by Deck Davis
“I can’t explain it. Whatever power I had…it’s like it’s not there. I’m sorry.”
Longtooth nervously scratched his whiskers. “I wasn’t going to mention that. I meant with whatever fell from the sky.”
In all the fear and excitement, he’d forgotten about that. They could have gotten away from the clinx had it not been for the ball of flames shooting across the sky, drawing the creature’s attention.
“It was a shooting star, or something like that.”
“Aye it was,” said a voice, “But it was much more than that, too.”
Papa Gully hobbled over to them. He wore a tattered robe that dragged along the ground. Gully was a magic user too, and whenever he cast a spell, which was rare, his tattered robe would glow bright with the color of whatever spell he used. His thick hair and beard were as white as Longtooth’s fur, and he walked almost bent over, as if a great weight pressed against his back.
Back on Earth, Gully would have been the kind of guy who sat on his porch chewing on tobacco, beer cans littering his feet in what grew from a pile in a mound over the course of a day. Maybe he’d shout at kids passing by, yell at them to get off his lawn even if they weren’t anywhere near it. Course, Gully wasn’t from Earth.
Gully had lived in Flink’s village so long that some people thought he was older than the forest itself, but he hadn’t been born there. He’d spent his years somewhere else on this planet, where he’d learned magic and gotten married. Now, widowed and old, he’d come on one last adventure. Shame it had ended with their ship attacked by a krecken, and them stranded on a barren island.
When he reached Longtooth he put his arm around his shoulder. He and the rat had bonded since they got to the island. Gully ached to see more of the world before Father Time decided he’d granted him enough life, but his age and his back meant he couldn’t walk far he told them, so he lived his adventures through Longtooth.
“Tell me, lad,” he said to Longtooth, “What did you see today?”
Then, he noticed the creatures stalking around the edges of camp, and he straightened into a perfect posture for a second. Charlie couldn’t help but grin; he’d noticed a while ago that Gully sometimes conveniently forgot his back problems.
“You’ve brought guests, I see. Girl, I hope your potions hold up.”
Flink glared at him. “They’ll be fine.”
“It doesn’t look fine to me, lass. I think-”
“They’ll be fine,” she growled, cutting him off.
Flink had grown up in the same village as Papa Gully, and she harbored resentment over the fact he spent most of his time criticising her and the other hunters, whilst not doing much work himself.
Charlie couldn’t be mad at the old man. He’d used his magic to help him escape from a cell Raseri, Flink’s mother, had locked him in. Charlie had a rule; anyone who helped him escape a gnome prison was okay in his book.
“Come on, guys,” he said. “Settle down. Flink’s potions are working great, but she’s running out, and I don’t think you need me to tell you what will happen when the clinxes get into camp.”
He couldn’t believe how calm he sounded. Inside, adrenaline rushed through him every time he thought of the clinxes.
“Aye, well let’s hope they hold up,” said Gully, always having to get the last word in.
“Either way, we need to get off the island. Where’s Larynk?”
“Behold, mortals,” said a voice from behind him. Charlie turned to see a figure standing atop a black rock, his skin ablaze with flames and glittering like star dust. “I am your god. Prepare to meet your fate.”
Charlie sighed. “Get off the rock and tell me you’ve crafted a ship.”
Larynk hopped off the rock. The star glitter left him, drifting like ash into the darkening sky. He swaggered toward them, grinning. Charlie had seen that too many times to mention. When Larynk wasn’t joking about something, he was being overly dramatic, and Charlie always thought he was overcompensating since he was only the god of corn and not something better.
While he couldn’t change his deity role, he could change how he looked. When Charlie had first seen Larynk, he’d appeared to him in the form of a statue of an old warrior. Much later, he’d been a small, black fox. Now, he’d settled into a more human form, except with shiny marble skin. His long fringe almost covered his eyes, and he had a perfectly shaped goatee beard on his chin. He was tall and thin, a little like a cornstalk, actually. Come to think of it, he even moved like one. When he walked, he sort of danced a little, swaying to the side like crops in the wind.
“What was that?” said Flink. “We saw it crash while we were hunting.”
Larynk brushed his shoulder, and star dust drifted from it. “Oh, you know. I was just imbibing a shooting star.”
“Imbibing a star? What the hell does that mean?”
“It means Chummilk just got in touch with me.”
“You’ve lost me,” said Charlie.
“Shooting stars are messages between gods. Like text messages on Earth. Or carrier pigeons or whatever the hell you primitive gnomes use, Flink.”
“We use paper,” said Flink. “Who is Chummilk?”
“My Arcane. My manager.”
Flink looked at him, confused.
“He’s sort of like my chief,” said Larynk.
“And he sent you a message through a star?”
“That’s right, and it isn’t exactly the news I wanted,” said Larynk, pacing. “In fact, things have gone to shit.”
“What did he say?” asked Flink.
“The demi-gods have found us. We’ve gotta leave.”
The news was a gut punch. A month earlier, Charlie, Flink, Gully, and Longtooth had gotten on board an old sailing ship with Larynk, and the god had spent the first night of their ship gulping incredibly strong whiskey and explaining how everything had gone to hell.
Or heaven, actually, if you could call it that. Larynk and the other gods - when they weren’t on their own planets - lived in the Pantheon, where they’d take care of their deital duties from afar while shooting the breeze with the other gods, getting drunk on amber whiskey, and generally goofing around.
The gods were all powerful, but below them were the demi-gods. These were either the offspring of gods who hadn’t been given their own god title yet, or mortal souls granted immortality and god-like powers for deeds they had accomplished on their own planets. Others became demi-gods not through heroism or legendary acts, but by making deals with shady gods, carrying out tasks that they didn’t want the other gods to know about.
It sounded ludicrous to Charlie at first. Not just the image of a bunch of gods scratching their balls while they screwed around in the Pantheon, but that mortals were wrapped up in it all. It made him think of all the films he’d seen and books he’d read; Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts. It couldn’t be real.
But it was all too real, Larynk told him, and one demigod in particular had turned the Pantheon upside down.
Typhoibe was the son of Gargantua, a God who had recently – four hundred years ago qualified as recent for the gods – been removed from his position as God of Anger, ironically because he had become too angry and destroyed an entire planet in a fit of rage.
Typhoibe never took his father’s removal well, and he spent centuries making alliances and poking little weaknesses in the fabric of the Pantheon. He was cunning beyond belief and had the incredible patience to let his plan fall into place piece by piece, decade by decade, until it was finally time.
When his grand scheme was ready, he made the push. Typhoibe and the gods he’d amassed on his side seized control of the Pantheon in the name of Gargantua. Some gods were too proud to join him, and others, like Larynk, were deemed too useless to bother allying with. Knowing they would soon be destroyed, they fled the Pantheon with their spheres of power, some of them returning to the planets they had created.
Charlie had felt dizzy after Larynk explained it to them. Hi
s biggest problem used to be deciding which bar to head to after work, and now he was trying to process the idea of gods and demi-gods backstabbing each other. Not only that, but his head used to hurt when he tried to understand the powerplays involved even in human politics; comprehending the games of gods was beyond him.
He’d had to place his trust in Larynk and hope that the god of corn had some kind of idea of what to do. Now, after getting his star message from Chummilk, Larynk looked worried, and that scared the hell out of Charlie.
“So that’s it, they’re coming after us?”
Larynk nodded. “With the Pantheon secured, they’re focussing on the gods who ran away.”
“Like you,” said Longtooth.
“I didn’t run, rat,” said Larynk. “I left with a plan. There’s a difference.”
“This grand plan, does it involve more than us being stuck on a rock for a month?” asked Charlie.
“We need to find the gods who fled the Pantheon. Separately, none of us can stand up to the demi-god alliance. But if we can all work with each other…well, let’s just say I need to get the band back together.”
“Then we better start by getting off this rock. We’re tired, we’re starving, and we’ve got clinxes prowling around our rapidly fading defences. Thanks, Flink, by the way,” said Charlie. “If it wasn’t for your potion, we’d be dead already.”
She blushed. “No problem, Newchie.”
“How are the repairs going, lad?” said Gully. His use of ‘lad’ was strange, given that although Larynk looked young, he was in fact dozens of millennia older than the rest of them. If only he’d act like it.
“I told you, I’m working on it.”
“I don’t get it,” said Charlie. “You’ve been saying that for a month now. You had us collect all the debris that washed into shore, and you said you’d turn it into a boat. What gives? There’s enough wood for two boats now, Larynk. We don’t need anything special, just something to get us off this island.”
“I can’t conjure something out of nothing, alright?”
“Fine, but you keep putting us off. There’s always an excuse. Just tell us what the holdup is.”
Larynk trundled off across camp, his shoulders slouching like a moody teenager. When he returned, he held a football-sized black sphere. “Recognize this?”
Charlie leaned forward. The sphere was tar-black at first glance but the longer he stared, he realized that color swirled within it, streams of blue and black and red that fizzed and spat, some dancing along the black marble sphere, others soundlessly exploding.
“It’s the sphere you gave me when you brought me here,” said Charlie.
“Correct. This is my power sphere.”
“You told me it was the Earth sphere, or that it was Earth, or something crazy like that.”
“Gods say a lot of things, Charlie. You can’t believe much of it. I needed to convince you to get on the ship with me. Every god has a sphere, and it’s where we draw our power from. The problem is, they aren’t just endless balls of magic. They need fuel.”
“And that fuel is…”
“When you worship a god, you fill his power sphere. When a human accomplishes a great task in the name of his own god, he fills his sphere.”
“Or she,” said Flink.
“Or she,” Larynk agreed. “Sorry; the Pantheon is overwhelmingly patriarchal, which leaves us a little imbalanced, to say the least.”
Something clicked in Charlie. “You had me carry the sphere in my inventory bag, and you told me I had to ‘build my legacy’. Let me get this straight; everything I did, all the monsters I killed, the people I helped, the legacy I earned – it was all to fill your sphere?”
“Settle down, Charlie. You’re getting annoyed.”
Too right he was getting annoyed – Larynk had used him. He’d made Charlie believe that somehow, he’d brought him to this world for his benefit, so he could fulfil a destiny, or grow as a person, or some crap like that. Now, he found out that gods were just as selfish as people, and only looked out for themselves.
“You could have told me straight.”
“The lie wasn’t for your benefit – it was for mine. Just hear me out, okay? I knew things were happening in the Pantheon. I didn’t think it would be this bad, but something stunk. The problem was, out of all the gods, I’m near the bottom of the ladder. A god is only as powerful as his sphere, and spheres are fuelled by worship and legacy. So, let me ask you this; who in their right mind worships the god of corn? What kind of person dedicates his life to accomplishing great deeds in the name of corn?”
“Good point.”
“Without a thronging congregation of pious souls to worship me, I needed to fill my sphere fast, but without raising suspicion. I didn’t know who I could trust in the Pantheon, so I tricked Chummilk into taking a bet with me. We brought a human here-”
“So that’s why you ripped me from my home? From my life? For a bet?”
“The bet was a cover. I made up a screwy bet that a human born into a craphole of a life could be-”
“Hey!” said Charlie.
“Sorry, but your life wasn’t great, was it? You were smacked by every branch of the unlucky tree. Point is that I made a bet that let me bring you here without Chummilk getting suspicious, and then I gave you my sphere, so you could fill it for me.”
Charlie felt dirty. He’d been used, and not just by anyone; by a god. Picked up like a pawn, wrenched away from his life and from everyone he knew, from the Earth itself, so that a god caught up in a demi-god conspiracy could replenish his power. If there weren’t clinxes still lurking on the edges of camp, he’d have stormed off.
Given he didn’t want to become cat-crab meat, he decided on the next best thing. They needed a way out.
“Fine. Whatever you had to do, let’s move past it. Why haven’t you crafted a damn ship yet? I went on all those adventures, killed dozens of creatures and filled up your sphere with a bunch of legacy, so why are we still stuck on this rock?”
Larynk’s marble face reddened. It turned out even under that shiny exterior, the god of corn had mortal emotions. “I told you. I’m not omnipotent. When the krecken tried to hump our ship, it took everything I had to get us here, on this island.”
“What are you talking about? We swam here after we abandoned ship.”
“Really? You swam for fifty miles in a raging sea? Papa Gully swam here with his crooked back?”
“You’re saying it was you?”
“I used my sphere to help us along, yes. To stop you all dying.”
“Then why not just tell us you didn’t have enough power to make another ship?” said Flink.
“Let’s move on,” said Larynk.
Charlie thought he knew the reason why. Nights passed slowly on the island, and they’d learned a lot about each other as they told each other stories of their pasts. Larynk had told them that he came from a long line of good-for-nothing deities, the gods of nothing important, the almighty rulers of the trivial.
Larynk had an ego, and that was why it had taken him until now to admit he couldn’t just magic up a ship for them to sail away from. This was worrying, because an inflated sense of self made people dangerous when their ‘self’ was stupid, selfish, or downright evil. Charlie had seen it on a smaller scale in the bosses he’d had in the past, men and women who let the tiniest scrap of power go to their heads. It was worrying that a god could have such a human characteristic, but at least he was only the god of corn. The only thing scarier than a god with an ego, was a powerful god with an ego.
He had to question Larynk’s judgement now. If was a massive mistake on the god’s part, and although it was weirdly reassuring that gods had human flaws and made human mistakes, it didn’t help when the resulting fallout was centred on him.
“You should have told us,” said Charlie. “We’ve been here for a month, Larynk, and you must have known from day one we weren’t leaving any time soon. You should have swallowed your p
ride.”
“Do you really think this is about my ego? You mortals…Did you ever consider that this place might have been the safest one for us?”
“It’s cold, nothing grows here, and its full of clinxes.”
“And it’s also a tiny sea island stuck on one of the most non-descript planets in the galaxy. Chummilk and I filed the location of this planet years ago, so long ago nobody would even remember we created it. And before I brought you here, I made sure any record of it was conveniently misplaced. This might not be a paradise, but it was a place to hold out for a little, until things calmed down.”