“And Pan’s Oblivion?” Wayne asked.
“Not quite . . .” This was the moment she’d been most apprehensive about. The moment they learned, truly, who and what she was. The moment when any of them would be well within their rights to hate her, to change their minds about helping her at all. “Demigods can be made two ways. One, they can be crafted by two greater gods—and that’s how Snow came to be. The other is by splitting a greater god in two. In this case . . . Oblivion was split by the other gods to prevent her from destroying, well, the entire universe. The two demigods formed were Destruction and Chaos.
“From what I can tell . . . every divinity was just named after the thing they created and represented in the world—light, life, creation, what-have-you. Mortals gave them other names. Names that, like Eslar’s story, continued to linger through the ages in different forms even when the gods themselves did not. Chaos’s name is one such example.”
“Well, don’t hold us in suspense—what was it?” Wayne asked, though Jo could tell from the expression on his face, he already knew.
“Pandora.”
“Pan,” Takako whispered.
Wayne let out a groan that turned into an expletive. “We’re so stupid.”
“Destruction?” Samson was the only one still glued to the story. Jo held her breath for a moment, letting it out in a weary exhale.
“That . . . was me. Which is why my magic was—”
“Always breaking things.” She couldn’t tell by Wayne’s interruption if he was upset or just eager to know more. Either way, Jo was too far down the rabbit hole to stop now.
“As long as Destruction and Chaos existed together in the same world, there was a chance for them to come together and become Oblivion once more. The pantheon wanted to avoid that, so they made a natural counterbalance to hide me, Creation . . . or Snow, as the mortals back then called him.
“It worked, for a while. But Pan was none too pleased about the situation and began wreaking havoc.”
“Shocking,” Wayne rolled his eyes. Jo almost smiled.
“Creation and I knew that for mankind to ever be free of Pan’s terror, we needed to destroy her for good.”
“How?”
“We came up with a plan . . . a demigod split is made mortal. The idea was that Snow would split my power once more and gain control of it once it was freed from my body. He’d use it to destroy the world as it was, but then use his power of creation to quickly rebuild it free of gods . . . and Pan.”
“The Age of Gods to the Age of Magic,” Samson seemed to realize, and when Jo and he shared a glance, there was something indescribable in his eyes.
“Clearly, it didn’t work,” Wayne remarked, ever helpful.
“Sadly no, it didn’t. As long as I’m alive, she’s alive. And since my magic was in Snow and my body was reborn as a mortal, Pan persisted. Snow was weak from the shift—”
“It takes a lot out of him to change an age,” Samson said softly. Jo paused, briefly, taking note of the understanding tone in his voice. There was something more there, his eyes still alight with that indescribable expression, but she pressed on nonetheless; there would hopefully be time to pick his brain later.
“—and Pan seized the opportunity to bind him to her, forming the Society outside of time, so she could wait to try to find me. She knew Snow would have to grant wishes to skim magic for them both to survive, for the whole Society to survive. And eventually, she knew would have her chance to be whole again.”
A heavy silence settled on the room as everyone processed. Jo felt like she’d just run a marathon and now, even though there was suddenly no more track, every muscle in her body was still cranked taut with tension.
“For better or for worse, I have my magic—all of my magic—back again. In destroying the Society, I’ve gone back to being a demigod. Pan and Snow are once again walking among mortals, and the world has been reverted back to when the Society was founded . . . sort of, at least. The year is different, I think. My money is on things resetting from square one, even if to us it seems like this world has only existed for a year—or a few days.”
“And now that you’re back, too, she’s going to be on the hunt for you again,” Takako added.
“Yes. The stalemate in a war that’s been going on since the dawn of time has ended. Now, I want to finish the war for good.”
“Why?” Wayne asked, looking at all of them with denial filling his eyes. “Why not just let her be? She hasn’t done anything too bad over the past couple hundred years according to the history of this world. We have our lives back, we don’t have to deal with time, and—”
“And there’s a demigod who can gain the power to destroy it all,” Jo interrupted. “As long as Pan and I are both alive, mankind isn’t safe.”
“Couldn’t you just stop her from joining with you?” Wayne asked.
“I can try, Iwouldtry . . . But there’s something about her magic. It calls to me in ways I don’t want to hear . . .” Her voice trailed off and none of them probed further. It was the darkest corner of her soul, the part that Jo was coming to accept as the lingering remnants of Oblivion. She wanted to vow that there was no way she could ever be tempted by it. However . . . “The best course of action is to destroy Pan and ensure that Oblivion is gone for good. That’s the only way to be certain.”
“I bet she’s trapped Snow again,” Takako mused, changing the topic and following a train of thought Jo hadn’t even considered before. “If she trapped him once after a seismic shift of realities, I bet she did it again. I bet that’s why he has her as his ‘advisor’.”
