Page 87 of The Endless One

“I am telling you that I can help you. I will save your sister. All you have to do is trust me.” Jessamine didn’t know how people worshipped the gods. She never had.

Her mother had never been devout for any god, nor would she likely have been if the gods were still alive. But these people believed. She wondered if it was that belief, that fervor, that gave the gods their strength. She just needed them to look at her like that and she could actually help them.

A snort interrupted her thoughts. Jessamine flinched, and the woman groaned with the pain before slithering toward the pantheon once again. She looked up, and another woman stood there. She had her arms crossed over her chest, wild red hair billowing in the breeze, and her clothes were… odd. Stitched together from several outfits, it seemed, giving her the impression of a patchwork woman. Both new and old.

“You really think they’ll believe you over him?” this newcomer asked, obviously not believing that anyone would.

“They should. I am a goddess.”

“A new goddess. It takes time to gather a following. Time for people to trust you. After all, what goddess would try to stop the person helping them?” The woman lifted her foot and placed it down on the hand of a young man crawling beside her. When he cried out in pain, she merely grinned. “In this case, the old ways are always best.”

“Who are you?” she asked, nerves gathering in her belly.

The woman grinned. “Maiden, Mother, Crone, I have many names and many faces.”

Oh.

Fuck.

It wasn’t possible. But now that she was really looking at the woman, Jessamine could feel it. This was a goddess standing in front of her. A real-life goddess, one who had been around for centuries and who was still gathering her power, but had plenty of it.

“So he raised at least one of you,” Jessamine replied matter-of-factly. “Good for him. At least he’ll die knowing he accomplished something.”

“He’s got me now, dear. He won’t be dying anytime soon.”

The Many-Faced Mother was the stuff of legends. Jessamine remembered that she had control over the earth just in time to leap over the giant chasm in the ground that suddenly formed where she had been standing. A group of peasants tumbled into the darkness, their screams echoing in her mind until something in her just… snapped.

She was tired of this. Over it. So tired of gods taking advantage of people who loved them.

Her magic coiled tightly in her chest until it exploded.

Gold strands burst out of her. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each of them an impossibly straight wire that stretched out twenty feet and just… hovered there.

She could feel it. The anger and rage that strengthened them, but also the certainty that she was right. Words tumbled from her lips, damning in their shapes and forms. “You never cared for anyone who worshipped you. These people laid down their lives, begging you to help them, and all you saw was someone who sacrificed for you. They were begging for your help, and you took from people who had nothing left to give. You are not a goddess. You are a leech, and I will burn you from this realm.”

The Many-Faced Mother started to laugh, but then froze as those golden tendrils that had burst from Jessamine’s chest started to cut her. They suddenly became sharp as wire, slicing through flesh and physical form. Spearing through magic, flaying it until it peeled away from her body strip by strip.

There were no screams from her. No terror. Just the sight of a goddess meeting justice for the very first time and falling to pieces at her feet because of it.

She watched as she killed a goddess without the help of anyone else. Just her. Just the realm they walked on, tasting its vengeance for the first time, and she could feel how hungry the land was. Drops of the goddess’s blood hit the ground, and flowers bloomed where it landed. Then it was a gush of blood and gore and the earth soaked it up, spreading greenery and lushness and life from the sacrifice Jessamine made to it.

When it was done, the golden wires faded as if they had never been there at all.

The sound of footsteps startled her, tore her eyes away from the smudge of a goddess leaking out onto the ground. Elric was suddenly there with her. She thought, for a moment, to worry he would judge her for the death of his sister.

But of course he didn’t. Her god merely wrapped her up in his arms and pressed his lips to her hair. “One death,” he murmured. “And now, many more.”

She had never wanted to be a goddess of justice, but… maybe that was part of life. Part of living. Not just taking what was thrown at her and enduring. Not just assuming that everything that happened did so for a reason. Instead, maybe life was about grabbing at the visceral, raw meat of time and squeezing it for every drop of blood she could wring out.

Nodding against Elric’s chest, she turned toward the pantheon and took a deep breath. “We do this my way, right?”

“And how would you like to do it?”

“Bloody and horrible,” she replied as she stalked toward the pantheon. “I want to hear him scream.”

He had never seen such a glorious goddess as his love. Jessamine walked through the crowds of people, and he could feel her magic burning in the air. The heat of it—the golden energy that surrounded her—had truly been something to witness, no matter how much it also made him wince.

Because he had watched what she had done to the Many-Faced Goddess. It had taken so little of her magic to slice right through his sister, to shred her mortal body and release the goddess within her. That goddess was now banished. He wasn’t sure where god energy went when they died, but he had also not seen anyone kill a god other than the coven who had sacrificed itself to do so.