Crane's Demand

Young gods often flexed their power. They would rage across continents, spark wars and controversy, fight with tooth and claw until brought back down into their place. Often, their fellows would do it, content to let them throw tantrums like spoiled children until they became too annoying and use it as an excuse to flex their own power, a reminder not to the young one but to their own following of just who they were.
Goddesses differed. When a goddess flexed their power, it was often less about seeing what they could do. It was about a message. Born naught with the silver spoon in their mouths, wrath of Goddesses always held with the mortals, even when they eventually were put back in their places.
Especially when they were put back in their places.
Soliairs knew this.
They knew Shia knew it as well.
Both gods, one of death and its inescapable reach, one of cranes and the ordinary folk, stood at a standstill at the border of the living world and Limbo.
The flintlock on Soliairs’ hip was loaded and chamber still warm from the warning shot that grazed shi’s hide, the godsbane that coated those silver bullets and had ripped through shi’s rotting flesh itched and tinged with the memory of pain. Their eyes were fierce, as they always were, even when they were mortal.
Beneath them though, their paint and makeup were smudged from endless tears, eyes heavy with bags from days without sleep but determination to not rest kept them going.
Even goddesses, no matter how mighty, how young, how bold-hearted, had breaking points and Shia always was one. What was a goddess to the god who had not known life in millenia? The god born of a dying world, the god whose duty was to listen to the thousands of echoed wailings of the grieving and desperate, to meet each one with the stoic nature that death was immovable?
But the goddess was smart, even at their most deranged, to strike out at death itself.
“Give him back to me, bring him back or I will tell them.”
“Tell who, tell what, exactly?” Flowers and grasses wilted and died at the drops of shi’s blood dripping on them, the sick ichor too much to handle.
“We are not gods. We hold no more power over the world than mortals do and are slaves to their ideals and associations.”
Shia huffed at that. Most mortals had already figured that out long before, it was no secret but an unspoken truth of the world. God, celebrity, public figure, all were the same and under the whims of the world and what it wanted them to be. A god who never wanted to be war was such anyway, a god who never wanted to be calamity grew into their role, a god everlasting became dust when the world was done.
As such it was meant to be, it always became.
Before shi stood a goddess who didn’t want to be, and yet, they were.
“Soliairs, you may as well tell mortals the sky is blue, the sun warm, and that you are heartbroken. They all know this.”
“I will tell every mortal we are fallible, that they can kill us, become us, replace us.”
The last of the threat laid heavy on shi’s ears, long rotted away but in phantom memory still ticked up at the statement. Most other gods did not know how to truly kill one another for good if shi didn’t allow it. How did they?
As if sensing the question, Soliairs once again raised the pistol, cocking it, a bullet in the chamber. A useless gesture, only to be accentuating the words that were the true shot to shi’s heart and ice in shi’s dead veins.
“You and Mora are not the ones to create gods and not the only ones to allow them to pass, it happened long before either of you, long before the Blackhide. Every god before them, The Ivory Sun, The Crestfallen, The Wordeater, was a god that lived and died without you, only on the whim of mortals and nothing has changed but whether or not you allow it.”
“And how are you sure of that, Child of Defiance?” Shis still put on the air of being unwavering, unmoved, but at shi’s core, there was a trembling in the memory of fear, of being cornered prey. Forgotten names, ones that should have been long buried, had been spoken. Names that were erased, wiped clean, their very existence but a specter now turned a wraith to be wielded like a weapon. “Myth and legend, nothing more, stories between mortals of magic they did not understand. I am far older than even Wordeater ever was.”
“I’ve seen them and their accounts, I saw The Fates you thought were gone. Mortals will know how to make and kill gods”
No.
“The Fates told me, they whispered to me as they do you. Fates do not lie and only speak truths, you say it yourself on every moon.”
No.
“I am the god of the oceans, of the people, ‘Child of Defiance’ as you said yourself, Shia. Mortalkind will be no more and they will heed my word, they already stir in my favor.”
Damn the fish and his seeking, damn the peacock and his favors, damn life and his acceptance of radical change, to allow the crane to find things none should know-
“Your tantrum will be meaningless. In centuries as the clock turns you will grow cold to the losses of mortals as every god does, as every god tires of things that live bright, hot, shiny little lives that fade in moments compared to your own. You will regret wasting your choice on but one you have known for a briefest of moments when you realize you will never again save another as him, not even your own blood.”
Soliairs flinched, slightly, at the statement. Shia knew of the life they had yet to bring and if The Fates had told them such forbidden things, then they also had told them of what was yet to come.
But yet the goddess stood firm, despite the wound.
“One man, or the era of gods. It's your choice.”
“Fine. You can have your mortal, but know this, it comes at the cost that you and he shall ever be bound in my name.”
Soliairs spat, the drool running down the bone of shi’s face.
“I spit on your name.”
“You don’t have to like it, only accept the deal.”
Shi extended the scythe, mark of one of many gods to come to a deal, paid for with a rib. Soliairs holstered their gun and drew a blade, slicing through their wrist and dug, a measly tendon in offering.
A final act of defiance, to not even let shi claim the offering or how much, but be it a pound of flesh taken with shi’s own metaphorical hand or an entire body, it was the same. If all worked as it ever had before, it would be their final defiance of how things were and should be.
Just the same, the scrap of fresh parts was a good replacement for the tendon long ago worn to dust in shi’s jaw.
Fates whispered of the consequences, invisible even to the eyes of most lesser gods. ‘God of Unending Love has been born’, ‘God of Devotion’, ‘The God Who Goes Against Death’. Soliairs’ eyes tracked their shifting and twisting forms, something they should not have been able to see. Fervent and Olrath maybe, at times could hear them, occasionally could see but they were old, a different breed. One so young should not have been able to, not without help of something else.
Someone had not been keeping their end of the deal.
Someone had loose lips.
Someone who would have been able see what they gained from it all or did not care as long as it happened at all, a deeply wrong and troubling notion to allow such a goddess, barely a god yet themself, to threaten with real intent to not just rock but shatter the foundations of the world.
There was work to do, but first the menial task of regulating the dead to find one of their own, no doubt a bloated corpse drifting on the seafloor, and put the man back together so the goddess would not attempt to go back on the deal out of spite. New flesh needed to be sowed, archives combed to find the man’s visage, depths of Limbo plunged to drag him back, forever sear his eyes with the mark of being something never meant to exist.
All for the sake of one lovesick fool who did not know when to let go or what should not be broken.
Shia snarled, jaw popping back into place as the rush of fresh blood and meat quickly faded.
“It will take time, but he will be back to you, Child of Defiance.”
“He had better, what’s stopping me from telling mortals anyway if you try to trick me?”
For a moment, Shia considered activating and unleashing the link they had given to shi, filling that missing tendon with pure death magic to bind them like any other foolish god. All living things fell when the raw force of death filled them, as nature intended.
“If you want him whole, as he should be, as he was, you will not rush it. Reviving the dead is an artform, and I a perfectionist sculptor of my subjects.” Shia turned away from the goddess, marching toward the arcing lines in the sky to Limbo’s entrance. Towards the twisted corrupted trees, the soils that smelled ever of decay. “Try not to shake the world in the meantime, young goddess.”
“Fuck you.”
“I lack the parts, they decayed long before you were but a thought in your ancestors’ eyes.”