‘You’re assuming she wants to be saved,’ he thought, but didn’t say it. Why had he even thought that?
“If there is a way, we will find it,” he assured her, sounding more confident than he felt.

He wondered if Cerebro could get him in touch with the mind of a god.

****

The tiny, delicate bones - as fragile as spun sugar - were thrown into the circle, which kept oozing out of shape. Damn it - didn’t Humans have decent clotting factors anymore?

The woman who sat at the edge of the circle, casting the bones, was approximately four feet tall and had a form that was half-humanoid, half lion. Her strangely egg-shaped, pale blue face was devoid of eyes and nose, or ears; any features at all, not even hair. She did have a knife slash of a mouth that only revealed itself when she spoke, and she did that rarely, mainly because her voice could kill in mixed company. “It was Camaxtli,” she pronounced gravely. “Or his energy at least - it did manifest on the Earth plane.”

Osiris made a noise of disbelief deep in his throat, and shook his head.  That poor son-of-a-bitch.  He knew Eris hadn’t really killed Camaxtli - like that bitch goddess could really surprise someone as crafty as Camaxtli. What he couldn’t believe was that that exiled sack of shit Bob had actually killed him - no fucking way; he wasn’t buying that.

“Has it begun?” He asked, consulting the book of recent deaths on its marble pedestals. He thought that recent spate of men - who came in as one big clump, along with three females - tasted of Camaxtli’s energy.

The woman appeared to look at the bones with eyes she did not have. But Clotho had eyes that didn’t need to manifest; she could see everything, whether she liked it or not, and generally she didn’t. But it was her curse to do so, as well as the point of her existence.  If you believed the Greeks, she was one of the Moirae - the “three fates” - who held the destiny of all, mortals and immortals alike, in their spindly hands. This wasn’t exactly true (it wouldn’t be mythology if it was true), but Clotho was certainly a good reader of what could generously be called destiny; there were rumors she could manipulate it, but she never said. She was one of the more taciturn gods. “Yes. An instability has developed; all will crumble from the outward radius.”

“Solid,” he said, wiping his thumb along the vellum page and smearing the new blood spelling out the obscure names of Camaxtli’s first sacrifices.

He knew exactly how the other gods saw him: pathetic, a vulture, the carrion crow of the Highers. But he didn’t mind, as that allowed him his peace and privacy.  As they dismissed him as a necrophile with a pointless and morbid library, they overlooked the fact that not only he was he a death god, he was the most popular and well known of all the death gods - Cthulu had nothing on him. Stupid Humans - witches and warlocks, sorcerers and sorceresses - still called on him from the Earth plane, begging favors and making sacrifices and rituals in his name.  He had a good segment of followers he could call on if he needed to.

He did not resurrect the dead often, although it was within his power, and easy enough. No, he would only resurrect someone if he was sure their return would cause maximum pain and chaos for all involved, and eventually lead to more deaths. A three-for-one sort of deal.  He rather liked Camaxtli - he'd brought him a lot of bodies.

Bob hardly brought him any at all.  He was on the shit list.

Unlike Camaxtli, he had no desire to run the Higher Realms, or a place as low and pedestrian as Earth. Fuck that - who needed the hassle for so little pay off?  Truth be told, he really didn’t want anything.  He had his niche, and he rather enjoyed it.  He never went hungry.

But what he did love was chaos and pain; it equaled more bodies.  Lots and lots of bodies; an endless supply. And if anyone wanted to bust his ass about this, he was clean - he had nothing to do with Camaxtli having an avatar, or dying, or passing on his powers. Nor did he have anything to do with the said avatar’s decision to return to the Earth plane, however briefly.

Did Bob neglect to tell the avatar that the return of Camaxtli would cause an energy instability that would threaten the dimensional balance?  That - according to those who did silly things like prophesizing -  Cammy’s return would be a minor catastrophe, a potential Class-Four apocalyptic event?

Oh, wait - the fallen bastard missed that meeting, didn’t he?  Aww, what a shame.

Of course, nothing was actually written in stone (although you couldn’t tell Clotho that - she might unhinge her jaw and bite your head off). It was possible some extremely powerful do-gooders, maybe a misguided god or two, could head it off before it became a terminal imbalance, but it was highly unlikely.  Still, he really didn’t care if it completed its cycle, or was cut off in the middle: while it happened, there would be deaths by the score.  It would be like the Black Death or the Spanish Inquisition, only better.

What the minor gods like Bob didn’t understand was it was great to be a death god - you never needed
to do anything. Time was always on your side.  Either entropy provided the cataclysm or it didn’t, but regardless, everything eventually died and came straight to him.  Inevitably, he controlled it all.

He smeared the blood onto his lower lip, still tasting the lingering sensation of Camaxtli’s energy, and watched the names reform themselves on the page, soak through, the blood rapidly aging to a rusty brown, headed towards its inevitable black. He wondered if he could exacerbate the chaos by calling on his Human followers. They knew his power; they knew disobedience was a fate worse than death … and if they did die, they were coming straight to him. That was both a blessing and a hideous damnation.

Eris could, in theory, shut it all down. But she wouldn’t, because she - like all the other Highers - believed herself to be infallible, therefore Cammy had died when she killed him, and there was no energy left.  If Bob tried to convince her otherwise, he’d be lucky to get away with a severe beating. Gods were always right, they were never wrong - especially when they fucked up.

“Feel like playing a game?” He asked Clotho, turning back around to face the cat-pawed goddess. But she was gone already, faded back into night, taking her bones with her.  All he had left was a rough semi-circle of blood on his marble floor, currently being lapped up by the vines as they desperately stretched towards it, craving its charged sustenance.

Oh well.  He didn’t need her, and she could always play her own games.  She usually did, didn’t she?
No matter. He could release his hounds of death at any time, and simply sit back and reap the rewards. Even if they died, he still won. And as one personification of death, he himself could never really die; the best anyone could do was make him sit something out for a bit.  How could death ever lose?

The players were all in their places, and the stage was set, whether any of those short-sighted creatures knew it or not.

Let the end begin.

_______________

The End (?)

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(Oh, come on - like I’m going to leave a cliffhanger like that forever…;-)