We had a name.

The Therians rose before the sunlight, gathering for a communal blessing before the start of the work day. Those preparing for physical labor—a minority of the village, all of them male—weren’t wearing their decorated shawls. The square which had last night been the site of a bonfire and dance now hosted the workers in a loose gathering. The village elder raised her hands over the assembled workers, intoning a short liturgy:

“Tireless Seindel,” she said, “he who carries sun and moon, guide our hands this day. Grant unto us strength for our labor and peace in our days.”

“Great Seindel, guide our hands,” the workers replied.

“Mighty Horcutio, he who commands the wind and storm, forbear thy wrath.”

Correction: we had two names. Sounded like this was the asshole who killed Val and Abby. I glanced over at them as the elder continued, but neither reacted to learning the name of the god that got them. I guess multiple centuries of this job took the novelty out of getting smote.

“Offerings we have given, that you might look mercifully upon us. Be merciful, therefore.”

“Boundless Horcutio, spare our fields,” said the workers.

“Bountiful Kives, she who turns the wheel of the stars, grant that these fields and these your children may grow in their season. For the fruit of our harvest shall be returned unto thee.”

“Great Kives, protect the harvest,” said the workers.

Three names, including the name of what was probably their fertility goddess and thus the oracle paining our asses. Now that was a windfall. Oh shit, she wasn’t done. Were we gonna get the whole pantheon in one go?

“Torgaior, who sits at the feet of the gods, smile on your descendents. Grant us your favor, that we may carry your name forward.”

“Honored Torgaior, favor us,” said the workers.

And with that, it was done. A word and a smile from the elder, and the workers dispersed to their tasks.

Back in the command center, the four of us looked at each other. The hunt was on.

*

Growing up, there was a brief window—before my parents caught wise—where my brothers played a bunch of video games where the final boss was some kind of god. And the god was powerful, as befits a god, but ultimately you killed it the same way you’d been killing rats and minions and whatnot for the entire game up to that point. When I signed on with Eifni, I’d been surprised to learn it didn’t work that way.

We are krill in the baleen of a god’s mouth. The size differential is planetary. There is no weapon big enough to inflict significant damage to a god. If you’re fighting a god, you’re on its home turf: a civilization-sized ecosystem, deftly tuned over millennia to maximize the etheric energies that sustain and empower it. You can’t fight a hurricane with a leafblower.

Luckily for us—I mean that earnestly—initial scans of Theria told us we weren’t just fighting one hurricane: we were fighting twelve. (And a lesser host of tropical storms, tornados, and… well, I’m running out of wind-based metaphors here, but the point is there’s a bunch of smaller critters we can ignore for now.) Two hurricanes rotating in opposite directions just cancel each other out. Etherspace is more complicated than just slamming clockwise and anticlockwise together, but the principle’s the same: if you take one god’s frequencies and divert them into a god that can’t handle them, it’ll die.

Hence the sociological research. We’d get a handle on how things worked around here, Val would do the math, and that would tell us how to set up the deathblow. Wide-sweeping cultural change was technically an option, but that would require many, many deicide teams working in concert. We were just the first wave, so any hits we made would have to be the quick and dirty kind: setting up big dramatic events, bolstered by etheric amplifiers, that struck right at the heart of the god’s aspects. Those were the fun ones.

The key to the aspect kill is softening them up first: you have to attack the god’s identity. Usually in a bunch of small ways. If you can beat them at their own game, specifically because you hate them, those meanings get tied together. Then their own aspect will carry the poison straight to their heart. Works better for some than others: you can seduce the love god’s high priest into apostasy, but what are you going to do to the weather god? Dump water on people?

There’s one other way for humans to kill a god, and if you’re lucky you only have to do it once. It’s risky. You have to take all that fancy mathematical analysis about the ecosystem and use it to make the god stronger. If you can get them all the way up to triphase, they’ll collapse under their own power. It’s been mathematically proven that stable triphase gods could exist, of course, but you’d need much more controlled conditions than what we do to them. Just to be safe, we try to leave a god with unstable aspects for last.

The real issue with the forced empowerment kill is by the time you’re going for it, you’ve got a pissed-off god with a dead family and you’re deliberately powering it up.

But that was years away at best. For now, we began the slow but necessary work of trying to learn about a culture without actually interacting with it. And, as a secondary matter, trying to keep ourselves from dying of boredom.

*

Our first mission was so short we’d never had any downtime. The second had been so chaotic that we’d never had any downtime. I’d been translating for years, and now that we finally had an opportunity I’d cajoled the rest of the team into humoring me.

“Okay, so the first thing you have to do is make characters,” I said. “We gotta do attributes first. You roll four of these dice, drop the lowest result, and add the rest up.”

“I wanna be a muscle guy,” said Markus, a muscle guy. “Is that Strength?”

“You need to roll high on Strength and Constitution for that,” I said.

“I note,” said Val, reading the rules document I’d translated into Velean. “that there’s a section on an optional ‘point buy’ system. May we use that instead?”

“Sure, whatever,” I said, distracted by Markus’s character sheet. He’d drawn a ripped dude with a disruptor rifle instead of filling out any of the actual details on the sheet. Well, at least he was engaging, I guess. He struck me as one of those players that was mostly in it for the roleplaying.

“You know there’s no guns in this game, right?” I told him.

“Markus!” snapped Abby. “Not that die!”

We all froze. Markus breathed in through his teeth, gingerly sliding my lucky d20 away from the rest of the pile. We stared at it for a moment as if it was a bomb that might go off any moment.

“Val, check it with the moirascope,” said the commander. “Lilith, we may need to incinerate it.”

“I understand,” I said miserably as Val left with the offending object. And I did. But I only had a few items with sentimental value from my old life, and it wasn’t like Eifni Org allowed worldjump tourism. Earth was still in its quarantine period.

“Lilith?” she said. I looked up. “I’m sorry, I know it’s important to you. I’ve a contact in etheric research. If we do end up incinerating your lucky die, I’ll call him up and we’ll make you a replacement. We can make it as lucky as you want.”

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“That’s… very kind, commander,” I said. “It’s my fault for bringing it. We’ll do what we have to. What are you thinking for your character?”

“I will be a barbarian,” said Abby. “And when our enemies assume that my lack of civilized manners imply a lack of tactical ability, I will reveal that I am actually quite cultured.”

“While smashing them in the face with your warhammer?” I asked.

“While smashing them in the face with my warhammer,” she agreed, smiling. The smile instantly died. “Godfire, Lilith, what the fuck is this?”

“What?” I said, taken aback. ‘Godfire’ was the most aggressive curse word in the Velean lexicon, which was weird to me as a native of a culture that didn’t find religion taboo at all, but Veles wasn’t Earth. She was pointing to… the line for the character’s deity. I’d copied it over without thinking. “Oh shit, I didn’t think… yeah.”

Abby looked particularly unimpressed.

“We can cross it out,” I said in a small voice. “It’s not important to the game.”

“My character will be named Slinky,” Markus declared. “He’s the sneakiest rogue this side of the peninsula. He turned to a life of crime so he could afford to keep his muscles oiled at all times.”

His timing was perfect; Abby and I couldn’t help but laugh. That broke the tension a little. Abby returned to her character sheet in a nonverbal gesture of truce.

We blotted out the field for deities, though.

*

“I don’t think F-36 is actually married to M-10,” I said, holding pictures of the aforementioned individuals side by side. “They look too similar. They gotta be related. They don’t do any PDA, either. All the married couples kiss in public.”

“Siblings sharing a house, then?” asked the commander. “It’s possible. They’re noticeably older than the non-married individuals, though.”

We were in the command center. It was my observation shift, but the commander had dropped in to process some old footage. We had four camera feeds now, courtesy of a couple flawless midnight excursions by yours truly. We’d kept Markus back after learning the village had its own ancestor god; my soul’s partly prosthetic, courtesy of the godseed that found me on Earth, and Eifni’s pneumologists had set me up with military-grade etheric cloaking.

“Maybe they’re a priestly lineage?” I asked. “Have we seen anything ceremonial happen yet?”

“Outside the daily blessing, no. The new cameras don’t have line of sight inside the possible worship location.”

“I could try for it tonight,” I said.

“We should take readings first,” said the commander. “Their ancestor might notice you slipping a camera in the ceiling.”

“We could kill it,” I said. “You said we’d probably have to do it eventually for opsec reasons.”

The commander breathed deeply, her eyes fixed on the cameras but too distant to actually be paying attention.

“Do you know how to kill an ancestor, Lilith?” she asked, a little too casually.

“It’s just a conglomeration of human souls from a single lineage, right?” I asked. “If we’re looking at a dozen generations or so, disruptors should do it.”

“If you can get it to concentrate in one location, yes,” said Abby. “But you won’t hit all of it, and the rest can go running off to Kives. No, standard protocol is to deploy amplifiers and then deliver an etheric shock down the lineage. Which, let me be clear, will likely require a murder. And as you’re the only person who can safely enter the target area, you’ll have to be the one to pull the trigger.”

I took a moment to absorb.

“It’s not my first kill,” I said eventually, hunching in on myself a little.

“I know,” said the commander, giving me her full, knowing attention. “It’s still not something to be done lightly.”

I looked at F-36 and M-10. If they were a priestly lineage, would that make them the ones I’d need to kill?

“Oh,” I said. “F-36 is a widow, I’d bet. Brother took her in.”

“Or the other way around,” said Abby. “It’s a matriarchal culture. But it’s a good explanation.” She paused. “Let me know if you need to talk about it.”

“No, I’m pretty confident in this theory.”

“Lilith.”

I sighed. “I’ll let you know.”

*

“Okay, so the paladin goes up to negotiate with the goblins, but you can see that it’s not going well. The group behind their leader raise their crossbows and aim them at Val.”

“What?” said Val.

“Must be those fancy clothes you’re wearing,” I said smugly.

“I told you I was switching back to traveling clothes before we left the city,” said Val. He didn’t exactly raise his voice, but his tone of voice was certainly more intense than usual.

“He did, Lilith,” said Markus.

“I draw my battleaxe and threaten them in their language,” said Abby.

“Wait, you know Goblin?” I said.

“Of course.” Abby looked at me quizzically. “You told us we’d be fighting the Goblin people. Were you expecting us to do a commando mission without learning the local language?”

I blinked at her. “Okay, whatever, it’s not your turn yet. Anyways, Val, they’re aiming at you.”

He sighed. “I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that I happened to remember Markus got a save when you were trying to get his character arrested. Fine, you’ve forced my hand. I’ll move up eight spaces and attack all of them at once.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “It’s one action per attack.”

“Cleave feat,” he said, indicating his character sheet.

“You need two actions for that and you used one to move,” I said.

“I have the Quick Step feat,” said Val. “And before you object to the target selection, my weapon has plus five range.”

I stared forlornly at him. “Fine, you dick. Roll it.”

He rolled a 20, looking way too fucking pleased with himself. “I can roll for damage,” he said, “but the minimum on a critical with my attribute bonuses is 8 damage, which I believe is the hit point total on these particular enemies.”

“Ugh. Fine, you kill all the crossbow goblins. Way to ruin my encounter. Their leader is furious and he’s gonna fucking stab you to death on his next turn. Markus, you’re up next.”

Markus gave the board a considering look.

“I roll to seduce the paladin.”

*

After months of surveillance, the back wall of the command center was a tangle of pictures and string representing the vast spectrum of human relationships. Family, rivalry, respect, love, lust, ambition—it was all noted on the wall in one of four examples of handwriting. We’d picked up body language and gestures, family structures, even a marriage ceremony. What was the line from War of the Worlds? Something about going about their daily concerns while a greater intelligence scrutinized them like microbes under a microscope? In the space of a couple months, they’d gone from a run-of-the-mill community to lab specimens without ever realizing it.

We’d all packed into the command center to stare at our handiwork. I was proud of us.

“Commander?” I asked. “Are we ready for first contact?”

“Just about,” she said. “Val’s got the engines functional again, so we can make a quick getaway if we have to. I’d like to get more speech samples before we start live contact exercises. It’s a shame we had to put the cameras so far out.”

“Perhaps now is our opportunity to kill the ancestor,” said Val. “It would not be prudent to move in closer before that point.”

The commander’s eyes flicked my direction. “Lilith?”

I breathed in, out. “I can do it, commander.”

“I’ll prep an amplifier,” said Val. “Hemispheric, do you think?”

The commander nodded. “Keeping things contained is good. I’ll need you on standby with the moirascope in case we alert Kives. In your analysis, what’s our best target for the etheric shock?”

Val studied the web of human interconnection.

“Three possibilities,” he said after a moment of contemplation. “One, they’re all valid descendants. Two, there’s a distinct family descent. Three, there was a distinct descent and they’re all dead now. Given the lack of an honored family other than the village elder’s in the sociogram, we should assume that any such descent passes through the elder. If there is no distinct descent, she’s the best indirect link due to her role and its association with the village. That makes her our best target irrespective of case.”

I looked at the pictures of the elder and her husband. Both were smiling. She’d done nothing to deserve it; it was just an accident of birth. Killing her would deeply wound the community for certain. But there was a predator lurking just on the other side of realspace, a thing that had once been human and was now eating its descendents. A monster that had ended countless existences and might have ended countless more if it hadn’t come to stand in our way.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m ready. Let’s do it tonight.”

One eternity against many. Sometimes you just had to shut up and do the math.