"I am especially pleased with my daughter Phage. She wisely builds my coliseum. She wisely speaks through the old crone there. She will speak also through another." The First's smile glimmered in the darkness. "Phage, I have brought the one who gave birth to you, who once ruled you. Now you will rule her. As this crone is your voice to the workers, this one will be your voice to the world." He gestured behind him.
The curtains on the barge parted. From them emerged Braids, a smile stitching across her face. "Hello, big sister!"
"I am honored," Phage said, still in her deep bow.
"Stand, Phage, Zagorka, and Braids. Approach."
While Phage rose, Braids skipped down the gangplank and came up alongside her. Zagorka left her mule, hobbling up with the others.
The First's smile deepened, and he lifted his hands to the starry heavens. "You three will make this coliseum into the center of Otaria, the center of Dominaria."
In that killing embrace, Jeska lived. In trembling agony, she became Phage.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE GODS LOOKED UP
In the midst of endless sands lay a tiny spot of green. Were any gods looking down, they might not have noticed that solitary acre of brush amid millions of millions of acres of nothing. No gods looked down, though.
It was left to Ixidor to look up.
He knelt on a little sandbar in the midst of the stream. Sand caked his arms and legs. Mud hung in dry scales from his face. Blood painted his three-fingered hand. He was creating. Feverishly. Already, his oasis teemed with life.
While fingers scooped and shaped clay, fish schooled to either side of the sandbar. With unblinking eyes, they watched Ixidor work. He paused and stared back, and the fish flitted away to wavering depths. Something else flitted, and Ixidor's focus shifted to the gleaming surface. It reflected his birds, flocking through an eggshell sky. Bright plumes and brighter calls filled the oasis.
Ixidor had set them there-birds in the heavens and fish in the stream-before he had thought of feeding them. At first he had made fish-eating birds-cranes, kingfishers, gulls-and bird-eating fish-creatures that had never been before. Some fish flew. Some birds swam. It was impractical, though, an endless solipsism. At last, Ixidor had relented, created harmless but prolific bugs-water striders, bottle flies, mayflies, gnats. Even now, they swarmed, plaguing their creator.
Growling, he turned his mind back toward the thing in his hands. Water had eaten at it. He rose, working the resistant material. This glob of nothing was soon to be a monkey. He had already created mice, moles, bats, hares, foxes, goats, and pigs. He only half understood what any of them ate and suspected some would eat each other. Such practical matters would work themselves out. After all, he was only their creator-an artist, not a husbandman. As long as he kept creating, there would always be abundance, and in their abundance, the creatures would work it all out. How more responsible could a creator be?
Ixidor paused again. Animals eating animals… people eating people… creators abdicating all… Behind this creative fury lay a different fury, the mania of loss. Every body he formed was an apology in flesh to the one body he would never touch again. Every mind he made was a vain search for the one mind that was irretrievable. He could hardly breathe. He had to focus, to think about something other than her, anything other than her.
The mud hung heavily in his hands. Cradling what would become the creature's head, Ixidor ran his thumb in to form an eye socket. Beside it, he formed a second. With his pinky, he created nostrils and began to carve out a mouth. The head lulled free of the shoulders. Ixidor scowled. He pinched clay together, trying to get the thin neck to reform. The head was too heavy. Grabbing a stick, Ixidor rammed it into the narrow body and up through the neck. The stick cracked the torso of the beast, though, and it crumbled into two clods. Ixidor tried to shove them together, but the mud would not bond. Angry, he hurled away the half-formed creature. It spattered against the river bank.
He stood there in the midst of the stream, clumps of clay falling from his hands. Fish snapped stupidly at the little clots.
Bugs swarmed him, their mad buzz in his ears. The trees thrashed with warring birds, and the undergrowth with tiny predations.
"Not enough room," Ixidor said to himself. "Not enough room."
Maybe he should make smaller creatures. Maybe he should make creatures that didn't eat, that didn't reproduce. Aside from those things, though, why live? What was the point of life except to eat and reproduce?
Ixidor stood, abstracted. There had to be more to life than that. If there wasn't, Ixidor would make more-he would create not just life but also meaning.
Before he could create either, though, he had to create room.
Ixidor slogged out of the stream and strode toward a desert agave. It was a light green plant with broad, sawtoothed leaves that jutted up all around it. Ixidor studied the configuration. He chose the widest frond at the base of the agave. Setting one foot beneath the foliage and the other on the flat of the blade, he bent it down and cracked it. He yanked back and forth until the fat leaf came off in his hand.
He was bleeding again. It was fine. He kept the blood off the leaf and walked along the bank. His feet knew the way. Ahead stood a burl of rocks, gushing water-the headwaters of the stream-and beyond those rocks, desert sand stretched like an empty canvas. Ixidor settle down on a shaded spot near the burbling spring. He laid the agave leaf beside him and stared out into the blinding desert.
Light flooded his eyes, blinding him. Overwhelming light and overwhelming darkness were the same-the unknown emptiness, begging to be made into something. In that blankness, figures moved. They were made of the same ethereal stuff that made up his spirit guide, his muse.
Ixidor reached for the agave leaf. In mud and blood, he drew a long, waving line up it. He widened the line and gave it depth, so it seemed to be a river with broad banks running through the trackless sand. He glanced up from the leaf to the desert and saw his vision imprinting on the world. At first, the curving line was only a retinal afterimage. He blinked, and it became real.
The stream reached its slender, intrepid way out across the desert. The rocky gnarl had become a bubbling prominence in the midst of rolling water. What had once been but a brief stretch of water had become a long stream.
"A river. I want a river."
His bloody finger widened the line, and a sudden roar told of the widened waterway. Without looking away from the agave, Ixidor created a distant lake-large and deep. Quick strokes raised a forest along the banks of the water.
At last, Ixidor looked up and saw the wide river, the thick stands of tree, and the deep and distant lake. He had created them out of his own mind, his own blood.
Ixidor trembled. This was new power, unbelievable power. Image magic could do more than raise mud pigeons to life. It could create whole landscapes.
He had created the oasis. The realization struck Ixidor with the pithy weight of fact. The oasis had come into being out of his own desperate desire for it to be. He had seen it in his mind and had made it.
A pit opened in the sand before Ixidor. A second and third formed in a curving line. They were deep pits, black, with no visible sides or bottom. Three more took shape. It was as if some great beast burrowed quickly below, causing cave-ins. Ixidor staggered back. He goggled at the agave leaf, only then seeing the blood spots that had dripped from his finger onto it. Those droplets had formed the pits.
Power indeed. His very blood could carve bottomless holes in the world.