Rise of the Goddess (****All proceeds from the Rise of the Goddess anthology will go to benefit the Elliott Public Library**** Book 1)

by Catherine Stovall

  Wide eyed, Matthew looked at Bia and recoiled in shock. She had large, beautiful, feathery wings that spanned at least four feet on each side. Her hair seemed more luminescent in the lighting, and her violet eyes shined with a warrior’s fierce heart. He took a tentative step towards her, and she smiled, running up to him and planting a kiss on his lips. He wanted to hold her, to be sure she was real, but didn’t know how to do so around her wings. Standing with his arms hanging at his sides, he tried to understand her appearance, where he was, or what had transpired, and how it could be that he had never been happier to see anyone in his entire life.

  As if reading his mind, she spoke quickly. “We have to hurry; more guards are undoubtedly on the way.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him through the hole in the wall, turning down the hall and running at a sprint.

  Matthew had trouble keeping up as Bia seemed to move faster than humanly possible, and when they hit the landing of the stairway, she turned and grabbed him around the waist before jumping. Matthew felt himself soaring, and as he looked down, he watched as they sailed down to the foyer and out the doors, guards shooting arrows at them. He felt Bia jerk twice, but she never slowed.

  As they passed over a black desert, the adrenaline faded and a slow, crawling, wet feeling caused Matthew to look down to find himself bleeding. He checked his arm to see how deep the wound went, but when he swiped the blood, it was clear it was not his.

  Suddenly, Bia dived towards the green rolling hills, setting them down gently at the last moment before she collapsed on her side, one wing bending at what looked like an uncomfortable angle.

  Panicked, he assessed her wings as best he could. He knew nothing of what she was, but there were numerous holes in the black feathery appendages where arrows had travelled through the soft down and bone. “Bia, you’ve been shot,” Matthew’s voice wavered. “I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

  I know that I should be much more concerned that she has wings, but I cannot lose another woman that I love. I just can’t, Matthew thought as he waited for Bia to instruct him.

  “There’s nothing to do. I am immortal. They will heal in time, I just need to rest,” she gritted out.

  Matthew didn’t know what to say. Immortal?

  *****

  Bia knew the moment Matthew finally lost his cool. His jaw dropped just the slightest bit and his eyes widened. She had to finish telling him the whole truth about who she was before her siblings found them and made the situation worse. At this point, if they find us, they will probably just kill him to teach me a lesson, she realized.

  “Matthew, I haven’t been totally honest with you,” she began, begging him with her eyes to believe her. “Everything I feel and have shared with you was true, but I’m not human. I’m the Goddess of Force. My brothers are the Gods of Strength and Power, and my sister is the Goddess of Victory.”

  She waited for his reaction, but when he simply nodded without a change of expression, she chose to continue before he ran. “It is against the rules for an immortal to be involved with a human, but I felt our connection from the first time we met, and I fell in love with you. I want to be with you.” Bia’s voice hitched as she admitted the truth to him aloud. She did want to be with him. She wanted him to make the choice to be with her, but it had to be his choice.

  “Matthew, I will take you back to the earthly realm right now, because that is the only place you will ever be safe, and we can never see each other again, or you can choose to stay with me,” she added hopefully. She would battle hundreds of armies to keep her man by her side, but she couldn’t force him.

  “How would that work? Don’t your siblings want to kill me?” he asked, his eyes darting around as he spoke the words, as if he feared they would summon them.

  “Only because you are human and Nike is a bitch, but she won’t change. You being human, though, can change,” she held out a tiny bottle. “This is Ambrosia, the nektar of the Gods, and will make you immortal. You will not have any godly powers, but you will be immortal and can therefore stay in Olympus, with me.” Bia didn’t know what else she could say. She had finally told him the truth, and her heart had lodged itself somewhere in her throat as she finished.

  Matthew took the bottle and looked at it, looked at her, and then looked at it again. When he dropped his hand, Bia felt her heart drop right out of her body. “I want you to know that I love you,” he said.

  Bia knew the next sentence would break her heart, and she did the best she could to hold herself together.

  “But,” he continued, “your family is psychotic.” Then, to Bia’s surprise, he gulped the contents of the bottle down in one swig. “I love you, and I can live with your psychotic family so long as they don’t kill me or separate us ever again. I have loved and lost before, and I will not lose you.” He leaned down and kissed her, gently cradling her face as tears streamed from her eyes of their own accord.

  Bia had never been happier in her life, and her Force would protect them both from anyone that threatened their union. She could already see the immortal glow around Matthew, and knew that no one would mistake him for human again. Soon enough, he would wear her mark, and she would wear his, no longer separate beings.

  Lying in the grass, Bia forgot about the wounds to her wings and became one with her lover.

  Carmaterdea

  Sinead Macdughlas

  *This story contains UK English*

  Carmaterdea surveyed her new neighbourhood with cautious optimism. It was a fixer-upper, alright. The open pathways on the outer fringes were nice enough, but the further she moved toward the well-lit center, the more drifting litter she saw. The first few places in the neighbourhood looked cold and uninviting. Those closest to the centre were too garishly bright. The third one back from the middle, though, that was more promising. The blues, greens and rich browns were soothing to her mind's eye. If Carm could clean up the trash around it, do something about any infestations, and scrub it up a bit, it might just suit her needs. The first thing to do was get rid of the trash keeping her from taking a closer look. With one great sweep, she brushed aside a few billion dollars worth of technology.

  ~When every satellite crashed at once, the general population stared at their blank screens, or shouted obscenities at the air. The great powers on Earth looked to the heavens and cried out in fear. ~

  That was much better. Now Carm could get a better look at the inhabitants. Since the majority of this ball was water, she checked in the centre of the largest ocean first. The diversity was impressive! Someone had done a great deal of work here to produce such a variety of life. The creatures were all shapes and sizes, all colours and patterns. Most of them were very quiet. A few were more boisterous. The most impressive, by far, were the largest. They, Carm decided, must be chief among the creatures.

  ~They sang to each other in voices full of tenderness and melancholy. A great mother nuzzled her baby and crooned to him softly. ~

  The sound lulled her senses for a moment, until one of the younger voices rose in panic. She scanned for its source.

  Oh, the folly! An island of unnatural filth marred the beauty of this ocean, some of it floating on the surface and more snaking through the water all the way down to the ocean bed. More garbage cluttered the surface, closer to the shores of great masses of land. Among the litter, a metal machine cut through the water. She watched in horror as tiny, bipedal animals scurried around the object, shouting to each other in harsh strings of sound.

  Tiny Deuses! Dammit! Carm thought she'd left all Deuses behind!

  A large arrow launched away from the machine and impaled the great mother, even as it tried to escape. Where was the creator of this world? Why wasn't it here to stop this atrocity? What were these horrible miniature Deuses?

  Carm extended her will. She removed the sharp device from the body of the gentle creature, and healed the wounded flesh. Then she created a giant wave and sent it after the death machine.

  ~The men screamed
, throwing their hands up at the face of the wave, as though they could somehow fend it off. One clung to the rail and sent up a fervent prayer. Another sketched a sign against evil into the air, even as he slid into the angry water. ~

  The machine roared toward the nearest Island. The land was cluttered with even more garbage and so many vermin that she could barely see the soil for their constructions. The wave grew with her fury. She would have it cleanse the land.

  "Stop!" The voice of a Deus cried out from behind her perception. "This is mine! You have no right to meddle with my work!"

  It had been too much to hope that this planet had been abandoned. The whole point of her relocation was to put a galaxy or two between Carm and her kin.

  "Your work is doing a fine job of ruining itself. I was just fixing things," she projected into the void of space. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of looking for him. Let him come to her. "You should be thanking me. These vermin are attacking other creatures, and they’re devastating the water and land. How long have you left this planet unattended?"

  "You are wrong, Goddess. Those vermin are my charges, given the others creatures to sustain them. You will ruin everything with your temperamental wave."

  If Carm had chosen a corporeal form yet, she'd have swallowed some part of it.

  It made much more sense, and somehow far less, when the Deus drifted into her focus area, blocking her view of the planet. His features were similar to the verminous creatures below. His hair was white, with a flowing beard the same, his eyes near-black orbs, and lightning flashed within. He had chosen a form that mimicked them; two arms, two legs, two eyes, yet he made no gesture for their salvation. Was he too weak, this Deus, to counter her?

  With a flick of her will, Carm halted the wave and smoothed the waters.

  ~One of the men cried. Another dropped to the deck, unconscious. The rest simply stared at the becalmed sea with wide eyes and slack jaws. ~

  Something was not right here. She would learn more before she intervened further.

  "What is your name, Deus?"

  "Yes." His eyes had calmed to dark brown discs, like rich, damp soil, but peppered with specks of starlight.

  "You have chosen 'yes' as a name?" He'd gone mad in his solitude, Carm decided.

  "Who's on first?" He laughed after he said it, a booming sound. It only validated her analysis.

  ~People all over the planet looked to the sky, wondering at the thunder without lightning. ~

  "What?" Carm shook her head. He made no sense.

  He laughed again and shook his mighty beard. "A silly human thing. You wouldn't understand. I'm known to them by many names, but nearly all of them mean Deus or God."

  "You call them humans, then? An odd —Wait, you chose Deus as a name?"

  The corners of his mouth turned up and his eyes flashed. "Aaah! It's been so long since I've had the company of other divinities. There is so much to tell!"

  "How can you let them destroy your world? What is your true name? How long have you been here alone?" He seemed harmless enough. A few direct answers would be worth conversation with a rogue God.

  "I've nearly forgotten..." He stared at the cloud of cosmic dust that was Carm. "Perhaps you could select a more...traditional form. There is a place where we can rest and speak of things."

  "Where?"

  "One of our many ancient homes. It's not nearly as pleasant as your domicile, I'm sure, but it was quite beautiful in its day." He moved toward the planet, his diaphanous form becoming more compact and opaque as he drew closer.

  Carm couldn't see the harm in following. As the earth drew near, she elected for a feminine version of his corporeal form, though she allowed herself three pair of arms, if only to appease her revulsion of the human creatures.

  They came to rest on the highest peak of a mountain. A long cleft in the peak, tilting up on the sides, offered a place for them to sit facing one another. The god waved his arm and clouds gathered beneath, surrounding the mountaintop in a carpet of white, obscuring the two from the world below. Carm could feel the familiar tingle of power she associated with her home on Atlantis.

  "What is this place?" She asked.

  "This was Olympus. When the gods moved the citadel to Atlantis, they took much of the peak with it to form the Island of Atlantis, far from the reach of humankind. Eventually—"

  "But Atlantis is not an Island!"

  "Perhaps not where it rests now." One corner of his mouth pulled back in a half-grimace and he tilted his head down to look at her from beneath scruffy brows, drawn together.

  Carm was in no mood to be chastised by the god. "Well? Go on, then, if you must make an epic tale of it!"

  He continued to stare for a moment, before taking up his tale again. "When the gods grew weary of playing with their human toys—" He stopped speaking to stare at her again. This god must have seen her rolling her eyes, "—they withdrew the citadel to a place across the seas. They lived there quietly for a time, but eventually the humans began to travel farther, and the risk of discovery was too great. It took the combined power of all of the Gods to send Atlantis to the part of the universe you know as your home. Some bits remain; the humans call it the Bermuda Islands. To this day, when even belief in even gods is rare, superstition lingers around that remnant of our last Earthly home."

  "So, this is Orbis Terrarum, Gaia Soporatus!" Carm ignored his glare. "Ludum relictus."

  "Yes. Earth, the dormant goddess Gaia, and the abandoned game, just as you say. I see my absent kin still cling to much of the human Latin."

  "It is a human language, Latin?"

  "Yes. The Gods adopted it." He nodded as he spoke.

  "Yet I understand your words, though they are not Latin."

  "It's a quality of the gods. We always comprehend one another."

  "Who are you? You speak of the gods as kin, yet all of them are on Atlantis, aside from Gaia, and —" Something in her memory tickled the back of her tongue. "Prometheus!"

  "That was my name once, yes. Now, young goddess, what is yours?"

  "Carmaterdea" She stretched the word out slowly to give him the pronunciation. It sounded like Carm-mate-er-dee-ya.

  The Gods brows drew together again. "Hmm...'karma is an Indian concept. Mater for mother. Dea for goddess.' Your mother had great plans for you. Which goddess birthed you?"

  She looked to the rock between them. "My mother is Justitia."

  "Ah, that explains your indignation and sense of righteous justice." He nodded, his mouth turning up in a half-smile. "But I asked who birthed you."

  This god was too clever by far. Carm raised her head and searched his strange eyes. "Vesta." She had the satisfaction of seeing his brows raise and his mouth fall open for a moment.

  "The virgin goddess has broken chastity? Now that is news!" His expression was inscrutable, now. "Birthed by Vesta, raised by Justitia." He seemed to be talking to the air, but his gaze returned to her with an intensity that made her assumed skin tingle. "Which god fathered you?"

  "None!" She knew, even as she spat the word through clenched teeth, that he would see through her.

  "Fine. It's no surprise that many of the gods are horrible fathers. Which conceived you, then?" He asked

  Carm fought down anger. She had come here to escape such things. This was to be her new existence, far from the control of the other deities and the animosity of her mother. Gaia, however, intrigued her. She had an overwhelming desire to reclaim and reawaken the most ancient Goddess of all. If she left now, she would never find the means to wrest her from the power of Prometheus.

  "Saturn. Saturn conceived me on his virgin daughter, an unwanted child on an unwilling goddess." The words came with anger, no matter how she fought to contain it.

  "Ah, youngling! Has he cast you out of Atlantis to assuage his conscience, then?" His voice was soft now, as well as his eyes, but forks of lightning raced through the darkening clouds at their feet. He knew the gods well. Rape was not uncommon amongst them.

/>   "Saturn has no conscience." The venom was palpable. He would ask, she knew. Better to simply tell him, now. "I left to prevent war among the goddesses. Vesta would have cast me away at birth, but for Justitia. Venus and Trivia championed Justitia's petition to adopt and raise me to maturity. Vesta has yet to forgive them. Saturn disregarded me until I reached that maturity." She paused, trying to decide whether to tell him the rest. An earthly hour passed in silence. The god waited, unmoving, and she knew he was waiting for her to finish.

  "I left, to keep him from repeating his barbarism." She said.

  He reached for her, and she slapped him away. "Do not touch me! No god will ever touch me!" The cloud carpet began to swirl around the mountaintop, a pseudo-tornado her fury called into being.

  "Calm, youngling. I offer comfort, not harm. I am sorry. My brother and his children are—"

  "Don't. I want nothing from any god, certainly not pity."

  "Nothing? Would you condemn me with the others? Me, the one divinity who never abandoned this game? The one who remained behind to protect our many creations?"

  She could feel her jaw tensing. "Chiefly the humans. Why?"

  "Such difficult questions you ask. I'd forgotten how thirsty the young are for enlightenment." He laughed then, and the stone beneath them trembled.

  Carm pursed up her lips and rolled her eyes, but she was grateful for the levity. "So, enlighten me."

  "We would be here for centuries if I explain it all, child. All the while, the humans are suffering for your curiosity. A moment, if you please?"

  The god closed his eyes, and she felt power radiate from him. When he opened them again, he was smiling.

  "What have you done?"

  "I've restored what you so casually destroyed and cleansed the memory from the minds of the humans. That one swipe of your power created chaos worthy of Eris. The economic structure collapsed, causing riots, looting, murder... It has become a very complex and delicate world. I've left it unmanaged too long, and your ham-handedness did far too much damage to leave it unchecked."