There was once a girl named Brianna, who lived with her mother Elena in a small apartment halfway up a somewhat tall building. The small apartment, it was small indeed, but Brianna was small as well, and so there was room enough for her-- and because there was room enough for her daughter, Elena was happy. 

Every day, Brianna went to school, and while Brianna was at school, Elena worked at a department-store several blocks away, making sure that the prices printed onto price-tags were the right prices for the things that those price-tags would be stuck upon; if they were the wrong prices on the price-tags, people would get angry, and if people got angry, Elena would get fired-- and if Elena got fired, she would not have the money she needed to buy Brianna food and clothing-- and in fact, she would not have the money to keep her daughter in the small apartment. They would be out on the street. And so Elena was very careful to always make sure that the right prices went onto the right tags, and that the right tags went onto the right things. She checked and she double-checked, and when she came home from work every night, she triple-checked and on and on and on in her head, every single price she’d tagged, worried that she might have made some mistake. Every night, she came in the door with worry-lines on her forehead and Brianna, who’d already been home for hours, jumped up from her homework and came running to rub the lines away.

“You mustn’t worry so much”, she told her mother, “If you keep making lines like this in your forehead, bugs will come to live in them! Like the cracks in the walls!”

Elena always laughed, and she always promised Brianna that she wouldn’t worry any more than she had to-- but even as she cooked dinner, even as she helped Brianna with her homework, even as she read a bedtime story and wished a warm goodnight, Elena carried on worrying. She lay awake on the couch where she slept, and she worried, staring up at the ceiling-- and as the nights went on, she began to see prices dancing across the peeling plaster, and they were always the wrong prices, and her worry only got worse, all the way into her dreams. There were deep circles under her eyes. She grew pale, and thin, and wobbly.

One day, she was too sick to work. She wanted to work, she needed to work-- she knew she did-- but there wasn’t enough strength in her to get up from the couch, certainly not enough to reach the door, and the elevator, and the sidewalk, and the bus-stop. As Brianna marched off to school, she asked her mother what was wrong, and Elena promised her that everything was fine, and as soon as her daughter was out the door, she picked up the phone and called the department-store to tell them that she would not be able to come in that day.

That afternoon, that same phone rang, and when Elena answered it, she was told that she would never have to come in again; she’d been fired. She begged and she pleaded for another chance, promised that she’d get better and come back as soon as she could, but it was no use. The manager told her that it was easier for them to just hire someone else, someone who really wanted the job, someone who wouldn’t go around getting sick whenever they felt like it. There was nothing Elena could do. 

When Brianna came home that night, she was surprised to see her mother still on the couch, and she asked what was happening. 

There was nothing more Elena wanted than to lie to her daughter, to tell her again that everything was fine, and that everything would keep being fine. But Brianna was old enough not to be lied to about these sorts of things, and so Elena told her the truth.

“I have gotten sick”, she said, “And I have lost my job”

Immediately, Brianna began to worry, just as Elena had been worrying-- “What will we do?”, she asked, “How will we afford food and clothes? How will we be able to stay in this small apartment?”

But Elena smiled at her-- “Don’t worry so much, or bugs will come and live in the lines. I will get better, and once I’ve gotten better, I will find another job”

Finding another job was not an easy thing to do, though. Elena knew this. And knowing this made her worry even more-- and worrying more made her even sicker. The days went by, and she did not get better, no, she got worse-- she got paler, and thinner, and weaker-- the circles under her eyes grew deeper and darker.

“You need to go and see a doctor”, Brianna told her, “You cannot get better from this on your own”

Elena sighed, coughed, sighed again-- “Without a job, I cannot afford to go and see a doctor”

“But without going to see a doctor, you cannot become healthy enough to get a job”

Brianna sat beside her mother’s couch for quite some time, thinking-- and when her mother finally fell asleep, she stood up and began to pace. She paced and she paced, back and forth across the living-room. Then she took out the dusty old copy of the Book of the Certain Future from the shelf by the radiator, and she went flipping through it to the list of Gods and Goddesses-- that was the only bit she’d ever really properly read. Down the list she went, name and name, title after title, until at last she found what she was looking for. Brianna put on her shoes, filled her backpack with potato-chips, and went out into the city. She knew exactly what she had to do.

She took two buses, and then the train, and then a long walk-- it was nearly midnight by the time she got where she was going, but eventually, she got there. A tiny house all on its own in the center of the city park. It was a very hard place to find; not everyone knew about it, but Brianna knew about it, and so she knew how to find it. The house had dinner-plates for shingles, and mirrors where there should have been windows. For bricks it had old bars of lovely-smelling soap, and in the front yard was Fyfu, a great grey rabbit, with fiersome crow-heads for ears. As Brianna stepped into the yard, the crow-heads noticed her and began to squawk angrily, waking Fyfu, who likewise began to growl. 

Brianna hesitated. She’d heard stories of Fyfu, of how horribly dangerous it could be.

But she’d already come this far. She’d already taken two buses and a train, and then walked alone through the city park at nearly midnight-- she’d already faced horrible dangers just to get here, and as horribly dangerous as Fyfu was, it wasn’t any more horribly dangerous than those. She had to save her mother. Brianna walked calmly, but cautiously across the house’s yard, up to the door-- the whole way she stared straight into Fyfu’s eyes, and for all of its angry growling and squawking, it did not attack her.

Once, twice, she rapped her knuckles against the door of the tiny house, which was made from the bottom of a bathtub. 

One, two, moments of silence, and then a voice from the other side-- “Who comes here, and why?”

“I am Brianna, and I have come here to see Heva”

A shining blue eye peered down at Brianna through the small hole which had once been the bathtub’s drain-- and when it saw that Brianna was truly herself, the door swung open, and indeed Brianna was standing before Heva, Goddess of Knots.

Heva was the perfect Goddess to come to, for it was in a terrible knot that Brianna’s mother was tied. She invited Brianna inside, and she listened to her problem.

“Your mother cannot get another job until she gets well, and she cannot get well unless she goes and sees a doctor, and she cannot go and see a doctor without money, and she cannot get money without getting another job”, Heva repeated, stroking her chin. She was even more wondrous than Brianna had imagined her to be, with beautiful green pine needles for her hair and the forever-burning wick of a candle upon the center of her tongue, its light and warmth spilling out every time she opened her mouth to speak, its thin, eerie, smoke rolling from her nostrils with every breath. The Goddess of Knots had two slender left arms for the careful solving of tricky puzzles, and one thicker, stronger right arm for the smashing of puzzles which could not be solved. 

“Please!”, begged Brianna, “You have to help me!”-- and she emptied her backpack full of potato-chips onto Heva’s coffee-table, exactly as the Book of the Certain Future had explained that she must do-- “Potato-chips are my most favorite thing in the world, and I’ve brought you every last one from my home, as payment… please…”

For a moment, Heva was silent. She studied Brianna, and she studied her chips. And then she smiled-- “Of course I will help you. For a price such as this, how could I refuse?”

Brianna burst into tears, thanking the Goddess over and over. She knew that there was no solvable puzzle that Heva’s two left arms could not solve, and she knew that there was no unsolvable puzzle that Heva’s right arm could not smash-- surely, with arms such as those, the Goddess would be able to fix this. But Heva did not use her two left arms, and she did not use her right arm, no; what she did was use her voice, and with her voice she told Brianna the simplest and most obvious way to solve a problem, for that was how Heva started every puzzle, with the simplest and most obvious way.

“You must go to see Dupp, Said-God of Wealth and Prosperity”, Heva told Brianna, and then she told Brianna where Dupp could be found, and how to get through to see him. “Dupp has more than enough money to pay for a doctor for your mother. If he will give you what you need, this whole thing will be over and done with”

This wasn’t at all what Brianna had expected, but she didn’t complain. She thanked the Goddess again, and she bowed, and she left. Fyfu did not attack her on her way back across Heva’s yard-- indeed, it did not even squawk and growl; anyone who could find Heva and earn the Goddess’s help was someone to be respected, and so Fyfu simply watched Brianna go.

When Brianna got back to her small apartment, the sun was already starting to rise, and her mother Elena was already awake, and terribly worried. She cried out with relief as Brianna came in the door-- “Where have you been?”-- her voice was weak, and the circles under her eyes were deeper and darker than ever before-- “I have been so worried about you!”

Brianna smiled-- “There is nothing to worry about! I went to see Heva, Goddess of Knots, and she has agreed to help us!”

But this only made Elena more worried, because she knew all the dangers Brianna would have had to face to see Heva so late in the night-- “Please, you must promise me! You must not go out alone at night again!”

Brianna promised, and she meant it. She climbed onto the couch beside her mother and slept there for three hours, until it was almost time for school-- and then she got up again and dressed herself in her very nicest clothes, just as Heva had told her to do.

When the bus came, Brianna rode it in silence. She sat alone, she did not listen to the laughing and stories of the other children. All she could think of was her mother, and the advice that Heva had given her-- and the whole way to school, all through the day, she thought it over, over and over-- during all of her classes, during lunch, during recess-- and when the schoolday was done and the bus came to gather up all the children, she did not get on. Instead, she walked down the street. For nearly two hours she walked, block after block after block, until finally she reached the place where Heva had told her to go.

The building was a magnificent skyscraper, higher than any other building in the city. It was metal and glass and marble, and the name “Dupp” was written in huge letters across the top of it-- surely, then, this was where Dupp himself lived. Brianna went into the lobby, and immediately, she was stopped by the guards.

They looked at her and they saw how well-dressed she was, but they also saw that she was just a little girl, and so they knew that there was no way she could have normally belonged in a building such as this. “Do you have an appointment?”, they asked her.

Brianna answered that she did not, just as Heva had advised her; that would have been the wrong lie to tell, it was much too easy to catch. Instead, she told them that she was a friend of Dupp’s daughter Ivory, come over to do homework. “You can call up and check with her if you’d like”, she said, and she got very nervous saying it-- but Heva had told her that this was what to say, and sure enough, it worked. As tall and well-dressed as the guards were, they were only slightly less poor than Brianna herself, and they knew how much Ivory hated being asked anything at all by anyone poor. The math was simple; if they let Brianna pass, there was a chance that she was lying, and so there was a chance that they would be fired, but if they called up to check they would be fired whether she was lying or not. And so they let her pass.

Dupp’s tower was unlike any tower anywhere else in the city-- anywhere else in the world, even. For starters, the whole inside of it was coated in gold, every surface-- the floors, the walls, the ceilings, the benches, the chairs, the sills of the windows, the decorative ferns. Unlike other towers, Dupp’s tower did not have elevators. It did not have escalators-- it did not even have stairs. They only way to get from the ground floor of the tower to the Said-God Dupp’s office at the top was to ride a series of great gold-plated ferris-wheels, one atop the other atop the other, like cogs. The wheels were all turned by great propellers, and the great propellers were all turned by numbers, which flowed like water down from the top of the tower, and when they reached the bottom they were inflated so that they could float back up again to start the whole thing over.

Brianna gazed in wonder at every inch of the tower as she climbed, as she rode wheel after wheel towards the top. It was amazing how rich Dupp was-- and of course how could he have been anything but rich?-- he was the Said-God of Wealth and Prosperity, after all. Paying for a doctor for Brianna’s mother would be nothing to him, effortless, painless. Heva’s answer was a good one, Brianna thought.

But when she finally reached the office at the top of the tower, things didn’t go so smoothly.

The office of Dupp was even grander than the tower leading up to it, as was fitting. Where the whole rest of the building had been coated in gold, every surface here wore a skin of diamonds, dazzling from every angle. The place sparkled and shone, and Brianna was very nearly blinded as she stepped inside-- but through the glare, she could see Dupp, sitting behind his desk at the far end of the room.

Dupp didn’t look at all like Heva had looked. He was not a God, but a Said-God, and so there was nothing to him but what he was said to have, and all that he was said to have was wealth and prosperity. He had two normal arms, two normal legs. Two normal eyes, two normal ears. Normal hair, a normal tongue. There were no great magics that he could do, and he had no true legends behind him. But he had wealth and prosperity, just as he was said to have, and it was wealth and prosperity, just the tiniest bit, that Brianna needed to save her mother, and so here she was. 

The moment Brianna stepped into Dupp’s office, he rose from his desk and demanded to know what she was doing here; he didn’t have any appointments scheduled. Brianna did not bother lying again that she was here to do homework with Ivory because Ivory was right there in the office, right there upon the desk, seated with her head thrown back in drama-- just like everything else here, her dress was made of diamonds, and there were diamonds in her hair. 

“I am here to ask for help”, Brianna said, and Ivory sneered at her the moment she said it.

“Another leech”, Ivory muttered. “Typical”

“Yes, yes, another leech”, her father agreed, “Probably went looking through the Book of the Certain Future, saw ‘Wealth and Prosperity’ next to my name and came running right over! How much more pathetic can their desperation get, I wonder?”-- and he immediately called for security to have Brianna thrown out.

“Please! Please, just listen!”, Brianna begged, “My mother is sick! She lost her job, and she has no money to pay for a doctor!-- and if she cannot pay for a doctor, she cannot get well enough to find another job! We shall have no food and no clothes! We shall be tossed from our small apartment, out onto the streets!”

“You shall be tossed out onto the streets right now!”, Ivory spat back, with a sassy twirl of her hair and an ugly look on her face, “That is where you belong, and so that is where you shall end up!”

The guards came stomping into the office, and they seized Brianna’s arms, and they prepared to throw her out-- but Dupp stopped them with a raise of his hand.

“Just a moment”, he said, “She has come this far. Let her at least leave with a lesson, one she can share with all the other leeches; perhaps then they will all know to leave me be”

Dupp stepped out from behind his desk, and he came across the room to Brianna so that she would hear perfectly clearly everything that he had to say.

“The name of the lesson I will teach you is ‘responsibility’”, he said, “You will remember that, yes? New words are only useful if you remember them, so I want you to say it back to me; ‘responsibility’”

“‘Responsibility’”, repeated Brianna, though of course she already knew this word.

“Very good”-- the Said-God Dupp nodded his approval-- “What ‘responsibility’ means is taking care of yourself. If your mother cannot afford to see a doctor, then she shouldn’t have gotten sick. Getting sick without the money to see a doctor is a very irresponsible thing to do-- especially when you have a daughter to look after”

Ivory crossed her arms-- “Daddy can get sick whenever he wants because he’s responsible enough to pay for it”

“That’s right”-- Dupp nodded again-- “Like I said, it’s irresponsible getting sick without any money. But what’s even more irresponsible than that, little leech, is to come begging to me!”

“But you have so much!”, Brianna cried, “And I only need--”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Dupp hushed her with a waggle of his finger-- “Hush, hush”, he said, “If I gave my money to everyone who needed it, I would have nothing left! What is a God of Wealth and Prosperity without any money??-- and without any money, how would I be able to give money to those who need it?”

Ivory scoffed-- “So irresponsible”

With that, Dupp had his guards drag Brianna out of his office, and toss her with a bump into the carriage of the highest ferris-wheel-- and when she’d been turned down to the bottom of the highest ferris-wheel, another two guards grabbed hold of her, and they tossed her with another bump into the carriage of the second-highest ferris-wheel-- and so on and so on until at last she was tossed out onto the sidewalk, covered all over in awful scratches and bruises.

She did her best to cover it all up before she went home, so that her mother would not worry.

When Elena asked how her day had been, Brianna told her that school had been boring like usual and that she’d gone over to a friend’s apartment afterwards to do homework.

“Oh? Which friend?”, Elena wondered. 

“No one you know”, Brianna answered. She cooked up a simple dinner of beans because her mother could not get off the couch, and after that she did the dishes, and after that she wished her mother a warm goodnight, and after that, she sat alone in her room and she cried, because she did not know what to do next. The obvious something for her to do next was to go and see Heva again, but it was dark now, and she had promised her mother that she would not go out alone in the night. So she sat. And she cried.

Heva, meanwhile, being a Goddess, had watched all of this happen. She knew that Dupp had refused to help Brianna, and she knew that Brianna would not come out alone to see her again because of the promise she’d made to Elena. So Heva, clever Heva, she stepped out into her yard, and she woke Fyfu with a gentle shake, and she fed it three of Brianna’s potato-chips-- one for each of the crow’s-heads it had as ears, and one for its whiskery rabbit-mouth. 

“Go, Fyfu”, she told it, “Go and bring Brianna to me”

Less than an hour later, Brianna heard a strange scratching at the door of her small apartment, and when she went to check, she saw Fyfu sitting out on the welcome-mat, picking at the fibers with the beaks of its two crow-heads. Brianna squealed with glee!-- this was perfect! She had promised her mother not to go out alone at night, but she wouldn’t be alone if Fyfu was with her!

Without even a moment of hesitation, she hopped up onto the rabbit’s back-- which was not at all what it had expected her to do-- and she told it that she was ready to go. 

Fyfu grumbled, annoyed, but it supposed that it would indeed be much faster to simply carry Brianna to Heva’s house on its back instead of riding two buses and a train with her-- and more than that, it would cause much less of a stir. So just like that, off it went.

Brianna had never ridden anything like Fyfu before. She’d ridden a horse once, a long time ago, and that was a terrible comparison; Fyfu was faster than a shout, faster than a bullet-- it sped down the hallway on its four swift rabbit-feet-- down the hallway and around the corner and into the stairwell-- but not down the stairs, no, it didn’t run down the stairs-- it had come into the stairwell because there was a window in the stairwell, and when it reached the window it went leaping out, out into the night. Brianna let out a scream-- her small apartment was roughly halfway up a somewhat tall building, which was a very long way to fall. But for all her screaming, Fyfu didn’t do any falling; in a whirl of magic and color, it’s great gray rabbit body shrank down into the tiny gray body of a tiny gray rabbit-- and the two crow’s-heads it had for ears blossomed out into two full-bodied crows, larger than eagles, and each crow stretched out one of their great black wings and together they soared over the city, with Fyfu’s tiny gray body dangling down by its head between them, where their legs would have been, and Brianna holding onto the left-hand crow’s stomach, holding as tight as she could.

On and on, they soared, and bit by bit, Brianna became less afraid, and she stopped her screaming to gaze in wonder at the glittering streets below. There were buses and taxis and people walking, staring into the glow of their cell-phones. There were alley-cats slinking here and there, there were jazz clubs with wild and fantastical sounds cracking and bopping out from them like bursting balloons. Fyfu wove back and forth between the skyscrapers, and in the windows Brianna could see workers hard at work, or getting set to head home, or just arriving and stalling as long as they could before getting started. She even saw the department-store where her mother had once worked, and she spat at it as she passed.

Finally, they were coming close to the city park, finally, Fyfu began to drop-- and as it dropped, slowly of course, safely of course, the wings of the crows began to retreat back into their bodies, and their bodies began to retreat back into Fyfu’s head-- and as their bodies retreated, Fyfu’s body began to grow, until at last it was once more a great grey rabbit, and it once more had tiny crow’s-heads for ears, and Brianna was once more standing in the front yard of the Goddess Heva, who was waiting for her on the porch.

“Thank you, Fyfu!”, said Brianna, giving it a gentle scratch between the crow’s-heads.

“Fyfu!”, it said back, which was why it was called that.

Heva smiled-- “I’m glad you made it here, Brianna”

Brianna fell to her knees before the Goddess-- “I am sorry to have to come to you again… Dupp did not listen, he--”

“It’s alright”, said Heva. “Don’t worry, I haven’t given up on you”-- and just like last night, she invited Brianna inside.

Once they were seated comfortably, Heva told Brianna to tell her all that had happened, even though she already knew-- she also knew that telling it to someone would make Brianna feel a little better, which it did. But even so, Brianna was still worried.

“Surely there is something we can do”, she said, “Surely we can go and see Gnor, God of Illness-- surely he will heal my mother”

Heva shook her head-- “Gnor is friendly and helpful, yes, but he can only make illnesses, not take them away”

Brianna buried her head in her hands-- “I do not know what to do!”, she cried, and Heva let the hand of her mighty right arm rest gently upon the girl’s back. 

“It is an awful knot, Brianna, but I am the Goddess of Knots, remember? That was why you came to see me in the first place. I will help you-- I have taken your beloved potato-chips, and so I will not give up until you are helped. You have my promise”

Now that the simple and obvious solution had failed, it was time for cleverer things. Heva sat thinking for a moment, and then she nodded.

“I know what must be done”-- with one of her slender left arms she reached over and pulled open a drawer in the table beside her wide comfy couch, and with the other slender arm she reached into the drawer and pulled out a vial of sparkling blue liquid. She gave it to Brianna-- “For you”, she said, “This is the key to saving your mother”

“Is it medicine?”

“No, it is not medicine-- it is magic. And here is how you must use it”-- and she explained to Brianna exactly how the magic of the sparkling blue liquid worked, and how it could be used to save Elena.

Again, Brianna burst into tears of gratitude, and again, she thanked the Goddess for all her help. In return, Heva kissed a gentle kiss onto the middle of Brianna’s forehead-- she could feel the kind warmth of the burning candle-wick upon the Goddess’s tongue, and so her worry-lines relaxed away. Everything was going to be alright.

Fyfu carried Brianna home, and it stepped inside with her for a few moments so that Elena would see that Brianna had indeed not been out alone, she had kept her promise, and then after one more soft scratch between the crow’s-heads from each of them, mother and daughter, it went scampering off. 

“I had always thought that Fyfu was a terrifying creature”, Elena murmured, letting her eyes fall shut-- she could hardly keep them open. “There are such stories! It eats subway-tokens and switches around traffic-signals and kicks up puddle-water into people’s faces!”

Brianna had heard all those stories too, and she supposed that Fyfu very well might have done all those things-- “But it hasn’t done any of those things to me!”

She told her mother about her second visit to the tiny house of Heva, and she showed her the vial of magical potion that the Goddess had given her. Until the sunrise, the two of them stayed up, discussing the plan, and even though a night of lost sleep had left Elena tireder than tired, tireder than she’d ever been, she knew that the plan was a good plan, and she knew that by the end of this next day, she would be healthy again.

The next morning, when the bus came to take Brianna to school, she did not get on. She wasn’t even waiting at the stop, no-- in fact, Brianna and her mother weren’t even in their small apartment anymore by the time the bus came. They were already in a taxi, already on their way to Dupp’s great tower. Brianna helped her mother out onto the sidewalk, and from there she helped her over to a cluster of decorative bushes at the base of the tower, and there the two of them hid, watching closely.

Soon enough, they saw a long, black limousine pull up to the curb-- and soon after that they saw Dupp’s daughter Ivory step out from the lobby. She climbed into the limousine, and off it went, off to school. Not the same school that Brianna went to, obviously; Ivory didn’t go to the sort of school which had schoolbuses. Once the limousine was out of sight, Brianna took Heva’s vial of magical potion from her pocket, and she popped out the stopper, and she poured the potion into her mother’s mouth. 

Immediately, the magic began to take effect. Elena’s skin shifted and pinched and stretched, her fingers and toes wriggled and shook, her brown eyes went dark, fell shut-- and when they opened again, they were the same green as Ivory’s eyes. Not only that, but Elena’s black hair was now the same bright blond as Ivory’s hair, with all the same diamonds in it, and her deep-brown skin was now the same pale white as Ivory’s skin. She wore the same dress, too, sparkling in the midmorning sun. When the transformation was complete, Brianna helped her mother rise to her feet and gave her a little start walking out from behind the bushes, out into view-- and then she let go. 

Elena was weak and tired, and she only made it a few steps before collapsing. But of course, that was exactly what she’d been meant to do.

The moment the guards in the lobby saw her collapsing, and saw that she was Ivory, they came running out, panicked, calling on walkie-talkies, surrounding the fallen Elena. Brianna stayed back in the bushes, still watching-- a few minutes later, Dupp himself came marching out of the lobby, fidgeting with worry-- his own daughter, collapsing in the street! He demanded that she be taken to see a doctor at once!-- Brianna watched as another limousine pulled up, she watched Dupp climb in, she watched the guards gently place the limp body of her mother in beside him, and she smiled; it had all gone exactly as Heva had promised. Once this second limousine was also out of sight, once the tower’s guards had shuffled back to their places, Brianna came out from her hiding-spot, and grinning ear to ear, she went skipping down the sidewalk in the direction of her school. It was a long way to get there, and she knew that she’d be terribly late-- but she also knew that by the time she came home that afternoon, her mother would be waiting for her, perfectly healthy.

And indeed, she was.

It would have been so lovely, wouldn’t it?-- if the story had ended there?

If Dupp had been a true God instead of just a Said-God, everything probably would have been alright. He would have been annoyed, of course, when Ivory-- the real Ivory-- came home from afterschool lacrosse-practice that evening and didn’t remember anything at all about any sort of collapsing or doctor’s-visit or top-of-the-line secret-medicines being pumped into her-- of course he would have been annoyed. But if he had been a true God, that’s where it would have ended, with annoyance. A true God wouldn’t have worried so much about being tricked and humiliated, a true God wouldn’t have worried so much about what everyone might say when they found out because a true God was a God no matter what anyone said. But a Said-God needed it said that they were a God, and so the moment Dupp realized that he’d been tricked and humiliated by Brianna, he flew into a horrible rage and began plotting how to get revenge. 

He had to get revenge. He absolutely had to.

If he didn’t get any revenge, then soon enough everyone would be trying to trick and humiliate him-- they’d have no reason not to. And so he decided that his revenge had to be horrible and vile, and yet also fitting to what had been done. He paced back and forth in his office, just like Brianna had paced back and forth in her small apartment, and he thought, and he thought, until finally he thought up exactly what it was that he would do. 

A few phone-calls later, Gnor, God of Illness, came stepping into Dupp’s office, shielding his four eyes from the sunset glare of all the diamonds.

“Ah, good-- you’ve arrived”, said Dupp, and he motioned for Gnor to have a seat in one of his diamond-covered chairs, which were not at all comfortable.

“I’ll stand, thank you. Why have you called for me?”

Gnor did not like Dupp very much. 

“Well, my dear, fair, fellow, I have called you here because I knew that you are a dear, fair, fellow-- and something quite unfair has happened!”

Gnor’s mouth twitched. He knew full well that if there had been a real unfairness, he was not the God Dupp would have called for; there was another God for those sorts of things. Moreover, he knew full well that Dupp was not the sort of person who cared much for fairness and unfairness anyways. But still, he listened. He’d come all this way, hadn’t he?

“You see, there was a woman who was sick… the mother of a girl, Brianna, she was quite sick”, Dupp explained, “Your doing, I imagine”

“Not that one, no”, Gnor replied. Sometimes, people just got sick. Sometimes, that was just what happened.

“In any case, she got sick, and so her daughter, like a leech, she came begging to me for help!”, continued Dupp, and he went on to tell Gnor his own version of what had happened-- the magic, the trickery, and so on. The trickery was much, much trickier in Dupp’s version, of course, because Dupp’s version of himself was not so nearly as easy to trick. When it was all told, the Said-God of Wealth and Prosperity put his hands on his hips and let out an indignant huff-- “Obviously, you see the problem!”

Gnor did not see the problem.

“The problem, Gnor, is that someone has gotten healthy who doesn’t deserve to be healthy! This woman was irresponsible enough to get sick when she didn’t have the money to pay for a doctor, and now she’s back to healthy without spending a dime! As Gods, you and I, clearly we cannot encourage this sort of behavior!”

The God of Illness let out a sigh. He wasn’t in the mood tonight to remind Dupp that a Said-God was not at all the same thing as a true God. There was no point. “What do you want me to do about it?”, he asked.

Dupp pretended to consider the question for a moment before answering-- “Hmmm… it seems to me like the only fair thing would be for you to make her sick again!”

“Not a chance”, Gnor grunted, and he turned to leave.

“Fair enough”, Dupp replied, “I know you’re busy, after all. I’ll just handle it myself. It should only take a few phone calls, a few bills changing hands to make sure that every single hospital in the city gets shut down”

Gnor froze-- “What in the world are you talking about?!”

Dupp gave him a shrug-- “Well, I mean, if we let one undeserving person be healthy, and we don’t want to make her sick again, the only fair thing left after that is to make sure no one has the chance to be healthy, deserving or otherwise”-- the Said-God reached for his phone-- “It is an awful shame, of course, that so many people will get sick and die… an awful shame which they’ll all blame you for… but don’t worry, I’ll be sure to tell everyone that this is all because you refused to make Brianna’s mother sick-- I’m sure they’ll understand. I’m sure they’ll all respect the principle of it”

“...fine”-- Gnor stepped back into the office-- “I’ll do it your way”

The God of Illness was a true God, not a Said-God, and so it didn’t matter at all what people said about him. But he was also a kind God, whenever he could be, and as much as he hated the idea of making a good person sick for no good reason, he hated the idea of so many people getting sick and dying for no good reason even more. And so he closed his eyes and he snapped his fingers and halfway across the city, as she sat down for dinner, Elena began to cough.

Brianna’s mother’s new sickness was much, much worse than her old one-- and her old one had been awful to begin with. In less than an hour, she was back on her back on the couch, hacking and coughing-- soon, there was blood with every cough. Brianna called an ambulance, and she rode with her mother to the hospital, and she sat beside her mother in the bed, and together they listened to the doctors. 

“For now, your mother is stable”, said one of the doctors, “Her sickness is severe, but we have the medications to cure it. A day or two and she’ll be good as new”-- he said it cheerfully, and as he said it he handed over a clipboard for Brianna’s mother to fill out all her information, including how she was going to pay-- and when Brianna’s mother saw how much the medication was going to cost, she handed the clipboard right back.

“I can’t afford this”

The doctors glanced an anxious glance at each other, and asked how much money she had set aside for medical expenses-- there were cheaper treatments, less effective, but they would still get the job done eventually.

“We haven’t got any money set aside at all”, Elena told them.

The doctors glanced another anxious glance at each other, more anxious than the first. They asked how Brianna’s mother had gotten here in the first place. When she told them that she had come in an ambulance, they all sighed. One of them fetched her a wheelchair, another helped her out of bed, into it, the third rolled her out of the hospital, Brianna following close behind. The last doctor handed Brianna a piece of paper and told her not to wait too much longer than two weeks-- “The paper-pushers get kind of antsy if you keep them waiting”, he explained, and then he turned around and walked back into the hospital.

Brianna unfolded the piece of paper; it was a bill for more money than she had ever seen in her entire life-- the cost of the ambulance-ride, the cost of the hospital bed, the cost of the five minutes the doctors had spent telling her how much more than that it would cost to treat her mother. Her hands went limp. The paper drifted down to the ground, landed in a puddle.

“Mom…”, she murmured, “What are we going to do?”

Brianna’s mother coughed, and then coughed again-- and again after that-- and then finally, she stopped coughing just long enough to tell Brianna that they needed to go and see Heva. 

“That’s right! Heva!”, Brianna exclaimed, “She’ll help us! She’ll find a way to make you better!”

“She--”-- another cough-- “Heva will know what to do”

The Goddess Heva, of course, had been watching this whole time, as she was always watching, and so she had sent Fyfu to come and guide Brianna and her mother safely back to her tiny house in the center of the city park. The great gray rabbit with crow’s-heads for its ears came running up the sidewalk towards them at more or less exactly the same time that they decided to go see Heva, and it walked beside them the whole way there, keeping watchful eyes on all of the dark and dangerous places they passed. When at last they arrived back at her house, Heva came out to greet them, and with Brianna’s help she carried Elena from the wheelchair across the yard, up onto the porch, and in through the door. Heva gently, carefully laid Elena down on her couch, and after a long, clear, look, after a silent understanding had passed between the two of them, she went into the kitchen to make some tea.

“I’m sorry”, she said softly, through the open door, “I really thought I’d fixed things for you”

Brianna’s mother told her not to be sorry-- “We are so honored to have had you helping us at all… there is nothing to--”-- she exploded into another violent fit of coughing before she could finish.

“What matters is that we’re here, now. You can help us, Heva, your slender left arms can find another way to untie this knot”

Heva stepped back into the room with a fresh pot of tea. “This knot cannot be untied”, she said, and despite the warm candlelight spilling from her mouth as she said it, her face was cold and miserable.

Brianna knew the legends of Heva-- “Any puzzle that cannot be solved can be smashed; any knot that cannot be untied can be cut though”, she recited, exactly as it said in the Book of the Certain Future, “If your left arms cannot untie the knot of saving my mother, then your right arm can take up your sword and cut straight through it! That is the way of the Goddess Heva! You can take up your sword and you can march right into the office of the Said-God Dupp at the top of his awful tower, and you can demand that he pay for the doctors to cure my mother!-- and if he refuses, you can cut straight through him and take what you need!”-- Brianna was not afraid, not with the full power of a Goddess on her side.

But still, the face of Heva was cold and miserable. 

“This knot cannot be cut through, either…”, she murmured. 

“That’s impossible! You’re the Goddess Heva, you--”

“There’s no knot left to cut”

“What are you saying?”, Brianna demanded. And then she noticed that Heva had only fetched two cups from the cupboard-- “Take another one! My mom needs a cup, too, doesn’t she?-- don’t you, mom?”-- she started turning to see her mother’s reaction, but Heva stopped her.

“Don’t. Don’t look at the couch, Brianna”

Heva knew that Elena wouldn’t have wanted her daughter to see her like this.

“But…”

“It’s over. I’m sorry”

Brianna’s eyes began to tear up-- she balled her fists-- “But… but you promised! You told me you’d help us! I paid you all of our potato chips and you told me you wouldn’t stop until we were helped!”-- her head began to turn again.

“Don’t turn. Keep your eyes on me”-- Heva tossed a glance to Poll, God of Buses and Trains and the Dead, slipping in through the window at the other end of the living-room; he nodded back at her and moved straight for the couch. “I promised I’d help you, and I meant it-- and I mean it, I still do. I will help you, Brianna”

“How will you help me?! She’s gone!!”

“I’ll take care of you. I’ll make sure you have food and clothing and a safe place to live. I’ll teach you everything you need to know, everything she would have wanted you to know”

“Everything she would have wanted…”-- again, Brianna began to turn, and again Heva warned her not to-- but she didn’t listen. Brianna turned, and so she saw Poll, in his many hats, with his many empty sleeves, lifting her mother’s lifeless body from the couch-- “No!”, she cried, “No, you can’t have her!”

She sprang up from the chair, moved to stop Poll-- and instantly, she found herself tangled up in knots of twine and wood-fiber, sprouting from the floorboards.

“I’m sorry, Brianna”, Heva whispered.

“Let me go! Let me go!”-- Brianna watched helpless as Poll left back out through the window, and when Heva finally untangled her feet, she ran at the Goddess, screamed at her, pounded at her with her tiny fists-- “Why?! Why did you let her die, why did you let him take her?!”

“Brianna, I--”

“I hate you!!”-- she turned and ran from the house-- out the door, across the yard, into the city-park night.

Heva lingered for a moment, watching her go, and then she commanded Fyfu to take off after her.

“Make sure she’s safe”, she commanded. “Bring her back”

“Fyfu!”, said Fyfu, and it zipped away, a blur of fur and feathers.

The Goddess walked to her window, and whistled out into the wind, and by her whistling she called Trer, God of Anarchy and Justice, to stand beside her.

“You were watching?”, she asked him.

“I was”

“Then you agree that something must be done”, said Heva. It wasn’t a question; no God could have watched all this and not agreed with that. “Good”

Together, now, the two of them whistled, and by their whistling they called Gnor.

The God of Illness took one look at the couch, and his face clouded with shame. “He left me no choice”, Gnor murmured.

“We know. We saw”

“We were watching”

“Something must be done”

Gnor shook his head-- “The Said-Gods can’t be touched, not yet. If we deviate from the Book--”

“No one is suggesting that we deviate from the Book”, Heva cut in, “If I wanted to deviate from the Book of the Certain Future, I wouldn’t have bothered calling you-- no, I would have pulled out Dupp’s spine through his nostrils and been done with it”

The three of them stood silent for a moment, thinking about how lovely that would be. 

Finally, Gnor stepped forward-- “I’m the one who did this; I’ll be the one to make it right”

Heva scowled-- “You can’t make it right. Nothing can make it right”

“But you can make it balanced”, said Trer, and he told Gnor exactly how it ought to be done, and so Gnor did it.

The next morning, on her way out to the limousine, Ivory collapsed, coughing. Just like before, the guards went swarming around her, radioing up to Dupp. This time, he didn’t bother coming down-- “Stupid leeches”, he muttered into the glittering wall of his office, “Did they really think the same trick would work on me twice?”-- he told his guards not to bother with doctors and hospitals-- “What I want you to do is take that stupid girl’s mother and dump her body somewhere out of the way before it starts attracting flies”

They left his daughter in a garbage-bin behind the pizza-shop across the street.