“The only reason I am not expelling you on the spot is because of your personal circumstances, Ms. Gale. You are lucky to only get a week’s suspension from school.”

Calista sat in the principal’s office, looking out the window and trying to ignore the angry man behind the desk. Her fingers absentmindedly twisted the ends of her long red hair as he babbled on about her future and how she would ‘end up working someplace miserable, alone and forgotten’ if she did not shape up. Or something that like. It was hard to pay attention.

“I don’t even remember why I am here,” thought Calista, starting at the dark path that stretched beyond the schoolgrounds. One path leading to a shining field. The other to a graveyard. She did not remember either being there yesterday, yet it did not seem to bother her that it was there now.

“Oh right,” Calista remembered, “That little skank Laura was sniffing around Tyson. Tyson is mine. And Laura will remember that after what I did to her. Bitch isn’t so attractive now without her cute little ponytail.”

She did not even like Tyson, though she was supposed to. Those were the rules, right? Cheerleaders dated footballers, or whatever they were called. She felt a touch of guilt. but pushed it deep down inside her with the others. Mean girls do not feel guilty. Show regret, and those waiting to take her place in the social hierarchy would eat her alive.

“Whatever, Mr. Peckerson,” Calista laughed dismissively. “Can I just go now? I’ve got a week of free time ahead of me, and I want to get an early start.”

“It’s Peterson, Ms. Gale,” Principal Peterson said, the veins starting to pulse on his neck as they always did when Calista got underneath his skin. “And that just got you another two days added to your suspension.”

Calista was about to respond with another snarky comment, hoping to make it an even two weeks, when there was a knock at the principal’s door. It was the school counselor, Mr. Dedrick. He was the only adult in this school she could actually stand. Maybe it was because he treated her as a human being. Maybe it was because of the ironic mullet and sideburns that he grew out for a school fundraiser and then kept because he liked it.

“Pardon for the intrusion, Principal Peterson, but are you finished with Calista? I need to speak with her.” Mr. Dedrick’s tone did not have his usual cheerfulness, which made Calista nervous.

“Yes, we are done here,” Principal Peterson huffed, “And she will be done at this school if she does not turn her attitude around. Use this time to think about who you are Calista and who you want to become. Because if you do not change, you will not be my problem for long. Do you understand me?”

“Whatever, Peckerson,” Calista snapped, and slammed the door behind her before he could respond.

“You really should not antagonize him like that, Calista,” Mr. Dedrick said, but it was a token admonition. He stared forward and Calista could sense something that wrong.

“Carl, what is the matter?” Calista asked, dropping the mean girl persona once she was sure there was no one else around.

“Look…Calista,” Mr. Dedrick started. “There is no easy way to say this. I just got word from your uncle. Your father has taken a turn for the worse. He…might not have long left. A day. Probably less.”

Calista stopped walking, feeling her knees grow weak and her face turn ghostly white. “But the treatment last week. They said he… that he… he told me it would work…” Calista dug her fingers into her palm, drawing blood to try to prevent herself from crying. No one at school could see her cry. No one except Mr. Dedrick and Principal Peterson even knew her father was sick, and even they did not know that every day for the past year she had come home to an empty apartment while her father lay in the hospital, fighting a losing fight.

Carl turned and stood in front of her, helping to shield her face from onlookers. “Come on Calista. I will drive you to the hospital.” He put a hand on her back to get her to start walking again.

“He promised…her promised me he would not go anywhere,” Calista’s voice was starting to crack, her tears rebelling against her attempts to hold them in.

Her tears won the second her feet touched the concrete outside. She did not remember the drive to the hospital or Carl’s attempts to comfort her or the nurse leading her to her father’s hospital room. It seemed like only a moment had passed before she was sitting at her father’s bedside, clutching his hand tightly.

“Do you remember that hunting trip we took when you there thirteen. When we accidently ran into that wild boar?” asked her father, coughing and smiling weakly. He was hooked up to wires and tubes, his skinny frame now only a shadow of the muscled outdoorsman he had been only a year ago.

He was staring at the ceiling, his eyes clouded with medication to keep his pain at bay.

“I guess,” Calista said softly, squeezing his hand. “I remember being really scared.”

“No, my beautiful daughter, you were so brave. You looked that boar square in the eyes as it charged. You did not show your fear. You stared it down, and it was the one that blinked,” her father said with pride in his voice. “You were so good at hunting. You could have surpassed even me.”

He coughed, and Calista wiped the blood from his mouth. His eyes fell on her long ponytail. “You started to grow this out after our last hunt…” he whispered absentmindedly.

“It… just looked better, that’s all,” Calista said, grasping her hair in her hands, suddenly self-conscious. She had kept it short for hunting with her father, which brought her so much joy as a child. But she had switched to a new school after their last hunt and suddenly popularity was everything, and hunting was embarrassing.

“Those were happier days,” he whispered, eyes looking at something Calista could not see. “Before you grew cold and mean and distant. Before you turned your life to ash.”

He turned, looking into her tear-filled eyes and gave a sweet smile.

“That hunt was the last happy memory I have of you.”

Calista’s tears fell onto her lap. There was no menace in his voice. Only the certainty of truth.

Her father turned back to stare at the ceiling once more. “Maybe if your mother had stayed with us, I would have done a better job of raising you. I wonder what happened to her. Do you think she is waiting for me on the other side?”

Anger cut through Calista’s grief. She knew it was his disease talking, that this rambling was the prelude to his last moments in her life, but it still hurt. “I don’t fucking know, Dad. I don’t remember her. She abandoned us when I was three, remember?”

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“She was so beautiful. You got your hair from her, and your eyes. I did my best to raise you, you know. It’s not my fault you turned out the way you did. Do you think she will forgive me?”

“Someone has to,” Calista said, grabbing her backpack and standing up abruptly. “I’ve got to go, Dad. I’ve got… schoolwork to do.”

“Do you remember that hunting trip we took. The one with the boar?” he asked again, “Why did you stop coming with me? It broke my heart.”

Calista wiped away her tears and left her father looking at the ceiling, mind lost in the fog of illness. She ran for the exit, head down, and struck the chest of a nurse at the doorway.

“Move,” Calista mumbled, but the nurse just stood there. She tried to go around her, but she stood firmly in place, blocking the exit.

“Get out of my way!” Calista demanded, desperate to leave the room.

“You know this is the last time you saw him. You did not even attend his funeral,” the nurse said, her voice low and rumbling, as if it were echoing off the walls of her father’s hospital room.

“What are you talking about?” Calista began to protest. But something in the voice triggered memories within her. She remembered this day. Her father had died an hour after she left him. She had hidden in their apartment for a week, ignoring her aunt and uncle and Mr. Dedrick and the slew of others who had tried to see if she was safe. She remembered growing angrier every day, culminating in her smashing their television and throwing a vase at her aunt and uncle when they came by to take her to the funeral.

“There are crossroads in life that define who we are. This moment in time was yours.”

Calista looked up at the woman. She was young, dressed in thick hides with white fur in the Inuit style. Her shimmering black hair tumbled out from beneath her hood in two thick twin braids that reached her breasts. She shimmered with an aura that matched the blue of the sky, and carried a simple spear composed of a driftwood shaft and ivory point, tied on with complex bands of leather.

“A…crossroad?” Calista said.

“Yes. You used this moment to close yourself off to the world. To justify your pessimistic view of yourself and your behavior towards yourself. Your father’s final words to you would become the foundation of your self-centered behavior that would be your security blanket against the world. And each day it would take you further away from the person you wanted to be.”

“My aunt and uncle kicked me out of the house when I turned eighteen,” Calista said, remembering. “I barely finished high school. I moved to the city and could only find a job at Acicentre, at the Castle of Glass. I did not believe I could do any better.”

“Your choices, stemming from this moment, would be what led you to The God Contest. It is the reason you are here now.”

“Who are you?” asked Calista.

“I am the Manifestation of Pinga, Inuit Goddess of the Hunt. A guide. And I am here to offer you a choice,” said Pinga, resting a weathered hand on Calista’s shoulder. “As one huntress to another.”

Calista swallowed hard. “What choice?”

Pinga smiled sweetly, “We all make poor choices in life that diminish us. I give you this chance to right this wrong. To make peace with your father before he passes on and crack the foundations upon which you built your adult life. To change who you would become, that you may lead a successful and happy life.”

“Just like that? I make peace, and become someone new?” asked Calista, cynically.

“Just like that,” smiled Pinga, an open palm stretched out towards her father. “Do you accept? A new life, a new Calista?”

Calista turned around and took two steps towards her father. It seemed like such a simple choice. But then she suddenly stopped. Something was not right. She turned back to Pinga.

“If I make peace, I become someone new? I make real friends, live peacefully with my aunt and uncle, and have a real career. I make different choices and my life takes me in a new direction?” Calista reasoned.

Pinga nodded.

“And that means I would never work at Acicentre. I would never be brought to the God Contest.”

“A fresh start. A new life,” Pinga confirmed.

“A fresh start,” Calista whispered. “A chance to forgive my father. To forgive myself. To succeed in a life of failure.” She took another step towards where her father lay, delirious.

Yet something stopped her from taking that next step. She hated her life. She hated what she had become. Hated being the bully. Hated how she used it as a shield against the world. Hated that, deep inside, she too believed her last happy memory of herself had been that final hunting trip with her father.

If this had been a week ago, she would have changed her destiny in a heartbeat. Except…

“Except I like who I am becoming in the God Contest,” she finished aloud. “I have dozens of people that rely on me every day to survive and to thrive. I have devoted friends, and the spark of something more. What happens to all of them if I choose another path?”

Calista turned back to her father. “I miss him. Every day. I hate how it ended and who I became. But I would not sacrifice this past week for anything. This is the first week in a long time that I have liked who I am, and I need to see where tomorrow takes me.”

Pinga smiles and moves aside from the doorway. “Then pass through this door and resume your life as it has been. Feel content in the knowledge that you chose the God Contest over the chance at a new life, at your own free will. Embrace it. May it give you the strength you need to survive what is to come.”

Calista nodded a silent thanks, then pointed to Pinga’s spear and asked, “Can I borrow that for a second?”

Pinga wordlessly handed her the spear. It was light, lighter than it should be, and Calista’s fingers wrapped around its shaft protectively. She walked over to her father’s bedside, looking down at his eyes as they stared into his oncoming oblivion.

“I’m sorry I did not make you proud, dad,” she sniffed, the last of her tears falling onto his chest. She grasped her long hair in her hands and used the spear to slice it clean off at her shoulders. The long strands fell to the ground in a scattered pile, her hair fanning out in a messy bob, ends frayed. For a moment she felt like a child again, staring down at that boar. Scared but brave.

“But perhaps I can make you proud of who I will become.” She turned her back on her father and walked towards the exit. She held up the spear for Pinga, but Pringa shook her head.

“A huntress needs a proper weapon. Take that one with my blessings. May we see you rise it up, victorious at the end.”

Calista nodded, feeling lighter than she had in years. “I intend to.”

She marched through the door with purpose, towards sunlight gliding through forest leaves, and her world faded away.

* * *

Vivian was ten years old. She sat on the floor of her father’s house, playing with her growing collection of dolls. Her father always got her a new once after every business trip, and…

“Ok, no, we are not doing this,” Xavier shouted, wincing at the little girl’s voice that came from him. A voice he had chosen to leave behind a long time ago.

“Are you ok, sweetie?” came the voice of his father, laced with love that Xavier knew would turn to hate once Xavier became who he truly was.

“I’m not talking to you, asshole,” Xavier shouted in the girl’s voice, “Where is the puppet master behind this gods damned farce?”

“Young lady, you watch your mouth,” her father demanded, emerging from the kitchen. He was still dressed in his business suit, including his plain black tie, and stood imposingly tall. His short-cut hair and striking features spoke of a man that liked things his way and more often than not achieved it. “How dare you take the good lord’s name in vain. Apologize this instance.”

Xavier pushed past him into the kitchen. He reached up on his frustratingly short legs to the block of knives high up on the counter. He managed to knock over the knife block, tiny hands grasping the longest one. His father always kept them nice and sharp.

“Did you hear me, young lady?” he shouted, following her in a growing fury.

“Tell you what, father. Why don’t you deliver my apologies in person?”

As his father reached down to grasp his skinny arm, Xavier thrust the knife forward, impaling it through his father’s throat. His father’s eyes flew open in shock and betrayal.

Xavier watched impassively as his father clawed at the knife in vain, growing weaker, until he finally collapsed on the floor in a pool of blood.

“Damn it,” Xavier mumbled, stepping over the body. “I forgot. You will not be able to deliver my apology to the Lord. Not where you are going.”

Xavier stared out the window into his childhood backyard, where there was now a dark path that forked towards a shining cleaning and a graveyard. He already knew which way his path would lead.

“Well? Can we get this moving along?” Xavier shouted to the world around him, “I have places to be.” He tapped his tiny foot irritably. “And I really hate being in this body.”

The house faded away, leaving Xavier standing in a void in his normal body, his father’s corpse still laying at his feet. “If only it were my real father,” Xavier muttered, staring down at it.

In the darkness beyond, Cizen, the Mayan God of Death, the Stinking One, ruler of the lands of the dead, grinned.

“Oh, yes. You will do nicely.”

* * *