As he watched her, his memories went back to the worst day of his afterlife.
He’d been sitting at this very table when he’d heard Vala scream out his name.
Not Nibo.
Xuri.
By that alone, he’d known how urgent it was, as she never used his real name lightly unless they were alone. And usually naked.
Twice so when he’d reached the gates to the human world and Kalfou had refused to let him pass through them. When Legba hadn’t answered his call to let him go so that he could help her.
Because of his nature and the rules of this land and his kind, Nibo couldn’t cross through the gates on his own. As a psychopomp, he was trapped here or on the other side. One of them had to open the portal for him so that he could pass from one world to the next. Otherwise he would be trapped in one dimension or the other forever.
Normally, no one minded when he wanted to come and go, and there was no problem with opening the portal.
Yet neither had seen fit to oblige him that day.
Instead, he’d been forced to listen to Vala’s cries as she died, unable to help her. Unable to stop the ritual that had stripped her soul from her body and left her trapped between worlds, lost and alone, cursing him. That, too, he’d heard every word of.
Damn them all for it.
He’d attacked Kalfou and they’d fought over it, but it’d done him no good. Nibo couldn’t leave here unless they allowed him to cross over.
Rules were rules.
And he’d always hated rules.
Sighing, he narrowed his gaze at the petite woman before him. She was one of the few of them who’d come here from an older pantheon … another nanchon.
Her mother had been the raven battle-goddess the Morrigan, which made Brigitte a goddess in her own right. And as such, Maman Brigitte had some of the strongest powers of any of them. “You know, I’ve never understood why you left your lands to come here and join us.”
Maman sighed. “Sadly, times change, Bo. As do people.”
He heard the heartbreak that lay beneath that tone. Someone had hurt her badly. And grief and regret were the two things he understood all too well. Better than he’d ever wanted to.
Sometimes he wondered if perhaps those hadn’t been the first emotions created by the gods for their perverse pleasure. And then happiness made as an afterthought and given only as a way to increase the pain and depth of emotional suffering. After all, without joy and happiness there to remind people that there could be relief from the agony, someone could become immune to the pain. But nay, just as soon as you felt like you couldn’t take it anymore, fate or life threw in just enough happy to alleviate the bitter misery, and just when you thought you’d be all right, it would rip that rug right out from under you and send you back on your arse, to a depth even lower than before. It was an unending seesaw of perpetual anguish.
And how he hated every heartbeat of it.
So aye, despondent heartache must have been the gods’ first creation, as it was their go-to place for everything else.
And that bitter, dreadful emotion darkened her gaze as she fidgeted with the lace cuff on her sleeve. “The world wasn’t the same, Bo. People had begun to forget me, and my powers were growing weaker every day. I didn’t want to die off like so many others I’ve known.”
Nibo understood and couldn’t blame her. That was the most tragic part of all about the old gods. If mortals ceased to believe in them, their powers faded drastically. When that happened, they became vulnerable to the others of their kind, who could then prey on them and take over their territories, absorb their powers, and erase them from existence. Or worse, they would become mortal and their powers would be released back into the universe.
It was a gut-wrenching fate of their kind. To die out as a forgotten whisper. As opposed to the old way, where they’d fought bloody, violent wars and killed each other off at the height of their powers. Nowthathad been a problem. If two gods in their prime went at each other and one killed the other and didn’t manage to absorb the powers before they were released back into the universe, it could cause the entire fabric of creation to come undone.
Which meant all life, in all realms, ceased. Everything was reset.
Total annihilation.
The world would fracture, and all life would end.
Nibo shuttered in memory of the Primus Bellum that had led to the death of the Malachai race and all the Sephirii who’d been created to fight them. Those had been wretched times that the world had barely survived.
It was what most of them were trying to avoid now.
Being one of the survivors, he was in no hurry to repeat it. Sadly, not everyone here shared his memories.
