Moira #26: Starfish (Patreon)

As they walk away from the karaoke bar, it becomes clear the epicenter of whatever Moira started isn’t the bar. It’s Moira. The crowd’s not following the group of goddesses as much as loosely encircling them, getting larger as they move. Dancing, embracing, kissing. And occasionally getting larger in height, not quantity, although violence from newly giant citizens stays very directed: checkpoints demolished, cop cars smashed.

Hazel’s giving Diana a sidelong glance as they move. “How did you—”

“Find you?” The sheep waves her arms, looking exaggeratedly from side to side. “I guess I just picked up some subtle clues you all might be in the area.”

“I mean in Fresno. How are you here? Now?”

Moira’s tone is flat. “She came in with Celestial.”

Shocked hurt wells up in Rhiannon’s eyes. “Is she right? You’re on their side now? After—”

“I’m on the side of not having a war between gods! You understand that’s where we’re heading, don’t you?”

“Do you understand Celestial’s beta-testing a state-of-the-art corporate dystopia here?” Hazel glares back at Diana.

“Yes, Hazel, actually I do, and I want to stop it. I also want to stop the literal end of the world.” Diana’s voice rises angrily. “So maybe we could stop treating each other like enemies.”

Moira sighs. “There’s an all-night diner a couple of blocks from the hotel.”

They walk on without speaking, surrounded by the increasing noise of the divine party expanding out from downtown, until they get to Moira’s car. Stetson sits in the back between Rhiannon and Diana, ears down, looking flustered.

As Moira drives along surface roads, her route draws a fracture line in Celestial’s order, people walking out on the street behind them and gaping. Diana rubs her face.

“All this has something to do with the test Celestial’s about to conduct, doesn’t it?” Rhiannon asks. “All the new enforced hierarchy.”

“I think so,” Diana says.

When they get inside the diner, it’s straight out of the 1970s, tan linen wallpaper, a dark green patterned carpet that tries and fails to hide years of spills. The air smells like grease and burned coffee. There aren’t any other customers in the place right now. The sole feline waitress walks over to them, and looks between Stetson and the rest. “I’m sorry, we can’t…” She trails off when Diana flashes her QuickPass card. “Ah, sit anywhere, ma’am. I’ll get some menus.”

Hazel blinks, then looks at Diana’s card. Instead of the blue herbivore or orange carnivore background, hers is steel gray. She frowns self-consciously, putting it away, and strides toward a larger round booth big enough for all five.

The others sit down after her, leaving her on one end, Stetson closest to her. She looks down and finally addresses him. “So, just who are you?”

The coyote smiles up nervously. “I’m Stetson. Nice to meet you.”

Diana keeps looking down at him, as if expecting more explanation, until Rhiannon starts speaking.

“The last goddess from Celestial we heard from told us we were inadvertently bringing about the end of the world by fighting against the natural order. At that point, either she turned your high priest into a monster or let him turn into a monster. She watched him rampage across your worshippers and come alarmingly close to killing all of us before running him through with a giant sword, letting him literally die in your arms. Then she went back to Celestial and, I presume, helped with their PR campaign to convince anyone who believed we were real gods that we were actually demons.” The squirrel steeples her hands on the table, leaning forward. “If I’ve gotten any of that wrong, feel free to jump in.”

Diana looks down. “Do you think going to them was easy for me?”

“Kinda looks that way,” Hazel says.

The waitress comes by and pours them all cups of coffee, but something in her clicks when she meets Moira’s eyes. She looks around at the other women and starts shaking. “I didn’t—what—”

Diana puts her hand gently on the cat’s. “Just coffee is fine for now, please. Don’t be afraid of us.”

She nods hurriedly, leaving a tray of sugar packets and artificial creamers.

“I needed to try to understand what they wanted. Why they do what they do, why they believe what they believe.” Diana looks around at all of them. “And I couldn’t get that by going back to you.”

Hazel starts to snap back, but Moira holds up a hand. “So what do they believe?”

“Do you remember when we went to Hazel and Rhiannon’s place, the first time I met both of them? When you deified Rhiannon?” Diana tilts her head. “I told you that you were right. The natural order needed to end. You lamented that you’d thought that even if you’d lost the battle, you might win the war. That mortals losing their faith in gods might lead to them upending the natural order on their own. But they never did.”

Moira nods slowly. “I remember.”

“Maybe they would have, if it wasn’t for the Order of Caeles. And now, Celestial.”

Moira’s eyes remain locked onto the sheep.

“They believe that mortals would upend the natural order on their own, if they were allowed to—but they also believe that would mean the end of this cycle. Your first war would have ended it, too. And the end of the cycle is the end of the world as we know it.”

“So, what, then?” Hazel arches a brow. “Nunwick thinks the way to stop the world from ending is to stop progress?”

“That’s not—”

“Yes, it is!” Hazel’s tone becomes uncharacteristically fierce. “Believe me, I understand wanting to hold on to what you have, even if you’re a god. Maybe especially if you’re a self-made one, like Nunwick seems to be. But what kind of world do we have if he wins?” She pulls her QuickPass out and slides it across the table. “Walk around Fresno with one of these cards, not yours. See where Stetson can go that we can’t. Seeing where we can’t go together. Thinking about how that’s already tied to policing and businesses, and how it could be tied to everything else. Housing. Medical services. Banking. How many more tiers there might be.”

Rhiannon cuts in. “Do our cards also tag us as women? Hazel as disabled? Me as trans? And you as part of the one percent of the one percent who gets to set the rules?”

“I want to use my power to make the world better, too, but I can’t do it if there’s no world left to change!” Diana rubs her face, then shakes her head, taking a sip of the diner’s dreadful coffee. “I didn’t come in with Celestial. I came here on my own, using information they may not be happy to learn I have, to try to meet all of you before whatever’s about to happen starts happening.”

“What is about to happen?” Stetson murmurs.

“I don’t know. They don’t want what happened in Black Oak to happen again, though.”

“Black Oak wasn’t the first,” Rhiannon says.

“I know.”

“Or the second.”

Diana sighs. “Are you so sure they’re lying?”

“Are you so sure they care?” Rhiannon spreads her hands. “Maybe what they do in a few hours just kills half the people in Fresno instead of all of them, and they say ‘fifty percent improvement’ and put a big fat X in the success column.”

“What if he’s right, Rhiannon? What if it’s a choice between a hundred thousand people and billions?”

“What gives Nunwick—or you, or me—the right to make that choice for them?”

Diana slams her hands down on the table, rattling the coffee mugs. “Because we’re gods!”

Everyone but Moira stares at her. The hare looks unreadably distant.

“We affect mortals on small and large scales everywhere we go, in everything we do.” She waves toward an outside window. “No one out there woke up this morning knowing they’d stage a revolution tonight in the form of a street party. We’ve all treated mortals like they barely matter, and we’ve also all treated them like they’re the reason we exist. Both of those attitudes are in our nature now. Individual mortals may not matter, but collectively, they’re our responsibility. And as many horrific things as Celestial may have done, isn’t stopping the end of the world a responsibility worthy of gods?”

“Starfish,” Stetson mumbles under his breath.

Diana looks down at him.

The coyote sinks into the booth cushions, stammering. “J-just remembering an old parable, the kind of silly trite thing you learn in Sunday school or put on posters in the office. It’s about a child walking along a beach after a storm, throwing starfish one by one back into the sea. An adult stops her and says, ‘There’s so many of them, child. Saving just a few of them hardly matters.’ So she thinks about that.” He looks up at Diana. “Then she picks up another starfish and throws it in the ocean, and says, ‘It matters to that one.’”

The sheep frowns, leaning back.

The hare picks up her cup of black coffee, sips, grimaces, and adds sugar and creamer. “It’s not like we thought about the end times often, but we all knew the mythological world was on a cycle. We knew our time would come to an end. Daranu never said we should try and stop the cycle from turning. I’d have told you it sounded like something a mortal would say. Maybe a selfish demigod.” She takes another sip of coffee and grimaces again.

“They never planned to stick around for the end of the world, though, did they?” Rhiannon snorts. “They just didn’t share the escape plan with you and Briley.”

“Briley chose to stay here. I’m the one who was left behind.” Moira looks into her coffee cup. “Do they know about Briley?”

“I haven’t told them.”

Moira narrows her eyes thoughtfully. “I’m the only old god Celestial knows is left in the mortal realm. Yet they acted like I didn’t exist until I started affecting the world again. Even after that, they still didn’t take me seriously enough not to send out a low-level idiot. Why wasn’t Nunwick himself meeting me in a Paris café in the 1700s to tell me about the new, glorious purpose I could have?”

Diana shakes her head again after a moment. “Parker mentioned that Max went rogue when he contacted you, but that’s all I know. Mr. Nunwick kept returning to how you chose war over love, though, like he was personally offended.”

“I chose war because of love.” Moira drums her fingers on the table. “So, bottom line, Diana. You want us not to interfere. To let Celestial run the test here and see what happens.”

“I want—I want you to consider it.”

Everyone looks at Moira.

“The location on the list Rhiannon decoded is just an empty warehouse. Did Celestial move it because they thought we had the list?”

“I don’t know. I’m not supposed to have this list, either.”

“Is the location you have here in Fresno on Pine Avenue?”

Diana hesitates. “No.”

“Where is it?”

Diana meets Moira’s eyes, remaining silent.

The hare leans back, crossing her arms. “All right, how about we meet you halfway.”

The sheep tilts her head.

“You give us the correct address, and we do what we were going to do: wait. If we don’t see a little apocalypse starting, we keep waiting. If we do, we stop it.”

“Before you do anything against—”

“Or,” Moira continues, in a flat don’t-even-try-to-argue tone, “you can fuck off right now and hope Celestial has a good life insurance plan. Your choice.”

Diana swallows, then closes her eyes. “Off Olive and Fowler, near the golf course.”

Hazel rolls her chair back a fraction, looking at Moira. “So do we…?”

“We keep our word.” Moira waves at the waitress. “And get mozzarella sticks.”

They’ve just put in a second appetizer order when the sun comes up again.

They all stare out the diner’s windows. No, it’s still night. But the buildings a block away glow so brightly they’re hard to look directly at, their edges outlined with lightning. As the goddesses watch, the light hops from building to building, bending and flickering.

Moira rises to her paws. “I thought this thing was supposed to go off closer to sunrise,” she hisses to Rhiannon.

The squirrel checks her phone frantically. “That’s what the time says!”

Stetson’s watching the window warily. “Maybe that’s when it finishes, not starts.”

The waitress stops what she’s doing, walking toward the window. “What is that?”

The light reaches the buildings across the street. The paint’s visibly cracking and peeling, wood weathering, metal rusting. “A very bad sign,” Hazel answers. “Doesn’t look like they’ve changed so much, huh?”

“They—” Diana rises to her feet, horrified. “If the changes were enforcing order, what you’ve done tonight—”

“Fucking don’t,” Hazel snarls. “They know what we’ve done tonight and they’re doing this anyway.”

Moira glances at Rhiannon. “Where’s Olive and—”

“A few blocks southeast. You’ll see the golf course.”

The light arcs across the street, hitting the diner. Abruptly the windows become too bright to look at, and the cat jumps back with a shriek. Moira hurries to her, and the light leaps around the front half of the diner—over both the cat and the hare.

Moira winces. The waitress, though, stumbles, falling against the taller woman. As Moira catches her, she’s looking into the face of a much older, frailer, terrified cat. Then she’s looking at a cloud of dissolving dust.

Moira’s eyes widen, and she looks over at the table—at Stetson—just as the light reaches it. Horrified realization flashes across everyone’s face. Stetson scrambles back against the wall.

“No!” The hare leaps for him, even though she has no idea what to do, even though she suspects it’s already too late.

Diana, though, moves faster, whirling to tackle the coyote. The light flashes over both of them, and they vanish together.

Rhiannon gasps. “Are they…?”

“I don’t know,” Moira says hoarsely. “We have to go.” She takes a deep breath and runs for the door, growing with each step, smashing out of the already-ruined building.

As her vantage point rises, she sees the light flowing, forming a vortex spiraling back toward a center point a couple miles away. It’s brighter at the expanding circumference, where it consumes buildings and cars and, at the brightest sparks, people. It hasn’t reached downtown yet, but it’s taken the freeway they’d come into town on, residential areas, part of the airport, the Hampton Inn they’re staying at.

She looks toward the equally giant Hazel and Rhiannon. “Go save the rest of the town before it’s too late.”

Rhiannon gapes. “How?”

“Improvise.”

Hazel looks dismayed, but nods. They turn. Moira doesn’t wait.

A hundred-foot-high hare in a full run causes her own earthquakes, buildings ripped up with each step, cars flying, a cloud of destruction behind her. It doesn’t matter. The area she’s carving a path through has already had its life pulled into the vortex. It’s already lost.

As she gets closer to what had been Hank’s Swank Par Three Golf Course, the force of the energy around her gets stronger. It’s like fighting through a hip-high hurricane. The vortex’s center forms a flickering sphere of energy, multicolored lightning dancing within, shooting into an intact, unaged, and incongruously normal-looking single-story brick office building. Even though the night’s still hot, the ozone-scented wind cuts through her like blades of ice, and the crackling electricity bristles her fur.

She’s tempted to just stomp. But as little as there may be in creation that can kill a god, she knows better than anyone that other gods can. And the truth is, she needs to know what’s in there.

Moira returns to a smaller size—still half again as high as her normal height—and staggers in the gale as it howls around her. From down here, the lightning looks like the heart of a supernova.

She starts to run again, arms crossed in front of her like a brace. Jeans and t-shirt transform to leather leggings and armor, short sword strapped to her back. Earlier tonight she was, for the first time in far too long, fully the goddess of love. Now, for the first time in even longer, she is fully the goddess of war.

Hitting the sphere feels like hitting electrified barbed wire. Her armor and exposed fur smokes as she barrels toward the building’s front door, smashing it with a battering ram kick. She ducks through.

The three BlueGuard officers, all wolves, standing closest to it aren’t paying that close attention to their post. They’re watching something inside. When they hear her crashing entrance, they turn. The one who moves to grab her gets the same kick that destroyed the door, and doesn’t end up in any better shape. One of them’s fast enough to grab his weapon before her huge hand wraps around his face. She catches the other one the same way and slams their heads together without breaking stride.

They’d been staring at a replica of the crazy underground room from Black Oak: the same massive machinery, the same long control console. Now a half-dozen men in lab coats scurry between them all. The machines are on, visibly vibrating, lightning crackling along their housings. Whatever they’re doing, they sound like they’re ready to explode.

The ominous ray gun is here, too, pointed at the chair in the center of the ritual circle. Like the machinery, it’s turned on, lightning crackling around it, firing a thick, fuzzy multicolored beam at a scrawny lion in a prison-like jumpsuit chained to the chair, bathing him in its energy. From his tortured-sounding screams, he’s not enjoying the process. Surely that’s not Nunwick? His aura is fatally mortal. But someone here—

“I’m telling you, if we don’t shut it down, it’ll take the whole city,” a scientist shouts over the din. He’s a lanky fox facing a tall lioness in an immaculate business suit, and he looks terrified. No wonder: the lioness isn’t just angry, she’s an angry god.

“The data are more important than the city,” the lioness growls back. Then she looks straight at Moira, eyes narrowing. The scientists look over at the hare, too. She claps her hands once and gestures. Soldiers pour into the room from both sides, seemingly from nowhere. “Keep her occupied until we finish!”

Moira’s a big target, but she’s a big target in motion before they open fire. She leaps up at a high angle, vaulting off the nearest, highest machine sideways, spinning mid-air as she draws her sword. She plummets into the middle of one line of soldiers, sword swinging, and grabs one hapless tiger to use as a shield as his companions go down like saplings under an axe.

The soldiers aren’t quite mortal, but they’re not gods, not even demigods. Her sword—and the tiger’s corpse—deflect enough bullets to keep her almost unscathed as she mows through the squadron, heading directly for the lioness.

The lightning coursing around the room flickers, and the gun’s beam narrows. The lion in the chair goes limp.

The lioness whirls on the hapless fox. “What’s happening?”

“We’re not drawing anymore!” He punches at a console frantically.

The lioness starts to respond, but Moira lunges, and her sword tip stops just before the goddess’s throat. “What’s happening is we’ve saved you from turning Fresno into another Black Oak,” she growls. “You’re welcome.”

The lioness looks at her with undisguised loathing. “You have no idea what you’ve ruined,” she hisses. She clenches her fists, and abruptly Moira finds herself rocketed backward, crashing into a pump housing with enough force to shatter every bone in a mortal body. As she tumbles down to the floor, stars swim around her vision.

“We’ve got enough data, Lady Ironheart,” she hears the fox say. “Let us go. Please.”

Moira gets back to her feet in time to watch all the scientists scurrying madly, two picking up the dead lion from the chair, others hastily turning machines off.

She stalks forward. “You’re not going anywhere until I get answers.”

Another lion walks in front of her: a broad, handsome one in another perfectly tailored business suit. His eyes meet Moira’s for a moment, cool, appraising.

“To this day, I don’t know what my father saw in you.” He claps his hands once. The scientists and the lions all disappear, leaving Moira alone with the corpses scattered around the control room.

Moira furrows her brow, lowering her sword. Not drawing what anymore? What data do they have enough of?

His father?

But the noise from the machines isn’t fading. It’s increasing in volume, in pitch, in vibration. They haven’t turned them off. They’ve turned them to self-destruct.

In a flash, Moira’s outside the building. The vortex is gone, but the lightning sphere around the building has grown bigger, more violent, sizzling. The ground is on fire, and the flames are spreading. The newly fifty-year-old buildings in all directions are dry tinder.

Shit. She’s not a god of—of fire suppression. A storm, maybe, wind and rain. No, a fire break—

A giantess steps out of nothing, a huge, soot-covered hoof landing in front of the hare. Her hand reflexively goes to her sword hilt as the black sheep crouches, lowering a cupped hand.

Diana’s fingers uncurl to reveal Stetson, barely conscious, with new streaks of grey fur. But alive.

Moira pulls the limp coyote into her arms, breathing a relieved sigh, giving him a kiss. He returns it weakly.

“I’m sending you home,” she murmurs in his ear. He smiles. She kisses him again, then teleports him away.

Moira steels herself, and then she’s Diana’s size. “They’re gone. How do we stop it?”

“I don’t know. Brute force. You stop the fire.” She starts getting larger. And larger.

Moira steps back, then brings her arms out in front of her. A mile away, a geyser erupts with the force of a newly born river. She moves her hands apart, and the water follows where her hands point, rapids rushing into a curve.

Diana, now dwarfing the already-giant hare, brings her hoof down on the building. The lightning warps around her planted foot, racing up her leg, up her whole body. She chokes back a scream, but keeps grinding.

Moira’s geyser-river-lake cuts through the land until it meets itself, two ends crashing together in a wave. As fast as the fire moves, it hasn’t reached the water yet, and the moat is too wide to cross.

The lightning is gone, too. Diana collapses. Moira kneels, growing until she’s big enough to gather the sheep in her arms, and turns to face downtown.

Rhiannon and Hazel tower over the buildings like mountains. Except the buildings are at Rhiannon’s shoulder level. Fresno is levitating. All of downtown, most of the adjoining neighborhoods. The goddesses saved the city from Celestial’s infernal machines by lifting it out of the way.

Well, most of the city. Moira walks forward, over the ashes of the neighborhood around the golf course, stepping over the moat.

Rhiannon and Hazel have spotted her, and the buildings and cars and pedestrians slowly lower back down into place, skyscrapers fusing back to foundations, infrastructure flickering back to life as power and water lines reconnect. There’s a lot, a lot of screaming and panic, but there’s just as much celebration. It’s hard to tell how much the mortals understand about what just happened—hell, she doesn’t understand all of it—but it’s clear many have figured out that as terrifying as what just happened was, it saved them from something far more terrifying they could literally see coming for them. And they’ve figured out that the beautiful, impossibly enormous women they’re at the feet of did it.

She walks more carefully, joining the other goddesses at downtown’s edge, in as clear a space as she can find. Diana’s stirring in her arms; she sets her down and helps her stand.

“The levitating was Rhiannon’s idea,” Hazel says. “It was fucking awesome.”

“Yeah.” Moira nods. “It was.”

“I’m almost afraid to breathe at this size,” Rhiannon murmurs, looking down at the gathering crowds, at news helicopters, at people cheering from rooftops, at literally tens of thousands on their knees. “We’re fully out of stealth mode, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.” Moira speaks more softly. “We are.”