#violence!!!!

They dragged themselves to a kneel, hoping that they would not be ambushed. Presumably, the god would be on K’s side. Nothing to do about that now. They wouldn’t fight if it was deemed pertinent to destroy them — but they would ask for their fair reward. Safety for their friends. And then Clem could meet their mother. Either way, they’d be going home.

Each deity had its own sort of signature. Followers were attuned to it more than most, but Clem was in one’s domain. Some felt like rushing water, others like an enveloping sense of awe. They shifted on their knees uncomfortably, swallowing stress as they felt heat build on their skin. This felt like the unfiltered blaze of the rising sun.

Mercifully, it stayed just rising. It seemed that the sun - or the Goddess, stopped at dawn. Clem’s eyes were trained to the ground, deferent, respectful. They had something to ask, and wanted to have the best chances of being granted it.

The voice spoke with no warning, no crack of thunder or sky splitting apart to mark the occasion. Still, each of their atoms snapped to attention.

Clemency.

A full-body shiver rushed through them. They did not look to the source of the voice or to the sound of a body thudding to the floor. Unmistakeably and shockingly, they heard chains too. They were very aware of the side of them that faced her, but they did not look. It had been nice to be rid of K’s presence for a while.

Look up.

It was common knowledge that deities were beautiful. Still. There was nothing like seeing one.

She was magnificent. He aura covered the entire span of the horizon, like an unencumbered strip of dawn. Her dress was a swirling mass of light and solar flare, and her face was unwatchable, a sun in its own right. Everything was bright, and after what felt like an eternity of night, it would have been blinding anyway. Clem looked down almost instantly, flushing. They felt winded from just two seconds witness to a goddess’s visage.

“Don’t be shy,” she teased. Her voice held the kind of light and airy tone usually expected from young teenagers. “I’m not very important.”

Clem had no idea what to say. That wasn’t what they thought she’d say at all. They started to stammer out an introduction, despite the fact that she clearly knew who they were already. “Your eminence, I -”

K made a sound so bizarre that Clem could not finish what they were saying. They thought they knew her as well as they knew themselves, but it seemed she still had surprises. They looked over in shock. “Did you just laugh?”

“Your eminence,” she mocked, unfazed by the heavy cuffs weighing her wrists down. She was not kneeling, which had to be on purpose. “She exists because of me,” K snarled, clearly seething.

Clem met her fury with a cool gaze, refusing to give her any more fuel. They were not afraid of her, not anymore. But they shuddered at the sudden burst of tangible anger that rippled through the air. It was hot, so fucking hot. And Clem was in their dragon form, scales and toughened skin and all. Their wings wrapped around themselves instinctively, protective. God, they had missed those. K had been the reason they locked them away in the first place, they remembered with a start. It felt like a lifetime ago. Well, more like fifty.

Clem’s panic had been short-lived, aware that the anger was not directed at them. But now they had to reckon with the fact that K bore it all. To hear a laugh from her was one thing, but a genuine scream of pain was something completely different. Instinct told them to help, but they stayed kneeling.

Serves you right, Clem thought, instantly feeling nauseous. That was not a thought they would ever have entertained before. Who were they to pass judgement?

“Stand,” the goddess ordered when the scream gave way to laboured breathing. Clem knew she was talking to them but could not explain how. The teasing tone was gone. Where K’s voice had echoed, the goddess’s simply dripped with raw unfiltered power. K had a taste, this was the source. Her voice did not need to echo. It filled the space and then some.

Clem stood, preternaturally aware of K still on the ground a little ways away from them. Her breathing still bordered on agonal, but despite their nausea Clem felt no pity. You could not hurt people with impunity and expect no justice to be served. By a God.

The deity in question seemed to be diminishing herself, presumably for their benefit. Her dress stayed wild and unwieldy, its train spread across the ground for what looked like miles. It was solid and liquid and gas all at once. Her physical form shrunk to a height a little taller than them, and her face became less like the sun itself, though the completely white, star-like eyes were still impossible to look at directly.

“Are you afraid? You need not be. You beat my champion.” Her voice demanded authority. She did not sound angry, but Clem did not feel reassured. They felt immensely young, suddenly. It was unsettling to remember that they were so much younger than both other people in the space.

They lowered their head in a nod. “She fought well,” they said quietly, thinking instantly of all the times she had played unfair. If all of them had been fair, who would have won?

The goddess laughed, a single short bark. “She fought dirty. That’s why I like her. And you beat her still. Impressive.”

Clem had nothing to say. “Thank you,” they managed.

“Would you like a prize?”

Clem’s eyes widened. It seemed, bizarrely, like a completely genuine question. But they were no gladiator. They fought for one reason and one reason alone. Their voice came out as a whisper. “I seek no reward, your eminence. That was never my intention.” They didn’t want to reject a kindness, but could not fathom accepting any sort of reward.

“Oh.” There was silence for a while, then something almost bored and faux-grandiose entered her tone. “You are aware that this is my domain?”

They were still looking down, but they imagined that the statement was accompanied with a gesture at the world. They couldn’t ascertain if she was proud of it.

Clem nodded anyway. “I realise that it could not belong to -” They gestured with a hand to K on the ground, then quickly resumed clasping them behind their back. Their fingers gripped their wrist and they could feel their own heart racing.

“Hm. Clever,” she praised. “You are clever.” They felt the sensation of their hair being ruffled. It felt gentle, yet also as if their skin was being burned off. Unprecedented.

“Thank you,” they mouthed, blushing furiously.

“I should think you would be a far better follower than my current delinquent.” The last word was laced with something worse than venom. Clem was surprised that K had not already completely withered away.

“I would try my best,” Clem replied. They wanted to go home. They were getting impatient. They pinched their hand behind their back. Focus.

She sighed. “Not ‘you will’? You don’t want to stay with me?”

Clem reeled. Her tone had shifted from the judge presiding over the court to a friend asking them to play at recess. They did not feel smart enough for this. Ruth would know exactly what to say. They had never been taught how to advocate for themselves - quite possibly anyone would be better.

“I always intended to return home, your eminence.” They knew this was not right and felt a bone-deep terror at the prospect of outright denying a deity, but they couldn’t stay.

“So you hate me.”

Clem’s eyes widened. The goddess didn’t give them time to correct the assumption.

“You’ve seen how she talks to me! And that was only for a moment, imagine that for thousands of fucking years, that whining voice in my head constantly complaining about literally fucking anything. ‘Oh, Rory, it’s so cold out here.’ ‘Rory, I hate the short nights.’ ‘Rory, are you even listening to me?’ No! No, I’m not listening, because I don’t have to, if she had done her fucking job then I would have plenty of other voices to listen to, but she’s -”

She - Rory - suddenly moved over to K’s side and kicked, hard. “- so fucking useless, and I’m just stuck with her!” She let out a scream, then kicked again. And again, and again, moving from the stomach to the head. K took it stoically at first but she was worn down already, and struggled in vain to shift away from the kicks. Clem had no idea what to do, witness to a relationship clearly a lot bigger and older than themselves.

Then, as suddenly as the outburst had begun, Rory was in front of them again, and older. They hadn’t realised she had ever aged her form down. She seemed incredibly fluid, ever-changing based on nothing but whim. She let out a short, sharp breath. She was no longer wearing a dress, but a remarkably casual outfit instead. She was still clearly deific. Her skin glowed. Everything glowed. Her eyes stayed burning white.

“Sometimes I lose my temper with her.”

Clem said nothing, had nothing to say. She did not have to explain herself to them.

Rory took a step back, ageing down to teenager again. This was exhausting. Was she trying to make herself more personable? Did that ever work? Was she aware that her eyes glowed and her hair was on fire?

“So you won’t stay?”

Clem felt horrible rejecting her outright. “I - I would remember you. At home, if you wanted me to. Can I not do both?”

She made a noise of vague disapproval and moved on without replying. “You had a condition. For your war.” The last word was spoken with derision, and Clem thought with dismay of how juvenile it must have seemed to her.

Clem swallowed. They took a deep breath. “Yes. She was hurting one of my friends. The condition - if I won - was that she would stop. And not hurt any of the rest of them.”

“Mm.”

There was a long silence. Then she was younger than she’d ever been before, somewhere close to six or eight. She sat on a chair of her own making, pulling her legs up and examining her nails. She had no clothes that Clem could see, just a vaguely gaseous mist surrounding the image of a young girl. Her hair trailed out long behind her, looking in places like lava flows and molten glass. No wonder the world had to be made of marble.

Or - was it? For the first time, Clem considered the idea that the world was more of a prison than a palace.

A big sigh attracted their attention again. “Well,” she began, undeniably petulant. “You don’t have to deal with her, and I’m telling you that she behaves better when I let her play with something.”

Clem blinked. Blinked again, simply processing. Trying to process, though it felt impossible. They couldn't fathom it, the casual referring of weeks of torture as ‘play.’ People are not toys, Clem thought vehemently. They thought of Calyx, of Arthur, of everyone else who they could not protect if they asked simply for their family to be left alone.

“Okay,” they ground out, instead of the slew of swear words that they thought. This is a God, they reminded themselves. Like it or not, you can't fight this one. “Can - can she stop? Can you stop her doing that?”

It was bizarre to talk about K as if she was not there, but they preferred this version of the conversation. It was impossible to imagine having a civil or productive one with her involved.

“If I may offer a suggestion, your eminence.” Head bowed, hands clasped behind their back. The picture of subservience. They could stay like this for hours.

“You may,” came the slightly bemused answer. As if through revelation, Clem realised that their deference itself may be the cause of her amusement. From the way K had been acting, it was clear that she was never obedient of her own accord.

“I think - K - needs another hobby.” Clem stumbled over the name, only because they knew that they were the only one out of the three who did not know the true name. It was their only disadvantage. There was a kind of cosmic unfairness in it, like they were on a stair below the both of them, playing with things that they did not understand. But they did understand. "It's not fair to just use people like that."

Rory looked at them straight-on. “I think it's fair. She does good work. Sometimes. But when she’s good, she’s so good. Don’t tell her I said that.”

Clem couldn't help their blank stare. You said she was a delinquent. You said that she was useless. If you weren’t a God, you’d have kicked her to death minutes ago.

“My prize," they remembered, saying it with effort. “My prize would be to force her to stop playing God with people.”

Everything was still.

“Ah,” she hummed, turning to stalk over to the mute K still on the ground. She looked older now, anywhere from a young adult to a woman in her prime. “Is that what you're doing?” Her tone was cutting. When she lowered herself to lift K’s chin, Clem saw sharp nails dig into her skin. They darkened quickly, blood starting to travel down her hand as K struggled in the grasp. Those nails had to be knife-sharp, slicing cleanly through the skin.

“I don’t kno- know why you’re listening to them.”

Rory gave her a sharp backhand, and Clem could swear that they heard skin sizzle.

“Sometimes I want to destroy you, you know.” It was only a whisper, but in the silence Clem still heard it.

K hissed but collapsed once she was no longer being held up. She was more exhausted than they’d ever seen her.

Rory walked to Clem with a hand still dripping with blood. She lifted their chin with a nail, and they held their breath, eyes widening in fear. They’d been held at knifepoint before and this felt no different. Rory appraised them in silence, Clem getting more and more nervous with each passing second.

She sounded unbothered when she spoke again. Bored. “I don’t actually think you should be rewarded for beating her. It’ll just encourage people.”

“Okay,” they said quietly, self-preservation taking over.

“But you are… very polite. And I think it’s funny that you won. So, I can accept this request of yours.”

“Okay,” they repeated, a little lightheaded. “Thank you, your eminence.”

She moved her hand away, and for the first time dimmed her eyes so it did not hurt to look at her. They realised that they were shaking, thoughts stuttering over themselves. The magnitude of their situation and the encounter was starting to take its toll, and it took a long few seconds for them to come back to themselves. By then, Rory had pulled K up to standing, and was supporting her in a gesture so misaligned with their previous interactions that Clem could not at first understand what they were seeing.

They shook off the confusion. Not their problem. They would likely never understand the full extent of it. Clem stood up, holding their elbow and making a half-step towards the pair who had already turned away.

“Um.”

Rory turned her head, head cocked to the side. “Yes?”

“I - forgive me. Is it possible for me to go home?”

“Home? Where is home?” She sounded genuinely confused.

Clem's mouth opened and shut, and they could not stop thinking of Elene. Her face. Her soft golden hair, the way they found strands of it on the pillow, the way she worried at her lip when she was nervous, her voice, her kind eyes -

A giggle. Clem was so distracted, so caught off guard that they did not have the time to thank her. They fell through space itself, wings trying automatically to cocoon themselves against the force of it. Terror came and went, replaced by a light feeling in their chest. ‘Home’ had redefined itself without their knowledge, and Clem was excited to see it.

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