27. Caspian

I was trying not to get angry because if I lost it, Benji would take that as permission and go on a killing spree. I might still do that, but I’d at least hear them out first. Maybe. Everything they’d said so far pissed me off. I knew all the angels wanted me to see things from their point of view, but I didn’t. I could have buried my head in the sand when it came to the Coalition. There had been a very long span of years where me helping Coalition victims and trying to discreetly bring them down could have resulted in me swinging from the gallows with them thinking I was human.

The angels were looking nervously at their Father and I was a little gobsmacked when he just smiled and gave them two thumbs up to tell them to proceed.

“So, first things first. The control room to watch this realm had been previously off limits to the angels. It’s in the Father’s home. Jeqon’s followers found the sigil to banish gods. We weren’t sure if it would work because we thought those were all false gods. We tried to talk him out of using it because if it didn’t work, we’d be punished.

“But then it did work. It emboldened Jeqon and sent him on a power trip. For a lot of us, it opened up about a million questions. The upper choirs seized the Father’s house first and gained control over viewing Earth. I can’t say for sure, but I know some of them would have watched the other gods that live there and watched a few of them figure out where they came from.

“We eventually kicked them out, and we saw the same thing. We learned about self actualization as we watched the other gods talk about it. We taunted the upper choirs with it. It was just another thing that divided us. Some angels thought it was heretical lies by false gods, but for the rest of us, it was devastating. It was like our entire existence and belief was this giant, cosmic joke.”

I was starting to see where this was heading and I hated that I could see things from their point of view. They were isolated in their realm with a distant Father and a fucked-up hierarchy. They were blaming their Father for all of that and he was only really responsible for the hierarchy.

Humans and supernaturals were alike in that we all wanted to know where we came from. We were also the same that in the modern day, you either believed in evolution or you were initially created by a god.

There were about a million different origin stories for shifters and they varied by region. A lot of them centered on various moon goddesses, but some involved a magic user getting bitten by an animal during a ritual. I’d studied a lot of them and self actualization still blew my mind.

“So, who were we supposed to blame after that? You were doing what you were created to do and so were we. Yes, a lot of us thought it was heresy and lies, but just as many thought our actions were being controlled by the beliefs that created us. It created even more factions, but most of them were secret.

“Some of the angels were against harming innocents, but didn’t take a stand against the Coalition because they thought if they could get the Father’s attention and figure out where he was, they could ask him to clarify all of this. Then, you have Jeqon and his followers. They think if they can kill the Father and everyone on this realm, they’ll be free and no one can control them anymore.”

“Can they even do that?” Medusa asked. “As far as we know, only a god can kill another god and the only beings capable of wiping out everyone on an entire realm are gods with an apocalypse associated with them. None of them have been interested in triggering it.”

“Our Father is associated with the Book of Revelations. Jeqon wants to capture him, force him to trigger it, and then kill him.”

Lucifer fell out laughing, and it was totally inappropriate. I got what everyone who’d known gods for a long time or was a god was saying, but at the same time, the angels could have found something from a dead religion that was older than the pantheons any of these gods came from. Lucifer needed to take this seriously.

“Sorry, did you chuckle fucks actually read the Book of Revelations? You can’t force him to trigger it because he can’t. There’s a whole fuck-ton of people involved in that spell. You’d have to go to Hell, fetch Satan, and try to force him to impregnate a woman or at least get a sperm sample. Satan dislikes kids, so he’ll kill you for even asking. He’s also tickled pink by the various Satanists who don’t even worship him and he owns an island in the Bahamas he likes to vacation at. He won’t help.

“You also have to get all four Riders involved. They aren’t all men, so the whole Horsemen of the Apocalypse thing was just the patriarchy erasing Pestilence and War. You have to get them on board, too. They’ve got some pretty sweet gigs with their respective powers and they prefer helping rather than destroying. Those five aren’t going to help jumpstart the apocalypse.”

“It’s true. My particular apocalypse has several key players and like everyone else, we aren’t interested in starting it. No one has the stomach for it and we like this realm.”

“First things first, do they actually know a way to kill a god?” Pax asked. “They haven’t wanted to fight ours. They’ve been banishing them. It seems like they’d actually want to test that before they captured someone who can smite them.”

That made a lot of sense. It would be pretty fucking stupid to kidnap any god unless you had the know how to finish it. Even if they let angels they thought were dissenters do it, that wouldn’t stop that god from hunting the rest of them down.

“We don’t know. Jeqon only sent his most loyal out to do research because he didn’t trust the rest of us to come back or share if we found something major. He likes to make big speeches, but he only shares information with everyone if it benefits him. He pulled everyone into a meeting to teach us the sigil and the chant to banish a god because he wanted us to graffiti our realm with it, but he hasn’t actually said his angels have found something to contain and kill a god. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how.”

“Yes, it does,” I said. “There were about sixty of you at the prison. I doubt that was sixty dissenters because they didn’t send that many to attack my house. Anything they have is untested. If someone had tested it and killed a god, I’m guessing Dionysus would know about it.”

At least, that’s what I was banking on. He seemed to know all the gods on this realm. He said he’d felt it when Orion Onyx was created. I didn’t know if they could feel it if a god died. I imagined the blowback from that was intense. Maybe it would have been intense enough for everyone to have felt it, even if they weren’t a god.

“We know,” Dionysus said. “I’m one of the Dying Gods, but I’m also a Rebirth god. Everyone felt it when I died, but Zeus was the only one Hera was afraid of. He showed up and made sure I didn’t stay dead.”

“Can you feel it if you’re not related?” Pax pressed.

“Yes,” Hades said. “You’d actually be able to tell as well. Humans would just think it was a spree of natural disasters. It would feel like a dark omen to everyone else. It hasn’t happened in a very long time and it would take a bunch of people self actualizing a being with enough power to take on a god. A sigil to keep us out is one thing, but containing us or killing us is another story. Only another god is powerful enough for that.”

“Well, bro, no offense to everyone in this room because I guess you’re kind of cool, but you kind of set yourself up as the grand poobah, said all the other gods were false, and stole their believers. How do we know Jeqon isn’t working with another god?” Benji asked.

That was a damned good question. The gods I’d met so far had been decent and they all seemed interested in meeting the new god, but Medusa, Dionysus, and Persephone were living proof that not all the gods were decent. The birth and death of religion depended on the believers.

“Not any of the gods from this realm,” Dionysus said. “Between various college courses, the reemergence of paganism, and fuck, even paranormal smut a lot of us are getting belief again. We’re older and wiser and we understand the cyclic nature of things. If they found someone, it’s not anyone living in this realm.”

“None of the afterlife realms ,either,” Hades said. “They just aren’t interested. Their realms are a little more manageable without the influx of souls. They are enjoying themselves.”

“Some of the other god kings would. Zeus would do it and so would a few others if they thought it would make them powerful again,” Persephone said.

“Old-school Zeus would. Same with some of the other gods. Not in the modern day. We understand belief and self actualization better. They haven’t yet, but if they wanted revenge on one of us for killing their deity, they could self actualize a new race of god killers. They still could, but none of us are dumb enough to give them a reason,” Hades said.

We needed to be working in facts, not theories because based on what I’d heard so far, some of the gods were that dumb. I needed to redirect all of them because I hadn’t gotten this far helping Coalition victims by running with random theories. Any ideas I might have had about any of this had been totally wrong.

I needed to redirect because we were wasting time.