62. Parenthood

  “They’re making statues of me again,” Aetla complained one day while I was inspecting the fourth division of the Atlian army.

  “Aren’t the statues of Matla literally part of the religion?” I asked, pausing to address my world-daughter’s concerns. The men and women escorting me through the ranks looked annoyed, but I could tell that this was important to Aetla.

  “I mean the real me, not Matla. They’re making statues of Atla and Aetla,” he said.

  “Is that so bad?”

  “I had to shatter five of them because they weren’t wearing clothes,” she objected.

  “Well, okay, if you don’t want them depicting you nude then just keep shattering the statues that they make of you like that,” I said. “Problem solved. Right?”

  “Well, yeah,” she muttered. “But it’s weird.”

  “It’s not that uncommon for statues,” I reiterated. I paused. “Are any of my statues in the nude?”

  “No! None of them. It’s stupid, because I think it would be funny, but the statue makers that I suggest it to think that it would be ‘undignified to depict the Worldfather that way,’” Aetla complained.

  “I see,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Well, anyway, have you thought about how you want people to worship Atla and Aetla?”

  “Not really,” Aetla admitted. “But they’re getting ideas on their own.”

  “What are they thinking?”

  “That Aetla is hardworking and serious, and that’s why almost nobody ever sees her, while Atla is fun and mischievous, but also unreliable since he’s constantly getting into mischief and running away as soon as he causes a problem.”

  I snirked. “Well, are they wrong?”

  She kicked me in the shin.

  “I just mean that when you manifest as Aetla, it’s usually just around me. When you’re out playing in the world, you’re usually Atla, are you not?” I asked.

  She frowned. “You think I should spend more time as Aetla?”

  “It’s up to you how you present yourself. I love both my daughter and my son. And I love Matla too, in her own special way,” I said.

  “You know that they think she’s your first wife, right?” She grinned at me. “That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  “You should see some of the religions I’ve worshiped in my past lives,” I said. “In one of them, the chief god would seduce anything with a pulse. He was a thunder god, and but aside from smiting his foes with lightning, the thing he was most known for was seducing literally anyone. Women, men, boys, girls, animals, didn’t matter. His name was …” I paused, pulling the memory from the depths of my soul. “Kupiter? Yeah. I wasn’t a devotee to him, but everyone worshiped him in some capacity.”

  “What did his wife think about that?” Aetla asked.

  “Oh she was livid all of the time. It was kind of her thing. She hated any girl that whats-his-name looked at more than twice, and she was constantly cursing his sons.”

  “Huh,” Aetla said. “I’m going to go be seen playing as Aetla so they know that girls can play too.”

  She vanished, and I turned my attention back to the gathered forces. I began looking among them for any signs of greatness or promise. As was often the case, it was a mixed bag. I sighed, looking through the possibilities, and began ordering the army about.

  It took hours, but soon I had divided the division into a thousand squads. Five hundred of those squads would be transferred to another division. One hundred of them showed some measure of promise in their current state. Those were grouped together and marked for advanced training. The remainder were likely to make up the rank and file, but unlike to advance.

  I sighed, rubbing my forehead. Looking at the fates of so many individuals, cultivators of rare talent almost all of them, gave me a migraine. The corruption centered in my chest made itself known at that moment as well, and I had to expend a few heartbeats getting it back under control.

  Atla had volunteered to take some of that corruption onto himself. To dilute it in the mass of his existence. I wouldn’t let him. The darkness that was the memory of the dread-god’s plane of despair wasn’t something that he could handle yet. Maybe, eventually, he’d be strong enough.

  Instead I would shove it down into one place on my body and ground it down piece by piece with the power of my soul. It was constant agony to my flesh, but physical pain had never bothered me that much. And as for my soul? It was like a cat-scratch. Nothing more. I would allow it to irritate my soul, then allow my soul to heal, and then rub up against it once more, then allow myself to heal.

  It was a slow, methodical process, but eventually there would be nothing left of the dread-god. Not even the memory of its name.

  As for the army, I released them from their inspection and sent them off to their various duties. Many of them would be traveling the world, setting up the vast and complicated arrays that I had designed for them.

  With their efforts, the next time that the world of Atla was invaded, the invaders would not find us unprepared.

  ~~~~~~

  It was the dead of night. She had waited until after midnight before sneaking out of the inn. She’d run away six years ago, taking with her a literal fortune in coin, but she’d lost most of it due to bad investments, bad decisions, and bad habits.

  She was too proud to return home, but she wasn’t too proud to pay for a month’s lodging and then stay for two months, or however long she could get by without the innkeeper kicking her out. With the new waygates her younger brother had installed everywhere, it was easy enough to outrun her reputation.

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  It was easy to outrun most things, she thought.

  But maybe not this.

  She found the statue in the square and, after a moment’s hesitation, she touched it with a trembling hand.

  The eyes turned gold.

  She cursed.

  “I don’t get why women do that,” a girl said from behind her. “Isn’t it supposed to be a happy thing? I mean, unless it’s because something bad happened to you. But you’re one of the people I watch so I know nothing bad happened to you. You were happy when this happened to you, why aren’t you happy now?”

  “Whatever. Leave me a lone you little brat, this is none of your business,” Po Sinai said, storming off.

  “You know that grandmother misses you, right?” The little girl said, suddenly in front of her. Po Sinai blinked, then looked behind her. The girl had just been …

  “Aetla?” Po Sinai asked.

  “That’s right, Auntie,” the girl said, smiling. “You should come home. It’s best to give birth with family around, isn’t it? That’s what mothers always say. You can have your mother and—”

  “You may be a god but you don’t know shit,” Po Sinai said. “I had to get out of there before Po Guah killed me, and that’s all there is too it.”

  Aetla looked confused. “Why do you think that father would do that?”

  “Because I deserve it,” she answered. “I was a horrible big sister. I’m a horrible person. I—”

  “So what?” Aetla asked. “If you were bad when you were younger, then decide to be better. Father will forgive you for whatever you think you did wrong, and he treasures the name you gave him. He—”

  “That’s crap! He mocks me with that name. Everywhere I go I hear how a little bug is a god and how a little bug is the greatest man to ever live and how a little bug will save the world again and again and again! I gave him that name to mock him, and now he uses it to mock me!”

  Aetla was quiet for a moment. The she admitted, “Honestly, I don’t remember the last time father mentioned you at all. I don’t think he wastes that much time on you. I’ve been keeping an eye on you, since you share his bloodline, so I could have told him where you were anytime he asked. But he never did.”

  “Well, thanks. Glad to know that my god-brother has completely forgotten his big sister,” she shouted.

  Aetla was quiet. “I’m going to tell him that he’s going to be an uncle,” the girl-god said eventually. “So if you think about hurting the baby he’ll come for you. Not me, I think I might curse you anyway. But if you hurt the baby I’ll tell him, and then you’ll have to deal with him.”

  Po Sinai recoiled from the look in the girls face, then turned and ran away.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Adan Pocef sighed, leaning on his shovel as he took a quiet break while the sergeant’s attention was elsewhere. He was only a bronze level cultivator, making him practically a mortal in this new world. He had been a mortal in the old world, so the extra life expectancy of advancing to the bronze path was a welcome change. He’d get an extra, what, sixty years or so? Yeah, he’d take that.

  Even if it didn’t come with the respect that a bronze level cultivator had demanded in the old world. It might mean that he could live long enough that he could stand to face his daughter again. She came by now and then—gods only know how it was that she kept tracking him down—to tell him about his granddaughters and his son-in-law, but Adan avoided Yara as much as possible.

  He didn’t want his poisoned life to rub off on her perfect one.

  It was better this way. He’d given her the worst examples to follow when she’d been younger, and he was so damn proud of her that she’d risen above it. But he couldn’t take credit for it. It was clearly the Worldfather’s influence, and maybe that of Hien Ro. But not his.

  No, Adan was a deadbeat. He’d been a deadbeat father, and he was a deadbeat grandfather, and he’d be a deadbeat until the day he died. But at least he wasn’t there to poison his daughter’s happy life.

  When the army had put out the call for recruits, he had presented himself, just as he had the last time. Because the army protected people, and even if his daughter was far, far stronger than him, he could still obey the army and do his part to protect her, just as he had before.

  He glanced around at his squad, wondering for a second if the Worldfather had wasted another avatar by sending it to protect him, but if he had, then he was using a technique too profound for Adan to see through.

  Some instinct—honed from his previous experience in the army perhaps—caused him to grab his shovel and resume throwing dirt just as the sergeant turned his attention back at his squad, barely avoiding the tongue-lashing he would have received if he’d been caught taking an unauthorized break.

  “Dunno how he does it,” one of his squad said. “Adan’s the only one who risks the sergeants wrath like that, but he never gets caught.”

  “I feel her intent,” he bragged, although it was a bold faced lie. “Just wait. When I reach gold rank, come find me and I’ll show you where the good brothels are. You know, the ones that you won’t be able to go in unless you’re gold rank. Which you won’t be able to, since you’ll be stuck at bronze forever.”

  “Hah,” his companion laughed. “So what do these arrays do anyway?”

  “The one we’re building? Dunno. Something about interlocked multiple layers of protection and interaction and other big words,” Adan said, shoveling. “I think there’s an interdimensional in there somewhere but that’s just a guess.”

  “Huh,” his companion said. He paused, leaning on his shovel. “Say, you served in the first war, didn’t you? What was it—”

  “You there!” the sergeant shouted. “Back to work.”

  The man grunted and resumed shoveling. Adan grinned.

  “It was hell. We spent most of it hiding in holes like this while the powerful cultivators killed the powerful undead. Then when the silver and bronze ranked threats were gone, they would retreat and let us mop up the rest with our formations,” Adan said. “It was hell. Especially since there were so many kids.”

  “You killed kids?”

  “They were already dead,” Adan said. “It was a mercy, putting them down. They’d have thanked us for it if they could. You’re too young to understand, you never saw a real wight. They were terrible to look at, twisted ugly things. Half-rotted and all malice. Whatever spark was in them that made them human once was replaced by something twisted and ugly. They were like puppets. Or insects. Like ants in human bodies following the command of their queens.”

  “Huh,” the companion said. “Glad I was too young for that war then.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry that I’m not too old for this one,” Adan muttered, and he just kept digging.

  Whatever this array did, it was important. Adan didn’t know what it did, but it was designed by the Worldfather.

  The same man who’s statuette the man kept with his boot, just like about a third of the other members of his squad.

  ?