Book 2 The Gods of Light and Liars

Chapter 9: Impact

The Archon finished with the tone of one reciting a much loved tale...unaware that Hawk had sunk down to her knees halfway through. Her frantic I get the point had not been at annoyance with the tale, but at a deeper horror growing within her.

Alex had been inside the Prism. That meant that Alex had been transformed, as the Ape had been, into an Archetype. He somehow became the protection for every other human within this Rift. Hawk remembered the Ape. She would definitely have called that thing "First God" material. She also knew that Naomi Studdard and her people would have been near Alex, ready to gain and keep control of the only thing keeping them alive.

The First God had been killed and eaten.

"Do...do your myths say anything else about the First God? What He was like? What He did?"

The Archon shook his head. "No. There are, I must say, very few myths about the First God. After all, he was murdered before he'd had chance to gain even a name."

"As was your God? Ehern?" She said.

"As was my God." He inclined his head.

"Is that why you sound so resentful?" She asked.

"Well...would you not? If others of your rank and office may reach out and touch their very gods...they have no fear of doubt, no cause to heresy. Their God is there, in the very room. Mine...I have only a myth and Our Lady's law to sustain me." He sighed. "We servants of the White God, as He is called, keep house for one who will be forever absent."

Hawk wasn't so sure of that. She wasn't a hundred percent sure, but she thought she could read little bits and pieces of Naomi Studdard's story into the Archon's creation myth. But mostly her mind was consumed by the image of a smooth, white orb. Substance of the First God, he'd said. She remembered the Ape. If she hadn't known better, if she hadn't been armed against it by skepticism and a secular education and decades of dealing with dishonest humanity, she would have laid herself prostrate before it. Not because it was better than her, smarter or faster or more powerful. It had been something that transcended better. It was something that always should have been, that in a just universe would always exist. I love you, it had said, and she'd had no doubt of that love. She'd known it with every cell in her body, that she was loved—no, adored—by this being, and it wasn't some toxic depth or mercenary thing, a love of comfort and full stomachs. It was a love that encompassed all. The Ape's death had, for a moment, been the death of all things. How could the world exist, how could love continue to exist, when the thing that did it perfectly was gone?

It had melted, when it was killed. The Ape. It had melted away into white fluid, leaving only the Orb behind. It was pearlescent and bitterly beautiful. It marked where a beautiful thing had once been, and now was no longer.

Which meant, if she was right about the myth, if she was right about Alex being trapped in the greenhouse-Prism of Bittermoss School, that Alex wasn't just dead. He'd been eaten.

But maybe she was wrong. She had to be wrong. She hadn't done all this, survived all this, survived the fucking Shadowbeast, to lose Alex to Naomi Studdard's ambitions. No. She was wrong. If she'd come to this place, this land of gods and monsters where worship was a prerequisite, she was going to cling, not to a god, but to an idea: Alex was fine. She would find him. She would dig through this hell-maze of plants and beasts and darkness, and she would find her husband and bring him out of it. Yes. That was what she was going to do.

She picked herself up off the ground, aware at last that she was under the Archon's concerned gaze. She wiped her eyes, because they'd been leaking. Took a deep breath, and chose to go with the bare bones of truth. "I'm sorry. I'm here looking for my husband. I think he fell in here. We live above the geode...thing. Up..." And she trailed off. There were five crystal pylons leading away from the Temple of Light, each terminating in a geode. And she didn't for the life of her know which one held the rest of her people. "Up there, somewhere. My husband found his way down here, first, with a bunch of missing children. And I'm trying to find him."