Goddess by Liv Savell (autobiographies to read txt) 📕

His fingers wrapped around something slippery but real within the depths, and the God grunted as he hauled back, trying to force Va'al into the daylight realm of destruction and pain. No matter how many times he thought he had a grip on the form, it shifted and changed.

With a scream of rage, Mascen watched as the shadows disappeared, Va’al with them. He needed to make the trickster God hurt, needed to tear his new form apart. Va’al deserved it, deserved to spend the next three hundred years in pain as Mascen had done, alone and chained to some solitary rock.Five on one, Mascen couldn’t defeat them. That was why he wasn’t even bothering to try. But one on one or two on one? In their newly minted forms, not fully set nor powered? He should be able to harm them.

With the Gods in retreat, Mascen would then have time to make a proper plan. Amass followers and gather more strength and power. He had once been nearly as popular as his dear mother. He could do it again. And with armies of men and halfbreeds, he could face down Enyo and Va'al and all their little companions and finally rule supreme over Rhosan. Unabated, ultimate, and final.

But first, he’d have to catch one of the snakes —

Mascen looked down.  There was something glassy in the curve of his shoulder, somehow moving and still at once. A shadow, small and unassuming, smeared like dirt or blood across his body. Something easily ignored.

Only, he had seen the mark before. Borne it once.

Hissing, he laid his burning hand upon it, but even as his skin bubbled and oozed, magma sealing it up and drying…

“Cursed Realms!” Mascen bellowed. The smudge had not faded. His father, the sly creature, had left his mark. And that meant the others would try to do so as well. They would all ward him, send him back to his island with five magical anchors so that he would not be able to tear himself free for another three hundred years.

Of course, he didn’t know then what he knew now.

The crunch of gravel under heel made Mascen look up. There was Enyo, eyes like fire and face wild. He knew his mother well enough to know she would be proud of Va'al’s pathetic little trick. She was always amused by his father’s meddling.

“Stop fleeing like a coward,” her voice was the thundering of waterfalls. She was trying to bait him into a confrontation, into chasing her.

Mascen smirked. So predictable. With the wink of an eye, he was bounding through the streets again, away from his honored mother.

Faster.

There was the beast at his left, growling and lunging closer. Mascen whipped Maoz back with a lance of wind and bounded onward.

Faster.

Esha careened around a corner, and Mascen laughed. How ridiculous that she should think she could stand a chance against him?! He bowled over her, and the Goddess’s body crashing into the earth could be heard echoing through the alleys for miles.

If he could get to the back of the city, then he would lose them in the sewers and pick them off one by one.

A flap of wings overhead had Mascen ducking between two buildings, too close together for Aryus, the idiot Death God, to fit between. Not with those wings. Instead, Aryus landed in the open street beyond, chortling. Mascen was trapped, cut off by his own maze, and without the time to rearrange the streets again. Enyo would be here in a moment, or Va’al—stepping out of some pocket of shadows like a back-alley whore. Then, he saw the door. Mascen tore through the home of a merchant, ignoring their sniveling cries as they cowered away from his break-neck charge. He was through the next entrance and into the courtyard beyond before the Gods could make use of his blunder. Idiots. They were nowhere to be seen, left in his wake as he finally made it to Caerthleon’s main square. The stalls were empty of vendors, more barren than he had ever seen it, even on the day when he had taken this place for his own. The fountain gurgled away, devoid of wives and their brats. No animals stank or shat next to merchant carts.

Good. The populace showed some common sense.

He was in the city’s center now, nearing the sewer entrance where he might disappear, cloak himself so that he would be better positioned to destroy them.

Aryus landed ahead in a spray of pink petals and street dust, their ungainly, albatross wings spread out to block his path. Mascen changed course and scrambled to a stop once more. Maoz and Esha did not provide so impressive a display as the Death God, but together they presented a blockade. He could not sweep past them. These numbers weren’t terrible. Aryus didn’t fight; why bother? Death always won in theend. Esha certainly didn’t know how to defeat him, and while Maoz was a hunter, he was not a warrior.

Still, the spear the hunter clutched in his grip gave Mascen some pause. Maoz’s weapon could actually hurt Mascen, as could any Companion Weapon. 

Like a boar finally in sight of his enemy, Maoz lowered his head and charged, spear clutched loosely in his right hand. He was a bear of a man, tallest of the Gods and broad-shouldered, every ounce of that physical power put into his lunge.

But Mascen was too wily to face it.

At the last possible second, he stepped clear, kicking at Maoz’s legs to send him sprawling. The Beast God was up in a moment, the square lines of his face tight with anger. “Face me, child,” he said, and Mascen rankled. He would show this brute that he was no child to be dismissed to some island prison.

Not anymore. Not a second time.

Esha, dirty and scraped from the blow he had dealt earlier, threw herself into the fray. Her pale eyes were determined, a sharp contrast from the warm browns of her skin and hair, and