The first level was a simple square shape, with windows and doors. The second was perfectly round, and the third was a perfect triangle. The fourth was a long, thin rectangle, barely high enough for one of the Abcurses to stand in, but long enough to fit a crowd. It was difficult to tell the shapes of the others, beyond the long platform, but I could count eight levels in total.
“Holy god-balls,” I breathed out, taking in the beautiful monstrosity.
“God-balls?” Siret questioned, pulling me toward the residence. “Why not, I guess. Try not to touch anything, Sienna likes her pranks and illusions, even if they’re at the expense of someone losing a hand.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“She’s not a very nice goddess. A god once tried to feed one of her longnecks—” he motioned to one of the pink bird statues out the front of her residence. It had a long, slender neck, topped by a tiny, mean-looking face with a sharp orange beak. “He thought the bird was real,” Siret continued, pushing open the door and pulling me into the first level. “It grew a giant snapper jaw and took his arm clean off. There was blood everywhere. I’ve never seen Sienna more pleased by anything. She couldn’t stop laughing. When people started slipping over the blood, I thought she would piss herself.”
I snorted, but quickly tried to mask it. That was not funny, not even a little bit. Except for the part where—
“Nope,” Siret broke into my thoughts. “There was nothing funny about it. I was having a perfectly decent night until that happened. The gods didn’t know what to do with all the blood—metals and such are usually unable to pierce our skin, unless we’ve been severely weakened by Minatsol. Sienna had to especially enchant the prank with some of Death’s magic so that it would break the barrier of our skin and draw blood. Everyone was freaking out about it. They all tore their robes off, but kept getting covered in blood. I think she must have come up with some kind of bleeding enchantment because I’m sure that amount of blood was unnatural.”
I was standing still in the middle of the room, Siret two steps ahead, tugging on my arm. He turned around when he realised I wasn’t walking, and took in my expression.
“That’s disgusting,” I finally said. “No wonder you didn’t want to touch me. I’m a maniac. A freaking blood-crazy maniac.”
“Technically, Sienna is a blood-crazy maniac,” he corrected me. “You’re just … a normal maniac.”
I shook my head to dislodge the images in my brain, casting my eyes about the room. The inside looked very similar to the outside: random and weird trinkets and pieces of furniture placed carelessly about. Different coloured robes had also been discarded here and there, some of them torn and some of them folded. Plates of food had been left out, and many many pitchers of drink were standing at one of the tables. The room was also devoid of people, just as the outside had been.
“Is everyone at the meeting already?” I asked, as we headed for the stairs.
“Yes, that’s why Aros needed to leave immediately.”
We climbed up to the second level, but Siret quickly stepped in front of me before I could clear the top stair, blocking my view of the room.
“What have you done?” he asked, his voice weirdly toneless.
“It wasn’t me,” Aros’s voice answered, before I could open my mouth. “I found her like this.”
I tried to push past Siret, but he was faster, tucking me behind him again. I was just about to make another escape attempt when his story from earlier came back to me, forcing me to hesitate.
“Oh gods,” I stopped, taking a step backwards. “There’s blood everywhere, isn’t there?”
“Let her see,” Aros spoke up, as Siret turned to face me. “She’s as much a part of this as we are.”
“She’s not,” Siret replied, his eyes on me, a frown weighing heavily at the sides of his perfect mouth. “She didn’t know what she was getting into, she didn’t know what stealing the cup would mean.”
These were too many riddles for me, so I sidled closer to Siret, plastering a confused look over my face, and then quickly slipped past him, evading the arm that he shot out to catch me. I paused after clearing the top step, shock forcing me to lock into place. There was a woman sitting in a wide, high-backed chair, a set of chains binding her wrists and ankles. Her hair was long and shiny, an ebony curtain that fell over her front to tickle her lap. Her skin was sickly pale, her eyes wide and unseeing.
“Is she d-dead?” I stuttered, when the goddess made no movement. “I mean, dead…er?”
“Worse,” Aros replied, the same frown on his face as the one marking Siret. “Her soul has been separated, locked into torment in another realm.”
“What realm? Minatsol?”
“Not a realm in the sense of another world, as you know Minatsol and Topia to be,” Siret began to explain, stepping up beside me, “but more like a pocket of existence where only bad things exist.”
“Like hell?” I flicked my attention from Sienna to Siret, to Aros, and back again. My horror over this situation was a slow build, starting somewhere in the base of my stomach and slowly travelling to my mind.
This wasn’t good.
A goddess was dead.
Goddesses weren’t supposed to die. They were supposed to be undead, immortal.
“Not quite like the myth of hell.” Aros stepped to my other side, his fingers reaching through mine, locking our hands together strongly. “It’s a prison-realm where things get trapped, and because they’re trapped, they’re in torment. There’s nothing there but torment and the inability to escape it. That’s where her soul is, and once it’s been sent there, we can’t get it back. She’s as good as gone.”
“But gods can’t die,” I spluttered, panic building. This wasn’t a good sign for me. This meant that I could die again—probably would die again.
“Not without the assistance of Crowe—the God of Death, or the Creator,” Siret agreed, motioning toward the chains that bound Sienna.
I glanced down, noting the dark metal, the tiny inscriptions that covered each link.
“But Crowe helped her with pranks.” I sounded petulant, upset about people and relationships I had never even encountered. Crowe and Sienna were supposed to be friends. Friends didn’t send their friends’ souls into torment realms. It should have been the first rule of friendship.
“You’re actually right.” Siret bent down to inspect the shackles. “They were friends, and they have been for hundreds of life-cycles. It would have taken something significant to turn Death against her.”
“The cup,” Aros actually sounded panicked. “Rau figured it out, somehow.”
“We need to check the vault,” Siret agreed, standing and taking my arm.
Without further warning, the room was disappearing around me and I was being pulled from the platform and into a dark space flickering with the barest hints of orange light. The ground was smooth beneath my feet, but the air felt heavier. I could feel the two guys pressing in against me from either side, and when they started moving toward the light, I followed alongside them. As our surroundings became more illuminated, I started to realise that we were in some sort of cave again—I recognised the dank, heavy feeling of the air. It was a different sort of cave to the others, though. This one was coated in marble, with flat marble floors and a marble ceiling. The walls were still stone, but they had been treated in some way, turning them smooth and shiny, almost giving them a shimmer. Alcoves had been cut into the stone walls to house torches, with each alcove appearing closer together the further in we travelled. Aros stopped at a bench set beneath one of the alcoves, our tunnel now well-lit, and bent to work one of the planks loose from the seat, pulling it up and out. There was a tiny compartment set beneath that plank, with a single golden key laying inside.
“Sienna is a little dramatic at times,” Siret explained, as we followed Aros further down the hallway to a set of vaults set into the stone wall.
He moved to the last one, but the key dropped from his h
and before we even reached it. The door was hanging open by an inch. He pulled it wide, spilling light into the shadowy depths. Inside, there was a blade set into a holder, propped up so that it looked as though it were standing on its own tip.
“Fucking Rau,” Aros growled, his body lined with tension.
“The cup is gone?” I was pretty sure it was gone, since Aros was standing in front of a cup-less vault, saying ‘fucking Rau’, but I needed clarification before I could get angry.
“Yes,” Siret confirmed.
“Fucking Rau,” I growled, before pausing for a click. “How do we know that Rau did this?”
Aros was still staring at the knife. “This is a message. He thinks you’re dead, not undead, just plain dead. He wants revenge.”
“Why does he need to torture Sienna and steal the cup to get revenge? Why does he need revenge on you five at all?”
“He knows we care about the cup—otherwise why would we have snuck back into Topia to steal it? Why would we have taken this much effort to hide it? And he clearly thought that torturing Sienna to get it would be a good message to send us.”
“But why does he need revenge on you five? Cyrus is the one who killed me.”
“Under his apparent orders. He wanted you dead so that you would join him. You died, but didn’t join him.”
“And that’s … your fault?” I was confused.
“The curse was meant for us. You got in the way and were somehow affected by it.” Aros slammed the vault door and moved back to me. “We treated you as one of our own from then on. We protected you, treated you as something special, something precious. We basically told him that the curse succeeded in turning you into the Beta, as it was supposed to turn one of us into the Beta. We fooled him—not deliberately, but I am sure this is how he’s twisted it. We made him believe that you were the Beta, we made him turn his attention to you while we stole the cup and hid out on Minatsol, and it was all for nothing. He has no Beta, and we’re back in Topia. We’re no longer weak enough to infect with another curse. His whole plan has been ruined, and it’s our fault. Now he wants revenge.”
Aros shook his head, his hand lifting up as though he would touch my cheek, but he dropped it again, his eyes moving up to Siret’s, over my shoulder. “Can we have our girl back now? Whoever did this is going to know that Sienna shouldn’t be at the gathering.”
Siret didn’t answer with words, but I could feel his fingers on the back of my neck, and the trickle of his magic passed through me. I didn’t need to pull my hands up before my face to make sure that I was a healthy, golden-brown again. I could feel how my two guys suddenly pressed closer, how their hands suddenly reached for me and their heat suddenly surrounded me. It was the only confirmation that I needed. I was me again.
Four
I was seduction personified. The meaning of seduction. Seduction was me. I was seduction.
“Make her stop,” Aros begged. “She’s going to give us up. Look at her. She keeps doing that weird thing with her hands and talking about how she’s seduction personified in her head. Nobody is going to buy that.”
“You should stop,” Siret agreed, watching me with a smile that said you really shouldn’t stop.
“Seduction,” I agreed while pointing at him, my index finger extended and my thumb sticking up: my fingers were arrows and I was shooting Seduction at him.
“It needs to stop,” Aros insisted. “She might look like me, but I do not act like that.”
In fairness, I’d never seen Aros make little arrows with his fingers and try to shoot people with Seduction, but he really should look into it, I decided.
I was high on the power of looking like the Seduction God. We had decided that the best way to disguise me would be to leave one of the guys behind and have me appear as them. Aros had opted to stay behind, and Siret had given me his form. And his ego.
“Okay fine, I’m finished playing,” I lied. “We can go now.”
“She’s lying. You need to keep an eye on her,” Aros warned, as Siret took my arm.
He held me as though he didn’t really know how to touch me, just like when I had been disguised as Sienna.
“I’ll behave,” I promised, as Siret shook his head.
A moment before we disappeared, I made sure to shoot Aros with my Seduction finger-arrow one more time, and I caught his grimace just before the marble cave melted from view. We appeared at the very back of yet another marble platform, with pillars set along each of the square sides to cage us in. The pillars were so high that I had trouble actually seeing where they ended and where the clouds began.
The marble of this platform was shot through with maroon and blue colours, but the platform was otherwise bare of foliage or decoration, barring the display at the other end. It seemed to be a procession of statues, each one almost several stories high, made from the same blue and maroon marbled stone as the platform itself. The statues, I saw, were of eleven faintly-recognisable figures—Staviti in the middle, with a woman on his right, and a man I recognised as Abil on his left. I turned my attention back to the statue of the woman again, realising that it was Pica, looking just as she had when I’d seen her in the walls of the pantera cave that Leden had taken me into. There were eight more figures in total, off to the sides of the statues of Pica and Abil, respectively—three more women and five more men, including Rau, who was on the far left side, facing away from the others.
The Original Gods: all ten of them, with their creator, Staviti.
There was a raised marble dais directly beneath the statue of Staviti, elevating a man over the heads of the gods and goddesses that had gathered on the platform. I assumed that it was Staviti, even though I couldn’t see him very clearly. He was wearing white robes that had the same pattern of marbled blue and maroon that I could see everywhere.
He was so important that he got three colours.
“How will we find the others?” I attempted to ask quietly. I wasn’t used to my new voice yet, so it came out as a growl instead of a whisper.
Siret turned to look at me with raised eyebrows. “Quit growling at me. Can you feel them nearby?”
I closed my eyes, trying to feel for the connection that bound me to the Abcurses. It flickered there, on and off, muddled—possibly because of Siret’s Trickery coating my body, or possibly because of the press of people all around us.
“I think they’re over here somewhere,” I growled again.
Siret sighed. “Okay, lead the way.”
I started to move through the crowd, but I slowed down when I realised that I wasn’t jostling anybody. People were moving out of the way for me. People were … oh shit, they’re staring at me. I glanced down at my hands, but they were still strong, perfect golden man-hands.
Did Siret give me a girl-head?
“Didn’t give you a girl-head,” he muttered from behind me. “You still have Aros’s head, keep walking, Soldier.”
Well then why is everyone—oh. Oh.
“Seduction,” I growled, shooting a nearby goddess with my Finger Arrow of Seduction.
She seemed a little unsteady on her feet, having to lean against the woman next to her for support. I thought that was hilarious, so I took aim and shot my Finger Arrow of Seduction again, at the next woman, adding a wink for good measure. She giggled, swaying on her feet.
“Quit that,” Siret complained, reaching over me to slap down my weapon.
I didn’t get a chance to fight about my right to seduce whoever I wanted to because as soon as I opened my mouth, I caught sight of Rome. I motioned to Siret and started walking faster, making my way over to the others, just as the masses of people around us began to quieten—Staviti must have been making some kind of motion up on the dais.
Rome glanced over and caught my eyes as I neared. He moved past me without pause, and then past Siret next, and then beyond us, searching for someone. Me, presumably. Or Sienna.
“Which one is she?” he asked me, as I pulled up at his side. The othe
rs—Adeline, Abil, Coen, and Yael—were quiet, waiting for my response. No other person had joined our huddle, and Rome seemed to notice that, because his eyes grew dark, narrowing. “Where is she?”
“Right here,” I growled out, raising my hand.
“Rocks?” Yael asked, staring at me with slight disgust in his features.
“Seducti—” I began to answer, but Siret cut me off, quickly capturing my finger-arrows before I had a chance to shoot them.
“That’s her,” he assured the others. “Seduction stayed behind. I’ll have to fill you in later.”
“No more talking.” Adeline’s voice was cool, calm, but it held a warning. “He will hear.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was, because she turned to the dais immediately after her warning, and the robed man began to speak.
“My children.” His voice projected clearly, his arms splayed out wide in a welcoming posture. He didn’t look exactly like I had expected, despite the statues I had seen of him. His forehead was broader, and the statues had given him lines of age and wisdom that didn’t exist. His lips were also broad, stern, unsmiling. His hair was dark, kept short enough to tame any wayward curls.
“My fellows!” he boomed. The second greeting suggested a distinction between the collection of immortals, but I couldn’t tell where the distinction was, until Staviti bent his head in a nod directed at a specific woman.
She was ethereal, draped in magenta robes, a crimson veil covering her curls. She nodded back to him, her eyes cool. She seemed like a contradiction: both regal and delicate, precious and cold. It was Pica; the Goddess of Love.
“I have called this gathering to announce that the sols able to pass into godhood have become an endangered species. Over the life-cycles, less and less of the mortals have been able to ascend to Topia. They grow strong—strong enough to take their place in this heavenly realm—but fewer and fewer have proven themselves able to pass through. Their strength flees in the immortalisation process. I fear that the overpopulation of Topia has left no room for further ascension. There are no new lesser god positions available anymore, which means the god-positions we have now are the only ones we will ever have in Topia.” He paused, briefly but dramatically. “There has never been a third—only a God and their Beta, never a third with the same energy. This leads me to believe that the only way for a sol to successfully ascend to Topia now would be for a Beta to die and free up their position—”
Strength Page 5