Really, it wasn’t his style.
Va'al dropped onto the ground and made himself comfortable, stretching out his aching, mortal feet. “You know, it would be much more fun to tear each other apart in your actual bodies. Which you need each other to get if you want them sometime, I dunno, this century.”
They rolled in the earth, Enyo whipping her head to the side to bite the inside of Maoz’s wrist. He roared with pain as blood dribbled down his arm and released her throat. The Goddess delivered one final blow, giving Maoz a good gut punch before she crawled away, panting.
She spat blood and probed a gash on the inside of her cheek with her tongue. Enyo growled in displeasure and rubbed the back of her hand over her mouth, smearing her and Maoz’s blood there. Maoz looked stunned as he clutched his bleeding arm, and Enyo was still red-faced, but they both at least had stopped squabbling.
Enyo, the fickle creature, made it over to Va'al, who she slapped on the shoulder and climbed into his lap. Licking her lips to get the last drops of Maoz’s blood, she rubbed her throat. In their old bodies, that would not have made her lose her breath.
Maoz was clearly dumbfounded by the sensation of pain from Enyo’s vicious bite, her teeth sharper than theirs. It had been three hundred years since he had felt anything at all.
Va'al just cocked an eyebrow at Enyo. “Was that really necessary? You went and made Maoz bleed all because I fucked him hundreds of years ago. After you fucked him, I might add.”
Really, the misfit God was amused. It had been entertaining to watch, for all that it slowed them down. He supposed it was easy for Enyo and Maoz to forget their mission from time to time. They were still new to these bodies. He had been craving real power for eighty years now.
The Goddess didn’t dignify that with an answer and instead gave Va'al a bloody, savage kiss. She was clearly planning to do more when Maoz’s voice pierced through the field.
“When will the bleeding stop?”
⥣ ⥣ ⥣
“Realms, Aryus was such an anchorite,” Enyo complained as they neared the base of the tower. It was a solitary building, alone in the open field. Lacking decoration or adornment. A dirt path led up to it, circled around the trunk of the tower, and then meandered off in the direction of Esha’s people and Va'al’s little lake.
As they wandered about the tower base, Enyo noticed the complete lack of a door. After a full lap and no apparent means to gain entry to Aryus’s temple, she bared her teeth. What was the catch? The joke? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t cared when Aryus had told them about it, and now that it mattered, she was only frustrated. Tipping her chin back to peer up the length of the building, Enyo could see balconies on the uppermost level. Of course, it would be impossible to climb in these mortal bodies, what with the stone being too smooth to produce footholds. If one of them had a bow and arrow and a pile of rope, then they might have been able to thread it through one of the windows and scale the side of the building, but as it was…
Growling, she prowled around the tower again, this time closely inspecting each inch. Was it a puzzle or ruse? A hidden door, cleverly placed? How would they get in? How did people get in?!
Her frustration was starting to boil into full fury when a small symbol caught her eye, barely discernible beneath the layers of dirt and mud. Enyo crouched down and smoothed one hand over a stone near the very base of the tower, revealing a crude drawing of a fish. To the right of that stone was another one. A bird. As she kept crawling about the tower, scrubbing each lowermost piece of stone, Enyo uncovered more symbols of animals, plants, and people.
How strange that Aryus would cover the base of their temple with depictions of life when nothing else bedecked their sacred space. What could it mean?
Frowning, Enyo caught Va'al’s eye where he stood near Maoz. “What do you make of this?” she asked, straightening up and dusting her dirty hands off on her sarong. “There is nothing else— just these little pictures. It seems strange unless it is some part of a game Aryus designed. The idiot.”
Va'al examined the drawings, a smile quirking his lips upwards. “Of course it is—a game or puzzle. This is Aryus we’re talking about. They liked little else more than playing.”
Stepping back and trying to see the temple from a more reasonable perspective, Enyo felt something giveaway under her bare foot. Thinking it a trap, she leaped artfully back, hunkering down into a crouch, ready to attack.
But nothing happened. No warriors sprang up from hidden lairs, no blades flew at her heart. Enyo glared down at the patch of ground. There was something there, twinkling in the dull yellow of the grasslands. She pounced on it, hauling plants up by the root and flinging them over her shoulder. It was a bronze disk, the size of both her hands spread apart. “Look!” she called, her voice full of pride. She had found it. Whatever it was. “Bring me water!” Maoz’s hand came into her periphery with a canteen. Yanking it away, she uncorked it and poured the contents onto the disk set into the earth. Washing the rest of the debris away.
There was an inscription there. Of course. In the old tongue.
Alive as you but without breath
As cold alive as in death
Never a thirst, though I always drink
Dressed in mail, but never a clink
A riddle. She hated riddles. “What is the blasted point of this?!” she hollered down at the disk. “Why would Death need their followers to prove they are canny to enter their
