3.

 

“To understand why the concept of a child was frightening to the gods, you first have to understand how they lived,” said Mother Estalia. “In our post-divine world, we no longer ask that question. We have stopped asking how gods saw us, what our purpose was, how we are part of their plan. Instead, we ask, what existed before them? A foolish question, especially since the answer that is put forth by philosophers and alchemists and astrologers … is nothing. They write in countless books that before a large, cataclysmic event, there was absence. There was nothing. Life, these men and women argue, was born out of whatever this event was, the force of it awakening a spark that over millennia allowed for the creation of all life. It is the wrong question and the wrong answer, but it is an understandable mistake, born from watching the world around us and its growth.”

She had begun speaking on the rocky shoreline before the broken Temple of Ger, though Bueralan had not asked her to do so.

He had not spoken to her, or to anyone else, since they had begun the narrow, treacherous walk along the red-lit river. No one had asked if they were going in the right direction, but the temple was easily visible. Instead, he remained quiet, fearing that if he lost his concentration, he might stumble. The muscles in his legs already ached not just from the journey, but from having to balance himself against the slippery wall with chained hands. He was keenly aware that misstep he took, every strain on his body, saw his ability to escape gradually slip away.

And so he was silent as he weighed his options.

“The truth, however, is that time is not linear,” she continued. “While you and I experience it as a concept that has a beginning, middle and end, that structure is merely a product of our life, of mortality, and the time that we have constructed to measure it. When, in discussing the world, we begin at the ‘start’ we do so in a flawed position, for the ‘beginning’ of anything is a construct, a narrative distinction that you and I have been taught to recognize as a social one. For the gods, however, that concept of time does not—and did not, for some—exist.

“It is not disagreed that the divine experienced time differently than you and I. Earlier histories report stories of the gods being slow to react to prayers, of intervening on disasters decades after the fact; of curses put on dead men and women for failings long gone; of rewarding success that had turned into disaster. Eventually, it was agreed that the way by which we could understand how a god saw us, was by understanding that they existed in a singular moment that was defined by the past, the present and the future, and all its possible outcomes and permutations. One priest wrote that all elements of time were merged together in a constant awareness for a god, with no sense of causality.”

The climb down the jagged wall had been just as difficult for Bueralan. His fingers, without the strength to hold his weight, slipped multiple times. For all but the last, he was able to judge where he landed, ending on a narrow ledge or a small path. For the last of these falls, he misjudged the direction and ended in a two-foot drop that saw him arrive at the base in a dirty, injured mess, his knuckles skinned, his shoulder bruised and a mix of both on the left side of his head.

“It is difficult to find many people who hold this awareness of the world, now. There are a few, the surviving servants of the gods, and one of the new immortals.” Mother Estalia stood beside the decaying corpse of the Quor’lo as if it were a talisman, a truth. “The latter theorized that the gods were dying, that they had been dying for thousands of years while they fought, while they were alive and while they were dead. He offered a frightening vision of gods who saw multiple strands of time, who were always dying, always alive, always in war, always at peace.

“But he did not know about the child.”

She paused as, across the lake, the four silent priests rose from the water like strange newborns to the fissure that ran down the temple.

“Very few outside the gods knew about the child. She was the creation of the Goddess of Fertility, of Linae. It was perhaps fitting that a god who fashioned herself as a woman gave birth, but she did not do it in the way that you or I understand. Rather than use her own form, she dug into the earth and created a womb from soil, from mineral, from blood, from bone, and infused it with part of her life. She gave a part of her divinity to the ground, so that it would pulse, breathe and incubate the child she had created, though she would be unable to explain why. Perhaps the reason for it is as simple as her death, for she made the womb as she experienced her death at the hands of the Sun God, Sei. Or, perhaps the reason is different, and if so it is lost to us now.

“For Sei, who would be called the Murderer by us, the reasons were written down. He told his priests that he struck Linae because that was what he had always done. Everything existed as one and once the child was born—and the child always existed—he killed Linae. He had always done so. He would always do so. There had never been a time when he did not kill Linae. It was, he said, a truth.”

She turned to Bueralan, but there was no kindness in her gaze, only dedication, commitment and an obvious, belief.

“It was fate, a single, unalterable fate,” she said. “With the child, all other time was lost. No more would there be multiple strands, multiple outcomes, and with it, the gods lost their self-determination, their freedom. They no longer saw possibilities, they saw facts, and the gods feared it.”