“Thassa!” he raged, so loudly he startled Keranos, and in response streaks of lightning blazed across the stormy sky.
The female voice ceased abruptly. A pool of water calmed itself in the midst of the tumultuous waves. Heliod became a beam of sunlight and shone down on this calm eye of the sea. Out of the waves rose his sister, Thassa, now a giant squid, her one great eye staring at him defiantly. She knew Heliod fancied himself the head of the pantheon, but the waters held more secrets than the blazing sky could comprehend. Thassa did not bow to the Sun God, but she deigned to emerge a little from her watery domain.
“Where have you been?” Heliod asked. He had a fondness for Thassa, and it irked him when she disappeared for ages in the inky blackness of the oceans beyond the extent of his rays of light.
“You upset Keranos,” she said disapprovingly. She took her favored form, a sleek triton, and swam circles around the perimeter of her calm pool. Beyond the tranquil circle, sirens wheeled through the sky in agitation. Creatures like sirens who had little capacity for mortal language were still attracted by god-speak, the multifaceted language spoken by the gods. Heliod could communicate with many of his world’s lesser beings, often in their own language, but sirens were Thassa’s children. Their squalling merely hurt his ears.
“I wish to tell you something—you and no one else,” Heliod replied. “You see wider and farther than me. You see more than all our brothers and sisters combined.”
He meant to flatter her and keep her attention. He gathered seawater to him in great handfuls, but she showed her disinterest. The waves knotted themselves around him and fell away in unnatural patterns, more like woven cloth than the natural waves.
“Was my voice not clear beneath fathoms of the sea?” Heliod asked pointedly.
“There are civilizations beneath the waves,” Thassa bragged. “Erebos thinks of himself as a mighty king of the Underworld, but even his boundaries are narrower than mine.”
“I have seen the edges of your sea,” Heliod said, although it was not precisely true. “I have seen the roof and the floor. I would not be so boastful, queen of dead-eyed fish.”
His insult incensed her, as he had intended. Around them, the waves became like mountains, crashing down and rising up as if to leap into Nyx itself, which was not possible, of course. The boundary between the realms was inviolable except by the gods who could move freely among them. That was the order of the world. It was decreed that neither grains of sand borne on the wind nor the mightiest of the Hundred-Handed Ones could break the dome of the sky and access the gods’ realm. Only the gods could transverse the invisible passageways. Only the gods could both inhabit and be completed by the constellations.
“The waves cannot access Nyx!” Heliod bellowed with such force that Thassa transformed into mist to avoid the crippling sound of his voice, which traveled for miles. Miles away, his power overturned a small sailing vessel, which crashed into the rocks and was claimed by the depths of Thassa’s kingdom.
“Purphoros’s Sword crossed the boundary,” Thassa reminded him. “All things are possible, if a god wills it to be so.”
“So it’s Purphoros again, trying to destroy me,” he said. He breathed the name of his enemy into the four winds, and the sky trembled.
“What do you want?” Thassa said with irritation. “I am weary of your feud with our brother. He has suffered enough from your last battle.”
“How can you ask me what I want?” Heliod replied. “Look around you, Great Eye. Purphoros again threatens Nyx. He would cast all the Ancients in the Heavens down amongst the mortals. Fragments of the night sky are falling. Nyx crumbles while you paddle about unawares.”
“Who told you this?” Thassa asked. She now appeared as a fine mist that danced around him in strands of sunlight. It gave him comfort that she could turn the sea into one immense tidal wave that would inundate all the land, even the tallest mountain peak, yet she could still not hurt him.
“The horizon felt them fall, and Kruphix sent a dove,” Heliod replied. He took the form of a man again, standing on the crown of rock as his sister appeared as a woman beside him. Together they stood in the mortal realm, corporeal and hollow. The sun warmed them, and in the places where they should have cast shadows, the glittering stars of Nyx lay on the ground.
“And what if the horizon is a liar and the dove merely a dream?” Thassa laughed. She was not one to laugh easily, and Heliod was furious with her for taunting him. Nearby, the sirens had reconvened above the waves in a great flock. They screeched and mimicked their queen’s laughter. Heliod could not be bothered with them, so annoyed was he at his sister.
“I do not dream,” he said stubbornly. He was lying. He should not dream, yet last night he fell asleep in the form of a man and saw holes in his consciousness. In this dream state, great spaces of void invaded his vision and prevented him from seeing the expanse of his domain.
“Perhaps Purphoros is feeling murderous, boiling his iron skin in his infernal forge,” Thassa spoke as slowly as a trickle of water, just to infuriate her brother. She knew something, but she wanted to torment Heliod before she told him. He had grown too arrogant, even before his battle with Purphoros, and he had fancied himself above the rest of the gods.
“Does he forge another sword of chaos?” Heliod asked. “Tell me! You cannot condone the destruction of Nyx. Your realm would suffer greatly.”
“You pretend as though you fear the destruction of Nyx,” Thassa said. “But it’s him who makes you tremble.”
Presently, Heliod tired of her attempts to taunt him. He became knots of white fire and bound her to him. He caught her by surprise, and as a winged horse he stormed across the sky with her leashed to him. The ocean rose higher and the waves plucked desperately at the air, but they could not save Thassa from his grasp. Keranos, who hated the sight of suffering, protested with lightning that branched across the sky. Always cautious, Karametra covered her city with her hands. Even Phenax stepped around a shadow corner, so intent was he on watching.
Heliod dragged Thassa to the Despair Lands where the Nyx fragments had dislodged from the god realm and struck the mundane earth. He released his hold on Thassa and let her drift like a feather to the black sand beneath. He could sense a shaft to the Underworld nearby. Heliod could hear the rushing of the underground river and taste the despair leaking up from the shaft and into the mortal realm. He hated Erebos with his ceaseless vanity and self-loathing. The God of the Dead should have two faces—he was such a pathetic liar and coward with his bully whip.
“There,” Heliod said to Thassa. He pointed with his great spear of light. “And look above, Thassa. There are voids in places where Nyx should be.”
Thassa had landed at the feet of the Nyx fragments, which stood taller than the greatest cyclops, who was seven times as tall as an average man. There were ten broken shards that looked like the fingers of a titan grasping up from under the ground. The fragments were hollow like the gods, filled with the night sky and the sparkling stars and mists of color and patterns of all the knowledge of the world and the cosmos beyond.
“Nothing like this has ever fallen before,” Heliod said. He tried to say it gently. He needed her to understand the dire circumstances. “If this is done by Purphoros, then it is by a weapon I cannot conceive.”
“No, you cannot because you think in straight lines, while his mind is as tumultuous as waves in a storm,” Thassa said. “You are even more blind than you know.”
“Tell me what you have seen!” Heliod roared. His last trace of patience was gone.
“I have seen nothing,” she said. “I have heard footfalls from a creature at the far edge of the Nessian.”
“What did you say?” Heliod said. “What forest creature is so vast that it could make its presence felt in your realm?”
In the next instant, Heliod realized what creature she meant, and he did not believe her. “You lie!” he shouted, and the gray stones around them cracked and turned to dust. “Poluk
ranos does not stir.”
She became the giant eye that hated him, and he saw her stone-cold intentions reflected in every drop of water that fell dripping from her, the lidless pupil, onto the wasteland that had seen no water in anyone’s memory. In the distance, her waves pitched and roiled as she spat out her indignation at being dragged across the sky.
“A great shadow will swallow the sun,” she raved. “A war will rage across the land, and my children will feast on the drowned corpses of your favored ones.”
And Heliod was sad because Thassa had been his favorite among his sisters and brothers. She became feral—which was nothing he had seen from her before. She slashed at his face with razor-sharp pincers. He felt pain, though he did not know how she accomplished harming him because they stood in the mortal lands and not in Nyx. A god shouldn’t be able to hurt another outside of Nyx. It should not be possible except that something was very wrong with their world. That was what he had been trying to make her understand. He needed to know what damage Purphoros inflicted and how. It was not just for him but for the sake of every living thing. But Thassa had set logic aside for the sake of her pride.
He lost his temper and struck her with his spear-of-light, catching her in a vulnerable state between forms. The rules of the world had been broken, and the blow nearly split her in half. She fell pathetically amid the common slate stones and sand where she slowly reformed into a worthy vessel for the stars. But Heliod wasted no more time on her. He became white flames and burned his way across the horizon. He left Thassa cast down among the wayward shards of his realm.
Elspeth unbuckled her armor and laid it on the floor. She wrapped her sword in rags and hid it under blankets on the cot in her rented room in the Foreigners’ Quarter at the edge of Akros. There was an old mirror above the washbasin, and Elspeth caught a glimpse of her distorted reflection. With her hair gathered high on her head in the popular Akroan style and wearing a simple silk dress, she could have been mistaken for a carefree native of the city. She looked like a woman with no scars, no secrets. The reflection in the mirror didn’t look like someone who lay awake at night counting the litany of mistakes she’d made.
Aran and the knights of Bant—they all thought she was honorable and pure. But she was riddled by doubt and far from blameless. She could put on the shining armor, but Elspeth knew what she was. She was like Akros, this city of gods and warriors. On the surface, Akros was glorious—all scrubbed stone and blood-red banners. But every place had an underbelly of madness and violence like what she’d just witnessed with the crazed satyrs. The people who inhabited the shadowy corridors and poorest hovels, untainted by lies of glory, might be thieves and liars, but in some ways they were more honest than all the kings on their thrones. And if she only visited the beautiful temples with their open doors and careful words of praise she would never learn the truth.
When her friend Ajani looked at her, he saw her for what she could be, not what she really was. Ajani was a fellow planeswalker and a leonin from Alara, and it was his gift to look at someone and see past their failures to the pinnacle of their potential. He’d seen her fighting like a disreputable thug in a gladiator’s pit in Urborg and still treated her as if she were a noble knight. She hadn’t seen the leonin since Dominaria, when he returned her sword to her. She wondered what Ajani would have to say about the gods of Theros. She knew he wouldn’t have good things to say about where she was going and what she was about to do.
Elspeth crossed the small room to the open window that overlooked a dingy alley. A warm breeze blew over the tops of the buildings and the Stone Colossus, which towered over all the roofs of the city. The Stone Colossus faced the ring of red mountains on the horizon with his arms raised as if to taunt the world: This city has never been conquered by our enemies!
But Elspeth had stood in the crowd on temple days as the bodies streamed past her on their way into Iroas’s massive temple. She knew that in less time than it takes to blow out a candle, it could all come crashing down. How could they not comprehend the fragility of their lives? It was true that they had never witnessed the sickly ground of Grixis emerge into the placid fields of Bant. They had never seen Elesh Norn’s minions up to their elbows in blood and flesh from the slaughter. They didn’t know the horrors that could befall their world. Though the Akroan legions made her feel safe, she could also sense arrogance among the well-trained, well-fed natives of the city. They believed they were indestructible. And after what happened at the Takis Estate, she wondered if their arrogance was blinding them to dangers already present in the world.
Or maybe Theros was different. Maybe gods made it different. Perhaps they wouldn’t permit their people to be taken to slicing rooms and be subjected to the butchery she’d witnessed on Mirrodin, the metal world now overrun by Phyrexia. No matter what plane she went to, she found savagery. But she’d never been to a place with gods. Maybe Theros was incorruptible, but Elspeth couldn’t take it on faith. She had to find the underbelly herself.
An elevated walkway known as Stone Pike ran along the perimeter of the Foreigners’ Quarter, and it was the fastest way to get through the crowds and winding streets. Non-natives said the route had been built so the Akroans didn’t have to mingle with the outsiders. It might be true: You had to pay a toll at the gates on either end, which was too pricey for most foreigners, who often didn’t have access to Akroan currency. Elspeth paid with some of the coin she’d earned from the Takis Estate job and climbed the steep marble steps up to the walkway. A crimson sun was setting behind the mountains, and the evening light stained the city with red light. To her left, she could see the uniformed soldiers training on one of the many public parade grounds. The men moved in perfect formations, stopping on precise commands, and slicing their swords simultaneously through the air. Their stances and angles of their blades were slightly different, but the forms were very similar to those of Bant. Men seemed to reach the same conclusions when they set their minds to war.
The soldiers trained near a public monument known as the Five Fountains—shallow rectangular pools with glistening water. A colorful mosaic dedicated to one of the major gods decorated the bottom of the pool. Elspeth stopped, as she often did, where she had a clear view of Heliod. His strong features and piercing eyes were as familiar as ever.
Heliod was the one she’d seen years ago on the summit with the little boy with the amulet. Over the years, she’d often thought of him and how, without him, she would have died alone in the forest. The other gods were just images under rippling water. But Heliod was something more. The memory of him always carried a tinge of childhood fear.
The Stone Pike was crowded with soldiers heading home for the evening and young couples strolling together. She was blocking the flow of foot traffic, so Elspeth hurried on her way. Beyond the toll gate at the other end of the Stone Pike, Elspeth crossed the crowded boulevard and stopped in front of a large public bathhouse. It was Xiro who begrudgingly gave her directions and warned her that young women must avoid the main baths. Instead, she entered the shared courtyard behind the building. When she saw the untended garden and pool with stagnant water, Elspeth knew she was headed in the right direction. She followed a deserted colonnade with cracked columns, and her footsteps echoed in the silence. Strange, windswept piles of black sand were heaped along the inner wall. Xiro told her to look for a defaced statue of a soldier with a broken javelin. There was a hidden door behind that statue. That marked the entrance she was looking for.
She found the crumbling statue easily. The door behind it was harder to find. It was getting dark, and she had to search the surface of the dirty wall for a certain stone—the one with a symbol of a knife carved into it. It took so long she thought that her friend had sent her on a wild goose chase. By the time she found it low on the wall, she was angry—both with Xiro and with this task she’d set for herself. She pushed at the stone with the toe of her soft slipper, and a door opened. Beyond was a dim, foul-smelling corridor littered with crates and
sacks and lit only by strange orbs of light hovering near the ceiling. Her anger made her reckless. With her heart beating fast, she stepped inside.
The door clicked shut behind her, and as her eyes adjusted to the strange light, she recoiled in shock. What she had mistaken as sacks were actually inert bodies. Elspeth reached for her sword and remembered she left it back in her room. She peered more closely at the slumped figure just inside the doorway. He was a young man, sitting on a crate with his back against the dank wall. When she leaned closer, his eyes popped open and she stumbled back in surprise. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, and he mumbled incoherently. Elspeth picked her way down the corridor, past other humans in a similar condition. It reminded her of the poppy dens she’d seen on Kell Phir.
Someone had scrawled lewd pictures in graphic detail on the walls. Violent and depraved images of humans and satyrs repulsed her, and she better understood Xiro’s reluctance to send her here. Among the graffiti there was a single phrase scrawled over and over: KING STRANGER. It was the same phrase that the satyrs had been screaming before they burst into flames.
Elspeth didn’t have time to ponder it, because something moved behind her. She spun around and saw a man watching her from an open doorway. The edges of the doorframe were blackened and pockmarked from the heat of a past fire. The man, who was wearing a dark blue cloak with gold trim, stared at her intensely. He wore a leather knife belt diagonally across his chest, and there were braids in his long black beard. He looked young and powerful. When their eyes locked, he seemed to dissolve backward into the room. Elspeth followed.
Inside, a lantern hung on the wall over a wooden table scarred with knife cuts. The stone wall had also been slashed by dozens of blades—though what blades could cut stone, Elspeth didn’t know. On the floor below, knives had been stuck into the ground through small pieces of paper. Xiro had told her that visitors to the Temple of Deceit were usually looking to kill someone. Each page bore the name of someone who was hated. She’d found the altar of Phenax, God of Deception.
Theros Page 5
