Golden light flowed as Calliope slowly slid her sword back into its sheath.
Though the blade was sheathed, the epic, sweeping intent did not fade; wind pressure, wrapped in noble, orderly divinity, swept in all directions.
"Nonsense, wild accusations, and baseless entanglements."
"There is no need to say more. Let my great Father and the gods bear witness, then."
A clear hint of mockery flashed through her golden eyes.
"Your crimes do indeed need to be properly accounted for."
"I will wait for you on Olympus."
"If this truly reaches Father's hall, with Mother's excuse already prepared, even if it is put before the gods, there will be no lack of gods to speak for Mother."
"Father will not even need to show His partiality; Mother's face alone is more than enough to handle this little inner-sea upstart."
No longer willing to waste another word on this battered cur, she turned, becoming a streak of golden holy light, ready to depart.
Before leaving, a corner of her gaze fell upon the mortals kneeling in the mud, weeping in bitter relief.
For a heartbeat, her expression softened, a trace of unspeakable pity touching her eyes—only to vanish in a quiet sigh she kept locked in her heart.
"What I've done today must have nothing to do with humankind."
"Otherwise Father's face will not be easy to preserve."
"Today, Absu Naya will not dare make another move."
"However vicious her shouting seems now, in truth, she can do nothing more than shout."
"As for going to Olympus to accuse me?"
Calliope allowed herself a truly noble and confident smile.
"A joke."
"Do you even know my full name?"
"My name—Calliope Zeus."
(Author's note: The basic form of Greek names is given name first, family name second, i.e. given name + surname. A more formal style is given name + patronymic + surname. There are some suffix differences between male and female forms, but that's beyond our scope here.)
Absu Naya watched the Muse Princess's golden silhouette recede into the distance; her flat chest felt as if it had been flayed, and she bit her lip hard.
In her eyes, pain and hatred, humiliation and shame all flickered at once; tears even shone there.
She had finally managed to leave home once—
only to be bullied and humiliated like this.
Inwardly she shouted over and over: "Clearly…"
"Clearly I have already humbled myself so much!"
"Could you really not speak properly?!"
"This is going too far—far too far!"
She glared fiercely toward the still-kneeling humans, fists clenched.
In the end, though, she let go any thought of venting her anger on them.
Who knew whether Calliope had truly left?
If she laid a hand on them and Calliope came back to strike her again, it would be even more unjust.
Moreover, as the God-King's beloved daughter, Calliope surely knew His likes and dislikes best.
If today Calliope was willing to bend the law to shield humankind,
what did that say?
It said that her own "votive offering"…
was aimed at the wrong target.
In truth, perhaps she had misjudged the whole thing.
His Majesty had never truly, utterly abandoned humankind.
Ripples of light played around her; it was as though undercurrents heaved all along her body.
Turning over all the pros and cons, Absu Naya's face twisted through shifting expressions.
She swallowed her rage.
For now, at least, she had to.
Humankind was no longer something they could touch lightly.
At least not until the situation was clearer.
If His Majesty had not truly given them up, humankind could not be used as a pretext.
The water was still too muddy to stir.
She even felt a stab of regret; she had been careless, failing to investigate thoroughly.
Humankind as a race was too complex; their case was politically too sensitive to meddle in.
She steeled herself. On humankind, she would endure—for now.
"Do not bully a 'small god' just because she is weak."
Thirty thousand—no, three hundred thousand—forget it, three million years east of the river, three million west!
When humankind truly had no great gods watching over them, then she would settle today's score.
She was immortal; she could afford to wait.
But this matter could not simply be dropped.
She had to take it to Olympus.
She could not use humankind as leverage; Calliope dared not use them either.
That made it easy.
From now on, she would speak only of Calliope's wanton slaughter—nothing else.
On that point, she had the law firmly on her side.
This indignity, Absu Naya truly could not swallow.
The raw brutality of the deep and the unendurable humiliation churned wildly through her divinity.
This was going too far.
Absu Naya, daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, direct scion of the inner-sea pantheon—when had she ever suffered such a disgrace?
The beastly half of her face twisted with fury;
the beautiful half went cold with ruthless reason.
She forced herself back to calm.
Yes, the other was a top-tier divine second generation.
But she had the law. She knew the code.
His Majesty was just and reasonable—that was a belief shared by all divine beings.
She did not dare hope for any real punishment of Calliope—that was not realistic.
But even if she could only take some of the shine from Calliope's face—
even if she could merely let all Olympus see how Calliope had defied her Father's Order and slaughtered innocents—
that would be worth it.
For true, immortal gods of law, there are few things more important than face.
Today, before the eyes of those low mortals, Calliope had ground her dignity into the dirt.
However noble the other's station, she could no longer endure.
If they had clashed from the start and she had been beaten, she might have stomached it.
But she had already bowed so low, already humbled herself so far—
and still been trampled, her entire brood wiped out.
There was a point beyond which patience is no virtue.
Absu Naya set her jaw. "Fine. I'll fight you to the end."
There was still law in this cosmos.
The more she thought, the angrier she became; the more she thought, the more her argument seemed right.
Her faith in the God-King's code became her final pillar.
Her fence-sitter instincts, under this legal confidence, were crushed by rage.
She turned into a black backflow current and sped toward the center of the cosmos—Mount Olympus.
She did consider, for a moment, consulting her family.
But she dropped the idea at once.
She knew that if she told her clan elders the whole story,
those masters of risk and benefit, whose fence-sitter instincts were carved into their divinity, would certainly urge her to bear it and let it go.
But she had borne enough.
She had practically crawled to lick Calliope's feet—and still been humiliated.
"With the law on my side, I fear nothing in all the cosmos."
"Absu Naya, charge!"
"To hell with it—fight!"
The moment Absu Naya left, the suffocating abyssal pressure over the tribe, and that twisted, dead stillness field, vanished completely.
The air became breathable again.
That fishy, salty stench slowly ebbed.
Everything that had happened today seemed, to those who had survived, like a nightmare—
an inconceivably terrifying, bizarre, hopeless nightmare.
In it lay a writhing black mountain bearing down,
the warped mutations of those who had beheld a god,
the bloody spray of comrades exploding before their eyes.
Only when their beloved teacher, the noble Calliope, descended with songs like holy light
did a sliver of brightness enter that dark dream.
Now the fearsome invader and the goddess who had saved them had both departed.
The nightmare, at last, was over.
The survivors, supporting one another, staggered up from the blood-and-slime-soaked mud.
They looked upon their tribe, ruined and bloody by divine presence alone,
and their tears, only just stopped, burst forth again.
This time, unlike before, most of the dead were second-generation humans.
That was to say…
children who had only just learned to run and laugh.
Those little corpses, twisted and misshapen; those snapped little limbs, those tiny garments, those faces that had not yet grown up—all of it struck parents with a despair more crushing than any warrior's death.
A gentle first-generation woman knelt in the dirt, clutching a small, warped body no longer human in shape.
Her child.
Her shoulders shook violently, yet she ground her teeth shut, making not a sound.
Blood seeped from between her teeth; the tears in her eyes were red as blood.
Her child was no more than three to five years old.
The first generation had been created by the gods.
The second were their own flesh and blood.
That made this pain sharper than sending their children to die by their own hand.
How they wished they could die in their children's place.
But cruel reality does not bend to their will.
Stifled sobs of despair rose and fell amid the wreckage.
At last they broke free of all restraint and became wails that tore at the sky.
Nearly ten thousand survivors cried as one, their grief shaking the air.
Sorrow swallowed everyone.
Even a god, seeing this, could not help but feel it.
On a plane mortals could not see,
upon the very boundary between life and death,
Death's own sovereign, Thanatos, stood silent in the void.
He watched it all, expressionless.
No matter how Calliope and Absu Naya argued and clashed,
no matter who was right or wrong behind it all,
he simply watched.
He held to his sacred duty given by the God-King's Order and Fate; he would not interfere in the realm of the living.
His face remained as cold and hard as ever, like ancient, unmelting ice.
Yet in the depths of those eyes, which ought to have been utterly indifferent, lay a sorrow he could almost not conceal.
He was the embodiment of death.
Since he had brought the very concept of death to the cosmos, he had seen parting beyond counting.
But many partings in this world he could never easily accept.
The final separation of parent and child.
The last farewell of lovers.
The irrevocable parting of dearest friends.
Each permanent severing of these truest bonds stirred a reluctance in his heart.
______
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