“Finish it,” she said.
I thought only humans could teach me new emotions.
Here, in the Court of Nightmares, a new insidious drip began within me.
I repeated my question, tendons flexed, jaw clenched. “What did you do.”
She rose to meet me. Within her own court, she could distort her shape and amplify her voice at will. She doubled her height, bending as she yelled, then tripled her size as she towered over me. Her voice boomed across the obsidian.
“You could have left her alone!” The shout was half accusation, half maddening cackle. “The day I wandered into that shitty, clay hut, I told you, brother. Play with the humans. Have your fun. But to focus on one? To protect her? Toloveher?”
An iridescent glow reflected off the draped silk, and I knew it was my rage personified. I vibrated with it as I waited for her next words.
She laughed, her towering form pacing the endless land of terrors. A crackle of thunder in one corner. A scurry of spiders in another. An ooze of blood, a fanged beast, the gleam of a weapon, all crackling in their respective nightmares.
She tilted her head back this time, opening her mouth, unhinging her jaw like a snake as a wicked, belly laugh reverberated through her court.
“But I didn’t,” I said.
“But you could have!” She snapped back to my size, my equal in all but rage. “You could have stopped in the hundreds of yearsbefore the motherfucking prophecy! You knew better than every other deity? You were wiser than the beings who walked among the humans? You and your hubris, your attachment meant more?”
She was drunk on her own monologue. I let my fury grow, light banishing the shadows, forcing nearby residents to scurry to the comfort of known darkness.
“So then,” she drawled, “phase two. Heaven, spearheaded by a war god, found sheep’s clothing. You can only conquer so many lands through weapons and body counts, right? After all, every pantheon has a war deity, and they all use the same playbook. It’s why they stick with their own people, give or take a neighboring kingdom or two. Butthisguy? Our nemesis? Holyshit.”
I’d cut off my nose to spite my face if I grabbed her by the throat now. She was on the verge of telling me something. Yet the brighter I grew, the smaller she was. This may be her court, but she was no god. She could control her shape, but whether my land or hers, she did not hold my title.
Izi flipped her hair over her shoulder and walked toward a blank, black wall. She thrust her hands toward the darkness and flung a map of the mortal world amongst its nightmares.
“He almost deserves his victory. The first war deity to realize there was a new frontier to conquer: consciousness. He fought with emotion. His weapon became hate in the shape of peace. His blood-soaked agenda wore a kindly teacher’s face. He claimed victory over minds! Cultures!”
The blue-black crowd spread to show the expanse between the Dead Sea and the Tigres and Euphrates, the birth of Heaven and Hell. A blood-red ink blotched above and below neighboring seas, further west than Rome, all the way to Hispania, further north than Britannia thanks to the Plague of Justinian, further east than my sorrowful visit in Constantinople.
“Do you know what our soothsayers predict?”
The blue-gray expanded higher and wider than any nightmare I’d yet to witness. The red spread to lands neither I nor my legion had visited. I watched the fall of the Aztec Empire, understanding their presence in the summit, though I knew neither when nor how. The crimson blotch smothered continents on all sides of the globe in shapes that had yet to be mapped by any earth-bound scholar.
“You could have stayed in Hell,” she sneered. “You didn’t listen to my advice the first time around. You didn’t listen to my advice after their motherfucking prophecy when I begged you to stay here, to wait until desperate pagans thrashing for relevance stopped pressuring you to sire their champion. You could have waited, been silent, taken my advice, allowed the gods and their schemes to grow bored.”
Her map vanished, but the full moon glow of my silver rage continued.
“You decided, brother. You chose. You’d fulfill their prophecy. So, where is it? Where is the evidence you’re holding up your end of the bargain? Show us the fruits of your labor, Treacherous Prince. I’d hate to believe this infertility is intentional.”
My lips pulled back from my teeth. “What was your role in this?”
She plopped onto the silks once more. “I was on your side, even when you weren’t, Amagi.”
I studied her silhouette and had an epiphany that winked my starlight into blackness.
“Izi,” I said, fists clenched.
“Amagi,” she replied automatically, taunting, bored, ever herself.
“I owe it to you to tell you: this is the last time I will see you as my sister. With the resources at my fingertips, it will be hours,nay, minutes, before I unravel the fateful threads you’ve knotted in my life. You believe you’re wiser than me? You know better, you have Hell’s best interest, you’re worthy of puppeteering?”
Her throat bobbed without swallowing.
“I have a single piece of advice for you.”
