CHAPTER 19 #3
Bex lifted her swords in reply, both Gilgamesh’s white blade and Drox’s black one.
The latter was shaking like a leaf against her palm, but he didn’t flee back into his ring, which steeled Bex’s determination even more.
No matter what happened next, she was determined to be worthy of her sword’s loyalty.
Worthy of everything she’d been given as she moved to stand between Adrian and the furious god that had once been her mother.
Ishtar scowled in reply and held her arm out to the side.
Bex wasn’t sure what she was doing at first. Then her ears caught the faint ringing of metal right before the goddess’s sword flew past her to slap itself back into Ishtar’s palm.
Drox did the same thing when Bex called him, so it wasn’t surprising that Ishtar could do the same.
It was, however, extremely intimidating.
Taking a stand against Gilgamesh was one thing, but when the Goddess of War, Life, and Death turned to face her with Enki’s greatest masterpiece in her hand, even Bex felt like she was about to faint.
She was telling herself to go ahead and get it over with before she lost her nerve entirely when Adrian grabbed her shoulder.
“Not yet,” he whispered. “They’re almost here.”
“Who’s almost here?” Bex whispered back frantically.
“Just five more seconds,” he promised, giving her a wink. “Trust me.”
Bex trusted him with every single life she’d ever had.
If Adrian said wait, then her feet were welded to the ground.
Unfortunately, the same did not apply to Ishtar.
The goddess was already darting forward with her razor-sharp black sword to remove Bex’s head.
Bex responded by throwing up Gilgamesh’s white sword since she’d much rather lose that ugly thing than Drox, but she’d barely gotten the block in position before something huge and dark erupted out of the ground right in front of her.
Bex’s first thought was that it was a tree.
Adrian’s forest hadn’t stopped growing since he’d used it to destroy Gilgamesh’s prince tanks, and trees were how her witch solved most problems. She was wondering what sort of tree had such dark leaves when the black shape suddenly opened its beak to snatch the charging Ishtar off the ground.
It rocketed into the air next, carrying the screaming goddess high into the pale-blue sky.
It wasn’t until it spread its huge black wings, however, that Bex finally realized what she was looking at.
“That’s the Morrigan,” she said, staggering back into Adrian. “The Morrigan just ate Ishtar!”
“The Morrigan didn’t eat her,” countered a familiar voice as Muriel, Witch of the Future and Adrian’s youngest aunt, hauled herself out of the hole the Morrigan had just made in the tank’s sin-iron floor. “She’s disciplining her.”
“The gods have always been excessively violent with each other,” agreed Lydia, Witch of the Past, who popped through next. “That’s one of the reasons the Morrigan left in the first place.”
“I’m just glad we got here in time,” finished Agatha, gracefully bringing up the rear on her broom. “Not that I didn’t think our Bonfire Queen could win, but nothing good ever comes of family trying to kill each other.”
The Three Sisters all chuckled like that was an inside joke, but Bex was too alarmed to find anything funny.
“What are you all doing here?” she demanded, finally pushing off of Adrian, who’d been graciously holding her up. “You’re supposed to be in the Blackwood, fighting with my demons!”
“The rest of our coven is there,” Agatha assured her. “But Muriel foresaw that our work here wasn’t finished yet, so we stayed behind with the Morrigan.”
“And it’s a good thing we did,” Muriel muttered, tugging at her shiny black hair.
“I don’t like giving odds, but your chances against Ishtar after the amount of fire you used to beat Gilgamesh were not good, especially since all the demons who could’ve provided you with more are back in the world of the living. ”
“All of them?” Bex repeated as a weak smile crossed her face. “Does that mean everybody got to safety?”
“Only if you want to call evacuating into an active war zone ‘safe’,” Lydia said.
“What matters is they’re not here anymore,” Agatha added tactfully. “That’s about to be very important, Muriel tells me.”
The Witch of the Future nodded and turned her blue eyes to the sky.
Bex looked up as well, biting her lip as she watched Ishtar stab her sword into the Morrigan’s beak.
The Morrigan still didn’t let go, but she did swoop back down, throwing Ishtar to the ground at the last second so she couldn’t use her wings to avoid the impact.
“You heathen!” the goddess screamed when she’d clawed her way out of the crater. “What are you doing in this sacred place?”
“Getting a little payback while you’re still too weak to fight properly,” the Morrigan replied, licking Ishtar’s white blood off her beak with a forked black tongue as she set down next to her trio of witches.
“Say what you will about Gilgamesh. He always was the best at bleeding you pigs dry. Just look at you! Shriveled up like a raisin.”
Ishtar narrowed her glittering eyes. “I will not accept criticism from a barbarian who left the light of her divine kind to live like an animal in the woods. Your opinions have never mattered, and they never will. Now that Gilgamesh is dead, I can restore all the other gods to glory and put the world back in its proper order.”
“Really?” the Morrigan said, cocking her giant raven head to the side. “And how do you intend to do that?”
“The same way we did it the first time,” Ishtar replied haughtily.
“We built the Wheel of Reincarnation once. We can easily build it again. It’s simply a matter of time, and we’ve got plenty of that.
After all”—her face lit up with that lovely smile again—“what is time to true immortals? We only cared about it while Gilgamesh was making us suffer, but now that we’re back, the years no longer matter.
We can take as long as we like to craft a new Paradise that’s even better than the first, and then we’ll use those tools to roll this planet’s timeline back to its verdant beginning.
We can erase the damage an unfettered humanity has wrought and start over with a clean slate.
Everything is possible again, and it’s all thanks to my daughter.
” She flicked her glittering eyes back to Bex with a sigh.
“What a shame she’s determined to be a fool. ”
“What am I being foolish about?” Bex demanded.
“You’re talking about the destruction of everything that is.
All the things we’ve built, the people we know and love, you’re planning to erase them all like it’s nothing!
Just because the gods live forever doesn’t mean the rest of us are junk to be thrown away. ”
“But you are,” Ishtar said in a pitying voice.
“Mortality is one of the problems we built Paradise to fix. The only reason I facilitated the Blackwood’s decision to fill you with the flames of life is because I had nothing else to work with inside my prison, but that’s all behind us now.
You could have your immortality back in an instant if you’d just stop being stubborn. ”
Bex crossed her arms over her chest with a glare, and the goddess sighed again.
“Enough of this,” she said, turning back to the Morrigan.
“Just because I have infinite time does not mean I have infinite patience. I have a daughter to discipline, gods to wake, and a divine Paradise to put back in order. Just rebuilding the Wheel so we can reset the terrible state Gilgamesh allowed this planet to sink into will likely take a millennium, so I’d like to get started, if you don’t mind. ”
She made a shooing gesture with her sword, but the Morrigan just fluffed out her feathers. “Are you sure you’ve got enough time left to do all that?”
“Of course,” Ishtar said, giving the crow a nasty look. “We are gods. We have all the time there is.”
She said that like it was the only obvious truth, but the Morrigan started to laugh.
Just a bit of crow chuffing at first then louder and louder until she was cackling.
It was clearly getting on Ishtar’s nerves, but before the goddess could raise her sword to strike the giant crow down, the Morrigan stopped.
“All the time there is, huh?” she said, lifting her black-clawed foot. “Not anymore.”
She brought her talons down as she finished. It looked like she was just scraping the bottom of the quintessence tank, but the instant the goddess’s claws made contact with the metal floor, the world beneath them ripped away like paper.
That was how it felt to Bex, anyway. She grabbed onto Adrian, ready to jump them both out of whatever the Morrigan was dumping everyone into.
But while the floor did vanish, it didn’t drop them, because it’d never really been there to begin with.
This whole place was just another of Gilgamesh’s hidden spaces, one of the mini-worlds he’d crafted using the gods’ tools to house his secret project.
The Morrigan hadn’t even destroyed the entire thing.
She’d just ripped a hole through the section they were standing on, creating a window into Heaven below.
What used to be Heaven, anyway. Gilgamesh’s palace was still there, but the greenery Adrian had brought in with his tree—which used to be confined to just the blocks immediately surrounding the entrance to the Hells—now covered everything in sight.
The roads, the white buildings of the Holy City, even the black cube of the Hells’ Gate were all covered in verdant jungle.
The trees grew right over the giant wall where Bex had melted the lions during her battle with the Queen of War, filling the gray desert of the Goddeath Wastes with blooming, buzzing, overflowing life.