows. There will always be some fierce woman angry at the way of kings. And you will be defeated.”
And the god flickered and was gone from sight.
A hideous cracking sound rang out as Fear made fists of his hands, the finger bones splintering. “What did it mean? What fierce woman? Where is it?” he howled. “I did not get my turn!”
Power interrupted. “It is a nothing thing. I don’t even think that one is a real star.
You must ignore it. Work with your other brethren to break this place.
” He turned his pale head to the children of the Farthest Four.
“Unmake them. Or let them live in our agony. But finish it. I am weary of this.”
Fear stamped and shrieked. His bloodlust was not satisfied. He held his hands out towards the children, fingernails turning into claws.
A tiny daughter ran forward, darting amongst the fates’ legs and robes, and pricked her hand on one of Fear’s claws.
Before the fate could lap up her blood, she put her hand to the dirt at her feet and called forth, “They said I would have to bleed to speak to my mother again. Here is my blood! Here is my payment! Can you hear me, Mother?”
And the small plane that was the home of the gods of Tintar shuddered and shook.
Mountains shot upward into being, one after the other after the other, a seemingly endless series of jagged explosions.
Behind them grew trees and plants and vines and herb and harvest, eternal fields of flowers and fruit.
From amongst the trees, creatures poured out, bear, wolf, horse, cattle, wildcat, tortoise, coney, and lizard.
Beetles crawled under them and bees sang above them all.
“What is this?” screamed Fear, arms flailing.
The fates closed ranks and snarled at this.
A small son ran to stand next to the daughter, and he too cut his hand open on Fear’s claw. Before the fate could lap up his blood, he flung the droplet towards the ocean of Sister Sea’s tears and called forth, “Sister, meet us here!”
And the thrashing of Sister Sea drove itself into the rock of Mother Earth’s mountains, and the crash of one goddess against the other was so loud, so shattering, that every being, both mortal child and timeless fate, put their hands to the sides of their heads and squeezed their eyes shut.
When they opened their eyes, they saw that five tall rocks, each as big as a fate, sat high in the ocean.
“What are those?” demanded War.
“Sentinels,” said the orb in the sky, his voice full of pride. “My sisters have made dragons from stone to protect our babes.”
“It will cost them much,” seethed Greed.
“So much,” murmured Death.
“I despise it,” rasped Hate and drew his clawed hands over his own skin again, shredding the white, bloodless flesh of his face in a violent rage.
A word was made then, the repeating rush and withdrawal of the water goddess against the stone goddess, one part short and high and the second part longer and low, like breath’s kinship with a pair of lungs, drawn in and sent back out.
Tin-tar. Tin-tar.
“Enough!” Power hollered. “You have failed me. Stay here! The five of you stay and sleep here if you must. Several eternities. They cannot be allowed reign of this place!”
“May I speak, my king?” said a thinner, weaker voice than those of the six fates who had been thundering. A shorter, frailer skeleton man emerged from the throng of gray and white.
Power nodded but remained silent, his mouth drawn down.
Two equally smaller fates joined the one who spoke.
The one who spoke continued. “My king. You leave the strongest of us here, but there is no reckoning to this world. The little gods cannot weather this. They are powerless in comparison. There should be some justice here. I beg you also leave me and these others to balance out your mightiest.”
Power nodded again. “Very well, my dear Consequence, you may interfere as much as you would like, but know that you will be defeated at nearly every turn. You know this. Your work will be in vain.”
“We know, my king,” replied one of Consequence’s companions. “Let us at least try to balance them. It is only fair. And you are not an evil thing, my king. You are a world builder. How will this world spin, once we shape it, on any kind of axis if all is despair and desolation?”
“They would create a wasteland of endlessness,” added Consequence. “They all have, save Death, a desire to prolong suffering. I would advocate for a merciful end to all here, the four lesser gods and their kind, or that we stay here and give this place a chance to become a real world.”
Hate and Greed smiled when Consequence said they and their brethren desired suffering. War and Fear straightened as if the littler fate had praised them.
Death remained looking resigned, but he spoke in support of the three smaller skeleton men. “I agree with Consequence and Moderation. They are weaker fates, but also important. They and their companion should stay and try to weigh the other side of these arcane scales.”
“Who are you again?” Fear asked, his white head turned towards the third, silent fate.
“Balance,” said the little fate and folded its nearly twenty fingers together. It bowed to Fear, but there was a mockery in the way it held its head. “There are brave children everywhere, in every world. They seek me out, and I aid them.”
Fear’s eyelids that held nothing, only a hollowness, drew together in a squint as he appraised the third subservient fate.
“So be it,” pronounced Power, and his words were the last said.
Power departed and took the rest of his skeletons with him.
And the five mighty fates, Fear, Hate, War, Greed, and Death, remained as their king had ordered, skulking and lurking and sneering.
And the three other, minor fates faded from sight, but they did not leave. They stayed and watched and waited.
Hate, War, and Greed roamed to and fro, restless and raging, tongues lolling, spittle flying, ever starved for mortal feasting.
Death settled himself under a mountain on the eastern side of the world.
As he said he would, Fear went to the colder northern west to make himself an empire of terror, a pillar of reason, sightless eyes forever turned in spite to the little gods.
He, like Death, lay in the earth, making a long grave for his bones, awaiting those who would feed his appetite.
Of the five, he was the most embittered by not having had his taste of the air god.
The father shone down on his children and appeared in little flames they learned to make.
The mother was everywhere, beneath and beside them. Her bounty fed them.
The sister caressed them with her depths and carried them where they wanted to be. Her fish also fed them.
And the last god, the unknowable one, rested inside them and reminded them who they were, the people of Tintar.