Page 139 of The Princesses of Ruin
The violence has stopped. There’s no more world shifting, no more Spiders plummeting past me into the abyss. It’s a trick. It must be.
“What is this?”
He shimmers, changing from Walt to the queen. “Your destiny.”
I turn, gaining my feet to run. The world tilts and the trumpets blare. I reach for what little magic the Spider gave me and project it. Wind whispers around my body, and a faded memory comes to me of a courtyard long ago and a need to protect my territory. It was one of my men…
It’s not enough. The arcane power sputters out instead of propelling me to the seam. I fall forward and grab hold of the ground. My hands sink into the blackness with sickening sucking sounds. It’s thick and cold like spring mud, chilling my arms to the bone.
More people fall screaming through the seam.
“I was never making you to destroy the world,” Ashai says.
“Liar,” I shout, clashing against the pull of the ground and the warp of gravity.
Her warm hand against the back of my neck makes me gasp. She shoves me into the mud. I close my eyes and seal my lips.
She leans in until I feel hot breath on my shoulder. “I was making you to destroy the gods.”
Her grip tightens on my neck and she pulls me free. She stands there, defying gravity, holding me aloft. Her visage appears in front of me, too, and she wipes the muck from my face.
“You think I want to destroy all I helped build? No matter how wretched humanity becomes, I’m still proud of what you few have accomplished. Toppling dynasties, bringing yourselves together, fighting beasts that once reigned over your pathetic little squats of land where you lived in squalor. I gave you magic!”
She laughs and a thousand colors burst from her mouth.
“I made you what you are against their will, and they banished me to the depths of the lowest realm, the deepest hell. It was the most pitiful existence, surviving on scraps, but at least I got to watch you fight, climb, grow, lead, and reign until…you just stopped.
“You stopped striving, stopped caring. You built your walls and determined your borders and refused to come together anymore, to work any harder than this—” She thrusts her arms out, and the world explodes into view. It’s all of everything, all at once.
And there’s so much suffering.
“You could easily keep fighting, but so many of you don’t! I was tired of watching you waste my gifts. And then I realized you weren’t wasting them, you weresacrificingthem to the other gods. You were praying, groveling, begging for more from them when I had already given you enough.
“But they made you believe that you were lesser without them. They made you believe that you owedthemeverything you had. And so you built temples, and you got comfortable. You settled like pigs in the mud. You allowed your gifts to wane. You forgot me. Just like they wanted.”
The world shifts again, but we don’t move, suspended in this strange angle together as we look upon all of Gaien. The goddess of the earth cradles the continents in her arms and holds the swell of the sea in her belly. When she breathes, the wind caresses the land, or creates storms. Her tears nourish the crops, or collapse buildings in mudslides.
And her sickness, the same one that’s been growing in each of us, manifests as the Verdant Drown. The plague of the plants far to the south that I’ve never once put my mind to. It wasn’t a problem I needed to solve, but I see now at this height how dangerous it truly is. It’s a sickness of wild things, of brain rot and body growth. Cantankerous cysts of vile impotence boil up from below the ground and poison the land, making it more theirs than hers, or ours.
“You see it now, don’t you? Each one has their domain. Each their required supplicants, feeding them. Nol’Ther takes your soul, nourishing her own with your spirit. Eyzanth takes your passion; he feeds on your fighting and fucking, dancing and dallying. Yegress lives between each of your breaths, and Kor’Tar flourishes at the very last when rage has spilled blood in the soil.
“Vexune glistens with your gold trading hands, Juuren drinks your tears, Osselna thrives on the stroke of your pen, your brush, and the flutter of skirts around legs, and Morgah sucks on your mind when you work. She is not grit, but grind. She wants you broken under the wheel of industry.”
“What about Zephrom?” I ask, noting the one god she forgot.
She moves close and my mind snaps me into action. I reach out, wrapping both hands around her throat. I squeeze, calling on my magic to pull on hers, but nothing happens. There’s nothing in this body. It is not her, but a projection.
“That’s my girl, trying to use her power. That’s what you’ve all forgotten. The less you use your power, the more of it returns to them. The less you flex and grow your strengths, the stronger they become. And I’ve seen what they do when they’re truly immortal. So beyond the power of anything else that even their gentle breath can kill a world.”
She pries my hands away easily like I’m a child.
“Zephrom is not justice. She is righteous indignation. My theft of their magic to seed power in this world. She burns to unmake you.”
For the first time, I believe her—just a little. That pebble of doubt in the shoe of my reasoning aches with every mental step forward. What if the gods don’t want us to kill her because she’s dangerous to us, but tothem.
I grit my teeth against the troublesome idea, rejecting it for what it is: a distraction. Ashai wants me weak and stupid. She wants me questioning my path.
I spit in her face. “Get fucked.”
