Might.
Sefi fires her pulseFist past my head at the doors leading to her mother’s sanctuary. The ancient iron buckles. Bent and twisted hinges screaming. We flow past an army of prostrate giants who clutter the cavernous halls to either side. So much strength made frail by superstition. Once, when they were stronger, they tried to cross the seas. Built mighty knarrs to carry explorers across the oceans to seek out new lands. The Carved monsters the Golds sowed in the oceans destroyed each boat, or the Golds themselves melted them from the sea. The last boat sailed more than two hundred years ago.
We come upon Alia as she sits in council with her famed seven and seventy warchiefs. They turn to us now amidst large, smoking braziers. Huge warriors, with white hair to the waists, arms bare, iron buckles on waists, huge axes on backs. Black eyes and rings studded with precious metals glitter in the low light. But they’re too stunned by the sight of the three-hundred-year-old iron doors suddenly glowing orange and melting away to speak or kneel. I draw up before them, still dragging the corpses of the Golds behind me. Mustang and Sefi hurl their captured Golds forward, kicking out their legs. They sprawl on the ground and stumble to their feet, attempting beyond all reason to maintain some dignity here surrounded by giant savages in the smoky room.
“Are these gods?” I roar through my helmet.
No one answers. Alia moves slowly through the parting warlords.
“Am I a god?” I snarl, this time removing my helmet. Mustang and Sefi remove theirs. Alia sees her daughter in the armor of her gods and she flinches back. Fear whispers over her lips. She stops near the five bound and gagged Golds as they finally find their feet. They stand over two meters tall. But, even bent and old as Alia is, she’s a head taller than I. She stares down at the men and women who were once her gods before looking up at her last daughter. “Child, what have you done?”
Sefi says nothing. But the razor on her arm slithers, drawing the eyes of every Obsidian. One of their greatest daughters carries the weapon of the gods.
“Queen of the Valkyrie,” I say as if we had never met. “My name is Darrow of Lykos. Blood brother of Ragnar Volarus. I am the warlord of the Rising, which rages against the false Golden gods. You have all seen the fires that rage around the moon. Those are caused by my army. Beyond this land in the abyss, a war rages between slaves and masters. I came here with the greatest son of the Spires to bring the truth to your people.” I wave to the Golds, who stare at me with the hatred of an entire race. “They struck him down before he could tell you that you are slaves. The prophets he sent told it true. Your gods are false.”
“Liar!” someone screams. A shaman with crooked knees and a bent spine. He babbles something else but Sefi cuts him off.
“Liar?” Mustang hisses. “I have stood upon Asgard. I have seen where your immortals sleep. Where your immortals rut and eat and shit.” She twists the pulseFist in her hand. “This is not magic.” She activates her gravBoots, floating in the air. The Obsidians stare at her in wonder. “This is not magic. This is a tool.”
Alia sees what I have done. What I have shown her daughter and what I have now brought her people whether she wants it or not. We’re the same cruel kind. I told myself I would be better than this. I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility. I think that is what Mustang was looking for here with Obsidians. She was more afraid that I would allow my own idealism to let something loose that I could not control. But now she sees the compromise I’m willing to make. The strength I’m willing to exert. That’s what she wants in an ally as much as she wants a builder. Someone wise enough to adapt.
And Alia? She sees how her people look at me. How they look at my blade, still stained with the blood of the gods, as though it were some holy relic. And she also knows I could have made her complicit in the Golds’ crime. Could have accused her before her people. But instead I offer her a chance to pretend she is just learning this for the first time.
Lamentably, my friend’s mother does not take the offer. She steps toward Sefi. “I carried you, birthed you, nursed you, and this is my reward? Treason? Blasphemy? You are no Valkyrie.” She looks at her people. “These are lies. Free our gods from the usurpers. Kill blasphemers. Kill them all!”
But before the first warchief can even draw their blade, Sefi steps forward, lifts the razor I gave her, and decapitates her mother. Alia’s head falls to the floor, eyes still open. The woman’s huge body remains standing. Slowly it tips backward and thuds to the ground. Sefi stands over the fallen queen and spits on the corpse. Turning back to her people, she speaks for the first time in twenty-five years.
“She knew.”
Her voice is deep and dangerous. Hardly rising above the level of a whisper. Yet it owns the room as surely as if she roared. Then tall Sefi turns away from the Golds, walks back through the gaggle of warchiefs to the griffin throne where her mother’s fabled warchest has sat unopened for ten years. There, she bends and takes the lock in her hands and roars gutturally, like a beast, as she pulls at the rusted iron till her fingers bleed and the iron crumbles apart. She throws the old lock to the ground and rips open the chest, pulling free the old black scarabSkin her mother used to conquer the White Coast. Pulling free the red scale cloak of the dragon her mother slew in her youth. And hoisting high her great, black, double-headed axe of war called Throgmir. The rippling gleam of duroSteel catches in the light. She stalks back to the Golds, dragging the axe on the ground behind her.
She motions to Holiday, who removes the gags from the mouths of the Golds.
“Are you a god?” Sefi asks, her tone so different from her brother’s. Direct and cold as a winter storm.
“You will burn, mortal,” the man says. “If you do not release us, Aesir will come from the sky and rain fire upon your land. This you know. We will wipe your seed from the worlds. We will melt the ice. We are the mighty. We are the Peerless Scarred. And this millennium belongs to…”
Sefi slays him there with one giant swing, cleaving him nearly in twain. Blood sprays my face. I do not flinch. I knew what would happen if I brought them here. I also know there’s no way I could keep them as prisoners. The Golds built this myth, but now it must die. Mustang moves closer to me, her sign that she accepts this. But her eyes are fixed on the Golds. She will remember this slaughter for the rest of her life. It is her duty and mine to make it mean something.
Part of me mourns the death of these Golds. Even as they die, they make these other taller mortals still seem so much lesser. They stand straight, proud. They do not quake in their last moment in this smoky room so far from their estates where they rode horses as children and learned the poetry of Keats and the wonder of Beethoven and Volmer. A middle-aged Gold woman looks back at Mustang. “You let them do this to us? I fought for your father. I met you when you were a girl. And I fell in his Rain,” she glares at me and begins to recite with a loud clear voice the Aeschylus poem the Peerless Scarred use at times as a battle cry:
Up and lead the dance of Fate!
Lift the song that mortals hate…
Tell what rights are ours on earth,
Over all of human birth
Swift of foot to avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pure.