Ironically, the Triple Goddess view of femininity was narrow-minded from a true feminist perspective. Riordan came across several articles on the tropes that had become associated with those aspects and the emphasis on reproduction as so core to a woman’s journey, looking at the Maiden as the time before being mature enough to bear a child and the Crone as the time after menopause. It did not have an inherent place for mature women who chose not to have children for any reason. There were movements to create new interpretations or aspects to cover that, but it wasn’t there in the core. The Warrior was radical in its inclusion as it was, offering an alternative, if a rather narrow one.
It also rejected women who were female without being particularly feminine. Riordan wasn’t even talking about someone who was really a man in a woman’s body or who completely rejected a female gendered identity in some way. He was talking about women who had values outside of their reproductive cycles and outside of the associated ideals. The young women who were already stable and powerful. The old women who got cranky and narrow-minded instead of wise. The women who were trying to figure out for themselves who they were and what they wanted, all while fighting against a definition of womanhood seeped in patriarchy and perpetuated through popular media.
He’d never understood the urge some people had to reduce someone else to a sexual identity, perhaps because he didn’t seem to get hot and bothered the way others did. Seeing some barely clothed woman holding a product in an ad or a man with no shirt and ripped abs on a fitness magazine didn’t appeal to him, especially since objectively, the images presented there weren’t of healthy men and women. Sometimes they weren’t even anatomically possible men and women. Computers could do crazy things to pictures.
Now here was an ostensibly feminist cult that tried to narrowly categorize its members. Riordan knew it was for control, not logic, but he hated how that need for categorization made it easy to judge if someone was doing a good job or a bad job at being a woman.
“People are weird and messed up,” Riordan complained. “Women are just women. No one would ever have lived through telling my Ima that being a mother was what she was all about, even if she took pride in it.”
“My mother loved me, but having kids was always an afterthought compared to her career,” Daniel added. “She is a high-powered business woman, always going around pulling other people’s butts out of fires with project management stuff. I’d put her way closer to warrior than mother in mentality, yet she is both and neither according to these definitions.”
“Names have power,” Riordan mumbled, pondering something just out of reach.
“What was that?”
“Names have power,” Riordan repeated, more clearly this time. He leaned back in his chair and turned his gaze to the ceiling instead of the computer. He wished the room had a window, but understood the lack for privacy and security reasons. “It’s a magical rule. Defining something sets its nature. Naming something gives a way to interact with the whole of it magically. Did you know that spirits don’t start with names?”
Daniel settled in to listen, clearly interested in where this was going. “I didn’t. Go on.”
“Well, spirits don’t have names,” Riordan tried to explain, drawing from old conversations from years ago and many miles away. Kwaku would have laughed to hear Riordan teaching spirit stuff to someone. He’d always been a reluctant student at best, though Riordan wasn’t sure he understood why after all this time. It had seemed so important once that he defined himself as the warrior of the team and not the mage. He rejected knowledge because of a name. Because a name could be an identity.
Rirodan continued his haphazard lecture in halting words. “They are sometimes given names. One way is if the thing that they are the spirit of has a name. Once that concept gets strong enough, the spirit takes on that name since the concept and the spirit are too intertwined. You can see it as the name given to the concept gaining the power to attach itself to a spirit. Alternatively, a shaman or other spirit mage might gift a name to a spirit. Sometimes they will accept the name temporarily, at which point that name is a sign of their relationship or treaty. Targeting the name targets the relationship instead of the spirit. But sometimes a spirit will accept a name of their own, changing their own identity and rising out of the generic to the specific. It empowers and confines all at once.”
When Riordan fell silent after that, leaving his words hanging in the air, Daniel waited. And then got tired of waiting.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“What’s any of that got to do with feminism or anything?” Daniel asked, his hands twitching as he restrained himself from either tossing his hands in the air or hitting Riordan for being difficult.
“Labels are a form of name. Defining themselves as a role aligns themselves to that task. Limits and empowers.”
Riordan shrugged, embarrassed at his awkward explanation. Daniel looked thoughtful rather than confused, so he hoped the ghost understood what he’d been trying to say. There were several purposes to giving names to these “divine paths” in the cult. The first was practical. A name allowed speakers a shared word to use to talk about something. Someone could say a person was a Divine Mother or however that worked, and anyone in the cult would know what that meant.
The next was social. A defined and named role explained something about the person who held that title. A Divine Warrior would be a defender or attacker, the police of the cult probably. It was socially informative. Therefore, it could be used to define a person’s place in a group as well as be a role to aspire towards. The cult could socially groom their members into the roles by using the names, could have people ready to perform specific tasks, and could shame those who did not conform.
The last purpose of the names was magical. Spells could be tied to a name. They could be targeted to anyone in a role, if the casters knew how. Riordan thought back to the question of whether their enemies would be empowered. With a name like that, they could have something ready to go that would target all Divine Warriors at once, linking in new people to the name via those acknowledgment ceremonies. Or maybe they just applied some sort of compulsion spell on each group with the ceremonies. Riordan wasn’t sure what skill level the cult was operating at since they had resources from more skilled mages combined with almost no theoretical grounding. At least, as far as he’d seen. He’d only seen Helena once and his conversation with Phenalope had been short and insane.
“How do you fix something like that?” Daniel asked, breaking Riordan’s reverie.
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“If they’ve been magically named and shaped, how do you fix them?”
The sincerity in Daniel’s eyes at that question nearly broke Riordan’s heart. The cult had tried to kill Riordan, but it had succeeded in killing Daniel and yet, he saw most of them as fellow victims. At least, he did in the abstract. It could be harder to deal with when face to face with an attacking cultist. Riordan hadn’t dealt with cults specifically, but he had dealt with other political and religious extremists at times. They were not the sort to back down and debate when challenged. Usually it took showing some sort of betrayal before they were willing to consider that their faith was built on shaky ground.
Riordan dropped his head backwards, going boneless and sighing. “Fuck if I know. I’ve never really had to consider clean-up before.”
Daniel seemed disappointed with that answer. Then he let a wry little smile cross his face, leaning over Riordan. “See, that’s what you get for being a muscle-head.”
Snorting, Riordan shook his head, amused. “Don’t mock your vanguard. That’s how you get toasted.”
“Sitting here like this must be killing you,” Daniel observed, “You are usually the first boots through the door with problems, aren’t you?”
“Used to be, anyway,” Riordan sighed again. He got up and stretched before settling in to start typing up the results of their search on the Daughters for their files. “I’m not sure I’m usually anything anymore. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being that guy.”
Daniel fell silent, watching Riordan type for a minute, before saying, “It throws you off, doesn’t it. Not knowing who you are anymore.”
“Gods, yes,” Riordan breathed. “I’m so fucking lost.”
He was making progress on figuring out his new self. He knew he was a fighter and a survivor, but he wasn’t sure what form that would take. What was his fight? How did he judge what was worth risking everything for? And would he be fighting alone or could he find a team he actually trusted ever again? He’d never realized how much of his self-identity was tied up in his work and his pack. When he’d lost both before, he’d been losing everything at once. Now that he was considering who or what he was, those elements kept coming back to the fore.
So many paths lay before Riordan in that fuzzy indeterminate space beyond the end of the ritual. Some were dead ends, quite literally ending with his death. Some were horrific to him for a variety of reasons. Working as a pack shaman shouldn’t inspire the same amount of dread as being some sort of puppet for a cult, even if the dread was of different flavors, but it did. Others were variations on what he’d done before, going back to soldiering or finding his family. He’d fall back into old roles, but that idea felt wrong, like trying to fit back into clothes that he’d outgrown.
It was the new paths that were fuzziest and most compelling all at once. Magic itself held an awe that Riordan had never felt before, not when his own magic was passive and the shaman around him were either distantly esoteric or mundanely practical. Now Riordan had walked in the spirit realm, waded in death magic, and talked to trees. He’d worn his badger side as a mantle and bonded to ghosts. He’d even acted as a shaman in a team of casters, if a very junior one. Suddenly, he was aware of how much more there was to the world than he’d seen before.
Riordan wanted to see more.
Which left him in a conundrum of sorts, since he was clearly aimed at becoming a shaman but didn’t want to be a pack shaman but wanted to be part of a pack, assuming he could find one that he could belong with. He also felt a growing desire to try and stop death mages, but had no desire to join the Department of Magic, with their bureaucracy and high-handed methods and security leaks. As much as they pretended to be an organization for all magic-users, it was clearly heavily biased towards the traditional mage hierarchy. Riordan would never fit in well with that kind of rigidity.
Either way, it was a whole mess, both in Riordan’s head and on a practical level. He needed to think about it periodically as he worked through his changes and growth, but until things were more settled, Riordan doubted he could make any sort of meaningful decision. He absently rubbed a hand over his chest where a certain magical void gateway lay inside his soul.
He never knew what changes still lay before him, not this entangled with spirits.