In the last days of the Stormmother’s reign…
“Bring forth the next,” the Stormmother proclaimed from her azure throne. Flanked by a trio of powerful, ancient serpents, she presided over all that mattered in the world.
Her high priestess, in this time a fay and limber young woman with raven-black hair and carefully painted lips, bowed. “It will be as you command.”
Her court worshiped in awe, wrapped in the shimmering mists of her euphoric presence. They basked in the perfect safety at the heart of the storm, dipping their feet into the warm waters and sharing hymns in her name.
The Stormmother’s Spear approached. Young, beautiful, and rugged, he was chosen to captain all her armies not for his acumen but for the other use of his shaft. He stopped ten paces before her raised throne, bowed low, and awaited her dispensation.
“Yes?” she demanded idly, draping a naked foot over the edge of her throne. Even that sight was a touch of ecstasy for her loyal servants, shuddering in the wings.
How generous, how beneficent, how wise the Maiden.
“Another foray of those strange beasts from the Verdant jungle, beautiful Queen,” he announced. “Now there are birds of paradise who wield the fire of the sun like whips and drive your servants from the jungle.”
“And the pineapples?” she asked, teasing the air with her toes.
“All have been lost.”
“I see,” she said, and the mists began to churn. The sky began to darken, and the harbor kicked whitecaps. “Yet you return.”
He paled. “Another party is already being assembled!”
She sighed, stretching across the throne. “You will lead them, my brave Spear.”
He coughed. “I will?”
The mists churned harder.
“I will! For the grace of the Stormmother!”
She spun a finger dismissively, and the Spear rushed from the throne. Perhaps he would abdicate his duty and flee for the deep jungle himself. In years prior, she had waged war to snuff out such temerity. Her children were so very disobedient sometimes.
Today, she sighed again to the ceiling. Her banners floated gaily against the columns, and her children basked in her presence.
“I rather anticipated those pineapples,” she murmured.
She slumped, hand trailing just above the polished floor.
“Shall I send the servants away?” asked her high priestess. “I might minister to your other needs.”
“No,” the Goddess pouted. “They would still be waiting tomorrow.”
Always they wait, endless as the tides, pounding upon me with their petty prayers.
Perhaps a nice war with the Lord of Peaks would thin the herd and the demands both, but her neighbor to the northwest had retreated onto his dusty Plateau years ago. The raiding parties continued, of course, armed with spears and arrows instead of the power of a god.
She contemplated the terror of mortal men in the face of something as laughable as arrows and clubs. Found the memory of such mortality as distant and fleeting as pebbles on a beach.
Terror like an ancient dream – and excitement not far behind.
“Very well.” The high priest cleared her throat. “Let forth the next!”
The Stormmother felt a foreign presence enter her demesne. She heard the rush of white wings and the chuckle of a condescending speaker; she did not bother to raise her head.
“We are happy to report that your servants in the north have caught a foe of great stature!” the high priestess hummed, pleased with herself. “We present to you–”
“I know who she is,” the Stormmother interrupted, toying with the hem of her silks. “I smell the mark of ownership on her.”
The woman at the base of the throne stepped past her guards and spoke in a crisp, regal accent. “Nevertheless, I shall introduce myself. Alice Mishkan at your service.”
Auburn-haired, hazel-eyed, she regarded the Stormmother calmly.
“And you have been captured by my spies in Ruhum?” the Goddess asked, disinterested.
“So I am told.”
“The last we met, I believe I told you that our next meeting would be your last.” The Stormmother blinked, counting years. That had been before the construction began on her newest temple – she had grown bored of the last – and not one of the architects or masons of the project still lived.
“When last we met, I offered you an invitation to my household,” Alice replied calmly.
“That I might sup with Gabriel, the god in hiding, in the tomb of Aure, that soot-covered ogre?”
“Alas,” the former Queen of Ruhum noted, “Aure cared for neither dominion nor Reverie. He sails for distant shores, and I do not know if we will ever see him again.”
The Stormmother never felt him touch her waters. Upon which seas did he now sail…?
A Goddess and a mother both needed to know everything, and she changed the subject rather than ask. “Do they seek a new Goddess? I do not favor such cold weather.”
“No, Stormmother. The world begins to change.”
“I am change,” retorted the Goddess, poured across her throne in boredom.
“Aure has departed. The Lord of Peaks has withdrawn; perhaps he is already gone. The Verdant forges new artifacts that live, breathe, and breed. Only you remain constant.”
Raising one finger, the Goddess summoned her icy, black lance. “Consider your next words carefully, mortal. That mark of his is no use against another god.”
Her mortal children shrank away, swallowing their whimpers of fear. Rain began to patter against the temple and the wind to howl.
“Last we met, I invited you to my household,” Alice repeated, ignoring the threat. “Alas, two hundred years have passed, and you are clearly quite busy here. As such, rather than await you at my estate, I have decided to visit you at your own.”
The Stormmother flicked her thumb across the spear, and it began to spin silently. “And visit you have. Is the sight of my new temple worth the cost?”
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Alice agreed. Quite off hand, she remarked. “The central pool and flanking columns rather remind me of the First Peaks Temple. Ah, no, that is but ruins in the Bones now, isn’t it?”
First Peaks Temple. A name the Stormmother had not heard in centuries.
Memories tickled at her from a time when her divinity was fresh and new. When she laughed with her children, and they delighted in the restorative power found in the hot springs and clear waters of mankind’s first refuge.
“I am happy that you have revived the style,” the former Queen of Ruhum continued. “It always suited you.”
The Stormmother froze her spear in place with another touch of a finger and considered this prisoner with fresh eyes. The brand of a so-called Archangel burned across her belly button, but no defensive magics hummed around this mortal. No etched runes, no whispered echoes…
“I am quite at your mercy,” she agreed.
“The Tempest is without mercy,” the Stormmother corrected harshly. Thunder cracked.
Alice Mishkan nodded.
“You would die to make idle comments on architecture?”
“I measure myself by the century,” the woman remarked, a thread of exhaustion in her voice. “What good is a life that merely measures the passing of the year?”
An eternity measured in the drip of a water clock and the demands of needy children.
The Stormmother snapped to her feet and hurled her spear at the mortal. The storm outside roared, her children sobbed, and the spear froze a handspan before the mortal’s breast.
“Enough of this!” the Tempest demanded. “Where is your Archangel?”
“Fretting at home over my every move, of course.” Alice regarded the spear with gentle interest.
“You would have me believe that Gabriel would allow you to die?!”
“I would have you believe he does not make my choices.”
The Tempest snarled, hungry to deliver the pieces of this arrogant Queen to her husband. Yet a part of her wondered if even that would enliven her decade. What was one more war amongst gods?
Her rage felt hollow and thin, thunder across a vast and empty expanse.
“He will come for you,” she asserted. “Let him choose: his hollow pacifism or his beloved!”
Stolen novel; please report.
Alice Mishkan said nothing.
“Take her! Dress her in a dancer’s silks and set her to scrubbing the tiles in my boudoir. Let her please me with her exertion.”
Her terrified children fell to the task lest they feel the sting of a black lance from a furious Goddess.
Thus did the Stormmother make the mistake of her undoing in rage and haste.
Business as usual.
***
Several weeks passed.
The Stormmother tended to the sick, led her children in prayer, mediated petty disputes, and administered judgement. When the last of the criminals for the day was led away in black cloth to his burning sentence, she retreated to her sanctuary and flopped on her bed.
“Perhaps I should send an army to try the cliffs once more,” she wondered listlessly.
No, but she had played that song a dozen times. Breached the Plateau and led her men across the desert itself. What good an offensive that would inevitably end as it always did – rock and water clashing alone? Even the thrill of Tempest conflict seemed to pale into the thin mist of time.
And what if the Peaks did not answer? Why had he gone silent without a word? Had cowardice finally won out, or did he play a new game?
Her millennial anniversary was only a century away, but she had no interesting ideas for the celebration.
In the silence, a brush ground against the tiles.
The Stormmother sat up, her mists crackling with tiny thunder. “Who intrudes in my domain?!”
Alice Mishkan, on hands and knees in scanty dancer’s silks, dumped the brush back into her bucket of suds. “I scrub the tiles as commanded, Goddess,” she explained.
Her tone was neither the fawning supplication of her children nor the rancorous hate of a servant to another god. The wife of an angel reclined on her haunches, wiping the sweat from her brow. Her husband’s brand sat across her navel, a complex set of interlocked runes that formed the core of her continued existence. It glowed faintly in the corner of one’s eye, white like feathers.
The Tempest inside howled to splatter this interloper upon the stones, but the Stormmother dismissed the thought out of hand. She had declared that the Archangel would come for his beloved, after all.
Until he came, she could not kill her new servant. Such an action would imply that she erred.
She had trapped herself in holy proclamation, and not for the first time. Oh, she could amend the doctrine – correct the scrolls, reinterpret the announcement, brush the details under the rug – but why bother with the effort?
“Very well. Continue.”
The Stormmother sulked into her bed, listened to the scratch of the brush, and let time flow past.
One drip at a time.
***
“Servant! Run my bath!”
“Of course, Goddess.”
“If I have to weigh one more import duty, I will drown the city and be done with it.”
“It was certainly easier in the old days, wasn’t it?”
“What would you know of the old days, servant?”
“True, Goddess, I am several centuries your junior, but I do remember the day I ordered the commission of the first proper sailing ship to replace Ruhum’s triremes.”
The Stormmmother snorted. “I remember when the trireme was the most marvelous invention.”
“Oh?”
“The first days of true sailing when man turned his sights to the horizon. When the seas were young…”
***
“Servant! If you are so wise, tell me the truth of these reports.”
“The Verdant has finally perfected the phoenix, it seems.”
The Stormmother stared. “What do you know of these creatures?!”
“Only what Verdandi tells me in her letters. She was inspired by your serpents, you know, and the bonding between priestess and snake. Enjoined, they both become more…”
A long, pregnant pause.
“Would you like to read the letters, Goddess?”
***
“Servant! Why are the Whistlers in arms this time?”
“Your priestesses claim the rights to their rivers and lakes. They attempt to charge tolls to water horse or man.”
“I don’t remember ordering that.”
“Call it a spot of initiative from some of your more fervent adherents, Goddess.”
“Well? Why are you just standing there? Go fix it!”
***
The Stormmother arrived to the morning prayer, daydreaming as usual of more interesting times, and found Alice Mishkan leading the ritual.
The wife of an angel wore an azure blue sarong and a tight wrap of cotton. Her brand caught the dawn light in flickers of white, and she led the prayers with a firm, guiding contralto.
When the final note died, the Stormmother approached Alice through the forest of bowing servants. “Where is the high priestess?”
“I gave her the day off, Goddess.”
“The day off?!” What higher duty existed than tending to the Stormmother?!
“She is nearly forty now. She cannot match your indefatigable pace.”
The Goddess of Waves stumbled on that factoid. “Has it been so long? Servant, how long have you served me?”
“Over a decade now, Goddess.” The former Queen of Ruhum wore the raiment of a priestess proudly and walked with the limber sashay of this land, her every step a tease for men. Her skin, however, remained as pale as the day she arrived, neither burned nor darkened.
“Yet you remain a constant.” While mortals slowly grayed and faded, an inevitable procession of new faces and new names…
What ever happened to that singer from Moros? Ah, I suppose she would be dead by now…
That singer, and her daughter, and her granddaughter…
Alice Mishkan smiled, a thin and tight expression, and fought to keep her hands from her brand. For a moment, she looked drawn as a bow, stretched across the centuries.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I remain.”
The Maiden rose in the Stormmother’s breast. “The brand pains you. You cannot hide this from me.”
“No, Goddess. It is not pain.”
“I will remove it, then, and spare you.” Remove it, and claim Alice as her own. A high priestess who would endure as she herself endured…
A familiar face in the endless parade of new servants.
Servant or no, Alice shook her head firmly. “No, Goddess. What love has built, only love can remove. You might send me to the Black Gate, but you will not unmake this.”
“You think I am not the equal of your Archangel?” Tempest replaced Maiden with an ocean’s own fickle fury.
“No angel is the match for this power, Lynne,” Alice replied kindly.
Lynne.
A name so distant and buried that the Stormmother staggered a step backwards.
Lynne.
A woman who tended to serpents; plied her raft on the shoals for fish; offered poultice to the wounded; watched the backs of her hands grow wrinkled and her breasts flee for her toes.
Her memories from before divinity lacked the perfect clarity of her current existence, but she remembered the smell of the clay bricks in the kiln, the rasp of crude tools upon tree bark, and the chatter of her family.
Remembered the storm that sank her world into the black and reforged the woman Lynne into a creature that would never again fear the waves.
“My name…”
The Maiden sank beneath the crushing grief of a world vanished. No one remembered how to carve the rafts and canoes of her youth. Even if men learned anew, those trees no longer grew within a week’s ride of Wave’s Lament – the climate irrevocably altered in the war of the Plateau.
No matter how she tried, she could never put the pieces back together…
“All names echo for those who will hear,” Alice said. “Though perhaps yours was sunk deeper than most.”
“You are a mage,” the Stormmother breathed. “A thief of divine fire.”
Alice curtsied like a ballroom dancer. “I play at such on occasion, yes. These days, when I visit the garden of my soul, the guardian of that place only ever asks me one question: ‘When will you return home?’”
The Stormmother’s current veered once more. “You cannot depart. I require your presence!”
Alice bowed her head. “You are not the only one, Goddess.”
“Excellent. No more talk of these…these dead and gone things.”
“As you command. Would you like to accompany me today?”
“In your duties? Such trivial matters hardly need my attention. Why should I?”
“You have not left the temple grounds in over two years, Lynne.” Alice again spoke the Goddess’ name in quiet defiance.
“My empire is well administered.” The sick arrived daily for her tender touch, and the penitent would know her judgement no matter where they sailed. She was a generous Goddess, and her people prospered.
“Then we might enjoy a walk along the Dragon.”
The Stormmother sighed. “Very well. If only to prevent the incessant nagging you surely plan.”
***
Lynne the Stormmother and Alice Mishkan rested in the shadow of a tree under an expanse of sky as vast as thought. Seas of grass tall as a man rustled in every direction, and a distant trickle of smoke on the western horizon marked this season’s settlement of Whistlers.
“I fear we have strayed far afield,” the Goddess remarked. “Though the journey has been pleasant, I must return to my place.”
Her cold throne and her holy routine.
Alice did not answer.
“This is an ocean of sorts,” Lynne mused, stretching her bare feet into the dirt, “and my rains reach even here. What is the border, do you think, of this power you name ‘aspect’?”
Still no answer.
Scowling, Lynne turned to examine the wife of an angel. “Servant! Answer me when I speak to you!”
Alice stared into the far distance, her eyes as grey as fog, with her jaw clenched tight against an unseen pressure. She felt distant, a ghost held in place by the solid lines of a tattoo across her navel.
“…Alice?” asked the Goddess. She placed her hand atop the woman’s own and quested for the measure of the woman’s familiar presence.
Instead the Goddess felt the whistle of an empty plain.
Then the former Queen of Ruhum snapped awake, shook her head, and smiled. “Sorry. What were you saying?”
The woman’s hand suddenly throbbed with the little waters of blood and life once more.
“Where do you go?” Lynne demanded urgently. “I could not find you.”
Alice smiled. “I merely dreamed, Lynne. Do not fret.”
“That was no dream. Do not lie to me. Dreams are trifling things for mortal minds.”
“An uncharitable Tempest speaks from Lynne’s lips. Do not discount dreams so quickly. They have a magic deep and wide; they allow us to dance with ourselves.”
“Would you be the angel of dreams, then?”
Then, once Bloomed, Alice would remain…
“I know my place,” the woman answered. “Even as I defy it.”
Lynne scowled, and clouds began to build.
“Stop your pouting,” Alice teased, rising. “The grass needs no more rain today.” She spun and tugged the Goddess up as well. “Come now! The Whistlers are wonderful musicians of reed and flute, and there is magic in that as well. Hurry, hurry, so we might learn the Song and all it holds!”
***
“Welcome, Stormmother, Goddess of Wave’s Lament, who once and once again answers to Lynne,” said the Archangel, bowing with a flourish of his impossible wings. “My home is your own. You have only needs state your desire.”
“I am not sharing a mansion with that thing,” Lynne snapped, jabbing a finger at the strange creature that pretended to be a butler in this household. “I will not have those eyes prying at my thoughts like a thieving monkey.”
Sebastian arched one eyebrow. “Thieving monkeys only steal valuables.”
The harbor of the tiny hamlet town that would one day be known as Lumia suddenly heaved.
Alice laid restraining hands on the duo. “Let us not begin this visit with unkind words. Lynne, perhaps you would enjoy a trip to my estate instead? It overlooks the sea, and the flowers flourish in the spring.”
Sparing a poisonous glance at the angel of witness, Lynne relented.
***
Lynne draped her knees over the cliff and stared at the sea below.
“What bothers you, Goddess?” Alice asked, offering a biscuit.
“This distraction has been…a much-needed relief…” admitted the Stormmother. “But I must return.”
“Why, Goddess?”
“You do not need to call me that,” Lynne admitted softly.
“Lynne.” Alice clasped the angel of oceans on the shoulder. “Why?”
“My people need me.”
“Do they? Or do you need them?” The former Queen firmed her lips and spoke harsh truths. “Are they your children, or are they merely the measure by which you might count eternity?”
The angel of oceans flinched.
“They managed for two centuries while you barely left your boudoir. Why should you trap yourself in that gilded temple? Do you truly wish to spend the rest of this planet’s lifetime poised like a statue before them?”
“My people are defenseless against–”
“The Verdant has vanished into her jungle, protected by beasts cut of Malkuth cloth. The Peak has not been seen beyond his Plateau in a generation, gone to Reverie or deeper still. Aure has departed. Gabriel and Sebastian have no interest in rule. Who is this great threat for which you must sacrifice eternity?”
Very quietly, Lynne admitted the truth:
Me.
If she was not there to soothe the pains her Tempest wrought, what would be left but the fury and fear of the black ocean?
Alice exhaled gently. “Lynne…they will make mistakes no matter how hard you try to shield them.”
“No matter how I try,” agreed the Goddess quietly.
“I need you here,” Alice whispered.
In all the years they had traveled together, this was the first time Alice asked something of her.
“This brand aches like an anchor in the marrow of my bones…and my dreams are of a Shadow terrible and swift approaching…” The Queen laced her fingers over her brand. “I fear what may come, but the choice has already been made.”
“The choice? Who defies your Will? Together we will crush any who threaten–”
“There is a visitor in my garden,” Alice interrupted. “A bud that has chosen its soil.”
“I…do not understand.”
“My brand begins to burn. I am not allowed to change, Lynne, but change I must.”
Lynne could not find the words of comfort to soothe her dearest friend as the tears began to fall.
Fearfully, Alice whispered, “Lynne…I’m pregnant.”