She kept the wrappings on. She would wear them, she decided. As tribute to what she had overcome. Both her fear of the dark, and her fear of inanimacy. She had faced both in putting the bindings on. And came out the victor, unbound.
After the night fell she crept out of the temple, keeping to the shadows. It wouldn’t do to expose herself to the moon light, who knew who might be watching from the sky above. Many gods came from the heavens, and they might find it entertaining to tell Zsa Zsa what she had been up to. It was generally frowned upon to sabotage each other’s followers. An immortal rival was not something she was looking for, this early in her godhood.
She carefully approached the center of the village once more, standing in the shade of the same building she had been at earlier in the day. With a delicate summoning gesture of her forefinger, she pulled at the strings of the witches' luck, plucking them out of the air, summoning them to her. Golden dewy droplets percolated down the luck threads, many many of them wrapped around her finger from the whole host of witches, some thick, some thin. The luck beaded into her finger, seeping into her skin.
Now to find her lucky victim. She walked among the sleeping witches, looking into their faces. One that already stood out from the others, one that had already inspired some amount of envy would be best. She found the soon-to-be lucky witch, a beautiful woman with striking fox-like features, dyed flame colored hair and facial markings, and powerful muscles. She reached into the woman’s open mouth, much like the humans had reached into hers, all that time ago, only instead of taking from the woman, this time she gave. Letting many, so very many beads of luck trickle into the woman’s onto her tongue as she slept, blissfully unaware of the conspiracy against her.
Ketsuri slipped away once more. And now, all that was left was to watch the havoc.
It had only been a short while, only a couple of weeks, and already the witches were ready to tear the lucky woman apart, she could see it in the way they watched her, jealous, ravenous. The woman seemed oblivious, delighted with her good fortune, unaware of the emotional storm brewing around her. It was such a delight to watch the humans deteriorate into their base desires, ripping each other apart with so much savagery that Ketsuri decided that she might enjoy repeating the process a couple times with more witches, rather than just the once.
In the meantime she considered how she wanted to put her own devotees to rest. The cochineal corpses were kept in a laboratory, a robotics lab in the local university, full of elaborate equipment used to make mechanical manipulations on a miniscule scale. The cochineal were a small insect, after all, small and delicate as a whisper. She needed a way to instigate the building’s destruction without indicating another god’s involvement to Zsa Zsa. Perhaps her luck manipulation could be of use once more. The woman she had chosen for her machinations was a leading roboticist at the lab, making remarkable headway in her projects, stoking the resentment of her peers in this way as well. Ketsuri had made the right call in selecting her, a lucky choice. Perhaps Ketsuri wouldn’t have to do anything after all, just revoke the woman’s luck when she was still in the building and providence would do the rest.
Eventually it was time, emotional brewed sufficiently high, boiling over. Ketsuri summoned the luck back to herself, the woman deep at work in the lab, her protective garb insufficient to protect her from what was to come. A small band of colleagues set upon her, tearing her apart with vicious satisfaction. They left the woman’s body lying on the floor, warm blood pooling, heat faintly rising from the growing red pool, before putting a torch to the building, setting both her and the cochineal within ablaze in angry red flames. Ketsuri watched, pleased with the results of her labor. If she kept this up, all of the witches in the community would be destroying each other, and Zsa Zsa would never wise up to her involvement. It was perfect. Let the old deer brag about them now.
As she watched the flame jump higher, cochineal red, she contemplated her future, the endlessly long future, now an eternal one that stretched out before her. Perhaps after this she might continue with her games, whether with mortals or immortals. She had to find a hobby, after all. Forever was an awfully long time.
