Nick's ascendency had been depressingly devoid of grandeur.

Godhood had never been on Nick’s bucket list. He was just an example of the pitfalls of spending your whole life studying. You lose yourself in the field.

He was an architect a lifetime ago. He still had his round spectacles and his mid-length centre-parted hair framing his angular features. He appeared to wear a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back and tan slacks, held by black suspenders. He affected the form as it made him feel at home. To strangers he’d always come across as cold, maybe even calculating. Only his eyes gave away his modest, guileless demeanour. Now no one could even perceive him, let alone critique his attire.

He spent most of his time as he always had, nose-first in blueprints. Planning architectural masterpieces or exploring historical sites through doors and up stairwells he manifested into being from his will alone. Then he saw his first Rot Hound.

It was a moniker he’d given to creatures he’d come to loathe and fear. Vague lupine forms drenched in shadow, the beasts clambered jerkily as they moved. Black tendrils hung like loose veins from their silhouettes. Their deep-set eye sockets held orbs of fractured green glass that shimmered as they scanned their surroundings. Rot Hounds had displayed only one appetite: destruction.

The first beast he’d happened upon had come for the State Library of Victoria. The pavement cracked where it skulked, and as it passed over grass, the field wilted to mulch in waves. Nick had been inside discovering the majestic Queen’s Hall, with its iconic fluted pillars and palatial marble staircase. 158 years young and closed to the public for the past 14, the site filled Nick with awe.

So much so he didn’t initially register the distant throb in his head until it manifested as piercing pain. The walls formed archways and the tiles beneath him slid and rippled to speed his travel to the Library’s entrance. It was night outside and beneath the yellowed Victorian streetlamps he glimpsed the predator, teeth sunk into one of the massive columns that held the structure’s façade aloft. The concrete aged and fractured in its distended jaws.

By reflex and in a panic he threw his hand forward and the slab beneath the Hound slammed upwards, the beast was shot into the air and across the street. Its frame struck heavily into a parked Subaru, denting it inwards and rusting it instantly. Nick focused his thoughts and reinforced the column as best he could. For the first time, the beast truly took notice of him, muzzle frothing. Nick’s gaze met its own and terror-stricken he bolted, gliding down the street on flowing pavement. 

Pounding, shattering strides followed behind him, growing closer, louder. A hot, dank snarl blew across his nape. He had entirely forgotten the experience of fear until this moment. Nick veered left, opened a wall, and turned to see the maw of his pursuer slam into the reformed barrier. Burning spit had splattered across his shirt, smoking as it ate away the fabric. The paint of the room’s interior began to peel.

Nick fled silently as the beast released a mournful howl and dug at the fortifications.

There was a lot Nick didn’t know about being a deity. He had always taken terrible care of himself. It took him a week to notice he hadn’t eaten, and no longer needed to. He’d often see his imaginings with perfect clarity. Initially this was brushed off as merely an overactive imagination, or inspiration from his surroundings. The truth was, as is often the case, much stranger than imagined.

His sketches were given life as he mused them. They would appear without fanfare, and the locals would recall the structures as ‘having been there for as long as one could recall’. Vague histories crept and wound around the works, binding them to reality.

Those concepts he didn’t explore would become the revelations of those that unwittingly prayed at his altar. His church was the planning office, his bible the blank blueprint. His followers, any who would build with vision. He was The Architect.

As such, Nick felt an innate compulsion to fend off these entropic monstrosities that encroached with increasing frequency on the city. He’d learned how to defend the city’s artisanship from a relatively safe distance, and how to slip out of sight. Since that fateful night more than a year prior, he’d found himself in seven such skirmishes, their frequency seemingly increasing.

He wandered Collins Street, taking in the awe of Gothic Revival facades and arches contrasted against the imposing rawness of neighbouring Neo Brutalist unpainted slabs with its utilitarian rails. The city’s tapestry of juxtapositions had kept him transfixed for years. However, something new had caught his eye. Otherworldly sparks danced from a rooftop with violet incandescence.

The Van der Meer building, fifteen storeys of reflective gold-tinted glass and polished brass.  He gripped a cornerstone and had it soar up along the building’s surface. As he reached the top, Nick’s momentum threw him into a leap and he landed in a graceless stumble. There he saw something immediately familiar and yet inherently alien to anything he’d known. A woman, floating ethereally, spanner in one hand. Her other hand pointing at a weld, her fingertip the source of the grand glow seen from the street below.

She toiled on a large steel cube, surrounded by orbiting tools. Soft Russet Grecian curls floated down past her shoulders. She wore ripped navy coveralls with burns and grease stains. Across her back was a large patch emblazoned “EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE” around a decal of a robotic arm reaching towards an outstretched hand.

“Hello?”, he hesitantly queried, to no response. She drifted prone around the large contraption, zapping and manipulating. Her welding goggles hiding whether she had even noticed him.

“My name’s Nick. I don’t think I’ve ever met another god. Where-”

 “Nick is a ridiculous name,” She interrupted abruptly. “What’s your domain, theft? You can’t even go by Saint Nick, that’s taken. I’d rethink the title from the ground up. Pass me that angle grinder?”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Nick was taken aback. He’d never given a thought to his name, let alone thought of a title as essential. Nick plucked the floating apparatus from the air, and passed it to the mystery woman. The ice was broken, even if he felt the sting of a cold shoulder. Now he just needed to work out who it was he’d just met.

“I’m The Architect, and I don’t need a name that strikes awe and fear into mortal hearts to feel special. Let’s hear yours then,” Nick was addled and had unintentionally swung defensively at the first person he could recall having spoken to since…

How odd, he couldn’t remember even one single acquaintance from his old life. His heart sank, until she stopped in place, pulled up her goggles and smiled. Her eyes were blinding light.

“I go by Heph, but you’re right. I guess the formal names are just habit.” She touched down and stepped towards Nick, “An architect, huh? Sounds a bit dry, but when you compare power armour and smart home systems, most things do. Come take a look.” The self-aggrandisement was agitating, but Nick was intrigued. Heph fired a final bolt into the steel frame, revealing elevator doors that slid open with a hiss.

He winced as he peered at the ragged edge of the hole dug into the masonry below, as if done with a combination of a jackhammer and late stage Parkinson’s. He made a mental note to smooth it on his way out. She caught his slight grimace and she seemed to light up,

“It’s art to you, isn’t it? It’s easy for me to forget form. I focus on function.”

Nick paused in consideration, “Art gives a glimpse into the artist’s soul. Sculpture gives art form. Architecture makes a home in the bared souls of others.”

The elevator whirred and clanged as they travelled through the tower’s innards. Nick turned to Heph. She looked perplexed, but nodded. Nick continued, “The story of all humanity is found in our works. Not just the history of what we did, but who we were.”

Heph’s expression was akin to nostalgia, as if hearing a long-forgotten song. She recomposed herself,

“I get that. I mean, I solve problems, streamline solutions, but it’s about making the world a better place. You’re just making sure we don’t lose the things that make the world great as it is.”

The olive-branch was unexpected, but Nick was glad that his first contact with Heph wouldn’t also be his last.

They arrived at sublevel 3. The doors opened to a glowing sci-fi wonderland of crawling droids and automated appliances. To one side, a robotic operating table with an in-built MRI scanner. A lot of the clutter was alien to Nick. He barely watched television, and yet here every inch of wall had some measure of LCD display showcasing new I.T. breakthroughs or Elon Musk’s smug face. Overwhelmed, he sought a simpler topic,

“So why the name Heph?”

She’d crouched down to pet a four-legged robot that proceeded to fold into a ball and roll away.

“Well, my sphere is engineering. And the first god to make a robot was Vulcan, Hephaestus to the Greeks. For a long time, I didn’t call myself anything, but when I was fairly sure he wasn’t around anymore, I borrowed the handle.”

Nick smiled, unable to recall when he last felt this communal warmth.

“It’s nice. I mean, Saint Heph sounds ridiculous, but who even considers that when picking a name?”

In the back of his mind, something gnawed and throbbed. The building groaned low and loud.

“What the Hell?”, Heph worked a keyboard, the monitor-coated walls displayed the building’s security footage. Rot Hounds. Scores of them all through the foyer, mauling the walls.

“Son of a… I am getting sick of fighting these monsters,” Nick said. Heph’s face morphed from confusion, to shock, then outrage.

“Nick! Those are Entropies. They’re natural and unstoppable.”

“They’re evil, and I’ve stopped them plenty of times.”

“No, you just dammed up a river and now a flood is crashing through my home. Nick, they’re immortal agents of change, and you’ve pissed them off and led them here. You’re fixing this.”

Heph gestured to her gadgets and they streamed to her. The flurry and flitter was near instantaneous, as some of her automatons clacked apart to form a single suit of powered armour. The exoskeletal carapace then embraced and formed around Her. Others modified their cutting lasers into mid-range armaments, or affixed plating as shields, ready to enter the fray beside her. The familiar little orb-bot strained as it dragged an acetylene tank by its hose as if it were a mace.

On the cameras, the Rot Hounds, or Entropies, looked to be fighting, mauling each other into chunks, and then twisting back together.

Nick waved both hands apart. A manhole opened above him and flights of stairs raised to meet it.

Peering from his aperture, Nick was now face-to-face with the dog-pile, the horror magnified. The entropies leapt into the rancid pile, melting, merging, growing. First forming a black mangled bull, then swelling to the size of an elephant as limbs pressed the flesh from inside. Eight frog-like appendages with taloned toes tore free. The beast that emerged was mostly maw, its roar ear-shattering.

“If we let it get to the steel support structure now, it’ll bring the entire building down,” Heph shouted as she flew past him, propelled by jetpack, slamming shoulder-first into the behemoth. It budged, but barely. Nick woke from his hysteria and pushing with every fiber of his being, raised the floor into a wave and widened the entrance way until it cracked and tore, all to push the monster out.

The droids followed suit, skittering, leaping. Swarming to attack from all sides. As their combined might forced the monstrosity back, their casings oxidized, their wiring sparked. They were disintegrating at its touch. From the rear, the orb droid launched itself into the Entropy's side, its gas canister careening with it. Heph seemed genuinely concerned for it as it whirred in rising pitch, then detonated in a fierce blast. Aflame, the beast tumbled to its side, the asphalt sinking around it, torn up in chunks by the thrashing of limbs.

The abomination stilled as its disarray turned to seething rancour. The many legs jutted, twisted and righted itself, the whole-time a hundred glimmering emerald specs stared unblinkingly at the Van De Meer.

In a flash it returned one broad swing, scattering Heph and her bots in every direction. Heph cried out, wrenching metal plates from her abdomen as they scorched and deformed.

It slowly lumbered towards Heph. This creature was huge, and Nick had barely been capable of taking on single hounds. He had only one idea left.

“HEY, OVER HERE! REMEMBER ME?”

The creature sniffed the air, and turned with rage in its legion of pitted eye sockets.  Suddenly it rushed for Nick as he stood at the entranceway. He guarded his face with his arms and prepared for the worst. As it was upon him, Nick shot both arms forward. A foot-bridge launching out of the pavement mere inches in front of him, catching the creature in its belly. Arching over the road and slamming into the opposite side of the street, its base pinned the colossal frog. But already the structure was creaking as it rotted. The creature would be free in moments. Heph looked on, hopeless yet dragging herself to her feet.

Nick winced but didn’t hesitate. He had only one play left to make. Arms outspread and raised high, every muscle in his body strained. From across the street, he felt every graceful contour in the façade of the twelve-storey Gothic masterpiece towering over the monster. And Nick felt his heart break as he tore 450 years of history down into the earth, crushing the entropic mass.

The burst of the dust cloud blew him off his feet.

The silence that followed was deafening and prolonged.

Then Nick saw movement. From the rubble, obsidian rats, the size of footballs scrambled and squeaked in all directions by the hundreds until there were none.

The barren old-world structure opposite him now had its every floor exposed, like a ragged doll house.

Heph approached, drained but casting a half-smile,

“You sacrificed a lot of history there. Are you going to be ok?”

“The building can be repaired. Its history is lost, but … it’d be ridiculous to sacrifice the present trying to hold on to the past.” Nick paused and pondered aloud, “The entropies are going to be a nightmare, now. I’ll feel more like the city’s building super than a deity.”

Heph laughed,

“That’s entropy for you. Things end, and give way to new beginnings.”

Nick felt like he had nothing left to lose,

“Do you want to grab some coffee?”

Heph inquisitively tilted her head,

“You do know we don’t need to eat or drink, right?”

“Does anybody really NEED coffee?”

They smiled at each other. Heph paused a moment, then replied,

“Sure. I should get out of the workshop more anyway.”