Chapter Forty-One
Forty-one
Weakest of the gods, the Whisperer tried to manipulate their siblings, turn them against each other.
Instead, they came together in unity, a force against which the Whisperer could not hope to stand.
They were destroyed, their power so insignificant, their followers so few, that unlike all future divine deaths, they left no trace upon this land…
—THE DIVINE HISTORIES, VOL. II (RESTRICTED TEXT)
OSIRON… THE FIRST GOD to die.
A lie. A delusion. A game. This must be one of those things, or all of them, since there’s no possible way the Whisperer has survived for as long as this in secret.
And yet…
No, it can’t be possible. I am clearly in the eye of some storm of unchecked heretical madness. I consider fleeing—fighting my way out, if necessary. Wandering in the labyrinthine cliffs for as long as it takes to escape.
Instead, all I can manage is to echo what was asked of me: “Prove it.”
Rion tips his head. “Haven’t I already?”
“What—oh.” The changing passages, the vision of Tempestra-Innara… “Not enough. You could be trying to pass off some druggy hallucinations as divine.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “Please sit, though.”
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
The stone beneath my feet suddenly shifts.
The mosaic floor churns briefly before lurching up, encircling my wrists.
I am yanked downward, back into my seat, the liquid stone solidifying again.
Then comes the hiss, a nearly imperceivable reverberation whose source seems to be everywhere.
The two faces before me ripple, change. Across the table suddenly sit Morgan and Prior Petronilla.
The sound stops. I blink.
Rion and Avery are back.
And I am still trapped, but sufficiently convinced. Rion is a godsdamned god.
He… they… smile patiently. “Will that do? I’ll admit my most significant abilities lean more toward perception than such tangibles as fire and lightning, but the world bends to my will as much as it does for any other divinity.”
I don’t fight. Strong as I am, I won’t break free.
And the grim absurdity of the situation is rising, as if the world is filling with some invisible, vicious liquid, threatening to float me like a pickle in a jar.
I can barely breathe. Moments ago, there was a singular truth that burned at the center of my universe: that Tempestra-Innara was the only living divinity.
Now, Rion’s demonstration has extinguished that flame, leaving behind a befuddling dark.
A god… another deity…
A sour taste rises in the back of my throat, my fingers tingling distantly.
If he… they… whatever senses my growing panic, he is polite enough not to mention it. Which makes me wonder if I am handling this gut punch of knowledge better or worse than folks usually do.
“So, uh, Rion… Osiron. Whisperer?” I seriously might puke. “I… I’m gonna be honest. I don’t quite know how to address you.”
An amused sigh. “I have lived so long as a man that the designations of the divine feel overly formal. If continuing to know me as Rion makes this easier for you, then… please.”
“Okay.” I flex my hands into fists. Release. “Now what?”
“I imagine you have questions.”
“Oh, a few.”
“Then let’s make you comfortable.” Rion drums his fingers.
My bonds release, the stone and mosaic pieces snapping back into place like a loosed bowstring, no sign that they were ever disturbed at all.
Rion notes my bewildered examinations of the floor. “As I said, the world bends to divine will. But temporarily, and it much prefers its mundane state.” He folds his hands on the table. “So… questions?”
About a hundred flutter fitfully through my thoughts, but one—one rises above the others. And it’s a doozy. “If you’re a high and mighty god, then what the hell do you need me for?”
He laughs. “A question with many answers. But you already know why: to help kill my dear sister.”
“That answers exactly fuck all—”
Rion holds up a hand. “It will make more sense if I start at the beginning, when Avery arrived with his strange story about a young woman he met in the woods. One who was Chosen but didn’t speak or behave like it.
Later, I sensed you almost as soon as you and Nolan stepped foot in the city.
Tempestra’s children—here, for the first time in decades.
But, oddly, in secret. An intriguing situation, to say the least. Even more so when I began to speak with you, got to know you.
” There’s an uncomfortable, quiet moment where it feels as if Rion can see through my flesh and bones, into some buried part of me that even I haven’t uncovered yet.
“A pair with a mission, that much was obvious, as well as what it was. But some of the things you said to me… and when you helped Hiram…” He stops.
“I started to understand what Avery had conveyed.”
“That you knew who Nolan and I were doesn’t answer my question.”
“Doesn’t it? To me, your divinity radiates like the heat of a hearth, wafts through the air like a perfume. Especially here, where there is a marked absence of it.”
I glance at Avery, and the masked followers. “You’re saying Tempestra-Innara can do the same?”
He nods.
Okay, that explains why Emmaus, despite being under the orders of a god, was not blessed by one. If the gods could sense the divinely gifted children of their siblings, Osiron sending one as an assassin would have been as good as sashaying into the Cathedral and announcing they were still alive.
“Avery… your buddies in the cloaks… are any of them your Chosen?”
This time he shakes his head. “I’ve never ‘blessed’ followers in the way my siblings did.
You couldn’t know this, of course, but that was the core of our initial falling out.
The stories say I tried to steal their power.
In truth, I tried to stop them spreading it around.
” A scowl appears. “They became so enamored of their Chosen’s affection, so glutted with the devotion that a bit of their blood bought, that they surrounded themselves with armies of their blessed.
Then someone realized that divinity trickled down.
Blood and flesh became commodities. There were even periods where a ritual was made of it.
Try to imagine it: dozens, sometimes hundreds of a god’s devotees gathered to set upon a corpse.
Tearing it apart by hand, consuming that divinely infused flesh, reveling in the temporary elation of it. ”
Honestly not something I wanted to picture. “Gross.”
Rion gives me a look of agreement. “Weird times, let me tell you. I was ‘dead’ by then, of course. Turned on by my siblings for counseling restraint. They learned eventually, of course. When they built empires around themselves—great, grand things that grew and grew until they were all pressed up against each other… when those armies of the blessed turned on each other, devasting the land and giving rise to such horrors as the Renderers… they learned.”
I scoff. “You don’t seem to have qualms about working with those ‘horrors.’ ”
He shrugs. “They have their uses. And they only knew what they needed to.”
For the first time in a while, I feel as if I understand something—the Renderers knew they were dealing with heretics, but not a hidden god. I scan the room again, at how few followers are present. “How many of the folks involved with your plans know who they are really working for?”
“A special few. My Chosen, in a way, I suppose.”
“And you’re keeping the rest ignorant, leveraging their belief that the old gods will return if Tempestra-Innara falls, taking advantage of their faith.”
“Of course,” says Rion, smirking. “Why do you think I started that little rumor in the first place?”
Oh. “The other gods are really dead then.”
“Very. Not by my hand, of course. I kept myself hidden over the years, watched them turn on each other one by one. I’d already learned my lesson.
I was the oldest of the gods, but never the most powerful.
And six against one… it was never going to be a fair fight.
But I knew things, understood mysteries of our world that my siblings never did.
Do you know why they call me the Whisperer, Lys? ”
“Because of your whispered lies, your manipulations.”
“No.” That single word carries an ancient weightiness that reminds me who I am speaking to. “Because I’m the one who called them into being in the first place.”
“When they whisper, we wake…”
Around us, the prayer begins, then stops just as quickly. Something cold settles in my bones, born of a growing comprehension. When they whisper… Not Tempestra.
Osiron.
“Old words,” Rion says lightly. “Made good use of over the years. Nothing like familiar incantations and rituals to cement the stones of belief together, whatever those beliefs may be.”
“You created the other gods?”
“Called more than created,” says Rion. “From a place I can barely remember, somewhere outside the world of touch and taste and smell. I found my way here, the first of us to become flesh. The first of us to trade that flesh, when it began to fail. And even when my siblings destroyed that, when they overwhelmed me with the brute force of their combined power, well… they always understood destruction better than what they were trying to destroy. Lucky for me, though they were always able to sense each other, and their Chosen, I myself have always been a blind spot. A quirk, I suppose, of my part in their making. I was able to shift myself, find a new body, disappear. Which brings me to where I am now.”
“Eons later?” Each answer spawns more questions. “What have you been doing all this time? Hanging around guesthouses and peddling naughty books?”
Rion laughs. “Not the whole time. Your incredulity is understandable, and so very, very mortal.” He pauses.
“But I am not. I saw what was coming when my siblings turned on me. Peace never holds between spoiled children. I might have been their first conflict, but I also knew that—eventually—they’d turn on each other.
That someday, only one would be left.” A sly smile rises to his lips.
“I have the luxury of time. And as you can see, I can be very, very patient.”
“And yet you still need me to do your dirty work.”
That erases Rion’s smile. “Unfortunately, yes. Tempestra, even with a failing avatar, is still stronger than I am. Which is why I turned to alternative avenues of attack.”
“The reliquary. And the blood of a dead god.”
“Not the most eloquent solution, I’ll admit.”
“Or successful.”
“No,” he concedes. “Honestly, it took even me ages to conceive of the plot. It was the Stone God who made the reliquaries, as a gift to his siblings. None of them considered that the vessels might preserve their blood indefinitely, or how that preservation following their deaths would change it. I certainly didn’t.
Thousands of years and there are intricacies about this world—about divinity itself—that even I haven’t fully unraveled.
” His nose wrinkles, as if smelling something unpleasant.
“Did you know the Arbiters are entirely Tempestra’s creatures?
They didn’t exist until after Arcadius fell, and I’ve never sorted out exactly how they create the potion that gives them their particular ability.
I suspect they drew some inspiration from the Renderers’ ‘hounds,’ but…
” He shakes his head. “Someday, there will be time for learning and research unhampered by secrecy. Now is the time to strike, while my sister is in decline, before they take a new avatar.”
“What if you’re already too late?”
He shakes his head. “I’d know, feel that shunt of power.”
Well, that’s something at least. “And after Tempestra-Innara… then what? You take their place ruling the Devoted Lands?”
“Do you care what happens after? You’ll be free.”
There it is—the bait dangling at the end of the stick, my dream come true.
Except I’d always imagined it to be in a world devoid of divinities.
All of them. Now the landscape of that world is becoming something very, very different.
Again, I feel a touch of winter, a sensation like ice cracking beneath my feet.
“Then what?” I press.
Rion seems to understand, reluctance filling the air between us before he speaks again. “Mistakes were made, I’ll be the first to admit that. But it’s not too late to try again.”
“What do you mean?”
“The old gods are dead. Gone forever.” A fresh intensity ignites behind Rion’s eyes. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t make a few new ones.”