Theros: Godsend, Part I Read online

  “What’s this world called?” the girl asked.

  Daxos didn’t find her question odd. He could see both the god-realm and the mortal realm. And probably the Underworld, too, if only he knew where to stand. Perhaps the girl was from Nyx, and she’d stumbled into the wrong place. But there were no stars shining in the shadows of her body, and all creatures born in Nyx had that same starry essence.

  “Theros,” he said.

  The girl winced like his answer hurt her physically.

  “I need food,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. She hadn’t asked it like a question, and even if she had, he didn’t have an answer. He had no idea what to do next. She just wanted food. He envied her single-minded purpose.

  The sun was setting, and Daxos stared at the sky as the gods came into sharp focus above him. Purphoros was locked in a death match against Heliod. A god couldn’t kill another god, but they would cause each other as much pain as possible. To the mortals, such a duel would be confined by a custom called between the pillars. But to the gods, the entire sky was their proving ground.

  “What’s your name?” the girl asked.

  “Daxos,” he said.

  “I’m Elspeth,” she told him, but the boy made no reply.

  Planeswalkers

  Gods

  A Mixture That Could Prove Fatal to the World of

  GODSEND

  BOOK 1: THEROS

  ©2014 Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC.. Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC.

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  Cover art by Tyler Jacobson

  ISBN: 978-0-7869-6556-4

  620A9117000001 EN

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  v3.1

  To Dan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Lidia’s eyes flew open, and she was greeted by a darkened world. Instead of the gossamer curtains hanging around her bed, she saw the ancient trees of the Nessian Forest silhouetted against the brilliant colors of the night sky. She wasn’t at her home in Meletis, not even close. She hugged her sleeping son closer to her. His skin felt cool from sleeping outside, but his breathing was even, contented.

  A bird shrieked as it took flight from a branch above her. Through the gaps in the rustling canopy, she could see the god-forms shift in and out of focus. The night sky was known as Nyx, the realm of the gods. Every night the heavens displayed fleeting visions of gods and celestial creatures. Some just lingered for seconds. But sometimes the pantheon enacted entire scenes for mortal eyes to witness. Lidia rarely took time to step outside her home and watch the heavens, but now there was no place else to rest her eyes. Tonight the god-forms were vivid, and her heart beat faster as she watched their battle unfold.

  Purphoros, God of the Forge, thundered across the sky. He lunged for his brother, Heliod, God of the Sun. Purphoros’s intentions were murderous, that was clear even to Lidia, who felt like a grain of sand compared to the majesty of the heavens. Both gods had taken human form except with epic proportions. In every frieze or statue Lidia had seen of Purphoros, he always carried a bronze hammer. But tonight his weapon was a sword. Lidia didn’t know what it meant when a god changed his weapon, but watching him assault Heliod, God of the Sun, filled her with fear.

  Purphoros’s bronze face gleamed in the crimson flames that engulfed his sword. He swung his blade low as if he were trying to slice Heliod in half. Heliod parried with his sun-spear and blasted searing light at Purphoros. But his strike was not a victory, and the God of the Forge emerged from the attack undaunted. Purphoros slashed again, but Heliod evaporated into golden mist.

  Purphoros’s body transformed into divine fire, and the mist and fire fused together and appeared like a great rip across Nyx. Lidia frowned at the night sky, which now looked bruised and torn. It made her feel squeamish, like the time she’d fallen and gashed her knee. She half expected the sky to bleed. She rolled on her side and turned away from the battle raging above. She needed sleep and didn’t want to be troubled by the affairs of the gods. Tomorrow would be a long day. Tomorrow she was going to find her son’s soul.

  When they reached the Despair Lands, Lidia scanned the sky for locusts. She expected to see dark masses of them swarming above her. But when she and her son left the shade of the Nessian Forest and stepped into the rocky expanse, there was nothing overhead but an oppressive grayness that shrouded the midday sun. Not even the wind blew across the forlorn landscape. The stark line between the Nessian Forest and the Despair Lands seemed drawn by a god—and neither the trees nor the rocks dared argue with a god.

  Lidia had heard stories about the Despair Lands, which teemed with deadly locusts that ate the gold masks dropped by the Returned who escaped the Underworld. But Lidia saw no masks discarded among the scattered stones. No locusts, no masks—what else had the stories been wrong about?

  Her son, Daxos, whimpered and clutched her hand. Lidia, her unruly hair locked into a braid down her back, looked down and smiled brightly at him. With her oval face and large eyes, she looked barely old enough to be Daxos’s mother. But she was twenty-four years old and was married to a wealthy merchant of Meletis, the city of philosophers at the edge of the Great Sea.

  Before this journey, Lidia had never ventured farther than a day’s walk beyond the great walls of Meletis. Once, when she was a child, her father had taken her for a day trip out of the city. They’d ridden out of Hinter Gate between the giant statues and over the barren Four Winds Plateau. By late afternoon, they’d traveled all the way down Guardian Way and reached the edge of the Nessian Forest. Her father stopped their horse at the point where the interlocking cobblestones ended abruptly and gave way to a dirt road. A dense wall of towering trees stretched for miles in either direction, and Lidia shrunk closer to her father.

  “This is the end of civilization, love,” he said with a wink. And Lidia believed him. That was years ago, before she’d ever imagined herself as a mother with a child of her own. Her father had taken her only to the edge of the Nessian Forest. But Lidia had taken her son into the heart of it and then south to this land ruined by the breath of Erebos, God of the Dead, who ruled the Underworld. Lidia wa
s shaken by a sense of disbelief. Had she really done it? Had she really made this journey by herself? Her husband made her feel as if she weren’t competent to choose her own clothes. Yet here she was. Every citizen of Meletis would have been shocked to see her in the wilds near the entrance to the cave known as Athreos’s Shrine.

  Instead of appreciating the danger of the situation, Lidia’s gentle mind was consumed with worry for Daxos, who was quite small to undertake such a journey. He’d just turned seven, but he was the size of a four year old, and he was frail. As they picked their way across the foreboding landscape, with its sickly air that dampened the sunlight, she kept up a running conversation with her silent son. As they approached the entrance to Athreos’s Shrine, the red dirt beneath their feet became black sand that had no give under their boots.

  “What a strange place, Dax,” Lidia said brightly. “A place with no grass. Or birds! I miss the birdsong in our garden. And your swing under the lemon tree! But we mustn’t worry, love. This will pass, just like night passes into day. And we’ll be home in the garden soon.”

  Lidia always tried to transform her mute, blind son’s world into a place of joy through the power of her love. The truth was she didn’t know if he was truly blind or mute. She had seen many healers and every one of them had insisted there was nothing wrong with his eyes nor was there any physical abnormality that prevented him from speaking. But Daxos never spoke a word, and his eyes didn’t focus the way other children’s did. Most of the time he just stared into the sky, transfixed by things no one else could see.

  Throughout his early years, her son made no move to explore his world like children his age normally do. When inside the house, he would sit in a darkened corner. But he was happiest outside in the sunshine. Sometimes Lidia would leave Daxos alone on the grass in the garden, and she would stand in the shadows of the archway and watch him. When he thought he was alone, he would move his hands through the air, as though his fingers were tracing patterns that only he could see. Lidia could let this go on only for a little while. Then she would hurry to him and wrap her arms around him. She would clasp his little hands in her own until they were still and calm. Lidia couldn’t bear to leave him to a life of solitary mindlessness.

  “Do you see that cave over there?” Lidia asked. She pointed at a brutal rip in the rock face. “It’s where Athreos dwells. It leads to the rivers that ring the world. We’ll find what we’re looking for in there.”

  Lidia said it with a mother’s confidence, and her voice was as warm and comforting as sunshine flowing through an open window. But she had no idea what she was talking about. She had visited dozens of oracles, the men and women who served as conduits of the gods. She had waited for hours at temples on special holy days, like Stormcast Festival, when Keranos was said to grant desires in exchange for a piece of sea glass. She had written prayers, lodged them in vials, and cast them before Pharika, God of Affliction. She had tried every cure from everyone—magicians, charlatans, and liars—if they claimed they could help her son. But nothing had cured him. Nothing had made him like the other children.

  Then Lidia had heard a story from the Old Women who served her husband. It was a god-story about children losing their souls at birth. These unfortunate children were not like the Returned, who were dead but managed to escape the god of the Underworld. Instead, the Old Women described children severed from their souls before they ever had a chance to walk the mortal realm. It was Erebos’s pleasure to cause others pain, and if he could steal all the souls he would, such was his selfishness and bitterness at his lot. The Despair Lands were his fault, after all. His malaise and self-pity leaked out of the shafts of his realm and withered the earth. All who breathed his air too long became as miserable and joyless as he.

  After hearing the Old Women’s stories, Lidia made up her mind. With no proof but her self-made conviction, Lidia decided that her son’s soul—his eidolon—was wandering the world aimlessly searching for his body. She believed that only Athreos, God of Passage, could make her son whole. Athreos was the Boatman who guided the dead across the rivers to the Underworld. It was Athreos who remembered the names of the dead, the living, and the souls between. So Lidia filled a leather pack with gold and snuck out of her husband’s house with Daxos in the middle of the night. It never once occurred to her that they might be slaughtered in any number of ways before they ever reached the Despair Lands.

  Lidia did have one creeping fear about the journey, though she prayed to Heliod to help her forget it. The fear became lodged in her head just after they stole her husband’s favorite horse and set off down Guardian Way under the full color and glory of Nyx. The fear gnawed at her as they rode through the fields of yellow grain that bordered Meletis. When they entered the forest, her husband’s horse became restless and bolted. They were forced to continue on foot, and the fear became like a knot of sickness in her throat. Lidia was afraid that even when they reached Athreos’s Shrine, she wouldn’t be able to make the god understand what she needed. Gods spoke in a language all their own, the language of Nyx, or so the scholars taught in school. Lidia imagined if god-language could be written down it would simply be constellations of stars glittering across the page. Among mortals, oracles were the only ones who could interpret the god-speak and translate it to the mortal tongue.

  And that was Lidia’s problem: Although she had asked everyone she could think of, no one could tell Lidia whether an oracle actually dwelled in Athreos’s Shrine. In Meletis, there was an oracle in every temple. A towering woman with flowing black hair stood on a grand dais in the Temple of Purphoros and bellowed out his words of passion and fire. In Ephara’s temple a young man tapped a bronze staff in time while speaking steady words of progress and stability. Even in Pharika’s murky temple in the catacombs beneath the city, a snakelike woman hissed the secrets of life and death.

  But try as she might, the only information Lidia could find about Athreos’s Shrine was where it was located. No living person had ever been through the Despair Lands to enter the sacred cave. No one could tell her if an oracle would be waiting to explain her request to Athreos. She was warned, however, of his love of gold. The dead must pay Athreos for passage, and his docks were littered with the coins of those who no longer needed them. His ever-growing caches rose like spindly mountains toward Nyx, or so said the Old Women. Lidia decided that if a soul was worth a single coin, then she would carry a hundred of them. She reckoned that the return of a severed soul might fetch a high price, but she was confident she had enough coins to convince Athreos to answer her question: Where is my son’s soul? With the sack of gold slung across her back, they closed the gap between themselves and the cave.

  But Daxos grew agitated as they approached the entrance to the shrine. His hands fluttered in the air, and his eyes were riveted on his mother’s face. Lidia should have noticed his intense gaze on her because it was so unlike her son to fix his eyes on anything. But she was distracted by visions of a golden, happy future with a healthy son. In the shadow of the entrance, Lidia reached behind her neck and unfastened the amulet she had worn since she was a child. It was a delicate glass flower with six petals, almost star shaped, that glowed pink in the strange light of Erebos’s despair. She secured the amulet around Daxos’s neck and kissed him on his forehead and both his cheeks.

  “My mother gave this to me, and it was passed down from her great-grandmother,” Lidia said. “This is the flower that grows near my ancestral home, near the Great Sea.”

  Daxos reached up and gently stroked the amulet, which pleased Lidia, because he had taken no notice in toys or other gifts that she had given him in the past. She took this as a good omen.

  “It’s all going to be all right now,” she said, and rumpled his hair. She grasped his hand firmly and they marched into the darkness of Athreos’s Shrine.

  Once inside the cavern, the rushing sound of a distant river reached their ears and the boy stopped abruptly, tipping his head to one side as if to hear a little
better. The cave was sparse and clean, as if it had been swept of all rocks and debris. The gray light from the entrance ended after a few steps, and Lidia stopped and fumbled in her pack for a candle that she’d tucked among the gold coins.

  “It must be a little farther down,” Lidia chirped, but her cheerfulness sounded artificial even to her ears. She knew a little fire spell, which was the only magic she could cast. When she had the candle burning, she led her son deeper into the darkness, and the sound of the river grew louder with every step. The fire danced along the wick but remained small, almost nonexistent, as if it were afraid to be seen. Abruptly, the darkness felt like a fist closing around her, and she hesitated in the middle of the tunnel.

  For the first time since she spirited Daxos away from Meletis, doubt consumed her. It hollowed her out and devoured her resilience. What was she doing here, alone and in the wilderness? If all the great minds of Meletis couldn’t cure her son, what did she really expect to find in the savage wilds? Tears bloomed in her eyes as she was struck by the futility of this journey. Her abrupt change of heart was the work of Erebos, but Lidia didn’t know enough about the nature of the divine to understand. Erebos whispered to all: Resign yourself to misery. Such were the teachings of the keeper of the dead.

  “Oh, Dax,” she said, sinking her heels and wrapping her free arm around her son. He leaned into her, the way he’d done as a small child seeking her warmth on cool nights. “I’m a fool, aren’t I? A life with you in the garden is all I really want. However you are; whatever you see or don’t see. I love you forever, you know that, right?”

  “Asphodel,” he said clearly. In his palm, he held out the glass flower that she’d hung on the chain around his neck. Lidia was so struck by her son’s first word that it took her a moment to understand that he’d correctly identified the type of flower that grew in the fields of her ancestral house.