Page 13 of The Merciless Ones
When I turn the corner into the hallway where the Chamber of the Goddesses lies, Melanis is exiting, her wings rustling with happiness as she joins the group of Firstborn waiting outside for her. She seems much more relaxed than she was just an hour ago, but that is to be expected. Time moves differently inside the chamber, seconds stretching into weeks on end, hours compressing into the blink of an eye. The first true meeting I had with the mothers, I spent an entire summer in their presence, only to walk back out into the hallway and discover that mere seconds had passed. That is the power of the divine, the power only the Gilded Ones can wield.
The moment I near the doors, Ixa scrambles down from my shoulder, where he’s been perched since I left the war room. He absolutely hates the Chamber of the Goddesses. The former emperor pinned him to its wall with arrows made from celestial gold six months ago, and the memory clearly hasn’t faded, even though the wounds have long since healed. I’ve tried to talk to him about it several times over the past few months, but he always goes all sulky when I do, so I’ve stopped trying. For now, that is.
I’ll be out soon, promise, I say to him, but he just sends me a reproachful look as he disappears around the corner.
Traitor, his expression seems to say.
Sighing, I walk over to the line of armoured deathshrieks and alaki guarding the chamber doors, nodding in reply to their formal genuflections as the doors creak open. Most people have to wait until the guards announce their presence, but the mothers’ doors always open the moment I approach – another mark of their favour.
I breathe a relieved sigh when a wave of soothing energy washes over me as I enter. Just like that, I’m in the dark ocean, the one I used to visit in my dreams. Only, there isn’t any water in it – just an endless flowing of stars, all of them swirling, sparkling, around my body. This is the truest nature of the Chamber of the Goddesses – a thousand universes swirling together, entire rivers of stars flowing through the cosmos.
Before, when I had dreams of the dark ocean, all I could see was water, and sometimes that glowing golden portal at its centre. I was so ignorant then. I couldn’t understand – couldn’t even truly begin to fathom what I was looking at. Now that I can, I touch a finger to a distant nebula, grinning when it whirls back into the cosmos. I wish so desperately I could share this with Britta and the others, that I could open them to the worlds just beyond their gaze, but that is not possible. All the other alaki have some amount of mortal blood in them. Even White Hands, eldest of all alaki, had a mortal father. All she and the others see when they enter this chamber is the same sight I glimpsed in Melanis’s memories: a blindingly white room with four golden thrones and a ceiling that mimics the sky. No stars, no universes.
Every day, the distance between my friends and me grows.
Worst of all, they can’t grasp the true forms of the Gilded Ones. To everyone else, the goddesses are shimmering golden shadows, sunlight and stardust all mixed up in one. I, however, see the truth: the Gilded Ones are vast ethereal bodies made up of energy and starlight, each one so large, they could contain an entire universe, and yet so small, they fit on their golden thrones. They are limitless, contradictory. And they are my mothers.
The thought calms me a little as I walk to the foot of the thrones where Anok, as always, is the first of the goddesses to wake. Even before I reach her, the goddess’s fathomless black eyes are blinking open, tendrils of darkness shifting and wafting around her starlit form. Most people see Anok as an overwhelming shadow, a total absence of light, but to me, she is both darkness and light, a thousand suns spinning under that obsidian facade. Storm clouds gather around her brow – an expression of fury, deep and pure. Melanis must have informed her of what we saw at the Oyomosin.
I kneel respectfully in front of her. “Divine Mother Anok, Melanis informed you of what we witnessed?”
The goddess nods, a crown of stars shimmering in the coils of her inky-black hair – acknowledgement of her position as the oldest and wisest of the Gilded Ones. The mothers may have all been born together in the burst of cosmic energy that began the universes, but it was Anok who first put her thoughts to words and became an individual consciousness.
“Yes,” she says in a voice layered with the roar of a thousand distant planets. “She told us of the jatu who ignored your commands and resurrected.”
As she speaks, a subtle tremor ripples through the star river: the other mothers awakening from their divine sleep. Their movements waft a subtle, flowery scent into the air – the same one I always smell when they wake, though I can never quite pin it down. As always, it disappears just before the goddesses begin speaking. “It is as we feared,” they say together as one – a peculiar habit of theirs. Sometimes, they’re individuals, and other times, it feels like they’re four facets of the same being. One body divided into four aspects. “The angoro has been awakened.”
“The angoro?” I frown.
“The golden throne, the most powerful of our artefacts – arcane objects, we believe you have named them.” Vines writhe over Etzli’s fertile golden-brown body as she speaks, an expression of agitation, which, combined with the ever-fiercer storms flashing across Anok’s brow, worries me.
Gods don’t show emotions as mortals do. While they appear vaguely human, their cold faces and the crystalline perfection of their gazes mark them for what they are: divine beings. The few emotions they do display appear as unfathomable things: waves of colour, flashes of natural phenomena.
“It siphons our power and uses it to perform what humans consider miracles,” Etzli continues, distress wreathing a crown of storm clouds similar to Anok’s around her head.
“I don’t understand.”
Hui Li leans forward impatiently, light shimmering over the faint red scales that cover her body. Of all the mothers, she is the most humanlike – prone to impatience, irritability and other such mortal emotions. “Three thousand years ago, when we were at the height of our power” – she explains – “we created two objects to protect Otera and keep it from ever again devolving into the wars we had delivered it from: the n’goma, which would ensure that Hemaira’s walls never fell, and the angoro, the golden throne, which would guarantee that the Hemairan bloodline always ruled Otera.”
I frown. “But why would you want the Hemairans to always rule?” After everything the Hemairan emperors orchestrated – the jatu rebellion, among other betrayals – I assumed they were the Gilded Ones’ mortal enemies. “And why the emphasis on Hemaira itself, for that matter?”
“Sentiment and practicality,” Anok explains, her black gaze unblinking. “Hemaira is the seat of our power, the place where we cultivated our first and most devoted worshippers. And the Hemairan emperors were our first priests, birthed from the very first of our Firstborn, our most loyal child.”
White Hands, I fill in silently.
“We assumed they would remain loyal as well,” Etzli explains.
“Wrongly, as it turns out,” Hui Li grumbles.
I nod. “I understand.”
The Gilded Ones favoured their first children and put them in positions of power, only to have them rebel in grand fashion. It’s a story as old as time, and gods, sadly, aren’t exempt from such tragedies.
“So what about the angoro? What exactly is it?”
“The most fearsome of all our arcane objects,” Anok explains. “It has not only vast reserves of our power but also the ability to draw directly from us – to use our power to enable feats that seem like miracles.”
“The jatu’s resurrection,” I gasp, immediately comprehending.