I held out my hand. “Stop, stop! What the hell? What if I worship you? I’ll do it right now. Just tell me what to do.”
Eris laughed. “I told you already. I want atrueworshipper. That’s the only way this will work. You already embrace the chaos, but it isn’t your religion.Truefaith first requires a crucible. Look at Jesus here. Your mythology put him through insufferable torment.”
“Yeah, it fucking sucked,” Jesus said.
“If you deliberately do any of those things, I swear I will end you.”
She cackled with laughter. “I know, right? I can’t wait.” To Jesus, she said, “Flip it, pet.”
The small robot shoved his tiny Uzi into his waistband and grabbed the coin with two hands. “Up you go,” he said. He heaved the coin.
“No!” I cried, and I reached out and grabbed the coin as it flipped in midair. I grasped it and wrapped it in my right hand. The coin burned, but I didn’t let go.
Eris laughed and clapped with delight. “You picked the fifth side! Great! Chaos wins again!”
I felt the coin dissolve. When I opened my fingers, it was gone, but I now had a swirl pattern tattooed on my palm. The pattern spun on its own, like a slow-motion Signet tattoo. I tried to examine it.
I don’t even know what the hell this is. This bitch is coloring outside the lines.
I just stared at my palm for several moments. Jesus, bored, moved back to the food cart and grabbed another meat skewer.
“What is the fifth choice?” I finally asked.
Eris shrugged and then hopped off the food cart. “It’s one of the other four choices, or two of them, or three of them. Or all of them. Or none of them. Chaos. Random.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. “We’ll see what you get, Carl, my soon-to-be-favorite worshipper.”
[ 36 ]
Eris has left the realm.The Scavenger’s Daughter closes her eyes.
Both Eris and Jesus disappeared. The meat skewer in Jesus’s hand clattered to the top of the food cart. The gremlin, confused, tried to pick it up, but it turned to dust. He muttered something about over-spicing.
“Carl, Carl, I got a weird notification that said there was a god but then it disappeared before I could even read it,” Donut said as she landed right on Imani’s shoulder. “I didn’t get any special upgrades or anything. It happened too fast!”
“I saw it, too,” I said, clenching my hand tight. “The god is gone now.”
“Somebody probably got themselves killed,” Donut muttered.
My heart wouldn’t stop thrashing. At my shoulder, Quemada, oblivious to what had just happened, continued to talk about Emberus, giving me a pep talk about dying as a martyr. I quickly started jotting down everything I had seen and heard, starting with the four sides to the coin.
Was this real? Things had just gone from bad to worse.
First, we had these goddamned races, where we had no agency whatsoever. We were on rails with no ability to alter our own fates unless we just killed everyone. And now this?
That goddamned goddess was just popping around causing... well, causing chaos. If I was understanding her correctly, one of the following four things would happen. Donut would die, I’d get my feet chopped off, “most” of my friends would die, or whatever the hell that last choice was. But because I’d grabbed the coin, I’d unlocked the fifth choice, which made everything random. But I didn’t know if that meant there was a 20% chance that nothing would happen or if the odds were much lower than that, assuming they broke up each possibility equally. Had I made things much worse by grabbing the coin?
And would killing Eris fix the problem? So now I had to kill both Emberus and Eris?
And what else had she said? She’d mentioned something alarming about Britney, but she’d also confirmed it was the pickaxe, which confirmed it was a Ysalte issue. And there was that thing about Florin and all that about the Pineapple Cabaret. What else? I furiously jotted it all down in my mental pad, heart hammering in my chest.
I realized the eye on my chest was still open, and I had to make a conscious effort to close it.
We were playingtheirgame, doingtheirbidding. We had to alter the paradigm. We had to break the game. But how? Time was running out.
I had an idea, but it was so utterly ridiculous, so completely suicidal, that I immediately dismissed it.
Maybe these war mages had an answer to that problem.Maybe.
“Goodness, Carl, are you all right?” Donut asked.