The Awakening of the Gods (Forgotten Ones)

by M. H. Hawkins

  “Yes,” said someone behind her. “Much better, a small condolence for your disappointment. I mean, killing a god—especially the god of death—and not getting any of the fringe benefits… the nerve of him. I mean, you kill him, and all you got to show for it is…. What? This? The kingdom of the netherworld and this lovely tower filled with power—Sorry, monsters. I meant to say that it was filled with monsters.”

  Lilly didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. But she did need to roll her eyes, so she did that instead of turning around. “Azazel,” she said, her voice ripe with irritation. “You’re still here?”

  “Obviously,” Azazel said, stepped next to her. “Yeah, I am still here. Figured that I’d enjoy the, ah… change of ownership. Least while I can, you know.” Azazel gave her a snide, fleeting smile then followed her gaze, to wherever Lilly’s darting eyes were wondering at the moment. But with the exception of a silent glare that was loud and clear, Lilly didn’t say a thing.

  Azazel chuckled. His jet-black wings shot out of his shoulder and flashed behind him—like giant crow wings—then fell limply behind him and shifted into a shiny black cloak. “Do you think it’ll be difficult?” He said, observing Lilly’s missing arm. Then he quipped, “I mean, if you’re planning on raising Babylon, don’t you think it’ll be hard? You know, raising a whole city, a kingdom… with only the one good arm. I mean, I imagine raising an ancient city would be difficult enough on its own, but raising it with just the one arm… That seems like it’d be significantly harder, don’t you think?” To himself, he added, “Well, with just had the one arm I’d imagine lifting anything would be considerably more difficult—‘least twice as difficult, at least. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Lilly responded with another cold, silent glare. “I am already regretting releasing you. And yes, despite only having the one good arm, I plan on being just as successful in my goals. Now are you finished pestering me?”

  “Almost,” Azazel answered with a big shit-eating grin. “Have you decided where to start?”

  “Yes, but unfortunately I am still not at full power. And as you have so observantly and eloquently pointed out, I only have the one good arm. So my plans have been delayed for the time being… somewhat.”

  Fidgeting about, Lilly’s empty shoulder socket was itching again—itching something fierce. This time she didn’t scratch it. Hoping to avoid any more of Azazel’s snarky comments, Lilly showed some restraint; she did the best she could. But it was itching, so bad. After some fidgeting, she finally gave in and scratched it, and it felt better than drinking ice water in the middle of July. And it felt good enough that Lilly was able to ignore Azazel’s smirking and his snorts of condescension.

  “But, Azazel,” she huffed, “regardless of my missing appendage, I have other things that I can get started on. And I don’t need to raise Babylon, not yet at least. Haven’t you heard? The Chinese built cities—big, empty cities… move-in ready. And while I’m sure that they didn’t build them for me, I can still put them to good use all the same. And they’ll do, for now—there or somewhere else. I’ll figure it out.”

  Azazel gave her a puzzled look. Empty cities? China?

  “What?” Lilly snapped at him. “It was in Time (magazine). Azazel, instead of sitting around and mustering up these glib comments of yours, perhaps your time would be better spent educating yourself. Read something, for god’s sake.”

  “Oh, I have read plenty, but I must have missed that issue. You know, since I’ve been locked up for the past few months.”

  Lilly shrugged, but she knew what he was hinting at. The strictures, the prophecy, the Cleansing. “Yes, I imagine that you have read your fair share of books. Do you remember the last Cleansing—not the great flood, the real one, before the flood.”

  “Remind me.”

  “Well… this—what we’re doing here, it’s only the beginning. The mortals, they imagine that the world will end quickly. One, two years tops—a decade max. But in reality, Cleansings takes much longer to process—much, much longer. They’re cycles for god’s sake. I mean, we’re transforming an entire reality. That take time. So yeah, it takes a little longer than a decade. Eh, it varies from cycle to cycle, but I imagine that this one will take… fifty, sixty years. At the very least.”

  “Fifty-sixty years?” said Azazel, incredulously. “Why don’t I…”

  “Remember?” Lilly stepped away from the black hole (in the center of the stone tower) and ascended the great spiral staircase that wrapped around the outside of the hole. Lilly was moving at a brisk pace, and Azazel knew that he would have to chase after her if he wanted answers. So he shook his head, dashed up the stairs, and did just that. “Hey! Lilly! Wait up.”

  “I mean,” Lilly said, continuing on with her story. “Fifty-sixty years, that’s just an estimate. I think the last one took a little over two century to finish—from soup to nuts. Two or three centuries, who can remember.”

  “Lilly,” Azazel huffed and jogged up the stairs a little faster, still trying to catch up as she continued charging up the stairs at a strangely quick pace. It was only when Lilly stepped off the spiraling staircase and onto another stone-bricked floor of the tower—which was identical to the one they were just standing on and identical to every other floor in the whole damned place—that Azazel was finally able to catch up to her. “Lilly! Hey, stop, wait. Why are you telling me this? Why don’t I remember?”

  Lilly huffed dramatically then flicked him in the forehead. “Because, dummy, you haven’t slept. Why do you think the gods sleep? Because we’re tired? Because we need a nap? No, we sleep to recharge, to reenergize, to remember. But you… no, you want to go out and rebel against heaven, Elysium. And then you want to go on and get your wings ripped out of your back, get cast out of your home, and then… Oh, and then, you just go on and decide to just… quit. You just quit and decided to go out, walking the earth, pouting like… some depressed, boring version of Caine.” Noticing Azazel’s confused, slowly twisting face; Lilly huffed and her shoulders sagged. Seriously? Annoyed that she had to elaborate, she said, “Caine! Caine? From Kung-Fu? The TV show? I mean, not the one that killed his brother or whatever.” Azazel still had a blank look on his face. He shrugged, and Lilly let out a dramatic frustrated sigh again. “Caine? Never mind.”

  Lilly huffed again, shook her head, and continued on with her rant. “Oh, but that’s not even the worst. Your sister Mea, she goes off and does… whatever the hell it is that she does—just to screw with me. And the Dark One, aside from doing… all this, he just goes off and spends the last x-amount of eons harvesting souls. That was until he decided to just call it quits too and decides to go on and punch out of his time-clock permanently. Then he just runs off, chasing after your sister like a lost puppy.”

  “Until you killed him,” said Azazel, sounding indifferent.

  “Yes, until I killed him. I killed your buddy, Vincent Blackwell. So?” Lilly huffed and threw her one good arm in the air. “And you wonder why you can’t remember. Not sleeping, all those emotions bouncing around inside that tiny skull of yours, I’m surprised you’re even upright, at all. You know, First Seven or not, I’m kinda surprised you didn’t end up the same way as the lesser gods… you know: once gods, now monsters, and all that. All… slack-jawed, clawed, and covered in scales and fur. You got lucky.”

  Lilly huffed yet again and put her hand on Azazel’s shoulder. “Look,” she sighed. “The mortals have come a long way. They’ve progressed, a lot. They fight diseases, drive cars, fly like the birds do. They can watch stories on those little metal bricks of theirs. They capture memories in pieces of paper… and then store them away and never look at them again, but anyways… The mortals have spent the last one-two millennia creating and seeing miracles beyond their belief—beyond their wildest imaginations… and now they’ll spend the next two enduring horrors beyond belief… especially once the Beast and the Dragon awaken.”

  “Yeah, them.” Azazel’s voice was low and seriou
s, and his jokes were gone, almost gone. “Maybe one of them can get you a new arm.”

  “Yeah, maybe they could, but that won’t be necessary. Like I said, I have other plans.”

  “Other plans? Yes, I could see that.” Azazel waved his hand in the air and a green flame puffed out of nowhere and hovered above his open palm. “And you certainly have the resources.”

  As he tossed the emerald fireball into the black hole, the flickering green flames lit up each floor in in flashing green lights as the fire fell from his hand. And the light revealed the tower’s infestation of banshees.

  Floor by floor, as the green flame fell and shed light on the seemingly infinite number of stone floors and pushed back the shadows, the flickering lights revealed that each floor was filled with banshees, thousands of them—all standing tall, in their tattered black dresses, gathered around the deep black hole. And all of them were patiently waiting for Lilly to command them.

  “Resources?” Lilly smiled. “Yes, I have plenty of resources—and you still have a job to do, don’t you? A condition of your early parole.”

  “Yes… yes, I do,” Azazel reluctantly agreed. “Now I’m off to murder my sister’s family. Good luck growing a new arm.” Azazel winced at her then took a step back. Looking up at the crimson sky above him, he spun around until his black cloak stretched out and spun away from him and around him.

  His spinning black cloak turned into two sheets of midnight feathers. Flaring out behind him like spread-out crow wings, they slammed down, and Azazel blasted into the sky. Spiraling through the air above Lilly, she watched him disappear into the crimson sky above the stone tower.

  Above the tower, a plethora of black dots scattered and danced around in the sky. Aroused by Azazel ascension, they buzzed around the opening of the stone tower and through the crimson sky before again settling down on the tower’s stone rim, where they were previously perching, before they were disturbed. Though they dared not attack Azazel or enter the stone tower, they had no problem perching atop it like common crows. Reapers, ravens, Lilly knew, Blackwell’s lackeys.

  In a low, monotone voice, she smiled and said, “Your master is dead. You are all free, free to roam the underworld… forever. But if I were you, I’d flee. I’d fly away—far away from here… before you end up as dead as your master is.”

  Seemingly too low for them to hear, they seemed to understand all the same. And with a flutter of flapping black wings, they all scattered away like a frightened flock of crows. Lilly licked her lips and smiled even wider. “An excellent choice.” Solemnly pausing, deep in thought, she huffed then said, “Well, guess it’s time to go out and find a new arm.”

  CH 7: Back to Good

  Mea stood across the street of her childhood home and stared up at the apartment complex that she grew up in. Flashing in front of a lit up window, she could see her mother pacing through their incredibly tiny kitchen. For the past four days, since Mea had disappeared, her mother had done nothing but nervously look for her while also waiting for her return.

  It had only been four days—one day since she returned and since she visited Fenrir, but Mea certainly didn’t feel like herself. And her feet felt like bricks that were glued to the concrete sidewalk. She couldn’t go home, not yet.

  While her mother worried, Mea’s little brother Ryan didn’t. Seeming to know more than he should, her little brother had no doubt that she’d be back.

  Her mother was a different story. Diana sat up nervously each night and stared out the window, hoping that her daughter would return. Her days were spent checking the Internet for missing persons and calling the police for updates. And eventually her nerves got the best of her, and she reverted back to an old bad habit, biting her nails. And the habit returned with a vengeance. Diana’s nails became nothing but gnawed-down stubs with split and wounded edges. And it was only when Diana’s gnawing drew blood that she moved on to another fingernail.

  As much as Diana hated to admit it, the pain helped to relieve her nerves. Her daughter, her first-born, was missing. The pain from her injured fingernails was nothing compared to the other pain she felt, a pain no mother should have to endure. Still Diana did just that. She endured.

  And now… her missing daughter was standing just forty feet away from her home, a short walk away from washing away her mother’s pain. A minute’s walk to the front door and a minute away from healing her mother’s broken heart.

  Mea still hadn’t moved. She couldn’t. Four days, an eternity.

  While it was only four days for mortals, it felt like a decade to her. In the other realms, heaven and hell, time blurs. Years shorten to minutes, and days become an eternity. And her journey had turned Mea into an old soul—a colder, darker one.

  Staring up at the window of the Harris’s apartment, she watched as her mother passed by the window again. And when Diana looked out of the window, Mea found herself turning away and shielding her face, hiding from her mother’s painful, searching gaze—fearing that she might give her mom some sort of false hope.

  She thought of what Lilly had told her. “Once you shed your skin and return to your natural form, them—the family that you currently love so much, they will become nothing more than an old, withered, weathered memory.” Since Lilly had said them—those words, they had seared themselves into her memory. A painful scar, an ominous omen.

  And since she returned, Mea feared that Lilly was right. Being away, away from the mortal realm, away from her family, changed things. When Mea returned, everything was different. The world seemed less bright, duller and dimmer; and she wondered: what if my love for my family had dulled as well? It was a frightening question with a potentially painful answer. Truly she didn’t know how she felt. Her journey had put more than a few miles on her soul. She now felt more disconnected and lost in the world than ever before.

  How did she even escape? Pinned to the wall of that high-rise penthouse, Lilly’s venom burned like hot grease inside her, as it pumped through her veins. She shouldn’t have been able to get away.

  Her memory was broken, and the parts she did remember were fuzzy. Nodding off while hanging from that wall, she remembered seeing a large shadow. Two golden moons. They blinked. A sliding wall of teeth. Black scales. More black scales, closer. The lightning—behind the clouds, behind the two golden moons. It was silent, the lightning—and bright, and she could almost feel the electricity from it as it wrapped around her. The black wall of scales and the lightning neared. Talons the size of her forearm waved past her face and scraped her against the wall then scraped her off it, wings first and gentler than she thought possible.

  Then it happened. Mea fell limply into a sea of darkness, and the shadows swallowed her. They—it—wrapped her in a blanket of darkness, warm darkness. She slid her hand over one of the midnight-scales then grabbed onto it edge. It felt like a vinyl dashboard, she remembered as much. The quilt of black, soft-leathery patches curled around her, and she was so very tired, and drugged, and she found herself tightly snuggling into the quilt of shadows.

  How long had she slept? She did not know.

  The sound of gusting wind and the feeling of lighter breezes whipping across her face and through her hair, arousing her.

  Then it finally stopped. The giant shadow laid her down on a flat bed of rock, brown stones sprinkled with pebbles. Lilly’s poison was still coursing through her veins and scorching her heart with each ventricle heartbeat. And everything was blurry, and Mea nodded off again. This time, the sound of rushing waters, a waterfall, woke her.

  Pellets of water, the cool, refreshing mist, and the smell of moss shook her awake and aroused her senses. Through dilated pupils, she watched the shadows dissolve with an early, red, rising sun, barely peeking over a long range of warm mountains that were the color of freshly baked bread.

  A soft, familiar voice washed over her—a beautiful melody. “It’s okay, Mea. You’re safe, but don’t try to move. You’ll have to wait for the venom to run its course.”


  A woman’s voice, the voice of a girl; a voice that was too familiar. It reminded her of when Azazel had kidnapped her. Wow, she thought. So harsh and so brutal, it seemed like a lifetime ago. Azazel, my brother… he tried to kill me. “It’s okay, Mea. Rest.”

  That voice. Even with the thick fog that was swallowing her brain and clouding her thoughts, and with her mind blurred with euphoric dreams, the voice still sent sparks up her spine. Forcing some alertness into herself, Mea squinted and forced her eyes to focus. “Anna?” she said shocked. “You’re alive?”

  Mea blinked away the blurriness and tried to rub her eyes—but her arms were jelly, limp. Still her vision cleared, and the shadows dissolved into a sunrise that painted the sky red and edged the clouds in sparkling rose gold. It was her, Anna! Slightly overweight, overly self-conscious, plain-looking, perfect Anna. Her best and only friend. “Anna, you’re alive.”

  “Alive?” Anna gave a short apologetic smile. “No, not exactly alive—Mea! Don’t move. You’re injured.”

  The warning was useless, and Mea was already stumbling onto a bended knee then, just as quickly, she was falling back down. But Mea wasn’t giving up that easy. She wobbled upwards again, like a newborn horse trying to stand for the first time. This time she succeeded… sort of. While she was upright Mea was still swaying, like she was suffering from the worst case of vertigo in the world. Mea held out hands out to her side—like she was used the air to steady her swaying.

  She found it strange that Anna wasn’t helping her and was staying a comfortable distance away from her. She kept that to herself, and Mea was just happy that she got her best friend back—ex-best friend, somehow.

  None of that mattered right now. Staring at Anna, Mea was dumbfounded. “How? I thought… I thought Azazel killed you.”