PROLOGUE I
There are three rules:
All gods are cursed beings.
To become a god is to be possessed entirely of hunger.
Man’s dutiful worship honors the gods’ sacrifice.
There is a disconnect between the second and third, a product of the Kept shoehorning itself into the cosmic tapestry of existence. In so doing, they replaced the original third and vital rule that, had it been maintained, we might not have found ourselves in our current mess:
One must never strive to become a god.
The Kept teach us that this world’s Old Gods came to us from elsewhere. They possessed untold wisdom, skill, and magic from the full lifetimes they lived before becoming the center of Men’s lives. Their arrival, their affinity for the natural elements that bear the world, were fated or assigned by Chaos, but Men are to be grateful either way.
Before Ixia was a nation, it was a grazing ground. The Old Gods would take the form of a local beast for the hunt: Charge, Old God of the Harvest, stalked the lands as a boar nearly the size of a mountain. Merrine, Old God of the Sea, became a shark of impossible proportions. The hunt was easy, the targets abundant—until they weren’t. Before long, they had to slow down. The cultivation of Men was necessary toprolong the feast. And so Men were bred and nourished to worship and be devoured.
The witch, Ursla, had come sometime later. Then as now, no one could say from where. The proliferation of humanity had gone to some degree unchecked, and Chaos had always seen fit to distribute its magic to a number of demigods, witches, and the like. But this witch was not like one of them.
She looked human enough. Bipedal; rich, plum-dark skin; two hands of five long, strong fingers each; two bright, round, unnervingly attentive eyes. But there was something inedible about her. She possessed a certain juiciness, in the way of berries, but the threat of her being poisonous just barely outweighed the intrigue of her taste.
It had been unclear then that she was a harbinger of something, the embodiment of another discarded truth: One only becomes an Old God by being replaced by something new.
In the beginning, at least, the devouring of flesh held little appeal to her. No creature on any world went merrily to their own demise. It was not difficult to turn Men away from gods who would eat them in exchange for a fair wind and a full net—having first lived as a human, Ursla knew this. So instead of blood tribute, she cheekily demanded blood oranges, and vast groves were planted in her honor.
Ursla saw a wondrous potential in humanity, were it to be properly nurtured. Soon, the way Roc was praised for providing Men with sustenance, thanks was given to Ursla for giving them art, culture, music. Ambition. Politics. And when they were called upon to die for the Old Gods, she was there to challenge that fate.
When living souls were committed to the sea, she would stare into the faces of the damned with mirrored eyes, cradle their heads in her cold hands, and whisper sweetly into their thoughts, “You do not have to die here. Not if you love me.” Those who jerked away or gaped in horror until their lungs collapsed resigned themselves to death and the deep. She let them sink. The smart ones would nod, and she would smile something sinister in the dark and kiss them with full lips, breathing into them the magic they would need to live under the sea.Their new gills, their pearlescent fishtails, were only the beginning of what it would mean to love her.
The discarded reborn were called Urslings then, before the betrayal of Peris and the petty hubris of Merrine. The Kept’s praise of such traitors was an untruth, a machination of faith. But we will let them be for now.
Here, having created an afterlife from her own body and in defiance of the third true rule, Ursla became the Obé, the God of Death.
And she remained starving.
1The Day of Days
1
• YEMI •
The body was only a body in the sense that there was a belly button to keep it from being some other category of meat. There was a torso, bare and pale and waterlogged with shredded flesh at its ribs like so much fringe. What was left of the viscera that had once filled it was now a short trail just shy of the tide line. The remaining arm had been slashed in some places and nibbled in others and was without a hand altogether.
“Any way to tell if he’s one of ours? Crew of theClodion?” Yemaya frowned. She stood over the body, rolling almonds in her hand before popping them into her mouth.
“Not likely. The half of him that’s left has seen better days,” Commander Hurand replied.
“Sharks?”
“Could be. Not really the type to play with their food, though.”
He looked at her pointedly, the way everyone looked at her when they didn’t want to say the word.
Mer.
“Hmph,” she grunted, neither confirming nor rejecting the idea.
“My Light. Commander,” someone called from behind them. Yemaya turned to see another one of her younger soldiers climbing the short hill. He presented her with the violet tatters of an Ixian flag.
