Understanding flashed across Mera’s face, and I didn’t die.

That was actually a little surprising, in hindsight. I knew she had seen some absolute shit, and I’d literally just seen her shattering the wall of my workshop and crumbling it to dust.

The wall. The enchanted, near-indestructible wall of my workshop. A wall which was supposed to be able to split and spread damage in order to, well, have exactly that not happen. How had I barely even noticed that? How had I not—ah.

Spark, talk to me.

There was a long moment, as Mera idly flicked the dust off of her fingers. It slid off like water down a hydrophobic coating, and I began to worry about something other than myself.

Slow and slower, ease and slumber. The words are a lullaby, which I hear all around her.

“Did you…” I blinked at her. “Did you put Spark to sleep somehow? That’s—how did you even do that?”

“Skills,” she said shortly. “So, Veil knows that you worship the Olympians. Talk to me about that.”

“I don’t worship the Olympians. I don’t worship any Gods except for maybe the Eternal, and He’s on pretty thin ice.” I scowled, rubbing my temples with my fingers. “With the exception of Mister I Will Be That Which I Will Be, I engage in a mutually beneficial relationship—one gives, so that the other might give.”

“Which is, somehow, fundamentally different from how we worship our own Gods, despite being the same in every way. But you were telling me about Cleric Veil, and how they know about this and are somehow fine with it.”

If all were so simple, if all were so equal and identical, then in every house would there be such a circle, and to every crafter would there be the influence of the divine.

“Was I?” Buoyed by Spark’s reassuring intrusive thoughts—and there’s a sentence you don’t hear every day on Earth—I met her eyes, which was both a lot harder than I’d expected and a lot easier. “Cleric Veil knows. James knows. Meredith, Iōanna and Ketka, Zqar, Kartom, there’s a bunch of people who know. And that’s just who I’m sure about.”

“Iōanna. The fucking Sudha Delver Princess knows, and you’re still alive.” Something went out of Mera’s tension. “Shei Maham, render this forsaken blight of a world to wilderness, because there’s nothing left of sense or meaning.”

“And yet,” Kelly said brightly from across the room, “the ward stands.”

“May it advance,” Mera replied in what was clearly an automatic response, and then she was scowling too, just as unhappily as I was. “Soft touches. All of them, just soft touches. Fine! Fucking fine.”

“This is a lot more authentic than the earlier you, I feel like.” I tried to grin, and it came out something more like a grimace. “Breaking my walls and all. Look, whatever you might think, I have absolutely zero interest in unleashing the Five—”

“Uh huh.”

“—not to mention that of the last remnants of the Olympian Pantheon here—”

“Not counting you?”

“—the last remnants,” I repeated myself, glaring at Mera for interrupting again, “are two Gods who can’t manifest an avatar, two Gods just waiting for the clock to run out so they can leave, and Artemis.”

“And?”

“And while I might be grateful to Artemis for sending me here? Sure as the Furies rage and Demeter brings the frost, I am not interested in being a fireship docked in this harbor. I fucking live here, Mera, I’m planning on this being home for a while yet!”

I was yelling by the end of it, barely stopping myself from screaming the words into her face. She just stood there, smirking wider and wider, and it was all I could do to not hit her.

Panting, I turned away instead, stalking towards the nearest chair and throwing myself into it.

“You know,” Mera said with most of her usual smugness, “there are cities in the Forest. It’s not like you’d be roughing it.”

“Haven’t heard what they’re like.” I shrugged, not taking my eyes off of her. “Haven’t asked.”

“They’ve got a wilder kind of magic. More heart, less structure.”

“Not my jam. I like structure.”

“They don’t have the ‘nobody’s special’ thing going on, you know. You’d be someone there, someone venerated.”

“Also not my jam.” I snorted, shaking my head. “I’ve known a lot of people who wanted to be someone special. They were all people who didn’t deserve to be pissed on if they were on fire.”

“Lotta really pretty people there.” Mera’s smile gleamed. “Girls, boys, women, men, people who are more than one of those, people who aren’t any of those. Spirits of the Forest who’d take whatever form you wanted to spend time with—spirits of the trees, the rivers, the animals.”

“Walk. To. The. Circle.” I enunciated the words one at a time, cold and slow. “Stand in the center of it. Think about what you’d offer the two Gods I mentioned.”

She walked, hands out to her sides and palms open in surrender. Leisurely, though. “I just—”

“Hey, I know that dance!” Kelly cut in, almost entirely managing her usual good humor and bright excitability. “You start with those two words, and then you say something that proves them to be a lie! That’s a classic.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Kelly, please, I was—”

“Taphtala, don’t take me for a yearling.” My assistant and friend took exactly the right tone of voice, friendly and just a little bit disappointed, chiding but supportive. “I know it’s hard to go with it when Sophie turns something upside down on you. But you’re a big girl, and I believe in you.”

“Thousands bless and witness, little rakin,” Mera murmured. “You’ve grown talons fit to disembowel me.”

“Don’t be too hard on her, Sophie.” Kelly came close enough to touch her fingertips to my shoulder, smiling. “She had a picture of you when she came here, and it was so close to right, and she’s trying to deal with having the cloth pulled out from under her.”

“And as long as we pulled it fast enough, she’ll stay standing.” I smiled back at her, leaning my head fractionally towards her.

She stepped closer, leaning in so that we could bump shoulders and let our heads lean into the other’s head in a strangely intimate gesture. We stayed like that for a long moment as the tension drained out of our muscles and we came back to more stable emotional centers.

To be lulled is a less pleasant sensation than to drift into a natural torpor, Spark noted. Far better to be present, and to plan for the invocation of the divine.

I giggled—we giggled at that, which meant Spark had managed to do the simultaneous message, something it had struggled with for a while. As a signal that it had recovered from however Mera had lulled it to sleep in order to better blindside me, it was heartening news.

“Alright.” I prised myself off of Kelly, calmer by far. “You all squared off and tidy?”

“Thousands, Sophie. Don’t James at me, I can’t take it.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” I grinned back at her and took a deep breath, turning towards the corner of the workshop… and Mera, sitting cross-legged in it, the perfect picture of poise.

She’d picked a good spot. No, strike that through, she’d picked the exact right spot. The burner on her left and the mana battery on her right were exactly the same distance from the innermost circle, and the perfect vertical line of her spine was that same distance as well. And it was the right distance.

Impressed and a little baffled, I walked over and sat down, mirroring her pose. From my knees to hers and from my ass—or my spine—to the edge of the circle, that same distance again, and the burner and battery were exactly the same distance from our respective knees. It wasn’t necessary, but it felt… mindful, I supposed. There was craft in it, and intention, and an appreciation for the patterns of the mystical, and if you were trying to appeal to both Hephaestus and Hermes Trismegistus, you weren’t going wrong by hitting those notes.

“I apologize,” Mera said softly a few moments after I sat down. “I was wildly out of line several times this afternoon. That you’re still willing to do this is… beyond what anyone would demand of you.”

“Don’t be a dumbass.” I was the one smirking this time, with basically the same one she’d wielded against me. “The most important person in my life demanded it of me.”

I could see the moment where she almost cracked a joke about it, and the moment where she decided against it. It probably would have been a jibe about Kelly ordering me around, but it would have fallen flat.

I’d long since internalized that I was beholden to myself before anyone else. I’d even come to peace with the tension between that and other peoples’ expectation that they’d come first. But there was still, at the core of me, an imperative that lived peacefully alongside that understanding, a second guiding star.

Help where you’re welcome. Fix what you can.

“I forgive you, in case that wasn’t clear.” I put my palms on my legs, stretching my core, centering myself. “I’m not unfamiliar with trauma and the way we sometimes fall into the traps of it.” And you probably don’t have a community of solidarity, I didn’t say, because Shemmai magic and medicine probably fixes too high a percentage of everyone’s problems.

Too much like pity. Nobody, in my experience, appreciated pity.

“How do we do this?”

Her voice was rough in places, but it was barely noticeable—subtle enough that I might have been imagining it. Adequate. “On your right,” I said, “is a crafting flame dedicated to Hephaestus in some fraction of his aspects. On your left is a work of mystical alchemy, formed under the auspices of a whole bunch of Gods, but honoring Hermes Trismegistus.”

“Narrow distinction, but okay.”

I gave her a measuring look for a moment, making sure she didn’t have any other questions before continuing. “The reshaping of the body through intervention is medicine, but it’s also in the domain of alchemy—and inherently, doing it through means that involve magic or divinity is in the domain of the mystical alchemies. On the other hand? Repairing, reforging, annealing, carving, sanding, planing. All of these things are craft. It’s all metaphor; it’s all about fit.

“And it doesn’t come free. One gives, the other gives; it’s an exchange. Not worship, not a gift, not a token or going through the motions, and not a sacrifice.”

I used the Sylvan word for it, sacrifice, the word that meant harming yourself as an expression in its own right or as a performance of what drove you to do it. Modern Shemmai had two words for related concepts, one shared with Ancient Shemmai and one more or less a loanword through Qatn, probably from Yaroba, but neither of them were quite right. From the looks of her face, she understood what I meant—and if she spoke Sylvan, that explained some of how she knew to connect the names to the pantheon.

“What did you offer? I know you’ve got at least one thing going on. You’re learning to hunt, but I thought that might just be Ketka.”

“Artemis… or I guess the Artemis who sent me here, when I first went to the Hall of the Thousand she said I could dedicate every first arrow in a hunt until I make a perfect shot, and I want to do that. But that wasn’t an exchange. That’s grace, that’s me showing that I understand that what she did benefitted me.

“There’s one exchange I made, when four Gods turned our need for a bond into the bond itself, I offered Artemis, maybe a different Artemis or maybe not, that the first works of cypress and laurelwoods that pass through my hands, I’ll dedicate to you.”

The words rang in the air, something more than just repetition or recitation. They tasted of the smell of sawdust, of the singing perfection of the arrow in flight, of the coppery scent of blood overlaid with petrichor and the sound of—of frogs, bizarrely.

“And to Hephaestus?”

I took in a breath, and felt the heat of the furnace and the feel of the pipe in my hands, still unfamiliar but something I’d been learning with more determination than affinity. “I will learn the truths of sand and fire and air. I will make from those, by my own hands, a tool of glass of quality suitable to my work, and usable in my craft—and that tool, and what it produces, I will dedicate to you.”

“Dedicate. Not just the tool, but what it makes.”

I nodded. “Can’t sell it, it doesn’t belong to me. But those are, um. The more intense ones. I also…” I felt my cheeks heat; I had been so engrossed in my research when I’d made the offer, I hadn’t stopped to think about it, not really. “I offered to share credit for my research with the set of Gods that materially helped with it, and I got a bunch of help.”

“For them making something you couldn’t,” she said slowly, “you offered to make something. For helping you research something you didn’t need them for, you offered credit. Alright.”

“Alright?”

Her face set into something between determination and confidence, and something started to build around us. “I’m ready. Do whatever you’re going to do.”

I nodded, and let my breath out as far as it would go. Breathing in deep, I let everything fade away other than one singular desire. I wasn’t here for any other purpose, after all; this was a selfish move, but only if you defined that to a useless broadness.

May it be so, I composed, that you should consider her offer, and if all is well with it, may all be contented thereby; and if not, may there be no hard feelings or judgment, because seriously, she has no cultural context, so be easy on her.

I let it drift up and out, in some sort of w-axis sense, and waited to see what would happen.