The question Nana Rette had posed to Danto hung in the air for a moment.

“That’s what some people called one of the old gods.” Danto’s horse plodded alongside the creaking, rocking cart. “Eve. The Breaker of Heaven.”

When he realized Nana was steering the conversation toward gods, Galen sat up straight and paid much closer attention. He hadn’t found a chance—or the nerve—to ask Nana about the things she’d said to him yesterday, and she hadn’t brought it up again.

Yet. If she was now, then maybe he wouldn’t need to ask her too many direct questions, after all.

Danto had apparently heard of this old god, Eve, but Galen hadn’t, at least not in the context of this world.

The cautionary tale of Eve the Heaven-Breaker is well known especially among Voshellians. In it, the gods made the world as a paradise, but the youngest in boredom and disobedience allowed evil into the garden. Heaven was broken, and people were cast out from the presence of the gods forever.

There had been a period of about a month where Galen had tried out religion and crept into the back pews during services at a local church. No amount of praying had changed anything about his life, so he’d stopped going. He was familiar with the real life version of the Christian Eve myth, though. This world’s Eve story matched pretty closely.

“Eve gave birth to the world, but then she set loose evil in the world,” Danto added. “She’s not really around anymore.”

Nana Rette huffed. “She is far more than what the Voshellians have reduced her to. And she has never gone far from us.”

Danto blinked and drew back from Nana’s abruptly sharp words. She waved as if to shoo away the harshness and continued more kindly.

“Eve was indeed the youngest of the Creator gods. Last in birth and first in life.” Nana Rette made a grand gesture with one arm. The royal blue shawl she wore over a yellow blouse fluttered with the motion. “Without the Mother of Life, we would none of us be here. Only through her is any of creation possible.”

Nana Rette paused and ticked her head to one side. The noise she made resembled that of one of her hens clucking.

“Save the Dragons and the Radiants, of course. Their makers tried to push their creations through without Lifebringer’s blessing. It's why they’re mad.”

Galen noted the additional titles Nana Rette tossed around for Eve. He hadn’t heard any of them, which wasn’t surprising.

Radiants and Dragons, though, Galen had heard of—they’d been a main selling point of the game, back when things like that had mattered. Dragons were beasts of chaos; Radiants were said to consist more of light and sound than of flesh and blood, but Galen had gotten a distinctive angelic flavor from them.

The rest of what Nana said, about how those creatures had come to be in some abnormal way, was entirely new information.

Nana Rette waited, a sly smile on her mouth. Galen glanced toward Brin, but she only shrugged and shook her head.

Danto’s horse plodded on a few more steps. Then Danto looked down at Nana Rette.

“But Tender Hent said Eve betrayed the rest of the old gods and let chaos into the world.”

Nana Rette frowned, a rare sight on her face. “Well, when you say it like that, it sounds wicked. There are a thousand thousand stories about what happened at the beginning of time. None of them are true, and all of them are true.”

Wilm heaved a long-suffering sigh. “You say things like that, Nana, and they don’t mean anything.”

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Nana Rette ignored Wilm.

Danto’s face screwed up into an expression of utter confusion. “I don’t understand.”

The old woman’s smile returned as quickly as it had fled, creasing her entire face. She waved again with her blue shawl and sat up straighter on the cart’s seat. “Let me tell you, child. Let me tell you.”

Beside Nana Rette, Wilm fidgeted. Behind him, the parti-colored hens flapped and fluffed and muttered. Nana settled into a majestic pose and started her story. Despite his own skepticism, Galen listened closely. If Eve was some kind of nature god in this world, then that fit with the things he’d been experiencing. Maybe she was the goddess Nana had accused him of being touched by yesterday.

With the way the old woman kept talking in circles around Danto, Galen wasn’t eager to attempt asking her any straightforward questions, personally. Maybe he could learn a few things secondhand.

“Behind everything, before everything, there was the Source, pure and infinite and undifferentiated power. The beginning idea of all ideas. For eternity it existed and exists, perfect and yet… incomplete, perhaps. Perhaps our mortal minds simply can’t ken what would be perfect and yet want more. And so the Source divided itself.”

Danto grinned and nodded along. “And that made the different colors and light—the colors of the gods and different kinds of magic.”

“No, no, child.” Nana Rette clucked but not unkindly. “You’re getting ahead of things. There were no gods at first, no light or colors or anything at all. Before all that came the void, because before it could create anything, the Source had to make room for creation. And from the void emerged chaos.”

With broad strokes, Nana Rette painted a vision of a primal world of chaos, of night and shadow and dark stars in fiery swirls, ever-moving and ever-changing, where all possible things were created and then summarily destroyed. She told of the youngest of the chaos gods and how she betrayed the others in an attempt to hold onto creations she didn’t want to see destroyed. That goddess opened the gate of chaos—what Galen would, in another life, have called hell—and allowed order to come in and take over.

It was a dark mirror version of the Eve story Galen knew, and he didn’t think he was the only one who’d never heard it before. Danto looked doubtful. On horseback beside Galen, Brin faced forward, watching the road. But Galen felt the intensity of her attention focused on the old woman’s words behind them.

The words resonated inside Galen, even though what Nana Rette said was nothing more than game lore.

Lore is as close as you’ll ever get to reality again.

Galen couldn’t entirely fathom what the old woman was saying or what point she drove toward. But something about it felt true. Beside Nana Rette, Wilm grumbled but apparently knew better than to try to interject anything.

“From the forces of order which flooded the world, the Creator gods were birthed, one after another and following in the patterns tested by chaos. Glorious beings they were, all power and brilliance. Nothing separated them from each other, because they had no physical bodies to restrain them, not yet.”

“And the youngest Creator god was Eve.” Danto made this statement more confidently.

Nana Rette nodded solemnly. The cart’s creaking wheels and the fitful muttering of the hens wove between the clomping hooves of the walking horses.

“The youngest was Eve. And she did indeed open the gates of paradise, but not for evil. She did it because only with the presence of chaos is there a possibility for free will. And only with free will is there anything you can rightfully call life.”

Now, Nana Rette’s face smoothed, and a smile turned her craggy face into a visage not young but at least younger.

“Eve wields the elemental forces of our world. Only Lifebringer knows how to take the pure energy of a god and shift it into physical manifestation stable enough to hold a form. Without her, all those big ideas of the other gods would stay ideas. Nothing would ever come into being in this world. She is the Mother of All Life.”

A silence fell. Danto wriggled uncomfortably in his saddle. “But Voshell. The other gods?”

“Voshell is kin to Eve, of course. Her daughter or perhaps granddaughter, in a sense. The younger gods and their aspects are like imprints, flavors, impressions. They come to us from the elder gods, but they come to us through Eve, because in no other way can any idea come into reality. The gods are…”

Nana Rette pulled up short and peered from her seat into Danto’s face. Galen thought she might be reformulating what she’d originally intended to say.

“The younger gods are children of the elder, and Voshell is one of their faces, a piece of them which they provide to us here in our worldly state.”

Galen had only the vaguest understanding of what Nana Rette was getting at. It all obviously sat uneasily with Danto. Voshell, Esme, Mizan, even Keres—these were gods he’d probably known since childhood. They made sense. They reassured with their familiarity.

But I suppose that’s Nana Rette’s point.

Some understanding which seemed bigger than anything Galen had ever experienced fluttered at the back of his mind but escaped again before he could fully grasp it.

“And magic, then?” Danto asked.