Chapter Eleven

“Curse me if you will. Spite me if you will. I will not heed your misery. You disgrace yourself and spit on all of us.”

In a way, Leshin supposed, God’s little gambit had worked. Thoroughly beaten, Leshin had no choice but to return to her duties and work. For days, she refused to speak—even to Ilaki—as she found herself incapable of even telling the slightest of lies. Half-truths, lies by omission… they all seemed out of reach. Even when she was alone in the bathroom, long after her shifts had ended and the others were either asleep or slaving off in the kitchens, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. During her freest moments, guiding the other sisters and attendants through their exercises, adjusting their form, teaching them to project their essences into the water and take it under their control, she allowed herself a few jokes and comments. But nothing greater than that. Nothing that might lead into a question. Because the second anyone asked her a question, she would answer it truthfully, whether she liked it or not.

And so it went on. For days or weeks or months—she couldn’t even tell anymore—all she could do was avoid speaking at all costs. That suited her just fine. She hardly cared if she missed a bit of the mindless chatter all around her.

Every time God returned for another meal, followed by hours of painstaking demands for praise and adoration, it always turned its attention to Leshin, testing her faith as often as it could. And Leshin, for her part, stood strong. She refused to disappoint the deity, to ever offer any compliments it deemed inappropriate or ill-timed. And while her skills as a servant lacked, her ability to bullshit did not. Even with the disadvantage imposed upon her, Leshin rarely struggled to find something that would satisfy God’s appetite. To convince it that, perhaps, she truly loved it. Love was what it craved, of course. That whole dialogue on adoration and service had told her as much. So, she did her best to love it. She prayed to it every night, turned her terror into awe and her awe into reverence. And maybe that was love, just like it wanted. And if she loved God—truly loved God—then maybe it wouldn’t hurt her.

If her duty was to serve, then she would serve with all her heart—because the instant she failed, she would become like the others. Kilini, Mikele, and Nikime were the first to disappoint it, and none of them ever acted the same afterward.

Leshin never thought it possible, but Kilini had broken. After three punishments, she shrank. Became meek and skittish, a shell of herself, almost as quiet as Shina. During Slinging practice, she drew back, speaking less and less. She flinched at sudden noises and muttered of fire and hounds in her sleep. Mikele fared perhaps a little better, having only disappointed the god twice, but her old arrogance had evaporated like smoke. And Nikime, poor, sweet Nikime… She just stared out into space, these days. Five mishaps. Five punishments. And everyone knew a sixth would come one day.

With Shina and Ilaki having recently failed to meet God’s impossible standards and receiving their own torments, Leshin remained the only one who remained untarnished, and she had to keep it that way. Only Ilaki had ever disclosed what her own punishment was like—she had tearfully recounted how moments turned to weeks turned to months as God bathed her up to the neck in boiling tar while buzzards tore the flesh from her face and eyes again and again.

The others all seemed to agree that she had gotten a light sentence.

And so, Leshin refused. She refused to trip, to stumble, to stutter, to repeat even a single honorific. She refused, she refused to let it break her. It wanted to break her. But she refused.

That is, until the day God finally won.

It had been a simple day, an easy one. She hardly said a word, just got up, readied herself, went to the kitchens with Ilaki, prepared and threw out four or five entire feasts, spent a little bit of time cleaning the halls in between meals, and waited for Shina and Mikele to relieve her of her duties. As per usual.

But as she set the final feast of the day under the heating lamps just inside the kitchen doors, she turned around to see God’s smile no further than five inches from her face. Smug. Some cruel plan behind its scratched-out, charred eyes. Leshin shrieked and nearly dumped the beast’s horrific meal all over its torso, but she just barely managed to compose herself enough to offer a humble bow from the waist.

Things only worsened from there.

It seemed content to sit in silence, mostly. In fact, it hadn’t even said a word as she and Ilaki placed silver platters around the dining table. Around halfway through God’s feast, the creature had whisked Leshin, Ilaki, and the dinner table off somewhere into the stars with a snap of its fingers. Colors of all hues shimmered around the trio. The table and its frozen guests hung free in space. Great columns of vapor—at a scale beyond anything Leshin had imagined possible—spread out from neon nebulas looming behind them, which glittered with the fuzzy lights of so many stars that Leshin had to squint. She couldn’t do much beyond twisting her body, but her term of service had brought her into the void many times. She’d adjusted to the feeling of drifting through the aether, her white gown fluttering in an impossible breeze, which sprang from a cloudy bubble of air that circled God’s body.

 Before her, she beheld two spheres of breathtaking size, one orange and one red, if slightly purple in places. Planets, Leshin supposed, but not ones of earth and stone—at least, not any she could see through the thick, swirling miasmas that covered them from pole to pole. The two celestial bodies circled one another. They moved at a sluggish pace. But then, considering their sheer scale, they certainly moved faster than they had any right.

The heavens did move, of course. Any child who gazed skyward could tell as much, but in seeing the planets so unnaturally close, Leshin could tell something was off. There was a certain waviness to the space around them. If Leshin leaned forward, everything rippled and refracted as if she were glancing through a film of water.  

Leshin lowered her head ever so slightly.

Perhaps God had wrinkled space itself—God clearly had some control over how much space was inside a container… The temple itself was proof of that. And since God could do anything it pleased, it stood to reason that God could just… declare whatever space it liked a container. Bend that space into any shape or size, even stretch it out or squeeze it with the same ease as a master sculptor. But the consequences of that worried her. The planets moved too quickly. These kinds of events were meant to last centuries, not hours.

Perhaps God had hastened the flow of time to observe the movements of the heavens. That wouldn’t surprise Leshin, God did have a certain academic fascination with the workings of its creation. But an awful thought crossed her mind, and she had to wonder if time in The City kept pace with this warped bubble of space.

She swallowed.

If time outside this bubble went freely by, then she only had to wonder how many years were slipping by as she watched the planets circle each other.

Silika…

She clenched her jaw, pushing her grief away. It would do her no good, now.

The spheres orbited each other much closer now, faster and faster as well. Soon, the smaller of the two began to distort, turning ovular and eratic as it spiraled toward the larger planet, dragged out by some unseen force. Leshin might have assumed God had moved it, but from the way the deity calmly consumed the tender human flesh on its plate, Leshin guessed this must have simply been some natural phenomenon God wanted to spectate over supper.

The planets nearly touched, orbiting and swirling and stretching under cosmic forces Leshin could never begin to understand. As she watched, a portion of the larger planet’s gaseous form whipped around the other planet so fast that it arced off into space, escaping into the void like water Slung by a master—released at the perfect moment to fly free.

When the two planets finally collided, circled by rings of cast-off debris and vapor, their cores burst into white-hot flames that erupted up from below, slowly turning a joyous blue that nearly blinded her. Leshin gaped in awe as she realized what she had witnessed.

The dawn of a new star.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. God had never made such a spectacle of the natural wonders throughout its creation—it had always placed them second to itself. Mere set pieces to emphasize God’s own glory in comparison. But this… This was birth. A tragic, glorious birth that she had witnessed in person. There was something so ineffably natural about the way the infant star ignited from the inside out, gleefully bursting to life.

An act of creation. Sacred.

Two planets had sacrificed themselves, yes, but the brilliant blue light, the warmth that they now emitted, made Leshin realize with a light gasp that neither had truly died. They had come together, united. To create something grander and more beautiful that now—

“So many wondrous things,” God said, snapping Leshin back into the moment. She glanced at it and immediately regretted her choice.

God’s teeth sliced through the knuckle of a human finger, then ever so gently de-gloved the skin from the bone. 

“Spectacles beyond measure,” it said as it chewed, a second set of jaws clicking behind its bared, grinning teeth. “And all without even a guiding hand. They come about every day. New life, new possibilities, all created on their own, simply by the confluence of natural law…”

For a moment, it looked almost wistful as it idly stroked the rim of its glass of spirits. But then, it reached out, and Leshin watched in horror. She knew exactly what God intended. She had seen it so many times.

“I had no hand in creating this,” God said.

Leshin’s breath caught as the creature’s sheer Will crushed the infant star. The star’s rippling, flaming surface boiled and sputtered, lashing out as its form shriveled and shrank further and further, until in an awful instant, its light went out. All that remained was a tiny black ball the size of a taro seed, which God caught and spun around in between its finger and thumb.

“And that is profane,” God said. As it sank its teeth into the dead star, Leshin’s breath gave out.

She wiped her tears away. She had to be calm—God couldn’t notice her rage. This was normal. This was nothing new. God had consumed celestial bodies of its own creation many times. And just because this one was pure and uncorrupted, it wasn’t really a…

She turned away, desperate to look anywhere else, think anything else, until her eyes landed on one of the guests—the one seated at the right hand of God.

Terror to awe, awe to reverence, reverence to love.

Love was what God wanted, and if fear was love, then she had to look fear in the eye. If she just feared God enough, then she could never let it down. And so, she stared at the limp suit of armor. Though flames took her mind as she gazed into its dead, wooden eyes,(dear child) she refused to pry her eyes off the statue’s roughly carved mask, embossed with a swirling, fractalline pattern of chipped, green paint, and as her soul unraveled in agonizing waves, her eyes reddening as her veins burst at the seams and sent fresh blood coursing down her cheeks. But as painful as gazing at the mask was, it drew her in. Like staring into the sun with her eyes wide open. After a while, (will you)  it stopped hurting and started… calling. As it offering her something else to worship. Something (refuse) heretical.

Try as she might to believe she loved her jailer, no matter how convincingly she lied to herself, the rage grew. Like fire. Her vision shook, her teeth ground together. Just at the mere thought of all God had stolen from this world. This was… (with me) This was nothing short of…

Sin…

With a coy, knowing smile, God turned its vile head toward Leshin and propped its chin up on its hand, chuckling with a predatory grin. It knew.

“My, my, dear Sister,” it said, eager to see her finally fail, “you seem tense. Whatever could be on your mind?”

Sinner…

“I—” Panic gripped Leshin. She steeled herself, (just because it can) willed herself to be quiet, to say nothing, (nothing is sacred) or if not nothing, then to say anything other than what she wished she could; because if she said what she truly wanted to say, (it wants you to fail) what she really thought, then—

(let it weep let it burn let it die)

“I hate you,” Leshin growled.

And for the first time in her life, she knew God’s wrath.

I'm baaaaaaaack!! And I'm going to be keeping to a publication schedule once again for the next few weeks, just like I did last year. I like to do bulk releases, as it suits my work schedule. Not nearly as fun in the interims, of course, but I write when I can. Also, I have a Patreon. Feed me.