Theomachies Plural

This story was inspired by reading some of China Mieville’s work- I’m not sure I’ve ever read his stuff without being inspired to write something. Fair warning, lots of cursing, drug-use, and discussions of sex, though no explicit depictions.

For those of you who aren't patrons at higher levels- I mentioned this in the poll, but my grandfather passed away shortly after Book 7's release, hence the book 7 paperback not being completed. He was 96, and we had lots of warning, but it was still really rough. I've just not had any energy to do much other than play Zelda and argue with people on the internet until this week. (Zelda's pretty great. Arguing with people on the internet... meh.)

Anyhow, short story time!

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The first successful rebellion against the gods were started by a damned poet. Emphasis on the damned, yeah?

Wasn’t the first war against the gods. Reckon that were so back there even old gods only know it as legends, before Ur and Sumeria and all that shit. Before some god fucked the dream of Göbekli Tepe into some poor hunter-gatherer’s skull.

Wasn’t even the first rebellion where gods died. Demigods died most every proper rebellion, lesser gods went down now and then, and every once in a while, someone figured out a way to kill one of the greater gods. Sometimes by tricking them into fighting another greater god, or maybe some clever fucker would find all a god’s secret names, impale them through the heart with a crystallized fucking urheimat, poison their cherries of immortality, or some such shit.

It didn’t matter, though, because it wouldn’t take long for a new god to be born.

Nature abhors a fucking vacuum.

Scratch that shit. That non-sentient blind asswipe Nature abhors the fucking collective fucking subconscious of fucking humanity. That non-being shitrag the Universe itself doesn’t want its physical fucking laws meddled with, and if humanity goes unchained, said fucking subconscious starts warping it six ways to one of the shittier hells.

So it spawns the fucking gods, celestial fucking parasites that eat up the spare power of humanity's collective unconscious, and delight in brutality done in their name. They’re worse than demons, the lot of ‘em.

I should know, I am one.

A demon, that is. Not a fucking god. Why the fuck would a god be telling you this story? I don’t really fucking know why I’m even telling you this story.

Oh, right. Because I was there. I was a member of the fucking Poet’s Plot, and someone needs to tell the real fucking story. Not the literally damning lies the remaining gods are spouting; not the prettified, dolled-up, safe-for-kids bullshit the Free Congress is spreading.

None of them have any fucking clue who the conspirators were. They don’t know their names, what they did, who they were, or why they did what they did. They all just make up fucking fantasies instead.

I’m gonna tell you the real fucking story. How a bunch of idiot kids, myself included, invented a fucking pyrite apple for the gods.

All the rest of those assholes are dead now, anyhow. They’re not here to stick up for themselves.

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Being a succubus used to be glamorous work, used to be a good way for a demon to make a living. Since the various gods and goddesses of Capitalism stopped warring on the hells and started doing business with the Dukes and Duchesses, though, hell’s gotten to be a pretty shitty place. In my great-grandmother’s time, succubi got paid in beloved childhood memories, the ashes of the dearly departed, the stolen good luck of innocents.

Not souls, that’d be moronic. The fuck do we want with souls? They’re just dead humans with rapidly decaying memories. The gods give you all that shit about heavens and hells, and souls really do go there, but let’s be fucking clear- the afterlives only serve two fucking functions.

One, they’re a carrot and a stick. You obey the gods? You get to lounge around in a celestial opium den made of clouds and rainbows or some shit while your memories erode away, until you’re close enough to tabula rasa for government work. You disobey the gods, or they’re bored? You go to the hells and get tortured until your memories erode away.

Either way, give it a few decades, century or two, you’re good to be reincarnated again. Which is totally fucking random, by the way— it’s cheaper than actually sorting. Even before the gods of capitalism took over and began cutting celestial and infernal costs left and right, it was just about always random.

The second purpose of the afterlives is the much more important one— they’re power plants for the supernatural. The universe-manipulating power of the human collective unconscious? Yeah, as the afterlives strip memories away from human souls, it generates the raw energy of creation, and the powers-that-be can use that for… whatever they want, really. Manipulating reality, growing their power, fashioning it into divine artifacts, whatever. It’s the favored currency of everyone inhuman. Better than fucking cash.

Me? Nah. I don’t get to use it for any of that shit. I get my hands on any of it, it goes straight towards my damned (literally) student loans.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the fucking jokes about succubus school. You want to know what it’s really like? Mostly the damn same classes a therapist takes. You humans are two-thirds psychological issues by bodyweight. Just want a damn shoulder to cry on, or just basic physical contact. Here I go, looking to have some truly unspeakable, degenerate sex for a living, and you whiners just want to talk about your abusive boss or your dead pet or something.

Add that in with how over-crowded the field is and the recent reclassification of succubi as gig-workers, and I was having to take up damn imp work on the side! When I met the Poet, I was causing ladder-related misfortunes around the outskirts of London just to make ends meet.

(This is the point where someone always asks how the hell I can make money causing ladders to fall on people. It’s the gods paying us, that’s how. It’s a protection racket. You pray to the gods, or they pay us to mess your shit up.)

And yeah, I know, you’re asking why a dumbass upstate New York succubus like me ended up in London, of all places. First off, I liked British television entirely too much when I was young. Second off, fuck you.

Anyhow, the Poet. The Poet was…

Okay, I’ll insult a lot of people. Most people, really. Hell, I’ll insult the Poet too, he absolutely deserves it.

But then I’ll turn around and say this— he was someone fucking special. In another life, he might have just become an accountant, let his artistic dreams die in the face of a suburban wife, kids, and a nine-to-five. He didn’t have the drive or the will to be someone truly great, didn’t have the compassion or anger of a true rebel.

But he didn’t live that other life.

The Poet was born damned, and it turned him into a goddamn work of art.

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The afterlives might be bullshit, but humans, even those who hate the gods, take them fucking seriously. And knowing, from the day you could talk, that you were going to one of the hells someday, for no fault of your own? Knowing that you would end up spending your afterlife suffocating in a lake of shit in the Fourteenth Facet of Malice, reserved for murderers who drowned their victims? Even though you were totally innocent? It can fuck a kid up.

And boy, was the Poet fucked up. Drugs, alcohol, wild orgies, mental health issues out the ass.

But all that pressure? Knowing that nothing he did mattered, that he was going to a hell someday? It didn’t break him. No, that pressure crushed part of him into burning-hot, sun-bright diamond. Every moment he wasn’t spending debauched, he spent on his art, on studying languages, etymology, linguistics, philology, and poetry. By the time he was twenty-five, he’d written and read more than most poets and scholars do in a lifetime.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a fucking LOT of damned souls wandering the Earth. Plenty of them were born damned. But most of those? They were born damned for better reason. Their ancestors had angered a god, or rebelled, or some shit. There was a righteousness, a purpose to that sort of thing. You could under-fucking-stand it.

The Poet? None of that. His ancestry was boring all the way back. It’s like they were prophesied by the Universe itself to be destined for suburban living. Not a one of them had ever done anything interesting.

No, he was damned because of corporate fucking greed.

Remember me mentioning the gods of capitalism signing a deal with the Dukes and Duchesses of the Hells? You know what one of the first changes they made to the afterlives was?

They cut costs.

See, memories don’t degrade consecutively or linearly in the afterlives. The more important the memories are, the deeper the pride, shame, or other emotion attached to them, the harder they are to scrape free. And, sure, the most difficult memories to scrape are also the ones that usually produce the most power, but there’s eventually a point of diminishing returns, where the margins start to shrink again.

Used to be the afterlives prided themselves on scraping each and every soul completely clean. Now?

Cheaper to just let a few of the stickiest memories go, reincarnate the soul a little early.

Which is how the Poet got the poorly-recycled soul of a bastard New York landlord who killed four elderly tenants so he could lease their apartments sans rent control.

Sin still there on his soul? Yep. Gotta be scraped clean, and the hells have equipment better suited for murders, after all.

I’d say that was a hell of a thing for a kid to be born remembering, but even the hells mostly aren’t that cruel.

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Anyhow, I didn’t meet the Poet on the job, or at some debauched orgy. Met him at a fucking coffeeshop, of all places. A big corporate coffee-chain, not going to name it, but you know the one.

I’m refusing to name it not because I’m worried about being sued, but because their name is literally the name of an ancient eldritch being the company chained for its power. You speak its name, they can use its power to exert influence on you, make you buy more coffee.

How did you think they got so big? Their coffee sucks. Hate that place. It’s all over the hells, too. Its logo is almost as ubiquitous as screaming souls down there. I only went because the shitty gig-work company exploiting me gave me gift-cards.

The Poet just didn’t give a shit what his coffee tasted like, just that it had caffeine in it.

Long story short, the Poet and I had an embarrassingly stereotypical demoness/starving artist romance, like some shit out of a turn-of-the-millennium romcom.

Well, a lot more debauched than that, but you get the idea.

There wasn’t one specific moment when the Poet’s Plot crystallized. It just kind of… happened. There was always a lot of bitching about the gods, the hells, the way things were. Most of the posers that hung around with us would never do anything about it. They’d eventually die of drug overdoses or suburbia. They were the lumpenbourgeoisie, the upper-middle class assholes who desperately craved the appearance of rebellion, but had no revolt in their heart. They cared more about their looks than about the soul farms in the Midwest, where the Iowan Emperor, the Cob King, forced poor women to bear child after child until their bodies gave out, indoctrinated those children, then slaughtered all the boys at puberty, all to enrich the Corn Gods. They cared more about pissing off their parents than they did the Grande Coliseu in the Azores, the huge volcanic caldera that dozens of nations shipped their prisoners to, to die in horrific battles with medieval weaponry to satisfy the war gods displeased with the lack of world wars lately.

There were a few of us that were different, though. That actually gave a fuck, or at least enough of one to spend our hours doing more than just partying and looking cool.

Just five, to start.

There was the Poet, who you already met.

There was the Painter, who had stepped on a curse-mine from the last world war as a child, and suffered regular brainstorms, each somewhere between a synaesthesic stroke and a grand mal seizure. Her parents, a coven of eight witches who ran a major trans-hell legal firm, had the money and contacts to keep her alive, but even the best doctors and shamans doubted she’d live past forty. She would have been a brilliant artist regardless, but her gods-wrought madness took her to a whole new level, one that disquieted and fascinated everyone who saw her works.

There was the Mathematician, the oldest of us, at the grand old age of thirty-one. He, like the Poet, had been born damned, albeit due to the rebellion of one of his ancestors, not corporate malfeasance. He was a brilliant theoretical mathematician, a star in academia from a young age. PHD in his teens, news articles, the works. Revolutionized a half-dozen esoteric fields of math, along with origami, and even a couple fields of prayer delivery. Excellent pianist, too, at least from a technical perspective. Still couldn’t get fucking tenure at a decent university, though, and I think that pissed him off more than being damned, the vain prick.

There was the Musician. She was just as much a child prodigy as the Mathematician, could play a half-dozen instruments at a professional level by the age of twelve. Voice like an angel— the kind in cartoons, not the monstrous orbs of eyes and feathers and “be not afraid”. She was fucking still a barista at the shitty coffee-chain I won’t name, though, because this was still England. Doesn’t matter how good you are here, just whose crotch you got squeezed out of and what private school you fucking attended. If you’re not a nepo baby, you can fuck right off.

She wasn’t damned, or cursed, or anything like that. Nah, she was just a good fucking person, with more compassion and righteous anger than you could shake a stick at.

And then there was me.

What was my contribution?

I was fucking the Poet. Not like I’m the first disillusioned twenty-something demon led into revolution by their crotch.

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It was all just whining and bitching at first, but over time, it got more and more serious, to the point the lumpenbourgeoisie assholes around us got bored and wandered away from us when we’d lay into the topic of divine politics at parties and poetry readings.

And then, one day, the Poet invited the four of us over to his huge condo.

It was by far the nicest place any of us lived, much better than even the Painter’s loft apartment, which her parental coven paid for. Course, that was because the Poet stole it. The fucking place was an investment property, probably for some petro prince in the Middle East or a Chinese dragon who made it big by forcing peasants to pay crippling premiums for every drop of rain, then seizing their lands when their debts got too big. No one lived there, it was just a stupid overseas tax shelter.

There was a fancy theomantic security system on the place, but the stupid fucking thing recognized the Poet’s recycled soul as belonging to a landlord, and let him just waltz right in.

And then he showed us the Poem.

Yeah, that Poem. The pyrite apple itself.

Golden apples were one of the most common weapons against the gods. The universe spawns gods to rule over specific domains, right? Concepts, locations, languages, genres, even specific sports. And, when something falls in the overlap between the portfolios of two gods, it chafes them something fierce. They absolutely hate that shit. Sometimes they negotiate, take the time to compromise and draw up a more careful boundary between their portfolios, but most of the time? They’re gods. Lightning bolts and angelic hordes start fucking flying. More gods have died to other gods than to any number of humans.

So you build something specifically made to cause those overlaps. Get a god of dental hygiene to fight a war god by building a battle-toothbrush with daggers instead of bristles, forged of the melted holy symbols of both gods. (Never bet against a tooth god. Inspiring humans to go to war is easy. Inspiring them to floss? Takes far greater power and cunning.) Dedicate a temple to one god on the holy ground of a second, made out of materials beloved of a third. Hell, just have ten thousand people say prayers praising a war god for the deeds of another war god. Boom, divine fireworks.

Some ancient Greek goddess might have invented the first golden apple, but once the idea was out in the world, humans have made good use of it ever since. Toss out some bait, have a few gods die in the fight, boom, a bit of freedom. Course, the Universe promptly spawns new ones somewhere, but it’s historically been a good way to get rid of some of the worst divine overlords, get a little breathing space.

The Poem wasn’t that. The Poem was absurdly more complex than that.

It was an ode to two gods of language, one for English, one for French, on its surface. Nothing too notable, the first time you hear it, except for the fact that the ode to English is in French, and the ode to French is in English. Which, on its own, would be a laughable golden apple, unless it grew into a poem beloved by tens of thousands, if not more.

But it was so much fucking more. Half the words in there? Untranslatable. Shit like “supportive”, “élan”, “successful”, and “flâner”. Sure, translators can get close enough, but there’s always going to be just a bit of a gap. Added in plenty of other words that translated decently, but with a bit of ambiguity or different contexts that could confuse things.

Still easy enough for the gods to settle, though. Fist-fight territory, at most. Maybe some deific hate-fucking afterward.

I had the Poet himself explain the next bit to me, and I still don’t fucking understand it all. Combat linguists and philologists have written countless papers delving into the Poem’s mechanics, and many of the arguments don’t look like they’ll ever be settled.

Basically, he fucking tweaked the structure and word order of the poem to hell, until each language essentially used the grammar of the other, where a translation between the French and the English required no reordering of words or the like. Sometimes, the words descended into a linguistic morass where you couldn’t even sort out the grammar. I can’t do it fucking justice, I’m not a word-botherer. It was tailor-fucking made to piss off both language gods. You’d only need a few dozen, a couple hundred, people reading the poem to pull off the trick.

It got even better, though. The whole damn poem cryptographically encrypted another poem. Smaller than the first, due to cryptographic limitations I don’t understand. This one, the classic “praise one god for another’s works” traps, but rather than simply two gods, it formed a round, each misapplied bit of praise targeting another god, wrapping around and around five gods. The English god of domestic surveillance, a French god of undercover cops, the Divine Director of MI6, a German encryption god, and an ancient, vicious old Pictish thief god.

As if that weren’t enough, there was a third fucking layer, too. This one was just a limerick, a golden apple designed to piss off two English football gods. Not hard to do, their fans got into fist fights every time they visited each other’s cities.

Some people think there’s a fourth poem, but no one’s ever found anything, and the Poet never mentioned it. One guy swears he’s found a dirty joke about Thatcher, but won’t share it, so he’s probably full of shit. Though the Poet did frequently wish for a time machine to go back and smother baby Maggie…

Ironically, the limerick was the only poem of the three that was any fucking good. The other two were purpose-built tools. The best part was that the readers wouldn’t even have to know the hidden poems were in there to ensnare the gods with the golden apple. Shit, the gods didn’t even know why they were fighting at first, when we finally released it.

It took us weeks to argue over what to do with it, figure out how to release the golden apple into the wild. Couldn’t just throw it on the internet, you’d have spider demons pouring out of your phone and computer to wrap you up for pickup by the coppers, the police priests in their armor of literal copper before you knew it. Couldn’t speak it on the streets, you’d be swarmed by street preachers with brass knuckles. Gods cracked down HARD on attempts to build golden apples.

Not to toot my own horn here, but I was the one who got in touch with the revolutionaries. Working class Marxist pricks who didn’t trust us rich kids at first, but I managed to persuade them to listen to us eventually.

…What, you think just because I’m a succubus, I fucked my way into their trust? Nah, I wish, that would have been easier. My contacts were a a damned— again, literally— gay polycule of labor-organizing miners, of all the fucking luck. All big, burly tough men who could spout obscure Marx quotes about theological weaponry, profane architecture, and poison prayers after a long day digging bog mummies out of the peat. Gods paid good fucking money for bog bodies.

I earned their trust the hard way. Took risks, burnt down a few minor shrines, ran dangerous errands for them.

Finally, they agreed to test the Poem. Distributed it through their secret whisper networks and terrorist cells, to be read en masse on the holy day of a third language god, one for loan words from Romance languages.

We didn’t tell them about the hidden poems. We weren’t scientists, but we wanted a bit of rigor in our test.

That almost bit us in the ass, the Marxists weren’t happy about that omission, not one fucking bit.

They were fucking overjoyed about the results, though.

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Everyone knows what happened then.

The Godsnarl and the Workman’s Rebellion.

The Godsnarl was us. Was the result of the Poem.

Twenty-three gods, all wrapped up in a golden apple fight over a single poem, even though the poem itself, and its hidden poems, only referenced nine gods. The tenth was the loan-word god whose holy day the Marxists read it on, but the others?

Completely unexpected. A welcome surprise, sure, but still a fucking shock.

Some were obvious— gods of encryption, a god of hidden messages in poems. A god of editors got dragged into the limerick fight because the limerick lacked misspellings, and the worshipers of each football god insisted the fans of the other god were idiots who couldn’t spell. (At least, that’s what we figured out later. Early on, fucking no-one, not even the Poet, had any fucking clue why a god of misspellings was brawling two football gods.)

Others were less obvious— a god of origami hobbyists, a dark god of schoolchildren suffering. Though the god of schoolchild suffering should be obvious in retrospect, most of those little shits hate reading poetry.

It’s one of my life’s great joys that demons don’t give live birth or raise children on their own. I really want kids? I just inject my eggs into a cow or pig or something, wait for the kids to eat their way out, then hand them over to a creche. Visit them on birthdays and holidays, all the best parts of parenthood.

No, fuck you, I’m not laying my eggs in a human, the fuck is wrong with you? That’s fucking murder.

Okay, I’m going to say this exactly once. Us low-level, workday demons? We have a hell of a lot more in common with humans than with the Dukes and Duchesses, or the gods. And you have a lot more in common with us than with your billionaires and prophet-kings and vampiric presidents-for-unlife. It’s labour fucking solididarity fucking 101, okay? So lay off, already.

Right, the Godsnarl.

Here’s the thing about gods— they’re not, by and large, that fucking smart. Oh, some of them are brilliant strategists, or sage interpreters of the universe’s will, or some shit, but they simply cannot get their heads around self-restraint. When they want something, it’s almost impossible for them to stop themselves from going for it.

And oh, did they go for the Poem. The more other gods focused on it, the more they coveted it. The deeper the conflict around it got, the more energy and focus they offered it.

Capturing a golden apple isn’t just a matter of physical conflict for gods, though there’s plenty of that shit. It’s a godsdamned (figuratively) chess game of taxonomic redefinition, as the gods try to use theologic to re-draw the borders so their object of obsession lies inside THEIR portfolios and no one else’s. Because if they can do that, their portfolio of power is permanently larger.

(Also, did you notice my pun there? Theologic? Theo-logic? Ah, you’re no fun, humans don’t properly appreciate puns.)

According to the Mathematician, that act is what gods fundamentally ARE. They’re taxonomic categories reified into vindictive, greedy life.

He also believed that pantheons weren’t simply individual gods working together, but single beings, entire reified taxonomic systems acting on the world. Their internal conflicts? Just fucking ongoing category redefinition. That sounds like much more of a stretch to me, but then, I don’t want to believe that. The idea of pantheons just being some nebulous eldritch organism with its arms up the asses of its gods to puppet them? Creeps me the fuck out.

Anyhow, the Poem fight. It got big, fast. Twenty-three gods fighting over it.

But it didn’t resolve.

Worse— at least as far as the gods were concerned— no one got shoved out of it. The gods with the weakest connections to golden apples usually got shoved out of a fight fast, but this time?

Everygod’s connections just got deeper and deeper.

The Poet had, it turned out, passed a serious fucking threshold, where sufficient quantitative change in internal complexity in his golden apple gave rise to qualitative change. The poem turned into a monstrous fucking vortex of gods and godstuff, its pull growing strong enough it ripped and blended the gods into pulp.

The Poem had crossed and blurred the lines of the portfolios so far that the gods couldn’t resolve the taxonomic paradox at its heart. Shifting their taxonomic boundaries far enough to claim all its territory? It would have required them to absorb the categorical territory of all twenty-two other gods, to become an ad-hoc one-god pantheon— whether the Mathematician was right about pantheons or not.

It didn’t kill them though. It just kept that blended, shredded domain spinning and churning, looking like some anti-miraculous black hole in the sky above the English Channel. All that god-stuff is trapped there forever, permanently weakening the divine ecosystem. Arguably even more importantly, the categories those gods ruled? Origami, two football teams, the French and English languages— none of them will ever have gods again. A non-geographical shard of reality free forever from divine dominion.

It’s still there. Whips up storms every now and then, interferes with passing prayers, but it’s not dangerous, so long as you don’t try to fly through it.

Still not sure who named the Poem and its sibling weapons pyrite apples, but it fits. Fool’s gold indeed.

I should note that, in the end, one god escaped the Godsnarl.

It was the Pictish thief god, of course. Old asshole like that, last surviving member of his pantheon? He survived the Angles, the Saxons, the Romans, the Vikings, the Normans, and the Blitz itself, when the gods of fascism rained spears of lithified hate on the Isles for months.

Our trap was new and dangerous, but a god like that has to be crafty and smart to survive. Maybe he, of all gods, had learned to fucking step back from something he craved, even if just for a moment.

The deaths of twenty-two gods— mostly English, eight French, one that roved the Continent, and one from fucking Japan— left a power vacuum. Not a large one, but enough of one for the Marxists to kick of the Workman’s Rebellion, a guerrilla war against the powers-that-be.

There were still hundreds of English gods remaining, but few of them took the Rebellion as seriously as they should have. They, like the rest of the world, assumed the twenty-two gods were dead, not trapped, and the Pictish god didn’t care enough to inform them otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, they still came after the rebels with fire and brimstone, with plagues and weaponized prophecies, and most of all with armies. They were still terrified of the new weapon. Just not terrified enough.

They should have smashed the Marxists immediately, no matter the cost in innocent lives. They didn’t want to lose their worshippers, though— that would hurt their power and their bottom line, after all. Most gods weren’t as flagrantly wasteful as the Iowan Corn Gods, after all— they wanted to get as much prayer energy as they could out of their worshippers before they died. Useful for very different stuff than afterlife energy, I hear.

They didn’t hit hard enough or fast enough, and that gave us time to arm the Marxists with a host of epistemological, semiotic, and ontologic weapons to even the odds.

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The Painter gave the Rebellion their fabled shields, the Aegis of Madness.

When you have a stroke, the world warps in front of your eyes. Your brain can’t tell what anything is anymore, and innocuous, everyday items become squamous and rugose, turn into indecipherable shibboleths of a language spoken only by the monsters that tear at the seams of reality.

There’s nothing magical about it, it’s just neurons fucking up. The Painter’s curse brainstorms let her see it daily, though, and she learned to paint it. Learned to paint the synaesthesia the attacks brought as well. Mixed them together with lessons she drew from Escher, from that old logico-terrorist Godel, and from the long-dead conquerer-prophet Bach. That last might sound weird, but once I managed to find her copies of his death symphonies and war fugues in a little used bookshop in the hells, she was able to translate some of their power into visual media via her synaesthesia.

Probably for the best I couldn’t find her a copy of Bach’s Musical Offering. Some weapons are too dangerous for anyone to use.

The resulting images she painted were acts of taxonomic incoherence that operated in an entirely different manner and realm than the Poem. It didn’t catch gods in a trap, like golden and pyrite apples. No, rather than forcing them to fight over taxonomically twisted territory, the images were taxonomically incomprehensible, channeling all the madness of stroke-visions, synaesthesia, the visual tricks of Escher, the god-wounding power of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, the sheer destructive madness of Bach’s compositions, and a dozen other forms of scholarly madness.

The gods couldn’t even begin to parse who should have dominion over her paintings. And, since the core motive of godhood was to divide every single fucking atom of the universe between them, to draw lines over everything like some monstrous 1:1 scale map, a blank spot they couldn’t draw on? It caused them fucking pain.

So much pain.

Even having a few worshipers staring at one for a minute could give a god a migraine. Migraines with aura, or maybe auras with migraines.

So the Marxists copied it everywhere. Pasted fliers of the paintings on telephone poles across England, mailed them through the post, hid them as subliminal messages in films. Even Clockwork Oranged the Faithful, pinning their eyelids back and forcing them to stare at the paintings until their gods forcibly damned and excommunicated them from a distance.

We didn’t use Beethoven’s Ninth in those lovely little Burgess struggle sessions, though. We used something better.

The Musician and Mathematician’s contribution to the war.

This one was a pyrite apple too. A nasty fucking little earworm that burrowed deep into the psyche of god and faithful alike, filled with weird key-shifts and auditory tricks. I know less about musical composition than I do theoretical mathematics or combat theology— as long as I can dance to it, I don’t really give a shit how the sausage is made.

It used a thousand little mathemusical tricks all bound into a little ditty less than a minute long, easy to whistle as a John Williams tune.

(Even the gods like John Williams’ soundtracks. Seriously, what kind of asshole doesn’t like John Williams?)

The Earworm wasn’t as powerful as the Poem, didn’t actually kill any gods at first, but it affected far more of them. Dozens, if not hundreds of gods, were targeted by it. Gods of math and programming, of music and accounting, of fashion and war. All of them managed to struggle free of the Earworm, but every time, a tiny chunk of them was left behind, stuck to the earworm, which grew and grew in power each time. By the time it reached critical mass, it was a monstrous soundscape, a living musical storm roaring over Hull. Took eleven minor gods to stop it, and they gave their lives to do so. And their power? It’s still trapped above Hull, turning its skies from England’s usual depression to the grey static of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The tune doesn’t have power anymore, but it’s still pleasant to hum along with on quiet days when it drifts down to the city below.

There were plenty of other weapons. Smaller pyrite apples for two or three gods, false apples that dissolved when gods closed on them when the Marxists needed a distraction. Musical notes that made the faithful scream blasphemy, riddles that rendered worshippers prayer-less for hours or days. (And since prayer was the main way the armies of the faithful shared intelligence with their god, well, that was a shitty thing to happen mid-battle.)

All those weapons were a side-show to our biggest advantage, though.

Fucking Napoleon had just escaped Elba again, and the Continental Gods were all busy putting down his newest army of undead soldiers and living fools. That old bastard is the meanest fucking demigod to ever live, and the sun will burn out before he stops trying to conquer Europe and then the world.

St. Helena, at least, used to hold him better than Elba, but he tricked a god of nuclear weapons into wrecking the place half a century ago, which is why they had to move him back to his original prison.

The science gods have been claiming for decades that they’re on the verge of finding a way to kill old Boney Pants. I’ll believe it when I see it. You know how I think he’s staying alive?

Sheer fucking contrariness. Dukes and Duchesses grant me a tenth his spite.

As for my job in the Workman’s Rebellion? I was the delivery-woman. I was the point of contact between the bog-miners and my pet fucking geniuses. If I died, the Marxists would have no fucking way to find their wunderkind wondersmiths.

It also meant fewer chances for the gods to find my crew, though. Because there’s one thing I knew from the start— they were more fucking important than the rest of the Workman’s Rebellion combined.

And when the gods crushed the Marxists— and they did, after four long, bloody years— the identity of the Poet and the others stayed secret. The bog miner polycule took the secret of my identity to the grave, leaving us free and clear. The Rebellion hadn’t even touched London, no one was looking for the creators of the weapons here.

In the end, sixty-nine (nice) gods fell to pyrite apples in the Workman’s Rebellion. A dozen more actually died to more conventional means— between the deaths and pyrite entrapments, more divine casualties than any conflict since the last World War.

The dozen who died to conventional approaches were replaced by new gods, soon enough. Different gods, gods who mixed up the portfolios of the dead gods in interesting new ways.

The sixty-nine (lol, nice) trapped gods didn’t come back. Just stayed stuck in the various Godsnarls trapped around England. Chunks of mankind’s collective unconscious still harnessed, but not by the gods— just there in senseless knots of raw, untameable power.

When the gods realized what had happened, they got scared, and they got angry. They scoured the North in the most literal sense, revealing thousands of square miles of bedrock in their rage, killed half the population.

You’d think the Musician would be the one who felt guiltiest about all those dead, but pretty sure it was either the Mathematician or myself most fucked up about it.

I did what I had to, though. I got them focused, prevented the Poet from OD’ing, and got them back to work.

We had gods to exterminate still.

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We gave up on open warfare. No matter what weapons we built, the gods of the world had logistics and raw force on their side, and we couldn’t do jack shit against guns, bullets, and tanks.

So we started looking for new methods. Started recruiting.

The Physicist. The Ecologist. The Sociologist. The Virologist.

We did our research carefully, making sure to find brilliant scientists with reason to hate the gods. The damned, the cursed, agitators and those who had lost family when the North was scoured.

We also delved the underbelly of organized religion. Tracked down the prophets of dead gods, who still mourned their patrons that had been murdered by other deities. Serial heretics, who couldn’t help but be kicked out of one religion after another. Plenty had good reason to hate the gods and the system— especially those who’d also lost family and friends in the scouring of the North.

The Prophet. The Priest. The Seer.

Between the artists and the scientists and the miracle workers, we built delivery methods for the pyrite apples. We bound art and science and miracles into a greater whole, created a new whole greater than its parts.

I’m not going to tell you what most of the methods are. Some act like time capsules, waiting years or decades to activate. Some acted as linguistic bombs, rippling through the logosphere in slang, standup comedy skits, and underground music until they converged and released the apple hundreds or thousands of miles away. Others built up like toxins in the divine ecosystem, being ferried in tiny pieces through prayer until the level of poison concentrated enough to crystallize into a pyrite apple inside a god, usually one completely unrelated to the targets of the apple.

My favorite, though, was the disease. We found a way to embed a pyrite apple into a fucking virus. And I’m not using fucking as emphasis for virus here. When I say fucking virus, I mean it literally. We wove a pyrite apple into a damned (figuratively) STD.

Oh, did we have fun spreading that one. So many orgies, so little time.

It was the Sociologist who came up with the next plan. The Sociologist who realized, after five years of covertly releasing pyrite apples and other anti-god weapons into the world, that they would catch us someday. They weren’t searching for us across most of the world, after all— just on the Continent and North Africa. We were spreading out our attacks carefully, trying not to give our location away, but the divine search grid was slowly but surely shrinking, especially once they finally imprisoned Napoleon on Elba once more.

We switched from pyrite apple payloads to memetic payloads. We sought out ways to carry instructions for and memories of creating pyrite apples and other weapons, and spread them among humanity.

We didn’t give a shit if the gods got a hold of them, too. There were countless gods who would be stupid enough to use them on other gods, and once divine energy was trapped in a godsnarl, it was trapped. In the end, that was our goal- not defeating individual gods, but pulling their divine lifeforce out of the cycle of deific reincarnation entirely.

Most of the methods were just modified versions of older weapons. Memetic payloads weren’t that much different than pyrite apples, so it was easy enough to figure out.

My favorite was, of course, the new STD. More orgies, hurrah!

It was the Poet who figured out the unstoppable delivery weapon, though. The Poet who figured out how to spread the knowledge down through the ages, in a way the gods couldn’t stop, in a way that transcended all geographical, political, and theological boundaries.

Because of course he fucking did. Of course it had to be that fucking asshole. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

The Poet and the others had learned their lesson from the Workman’s Rebellion. The gods would always win any direct conflict, in the end. No matter how many rebellions rose up in the wake of their ever-more-esoteric attacks, they would all eventually be smashed, any spread knowledge of their methods suppressed and lost. There were literal gods of knowledge out there, after all.

Maybe it was a wrong lesson, but they were convinced of it.

The conspirators had to make sure that their knowledge and memories of the pyrite apples, the instructions and abilities, were their closest held memories. They built memory palaces, delved into memorization techniques used by pre-literate storytellers, practiced meditation, and took carefully monitored acid trips.

And then they all fucking offed themselves.

The Poet, that perverse bastard, chose to drown himself.

You should be able to guess why easy enough.

Corporate fucking price-saving.

Remember how the Poet got damned?

The afterlives stopped scrubbing the most deeply embedded memories in souls, just to improve their fucking profit margins. Shuffled the souls randomly afterward, not even keeping track of where those souls go.

The Poet and the others turned their souls into goddamn sleeper agents. Guaranteed that in the decades and centuries hence, their methods would be reborn, that they could teach others their ways, and in turn introduce even more souls with the knowledge of pyrite apples into the cycle.

The only way to stop them would be to cut back on profits. To return to scrubbing souls completely, to stop shuffling souls back into the cycle of life randomly.

And when has capitalism or its gods ever practiced restraint?

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So that just left me.

I loved the Poet. Loved all those pricks.

And they fucking left me alone.

No reincarnation for demons.

I spent so fucking long trying to convince them not to do it, or to at least delay. There’s no reason they had to do it right away, we probably had at least a year or two before the knowledge gods got to them. Hells, the condo security system the Poet had subverted? Used the very power of the gods to hide us from them.

But they were all determined not to take the risk. All worried that they might hold some secret to disabling the pyrite apples in their subconscious that the gods might extract through torture or worse.

They thought they were unparalleled fucking geniuses. Loved them all, but they were fucking dunces.

Geniuses? Absolutely.

Unparalleled? Not a fucking chance.

If they’d been born a century earlier, hell, just a few decades earlier, they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did. It was the right place and the right time, was all. Technology, science, art, and applied divinity had all simply grown enough that their field was fertile for pyrite apples to grow in.

Someone was bound to find it eventually.

The Poet and the others were brilliant, but they weren’t irreplaceable. I guarantee it.

Hells, do you know how many people the Free Congress found and released from the prayer factory in the catacombs beneath Paris? How many poor souls had been imprisoned in cages of bone, fed only when they’d reached their daily prayer quotas?

Two hundred thousand. Each kept in a tiny cage of ribs and spines too small to stand in. Many of whom had been there for decades, let out only to breed new victims for the prayer farms, when there weren’t enough criminals and poor people to send down.

And it had been going for two centuries.

How many fucking geniuses lived and died down there in the dark? How many people as smart or smarter than the Poet and the others?

My guess is a fucking lot. And that there are a lot more that have died in the Iowan soul farms, in the Grande Coliseu, entombed alive in the tens of thousands of pyramids along the Nile, or have been forced into the short-lived worship of plague or famine gods.

The Poet and his friends were brilliant, but mostly they were lucky enough to have been born into suburbia. For all the ills life and the gods dealt them, they still had the freedom, education, and resources to learn, to practice their arts and sciences.

I’m sure they knew it,subconsciously. That their act of martyrdom was always compensation, at some level. That they hadn’t suffered enough, in recompense for the chaos they’d caused.

I didn’t have the words for it, then. And telling someone not to martyr themselves because they’re not special isn’t precisely an effective strategy, is it?

Eventually, I gave up. I had the choice between fighting with them until the end, or enjoying my last few weeks with my friends.

And I took the latter path. The easy path.

I’ll always regret that, though I would have regretted filling their last days with anger as well if I’d failed. Don’t think there was a clearcut right answer there.

It almost broke me. I’m a demon, though, not a human, so I’m not going to weep on your fucking shoulder.

You know what I’m going to do?

I’m going to keep fighting.

And I’ve got a new weapon.

Money. More money than anyone but the greatest gods of capitalism. Not worthless human currency— the proper shit. The raw energy of creation itself, stripped from the souls of the dead in the afterlives.

Because I put something in our little memetic bioweapon STD, along with the instructions for creating pyrite apples.

A fetish for fucking ceiling fans. And fucking light fixtures. And even fucking chandeliers.

What, you say? That’s fucking insane?

I mean, I am a demon.

But no, it’s not insane.

Remember my backup gig work? That shitty protection racket from the gods?

That’s right. Causing ladder-related misfortune.

That stupid contract was still active when we bound many of the gods I worked for into pyrite apples. It’s STILL active. It will always be active, so long as I live.

And now, with people around the world developing the world’s most stupid fetish, and trying to hump holes in their fucking ceiling, ladder related injuries are the single most common cause of accident-related hospitalization on the whole damn planet. And every time they do, the divine contracts automatically draw power for me from the bound gods, with literally no one on the planet other than me the wiser to my wealth.

And I’m spending every damn bit of that money— that raw power— on bringing down the gods.

Not spending a fucking drop on my student loans.

I’m going to fail. No matter how careful I am, how secretive in funding the Free Congress and other rebels, they’ll catch me someday. The science gods are already chasing cures for our memetic bioweapons, and I’m absolutely confident they’ll find them.

But not before I find a hell (literally) of a lot of young angry artists, and teach them how to build pyrite apples. How to trap gods permanently, to strip the divine from our world. To fill the fucking afterlife with souls carrying the blueprints for the destruction of gods.

It might take centuries. It might take millennia. We might never end some of the nasty old bastards like Napoleon or the Pictish god. This might be just another foolish dream of freedom.

But fuck it.

As my dead Marxist miner friends would say— the gods have everything to lose.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.