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Outside, the drums had stopped. Eerie silence reigned, such that the group could hear the drop of moisture off the temple’s stone circles. Above, the largest moon cast a soft glow over the grotto.

“What. I don’t have a mother?” Ma’at asked, voice flat. “Or are you saying Aminia…”

“Oh, what? Nothing so fancy, I assure you.” Aminia chuckled, a slight blush on the god’s cheeks. “There’s no trick to it, miracle aside. Your mother is the river, clearly.”

“How?” I asked.

“Miracles,” Aminia and Michael repeated, in unison.

Maat’s brow furrowed. This explained quite a bit – his affinity for the Torrent, why Aminia took so much interest in him, how his father knew the god. But such a shock was a revelation that the young man scarcely had the brain space to process all the other truths of the past twenty years. All the other worlds and internecine warfare that his father had just gone on about.

“Dad, am I a demi-god?”

Aminia raised his hand. “We expressly avoided mentioning any of this at all to keep your ego at bay, at least until you got through the usual puberty travails.”

“Maat, dear, your patron god and I love you very much, which is why-”

“Just tell me what it means,” Maat said.

Sara and Lloyd had by now moved over behind a standing stone to give Maat and Michael space.

“You are, by blood, or biology as your people’s fancy tomes call it, your father’s son. I merely enhanced the bloodline with some divine essence and commanded the river to incubate you for a few days.”

“That just raises further questions. Like what the heck does incubation mean?”

“Well,” Aminia began with a grin. “First we had to-”

The Quarterchief coughed then cut Aminia off just as the god was starting to answer.

“Look, in over ninety-one percent of cases, mortal beings wish to reproduce to carry on their genetic legacy. It’s the same in this world as in your father’s realm. Through you, I’ve simply found a way to do the same with my deific legacy.”

Aminia scanned the grove, looking for signs that others approved or at least understood. Maat cocked his head. Even Michael appeared confused.

“So even though you’re an immortal god,” Michael began. “You were worried about your legacy?”

The god nodded.

“Contrary to popular belief, rivers can die of natural causes. Not as fast as lakes, but sources can dry up, sinkholes can send the whole thing underground at some early point. The whole delta can silt over into a swamp. By having offspring in the form of a, uh, patron here, it’s a type of insurance policy.”

“I don’t like existing purely as a backup plan.” Maat scowled at Aminia, but also at his father.

“It’s not that simplistic,” Aminia assured him.

“So, at the end of the day I’m going to, what, be destined to inherit your god position? Will I be able to leave the shrine?”

Aminia shook his head. “Just go live your life. That’s a legacy in and of itself. Your deific lineage doesn’t mean you’re destined for greatness. Everyone has parents. I’m no different from Michael in that regard.”

Michael was blushing, just slightly visible beneath his beard. “This was always going to be awkward.”

“You’re handling it like a champ, dear outlander,” Aminia gave a short bow.

Maat’s head spun. It would take some time for him to reconcile this other parent – at least he thinks Aminia’s his other parent. Certainly, it was hard to think of the Torrent itself as his mother. With the temple under siege here, he had all the time in the world to reconcile all this.

“Hey, Ma’at, you okay?” Lloyd asked.

“That was a lot to process,” Sara added. “Who knew dad was from some weird dimension. What did they call it. Tea’jas?”

Maat nodded, unsure how to proceed. He desperately needed some water from the spring, so he made his way over there as the twins continued to talk.

“Wait, so the Jean’in have been brought here by some old friend of the chief?” Lloyd asked.

“Yes. Came here on the same… vessel?” Maat’s voice waivered.

“It’s called a bus,” Michael said from over at Aminia's side.

“Right. They were on the same fleet of buses.” The word hung uneasy in Sara’s mouth. “Like a boat but it goes overland.”

With minimal hope of rescue and no sign of an assault, the group had plenty of time to hash out the implications of Michael’s tale.

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All at once, the water barrier collapsed. A fine spray of spring water covered the grove.

“Someone’s coming,” Aminia said.

The Quarterchief, Maat, and the paltry collection of warriors that remained in the grove rose to their feet, war clubs drawn.

A low rumbling drum line approached from the north, echoing off the stone circles.

“Hey, Team Cap. Don’t you want to hear my drawn out and tragic story of survival?”

A man in a foreign leather duster walked through the shallow waters of the grove. He wore that brimmed hat the foreigners were known to wear, sans the elaborate plumes. His ear tips were cut short from wounds.

“Richard.” Michael said, scowling and with his hair standing on end.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

The Stranger banged a handheld drum set with a metallic mallet. He was alone in the grotto, the only foreigner that dare enter.

“As it turns out I didn’t die,” Richard said.

“Clearly,” Michael said. “How?”

“Let’s go for the short version: A series of caverns and channels runs underneath this island. Underneath every island on the world plain, really; it’s how water keeps getting replenished. So, after an unknown amount of time I found myself thrown into the abyss of a subterranean sea. There wasn’t a light for a hundred miles. Eyeless fish nipped at the thin flesh around my neck and the back of my elbows.”

“Why did you come back, Richard?” Michael stamped his foot in the grotto waters. “And why with an army?”

“… impossible to eat with my jaw dislodged. Had to put that back in place by hand. Joints still sting. Ate those eyeless fish raw, every bite more painful than the last. Spent weeks just making my way from rock to rock. It’s the tropics, so at least the water is warm, right? Pretty damn humid down in the depths.”

The Quarterchief and his remaining retinue gripped their weapons in hand. Richard ignored them.

“Now, how did I get out of there? Well, some fungus served a dual purpose: bioluminescence and dew collection. They sapped water out of the humidity, producing a chemical reaction manifesting as a blue glow of a couple dozen lumens. Edible moisture pills that also provided light. How helpful.”

“Leave,” Aminia said.

The drumming grew faster.

“Every ocean in this world gets funneled through these underground chasms eventually. It’s part of the water cycle. Everything inevitably bubbles back up towards the surface.” Richard nodded towards the headwater’s central spring.

“So, you emerged through a spring?”

“Pretty much. Things bubble you up like a log flume. Hold your breath, it takes less than a minute. The moon was gone by the time I jumped out of a hole on the north shore. Months had passed.”

Michael let out a frustrated grunt. “There were rumors of a strange figure bartering for passage off-island around mid-year…”

“No body, no confirmed kill. Next time finish the job,” Richard said with a pained rasp as his jaw smacked shut.

The stranger started striking one of the stones in the innermost circle with his mallet.

“Spent the next eight years riding a trade route. There are hundreds of islands, most of which possessed a level of technology and social cohesion you might find circa the seventeen-hundreds or so. They had basic knowledge of rudimentary explosives. Printing presses were a luxury for the largest core islands.”

Aminia held his hands out. Water from the ground leapt up and congealed itself into the shape of a impressive-sized bow for an entity of his size.

“Leave,” the river god said again.

Each blow of the mallet too chunks out of stone blocks. Far more damage than what ought to have been done from a weapon that size.

“Took a few years to reverse-engineer gunpowder, steam engines, internal combustion engines. Made me a rockstar on the core islands. Had to find local substitutes for dead dinos – the sunoil from this very island has served us well in practice runs against five other less developed islands.”

Without further warning, Aminia let loose with an arrow of compressed water. It crossed the grove with the speed of the Torrent’s fastest rapids, only to dissipate into a fine mist before it ever reached Richard.

A rainbow formed from light bouncing off the faltered arrow. The mist shook with each strike of Richard’s mallet, as if it was giving off vibrations that were otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

“One thing that helped my one-man industrial revolution: there’s a cult from the core isles. Called the Baptism of the Forge – goanna be my rock name band when I’m back in Houston for sure – anyway, they worship a blacksmith god, lord of technology and invention, whose inspiration elevates man from beast. They were a minor sect, but with my patronage they’ve converted about a third of the core islands. Most of the boys out there? Fresh young converts, eager to prove the superiority of fire-forged rifling over wooden clubs. It is a core tenant of their faith, after all.”

Richard’s wide-eyed stare stopped at Aminia. “Forgotten every sermon my old man ever gave. But I’m pretty sure a god of steel and iron beats out some chickenshit pagan water nymph any day.”

“Steel can rust,” Aminia said with a frown.

“Oh?” Richard chuckled. “Michael didn’t tell you? We fixed that in our world.”

With one last strike from the engraved hammer, the stone archway collapsed into a pile.

“Forge beats stone,” Richard said.

“Goddamnit, Richard. You’ve done well for yourself, clearly. Why even come back?”

“To finish what I started, with or without you. I’d say it’s nothing personal, but…” Richard’s gaze focused on Maat, who slunk back, cowed. The stranger then stared at Michael. “… now that we’re face to face? Your son’s going to watch me cave your skull in with this hammer. Over and over.”

Aminia fired off three maelstrom-arrows in quick succession. One beat of the hand-drum filled the entire grove in a thick mist and sent Aminia’s bow and its in-flight arrows splashing to the ground.

“Steel beats water.”

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Richard was outnumbered but clearly didn’t care. And it didn't seem to matter.

"What else can I say. Oh, spent years looking for a way back. Pursued any lead. Met a guy from Japan, believe it or not. He was as clueless about how he got here as we were. Tried convincing him to team up. He was really good with a sword. Ah, but I digress..."

A stormlander warrior from the Quarterchief’s war party rushed forward, club drawn, only to be struck in the face with a thrown hammer. There was a sickening crunch and the warrior fell to the water, still twitching.

“This guy’s insane,” Lloyd said.

“Stay back.” The Quarterchief lunged forward, his own club in hand.

“Goanna kill you excruciatingly slow, Mikey, old pal.”

Though he was still outnumbered twelve to one, Richard rushed forward. He threw his duster off, revealing many more mini-hammers hanging off a bandolier. He pulled out two more hammers and threw one at another stone circle, blowing a crater into the archway and forcing it to collapse too. Then he pulled out yet another hammer and swung at two more hapless Secondhome warriors eager to kill the butcher of the riverbend.

Again, Richard banged his hammers together, and again, Aminia’s power over the headwaters dissipated. Amimia’s form grew hazy, as if it were a mirage disintegrating into the atmosphere.

“You all may want to get out of here,” the river god said.

“The grove is surrounded.” Michael readied his war club.

Richard dispatched the two warriors with blows from each hammer.

“I’ve been to the edge of the world,” the stranger said. “It’s all flat! Didn’t actually believe it, until I saw it for myself. There are falls. Bottomless falls. A roar is deafening from a hundred miles away. I saw that endless cliff into the void, from an island about to be eroded away. I saw that, and I knew I wasn’t getting back anytime soon.”

The hammers began to glow as Richard struck rocks, the ground, the chest cavities of random warriors.

A third stone circle fell.

“There’s nothing keeping the rest of the army out,” Aminia said nonchalantly.

More mercenaries in their leather dusters rushed into the remains of the stone grove. They were being rapidly outnumbered.

“Everyone get behind me,” Aminia said.

The youth ran to the central spring. Aminia held his arms out as if shielding the children with his body.

Richard and Michael were sparring. The war club was too long to serve as a proper counter to the miniature hammers.

“You’ve gotten slow in your old age. Living in a cave, hunting giant ducks on foot, fatherhood. Getting’ soft, Mike.”

“Stay back!”

Aminia summoned a wall of water that exploded out of the ground between Richard and Michael. The Quarterchief fell back, dark bruise on his shoulder where he’d taken a glancing hammer blow. Everyone who was still alive was on this side of the water wall.

“You’re hurt.” Aminia rushed to Michael and set his hand upon the bruise, but the wound did not heal.

Richard bellowed something inaudible behind the wall of rushing water. It wouldn’t hold him forever. Already, there was a steady drumbeat building, mist wavering as the vibrations grew stronger.

“Everybody dive into the spring,” Aminia said.

“What good is that going to do?” Lloyd asked.

“I can arrange for your escape.” Aminia clasped his hands as if in prayer.

There was an uneasy silence, during which the Jean’in drums began to build out beyond the crumbling arch stones.

“Oh, just listen to the river god,” Sara said.

The kids waded into the spring. Aminia carried Michael over his shoulder, lowering the Quarterchief into the water as well. The few remaining warriors left piled in as well.

“What about you?” Michael asked.

Aminia turned back towards the rapidly disintegrating water wall. He looked over the shoulder.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, then winked. “There are levels of survival a god can find tollerable. Just be sure to free the shrines at some point.”

One final water wall enveloped the spring in a spherical vortex. Aminia disappeared behind the shroud, but not before casting Maat and Michael another wink. The remaining Secondhome warband was whisked down through the naturally occurring spring at high speeds with only the smallest of air pockets.

Immediately, the surroundings grew dark, then pitch black.

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