“Alright!” she shouted. “I’m here! Somebody want to start talking, or were you just planning on throwing a dead Kaiser at me.” She paused. “Unless that’s your goal, you’re going to need to talk soon.”

She waited. No one responded.

“Alright. Guess I’ll just sit here and wait for something important to show up.” And she sat down, cross legged, on the lawn of star-moss. Funny; She’d left here knowing nothing; now she felt like she knew even less, despite now having a name for the lawn.

A disgusted voice came from the Archon’s former white wisteria arbor. The husk of a Fleet-Hare stood outside of it, head down like a toy whose spring had run down. As Hawk watched, a chip of desiccated flesh fell from its face to the ground, hissing in the dew. “Oh, Damn it all, girl. You weren’t ever wanted. What part of ‘make the deer run away from the human’ aren’t you getting? I want to speak with Kaiser. Go away.”

Kaiser’s voice, pained and irritable, followed the voice of Kali’Mar. “It’s quite alright, Miss W…Rayne.”

A pause. “Miss? I thought she had a doctorate.”

Oh, god. He was one of those. Right now she felt like her doctorate was good for paper airplanes and not much else, but clearly someone else thought differently. “I do have a Doctorate. I specialize in bugs.”

“Huh. Then maybe you could explain the ants. The big ones, with the golden behinds. I suppose you call them—”

“Honeypots. I’m the foremost expert in the United States.”

She heard Kaiser mutter something that she swore was she says it like it means something! “You heard this fine gentleman, Hawk. Go Away.”

“I can’t do that.” She took up a stance on the velvet soft moss like a baseball player preparing for the first pitch. The sword of milk quartz was her bat. She knew better than to tap its tip against the earth, but had no idea what to do beyond “Put the sharp end in the other guy”.

A disgusted sigh. “Whyever not, Miss Rayne?” Said Kaiser.

“Because you’re a member of my team—”

“Fine—”

“And my last name isn’t Rayne. It’s West.”

Her name on her own lips, at last, felt good. She only wished that she had done it earlier. And now a hand swept the gleaming flowers to one side, and a gleaming, golden shot foot brought Kali’Mar, Master of Air and God of his world, into Hawk’s point of view at last.

She was terrified to her core, of course, and felt that oppressive presence that seemed to indicate God-hood. But she also felt extremely disappointed. After all, Kali’Mar faced comparison to the psychotic Argon and murderous enigma Nasheth. And he failed that comparison. She was unsure as to why, because he seemed impressive enough; He had the hair of a Fabio, the physique of a Schwarzenegger, the beauty of Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. His golden robes had every inch the opulence of his fellow Gods, his display of jewelry at ears, and neck and naval and lip, were all lovely cut carnelians, diamonds, topaz, and more, all elaborately set in gold so that they could gleam at his glory…but he wasn’t a sun-god, and he wasn’t as imposing as his sibling-divinities. He was, in fact, the precise shape of idealized divinity a high-school chemistry teacher would imagine. Some who did borrow Fabio’s hair and Schwarzenegger’s muscles because he could not imagine anything sublime on his own. A mind well trained and narrow in focus, exploded by a change in circumstances, might find itself seeking the familiar old shapes even as it is blasted apart into new ones.

“God,” she said, out loud. “You’re so…small.”

And that was the problem with all four of them, now that she thought about it. This pantheon created less than one week ago, really, out of people who, with the possible exception of Naomi Studdard, had no expectations or (and Hawk knew she was being unfair) great gifts of imagination. Naomi tried to imagine a goddess of nature, and Nasheth was the result. Motherhood curdled, a worship of nature gone wrong. Humans turned to trees and burnt, because that’s what a wrathful God would do, isn’t it? Demanding service in the form of Catechism, Idolatry, and fire. Always burning, Fire wasn’t just Argon’s purview, wasn’t it? Not with the altars of all four Gods aflame and drenched in the burnt blood of sacrifice. They fed their worshippers to it because that’s what religion was Earthside. Religion was a method to separate people from money, from their families, from themselves. That there was ever more to it was something Hawk had denied…at least until she came here, and saw these people’s ideas about Gods come forth—ideas that could not have come organically from the focused worship of the innocent. No sane mind could look at Nasheth and see something holy, or Argon and see someone worthy of worship. The idea had come from something, or somewhere else. A memory of Earthside, maybe. A single whispered yearning that gave these psychopathic “Gods” all the inroads they’d ever need.

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But Hawk had met the gods this Pantheon had modeled themselves after. She’d known Christ and his Churches, the cold shoulders, the ignorant hatred and racism coursing beneath the surface of loving kindness, and she’d known that the surface was what drew you in, because you hoped that echo you followed into the cathedral would somehow blossom into the full song, and the promises would be true, and the faith would be vindicated. She saw the same bones of lust and avarice here, only no efforts had ever been made to cover them with charity. One thing she did know: Christ, for all the religion’s treachery, could lick this patched together pantheon hollow.

And she knew something else, thanks to Alex: She knew exactly how to hurt this man’s ego.

“That’s it?” She said. “That’s your big entrance? Nasheth appears in the middle of a tree, Argon has fire everywhere. You can’t even manage a big gust of wind?”

He blinked as the barbs went home. “You can’t say stuff like that to me.”

Stuff, she thought. Not shit. Stuff. “Couple eras down here and you’re still the homeroom science teacher. Nice to know self-censorship still exists.”

Wind began to circulate the Temple of Light’s great, pale yard. “Don’t you fear the wind?”

“I grew up in the South. I’d be an idiot not to.” She said.

“Then why aren’t you running away? You didn’t strike me as that great of a fool.”

She smiled. “I fight for the people I love. And you’ve offended them, and me, in every way possible. You ate Alex West. Or am I wrong, and that’s a metaphor for something.” A small part of her, not quite girded for war, hoped he would say metaphor.

His gaze softened, quickened with guilt, and then ignited with rage. “Who are you to question your Gods?”

“Who are you to claim to be a god?” she said. “Who are you to lay claim to me? You’re a science teacher who was too chicken shit to stand in the Prism yourself. You realize if you’d done that, you would have been the supreme God?”

“You think I don’t know that?” This snapped out of him like a broken tendon. Then he quieted, as if he were noting the existence of dignity. “What do you want, girl?” He said, at last.

“I want Alex West. Give him to me. Intact. Whole. And you’ll be allowed to walk away.” She stood tall and straight, in little more than the pale white chemise made of Honeypot silk, the blade of milk quartz in her hands. She felt her own smallness, not as a detriment, but as a fact. She felt it the way a stream feels small as it carves through the earth, a raindrop’s size as it contributes to the shattering of mountains. Straws that break backs. Fulcrums that move worlds. She also felt her own mortality. Survival? Not great. But she could greet it as a friend. The one thing she knew, the one certainty to survive all of this, was that Nasheth and her fellow deities were wrong. They were poison. There was no better place for a small thing to be, than to stand in opposition to the venomous. It is better, she thought, to be a small person than a small god.

“I don’t have time for this,” he muttered, and waved a hand. Lightning leapt from his fingers, cracking across the space to Hawk, as her hair rose on end and the taste of ozone filled her senses. She had only enough time to bring the sword up, and wait to die.

The lightning struck the milk quartz blade, and the blade drank it down. She felt it warm in her hands, like the touch of a Fleet-Hare in the dark beyond. Other than that gentle heat, she felt nothing. No, she did feel the lightning. It was in the warmth, a bubbling effervescence that wound through her fear-chilled bones. It spread into her, rendered harmless and pleasant, and was gone.

And there was silence. What was meant to kill had passed, fruitless. And she was identified as something like a threat. She stood before a God who had just tried to obliterate her with a lightning bolt, and all she felt was a fizzing excitement.

“You’re alone,” Kali’Mar said, at last. “Turn around. I will let you leave. I’ll even help you find your way up the Nexus.”

Which meant he would have actually found the real Nexus. It’d make it that much easier to break into Earth. And she had no doubt this would mean invasion. She’d seen the megalomania in Nasheth’s eyes. And she knew instinctively, without having to watch, that she’d taken a place as Queen of the Gods, and would play the other three one against the other. It was the kind of dynamic you’d develop in a small, wealthy school. It must have been the only familiar thing they had left, after they ate Alex. She would ply them into a rope to hang Earth upon, if she got the chance.

Whatever sympathy she had died as she remembered precisely why she was facing this god-man down with little more than a sword and her own hate.

“Why are you so brave, little girl?” He whispered, now. “I’ll erase you with a thought.”

“Then do it.” She said.

He struck out against her again, this time with more lightning. This time she dropped behind the blade and held it up, over her head. The lightning was drawn to the milk quartz like an iron rod. Crash after crash against her, her stray braids singeing as a growing wind whipped around her, yanking at clothes, ripping at her skin. There was pain in this wind like a thousand knives, lashing against her. Small cuts began to appear in the warm brown of her skin, red furrows plowed through her own sacred flesh, as Kali’Mar pulled the full effects of his power against her.

And then it was over, and she was still alive.

Slowly, she rose. Her chemise had gotten a few new holes, and her arms, neck, and even face were bleeding from the shallow cuts of Kali’Mar’s wind. But she was alive. And she stood now with the sword in her hands, tempted to say is that all you’ve got, but she knew better than to quip about an absolute certainty. She hadn’t become a serious threat to this god-man before her; she’d just identified herself as a bug too big to casually squish. He was going to have to get his hands dirty.

She looked behind him. Yes, there, in the recesses of the wisteria’s shelter, was Kaiser. He looked bloody and pale, and watched her from the shadows with hope, fear, and hate in his eyes. The latter she understood, even relished, coming from him. Fear, too, she understood. But why hope? What about this situation could give him hope?

“You’re tough,” He said, at last. “I’m going to give you one more chance to flee. Your life is my gift to you.”

“My love, alive and unharmed, is the only gift I’m looking for.” She said.

And then she charged in with the Shadow’s sword held high.