Partner

My head hurts so much, I just cannot believe it.

I also can't believe that I managed to get this done through a headache. So if there's gibberish in there somewhere, I apologise.

It's about the gods. Not really as important to the plot, but the information is mildly important to the plot... thing... Guh, I just can't think, I'm going to go drug myself and crawl into bed or something.

Read, Review and Enjoy.




By morning Mik was bleary eyed and more confused than he had ever been in his whole life. And he had had sex explained to him by a hobo on a street corner who used two bottles as examples.

It was likely so confusing because they gave him the perspectives of a logical, non-religious person at the same time as explaining all about the gods. Like. They were trying to justify to him why this or that happened when he didn’t care about the logics of it. It was religion. Religion wasn’t supposed to be logical.

But it went something like this:

In the beginning there was Mother, the earth goddess, the one and only, the land everyone lives on, eats, drinks and eventually, after death, returns to. Mother created Harella, because Mother was lonely and her lands were barren then. Harella got lost and Mother was sad.

So the stars made a being of their own but jumbled up the parts. Instead of a replacement Harella, they had created Shey, a man. Shey drew Harella out of her hiding place and coupled with her, claiming her as his own even as he gave over to her the only thing he had that was his -his name. Harella became Harella-shay, altering the name to show that she was not ruled by a man just because she had given him her heart. Shey became Shey-har, taking the small bit of Harella’s name that the goddess offered to him and cherishing every letter of it.

This was submission to women, acknowledgement that everyone begins as a female, even though the people could not peer into the womb and see the literal truth of it.

Other cultures around the world had males before females. Said females where the land and males were the seed and the land must do as man says. Mari, of course, chipped this in, said that if a baby were born with green eyes and its fathers eyes blue then the mother was killed. But people had it right. Only the mother could know for certain that the babe that comes from her womb is her own and so through mother to daughter, knowledge was passed.

Harella-shay grew bored one day and made a creature to tend the forests and lands that Mother was sprouting, a lush green paradise for her daughter and new son. These creatures were tall and lanky, faerie of type and loved to laugh and giggle. But they were so small, so little was their impact on the world that when Harella-shay became pregnant, Shey-har presented her with the people. As a gift.

The god had no idea that the Sidhe were already there, on the world, the first born and true owners of the lands. And Harella-shay, not wanting to hurt her mate’s feelings, accepted the people and blessed them to prosper. The people prospered and when it came time for Harella-shay to give birth, she chose two bodies from the people and pushed her twins, Rahl -meaning father- and Tahl -meaning mother- into the bodies to live as mortals do.

Even believing that they had one life to live, or perhaps because of it, Rahl and Tahl wasted not a moment of their lives. Rahl was brought up in a nomadic people, who raided and stole from others to survive and through this he learned tactics that are still used in the military in modern times. He declared war and attacked other nomads and those who were beginning to settle into villages and such. Two villages are still marked in the bibles. One was the village Tahl had grown up in. Fair of hair and skin, she was a beauty amongst her people and to Rahl, she was a goddess come to flesh. He claimed her for his own and razed her village, becoming lethally wounded in the process.

Tahl, having been brought up good and kind and caring for every life that Mother allows to live upon her, healed Rahl with her powers. For her village was one of the few allowed to have power and she was a healer, born of a healer, born of a healer, and so on for many generations.

The other village to mention had a young man in it who stood up to Rahl and beat the godling back many a times before Rahl thought to be clever and deceptive. He drew the young man out one way and swept in behind the young man, levelling the village with the destructive force of one of his empowered prisoners. The villagers were still in their buildings and when the young man discovered what Rahl had done…

He hunted the god down and killed not only Rahl, but Tahl as well. Having defeated the leader of the army, the young man owned the army. And he sent them, a scattering on the winds, to find a new home for his people. It was found, nestled in amongst an uplifting of the land and an old, old forest with trees bigger around than four people linking arms together, and the survivors, and the young man, moved to this new home, to live in peace.

They called it Cayalista, and the young man’s name was Ayato.

Now, angry with how he had killed them, Rahl and Tahl took Ayato as their own pet, torturing him and his lover for several lives before they realised that they could put him to other work and he would be very successful at this other work. Thus Ayato was put to work for the gods.

As if that explained everything. Mik rubbed at his eyes.

There was a great deal more information that they had fed to him. Like how Rahl and Tahl had mated to become Tahl-ra and Rahl-ta. Like how neither of those two had a true sex but could shift from male to female to male to female to half-male to half-female to unsexed. Tahl was first born and so to her went the title of ’daughter’ and to her the throne would pass, being the first born daughter of the first born daughter.

Tahl-ra and Rahl-ta had a child, De, whose birth signalled not only a huge changed, but destroyed the ranks of the gods. De was the god of chaos, known to be such before his birth, his existence influenced not only his mother, but his grandfather from the womb. Shey-har went mad and killed all but Tahl-ra and Harella-shay. Thousands of minor gods lost in one moment, all of them being child of Shey-har and so to the stars they returned, creating the band of stars that reached from the north and stretched to the south.

Something about astronomers well documenting this change in the heavens and how it put the people back millennia of cultural evolution. That and the plague now referred to as the death of the gods.

Rahl-ta escaped certain death only because he had angered his father so much that Shey-har and cast Rahl-ta out of the heavens, banishing him for no less than three thousand years. Rahl-ta not only escaped the slaughter, but he had no idea that his mate was pregnant, or even that she had given birth. He took to the heavens once he realised that the other gods were gone.

There, while it was well within his right, Rahl-ta left the throne for the Father empty and took to caring for his mate and his mourning mother. Harella-shay could not live without her mate. Ooohahelunemohyashen, that Sidhe word meaning to love one so completely that that one cannot go on without him.

Mik wondered if this was the origin of that word, but made no comment on it.

When Harella-shay died, Rahl-ta and Tahl-ra took the thrones, to bring the people to heel. But even as they took the throne, all across the lands, the earth wilted. Trees died, rivers stopped flowing, the very sky seemed to darken. Winter came far earlier than normal and lasted three years. Those who were not prepared died and a great many died. The earth was too cold to bury the dead and so they were tossed in piles outside of cities. Fuel was too precious to waste on the dead and so the bodies remained until the thaw began.

And then the carrion brought vermin and insects and with them came the diseases. In the mingling, in the piles, something arose that killed within hours of contracting the disease. Some became carriers and took it from village to village to city to land. More and more died and there was no cure, for man, woman or child. All died.

Illuva, having been born but not being a true god without the recognition of the heavens, escaped the massacre of the gods but was, as she had first appeared some six months before De’s birth, bound to mortal flesh.

Having no memory of who or what she was, Illuva was named for her power, Illuva could mean both life and fate. For with a few words she could bend a man’s will to her own. A glance and she could build or destroy a future empire.

Rahl-ta wanted to see this so called Mother-born, to judge for himself if this powerful goddess could truly be the offspring of Mother or if she was simply lying. Turns out, Illuva was not lying, though there was no conclusive evidence that she was Mother-born or star-born. She was an enigma, still was. An anomaly.

She was meant to mate De but something about that time that she claims she cannot remember shied her away even from him. She loves him, but she hates him.

She uses her powers, but is ashamed of them, for of the things the gods have given man, there are few in number and one of them is free will. Illuva’s powers all but took away a man’s free will.

Even though after she ascended, after she became a true and full god, her powers no longer worked. Probably something to do with the godsbane. The one plant that could kill a god, the plant that evolved and thrived during the long winter. Thus where gods were once immune to all, they could now be killed and that is exactly what Illuva’s own priests tried to do to her. They hid her body in the Blood temple, on the northern border of Norash, and there she lay for nearly a thousand years.

When she awoke she was weak and pushed herself too far, using powers that were once so available to her to get what she desperately needed. The gods. Who, in an attempt to find their lost sister, had taken flesh as their own and were scouring the lands for her.

The result was a tighter leash on the people. The result was Ayato being announced not only as truly existing, more than a creature that Mofvan Sidhe invented for his well known manuscript The Two Lovers, but also as something more than the people. Something close to the gods.

His feats, what he can do to the gods, to the people, to fate itself.

Mik stopped them when they tried to explain about Ayato. His head hurt and he was certain he phased out at all the … not so important parts… and all the parts about the relationships between the gods. It was… ten am… and he had to sleep at some point.

Yet both of them were talking with bright eyes, as if they didn’t need sleep.

Maybe they didn’t. That would explain how Mari got so much done…

Mik stumbled to his apartment and curled up around Paw in the nest and mumbled about how he never wanted to be religious. Far too confusing. Far too…

The man drifted off to sleep. Dreaming of something that just eluded him, that danced just out of his understanding.



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