I dashed over to her, my heart pounding in my chest. “What was that?” I blurted, forgetting to switch to her language. “Are you alright?”
Joanna turned toward me; her face turned blank and expressionless as the stone beneath her feet. "I'm fine," she said in my tongue, but as she spoke, a thin dribble of blood eked from one of her nostrils and traced a red line down to her mouth. "We've done it. We've been allowed into the temple. Come on, let's have this done."
I wanted to push, to bombard her with questions, to look her over for damage myself, but I reined in my worry. She was a god, or at least she was about to become one. Where she was going, what was happening- it was the purview of the gods, not of mortals like me, or even exalted mortals like my sister. "Lead on," I said simply. "I'm with you to the end."
Joanna’s face crumpled, and for the barest of instants, she wasn’t herself, wasn’t the woman I had fought to find and protect. She wasn’t even the dead-eyed thing I had seen by the remains of last night’s fire. She was a little girl, a child, battered and terrified. She looked up at me with eyes wet with the threat of tears and said, in her own language, “Do you promise?”
I didn’t know what she meant, but faced by the raw anguish in her eyes, I agreed without hesitation. “I promise, Joanna.”
The mask reformed as the others came up from behind and joined us, and Joanna was once again hard, confident, and self-assured. “Then let’s finish this,” she said in the tongue of the Erin-Vulur. “I will need all of you for what is to come.”
…
Joanna
We climbed the temple steps with the thick scent of ozone from the passing of the lightning god thick in our noses. The others were silent, except for the occasional pained grunt from Thukkar as he negotiated the steep stone staircase. I kept my face empty of expression, not wanting to reveal the turmoil within me to my companions- least of all to Volistad. My mask had slipped, but he didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
We reached the top, passing between the great stalactite pillars, and before us were wide portals into darkness, separated only by slim pillars to turn the open space into a chain of doors. The effect reminded me of old pictures of the Coliseum in pre-war Greece. I wondered if there were lions waiting in the dark to devour me. It wouldn't be exactly what the burning man of storms had told me, but it might fit the spirit of the situation.
As we approached the doors, light blossomed, deep within the dark, quickly filling the space within with a cold, stark glow. I couldn’t tell from where the illumination grew. It lit everything clearly, but it cast no shadows on the stone beneath my feet. This lent a surreal aspect to everything around me. I felt like I was walking in a dream.
The center of the room was dominated by a massive stone altar. Like the rest of the temple, it had been apparently shaped from a single piece of stone, but it was not pristine and unstained. Dark stains turned the whole upper face of the perfect rectangular block almost black. I didn’t want to guess what those stains were from- though I could guess. The clawed fingers of the ritual tool we had seen in the temple’s atrium snapped shut in my mind. I swallowed hard. There was no way out of this, but to go through it. I drew in a deep breath and mustered my confidence. Then, in the most commanding tone I could muster, I shouted “RAVANUR!”
The presence of the Erinye god was immediately apparent. The temperature of the air around us dropped, plummeting by at least thirty degrees Celsius in a few seconds. Even with my restored "blessing," I felt her arrival in the instant ripple of gooseflesh that rippled up both of my arms. There was no flash of light, no blast of thunder, no other display of overt power. One moment, there were three people standing before the great, stained altar. Then there were four.
I turned and met the eyes of the Great Mother of the Erinye, even as my three companions immediately prostrated themselves before her. She was just as I had seen her in my dreams, lithe and catlike and hauntingly beautiful. She grinned, baring a predator’s fangs, and spoke in Pan-American, her tone almost loving. “Joanna. My chosen. You survived the trip here.”
I didn't return the warmth that she displayed. "No thanks to you, dead god. Your temple nearly killed us. Why in the hell do you have a pool full of burug back there? And would it have killed you to tell me about the traps?” Though I knew my companions could not understand all of my words, they definitely took my meaning. Nissikul, in particular, seemed paralyzed with shock at my forwardness and disrespect.
Ravanur laughed, making the same coughing, jaguar's growl that I had heard from Volistad. "I didn't put the traps there, my child. Those were the handiwork of my ancient worshippers before this place was lost. It would have been a disservice to their memory for me to interfere with the remnants of their last service to me."
I snorted. “How considerate of you.”
"Yes, well," Ravanur said diffidently. "Even a god can be sentimental if she wishes to be." She looked down at my companions as if noticing them for the first time. "But that doesn't mean that I have time for undue silliness. Get up, all of you. I have never required obeisance from the Erinye; that was an invention of your idiot priests."
Evidently, though I heard Ravanur speaking in my language, my friends also understood her perfectly. They reacted to her rebuke like they had been slapped. They rose awkwardly, trying simultaneously to stand confidently and show deference to their god. Nissikul looked like her face was going to twitch right off of her head and slither away in agitation. Thukkar seemed to be trying not to laugh or, alternately, vomit. Volistad apparently had no idea what to do with his hands. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation.
I turned back to Ravanur. “I spoke to your servant. He told me what this would entail. He told me about-”
Ravanur raised a hand, cutting me off. "He might have told you about the ritual, but he did not tell you about the stakes. If you are willing, I would reveal the full extent of the war in which you are about to find yourselves." She stepped forward and placed a hand on my head. Her touch was cool and strangely soothing, as if she was my long forgotten mother calming her anxious child. "To that end, and to assist in the duties you will be assuming, I am going to give you knowledge of the Erinye language. It's really my language, and it's all that remains of my people. Use it well." The now familiar sensation of a red-hot poker stabbing into my brain exploded through my skull, and I staggered. Volistad was beside me in a second, supporting me with a firm hand on my upper arm. As quickly as it had come, the pain faded, and I glared up at the Erinye god, biting back a curse.
Ravanur appeared unconcerned with my discomfort, but that didn't surprise me. She was a god, supposedly a dead one, and she seemed to have little patience for custom or courtesy. "Now all of you, listen," she said. "All of you, even you,” she pointed at Nissikul, “all of you are mortal. Without intervention, you will all die someday.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I was once like you. All of my people were once like you. We lived for nearly a hundred years, and then we died. Much like you and your people, we feared death and sought for ways to cheat it. For many centuries we searched for a solution to the disease of mortality. And then, one day...” She smiled again, both with her eyes and her mouth full of fangs. “One day we found it. We found the solution.”
Nissikul cut in, apparently unable to contain herself. “But Great Mother, surely this isn’t true! You’ve always been here, always protected the Erinye! How could you ever have been… like us?”
Ravanur sighed. “You Erinye are a young people, far younger than you believe. I was already ancient when your people first looked upon this world, before it was frozen, when it was still a paradise for the lost and orphaned remnants of a thousand worlds. And long before that, long before Joanna’s people, your cousins, came down from the trees, I was just another woman, one among billions. We were great and mighty and still we feared the final oblivion. We sought to defeat it.”
“And you did?” I prompted. “You beat death?”
"Oh yes. We defeated death by the strength of our will and the sharpness of our minds."
Ravanur grimaced. "It was our victory over death that started it all. We discovered a process, a way to take a person's mind out of their body. At first, it was viewed as a way to avoid the inevitable specter of death. A dying person's mind would be stored, and then a new body would be made, a perfect new body, young and healthy and whole. We would then put the mind of the dying in the new body, and they would begin again, start anew, and get to enjoy the life they had left behind through new eyes. At first, it was nothing short of miraculous."
Volistad cut in. “How could such power be anything less than wonderful?” He gestured to Nissikul. “If our parents could have known immortality, what more might they have taught us?” He pointed to Thukkar. “How great a warrior and servant of the people could he be if there was no threat of death?”
Ravanur’s voice turned wry. “Like you, noble Volistad, we were so very blind to the danger. We couldn’t look up and see the path before us, even if that path had been laid out clearly for us to see.
Nissikul’s face was drawn in horror. Though the rest of us were waiting to hear more, it was clear that she had begun to grasp something that we had not. She looked up at her god, tears gathering beneath her fathomless eyes, looking for the entire world like a child that had seen her father cry for the first time. For all of her strength and arcane power, Nissikul had been something of an innocent. And that blissful naivety had just been shattered. I watched the shards of her faith crumble and fall away in the face of whatever dark secret she had guessed at, and I winced. It was horrible, seeing your heroes fall. How much worse was it to see your gods do the same? Nissi’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Even so, I could see the words that her lips shaped, over and over. “No. No. No.”
"Yes," Ravanur said sadly. Despite her immaterial nature, I thought I could hear tears in her voice. "Some… less-than-ethical people learned that there was a way to enslave multiple minds to one deemed greater. The ‘Overmind,' as it was called, was smarter than any one person. This Overmind could predict the future to some extent, and it even displayed a measure of control over the physical world. Because we had already learned how to put a mind into a new physical body, it became possible to put this new Overmind in its own brain- provided the body contained enough storage."
I understood where this was going. “And when your people realized you could make psychic supermen, it became an arms race.”
Ravanur laughed. "Worse. It became a fad. A status symbol. All the elite were Overminds. The ethical questions went by the wayside. No one asked where the slave minds came from. At first, they were criminals, death-row inmates with their identities psychologically bombarded out of them with a combination of chemicals and brainwashing. Later, when the prisons were empty, the new source was the homeless. When there were no more of those…"
“Whichever class or race that the elites could scapegoat,” I guessed.
"Yes," Ravanur laughed grimly, a cruel, hateful sound that sent chills rippling down my spine.
With a dawning horror like that, that wracked his sister, Volistad began to recite, his mouth moving as if against his will. “A man without limits is a god,” he intoned. “A god answers to no one but a greater god.” The words from the monolith. The Erinye "High Epic." I wondered if they had ever stopped to consider what those words really meant before now.
Ravanur continued her horrible recounting. The words spilled from her, faster and faster, and I wondered how long it had been since she had spoken to anyone about this. “The highest of the high, the most elite of the elite- they were in constant competition. The more minds made up a single Overmind, the better they were, the higher ranked they became in the unspoken hierarchy. The greatest and most terrible among them were nations unto themselves- Overminds composed of millions of souls, harvested at gunpoint before the armies of the lesser gods in their pantheon. Our home world went from a population of over twenty-billion to one of only a few hundred-thousand- in just a couple of centuries. We accomplished incredible things in that time, amazing technologies, advancements in physics, medicine, you name it. But it was all at the price of billions of dead slaves, trapped in always expanding shackles of the now immortal Overminds forever. The Elite soon abandoned bodies of meat and bone, and instead took up synthetic simulacra- bodies fashioned to look like their old castoffs, but with all the limiting meat thrown out. They were near-indestructible storage devices for minds as large as continents, and their powers were terrible and awesome to behold.”
“All gods forever hunger.”
“You ran out of slaves,” said Thukkar grimly, his expression sick. “You wanted more.”
"So we went to the stars," Ravanur confirmed. "We found new stars, new planets, new people. Many of them were much like us, their bodies and minds as much like ours as Joanna's body and mind are much like that of an Erinye. We enslaved them. All of them. We stripped whole planets bare and moved on to the next. Soon, each god- for we had long since abandoned all pretense of humility- contained his or her Overmind in a small, moveable storage device the same size as the moon on which you now stand. Our bodies could move about and do whatever we pleased, empowered by billions- even trillions of minds contained within the dark moon in orbit around whatever world we chose to inhabit. We split up. Claimed worlds in groups of ten or fifteen, and set ourselves up as deities to the primitives we found on other worlds. We weren't content with the extent of our powers, but without all of us on one little planet, the pace of acquisition was less severe. We contented ourselves with being gods to people who couldn't know better, and couldn't defend themselves if they did."
“You were one of them,” I accused.
“Not entirely,” Ravanur replied. “I was a lesser god. One of the people who rounded up the chattel and harvested them in service to a greater one. I was allowed a small tithe of what I took, and I accrued a modest amount of power over twelve-thousand years- enough that perhaps I might have ascended to the ranks of the mighty after another millennium or so of service.”
Nissikul seethed with growing rage, all pretense of deference gone beneath the white fury of betrayal. “Then how did you end up here? Who is imprisoned in this place? Lesser gods? Rebels? Who do you keep here?”
Ravanur laughed again, the sound once again cruel and cold as the moon that bore her name. “No. The gods are here. Most of them, anyway.” Her voice turned regretful again. “Some of us began to have our doubts. I don’t know what changed it all for us- it was not as if we were on the outside. We benefited from this system just as much as the higher gods, but it soured for us somehow. Perhaps that was why we hadn’t ascended at that point. Maybe our consciences were merely atrophied, not dead. I don’t know. But we began to see the horror we wrought on the universe, and we decided that it had to stop.
"We began to work against the greater gods. At first, it was little things, sabotage to their orbiting mind-hives, infecting the stored minds with degenerative viruses that would wait for a time before destroying whole swaths of slave intelligence. They caught on to our efforts eventually, and a very one-sided war began. It was impossible for us to fight them, really, since whenever any one of us was captured, he or she would simply be slaved to whichever Overmind had made the capture, adding to their strength and giving the god in question all of the captive's knowledge and secrets."
“A god is always defeated by hubris.”
"Yes, Ranger. That is correct. We built a storage world, like the others the gods had made. This one was special, though. Instead of allowing the connected god to access its power, this storage world was built to contain and compress anything that reached out to it. Several of us rebel gods connected ourselves to that world, armed with short term defenses against the containment process. Then those brave bastards went out and wreaked havoc across the higher gods little domains. They were all captured and assimilated, and when the higher gods took them, they were netwo
rked to the prison world- just in time for the temporary protections placed within newly consumed lesser gods to dissolve into nothing. The great gods were immediately ripped away from their bodies and domains, left to fall dead in front of all of their worshippers. They were bundled away, each one, into the heart of our prison, and there they were compressed like any other form of data, into a form of storage that prevented them from affecting the world outside. They were effectively dead."
“But you didn’t get them all.” It wasn’t a question. I had already guessed the answer.
“No, we didn’t. So we came to them. We moved our great prison around to each of the holdout systems, and broadcast our location, and each time the remaining local gods would attack, confident in their own power and blinded by their own towering egos. And so we harvested them all, the same way we had harvested the slaves over so long. It took fifty-thousand years to harvest them all. Some probably escaped and went dark to avoid us. But most of them, most of what remained of my people, most of them were not dead- or as close to death as we could make them.” Ravanur gave that cold, cruel laugh again, and I shuddered.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 58
