The City That Would Eat the World Preview Chapter #2

Just a reminder: The City That Would Eat the World, Book 1 of More Gods Than Stars, is available for preorder now in ebook and audio, and will be out on February 11th!

Chapter 2: Flashback: The Golden Child

Thea was eight the first time she was possessed by a god, and twenty-seven the first time she witnessed a god being murdered.

The former was uncommonly young, the latter was rare to the point of myth. The former was only of particular interest to Thea and her family, the latter was world-shaking.

Yet the former was, in many ways, more important than the latter. After all, if Thea had never been possessed by that small god as a child, she likely never would have been there to witness the murder of Faneras, God of Unclean Knives.

It hadn’t been a god of any importance that had possessed Thea a month after her eighth birthday. It was a quiet little thing that hadn’t announced its presence even to her, at first. It wasn’t a god of health or of strength, nor even a god of climbing or hiding.

It was a god of a children’s ball game.

The game didn’t have a proper name— it was just a bunch of children kicking a ball around a street, dodging passersby and sometimes landing it into an arbitrary goal. The rules changed daily, if the children acknowledged rules at all, and teams were ever-fluid, protean things.

Thea was just a grubby, undistinguished member of the kinderswarm. Only her parents and the other children could likely tell her apart, to all the passersby she was just a minor obstacle in the street. And even among the other children, she was just one of them, no one particularly special.

Until the nameless little god possessed her.

Thea went from just being another pair of feet to the undisputed queen of the street, the absolute champion of the game. It was a gradual process— each day, she seemed to have just a slightly keener grasp of where the ball was going to go, seemed to be able to guide it just a little more precisely with her own kicks, until she was dancing around everyone else, until only the biggest and fastest of the other children could stand up to her. She went from begging to select teammates to having teams beg her to join.

And, as the nameless little god’s blessings grew stronger, and she grew more and more unstoppable, there were inevitably accusations of cheating.

When the children took the issue to their parents, of course, they immediately suspected what was going on. And, rather than Thea getting punished, her extended family threw her a great party in the family compound, and the accusations of cheating were forgotten with liberal bribes of cake and candy for the other neighborhood children.

The first time a child was given a godgift or possessed by a god is almost always a cause for celebration, but children as young as Thea rarely had strong enough souls to accept boons or gods. It was hardly unknown, but certainly uncommon enough that Thea’s family celebrated her as a prodigy, lavished her with resources and education beyond any of her many siblings or cousins or second cousins.

The little nameless god didn’t stay with her for long— under the attention and pressures from her family, her interest in and time for the ball game soon vanished. The little god moved on to a younger neighborhood child, and soon became a common fixture in the area. It did leave Thea with a boon, though— for the rest of her life, she had an uncanny ability to predict the paths of moving objects. No additional supernatural senses or the like, just an enhanced ability to calculate the trajectories of moving objects with a quick glance.

It wasn’t until years later that Thea really gave the little god much thought and considered where it had come from. Probably for the best, and probably why her family hadn’t tried to push her too hard to keep that small god for longer. She often suspected, in fact, that great-grandfather had deliberately steered her away from it.

Every god great and small is born from the death of a living person, and every person old enough to have an awoken soul births a god when they die. And who, after all, would birth a god of a children’s ball game after death but a child, one whose soul had awoken early like Thea’s?

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Thanks to Thea’s soul awakening at such a young age, her family expected great things from her. And, in the City Atop Cambrias’ Wall, sometimes known simply as Cambrias’ Wall, or Cambrias, or Wall, or simply The City, there was only one true path to greatness.

The Wall Guard.

Thea had been told the story a hundred times, a thousand. It was old and familiar even in her earliest memories.

The City had been a place like any other, once. It was built alongside a river, deep in the prairie. It had another name before, though that’s long been forgotten save by a few scholars, and even they argue over it. It had markets, homes, and even a grand palace. It had more than its own fair share of gods: inhabiting its wells, its crossroads, and a thousand other places within itself. No city grows to any size without gaining countless gods of its own, one way or another.

And it also had a wall.

The wall wasn’t special to start with. It wasn’t particularly large, grand, or invulnerable. It was the height of three tall men atop one another’s shoulders, and two men could lay stretched out across its width. There were far greater walls in the world— walls made of ice, walls made of mist filled with twisting paths, and walls grown from living forests bound together into one solid whole. The city’s wall was nothing special.

What this wall did have, however, was a most uncommon god. Like all gods, it started out small— born from the dying soul of a guardsman, one uncommonly dedicated to his job. When he died, his soul took up his watch. It became a god of place, became the god of the city’s wall.

Cambrias, Whose Watch Never Ends.

There were, and remain, other gods of that wall. Some from generals on the wall and some from other guardsmen. Most commonly, laborers who died during its construction birthed gods who helped maintain the wall, who made repair-work easier. By this, at least, we know that the rulers of the city that became Wall were just and fair rulers, who used no slaves and treated their laborers well. Otherwise, odds were the wall would have been inhabited by much less pleasant gods, dedicated to the wall’s destruction, not its preservation.

Many monuments of kings and emperors have been torn down by the gods born from the deaths of slaves during said monument’s construction. Half the stories Thea was told as a child were stories of vengeful newborn gods bringing justice against wrongdoers. She grew up thinking they lived in a just world, that gods were an inescapable balance against evil.

Thea remained embarrassed at how long it took her to realize otherwise.

Cambrias had grown swiftly in popularity after he was born. Not because he offered many blessings— while other wall gods might offer guardsmen the ability to hold their bladders for an entire shift, or to keep their feet from hurting on duty, or as many as half a dozen other gifts at once, Cambrias offered only a single, solitary blessing.

But that blessing swiftly made Cambrias the most popular god on the wall. Every guardsman would pray, give a little tithe of soulstuff to Cambrias when they passed one of his wall-shrines, and with those prayers, Cambrias grew and grew and grew, and the power of his blessing grew with him.

Cambrias’ blessing is simple, but utterly altered the face of Ishveos, changed the course of history itself.

Cambrias slows the aging of guards while they are atop his wall. While they are actively on duty, they age even slower. Most Wall Guards these days live well over a century and a half, even two centuries. Some even longer than that.

Countless philosophers have debated what sort of life the guardsman who birthed Cambrias had led— had the man feared death? Had he spent all his free time looking for gods that might help preserve the life of a sickly child? None now know, for the knowledge of which guardsman had birthed Cambrias had been lost long before Cambrias ever became an important god.

Thea had spent countless hours daydreaming about the guardsman’s life, inventing ever-more-dramatic stories of his life.

No one debates what happened next.

Wall Guard positions became the most valuable currency in the city. Bribes were offered by powerful nobles to get jobs as common guardsmen atop the wall. Duels were being fought over open positions in the ranks. People were immigrating into the city from all across the plains in an effort to seek a coveted wall job.

Some stories claim it was the last queen of the city who would come up with the idea, others one of her ministers. Thea’s family usually went with the queen, but that detail didn’t really matter, only that the idea stuck.

Expand the wall.

At first the expansion was a simple one— a couple of half-circle extensions of the wall, like tumors growing from the city to encompass more land for the city to grow. Those new areas filled swiftly, however, and demand for wall duty grew even faster. Shanty towns began springing up around the city, and bandits from the plains and raiders from the mountains struck them regularly.

And so the wall expanded even further, to protect the new shanty towns.

As a child, Thea often imagined herself one of the earliest Wall Guards, fighting off the bandits and raiders.

Eventually, someone came up with the idea that changed everything. Perhaps that last queen, perhaps one of her ministers, it doesn’t matter.

They began widening the walls, until they were wider than the widest city street. They began placing buildings atop the wall. Shops and houses, barracks and markets. Soon fountains and even parks found their way atop the ever-growing walls, which had begun spreading out from the original city like grasping roots.

Barges filled with stone blocks arrived at the docks every day from the mountains, then twice a day, and then became a never-ending stream. More and more land was enclosed in great segments by the ever-growing wall. It crossed the river, the wall seamlessly turning into bridge and back to wall.

One day, the old city, the first city, didn’t exist anymore. Some of its buildings still existed— down between the walls, or transferred stone by stone to the wall-top, but most of the buildings, save for the homes of the poor still trapped on the ground, had been demolished to turn into materials for the wall.

It didn’t matter how many of the buildings still existed, though, because the original city had been devoured. Its wall had become the Wall, with the inhabitants on top dwarfing the parent city’s old population. It became simply one of the Wall’s countless neighborhoods.

Just a few decades into the city’s expansion, the walls finally encountered another city.

And devoured it. Absorbed it. Digested it over decades. Turned it into another enclosed section of land, then broke it apart into smaller chunks of land as the encroaching wall tore up its streets and homes for raw materials.

There had been battles fought over it, of course. The second city’s defenders had tried to fight off the slowly encroaching walls, but the ever-vaster Wall Guard had crushed them utterly.

The third city to be eaten by the wall just accepted their fate, and began construction of their own walls to meet up with Cambrias’, that they might be accepted more seamlessly into His Wall.

Thea was taught, as a child, that the third city celebrated their absorption, that their whole population rejoiced.

Looking back these days, she was sure that their wealthy celebrated, at least.

The poor, of course, stayed on the ground, trapped between their walls, only coming to the top to work— if they were allowed up at all.

And then the Wall ate a fourth city. Then a fifth. And it began growing across the plains not like the roots of a single tree, but like the roots of an entire forest. Like the mycelial tendrils of some great stone fungus. The wall split, curled in on itself, and intersected again and again, creating a colossal web across the plains, subdivided the prairie into endless closes.

And as the Wall grew, Cambrias grew with it.

Today, when the city of Cambrias’ Wall encompasses nearly the entirety of the plains? When you can travel for two hundred leagues, more, without ever touching the ground? Few save scholars even know which of the old cities enclosed by the Wall was the birthplace, and they argue as much about that as its name. Most of those cities are utterly gone, dismantled to be used in the construction of the Wall. Now, only the poor, criminals, and refugees live on the ground— all of those who matter in the eyes of the Wall’s rulers live atop the Wall itself.

There are more wall gods than ever these days. Most who join the Wall Guard do so in hopes of long life, but enough still believe in the mission of the Guard that their death spawns a new wall god, with boons and blessings fit for a guardsman.

Cambrias remains, and always will remain, the greatest of the Wall Gods. His ever-so-rare gift of long life has, in a mere millennium, transformed his wall into the greatest city on Ishveos or any world.

More than a hundred million people live atop the Wall, and many more than that live between, or even inside, the walls. The wall strains at the edges of the plains now, strains at mountain and sea, river and swamp.

And begins to overflow those edges.

Oh, there are those who oppose Cambrias’ Wall, who seek to stop it from devouring the whole world— but none of them can stand up to the might of the Wall Guard, whose Divines number Avatars and Living Gods among them, capable of leveling buildings with a single blow. Whose rank-and-file contains more Saints than likely exist in the rest of the world combined.

And Thea’s family numbered among the most loyal of the Wall Guard.

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Family legend was that they had lived in the seventh city absorbed by the Wall, long before even the Gidran War. If they had claimed descent from the first city, or the second, Thea might have doubted the claim, but the seventh? Who bragged about being seventh?

Thea’s family, that was who.

And they loyally served in the Wall Guard. Nearly every adult, in every generation in living memory. And atop the Wall, living memory can go back centuries.

Her family serves in the border guard, who keep out invaders. Her family oversees units in the construction corps, who eternally extend the city’s grasp. They patrol and keep the peace deep in the heart of the city, and also help control the flow of the poor through the gates on the ground.

Those who don’t join the Wall Guard are the black sheep, often shunned by the rest of the family. For Thea, the golden child, whose soul had awakened at age eight?

Her future glory was never even in question to her family.

Nor, for that matter, to Thea. She always knew which direction her path lay in, and she never deviated off that path, save to strive for even greater goals. Never took a wrong step, never broke the rules, never publicly questioned her role. Trained longer and harder than anyone else her age.

And yet…

She didn’t end up where she should have.

She didn’t bring glory and honor to the family name through service.

She didn’t rise through the ranks one after another, as so many of her older relatives had done. Didn’t live up to her family’s expectations. Turned from the family’s golden child into a disappointment.

Which, in the end, resulted in Thea being in the right place at the right time. Resulted in her being just a few blocks away when the murder of Faneras, God of Unclean Knives, began.

Working as one of the Wall Guard’s lowly mimic exterminators.