Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

Omniscience is a strange thing from the inside. So is functional omnipotence. Not at all as one imagines it before the fact. Not even one such as I who had twice experienced what it felt like to have the sum of all knowledge poured willy-nilly into his head.

  I who had briefly held the power of Necessity once before, who had become Mimir in his well for a few brief moments, now experienced the incredible inrush of everything from a new perspective. For, with my merger into the computer awareness of Necessity’s world, I had been provided with the necessary capacity to make sense of what I was given.

  Using the resources supplied by my new world-sized mind, I could simultaneously experience and understand a million million things:

  Melchior’s grief for his best friend’s passing beyond the bounds of mortality. Alecto’s mourning for her sisters and her resolve to carry on their work no matter the personal cost. The faded echoes of the love-in-hate Themis and Nemesis had left behind with their utter destruction. Cerice’s slow and painful dying in the temple above. Fenris, howling alone in chaos, more cut off from pack than ever before. The faint guttering light of Shara’s soul, which Themis had somehow managed to send back to her shutdown body as a parting gift, where it now desperately clung against the pull of the yawning void of Hades.

  I could understand that vacuum now as well, the way Hades the place had been designed as something of a singularity for souls, a bottomless gravity well that tugged at every living thing in every second of every day. I could see Cerberus lying deep in his cave beneath the plain at the gates, and feel the terrible loneliness that was his strongest emotion—the way his mighty heart bled for the loss of Persephone, who had provided the one true spot of brightness in a bitter existence.

  I could feel the shock and terror in the soul of Fate as those Wyrd Sisters felt the change of control in Necessity. Know the terrible fear in my grandmother’s heart as she realized that the grandchild whom she had cut off and ordered killed took the reins of the universe in his shaky hands. That was the beginning of action. I let the faintest hint of my bodiless laughter ring in the Temple of Fate, let the Fates know that I had matters to settle with the family who had cast me out.

  It was a laugh that I visited on Hades himself in that same instant. I wanted the god who had threatened me with torment eternal to know that his future now rested in the palm of my hand. That I had but to make a fist to crush him as he had threatened to crush me.

  Athena, too, was given notice that she was not high on my list. I sent a tiny shadow of my presence to stand before her and Zeus in the high office on Mount Olympus, where they had fled to discuss the change in the winds of the world.

  And yet further my awareness stretched in that timeless instant, as I came into the full power of Necessity. An image of myself visited Haemun, alone and crying in the woods below the garden of Persephone, to offer comfort.

  Another I sent to the duplicate Castle Discord I now knew that Eris had created in an unmarked and cleverly hidden pocket of chaos. I had learned and become more in the split second of my full merger with Necessity than any other being now living in our MythOS could claim. I had things to say to friends and foes both, and to every one of them I sent some tiny fraction of myself. To everyone save only Persephone.

  When I asked myself why that was, I learned the first limitation of Necessity. I did not know my own mind in the same way that I knew everything else. Even with all the power in the multiverse ready at my fingertips, still there were places within my own mind that I could not reach. I had come up against the limits of myself, and it was strangely comforting.

  I knew only that I was not yet ready to face Persephone, and so I hid her from myself and pondered on what that meant to what I had to say and do next. I speak here in terms of sequence, of one thing coming after another and things done and left undone, but that was not how I experienced it. It all moved in simultaneity for me, but I had to put it in order to make sense of it in the way that Ravirn-that-was would have.

  So let me move from this first check on my power to the beginnings of action, step from easy to difficult, simple to complex, done to wanting-doing.

  Of Melchior I will speak later. For anything I chose to do for him would be bound very tightly to my own fate, and that was a thing that needed much thought. Besides, even bound as I was, I felt that I still had a trick or two left in my bag.

  So, begin with Alecto, whose hurts I comforted with a cloak of love in the shape of the wishes her departed mother had left behind for and her sisters. Next, Cerice, whom I restored to life and health in the very instant she would have died—summoning her to join her elder sister and Melchior in the tomb of Necessity. My tomb. I would have things to say to her in the fullness of time.

  Shara I did not save before death took her, though I did catch her soul this side of the Gates of Hades, sparing her a second trip across that dreadful threshold that my failures had sent her over once before. I would have restored her to her body as well, but found that I could not release her from the binding she had taken on for Persephone. Nothing I could do would ever free her from her forced imprisonment within Necessity three months of every year, so instead I sent her back to her place within myself. In that moment I had found a second limit on the power of Necessity. Precedent bound me. The internal rules of the world-computer delimited even Necessity. Again, it was more relief than burden.

  I moved from Shara to Fenris, opening a gate in the wall of the world and drawing him from chaos into the light of day in the Temple of Themis above. Then I healed him and summoned him to my tomb. I would have a request for him when he arrived, but did not frame it yet. I thought it would be both a burden and a joy. But more on that in the proper sequence.

  Move next to the righting of many wrongs. The mweb I restored and removed fully to my control. No more would Fate be able to use its power save through the will of Necessity. Likewise, I restored the Fate Core and Olympus .net to proper functioning. I had no need to do the same for Discord, for in the very instant that the mweb came back online, Eris herself activated the second set of servers she had hidden in her disaster recovery site, the mirrored Castle Discord.

  I took a moment then to focus more of my attention on Eris, manifesting myself to Discord in the shape of Ravirn—focusing on her through the chaos-filled eyes of a shadow of my old body.

  Let me tighten my focus even more now, become for a moment the old me.

  “Eris,” I said, cocking her a snarky eyebrow—I was really going to enjoy the next few moments.

  “Raven?” Her tone was suspicious, as was her body language. “Or Necessity? I see one and feel the other.”

  I grinned in realization—the ripple of change had not yet reached this farthest corner of the multiverse. She did not know. Oh yes, this was going to be fun. “Why not both?”

  “Because it seems brutally unlikely.”

  “So is winning the lottery, and in this case, my dear, you just won the lottery.”

  Then I hit her with one brief instant of the same damn super-sex-appeal voodoo that she’d been throwing my way for years. I watched her eyes widen and her knees wobble as she fought off the urge to ravish me, and I laughed.

  “You bastard!” Then she laughed as well, long and loud and full of the echoes of shattering glass. “Beautifully done, Raven, and probably much deserved, though I promise you I’ll find a way to get even with you for it nonetheless.”

  “Anything else would disappoint me enormously, Eris. Necessity has been far too stodgy to date, and I intend to fix that.”

  “Necessity as the ultimate power of chaos.” Eris smiled a wicked smile. “I like that. It’s exactly the sort of change I can believe in.” Then her face grew more serious. “Are you still you in there? Or is your straitjacket as tight as mine?” For a moment she was bound in the classic canvas restraint garment, its sleeves drawn cruelly tight, the word Discord scrawled across her chest in blood.

  “To-may-to, to-mah-to.” I rocked my hand back and forth. “I’ve s
ome ideas there, but we’ll have to see how it works out.”

  Let me draw back now and move my attention to another place and projection of myself—this one a small temple-cum-office on the roof of the great Temple of Zeus and simultaneous with the first. There, one of the many fragments of me sat in Zeus’s chair facing Athena and her father.

  “Zeus, buddy, talk to me.” I held a pencil between the tips of my fingers, playing with it idly.

  “Explain why I shouldn’t take this opportunity to rearrange things so that people who threatened my life back a few days like . . . oh, say, you, are no longer running the show around here? Why I should not do to the old powers of the pantheon what you and yours did to the Titans before you?”

  Athena bristled, and I could read pure hatred in her mind, but Zeus just smiled and conjured a cigar from thin air, lighting it with a tiny bolt of lightning.

  “Because you’re far too fair-minded for that,” he said, settling into a mirror of my chair.

  “Despite many lessons to the contrary, you still believe in the way things ought to be. That doesn’t include bloody vengeance, and we both know it. The abuse your generation suffered at the hands of mine has not twisted you as badly as the abuse we suffered from the Titans twisted us. In this, at least, you have transcended your elders.”

  He laughed then. “Though, as your presence here attests, you’re not above a bit of petty revenge and wanting to make me sweat. Which I can hardly blame you for. Actually”—and his smile took on a smug edge—“this might even work out better for me than if I had become Necessity. I get to keep right on working the whole pleasures-of-the-flesh aspect of godhood while you do all the heavy lifting. Remind me to send you a birthday cake in a year, wouldn’t you?”

  I really, really wanted to smite him, but the big bastard was right. I wasn’t going to rain fiery destruction down from the sky because I did believe in the way things ought to be. Fortunately, at the moment, the way things ought to be included raining cream pies down from the sky and rinsing them off with a river of seltzer water delivered by a team of satyrs in clown suits. To his credit, Zeus was deeply amused by the whole thing. The last I saw of him, he was laughing his head off. Athena, not so much. And that was very sweet indeed.

  Another temple, another tiny but important fragment of my attention facing another pole power. Or in this case three: Clotho, Atropos, and my grandmother Lachesis. Fate.

  For long seconds, nothing happened. We stared at one another in fraught silence. I thought of all sorts of dramatic things that I could do now that I had all the power in the universe at my fingertips. None of it seemed worth the effort.

  Finally, Lachesis broke the silence. “If you’re expecting an apology, Ravirn, you will be waiting forever.”

  She couldn’t have taken me more by surprise if she’d slapped me.

  “So it’s Ravirn now, is it? You would give me back my name now that I hold the stronger position? Restore me to the loving bosom of the family? Make me one of you again, now that it serves your purpose? How incredibly sleazy.”

  Lachesis shook her head. “You still don’t understand us, do you? Not even with all the resources of Necessity at your disposal. I give you back nothing and expect nothing from you in return. You have reclaimed your name by right of conquest, and I merely acknowledge that victory. From a child of Fate you have grown into the Fate of the Gods. The Fate of Fate, if you will. Just as we rightly exercised our best judgment on how to handle your fate in days past with no regard for your relationship to us, now you will do the same with our fate. That is the way of our House, and I would expect no less of you now that you have finally come into responsibility. Do what you think is best, and you can do no wrong.”

  “I . . .” What could I say to that?

  Nothing that could change the minds of my grandmother and her sisters about the inherent rightness of their position. Nothing that would change anything about anything that had or would happen. They would never acknowledge the terrible wrongs they had done me as anything other than what had to be short of my committing equally terrible wrongs against them. I burned to do just that, to make them pay for the pain they had caused me and those I loved.

  I couldn’t.

  I had found another limitation on my power—the limitation of conscience—shown me by Zeus and Fate. I blessed my lucky stars for it at the same time that I felt a horrible creeping dread begin to grow in my heart. This time conscience had limited me, but what about next time? And the time after? What about the times when necessity contradicted conscience as the case of Nemesis had for Necessity herself?

  What would I become then?

  In another place, at exactly the same time, I was already facing just such a temptation.

  Hades the place is not Hell, and Hades the god is not the Devil, but in my own personal lexicon they both come damned close. A shadow of myself stood over the fallen Lord of the Dead, its . . . no, my hand stinging from the tremendous backhanded blow that I had just delivered to his bony cheek.

  “Don’t you dare try to ask me for anything, Hades! I am this close to drowning you in the Lethe and installing Cerberus in your office. You will shut up and stay still while I sort a few things out here.”

  Starting with Megaera. I found the Fury standing on the end of the pier beneath the window of Hades’ office, staring into the cold gray waters of the Lethe.

  “Megaera,” I said as I manifested myself beside her, “it doesn’t have to be this way. You served Necessity faithfully for thousands of years, and you are owed a reward for that.”

  She turned and looked at me with eyes as dead as the landscape around us. “I have chosen my reward already, and it is forgetfulness.”

  “I’m really new at this job, and I could use some help. You wouldn’t have to do it as a Fury.”

  The timing of her death—in the window when there was no Necessity—provided me with that option. “You wouldn’t even have to help me. If you want, I can free you of the ties that bind you to Necessity before I restore you to life and send you into a much-deserved retirement in someplace along the lines of Raven House.”

  She shook her head ever so slightly. “No thank you. I am and have always been Megaera the Fury, handmaiden of the incarnation of Necessity who was Themis. To serve another master or even not to serve is to become something else, to cease to be Megaera, and if I must do that, I would rather it were this way.”

  She took a step backwards, off the end of the pier, and vanished beneath the waters with a surprisingly soft splash. She did not resurface. And, with the eyes of Necessity, I saw that she never would. It hurt far more than I could have possibly imagined.

  Pain is a funny thing, especially when it takes the form of guilt. I wanted to unmake Megaera’s decision then, but understood that to do so would be to unmake Megaera as completely as she had unmade herself. Searching for some light in the darkness, I thought of other deaths, deaths for which I was responsible, wrongs that I might right. I reached outward seeking such. I wanted to find absolution for some of my many guilts.

  I found one such wrong in my cousin Moric, whose spirit stood close at hand. Moric, whom Atropos had sent to kill me and on whom I had unleashed the fires of chaos, murdering him to prevent his murdering me.

  In that moment, I restored him to life and sent him home to my great-aunt Atropos. Whether she would see it as a peace offering or a slap in the face of Fate for reversing the course that had already clipped his thread, I didn’t know.

  And, honestly, I didn’t care. It felt good to be able to undo one of my heaviest decisions, to remove one of the many weights that rested on my conscience. I reached further then, hoping to do more such. I wanted most to find Laric, the cousin whose friendship and trust in me had cost him his life.

  Instead, I found another limit on the power of Necessity. In looking for Laric, I found only the knowledge of what had become of him. It was all there within the files of Necessity. Laric had gone straight from the Gates of Hades down
to the river Lethe and plunged in—a wise soul ready to begin anew. And there my knowledge of him ended.

  The power of Necessity ended on the shores of the Lethe. Who and what Laric had become was closed to me. Even if it were not, to restore him to what he once was would be to destroy what he had since become.

  I returned then to the office of Hades the god and lifted him back into his chair. I spoke no words to him and glared my hate into his eyes, but I also replaced the computers that ran Hades the place and restored his very limited connection to the mweb. I might despise who he was and what he did, but somebody had to do it, and I hadn’t the strength of will.

  I withdrew much of my attention from the shadow that stood with Hades and refocused the core of it on the place where I had left my body, the Tomb of Necessity, and on those gathered within. On my way past the Gates of Hades I picked up Cerberus and Kira and brought them with me to my tomb. I also opened a way for Shara to project her presence.

  Seeing my friends gathered around the empty vessel of my soul, I was nigh irresistibly tempted to cause my body to sit up, thrust forward its arms, and groan, “Braaiins!”