scion - god.pdf - Scion - Dimzard

The young Goddess going by the name Black Water reclined in her father’s sitting room on a cushion of oyster-

ﬂ esh in a shell the size of a tasteful sofa. She sipped green tea from a whalebone cup, sucking the drink across the

pressure differential that held the hot beverage within the container. A supple byssus layer on the bottom of the

cup clung to the delicate saucer when Black Water brought them together, and another layer on the bottom of the

saucer held both dishes to the glass-topped table when she set them down. Within the table was trapped a pocket of

fresh air, and within that pocket burned lines of magical ﬁ re. The lines imitated brushstrokes that formed the kanji

for the master of the house, impetuous Susano-o. The ﬁ res would burn eternally, never dimming and never eating

the fresh air in their container. They lit up the sitting room with a warm, cozy glow. Black Water wished only that

the ﬁ re’s glow could warm this place so far beneath the waves. Neither the ocean’s crushing grip nor its impenetrable

chill bothered her, but a ﬁ re’s cozy warmth never went amiss when one enjoyed time at home with family.

“More tea?” Black Water’s mother,

Sakura, asked. She

sat up from her own

oyster-shell couch and

peeled the teapot off the

tabletop. She held it over

Black Water’s cup, her

pale ﬁ ngertips ready

atop the rubber-sealed

plunger. “Is it cold?”

“No, Mother,”

Black Water said. She

smiled. “I have plenty,

thank you.”

“Do you need

more honey?” Sakura

half stood, aiming herself

toward the kitchen. “I still

have some packets left

over from those cases

your friend had delivered.”

“I have plenty,” Black Water said, her smile

growing wider, wilder. She tapped the rim of her cup

and murmured conspiratorially, “I have plenty here,

plenty in my home on land, plenty in Takamagahara,

and waiters all but throwing it at me in my favorite

restaurants. Honestly, I think I’ll never need to reach

for another packet of honey again.”

Sakura stopped and turned back toward her

daughter. “I see. And your friend made all that

happen?”

Black Water nodded.

“He must be quite fond of you.”

Black Water’s head tilted, and she breathed out

a small, wistful sigh.

“I don’t think so, Mother,” she said. “We haven’t

spoken in a long time. Not since… since the trouble

in Atlantis, I think.”

“Did you part badly?”

“No. No worse than any other

time. But we never made

arrangements to keep in

touch. We spoke with

consequence so rarely

to begin with. It would

have been awkward for

both of us.”

“So why the

honey?” Sakura came

back across the sitting

room and sat beside

her daughter. “I’ve

wondered ever since

that girl with the ﬁ sh tail

came here with all those

boxes.”

Black Water thought

over her response. She pulled her

teacup loose from its saucer, raised

it and let it go. It hung at perfectly neutral

buoyancy, spinning like a prayer wheel when she

tapped its side.

“It was a gesture of gratitude,” she told her

mother. “Donnie always preferred to make strange,

large gestures instead of saying simple things.”

“Ah,” Sakura said. “Americans. Sometimes they

don’t seem to understand anything.”

Black Water smiled once more, though the smile

didn’t reach her eyes. “Never the right ones.”

A long, quiet moment passed. Black Water toyed

with her teacup, setting it spinning then letting it roll

down the back of her hand. She hadn’t been one to

ﬁ dget before she’d left home, but then she’d never

been quite so busy as she was these days. Moments

when she could sit with her mother in this underwater

palace were rare and precious. Unfortunately, when

self

till

d.”

cam

over her re

teacup loose fro

k Water’s mother,

“Did you part ba

“No. No w

tim

those moments came—squeezed between the last

World-shaking assignment and the inevitable next

one—stillness was in short supply. Black Water

was restless in body and spirit. It didn’t help that

she could feel her mother’s tension through the

woman’s slim frame beside her on the half-shell

couch. Sakura’s ﬁ ngers lifted from their prim fold on

her lap and inched toward Black Water’s own knee

as if to pat her reassuringly. But then the sheer

audacity of such a gesture, of a mortal thinking to

touch a God’s ﬂ esh and bestow comfort, interposed

itself between the two of them and sensible order

was restored. Rather, the semblance of order, as

both women sat together ﬁ dgeting and saying

nothing to one another.

“You know,” Sakura said at

last, “I thought I was so clever

the day I realized how

much you liked honey as

a little girl. You never

actually spoke about

such things.” She

looked at the sandy

ﬂ oor and drew a line

across it with the end

of her split-toed sock.

The hem of her dress

followed sluggishly.

“Do you remember?”

Black Water looked

back into the past—before

Sakura had vanished, before

Susano-o had claimed them both.

The warmth that had been guttering

inside her ﬂ ared once again, lighting her eyes

with mirth. “I do,” she said. “I thought I was even

more clever, I remember, when I said, ‘So Zatoichi

can see after all.’”

“And we giggled like two children.”

“We had to leave the lunch counter,” Black

Water said. “They said you were letting me behave

too badly to be out in public. Remember what they

said?”

“You were snorting like a barbarian,” Sakura

supplied. “The man behind the counter called you a

little piggy iteki.”

Black Water chuckled at the memory. Then,

for no better reason than she needed to hear her

mother laugh, she put her teacup over the end of

her nose like a pig’s snout and snorted three times.

She’d done it at the lunch counter all those years ago

when the cook had gotten onto her for misbehaving,

and it had driven the younger Sakura into hysterics.

This time, the magic wasn’t quite as potent as it had

been once upon a time. Black Water looked at her

mother and found her mother staring in wide-eyed,

open-mouthed astonishment.

“Oink?”

That did it. The dam burst, and Sakura was young

again, crowing and laughing and even snorting, all

decorum abandoned. Her cheeks burned red with

embarrassment, and the house kami slid open the

seaweed-paper screens to investigate the commotion.

She collapsed against her daughter, who laughed

just as hard, and they clung to each other howling

as neither of them had done since that day

all those years ago. When the house

kami were satisﬁ ed that no one

was being butchered alive,

they retreated to give the

women some privacy.

By degrees the

women calmed down

and lay back in their

broad pink cushion,

looking up at the

polished coral of the

ceiling. They breathed

heavily, drained, and

said nothing for a

while. Finally Black

Water spoke.

“I suppose Mister

Renshoburo didn’t really

understand us either, did he,

Mother?”

“You still remember his name,” Sakura

mused, impressed. “No, I suppose he didn’t.” She

took a deep breath. “But he didn’t make us leave

because we were misbehaving, that was just a

convenient excuse. I’m afraid I wasn’t very popular

in Shirahama.”

“I know,” Black Water said. “I remember.”

“I miss those days when you were little,” Sakura

said. “I live in a palace now with servants always

underfoot. I can look out a window and see wonders

no woman on land could ever dream of. I live in the

home of Susano-o himself. But still those years when

you were little—when you were the little snowﬂ ake

in my pocket—those were the best years of my life.

I miss them. I miss… I missed so much.”

Black Water could think of nothing to say.

She rolled on her side and put one arm across

her mother’s body. Sakura clung to it with both

hands, and in that gesture, all that ever needed to

be said between them was said. They could taste

each other’s tears in the water, and each one said

more than a thousand poems. That moment sewed

the perfect past together with the uncertain future,

and in it, stillness and clarity enveloped them. The

moment couldn’t last, but it was enough to sustain

them for now.

“Daughter!” a gruff voice called out from across

the sitting room. “Daughter, you have a job to do.

Where are you?”

Black Water kissed her mother on the cheek

and sat up on the couch. Opposite her, the ancient

tsurugi sword known as the Kusanagi rose from

among Black Water’s belongings and ﬂ oated point-

down. Coiled protectively around the blade was the

weapon’s familiar old kami, a spirit-serpent with

eight heads and eight tails. Seven of the kami’s

heads bobbed and wove among each other, tasting

their surroundings with their forked tongues. The

eighth head stood straight and perfectly still in the

center of the other seven, and it wore no serpent’s

face. Instead, its face was that of Black Water’s

father, Susano-o.

“Snap to it, daughter!” he said. “I haven’t got all

day.”

“Where are you?” Black Water asked out of old

cell-phone reﬂ ex.

“Never mind that now!” her father thundered.

“I’ve got a job for you, and time’s wasting. A friend

of mine lost something very important to him. He’s

tired of looking for it himself, so he’s called in an old

marker I owe him. Understand?”

Black Water looked back at her mother, who

sat up and showed her a look of inﬁ nite patience. “I

have one question ﬁ rst…”

“Make it quick! I have an important engagement

in Soku-no-Kumi to get to!”

“If this is your debt your old friend is calling in,

why am I—”

“Time grows short!” Susano-o cut in, his eyes

darting straight into his confabulation zone. “Don’t

worry, the Kusanagi’s kami knows where to take

you. Do this well. I’m counting on you.”

With that, Susano-o’s visage disappeared, and

the eighth snake head appeared in its place. The

other heads all stopped politely ignoring it, and all

eight heads looked in unison at their true owner.

“My father told you where he wants me to go?”

Black Water asked them.

“Yes, Mistress,” the snakes replied.

“I should be going, then.” Black Water re-

sheathed her blade as its spirit withdrew. With a

look back at her mother, she said, “When Father

calls, what choice have you but to do as he says?”

Sakura stood and bowed her head, her face

glowing with motherly pride in the cozy ﬁ relight.

“You understand things very well.”

The rest of Black Water’s belongings came to

her on invisible currents, garbing and arming her.

She smiled once at her mother and returned the

bow with overﬂ owing humility that wasn’t proper

from one of her high station. “Thank you for the

tea, and your time, Mother. I’ll come visit again

soon.”

“Do,” Sakura said.

Black Water bowed one last time and left the

sitting room. Patient kami slid open the screens and

pulled them shut again behind her.

“Make us proud, my little snowﬂ ake,” Sakura

said.

REVELATION

The God who had once been only Horace Farrow—now called Harsihar after his father—strolled

across the dusty surface of the moon in the company of slim, gray ﬁ gures. The ﬁ gures wore colorless

jaguar warrior garb, though they carried no weapons. They led him to an imposing step pyramid standing

above the Sea of Tranquility, with a cavernous doorway arch carved in the front, and a broad ritual area

on top, dominated by a stone altar.

E o

The God who had once been only Ho

across the dusty surface of the moon in th

jaguar warrior garb, though they carried no

above the Sea of Tranquility, with a cavern

on top, dominated by a stone altar.

“The master of the estate waits by the altar stone,”

one of the servants said when the party paused at

the base of the pyramid. The noise punctuated a long,

silent trek across the gray desert. “There are stairs

to either side of the door, other staircases within,

and an elevator in the center. Which would—”

“Couldn’t I just go straight up?” Horace asked.

“Wouldn’t take as long.”

“As you wish,” the servant said. “You are

welcome in the master’s house.”

Horace tipped his Stetson hat

and launched himself straight up,

kicking a cloud of gray dust up in

the moon’s weak gravity. He rose

high enough to see the unﬁ ltered

sun just rising above the lunar

horizon and ﬂ ew toward the

top of the pyramid, trailing

the ends of his time-worn

jacket like a kite’s tail. He

came down behind the

master of the estate,

who sat on the

edge of the altar

watching the

elevator doors.

“Housekeeping,” he said, startling his host. “You

need fresh towels?”

The master of the pyramid turned and came

around the stone altar that separated he and Horace.

He was tall and slim-shouldered, though strong

muscles stood out on his bare arms and torso. Fine

black hair hung down past his shoulders in the front

and back, and his severe, angular face was clean-

shaven. He wore a jaguar-skin loincloth, held in place

by a broad belt clasped in steel. On the center of his

belt hung a skull mask with a turquoise band over

the eyes and bulging orbs of polished obsidian set

over that. The mask’s jaw hung open slightly.

“Hey, Aaron,” Horace said. “Long time no see.

Did I startle you?”

“Aaron…” the master of the pyramid said. “No

one’s called me that in quite a while. Should I take

that to mean you’d prefer I called you Horace?”

“Always,” Horace said. He grinned, and Aaron

returned the expression.

Aaron came out from behind the altar and

approached his old friend, walking with a barely

perceptible limp. The two of them shook hands.

“How you been, Doc?” Horace asked. “How’s

the foot?”

“Not bad,” Aaron said, shrugging. “It doesn’t

hurt like it used to.”

“That’s good.”

Aaron nodded. He tapped his

chin then pointed at Horace’s chin

with the same ﬁ nger. “Growing the

beard out, I see.”

Horace tugged self-consciously

at the long hairs hanging there.

“Yeah, thinking about it. I’m

considering braiding them

out when they get long

enough.”

“Ah,” Aaron said

with a hint of a smirk.

“Not thinking of

dating for a while,

then, eh?”

“Har har.”

Aaron chuckled, which drew a grudging and

chagrined smirk from Horace, and the years of

distance between them didn’t seem quite so long as

they’d seemed the day before. Aaron limped back to

the altar and sat on the edge of it. Horace knocked

some of the dust off his lindwurm-skin boots with the

brim of his hat. As the harsh lunar sun rose behind

them, it glinted off the gold of the Falcon Amulet on

his hatband and the golden Eye of Horus design on

the stone orb in his left eye socket.

“So have you heard from any of the others?”

Aaron asked. “I’ve been a bit out of touch myself.”

“Yeah, some,” Horace said. “Brigitte calls every

now and then to chat. Yukiko’s dad keeps her pretty

busy, so I haven’t heard much from her. Eric asked

me to help him take care of some business with his

granddad, but that was probably a year ago. Maybe

two now… Damn.”

E o

the foot?

“Not bad,” Aaron said, sh

hurt like it used to.”

“That’s good.”

Aaron nodde

chin then pointed

with the same ﬁ n

beard out, I see.”

Horace tugg

at the long ha

“Yeah, think

considerin

out whe

enough

“A

wit

“

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