CHAPTER 19 #4
Everywhere Bex looked, plants were spreading their leaves.
Flocks of birds flew through the formerly empty sky, and the previously bone-dry air was thick with humidity and the drone of insects.
But while all of that that struck Bex as a definite change for the better, Ishtar was staring at the overgrowth like she’d just been stabbed in the chest.
“What is that?” she cried, whirling away from the beautiful jungle to shake her sword at the Morrigan. “You black-beaked traitor! What did you do?”
“The only thing that could truly defeat you,” the Morrigan said, lifting her wing to show the other goddess the trickle of blood running through her feathers from where Ishtar had stabbed her earlier. Ruby-red blood, not white.
“That’s right,” she said as Ishtar stumbled back. “I wished Gilgamesh luck the first time he fought you, but I already knew he wouldn’t win. He couldn’t, because there is no such thing as victory against an enemy that cannot die.”
“Of course,” Ishtar said shakily. “That has always been our strength.”
“Has it?” the Morrigan asked, aiming her sharp beak at Ishtar like a spear.
“I’m a god, too, as old as you are. I remember when we first found this place, how it shone like a blue-green jewel in the infinite blackness of time.
I thought we all understood how lucky we’d gotten, but the moment we set foot in this place, the rest of you started trying to change it.
You gave your ambition all sorts of noble names—civilization, improvement, refinement, salvation—but your intentions were always the same.
We settled in this place because it was so beautiful, but you couldn’t let it be.
You kept trying to control it, reshape it, bend it to your will.
” She stomped forward, shaking the new green world.
“You ruined the paradise we’d already found in the name of improving what was already perfect! ”
Ishtar stumbled away from her rage, but the Morrigan wasn’t finished.
“That hubris is why Gilgamesh was able to slay you so easily,” she snapped.
“He loved my wild son so much, I thought he might finally understand, but his rule was just more of the same. Even in his revenge, he was exactly like you, always trying to control the uncontrollable. It’s no wonder he met the same fate, but I am not so foolish.
I know that the beauty of this world lies in its wildness, its refusal to be tamed.
That unbridled freedom is what tempted us to descend to this realm in the first place, and it’s what I’ve given myself over to now. ”
“Given?” Ishtar repeated suspiciously. “What do you mean by that? You didn’t—”
“I did,” the Morrigan said with a proud lift of her beak.
“With the help of my beloved witches, I have given my heart, soul, and bones to the Great Forest of the Blackwood. The result is the forest you see beneath us, a verdant new life born from a god’s conviction.
Born here specifically, in the false Paradise the rest of you built with your magic.
Thus has my conviction become tangled up in all of yours, binding us together forever to the endless turning of the Great Cycles. ”
She delivered those final words like a death blow, but Bex didn’t understand.
From the way Adrian always talked about the Great Cycles, being tied directly to them sounded like having a mainline into the power of the universe, but Ishtar looked horrified.
Terrified, really, covering her face with her hands as her black sword clattered to the ground at the edge of the hole the Morrigan had torn in the world.
“You selfish creature,” she whispered through her clenched fingers.
“Our entire race worked together to build this place, but you co-opted our efforts and entangled our essences to tie us to your damn forest.” She ripped her hands down to stare at the Morrigan in absolute betrayal. “You’ve killed us all!”
“I prefer to think of it as a gift,” the Morrigan said, looking her fellow goddess dead in the eye.
“Now that I’ve bound the magic of the gods to the Great Cycles, we no longer have to live as outsiders.
We’re officially part of this world now, which means we will age and die along with every other creature caught in the Cycle’s turning.
Your power and authority have not been diminished, but you can no longer escape the march of time, which means you have two choices, Ishtar, Queen of Paradise.
You can stay here and grow old along with the humans you claim to love, or you can rip out the roots I just gave you, reclaim your immortality, and leave. ”
“Or I could rip out every root and burn your forest to the ground!” Ishtar snarled.
“And kill yourself in the process,” the Morrigan informed her cheerfully. “That’s a possibility now that I’ve made us all mortal. I’m not afraid of death, so what do you say, sister? Feel like taking a few thousand years to rebuild that wheel now?”
The other goddess stared at her for a long time, blinking her glittering eyes like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Then, with an urgency Bex had never seen from her before, Ishtar shed her human guise and turned back into the white giant from before.
Her sword changed with her, becoming enormous as well as the towering goddess scooped it off the ground and banged its black blade into the sundered coffin beside her.
“Wake up!” she bellowed in a voice that shook what was left of Heaven. “Rise, you fools! The Morrigan has betrayed us! We’re getting older every second! Wake up!”
She swung her sword like a whirlwind as she yelled, moving between the other giant coffins like a storm as she sliced them all open.
Bex couldn’t see the gods she was yelling at from down in the tank, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
The gods’ true faces were terrifying, as was their anger, for they were very angry.
They woke with curses and thunder, yelling back at Ishtar with earthquakes and whipping winds, but she was already on her way out.
The moment she freed the last god from his prison, she turned her sword on the blue dome of the sky, smashing it open like a window to reveal the black void beyond.
“I hereby turn my back on this world,” she announced in a ringing voice. “We offered you purpose and divine perfection, and you threw it back in our faces. Live then in the hell of your mistakes, and enjoy your miserable, meaningless deaths in the darkness without gods.”
That last word was still ringing through the air when Ishtar’s giant glowing form stepped through the hole she’d made in the sky and vanished into the torrent of time.
The other gods quickly followed, fleeing into the void behind her.
Their retreat was so bright that Bex had to hide her eyes, burying her face in Adrian’s coat until every divine presence was gone, and the world fell into a stillness deeper than any she’d ever felt before.
“What is that?” she whispered when the quiet didn’t stop.
“Peace,” the Morrigan breathed, collapsing back into her human form as she leaned on the Old Wives’ arms. “It’s over. Gilgamesh is dead, and the gods are gone. There’s no one left to rule over us now.”
“Can we please go back to English?” Adrian asked desperately. “Because I don’t speak Riverlander, and I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Well, my Riverlander is coming along splendidly,” Boston said proudly as he jumped off of Bran, who’d been hiding them both on the other side of the tank’s rim.
“I was able to understand almost all of that, which is how I know that the Morrigan worked with the Blackwood to bind herself and all the other gods to the Great Cycles. By tying herself to the turning of this world, she forced the rest of her kind into a devil’s choice: Stay here and grow old along with everything else or leave and keep their immortality.
As you just saw, they all chose to go, which means we’re finally out from under every pair of want-to-be-divine ruler’s boots. Is that correct?”
“It is indeed,” the Morrigan said, giving the cat an impressed smile. “Good work, little familiar.”
Boston’s chest puffed out so far that Bex was worried he’d pull something, but Adrian just looked floored.
“That’s how all that forest got here!” he cried, getting so close to the new window the Morrigan had ripped in the floor that Bex grabbed his coat on instinct. “I thought there was a lot more tree coverage than quintessence-accelerated growth could account for.”
“That’s because the Morrigan added her own blood to your mix,” his mother explained. “She bound herself to our coven, allowing the forest’s roots to enter her heart, where they then spread into the magic shared by all the gods for the construction of Paradise.”
Adrian frowned. “But I thought the Morrigan didn’t contribute to Paradise?”
“Not willingly,” the Morrigan said. “But as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, my kind has never cared much for consent.
They dragged me into their plans just as they did everything else in this world, and now that greed has become their downfall.
” Her pale face split into a grin. “Seems the gods and Gilgamesh had even more in common than they realized.”
“All tyrants are the same,” Muriel agreed. “But we should be grateful for that. Had Gilgamesh not sought total control, he never would’ve allowed Adrian into his Heaven and opened the crack that allowed all of this to happen.”
“It could only have gone as it went,” the Morrigan said.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d tied the gods to mortality while they were still trapped in their coffins.
They had to be up and about again in order to know what they’d lost and choose to leave.
It was quite the needle to thread, but I had no doubt.
My sweet Muriel has always been the best when it comes to these things. ”