The mightiest river, from which all rivers flowed, was the source of River’s power. Ant sent one ant with one stone into the stillest, deepest part. Then he sent another. And another. At first, the stones just added a nice pebbled finish to the bed of the river. But over a thousand years, the stones began to amass.
River’s new twins distracted her or she would have noticed the change in current sooner. But for now, they were delightful girls whose eyes followed her and her alone. So rare was the birth of god-twins that they drew a steady stream of visitors bearing tribute and admiration. Two firstborn, how marvelous. They would become the most powerful river goddesses the world had ever seen. When the flow of guests finally abated, River noticed the waning of her power, too much to be the result of the birth, from which she had long since recovered. Leaving her daughters in the care of her sister, she walked the bank. When she got to the site of Ant’s not-quite-finished dam, she pushed a wave at it, not knowing its cause or the resentment that cemented it. The stone wall repelled the wave, so powerfully that it knocked her over. Ant, who had been in the process of adding more stones, laughed and laughed, but silently, so he did not give away his hiding place. See River, knocked to the ground by the forces she controlled!
The problem with those who don’t know real power is that they do not know real power. River pushed again with all her rage, and this time the wall gave, the force of the water so great that it burst over the dam and flooded half the world. And in this half of the world was the largest ant colony you can imagine, a maze created over generations, a honeycomb of earth piled into a mountain so high that even the god of mountains was forced to respect it. But River’s fury washed it away.
Seeing this, Ant lost all reason. He ran to River’s house and, while her sister slept, slipped through an open window and snatched the children. He hid one girl in a colony of army ants, ordering them to guard the child from anyone who would take her, and the other he hid in a location where River would never think to look.
Unaware that her daughters had been taken, River dealt instead with the other gods and goddesses whose dwelling places were flooded. The god of birds had lost a quarter of his flock when they tired with no place to land. She begged forgiveness and they gave it easily, because was this not our River, so known to us, and had she not just birthed the next generation of gods?
The wail alerted her. So much anguish in that wail. River rushed back to her house, hoping the familiar voice or its anguish was simply a trick in her ear. But there was her sister, ripping her hair out by the roots, and there was the empty crib, barely cooled of the warmth of her girls. River released a tsunami of sound, and every god that could walk or fly, every spirit that haunted every place, came to her. Who, she wanted to know, and where? No one could think of anyone who would wish River such harm. Even Death shrugged his innocence, he who had taken something from everyone present. River’s sister hadn’t seen or heard anything, lost as she had been in the sweetest of sleeps. No one said it, but they all thought, This is what you get for asking a godling to do the work of a god. None of them, not even Love, kept in contact with their half-divine siblings, lest they discover that by putting the most powerful of their bloodline to rest, they might graduate to godhood themselves. Poor River, so indulgent, so generous, and look how she had been repaid.
The other gods prepared to smite her sister, and River was scared by the emptiness inside her where loyalty should lie. Then a field spirit stepped forward, terrified but determined, and held up a fragment of the dam for everyone to see. Ants. It was ants that held the wall together, and resentment that gave them the power.
River didn’t want to believe it. Ant was responsible? The little god with whom she’d traded pranks for millennia? Rage replaced disbelief, and River went hunting.
If Ant had stuck around when he’d dropped the first girl with the army ants, he could have prevented the scene to which he returned. If he’d stuck around, he would have noticed that the loss of the ancestral ant colony lessened his ant-controlling powers. He would have seen the ants swarm the child the moment he turned away, so eager for the taste of god-flesh. What many don’t know, a secret god-mothers have kept for eternity, is that god-children are just that, children. And just as a human child must learn to talk and to walk and to join the world of their parents, so must a god-child learn to become a deity. But unlike human children, god-children must even learn to grow, guided by their mothers from one stage to the next until they attain godhood. River’s child was too young to know she was divine and could not be eaten, and so she was. Ant returned to shards of bone, picked clean of marrow. He heard his name being screamed across the world and he knew River could never, ever know. She would drown the universe.
Ant ground the girl’s bones to dust and compacted it with panic and regret into a small blue stone. Into the stone he whispered the location of the dead girl’s sister, then deleted it from his memory. Such knowledge was too dangerous to have in these times. Then he went into hiding among the humans, trying to live as one of them. He married human women who bore children he suffocated as they slept, lest they leave a divine trail that led to his end. When the women grew suspicious, he abandoned them, and they would go mad or move on with their lives, slowly forgetting him as one does a god who answers no prayers.
River searched the world for her girls. She dug up every anthill she could find. The army ants were too frightened to tell her what they’d done, but they did tell her that the ant god had gone to live among the humans. River searched for Ant. She dug through entire lineages trying to find him. When, after three hundred years, the sky god dared to mention the neglected waters of the world, she dried up entire countries out of spite. This is our River, one god reminded the other, our sweet River. Let us help, not hinder. And so they sent emissaries from every spirit realm, second daughters and minor spirits of similar powers, godlings all, promising their aid for a hundred years. But River’s grief was so deep it consumed them, and her grief became their own. They forgot their mothers and their brothers and the lovers they’d promised to return to; they forgot that they’d had a past before this grief removed everything from inside of them. How, they wondered, can a body feel full to bursting with grief but also hollow? These godlings of land and air and memory resisted this loss of themselves, but River’s sorrow drowned them. Their husbands, their children, their homes became like reflections in a rough stream, fractured beyond recognition.
They tore the world apart. Unprecedented rains. Earthquakes that ravaged every region. One godling who had come from the house of flames set an entire city on fire trying to find River’s girls. It was a dark century for humankind and godkind alike. Then the female godlings got craftier in their search. They made themselves visible to human eyes, tempting men and women, threatening men and women, building a network of spies across the globe who lit candles and prayed to them and passed this new religion on to their children. Every new convert was a new set of eyes in the world, a new set of ears to catch whispers of men who didn’t seem to fit in, or men who rose to ungodly success but never seemed to pray. Many a good man was lost to angry godlings who peeled his skin away, searching for the god that might be hidden inside.