Goddess by Liv Savell (autobiographies to read txt) 📕

no great stone sculpture like the fountains in Dailion, but a simple pool with four spouts in the center, facing each of the cardinal directions. Someone had left a pitcher on the edge, where they had been collecting water before the Gods began their attack.

It was no great fountain, but it would do. They had only to find Mascen first.

Va’al reached for the shadows, then used them to feel out into the liminal space around him. Maoz was there, fainter than he once would have been, in the height of his power, but still, his magic pulsed through the Shadow Realm, a beacon for Va’al to follow. The Trickster God stepped back into Thloegr on a narrow side street, just to the left of Maoz.

“Maoz, Va’al,” Etienne’s voice erupted suddenly from the sigil beneath their ears, “The path ahead leads to Mascen if Enyo’s last sighting was accurate.”

The Beast God grinned. “It has been too long since we have hunted together. Let us stalk this wayward pup.”

Memories of other hunts sparked a thrill in Va’al’s chest. This was his son, yes, but it still had the taste of battles past, of using his power, of fighting alongside the other Gods.

Then, the walls around them shifted.

A beautifully colorful storefront slid into the street ahead of them with the world-shattering sound of tons of stone scraping stone, and cobblestone rippled out over the space in its wake. The street, once straight, now elbowed sharply to the left.

Va’al looked at Maoz. “Does it ever bother you that you give your children wings but have none of your own?”

The Beast God just grunted and turned down the new street in search of some other path.

༄

“What was that?” Delyth skidded to a stop, one hand on the blood rune Etienne had drawn on her skin, and waited for the mage to answer. Just seconds before, the city had trembled with the force of some collision, the sound of grating rock clearly audible in the quiet of this frightened warren.

“Mascen’s moving things around,” came the answer, hollow as though from a great distance. Of course. The God of Disaster was of Va’al’s ilk. He would find ways to trick and deceive them.

“Am I still on the right path?”

“Yes.”

Delyth flared her wings but refrained from jumping aloft. The buildings were too close for flying among them to be safe, and she remembered all too well how easily Mascen had yanked her from the sky before. Still, she was so blind on the ground.

She took up her easy run once more, her feet slapping against the even cobblestones that blanketed all of Caerthleon’s streets. The Marble City, travelers had called it when they stopped at Glynfford in her youth, and now she understood why. Though the buildings and streets were made of pale limestone rather than marble, all of the city was paved, the buildings stone rather than flammable wood. It must have taken centuries to construct, and it would all fall today if they failed.

Delyth turned around a corner and crashed into a wooden cart. A child screamed. Boxes went tumbling to the street and smashed open with sounds of shattering terracotta. Delyth stumbled back, only just keeping herself from falling atop the sword strapped between her wings.

Two men stood before her, one of them sheltering a young girl behind his body. They looked to have been unloading the cart in some desperate hurry. There were more boxes stacked just inside the open door of a home to Delyth’s left. Her temper was a riptide.

The taller of the two men had several inches on the warrior, but her wings gave her a sense of height and size that intimidated most. He was warm-skinned but had paled considerably at her appearance. “Take what you want,” he told her, his voice shaking only slightly. “But leave my husband and child.”

Delyth rubbed her hand over her eyes. “Your city is under attack by five Gods, and you decide that your goods are more important than protecting your lives? Than protecting your daughter’s life?”

Somewhere deeper within the city, the scream of a building being torn from its foundation filled the air, but the man, red-faced now, tried to argue. “Our lives won’t be worth much if we die of starvation a moon from now! We need these wares.”

“It’s die today or have a moon to figure it out. Get inside. In a basement or cellar if you have one, and shelter any who ask.”

The second man reached out to touch the first, his other hand still holding their daughter behind him, and the tall man deflated at last. “Get Baru,” he told his husband, and together they fled the streets with only what they could carry.

Delyth cursed them for idiots and distractions and continued on.

Chapter XXV

Eleventh Moon, First Quarter, Caerthleon

Blood dribbled down the skin of Enyo’s jaw and throat. It wasn’t from ripping someone else's flesh with her teeth. It was her own. She had managed to grab onto Mascen, who had been evading them all for an hour, but he had swung and punched her in the mouth before she could drag him away. No stranger to combat, Enyo returned the blow, but as Mascen reached for her with his burning touch, fear sprung up in her heart. Her body was no longer mortal, but it remembered the agony of his curse.

Her grip faltered a moment, a breath, and he yanked free, spiriting away while she fumbled to recover. Mascen was swift at manipulating the cobblestone streets, at convincing the very buildings to change their places. He was concocting a maze that stumped the Gods and mage alike.

From a rumble to her left, Enyo deducted that he was too far now to recapture and paused long enough to spit out her own viscera. They were Gods, but so was he. And he had been accruing power for hundreds of years. She hadn’t been adequately worshiped in a lifetime. Three lifetimes, actually. Her new body