Goddess by Liv Savell (books for 6 year olds to read themselves txt) 📗

keeping a safer distance. “So then you’ll know the despair I felt when you cast me out to that lump of rock in the middle of the ocean, disconnected from the mountains and the lands I was made to rule. And that shall be your price, my pathetic parents. Outcasts from all you love and rule. Specks of meaningless human flesh.”

“No!”

Mascen’s smile grew. “I’ll see you soon.” With a burst of sudden heat, he sunk back into the earth. All the plants in the glen withered and died, and Enyo’s scream of pain echoed through the valley.

Chapter XIII

Tenth Moon, Third Quarter: Caerthleon

From the shadows of the foliage beyond, Bledig stepped into a shaded clearing too-near to the human settlement of Caerthleon. It was empty, drowsy with heat and insects, but for the figure of a man in its center. He was blurred, an image seen through clouded glass, and his features seemed perpetually in motion, his nose bulbous one moment, then thinning to a line, his eyes widening and narrowing. Shifting colors.

He had not yet seen Bledig, so the God of Forsaken Places opened his mouth to call his brother’s name only to find that his throat had become so unused to the contours of speech that it had all but forgotten how to form the words. He took a breath and tried again. “Eifion.” The sound was that of a mountain cat’s growl.

Eifion turned, his shifting form changing slightly to mirror Bledig’s. Horns, rough and malformed, erupted from the changing head, and wings began to sprout from his shoulders before shifting away again. “You’ve felt it too,” Eifion said by way of greeting, each word in the voice of a different man, some high, others dark and low.

Bledig nodded. “Shall we see what justice our brother has wrought?”

Eifion shuddered, his shoulders giving a disjointed pop as he strained against the fabric of the world. Slowly, two wings grew from his back, spiny and over large.

Unnatural.

Bledig turned away and flung himself into the air with a single, powerful motion, his youngest brother not far behind him.

From the air, it was clear where Mascen had been heading. A swath of land was burned south of them, the earth and creatures crying out though much of the human farmland had been spared. Great rifts had cracked open the surface of the ground. Smoke turned the horizon a despairing grey.

Bledig followed the line of the destruction, turning his great, horned head north towards the settlement of Caerthleon. The largest human city left in Rhosan. And a fitting seat of power.

⥣          ⥣           ⥣

Long-fingered handsgripped the rails of the palatial house’s balcony from where Mascen watchedthe courtyard below. Humans scurried this way and that. Little ants hurrying to bring their loads back to the colony. Desperate to please him. To serve him.

He had torn down every temple within the massive city erected for the Old Gods, left their ruins nothing more than steaming heaps of crushed stone, and proclaimed to all that he was their new and only God.

Obediently, they had bowed to his will, like the humans on the isle, cast out of their ships and washed ashore— a collection of misfits and missing children. Not any longer. He would not rule over some handful of cast-offs but the entire populace of Rhosan. Perhaps Ingola too. It wasn’t as if his siblings were truly fitting Gods. They had all but shed their corporeal forms, only showing themselves before the humans for ‘miracles’ and “smiting.” They didn’t know the real purpose of a God.

All those years ago, when his mother and father, and all the other Old Ones, had turned against him, it had been for this very vision. This ambition to unite all people under one faith. They had thought him insane and greedy.

Now they were gone or locked in mortal bodies, and he was restoring the human’s faith in the Old Ways. He would right all the wrongs. He would rebuild the world, mold it into the shape it should have always been.

A shadow overhead drew Mascen’s gaze, and the ants below scuttled for cover. Then Bledig and Eifion landed in his courtyard.

“Brothers,” he murmured in greeting, remaining on his perch high above all else.

⇝

Eifion shuddered, stiff and twitching as his temporary wings rejoined the greater mass of his body. Above him, Mascen and the world around him were grey, too high for his brother’s writhing tattoos to have any effect on his form, still altered by the nearness of Bledig. Even as he watched, his eyes shifted again, painting Mascen in his familiar red.

“It has been too long, Mascen,” the Changeling God said in his strange, collage voice.

Bledig, as always, was blunt. “How did you free yourself, brother?”

Mascen shook his head, smiling and yet unhappy. “You did not feel our parents return? You did not witness the echoes of their journey?” He didn’t seem surprised. After all, Mascen was the strongest of the God-offspring. “I knew they were back, and I remembered the wrongs they had done to me. It was simple enough, breaking the wards around my prison, but enough about me.”

He gestured elegantly around the courtyard. His fingers ended in long-tipped claws that clicked against the stone rail he strangled.

“What are you doing here, brothers?” His black eyes glinted in the winter sunlight. Cunning. Challenging. Dangerous.

Eifion’s eyes shifted again, slit pupils turning the heat of Mascen’s body into a light so intense as to be painful. He looked away, blinking.

He had known that his father, Va'al, walked Illygad again for some time. And lately, Maoz had been a distant thread as well, but then neither did he wish to correct the First Child. He swallowed uneasily, but when his vision again changed, he turned his eyes back towards Mascen.

“Once, we were close,” Eifion murmured. “I only wish to welcome you.”

“And, perhaps, to see what this destruction has been for.” Bledig had let a