Bitterwood caught the girl as she sprang up to hug him. Her arms around his neck stirred memories of his own daughters, now dead. Yet somehow the memories were altered by the presence of Zeeky, becoming bittersweet rather than simply bitter.
"Where's your pig?" Bitterwood whispered.
"Poocher's okay," Zeeky said. "We gave him a bath."
Hex cleared his throat. "I don't believe we've been introduced."
Bitterwood lowered Zeeky to the ground.
"This is Zeeky," he said. "She's my… friend." The word felt foreign to his tongue. It had been many years since he'd used it. "Zeeky, the dragon is Hex. The man on the long-wyrm is-"
"Adam!" Zeeky said, waving. "You made it back!" She ran down the steps and hugged the snout of the long-wyrm. "Good to see you, Trisky!"
Bitterwood looked up from Zeeky to once more study the angel. The creature had long white hair and stood as tall as the statue that had just attacked Jandra. The angel's wings folded in an elaborate origami, the feathers tinkling musically as they furled up behind his broad shoulders until they vanished. The angel took the long piece of black cloth draped over his shoulders and shook it, revealing it to be a coat. He pulled the coat on and from somewhere within its folds a hat appeared in the angel's hands. It was broad-brimmed and black-exactly like the hat Hezekiah used to wear. Indeed, Hezekiah and the angel were almost identical in stature and garb, with only hair coloring and tones of skin to differentiate them. Bitterwood tensed. The only thing he despised more than dragons was the prophet Hezekiah. Of what relation was this angel to him?
The angel smiled once he was done adjusting his garments.
"As long as introductions are being made," he said, "call me Gabriel."
After a brief second of nothingness, Jandra was pulled into blinding light. She couldn't see a thing as two strong hands grabbed her shoulders and slammed her up against a wall. Her helmet striking the surface caused her head to ring like a bell.
"I run the show down here," a throaty female voice hissed, inches from her face. "If you were told I'd let some Atlantean skank waltz in here and piss all over my territory, you've been sadly misinformed. Who sent you? Cass? It was Cass, wasn't it?"
"I don't know who Cass is," Jandra protested, her eyes struggling to adjust to the light. The woman before her was little more than a dark outline, taller than Jandra by several inches, and judging from her grip, much stronger.
The woman slapped her hard. Jandra sucked her breath as the pain followed an instant later.
"Don't lie to me! My sister has ruined one plan after another and I'm sick of it. I'm going to use you to send a message. There won't be enough of your DNA left for her to clone your turds when I'd done with you!"
Jandra rubbed her cheek and cringed as she said, "I probably can't stop you from killing me but would you please stop cursing while you do so?"
The woman chuckled and released her shoulders. "Really? That's your big problem with me? My potty mouth?"
"No," said Jandra, straightening up. "My big problem is you pretending to be a goddess and letting my friend humiliate himself. Bitterwood may not be a saint, but I don't want to see him grovel in front of anyone."
As she blinked her eyes, Jandra slowly began to see the woman more clearly. She was tall, with broad shoulders and sharply chiseled facial features. With her big hips and ample breasts, she was obviously the model for the goddess statue. Thankfully, she was clothed, wearing a loose white cotton blouse tucked into tightly-fitting blue pants. She was barefoot and her toenails were painted green, matching her hair, which had a dark, grassy hue. The woman was staring at her intently. Her eyes softened from anger into thoughtfulness. She chuckled again, and backed away.
The green-haired woman moved to a metal table that sat in the middle of the cluttered space. The room they were in was long and relatively skinny, filled with tables and shelves. There were no visible doors or windows. The most eye-catching items in the room were the multitudes of frames lining the walls, filled with strange paintings that seemed made of light and motion, showing creatures and landscapes of countless variety.
The surface of the metal table was covered with hundreds of sketches, most in gray pencil, a few inked and colored with washes of faint pigments. The woman picked up a white cylinder of paper and put it between her lips. She raised a finger, its nail also painted green, but chipped from heavy usage. She touched the finger to the paper cylinder and a small puff of smoke rose from the point of contact. The woman took a long slow drag, bringing the embers at the end of the cylinder to a bright cherry red. She then opened her mouth and released a long stream of smoke. The acrid fumes stung Jandra's eyes.
"You know why I keep the human race around?" the goddess asked.
"I didn't know you'd been the one to make that decision," said Jandra.
"Tobacco," the goddess said. "I can build an exact replica of this cigarette molecule by molecule using nanites. Under a microscope, no one could tell the difference. But the taste just isn't right unless the tobacco has come through the whole process; the growing, the drying, the rolling. So, I decided to let humanity live, as long as they kept planting my favorite drug."
"I see," said Jandra. She had known that the goddess would be fake. She hadn't considered the possibility she might be insane. Jandra backed away from the smoke, trying to get a feel for her surroundings. Instinctively, she felt they were still underground. Her eyes were drawn from one flickering image in the frames to another. Was that Shandrazel? In another frame, she saw sky-dragons conversing in a room filled with tapestries. Something was odd about them… were they female? The valkyries? Jandra had never seen them before. Finally, Jandra felt her heart leap as she spotted the island temple in one of the frames. Hex and Bitterwood were on the steps, looking as if they were shouting at Adam. Even if she didn't know where she was, it was comforting to know they were still okay.
"You seem easily distracted," said the goddess.
Jandra brought her attention back to the woman.
"What are all these pictures?" she asked.
"I like to keep watch over my various projects," the goddess said.
"Your projects?"
"Little social experiments I've nudged along over the centuries. Living for a thousand years means you have time to follow a lot of different plotlines. I like to tune in from time to time. They're like my soaps, you know?"
Jandra didn't know. She couldn't see any correlation between the images and something you would use to bathe yourself.
"Judging from that glassy stare, you're not getting my jokes," the goddess said, crossing her arms. "Which clenches it that you're not Atlantean. Know what first tipped me off?"
"No," said Jandra.
"Your accent. Dragons speak a variant of English, but they do it without the benefit of lips, so the sounds are all shifted. They fake sounds like 'b' and 'p' by pressing their tongues against the roofs of their mouths in a slightly different location than 'd' or 'n'. You do the same thing despite having perfectly serviceable lips. I could hear it when you said, 'big problem.' It sounds like 'dig drodlen,' sort of. Which gives me a good clue who you must be. You're that dragon's daughter. Jandra, I think it is? And your father-for lack of a better term-was Vendevorex?"
"Did you know him?"
"Maybe," said the goddess. "It's not important. What is important is that I'm not going to tear you apart atom by atom and scatter your component parts out in a long smear through underspace. You didn't know what you were doing. Punishing you would be like slapping a retard for breathing through her mouth. It's not something a socially conscious ex-hippy such as myself is comfortable with."