Ishtar narrowed her glittering eyes. “I will not accept criticism from a barbarian who left the light of her divine kind to live like an animal in the woods. Your opinions have never mattered, and they never will. Now that Gilgamesh is dead, I can restore all the other gods to glory and put the world back in its proper order.”
“Really?” the Morrigan said, cocking her giant raven head to the side. “And how do you intend to do that?”
“The same way we did it the first time,” Ishtar replied haughtily. “We built the Wheel of Reincarnation once. We can easily build it again. It’s simply a matter of time, and we’ve got plenty of that. After all”—her face lit up with that lovely smile again—“what is time to true immortals? We only cared about it while Gilgamesh was making us suffer, but now that we’re back, the years no longer matter. We can take as long as we like to craft a new Paradise that’s even better than the first, and then we’ll use those tools to roll this planet’s timeline back to its verdant beginning. We can erase the damage an unfettered humanity has wrought and start over with a clean slate. Everything is possible again, and it’s all thanks to my daughter.” She flicked her glittering eyes back to Bex with a sigh. “What a shame she’s determined to be a fool.”
“What am I being foolish about?” Bex demanded. “You’re talking about the destruction of everything that is. All the things we’ve built, the people we know and love, you’re planning to erase them all like it’s nothing! Just because the gods live forever doesn’t mean the rest of us are junk to be thrown away.”
“But you are,” Ishtar said in a pitying voice. “Mortality is one of the problems we built Paradise to fix. The only reason I facilitated the Blackwood’s decision to fill you with the flames of life is because I had nothing else to work with inside my prison, but that’s all behind us now. You could have your immortality back in an instant if you’d just stop being stubborn.”
Bex crossed her arms over her chest with a glare, and the goddess sighed again.
“Enough of this,” she said, turning back to the Morrigan. “Just because I have infinite time does not mean I have infinite patience. I have a daughter to discipline, gods to wake, and a divine Paradise to put back in order. Just rebuilding the Wheelso we can reset the terrible state Gilgamesh allowed this planet to sink into will likely take a millennium, so I’d like to get started,ifyou don’t mind.”
She made a shooing gesture with her sword, but the Morrigan just fluffed out her feathers. “Are you sure you’ve got enough time left to do all that?”
“Of course,” Ishtar said, giving the crow a nasty look. “We aregods. We have all the time there is.”
She said that like it was the only obvious truth, but the Morrigan started to laugh. Just a bit of crow chuffing at first then louder and louder until she was cackling. It was clearly getting on Ishtar’s nerves, but before the goddess could raise her sword to strike the giant crow down, the Morrigan stopped.
“All the time there is, huh?” she said, lifting her black-clawed foot. “Not anymore.”
She brought her talons down as she finished. It looked like she was just scraping the bottom of the quintessence tank, but the instant the goddess’s claws made contact with the metal floor, the world beneath them ripped away like paper.
That was how it felt to Bex, anyway. She grabbed onto Adrian, ready to jump them both out of whatever the Morrigan was dumping everyone into. But while the floor did vanish, it didn’t drop them, because it’d never really been there to begin with. This whole place was just another of Gilgamesh’s hidden spaces, one of the mini-worlds he’d crafted using the gods’ tools to house his secret project. The Morrigan hadn’t even destroyed the entire thing. She’d just ripped a hole through the section they were standing on, creating a window into Heaven below.
What used to be Heaven, anyway. Gilgamesh’s palace was still there, but the greenery Adrian had brought in with his tree—which used to be confined to just the blocks immediately surrounding the entrance to the Hells—now covered everything in sight. The roads, the white buildings of the Holy City, eventhe black cube of the Hells’ Gate were all covered in verdant jungle. The trees grew right over the giant wall where Bex had melted the lions during her battle with the Queen of War, filling the gray desert of the Goddeath Wastes with blooming, buzzing, overflowing life.
Everywhere Bex looked, plants were spreading their leaves. Flocks of birds flew through the formerly empty sky, and the previously bone-dry air was thick with humidity and the drone of insects. But while all of that that struck Bex as a definite change for the better, Ishtar was staring at the overgrowth like she’d just been stabbed in the chest.
“What isthat?” she cried, whirling away from the beautiful jungle to shake her sword at the Morrigan. “You black-beaked traitor!What did you do?”
“The only thing that could truly defeat you,” the Morrigan said, lifting her wing to show the other goddess the trickle of blood running through her feathers from where Ishtar had stabbed her earlier. Ruby-red blood, not white.
“That’s right,” she said as Ishtar stumbled back. “I wished Gilgamesh luck the first time he fought you, but I already knew he wouldn’t win. He couldn’t, because there is no such thing as victory against an enemy that cannot die.”
“Of course,” Ishtar said shakily. “That has always been our strength.”
“Has it?” the Morrigan asked, aiming her sharp beak at Ishtar like a spear. “I’m a god, too, as old as you are. I remember when we first found this place, how it shone like a blue-green jewel in the infinite blackness of time. I thought we all understood how lucky we’d gotten, but the moment we set foot in this place, the rest of you started trying to change it. You gave your ambition all sorts of noble names—civilization, improvement, refinement, salvation—but your intentions were always the same. We settled in this place because it was sobeautiful, but you couldn’t let it be. You kept trying to control it, reshape it, bend it to your will.” She stomped forward, shaking the new green world. “Youruinedthe paradise we’d already found in the name of improving what was already perfect!”
Ishtar stumbled away from her rage, but the Morrigan wasn’t finished.
“That hubris is why Gilgamesh was able to slay you so easily,” she snapped. “He loved my wild son so much, I thought he might finally understand, but his rule was just more of the same. Even in his revenge, he was exactly like you, always trying to control the uncontrollable. It’s no wonder he met the same fate, but I am not so foolish. I know that the beauty of this world lies in its wildness, its refusal to be tamed. That unbridled freedom is what tempted us to descend to this realm in the first place, and it’s what I’ve given myself over to now.”
“Given?” Ishtar repeated suspiciously. “What do you mean by that? You didn’t—”
“I did,” the Morrigan said with a proud lift of her beak. “With the help of my beloved witches, I have given my heart, soul, and bones to the Great Forest of the Blackwood. The result is the forest you see beneath us, a verdant new life born from a god’s conviction. Born here specifically, in the false Paradise the rest of you built with your magic. Thus has my conviction become tangled up in all of yours, binding us together forever to the endless turning of the Great Cycles.”
She delivered those final words like a death blow, but Bex didn’t understand. From the way Adrian always talked about the Great Cycles, being tied directly to them sounded like having a mainline into the power of the universe, but Ishtar looked horrified. Terrified, really, covering her face with her hands as her black sword clattered to the ground at the edge of the hole the Morrigan had torn in the world.
“You selfish creature,” she whispered through her clenched fingers. “Our entire race worked together to build this place, but you co-opted our efforts and entangled our essences to tie us to your damn forest.” She ripped her hands down to stare at the Morrigan in absolute betrayal. “You’ve killed us all!”
“I prefer to think of it as a gift,” the Morrigan said, looking her fellow goddess dead in the eye. “Now that I’ve bound the magic of the gods to the Great Cycles, we no longer have to live as outsiders. We’re officially part of this world now, which means we will age and die along with every other creature caught in the Cycle’s turning. Your power and authority have not been diminished, but you can no longer escape the march of time, which means you have two choices, Ishtar, Queen of Paradise. You can stay here and grow old along with the humans you claim to love, or you can rip out the roots I just gave you, reclaim your immortality, and leave.”
“Or I could rip outeveryroot and burn your forest to the ground!” Ishtar snarled.
“And kill yourself in the process,” the Morrigan informed her cheerfully. “That’s a possibility now that I’ve made us all mortal. I’m not afraid of death, so what do you say, sister? Feel like taking a few thousand years to rebuild that wheel now?”
The other goddess stared at her for a long time, blinking her glittering eyes like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Then, with an urgency Bex had never seen from her before, Ishtar shed her human guise and turned back into the white giant from before. Her sword changed with her, becoming enormous as well as the towering goddess scooped it off the ground and banged its black blade into the sundered coffin beside her.
