Selfish Myths 2

by Natalia Jaster

  His banishment has been a torment. His identity has been peeled from him, sacrificed because of some misbegotten feelings for the Goddess of Love.

  Love. The mischievous vixen of his past.

  The one he can’t seem to let go of.

  Years ago, she’d become a renegade deity by falling for a mortal, a grave offense amongst their kind. But instead of spying on her like Anger had been assigned to do, and instead of reporting her, he’d kept his mouth shut. He’d defied the Fate Court in order to protect her secret, then he’d been expelled as punishment for aborting his job.

  For all the good it had done him. Love had won the mortal’s heart and thusly became human. To this day, she lives happily in the town of Ever with her boyfriend, a snarky fellow who gets to kiss her.

  To touch her.

  Meanwhile, Anger’s here, staring into the eyes of a maniac.

  Malice’s joyfully abrasive expression could strip tar from the pavement. He sifts through Anger’s silence, which isn’t surprising given that they represent similar emotions. Deities don’t feel overwhelmed by the emotions they serve, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel those emotions at all. And there are extreme exceptions, as with his class and perhaps exiles who aren’t tasked to rein themselves in.

  Whether or not Anger wants to be transparent to this archer, he is.

  Whether or not he wants to have that connection, he does.

  “You’re curious,” Malice says, pleased.

  “Not enough to kill,” Anger says, displeased.

  “Why is that? I’ve always thought pain to be pleasurable. But fine, since I never said kill. I said break.”

  “Funny. They sound the same to me.”

  “Yes, they do. But killing is achievable by yours truly, so long as I get creative with my hands. Whereas breaking—,” the demon god lifts a pinky and grazes his throat, drawing red streaks across his skin, “—now that’s a tender task. After being on your own, to hear there’s a chance to go home? You’re wondering, how is that possible?” His orbs gleam under the lights of a nearby scrambler ride. “Well, I ask you: How much is it worth?”

  “You’ve got the wrong person. Go look for someone who’s evil.”

  “I’m evil. That’s not the prerequisite. Imagine winning back what the Fates stole from us. Imagine that.”

  “Imagine my right hook.”

  “You’re a straight arrow, is that it? That’s beneath you and not what I expected from a rage god who got kicked to the curb. Very well, a deal. I’ll make this prospect even more attractive to you.” Again, he bumps his chin toward the west. “Come join me. What do you have to lose? If anything, you’ll gain insight.”

  Anger drums his fingers on his belt buckle. “How many of you are there?”

  Malice knows where this is going, because he visibly approves. “Only me.”

  “There’s never only me.”

  The demon god glances around, possibly for eavesdropping exiles, then steps closer. His voice reminds Anger of a meat grinder as he confides, “I know a way for us to regain our place in the Peaks—and our power to wield emotions—with the Fate Court incapable of reversing it. One small caveat is that it requires a challenge, a gig that I’m not qualified for.” He points at Anger. “But you are.”

  “Overpower the Fate Court’s will? There’s no chance. Only the stars have that divinity.”

  “I can recall a recent event in which a female deity sealed her own fate with a little help from the stars, and the Court didn’t have a say. I think you were acquainted with her prior to your banishment.” Malice cocks his head. “Tell me. How did she achieve that feat?”

  Anger’s nostrils flare. He doesn’t want to talk about the past.

  Yet Malice is right. There are technicalities in magic, ways around the Fate Court’s influence.

  The mysteries of the stars are infinite for a reason. One can never say what their plan is.

  The song that had been skipping on Merry’s record player invades the moment, drifting from the arcade where children shoot comets from the sky with plastic balls. Vaguely, Anger wonders if the flighty goddess has ever indulged in that game. He contemplates how many comets she may have vanquished…if her attention span had lasted long enough to punt a single target.

  The Constellation Carousel is not far from where he stands. Aries, Libra, and other zodiacs circle the whirligig’s diameter, swooping up and down, traveling but getting nowhere.

  Then there’s Malice, his carnivorous grin, and the carousel’s two-faced Gemini in the background. Why does this entitled misfit think he’ll be welcomed back into the Peaks, particularly if it’s forced? That will only insult the Court, which will swamp Malice with enemies.

  Or such brashness might intrigue their people, enough to act magnanimously.

  What possible deal can Malice strike that will make this worth Anger’s conscience? And Merry’s suffering?

  He won’t agree. But knowledge is power, and Malice is dangerous, both of which provoke Anger to join the outcast. They track from the Carnival of Stars to the city’s west end, which is posher and more sterile than Merry’s home in the east. This sector boasts townhouses, a library, and Midnight Park, where Anger had witnessed Malice charging after Merry.

  Anger recalls that absurd skirt she’d been modeling. A knee-length mesh of prismatic pastel. A rather optimistic piece of clothing to wear while navigating a skateboard.

  Malice guides Anger into the library, producing a skewer device that jimmies the back door. The rascal could just wrest the entrance open with a mighty flourish of his wrist, but while Malice doesn’t give the impression of caring about vandalism, nor about obligating inferior beings to repair the damage, his ministrations indicate that he respects this landmark too much to deface it.

  It’s a cavernous and grand space with numerous corridors of built-in bookshelves. Strands of ivy dangle from the ceiling, forming a leafy canopy over desks and reading chairs, like a hybrid atrium and book repository.

  The interior is drafty, smelling of old pages, cleaning agents, and intention. If Anger were human, his boots would echo on the polished floor.

  Down a stairway, they descend into the very throat of the library and reach a crypt, the subterranean ceiling indicating a vault that might house rare and brittle books, although Anger doesn’t see any chronicles.

  Camping here is disrespectful to both the mortal and immortal worlds. Anger cares less about the former, more about the latter. He’s no longer in the business of offending his betters.

  Nonetheless, it’s amusing. Malice hasn’t opted to create an invisible home of his own. Instead, this abominable stray has chosen to squat in a mortal structure. An erudite one, at that.

  One might speculate if there’s an additional reason for this.

  A pit occupies the room’s center, fire writhing from its belly. Under a lone basement window, a telescope cranes its neck. It’s a rickety, rusty model, from perhaps two centuries ago.

  Putting it mildly, Malice is an eclectic being if one counts the rocking chair fronting the blaze, and the crate of sepia-stained envelopes and letter leaflets on the floor. This, plus the library itself.

  All that’s left to question is where the fuck he’s stashing the taxidermy cobras.

  Mounted on a wall, Anger spots Malice’s archery. The quiver, longbow, and arrows are carved from hickory—everything but the fletching, which is comprised of turkey feathers. The result is beautifully robust, but still. Of all the materials that Malice could have forged his weaponry from, he’d selected the most elementary, the most basic combination.

  The most inherently human option.

  Either the library staff seldom frequents this vault, or the interior decorating is imperceptible to the mortal eye. It’s likely a case of both.

  Anger grasps his own longbow. As a fellow divinity, he cannot—and doesn’t need to—tap into Malice’s emotions, the way deities can with mortals. He’s nevertheless hyperaware of the atmosphere, t
he essence hostility and the barbed texture of spite. Evidently, Malice has bottled all his rancor down here, storing it for a rainy day.

  Which might be today, depending on what he’s about to propose. Arguably, he’s one reply—yes or no—away from changing his mind about Anger. Whenever denied something, it’s easy for allies to suddenly become haters. Even easier for a rage god.

  Anger would know. The last time he saw Love—the last time she saw him—he’d assured the goddess that he would never hate her, even though that’s the impression he’d given since their youth, growing up together in the same class of archers.

  In a way, Anger has retracted that fact.

  In a way, he now hates Love as much as he adores her.

  But that’s neither here, nor there. He has an audience.

  Malice fixes him a drink from a table against the wall, liquid sloshing from a flask and fizzing into a cup. There’s a charge in the air, something that could power the city. This extremist radiates faith and disbelief, gratitude and resentment. It’s coiling from one end of him to the next.

  Malice asks, “What do you think? You fancy my home, away from home, away from home?” Without waiting for a reply, he turns and hands over the drink. “I’ve been told alcohol is good for hydration. Be my guest.”

  Anger releases the grip on his bow. He loathes the impulsion worming up his limbs: belonging. One would think it’s been a while since anyone glanced at him with kinship.

  Actually, it’s been an hour.

  The inflammatory memory of Merry’s hands resurfaces. The nettling ache that he’d felt when she’d touched him. The way he’d retreated like a coward, like a bull harassed by a lamb.

  Anger takes the cup and squeezes it. He doesn’t give a shit about hospitality. He’s not about to guzzle the unidentified contents, the stench of which has been scooped from a gutter and fermented.

  More accurately, it stinks of noxious pomegranates.

  Malice settles into the rocking chair, a saddlebag hanging like a noose from the head rest. The chair’s legs creak as he tips back and forth, one of his calves propped over the opposite thigh. “Not thirsty?”

  “Not stupid,” Anger clarifies.

  “You’re a stogy houseguest.”

  “And this isn’t your house.”

  “You need to break Merry’s heart.”

  Anger hurls the cup across the crypt, the vessel detonating on impact, jagged bits of glass shattering to the floor like translucent daggers. “What the Fates!”

  “And by that, I mean really break it. Make it count,” Malice says. “Get her to love you, get her hopes up, and then rip out her soul, nice and slow.” He stops rocking and muses out the basement window while flicking his fingers, the elongated nails as acute as claws. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? Humans don’t value the moon as much as its counterpart. They can stare right at the moon, but they’d prefer to go blind admiring the sun—something that doesn’t even want to be seen. The sun is just so very sunny. Then again, watching mortals go blind might be fun.”

  “Just out of curiosity, are you insane?”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Deities don’t have hearts.”

  Malice swings his gaze back to Anger. “Literally or metaphorically? Do tell.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything. Or were you deported before learning the basics?”

  “I was a promising archer once, but they discharged me before I had the chance to actually perform as one. For millennia, the Court has kept our people on leashes, insisting on perfection and subservience without failure.”

  “At the request of the stars,” Anger defends.

  Malice scoffs. “The stars aren’t biased, and they don’t dictate everything. They create flawless figures, but they also create imperfections. So what? Some of us play hooky from one day of training, or we go for a joy trip to the mortal realm without permission, or we dig too deep in the Archives. Is that a crime? According to the Court, it is. Well, fuck them.

  “I want my place back. I want my power back, and so do you. And we can have it. As to your point, I think we both know deities have hearts. You’re an example. Every dipshit misfit in this city knows the circulating story of you. We all know your defiance was out of affection for the former Goddess of Love. You spent your life pledged to the Court, and one gaffe sends you packing without a second chance.”

  “I wasn’t partying past curfew,” Anger remarks dryly. “I was endangering our very existence by not reporting Love’s attachment to a mortal. His ability to see us, to see beyond the myth, gave him the power to destroy us all.”

  “Ah-ah-ah.” Malice shakes his head. “Quit the lame exposition, mate. You summoned the Court before any of that happened—period. You did your job.”

  “Not perfectly.”

  “Did you hear what you just said?”

  Anger pauses. He’s not sure what to make of that challenge, only that it causes his joints to lock, his teeth to clench. True, he’d belatedly carried out his assignment. And then he’d been degraded, cast aside in spite of his history of worthy deeds, of mastering fury in the mortal realm.

  One delayed report of Love’s actions. That’s all it had taken.

  Look where all of it had gotten him. Look at all he’d lost.

  His power. His purpose. His community. His home.

  And her.

  The demon archer goes on about thwarting the Fates’ authority by reinstating himself, flaws and all, sans their approval. Incidentally, he’s not the only one hankering for a little justice. According to Malice’s spiel, the desire for reprisal has begun to simmer amongst outcasts.

  Though he’s less invested in communal redress, more invested in himself.

  “You get my drift,” Malice says. “I know you do.”

  Anger does. “Where does Merry’s heart fit into your sermon?”

  “There are a few legends, as there usually are amongst the stars. What if I told you that I’ve done my homework? That if a deity breaks the heart of another deity, the heartbreaker becomes immune to the Fates. That the heartbreaker retains whichever power of emotion he or she was born with. What if I told you that? Hmm?”

  “This is assuming all deities have the capacity to love, which they don’t. It’s unheard of outside that one particular goddess you’ve mentioned.”

  “And yourself.” But when Anger refuses to confirm, Malice just beams. “And there might be one more exception.”

  Merry is right. Malice does have a sadistic grin.

  Even at this level, Anger still hears the carousel tinkling beyond the library. It skips through his ears, along with the wry tilt of Malice’s voice. The demon archer finds something amusing, even ironic about his own statement.

  Perhaps Anger has been asking the wrong questions. Perhaps he should have made an alternate inquiry first. Perhaps he needs to rectify that.

  He has an inkling. Merry had confided that she was a dud. A failed star.

  She’d never said what kind.

  Anger steels himself. “Before she was exiled, who was she? Who was Merry?”

  Malice has anticipated that, because he smirks. “She was Love.”

  5

  Anger

  Anger’s heart rams into his torso. If he were holding a second cup in his grip, he would shatter that one as well. He would pulverize it, the fragments slicing him open, his fist bleeding.

  Since he doesn’t have another vessel to vanquish, he settles for an arrow and a different target. The weapon is already nocked, the iron tip pointing at Malice’s sternum. It won’t kill the delinquent, but it will hurt.

  There’s no way.

  There’s just no way.

  There’s no way Anger could have heard the deity correctly.

  The nefarious misfit reclines in his seat and steeples his fingers. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you don’t like surprises.”

  “You’re lying about this,” Anger growls. “Another option is that you’re as d
elusional as you are demonic.”

  “No, to the first accusation. I saw the way Merry ogled you in the carnival. Why do you suppose I backed down? You’re the perfect candidate to break her.” Malice’s corrosive voice deepens. “I gave you time to get acquainted. Am I to believe that cupcake didn’t strike you as a tad affectionate?”

  “Even if she did, it means nothing.”

  “I’m sorry to traumatize you, but not really sorry. She was originally born as Love. Sugar glaze and all.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “You’re right. Cupcakes don’t have sugar glaze.”

  “On the count of three. One, two—”

  “Think harder, mate,” Malice says. “It’s not impossible. There’s a distinction between creation and attempt.”

  Anger stays his weapon. This scoundrel is right.

  Love had been the first of her kind. She’d been first goddess in history with the power to wield love. As the most complex of all emotions, it had taken the Fates millennia to conjure her.

  But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been endeavors. And defeats.

  Usually, failures of conception don’t survive birth, fading within seconds like snuffed-out stars. Yet in rare cases, some do survive.

  That’s why Merry had called herself a dud. She’s a prior attempt to create a love goddess. Certainly, she’s the only candidate who has lived to tell that tale.

  She won’t be the last mock-up. Now that Love is a human, ages will pass before the Fates manage to reproduce her, even if they’ve learned the method. Such pursuits take endurance.

  On that score, Anger suspects that he hasn’t been replaced yet, either.

  Back to the enigma called Merry. How quickly after her birth did the Court chuck her from their sight? How much of a chance had they given her?

  Anger shakes himself. It’s a moot subject.

  He lowers his bow.

  “Well, at least your temper is as consistent as your cock,” Malice says, running a bladed pinky nail over his lower lip. “You still have blue balls for the infamous Love, and it’s pissing you off. Don’t worry, resentment is healthy. By the way, I can see why the Fate Court used to pamper you, before they dropped you like a turd. You react with unprecedented speed and a fuse shorter than my middle finger.”