“Heaven and its false peace has been championed by a god of war for two thousand years. This future was foretold.” In my dullest attempt at idle chatter, I added, “At least your people believe in art. Among the colonizers and his places of worship…Your mosaics, the glasswork, the buildings they’ve erected…beauty is a small consolation.”
Perun was not one for small talk. “We attended Hell’s summit as this war god was seen among our oracles. The doom you casted warranted attention, and yet, I was reluctant to believe. Futures change all the time.”
“And this one?” I asked. I knew the king of their pantheon didn’t have a gift for premonition. But I wasn’t asking about the fate of our people. This question belonged not to the years, but to the moments stretched before us.
He looked into the eyes of a man ready to die for the one he loved.
Perun dipped his chin. “Your scroll states that we will not retaliate, should you seek revenge. It does not say that we will come to your aid when Hell spills blood upon our soil.”
The final wooden shutter slammed shut.
“I understand.”
“Jarovid has not yet violated your treaty,” he warned. The caution was unnecessary, and he knew it from the water lining my eyes. He lowered his axe. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I could have chuckled. “So do I.”
I appreciated the ominous vibrations that shook the world. The sounds, the terror, the tremble of the earth itself, paid a solemn respect to the moment and its gravity. A warm, sunny day would have been downright disrespectful.
Perun was long gone, but he’d left behind the rumbling thunder of a storm that refused to arrive. Those who dared a glimpse through the shutters wouldn’t see lightning amidst the gathering blizzard.
He masked the distant cadence of a thousand heels.
His people wouldn’t hear the first murmur of war.
I expected I would never again receive a gift from the Slavic pantheon, as he granted me something as kind as it was cruel.
This depended on my predictability, and as such, I dug in to do the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I tore myself from Love’s perimeter, perching just beyond the village, certain that the evergreens would mask my earthy scent as the army approached.
The plated crusade, its prince, the metallic clang of his religious army, believed they sought territory. The humans had no idea who pulled the strings, orchestrating their every movement.
They called their impulses “divine revelation.”
This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Heaven’s King could sit back in his chair, fold his fingers behind his head, and not lift a finger as others did the dirty work of his colonization for him.
The land would be his at the end of the day.
The rest was negligible.
I remained between Love’s home, hoping she enjoyed her final moments of peace, as the army crested the far hill and the enemy came into view.
To my surprise, Heaven had indeed volunteered a few of its men to stand side by side with a so-called pagan god and Hell’s most treasonous citizen.
The angel was unfamiliar—some asshole with a blue-green, scaley, fish-like albacore shimmer—who matched his uneasy strides with the angry, frothing god of wrath, war, and flame.
Heaven’s glinting bastard was flanked by one other presence I’d suspected for hundreds of years but needed to see with my own eyes to believe.
An hourglass shape.
A cloud of inky tendrils, floating on a wind of their own.
The smiling, confident stride of a succubus.
Izi had been issued a fair warning.
She’d killed Shala when she thought I’d become too attached to mortals, believing it was her role to nudgemeto play, rather than manipulate Love.
She’d toyed with my mortal, her culture, our fate.
