Book 2 The Gods of Light and Liars

Chapter 38: Divine Right

"Alright!" she shouted. "I'm here! Somebody want to start talking, or were you just planning on throwing a dead Kaiser at me." She paused. "Unless that's your goal, you're going to need to talk soon."

She waited. No one responded.

"Alright. Guess I'll just sit here and wait for something important to show up." And she sat down, cross legged, on the lawn of star-moss. Funny; She'd left here knowing nothing; now she felt like she knew even less, despite now having a name for the lawn.

A disgusted voice came from the Archon's former white wisteria arbor. The husk of a Fleet-Hare stood outside of it, head down like a toy whose spring had run down. As Hawk watched, a chip of dessicated flesh fell from its face to the ground, hissing in the dew. "Oh, Damn it all, girl. You weren't ever wanted. What part of 'make the deer run away from the human' aren't you getting? I want to speak with Kaiser. Go away."

Kaiser's voice, pained and irritable, followed the voice of Kali'Mar. "It's quite alright, Miss W...Rayne."

A pause. "Miss? I thought she had a doctorate."

Oh, god. He was one of those. Right now she felt like her doctorate was good for paper airplanes and not much else, but clearly someone else thought differently. "I do have a Doctorate. I specialize in bugs."

"Huh. Then maybe you could explain the ants. The big ones, with the golden behinds. I suppose you call them—"

"Honeypots. I'm the foremost expert in the United States."

She heard Kaiser mutter something that she swore was she says it like it means something! "You heard this fine gentleman, Hawk. Go Away."

"I can't do that." She took up a stance on the velvet soft moss like a baseball player preparing for the first pitch. The sword of milk quartz was her bat. She knew better than to tap its tip against the earth, but had no idea what to do beyond "Put the sharp end in the other guy".

A disgusted sigh. "Whyever not, Miss Rayne?" Said Kaiser.

"Because you're a member of my team—"

"Fine—"

"And my last name isn't Rayne. It's West."

Her name on her own lips, at last, felt good. She only wished that she had done it earlier. And now a hand swept the gleaming flowers to one side, and a gleaming, golden shot foot brought Kali'Mar, Master of Air and God of his world, into Hawk's point of view at last.

She was terrified to her core, of course, and felt that oppressive presence that seemed to indicate God-hood. But she also felt extremely disappointed. After all, Kali'Mar faced comparison to the psychotic Argon and murderous enigma Nasheth. And he failed that comparison. She was unsure as to why, because he seemed impressive enough; He had the hair of a Fabio, the physique of a Schwarzenegger, the beauty of Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. His golden robes had every inch the opulence of his fellow Gods, his display of jewelry at ears, and neck and naval and lip, were all lovely cut carnelians, diamonds, topaz, and more, all elaborately set in gold so that they could gleam at his glory...but he wasn't a sun-god, and he wasn't as imposing as his sibling-gods. He was, in fact, the precise shape of idealized divinity a high-school chemistry teacher would imagine. A mind well trained and narrow in focus, exploded by a change in circumstances, might find itself seeking the familiar old shapes even as it is blasted apart into new ones.

"God," she said, out loud. "You're so...small."

And that was the problem with all four of them, now that she thought about it. This pantheon created less than one week ago, really, out of people who, with the possible exception of Naomi Studdard, had no expectations or (and Hawk knew she was being unfair) great gifts of imagination. Naomi tried to imagine a goddess of nature, and Nasheth was the result. Motherhood curdled, a worship of nature but of nature gone wrong. Humans turned to trees and burnt, because that's what a wrathful God would do, isn't it? Demanding service in the form of Catechism, Idolatry, and burning. Always burning. Fire wasn't just Argon's purview, wasn't it? Not with it burning in the altars of all four Gods. They fed their worshippers to it because that's what religion was Earthside. Religion was a method to separate people from money, from their families, from themselves. That there was ever more to it was something Hawk had denied...at least until she came here, and saw these people's ideas about Gods come forth—ideas that could not have come organically from the focused worship of the innocent. No sane mind could look at Nasheth and see something holy, or Argon and see someone worthy of worship. The idea had come from something, or somewhere else. A memory of Earthside, maybe. A single whispered yearning that gave these psychopathic "Gods" all the inroads they'd ever need.