Divinity. Mortality. War.
Silva, Queen of Wolves, Lady of the True Woods, seeks her only friend Etan, who, along with other deities of the Council of Divinity, has gone missing for reasons unknown. Her search traps her on a world where the wolves ha...
She was falling so fast, so hard, plummeting like a dying Ice Crown Starling.
Yes. The bird. Desperately she tried to change — her humanoid figure stretched like elastic, briefly, then bounced back into its shape.
She was falling faster, hurtling to the ground below, and she was stuck in the form of a bipedal ape. Her powers weren't working.
How did this happen to me?
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Silva had always hated Council meetings.
They were never on a consistent schedule — every ten years, every century, every week, timing pulled out of a hat it seemed — and they pulled her away from her home and her children.
Worst of all, she had to appear human. Or humanoid. Terrans weren't the only bipedal ape-like mortals represented at the meetings of the Council of Divinity.
Terran was her least-favoured form. She only did it to appease the various other gods at Council. Even so, it made her blood boil to even have to — talk about anthropocentric!
Or perhaps it was just civilization-centric. She'd noticed other gods of the wild areas were held to the same standards as she was, yet Zeus could appear in any of his myriad animal forms and she'd certainly never seen anyone ask Djehuty to remove his ibis head.
But her standard four-pawed, white-furred, form of lupine grace was just too much for them. Even her new form of green and white Ice Crown Starling — she'd grown quite fond of the avian in her new territory and the bird got along with her cubs quite well — even that wasn't good enough.
She would have spent time with the other wild gods, but not every god showed up to these meetings. Representatives of pantheons — as such, many of the wild gods elected to stay on their planetary homes, in the wilds. Why come to a stuffy meeting where they couldn't be themselves, if they had the option not to?
She had no pantheon. She was Lady of the True Woods — the only deity the wolves and their cousins needed.
All her complaining aside, however, the Council did do good work in the universe and she was glad it existed. After the cataclysms that shook earth and various Terran species alike, the Council worked to pull various gods and put them elsewhere. They'd pulled not only Silva but all her children too: wolves, coyotes, huskies and various wolf-dog hybrids. She and her packs now were safe in the wilds of newly-colonized-by-Terran-apes Tau Ceti.
Well. Newly-colonized so far as she was concerned. The Two that ran this council had a different idea of space and time. The Twins. Or perhaps they were spouses; no one was quite sure. They had ageless eyes — mirrors of silver. Insanity swirled in those depths.
No one really knew their names, either; they were slippery words lost to time itself. All you could be sure of was they started with a consonant, perhaps — but whether it was J or T or Z or something else was anyone's guess.
