Reluctantly, Booth once again spoke up. “According to…”

…the narrator, he started to say and then bit the words off before he could blurt them out. Trying to have a conversation that was mostly over his head was difficult enough. Adding the whole IC/OOC restrictions made it an outright minefield.

Nildeyr and Karon looked curiously toward Booth. Booth took a breath and started again, translating what the narrator had said into his own words as best he could.

“According to everything I’ve ever heard, no one knew where the Crown came from. Berwan Dar just showed up with it.” Now, Booth also faced Lora directly, so that he could watch her expression in the flickering brazier light. “Most people assumed he made it himself. What makes you think it came from here? Whatever was in here could’ve been some other crown. There’s more than one crown in the world.”

Probably? How the hell would I know?

But the words were out there. All Booth could do now was wait to see what happened next.

Lora tipped her head, in the bird-like curious way she had. But the corner of her mouth curled, and in that she looked more like cat than bird. “No one really ever knew, no. But there were theories. One of them is that the Crown’s power had been granted by Lilith.”

Confusion drove any further questions from Booth’s grasp—Lilith was another name he didn’t recognize. He waited, but the narrator remained silent.

Lora’s smile blossomed, like she could see and was enjoying Booth’s mounting frustration. “Look more closely at this statue.”

All three of the men surrounding the statue obediently looked up at the stone figure. From the outer edges of the room, Arra and Dorri now stepped closer, too, heavier and lighter footfalls on the chamber’s stone floor.

Booth looked, but he only saw the same thing he’d seen before—a matronly woman with arms outstretched in a welcoming gesture. A loose robe flowed down her body, and a hood framed her half-lowered face.

“Look at her hands. Her face.”

Booth’s patience had about reached its limit. But there was no one here for him to hit, so he did what Lora said.

Almost immediately he saw what Lora must have meant, although he couldn’t at first see how it had been accomplished. The lines of the statue’s base and robe were clean, but the hands and face generated an odd doubling effect. In some places, edges had been worn too smooth, nearly losing their shape. In others, edges were beveled. The result was that it looked as if the brow had two lines, the nose contorted as if a second lay beneath it, but the ear was softened to nearly nothing.

If the statue had been metal, Booth would have guessed the mold had slipped when the figure was being cast. This statue, though, was carved from stone, which meant the effect was deliberate. The result wasn’t unattractive, exactly. But now that Booth had seen it, it unnerved him. To him, it seemed like two women were trying to occupy the same clothing—maybe even the same body.

“Lifebringer is not a ‘she,’” Lora said. “Lifebringer is a ‘they.’”

No one said anything. Lora was looking expectantly at Booth, but he had no idea what she wanted him to say or understand. He felt a lot like he was drowning, and every time he came up for air someone shoved his head back underwater again.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Lora opened her mouth and proved Booth’s sense of being picked on right. “Tell me again, Tilier, what is the story that Voshellians are told, of their Breaker of Life?”

Stop asking me fucking lore questions!

Booth’s mouth dried. He could remember the Eve story from his own life, but it had been different here. He wasn’t sure he remembered the differences. Nildeyr and Karon were both looking at him now, too, their heads tipped in eerily similar fashions despite all their other differences. Off to the side, someone shuffled their feet—Arra or Dorri. Both of them were waiting for Booth’s answer, too.

Lora smiled at Booth. He resisted the urge to shove her and then flee from the room.

The narrator saved him.

You have been hearing the story of the Breaker of Life since you were a child. When the gods were young, they lived in the Garden.

The narrator continued telling the tale. All Booth had to do was repeat what it told him.

“When the gods were young, they lived in the Garden.” Booth said “garden” like it was capitalized, because it sounded like a proper noun to him. “Everything was perfect and harmonious. But Eve, the youngest of the gods, got so bored that she defied her elders. Acting against their commands, Eve brought about the destruction of paradise and allowed evil into the world.”

The narrator fell silent. So did Booth. Everyone’s gaze shifted away from him and onto Lora. While he was relieved to feel their attention leave him, Lora seemed to shine in its spotlight. She stood in the flickering firelight beneath the Lifebringer statue and paused dramatically.

“When the Creators, gods of order, were young, they lived in the Garden,” Lora said. “But before that, before everything, there was the Source, in which everything was one and nothing was separate. By some impulse we do not and perhaps cannot know, that unity withdrew to create a void, an emptiness into which it could rebirth itself as the opposing forces of order and chaos, form and force. But before order could organize, chaos rushed in to fill the void, raw energy driven to create and destroy and create again, testing all possibilities as it sought the one thing of which it was incapable—stability. Order. Because order had been locked away and could not enter where chaos ruled.”

“The Realm of Chaos and Old Night. The Primal Worlds.” Karon spoke as authoritatively as ever, but quietly. He also stood beneath the robed stone figure, with Lifebringer’s shadow falling across his face. He was watching Lora as closely as Booth. “We know those forces now as the destroyers. The dragon-gods.”

“In a manner.” Lora tipped her smile toward Karon. Jewelry jingled as she lifted her hands in a shrug. “The power of chaos created many things—all possible things, in fact. But they immediately destroyed them, as well, which is why they are not called the Creator gods but rather the Destroyer gods.”

Booth took a moment to catch up and then asked, “Batzieh was one of those? A dragon-god?”

A memory that felt like it had happened a lifetime ago arose, of watching the Redemption Wars trailer with Toby. The whole thing had been centered around Dragons and Radiants.

And vengeful gods.

“Batzieh was a Destroyer god, yes. So, technically, was Lilith.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used that name.”

“It is. Lilith was the youngest of the chaos gods. Her purview was the manifestation of energy into physical things.”

Most of what they’d been discussing had felt abstract to Booth—proper noun soup and theories. Suddenly, he imagined a vivid scene of a fiery, smoky sky filled with leathery wings. A woman stood on the hellscape beneath, her arms stretched skyward.

Lora maybe caught a look on Booth’s face as the story she was telling finally took seed in his mind. She leaned toward him and told the rest of it.

“But we speak of the forces of chaos, and by their very nature they destroyed their physical forms almost as soon as they were made, ever restless to seek out what was new, what was next. Lilith’s garden was a vortex of chaos, ever-changing.”

The hellscape Booth imagined shifted into an inferno. The dragons spewed fire and destruction, falling from the sky and rising in new forms before destroying each other all over again.

“And it saddened her, that none of her creations ever truly lasted. She wondered—what would happen if she could just create something strong enough to last in the face of chaos? And so she looked to where order, chaos’s opposite, had been locked away by those first in-rushing, overpowering of her brethren. She opened the gate and allowed order to enter the world.”

Even Booth could see the parallels of this myth about Lilith to the one about Eve. And he could feel it, the sadness Lora was speaking of. This Lilith, all she wanted was to have something good that lasted.

I can relate to that.

Again, Lora’s facial expression shifted as if she could sense what Booth was feeling. One corner of her mouth curled downward.