But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Sakaj had resumed murdering herself.
“So, Father, any advice from the divine fount of knowledge?” Fingit failed to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“Screw ’em!” Krak sounded almost like his old, mighty self. “Let’s you and me head down into that valley with a couple of cute broads and a barrel of wine, and leave these fools up here to obliterate themselves.”
Fingit stared at his father. “Do you mean that?”
Krak giggled, looked back into the valley, and ignored Fingit.
Fingit leaned back, closed his eyes, and reflected on how impotent the once-omnipotent Krak had become and what that meant for everybody. I never appreciated what we had. Men were always begging to give us power and gifts and their virgin daughters. Then, BAP! Whatever the hell it was fell between us and man, and damn it to the Void for eternity. No more men, no more power. No more virgins, either.
“Father, what do you want me to do? I think the crisis is here. We must do something, or soon we’ll be too weak and stupid to do anything. Don’t you want virgins anymore?”
“Just a little more time,” Krak mumbled.
“It’s been eight years! Just tell me what to do!”
“I could use a drink and a chubby nymph…”
Fingit rose with a grunt. “Nice chat, Father. If you think of anything that can save us from an eternity of madness, misery, and terror, you might mention it. You know, just in case it comes to you while you’re picking your toes. I’ll be in my workshop making a poorly designed machine for doing something pointless, and which won’t work anyway. If I’m lucky.” He hurled an impossibly searing glare over his shoulder and then waddled back uphill.
Fingit began wheezing. Glancing up, he spotted Sakaj clinging high in a wasted pine tree.
Is that her executioner today? Is she going to brush her esophagus with a pine tree? Hah! Who cares?
Sakaj normally remained inscrutable and creepy. Therefore, when she began shrieking and throwing pine cones at Fingit, he stopped and squinted at her. Her actions perplexed him. Otherwise, she looked the same as she did every other day—filthy and crazy as hell.
Fingit glanced back toward Krak to see whether the old man was paying attention to his daughter’s more-bizarre-than-usual behavior. Fingit was therefore the first to see a monstrous, green-scaled hand appear from over the precipice and slam into the ground not far from the bench, launching clods of earth high into the air. The hand was enormous enough to seize two chariots at once, and it bore claws as long as Fingit was tall. Monstrous was indeed the proper way to describe this hand, since it belonged to a literal monster.
“Cheg-Cheg,” Fingit whispered.
In the next moment, the gargantuan, purple-feathered head of Cheg-Cheg, Dark Annihilator of the Void and Vicinity, rose from below the precipice. Its great, furnace-bright eyes squinted at Krak. Its maw—which could eat four chariots at once—opened and released a roar that promised unremitting destruction. The immense volume smashed Fingit onto his back.
Fingit sat up, blood streaming from his ears and nose, and he saw the beast clambering up onto the precipice. Based on eons of fighting this creature, he knew it would continue clambering until its entire three-hundred-foot-tall self eclipsed the bench, Krak, Sakaj, Fingit, and all the pine trees within sight.
Cheg-Cheg had, from time to time, made war on the gods, at intervals mysterious to even the cleverest among them, or at least to Fingit, who considered himself the cleverest. No one knew why the monster appeared from the Void to assault the gods and all their works, but in each conflict, the gods had prevailed only by employing all of their might and guile.
The Annihilator was now stalking the gods’ realm again, but the gods had grown punier than a modest breeze. Krak hadn’t summoned the impossibly searing light of the sun in years. Fingit’s Hammer That Crushes Souls was propped in the corner of his workshop with dirty laundry hanging on it. All that the gods had remaining was guile.
Fingit employed all of his guile by standing, running away three steps, running back toward the monster five steps, and halting with a slack mouth and twitching eyes. Krak stumbled uphill just as Cheg-Cheg snatched the timeless granite bench and shoved it into his maw. The landmark disappeared with a rumbling clatter of teeth against stone.
Krak slipped to his knees, and Fingit sprinted to help his father. Just one stride away from the old man, Fingit encountered one of Cheg-Cheg’s immense, leathery black feet capable of crushing twenty demigods with one stomp. One of the foot’s pearl-white claws smacked Fingit an incomprehensible blow. Fingit’s skin hurtled fifty paces away, carrying inside it dozens of smashed bones and a fair number of ruptured organs. He landed on his side, almost blind with pain and unable to move, speak, or breathe.
Before Fingit’s eyesight faded, he saw Cheg-Cheg bend down and slice Krak in half as if plucking a daffodil. His blood splattered over a great expanse of sad grass that perhaps hoped to be better nourished on this divine blood. The monster seized both halves of sundered Krak, hurled one across the valley, and chucked the other uphill over the horizon. Fingit wept as he watched his father’s majestic head flop around on his airborne torso.
Fingit was losing the ability to feel pain when Cheg-Cheg grabbed his destroyed body. The monster hauled Fingit up high above the bloody, grassy ground. As he dangled Fingit above his fetid maw and prepared to consume him, Fingit closed his eyes.
I hope Dad doesn’t act like a jackass about my letting him get cut in two.
Two
(Fingit)
Fingit strained and distorted his face for several seconds before his left eyelid opened, ripping through a light film of dried blood. His right eye didn’t respond at all, so it was probably a lost cause. A shapely leg lay in front of his face. It was clad
