Bone Gods

Because you are a good person, Petunia Caldecott, and you should not have let the Hag and her general with his dead man’s eyes drag you into the mud.
    “Just tell me what’s coming,” Pete said. “And I’ll find a way to stop it. Don’t just leave me here. I’m listening now. Please.” She refused to believe the wetness on her face was more tears. “I was wrong,” Pete whispered. “Tell me what’s going to happen.”
    The Hecate came back to her. She placed her palm against Pete’s cheek and stared into her eyes. It was such a human, mothering gesture that Pete nearly recoiled. Gentleness should not come from a being that didn’t even understand the concept of compassion.
    You really want to see what I see? the Hecate whispered. You truly desire?
    Pete nodded wordlessly. The Hecate turned her around to look down the other side of the valley, where the ground sloped inland to eventually end in the motorway that lead into Galway proper.
    There are triads in the Black, and there are triads before the Black, life and birth and death, stretching back to the beginning. At one time we were separate, and at one time we stood joined.
    Below Pete, clouds blacker than any soot crawled across the valley, and crimson droplets spattered against the back of her hands and her cheeks. She swiped at them, the blood leaving streaky tracks.
    Still , the Hecate ordered her. It’s a memory of the land, Petunia. It can’t touch you. Gods were born and gods died, and their corpses and their afterbirth became grave things. Other things , the Hecate whispered in her ear. The earth rippled under Pete’s boots, and from far below she heard a scream, expressed more as an earthquake than a sound.
    They spilled their blood on the earth, and they gave their seed to heroes, and some of us birthed mages and monsters and some of us birthed your dreams , the Hecate said. Pete saw the clouds descend toward the ground, a clinging black mist that withered wherever it touched. A fat white sheep grazing the hillside tried to escape and was instantly reduced to a pile of bloated entrails.
    Only one gave death, rather than birth. Pete saw a figure step out of the fog, not a spirit but a whole man, clad in black, fingers extraordinarily long, with black, oil-fed flames dancing across his black, fathomless eyes.
    He killed what he touched. The ground where he stood turned to salt, and the cities he visited turned to ashes. The Hecate’s voice was no longer a reverent whisper, but scornful. She bit off each word and spat it at the figure. We spilled his blood, but we did not know what we’d done. When we cut him down, stopped his march across the face of the Black toward the living world, he gave us his revenge—a child.
    The ground rattled again, and Pete lost her footing, going hard onto her hands and knees. A stone cut her palm, and the figure in the valley swiveled, elongated nostrils flaring. Pete met its eyes and clapped her bloody hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. It was like pressing hot needles into her brain, directly through her eye sockets. The thing below wasn’t simply wreathed in black magic—he was the source of it. The ground zero of the wave of malice that coated the valley, turning it into an abattoir for anything living.
    The god of plague giving birth to the one thing that no god or demon could slay. The Hecate removed her hand from Pete. Irony is not lost on gods, Petunia. And the men trying to free the child from its bonds do not realize what will happen if it becomes so.
    Pete stayed where she was, sitting back on her heels, trying to quell the wave of nausea and pain. The clouds rolled past, and the bloody rain dried on her skin, and it was as if nothing had happened to the valley at all.
    And the Hag , said the Hecate, is no better. She is power hungry, and she will use the child to spread the armies of Death to the daylight world. And then, because she is arrogant and grasping, she will inevitably lose control, and the child will become as his father. She smoothed her hands over her dress. Nergal was slain before the world, but he has tried to return before. If the Morrigan weakens the Black, he will succeed.
    “So that’s his name,” Pete said softly. “I wondered.”
    A name , the Hecate said. There are many more for what he is.
    “Can’t you stop her?” Pete said. “The Morrigan? You’re stronger. You walk the gateways.”
    If the dragon crawls up out of its prison, I will perish , the Hecate