Flash Fiction: Goddess Not

Staying out of the way of a god is not always possible

If she hadn’t had one of her eyes looking right at it, Ayia would never have noticed the indicator crystal worked into the wall mural, change from blue to red. Not even three thousand years of controlling her expression kept the fear off her serpentine face. A Kell was coming for her, again.

“Something troubles you, Goddess?” said the elderly human high priest at her side.

The absurdity of everything she’d done here hit her, and a hiss escaped her scaled lips. Every priest in the great hall turned their shocked attention to her. She looked them over, took a deep breath, and stood. Their Goddess standing up, froze all in terror.

Booming her voice through the temple and out into the plaza beyond she commanded “I want every man, woman, child, or beast of burden, driven out from between the two rivers and a full day into the desert before the next new moon. Any person found closer than that after the new moon rises will die.”

“As you command, Most Wise,” said her eldest and most favored priest, as if her ordering the destruction of all her kingdom was an everyday order. But then he went on, “May your priest know what your people have done they you wish us to punish them for?”

With as much pity as she could have for a short-lived mortal she told him, “You may stay and find out. But no other.” She looked at the other terrified priest. “All of you get out, spread the word to flee, now. I am giving you a very short head start before I start killing.” To make that point, she picked the most useless member of her priesthood present and burned them to ash with just a look, sending terror-filled priest fleeing out the temple doors, panic spreading in their wake.

She sat down and looked at the old priest, and had to admit she had become fond of him. “You have a mouse living in your quarter that you feed and care for each day.”

“I am sorry, Goddess, I did not mean to offend. I will remove it at once.”

“I bring it up, not because it offends me, but to make a point. If that mouse thinks of you as a god, does that make you a god?”

He was thoughtful a moment before answering, a trait she took pains to train into her priest. “No, Goddess.”

She let an approving smile cross her face. “Though I am as far beyond you as you are that mouse, I am no goddess. I just allow you to think of me as such because it is easer for you. But one is coming that is as far beyond me as I am beyond you. He may scratch my ear and give me a treat, just as you do your mouse, or he may skin me alive for some benefit only he can see. Or he may pick me up and put me down on some other world, as he did before. But this town means less to him than an anthill means to you, and he will step on it when he gets here, giving no thought at all to those living here. The people have not displeased me. I am driving them out to save them. When he sets foot here, nothing will live for many days walk. But they will take too much time if they are not running in fear of me.”

In the solemn voice that was his habit, he said, “Fear does move people faster, and your people do fear you.” Then his eyes shifted out the door and his voice deepened. “Is this a greater god, or a demon?”

“Neither. If I am a mouse to him, he is a flea in the fur of a true god, trying not to be swatted. The Gods and Demons are much further beyond him than he is beyond me. But he, at lease, can perceive a god to the level that a flea can perceive a mouse. That is well beyond the likes of I.”

“Then we would be little more than the dust in the wind to a true god.”

She could not help but have pride in her pet at making that leap. All of her priest reasoned better than any of their kind. But all her people had gotten soft, and her priests more than the rest. How many would survive in the desert? Would they remember how to build homes of stone or go back to nests of mud and plants as the rest of their kind did? Would they forget how to store food for the bad times?

Her gaze lifted to the stone column holding up the temple roof. In the three thousand years since she began domesticating them to serve her after a Kell left her here, these had gone from chasing animals to be able to eat, to building stone cities and storing food. Would they keep doing it or go back to chasing the herds from place to place? She had done what she could for her pets, but now it was time to see to herself. Few of her kind survived being toys of the Kell once, much less twice, but there were things she could do that would raise her chances.