Goddess

by Liv Savell

  “Leave her alone,” Risette ordered. Maxus nodded and returned to whatever he had been doing. Risette gave Alphonse a final look and then turned away.

  Duty.

  Freedom.

  Love.

  ⥣ ⥣ ⥣

  * * *

  Considering the years and years of work they all had put into Moxous to become sanctioned healers, the ceremony was oddly anticlimactic. Their masters said a few kind things about the graduates, they all stood and swore to adhere by the healer’s standards of care, and then the Sorceress who oversaw the marking of healers came forward. She raised her hands, glimmering with power, and spoke a few words in a language nearly forgotten.

  Alphonse felt the heat at her tattoo and looked to see the other graduates staring at each other with widened eyes. Their markings were glowing gold.

  Complete. Sanctioned. Ordained. Healers of Moxous.

  They had done it.

  She had done it.

  Risette pushed through the swarm to wrap Alphonse in a hug. “The color matches your eyes, Alphonse. I think you were always destined to be a healer.”

  Alphonse was so flattered she couldn’t think of a thing to say, but it didn’t matter because the others swarmed round to hug her and Risette in congratulations.

  “We did it!”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Mine is brighter than yours.”

  Alphonse breathlessly followed as they headed to Eloise’s in celebration. Her life’s work complete.

  Now, she had only to decide what to do with it.

  ⥣ ⥣ ⥣

  * * *

  The western gate of Dailion was the fourth branch of Ingola’s largest crossroad. It was filled with crowds of people streaming into the city or out along one of the three branching paths. South, towards her family’s village. West, towards the coast and Port Carcarac. North, towards Thloegr. The Wildlands. Enyo.

  Delyth.

  Alphonse stood to one side as she looked at each path.

  Duty. South. To her family’s village that was so small, it couldn’t be found on a map. It didn’t have a name aside from “home.” To a quiet, simple life. A life dictated by the laws of nature. The crops and seasons would tell her when to rise, when to sleep. When to work hard, when to wait, when to pray and when to celebrate. She would see her sisters again, likely mothers already and good wives. Good women. She would see her mother and father, hold them close and cherish the kindness they had raised her with. They had a steadfast resolution in what was right, what was wrong, and how one ought to conduct themselves. She would see Henri and marry him. Her family would be happy and stable due to the union. The village would prosper because it would have a healer. She would make her family and herself proud.

  But…

  West… To a brand new life. With friends. With no expectations besides perfecting the art of healing. No rules. No limits. She could simply be. And discover what it was to be Alphonse. Not the prude. Not the Vassal. Not the raging, fire-wielding Goddess. It was exhilarating and terrifying to think about. No one would look at her and see a Mother Agathi follower, a wife or a mother or a daughter. Or a survivor of something truly terrible. No one would pity her or look down on her.

  Or cherish her.

  Or leave her…

  And then, of course, there was North. North to the wildlands, ruled by hedonistic Gods and populated by people who had never embraced the quiet, ordered life Ingolans strove for. Lands overrun with torrential downpours and freak snowstorms. With creatures as fierce as their human counterparts and as old as the gods. Ingola didn’t have dragons or sea serpents.

  North. To a stoic warrior who awoke feelings within Alphonse that she had never experienced before. Who had fought for her even when all believed her lost. It was a life that might be as complicated and simple as the farm and yet incomparably different. Everything in Thloegr would be completely and utterly unknown. New.

  It was the place she’d experienced the greatest happiness and desolation.

  Love and hatred.

  Hope and fear.

  What would she possibly do in Thloegr? Become some clan medicine woman? Sell trinkets for travelers? Be Delyth’s bed-warmer?

  If Delyth even wanted Alphonse back. After all, it was because of Alphonse that Delyth was tied to Enyo forever. Because of Alphonse, Delyth would not have this choice, to choose which life she wanted. What if she was happier without the complications that Alphonse represented? What if it had all been a whirlwind romance because of the stress and fear of their journey?

  Did she hesitate from this path out of fear of Enyo? Or did she simply not wish to look back at that time in her life?

  Duty. Freedom. Love.

  South. West. North.

  It was time to make a choice.

  Trembling, Alphonse stepped off the side of the road into the flow of traffic. She couldn’t let others hold the reins any longer.

  ⥣ ⥣ ⥣

  * * *

  It had taken far longer than it should have, but Alphonse found the house she was looking for. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but the little cottage with large, airy windows and a weathered, waist-high fence was not it.

  There were creeping vines planted beneath the windows, tendrils crawling up the stones of the cottage front and towards the thatched roof. The little path was made of pavers covered in moss. Likely some back or side door was more commonly used.

  Alphonse fumbled with the gate latch, and a small set of bells chimed out, attached to a string to announce visitors. The merry sound felt jarring against the bundle of nerves that had replaced her stomach.

  The moss muffled her steps up the path, and Alphonse saw her hand was shaking as she knocked on the broad, wooden door.

  No one answered.

  Alphonse knocked again.

  Still, there was silence from within.

  With the sun setting behind her, Alphonse realized that the cottage’s owners might be out. Running an errand, tending to chores. Perhaps this was the wrong house altogether. She was about to turn away when she heard a noise out back.

  Despite herself, Alphonse eased around the side, peering across a small wooden trellis full of night-blooming flowers. The lovely scent wrapped around her. Soothing her.

  There, kneeling in the earth of the garden bed—

  “Hello,” Alphonse murmured, her musical voice soft and tentative with anticipation.

  A Note to the Reader

  For the following short story, we’ve created a playlist. We recommend listening to it while you read! Enjoy!

  Sisters Dawn & Dusk

  1820, Sixth Moon, Waning Gibbous: Brig’ian Mountains

  Delyth reached the cave at midmorning, the sun at her back and looking with her, east towards the mountains. They were the same craggy faces that she had known her whole life, but never before had she seen them from the west, in that strip of coastal plain that separated the ocean from the continent’s rocky spine. They seemed lighter, less drenched in shadow, though if that was from the rising sun or the absence of heavy memory, the warrior could not tell.

  The cave was a gaping wound in the mountain’s side, leaking blood in shining gold and silver. A dragon stemmed the flow, lying before the entrance to her lair in coils of opalescent scales that glittered in the sun she basked in.

  Ral’draig made no move as Delyth approached, but the warrior knew she had been seen. The great, blue-silver eyes followed her, a strong, winged figure carrying a satchel and a black sword strapped to her back. Delyth had never felt so small before, not even standing in the roots of the mountains. Still, she kept her shoulders straight and her eyes on the great, winged serpent. She would not be afraid.

  “Come closer.” Ral’draig’s voice was silken and purring. “No mortal has approached me so boldly in some four centuries.”

  Delyth stepped forward until she stood in a half-circle of white scales, the dragon’s body mounding around her in much the same way as the mountai
ns above the common plain. Though Ral’draig moved about her, the warrior held still, her heart hammering. She was being examined, the great head swiveling with interest.

  What would happen should she be found wanting?

  There was the brush of hard dragon scale against the skin of a wing, and then the great dragon’s eye was before her, wider than a splayed hand and slit-pupilled. The blue-silver depths seemed to writhe, to twist and billow beneath the surface. Metallic and restless. Clouds one moment. Mountains the next.

  Delyth did not breathe but stared into the eyes, shoulders tense. She would not flinch away. Minutes passed thusly, woman and beast locked in some silent exchange.

  Then, Ral’draig blinked and lifted her great head away.

  “You are more magnificent, Dawn Dragon, than even the finest stories profess.” The warrior was proud when her voice did not shake or stutter, but the dragon merely snorted.

  “Why have you come, little sister?”

  Little sister.

  Something warm in the pit of Delyth’s stomach bloomed. She was as much kin to the great dragon as she was any human, and the knowledge mingled with her awe and reverence for Ral’draig.

  Let all those who had scorned her see her now.

  Little sister to dragons.

  Delyth swallowed back her pride and answered solemnly. “I have been sent by the Goddess Enyo to trade for something she desires.”

  A ripple of arching spines passed down the dragon’s back, and she bared sword-like teeth in distaste. “You are a daughter of the Great Beast, small as you are. We do not serve.” She arched her neck, silver-blue eyes flashing white behind the curl of smoke rising from great, scaled nostrils. In the depths of her open maw, tongues of flame licked deep purple flesh.

  Delyth was running out of time.

  “I swore an oath to save someone I loved, and now I must serve.” She did not phrase it as an excuse, but rather as fact, dark and unpleasant as it was. The words tasted of smoke on her tongue, the anger behind them a burning, mephitic thing. She had managed not to remember for a while this time. To forget that she was alone and choice-less.

  The dragon hummed a breath of sulphuric air, carrying with it the odors of blood and metal. It was a mildly disappointed sound, as though she had fancied the idea of swallowing Delyth after all. “It is… good to guard what is yours, though why did you not use your teeth and claws, little sister? You smell too much of battle to be a coward.”

  “Enyo shared a body with my beloved. To attack the Goddess would have harmed her.”

  The dragon shook herself, sending a rippling pattern of reflected light dancing across the warrior in a myriad of colors. She seemed on the verge of a decision, glancing back at the cave where a black dragon slept. “And so you placed treasure above your freedom?” The great dragon’s scaled face softened the faintest amount, her scaled lid drooping. “I… We have made this mistake as well.”

  Delyth blinked in surprise. What could possibly bind the freedom of so great a creature? If anything, the dragon was freedom itself, all power and feral violence.

  “We will give you two tests, little sister, to prove that you are worthy of the bargain you seek. Now listen closely. I will not repeat myself…”

  ⥣ ⥣ ⥣

  * * *

  Delyth descended into the encampment in the blue hour, that hazy time between sunset and dusk. It was exactly as Ral’draig had described.

  The stench of piss and blood and stale ale rose from shoddy tents of poorly scraped furs. They were centered in a clearing still black with the fire used to destroy the plant and animal life that had once grown there. Half-devoured carcasses lay beside old cooking pits, wreathed in flies. Debris lay everywhere.

  In the midst of this strode some twenty men and the women they had forcibly taken from seaside villages farther south. Their faces were grime-smeared, their clothing torn. All was dirt and filth and negligence, and none more so than the leader seated in the center of the camp.

  The self-stylized Pirate King sat naked but for stained trousers, his right hand wrapped around a skein of ale, his left around the arm of a frightened girl. He was brown from prolonged exposure to the sun, his torso rippled with muscle and matted hair. He stood when Delyth landed before him and lifted a wicked ax from the dirt beside him.

  “Well, aren’t you a strange fucker?” He spat and shoved the girl away. She yelped, striking the ground. “Boys, this is why we don’t fuck animals!”

  He laughed crudely at his own joke, but the warrior made no move to respond to it. Instead, she delivered Ral’draig’s message from a face like stone. “The Dawn Dragon has heard the beasts of this land and named you a blight upon it. Some filth cannot be cleaned, but only scoured away.”

  Calamity was in her hand, its call now familiar. Her blood sang with it, and already she was rushing along that tunnel in which wind roared in her ears, and nothing was visible but the patterns of battle and dying bodies.

  She was a daughter of the great beast, and she would be a beast that night.

  “Ya hear that, men?” The pirate was still grinning. “I think it means to fight us!”

  Unsurprisingly, the Pirate King did not strike first; cowardice was a disease that always showed the same symptoms.

  Calamity whipped up, cobra-fast for all the sword’s tremendous weight, and caught the descending edge of a curving scimitar. The smaller blade skittered off towards Delyth’s hand but caught instead on the black guard. She twisted, and the scimitar went flying so that Calamity might find its owner’s unprotected heart.

  After that, time ceased to have any meaning.

  Delyth was death itself, swift and merciless. She cleaved a man’s spear arm from his body and kicked him away, to bleed in the dirt. Her next opponent lost his head on the reversal, too slow to raise his weapon in parry. A third she carved a split in, slicing down from his shoulder until his lungs parted ways and blood misted in the night air.

  It was not long before the pirates ceased to come after her, but Delyth let none escape alive. She flew after them, Calamity streaming blood behind her to sink its blade in backs and necks and skulls. By the time only the King and his stolen innocents remained living, the warrior was bathed in blood, as filthy as the men she had been sent to kill.

  She turned to face the quaking leader, at last, her chest heaving. He didn’t run, lent courage by sheer desperation. She had proven that flight was not an option. Instead, he raised his great ax and sent it crashing down towards her face.

  Only to be turned away with almost laughable ease, the ax head skipping off the flat of Calamity’s blade. Delyth kicked him to his knees, reached forward with her left hand, and gripped the haft of the ax. She placed one booted foot on the Pirate King’s chest and pulled. His strength failed, made soft by liquor and laziness. Pathetic.

  His weapon in her possession, the pirate raised his arms to protect his face, pale and quaking, but Delyth wasted no mercy upon him, scavenger, and slaver, and rapist that he was. She sent Calamity slicing through the air and took his head and hands in one fell swoop.

  The women left in the wake of the pirate’s massacre would have to find their own way home. Delyth had a dragon waiting on the Pirate King’s severed skull.

  ⥣ ⥣ ⥣

  * * *

  The following dusk, Delyth again stood before the cave, rain flattening her dark braids as she waited. Within, scales rustled against the stone floor, and there came the tinkling of gold coins and crowns sent skittering.

  Llu’draig was rising.

  When the great, black dragon reached the cave entrance, her wings were already half-lifted from her back in preparation for flight, but she took a moment to peer at Delyth through molten copper and fire eyes, letting the torrent drum against her sparkling hide.

  “My sister and I might speak for moments each day, precious seconds when we both lie half in this world and half in the Dream Realm ruled by Ruyaa. Today she has spent them telling me of a warrior looking to pr
ove herself worthy of a bargain. Well, warrior? Are you worthy?”

  Delyth bowed her head to the Black Dragon Goddess and held up a single iridescent scale, as long as her palm but tapering. “I have passed Ral’draig’s test and will take on whatever trial you present to me.”

  Llu’draig snarled viciously, shoving her great head forward. Every one of her long teeth was visible, and her talons dug into the earth.

  The warrior only just managed to keep herself from flinching back.

  You should never flinch from a dragon.

  “You did not answer my question, human.” The last word came out like an insult, dark and dirty.

  Delyth looked up and filled her lungs with sulfur-tainted air. She had dipped her hands into so much blood, so much darkness. She had chosen to take that oath in service to a Goddess she hated. Was she worthy to speak to these fearsome creatures? To stand as their equals?

  Alphonse would have thought so. But Alphonse was gone.

  The warrior gritted her teeth and met the red-gold eyes. “I am worthy, Dusk Dragon. And I will prove it by any means necessary.”

  Llu’draig gave an approving nod, the motion bringing her great dagger-toothed jaw inches from Delyth’s eyes. “You are full of anger, little sister. So am I. Even the sky above us rages tonight. We will lose ourselves in it. Come. You will fly with me.”

  The black dragon spread her wings and leaped into the air, her belly narrowing above Delyth’s head in a ripple from chest to tail, and then she was away, graceful as a dancer in flight. The warrior dropped her bag and threw herself after the dragon, trying to mimic the fluid power of her wingbeats.