Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  The controversy surrounding these gods’ deaths was that none of their fellow gods had brought them back to life. Instead, they had chosen to lock them away. And seeing them alive, youthful and happy … well, I had expected to see things in Hell that I wouldn’t have expected. But as prepared as I was to be surprised, I wasn’t prepared for them.

  The three dead gods—or rather, their youthful representations—walked in with a huff.

  “Ahhh, you three,” Penemue said. “Glad you could join us.”

  Baldr and Izanami nodded, muttering a half-hearted, “Hello, Mr. Penemue.”

  Quetzalcoatl, on the other hand, said nothing.

  “Mr. Aztec God, are you too good to be civil, or shall I send you to detention for another eon?”

  The birdlike god’s eyes widened. With a chirp, he said, “Hello, Mr. Penemue,” before taking his desk.

  “Very good,” Penemue said. He looked around the open-air room. “We’re almost all here. Everyone but ...”

  “We’re here,” said two voices in unison.

  I turned to see two teenagers with—you’ve got to be kidding me—fig leaves for scantily-clad clothing walking up the hill, hand in hand.

  “Adam, Eve—welcome.”

  “Sorry we’re late, Mr. Penemue,” Adam said. “We were …” His voice trailed off as a blush painted his face. Eve giggled as the two of them took their seats, never letting go of each other’s hand as they did.

  “We’re all here,” Penemue said. “All the gods and two very capable representatives of the human race, together under one roof.” He looked up. “Well, under one sky …” Everyone chuckled. “So, without further delay, let us begin today’s lessons.”

  ↔

  Penemue cleared his throat. “In the beginning …” Booming laughter followed. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. As silly as that statement may be—after all, we all know that before the beginning, there was us—it is a great segue into today’s lecture. In the beginning—the true beginning—there was only us. Gods”—he pointed at the godly pupils—“and their denizens.” He touched himself on the chest.

  “But you folks weren’t satisfied with just having us around. You wanted something else. Something more. And as loath as I am to admit that I, an angel of Heaven, wasn’t enough, I know that to be true. We—as in, your denizens—were not enough. You needed another challenge, something more than the creations who didn’t believe in you because they walked amongst you. In other words, you needed something or someone whose only connection to you was through faith. You needed humans.” Penemue pointed at Adam and Eve.

  “More specifically, you needed humans with free will. Free to do as they liked, to believe in what they wanted. Believe—and not believe—in what they wanted. You wanted these new creations to come to you honestly. You wanted them to come to you on their own.”

  Odin turned around to look at Adam and Eve. “And to be grateful for what we gave them.”

  “Fair enough,” Penemue said. “But it didn’t work out that way. Or at least, it’s not working out that way, is it? Does anyone know why?”

  The class went silent as they looked to their teacher for answers.

  “You all know my thing, right? My special ability granted to me by, well, all of you when you first breathed life into me? For those of you who might not remember”—he gave Baldr a wink—“my thing is knowing all that is written. That means everything put down on paper, parchment, stone or even written in the sand with a stick. I also know everything that is written on the human soul, and what I have read time and time again is that with human free will comes doubt. Doubt is a perfectly natural, healthy aspect of their being. They doubt you because there are so many conflicting messages, pain, suffering—but also joy, triumph and beauty that is both natural, unexplained and crafted by their hands.”

  The students looked at Penemue with confusion. Anubis cocked his head in that way dogs do when they’re unsure what to make of something.

  By the GoneGods, I was confused, and I had heard this little rant before. Like, hundreds of times before.

  Penemue, unperturbed, cleared his throat. “They doubt because they, too, can create. And no, they don’t have magic, but they do have ingenuity, intelligence, science and instinct. They use those abilities—abilities you imbued them with—to make things that never were. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, airplanes, rockets to the moon … Paradise Lost.” He smiled as he uttered that last one. “They create, they make. They imagine, and then they make those musings into reality. And in doing so, they expand their universe—their knowledge—through sheer will and determination. And they believe they do so on their own.”

  “But … but we’re helping,” Athena said.

  “Are you?”

  “Well …” She considered his question. “The muses are our creation.”

  “And they dabble from time to time. But they certainly aren’t responsible for all of humanity’s creations, are they?”

  His question was met with silence.

  “Are they?” His booming voice demanded an answer.

  Many of the gods shook their heads. Only Athena spoke. “No, I suppose not.”

  “And as for your direct involvement …” He scanned the classroom before finally pointing at a young god with an elephant’s head. “Ganesha?”

  “We don’t do that anymore.”

  “Not anymore. You long ago abandoned them to their own devices, and yet you still expect faith. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect you to come to Earth and start walking amongst them. That wouldn’t be good, given some of your less amicable natures. Loki, I’m looking at you.”

  Loki giggled. “Yeah, yeah. I would try to enslave them. It’s my thing.”

  “Indeed,” Penemue said. “But just because you shouldn’t walk amongst them doesn’t mean you can’t be more present. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share …”

  Penemue paused as he let the words sink in.

  “Share what?” Anansi asked.

  “Share what you know. Share a bit of what you can do.”

  “Give them magic,” Zeus boomed as literal lightning bolts rippled out of him.

  “No—knowledge. Share some of the secrets of the universe, let them in on some of your divine, God-only-knows knowledge.”

  “Why?”

  “Faith,” Penemue said.

  More confused looks.

  “By sharing a bit of your divinity with them, you will be expressing your own faith in them, and that … that is something they will reciprocate in kind.”

  And therein lay the crux of Penemue’s argument. Faith is a two-way street, and when you think about it—really think about it—it’s a tough pill to swallow. Faith was always one way: humans to gods. The idea that faith could be two ways, especially in the way Penemue meant it, was something most couldn’t wrap their heads around. Hell, I struggled with it and I’m an atheist. Even after the gods left and there was irrefutable proof that they existed, it didn’t change how I felt, because I never had faith in them before, and that didn’t change after.

  “Which leads us to today’s lecture.” Penemue swung the blackboard around, revealing The Importance of Faith written in bold letters.

  “Oh brother.” Loki rolled his eyes.

  Thor punched his brother in the arm.

  “Stop it, you two,” Odin boomed.

  “Gentlemen.” Penemue cleared his throat. Loudly. The three Norse gods immediately faced Penemue. “Thank you.”

  Whatever—or whoever—Penemue was in this scenario, he clearly had the gods’ respect. Bigly so.

  “What the hell is going on?” Bella said, loud enough that everyone in this classroom of the divine should have heard her. No one turned. Whatever was happening, we existed on another plane from which we could watch, but not interact.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but this never happened. I have spent way, waay, wa-aay too much time with Penemue in various states of intoxication, hearing all sorts of stories about H
eaven and Hell, the gods and their histories, and this was never even hinted at. This can’t be—”

  “It’s a dream,” Judith said.

  Bella, Marty and I looked at the once-upon-a-time specter in confusion. “It’s a dream,” she repeated. “Well, a daydream, at least. This is what Penemue wished happened, but didn’t.”

  More blank looks from the rest of us.

  “Think about it,” Judith said in exasperation. “The gods and humans in one room, being lectured by him. He has their respect rather than their hatred for what he did. And what’s more, they’re all young. And youthful minds are minds that can be shaped. He’s teaching them to be the kinds of gods he wished they were. Instead of what they really were …”

  I nodded in agreement; Judith’s theory made perfect sense. Penemue never regretted teaching humans how to read or write, but he did regret what happened afterward: being kicked out of Heaven, his time in Hell. He angered the gods—most of them, at least—and that cost him a lot.

  Penemue cleared his throat again, this time giving Baldr an authoritative look before pointing to an empty seat at the front of the class. The heavyset kid stood up in a huff to sit at the front. “Now, where was I?”

  “You were explaining the virtues of sharing,” Athena said with all the enthusiasm of the class pet.

  “Precisely. All you gods, you literally know the secrets of the universe. You possess immortality and powers beyond human imagination. Sharing some of that knowledge will in no way diminish your status as gods. It will do quite the opposite for—”

  “But if we tell the humans too much, they will try to replace us with … with them,” Loki protested, turning around to look at Adam and Eve.

  For the first time, the two lovebirds stopped looking at each other, their gazes turning somber as they stared back at Loki.

  “We would never,” Eve said. “We just want to know things. Learn things.”

  “And once you do, what will you do with that knowledge?” Loki turned to Penemue. “Learn to fly, to manipulate energy? Master the heavens in rockets?”

  “We … we …” Adam stammered, unable to find the words.

  “And once you master those things, then what?”

  “Well, nothing,” Adam said. “Things will just keep on keeping on.”

  “But what if you master immortality, too?” Odin said. “Won’t knowledge and immortality make you gods?”

  “More than gods!” Athena said. “For they can do things we cannot.”

  “Children, children.” Penemue waved his hands in a calming fashion. It wasn’t working.

  The class was quickly getting unruly. How, I wondered as I watched the commotion, would one discipline a classroom of out-of-control child-gods?

  “Like what?” asked Izanami. “We are gods. Gods!”

  “They can have children. We can’t. Yes, we can create. But their way of creation is different than ours. They multiply. They expand. And if their children, too, have knowledge and immortality, they’ll … they’ll breed us out!” Athena shuddered at the thought.

  “Breed us out?” Odin stood on his chair. “Never!” And as the raven god cried out, his youthful figure grew until he was a war-scarred, full-grown man.

  Well, a full-grown god.

  “I will never allow that,” he screamed, scanning the others with his one good eye. There was something different in Odin. Before he’d been a doe-eyed boy, eager to learn. But now that he perceived humanity’s threat, he was more switched on, his one good eye gleaming with the lust of the hunt. “I will never allow that. Never. For before they can multiply, I will … Wait. Who the hell are they?” Odin pointed at us.

  So much for being flies on the wall.

  Ever Been Punched by a God?

  Gods don’t punch. They’re more the lightning bolt, whirlwind, shoot-things-out-of-their-hands kind of fighter. Kind of like Raiku in Mortal Kombat, except there’s no arcade screen to shield you and no Play Again? option when you die.

  And that’s exactly what was going to happen if we didn’t find a way to stop them. A lightning bolt hit me square in the chest, pushing me onto my back with a heavy thud. But unlike what I expected to happen when hit by a god’s lightning, I didn’t explode into a million little pieces of Jean. Instead, I was able to take it in the same way I could handle being hit by a car.

  Which is to say: it hurt, but I’d live.

  Maybe.

  Normally in a situation like this, I’d go all Jean-Luc Matthias on them and pull some crazy stunt to get out of the situation. Generally it involved a loud boom. But there was nothing around to go boom, and I had Bella and Judith to worry about.

  Well, Bella.

  I didn’t know what to do, and looking for something, anything to help, my eyes caught Penemue’s. The twice-fallen angel no longer looked like the regal professor of only moments ago. He looked forlorn, wasted, tired. His tweed jacket was torn and his wings were no longer immaculately white; they had more of a dragged-in-the-mud quality.

  I’d been in plenty of fights with that angel by my side. As much of a buffoon as he was, he wasn’t a coward; he’d always jumped in by my side in fights. (Plus, he had badass meathooks that came out of his forearms whenever shit got real … And shit was about as real as it could get right now.) But the angel didn’t do anything; he just stared at me with glowing eyes as tears of light streamed down his face.

  So much for having an angel on your side.

  Angel-less, I drew upon all my military training that taught me how to handle situations like this, and did exactly what it told me to do.

  I ran.

  But not before grabbing Judith and Bella’s arms, pulling them out of the way of a child-sized Thor hammer flying our way, and—more literally than I would have liked—throwing them down the hill.

  ↔

  The three of us tumbled down the hilltop like Jack and Jill and Jack’s judgmental mother-in-law. If I had a quarter for every time I tumbled down a hill while pursued by overpowered magical creatures, I could make three phone calls in a 1980s phone booth.

  We tumbled as the childlike gods ran to the hill’s edge, each daring the others to follow. And that’s when it hit me: they might have been gods, but they were still children. Children who had yet to embrace things like blind violence or mob mentality. Children who, when they fought, didn’t play for keeps. They were still learning to embrace their more violent tendencies.

  I could use that. Or rather, Momma Bear tumbling a few feet in front of me could.

  “They’re kids,” I said when friction finally won over gravity and our tumbling ceased.

  “So?” Bella asked, stumbling to her feet.

  “So, we have a mother here.” I pointed at Judith, then up the hill. Thor and Zeus, the bravest of the bunch, were already halfway down. I turned to Judith. “You had years to hone your judgmental, critical, authoritative ways.”

  “Hey!” Judith protested.

  “That’s a compliment. At least in this context,” I said. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here. But Penemue is at the top of the hill, and if we can reach him, maybe, just maybe this whole thing will be done. I need you to go all judgmental on their asses.”

  “How?”

  “By being you.”

  Judith scowled at me.

  “Exactly … except at them.”

  “Fine,” she said. Taking a step past us, she walked to the base of the hill and yelled, “You two! Stop right where you are.”

  Full credit to Judith—she was all mother-in-law rage.

  Thor and Zeus stopped right in their tracks. The others, spurred by their bravery (and the fact that they were far enough ahead that the others could always turn tail and run if we proved more badass than they suspected), trailed down the hill, stopping at the same point as the two leaders.

  “Enough of this. Didn’t your mother teach you manners?”

  Good, I thought.

  “But we don’t have moms,” Athena said. “We m
ade ourselves.”

  “Well, technically I made you when I was swallowed by Metis,” Zeus said.

  “That’s not what I meant, you cheeky little monkey, and you know it,” Judith yelled.

  “I’m a god,” Zeus muttered. “Not a monkey.”

  Judith ignored the pouting god. “So you made yourself, huh? Well then, you should have made yourselves some mothers to teach you the proper way to treat guests.”

  “Guests?”

  The kids were looking between themselves while they tried to assess exactly who we were.

  “Yes. Who do you think we are? Invaders?” Judith asked.

  “Titans?” Zeus said.

  “Or Frost Giants,” Thor offered.

  “Or the Devil,” Eve yelled, pointing at—oh shit … Marty. “That is the Devil, and he is trying to tempt me again. Tempt us all!”

  And that was all it took for our little reprieve to come to an abrupt and probably fatal end.

  “GoneGodDamn snakes,” I said, pulling Judith and Bella as we continued fleeing from an angry mob of children.

  ↔

  Since we had tumbled down the hill in a southwesterly direction, we had two choices. We could head toward the floating iceberg and—among the ice cracks and glacial gorges touching the earth below it—try to find somewhere to hide, or we could head into the dark forest I was pretty sure was Yomi, the Shinto land of the dead.

  Partly because it’s easier to hide in the dark, but mostly because I don’t like the cold, I pointed toward Yomi and charged ahead.

  Judith and Bella followed and within a few moments, we were in Yomi’s embrace.

  As soon as our feet touched the forest’s foliage, we were enveloped by a dusk-like hue as an eerie sense of danger overcame us.

  This place gave me the creeps. Maybe the cold would have been a better way to die.

  Dark Forests, Skeletons, Stonewalls and Goodbye Kisses

  I’d been to Yomi once before. Well, I hadn’t actually been in Yomi, but rather, a particular chamber inside it. A museum. The Museum.