“Wake up!” she bellowed in a voice that shook what was left of Heaven. “Rise, you fools! The Morrigan has betrayed us! We’re getting older every second!Wake up!”
She swung her sword like a whirlwind as she yelled, moving between the other giant coffins like a storm as she sliced them all open. Bex couldn’t see the gods she was yelling at from down in the tank, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The gods’ true faces were terrifying, as was their anger, for they wereveryangry. They woke with curses and thunder, yelling back at Ishtar with earthquakes and whipping winds, but she was already on her way out. The moment she freed the last god from his prison, she turned her sword on the blue dome of the sky, smashing it open like a window to reveal the black void beyond.
“I hereby turn my back on this world,” she announced in a ringing voice. “We offered you purpose and divine perfection, and you threw it back in our faces. Live then in the hell of your mistakes, and enjoy your miserable, meaningless deaths in the darkness without gods.”
That last word was still ringing through the air when Ishtar’s giant glowing form stepped through the hole she’d made in the sky and vanished into the torrent of time. The other gods quickly followed, fleeing into the void behind her. Their retreat was so bright that Bex had to hide her eyes, burying her face in Adrian’s coat until every divine presence was gone, and the world fell into a stillness deeper than any she’d ever felt before.
“What is that?” she whispered when the quiet didn’t stop.
“Peace,” the Morrigan breathed, collapsing back into her human form as she leaned on the Old Wives’ arms. “It’s over. Gilgamesh is dead, and the gods are gone. There’s no one left to rule over us now.”
“Can we please go back to English?” Adrian asked desperately. “Because I don’t speak Riverlander, and I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Well,myRiverlander is coming along splendidly,” Boston said proudly as he jumped off of Bran, who’d been hiding them both on the other side of the tank’s rim. “I was able tounderstand almost all of that, which is howIknow that the Morrigan worked with the Blackwood to bind herself and all the other gods to the Great Cycles. By tying herself to the turning of this world, she forced the rest of her kind into a devil’s choice: Stay here and grow old along with everything else or leave and keep their immortality. As you just saw, they all chose to go, which means we’refinallyout from under every pair of want-to-be-divine ruler’s boots. Is that correct?”
“It is indeed,” the Morrigan said, giving the cat an impressed smile. “Good work, little familiar.”
Boston’s chest puffed out so far that Bex was worried he’d pull something, but Adrian just looked floored.
“That’show all that forest got here!” he cried, getting so close to the new window the Morrigan had ripped in the floor that Bex grabbed his coat on instinct. “I thought there was a lot more tree coverage than quintessence-accelerated growth could account for.”
“That’s because the Morrigan added her own blood to your mix,” his mother explained. “She bound herself to our coven, allowing the forest’s roots to enter her heart, where they then spread into the magic shared by all the gods for the construction of Paradise.”
Adrian frowned. “But I thought the Morrigan didn’t contribute to Paradise?”
“Not willingly,” the Morrigan said. “But as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, my kind has never cared much for consent. They dragged me into their plans just as they did everything else in this world, and now that greed has become their downfall.” Her pale face split into a grin. “Seems the gods and Gilgamesh had even more in common than they realized.”
“All tyrants are the same,” Muriel agreed. “But we should be grateful for that. Had Gilgamesh not sought total control, henever would’ve allowed Adrian into his Heaven and opened the crack that allowed all of this to happen.”
“It couldonlyhave gone as it went,” the Morrigan said. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d tied the gods to mortality while they were still trapped in their coffins. They had to be up and about again in order to know what they’d lost and choose to leave. It was quite the needle to thread, but I had no doubt. My sweet Muriel has always been the best when it comes to these things.”
The Witch of the Future dipped her wide-brimmed witch hat gracefully at the compliment, but Adrian just rubbed his temples with a sigh.
“Well,” he said, “at least now I understand why you let Gilgamesh kidnap me.”
“You were our Trojan horse into many things,” his mother informed him with a wink. “Never underestimate the patience of witches.”
“I think this goes beyond patience,” Adrian argued, glaring at the Morrigan. “Just how long were you planning all of this for?”
“Since Gilgamesh conquered Paradise the first time,” the goddess replied with a shrug. “That’s when I had the original idea, though I didn’t get serious until around a thousand years ago.” She heaved a long sigh. “Even I can fall victim to the divine fallacy of infinite time, though I suppose I’m free of that now that I’m mortal.”
“How long will you live?” Bex asked.
“Who knows?” the goddess said as her thin lips curved into a smile. “But I’m excited to find out. Having limited time is a new experience for me. It makes everything feel more important and exciting, especially since I’ve got a forest of my own now.” She turned to Adrian. “Do you always feel everything crawling on you, or does that fade with time?”
“It doesn’t fade, but you do get used to it,” Adrian said. “But what do you meanyourforest? All of this grew out ofmyheart tree.”
“You should be grateful she’s committed to taking it over,” his mother chided. “Unless you want to be stuck in Paradise for the rest of your life?”
“Not particularly,” Adrian admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “Assuming I survived, I was actually planning to move everything back to Seattle the moment Gilgamesh was dead. Unlessyou’replanning to stay, of course.”
He’d been talking to his mother, so Bex didn’t realize that last part was meant for her until Adrian turned around.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she confessed, glancing down at the new, inhospitable-looking forest. “I’ve always promised my people that I’d return them to Paradise, but I don’t see any Rivers of Death down there.”
“The rivers will never flow here again,” the Morrigan informed her gravely. “The only reason they were in Paradise to begin with is because that’s where the Wheel of Reincarnation forced them to flow. Now that the wheel is broken, they’re back to flowing where they used to before the gods started meddling: into the great beyond.”
“Well, that’s going to be a problem,” Bex said angrily. “We might not be Ishtar’s tools anymore, but my people still need to eat. Without rivers full of souls to pull from, where are they supposed to get their sins?”
