Godkiller

 

Jon Godkiller (who they later called Ahuizotl after his father) lived in the skull of a great dead thing filled with crystals. The skull often flooded with the gifts brought by Water, and when it was dry John and his friends spent most of their time killing and eating the great Bloodbats who were the beloved children of the Healing God. This was, you'll recall, after Wolf died and let Fire remake the world. And remake it again and again until the land rose and fell like cheese in molten dough.

 

Jon liked to swim down into the pores beneath the bones, or the mulch as the men from the cities called it, and fish for things left behind from the days before the land melted. He had a collection of such artifacts and he would often ask Teacher, who was a speaker of the Voice From the Cave, for understanding of what they meant. Teacher made up stories but was in truth just as clueless as Jon. He had been thrown out of the Cave for some reason or another, or possibly it was all a plant so he might spread doubt of the other Gods in the guise of exile.

 

It was Teacher who put the idea in Jon's head to rob the great mating caravan that brought Water his annual shipment of wives. These women, chosen by lottery and gathered from across the realm, were given to the God and then drowned in the act of bearing his tadpoles, which he then devoured. Jon wasn't thankful to Water for bringing the rain and wasn't afraid of his priests, and he wanted a wife who was large enough that he didn't instinctively try to eat her.

 

  

Jon led his group of bandits to the spot where the caravan crossed the mountain of bones where he lived. The enormous juggernaut was pulled by blinkered slaves and full of women in cages. Jon tried to explain the plan to his fighters but lost interest and leaped down onto the cart. He opened up a space for his men to attack by expedient of impaling himself on the carapace spears of the guards. He sank down onto their blades and laid about with his dewclaw, eviscerating some and shoveling others into his wide mouth for instant consumption.

 

There were many more guards than bandits and Jon's initial plan was to seize his query and escape: the largest cage with the largest woman, a princess who had been selected by lottery (but in fact to eliminate her from the line of succession). She was imprisoned alongside a smaller woman and Jon, when the cage wouldn't open, picked up cage and women both and made to escape. He saw the drivers of the juggernaut whip the pull slaves. He would happily have devoured all the slaves given the chance but seeing them suffer under the priests' whips made him angry. He caught the whip and yanked the driver into his mouth to be devoured in his toothless maw, prompting the other to leap over the side into the ravine rather than face him. He shouted to the slaves that they were free, and that they were much larger than the caravan guards. It was the only thing he had in common with them. The freedmen followed him into battle and he hacked his way through the remaining soldiers. His men, many of whom had already fled with the God's slave-wives or been cut down by the priests, rallied to his side.

 

Without the pull slaves to haul it, the cart began to roll backwards down the hill. It gathered speed and Jon leaped to grab the reins before it sailed off a cliff. He sank his claws into the earth but it was insufficient to arrest the divine vehicle. Then the first of Jon's miracles filled the valley. A torrent of rain that caught the Car of God when it fell off the cliff, turning it into a mighty raft that carried him home. 

 

Jon gave the lesser woman from the cage to Teacher, so that they might be small together. He took the large woman himself. In some tellings of the tale the Princess' people practiced a ritualized form of bride kidnapping, which made the giant frog-man's advances into an idealized courtship. While this is one way to soften the tale we must remember that Ahuizotl began his career as a bandit and often acted like one. In any case, after he fucked his new wife he excitedly showed her his collection of garbage. She recognized one object in the pile. A talking box, with which Jon and Teacher could only produce an exasperated droning sound. The princess activated the artifact and it filled the crystal skull with music.

 

With the escaped slaves and bandits and the wives of Water, the hideout in the skull became a village. Crusaders from across the realm laid siege to the fortress of bone and crystal and met their end in the drowned labyrinth beneath. The skull periodically flooded and every time Jon would descend into the tunnels to open new holes and let the water out. You may remember that Jon did not know the face or voice of his father and one night was distressed to find his dreams filled with a voice that beat the water like the hyoid bone in the throat of the trapdoor toad.

 

JON said the voice

 

I HAVE SEEN YOUR FACE it said

 

NOW.... DIE

 

He recognized the sound, which he could feel through the wetness in the air. He remembered swimming through the rain, faster than his siblings as they disappeared into the giant thing behind him. His mother gone to drown, and to stay and to stay.

 

When he woke the interior of the great skull was completely filled with the slimy bulk of an enormous frog wedged inside. It gurgled massively and rotated in search of prey hidden amid the crystals. None of the inhabitants of Jon's bandit village dared make a sound. He was Afraid. Excited. He swam out of the fortress and shouted as loud as he could to draw Water's attention away from his people. Then like the tadpole in his dream he swam away as fast as he could.

 

He wasn't fast enough. He didn't need to be. 

 

Down into Water's crop went Jon Godkiller. Through the acid and the crushing peristalsis of the eyes and the throat and into the stomach. Water made a mistake, he thought. I am too big to swallow now. I will not dissolve. In the stomach he looked around for something to pierce the intestinal lining. His dewclaw could not cut through. Lodged in the interior wall of his father's belly was a tooth from Wolf, leftover from the war. He grabbed the tooth and cut open the wall so that blood spilled into the belly. He swam into the vein and let it carry him out to the farthest extent of Water's limbs, then back to the heart.

 

The space inside Water's heart was hollow. Cavernous. Inside it was nothing but a single tadpole, small and frightened. Every fiber of Jon Godkiller's being demanded he devour this small thing. He caught it in a webbed hand. He slid Wolf's tusk into the wall of the heart and opened a path. He uncupped his hand and let the tadpole swim out.

The enormous corpse of Water sloughed downward and became lodged in the pores at the base of the skull. When a God loses one power he gains another. When he took his father's life, Ahuizotl left something behind inside of him. As he let the tadpole leave, so left his inclination to devour things smaller than himself. He summoned his fastest runners and his swiftest sailors and bid them journey to the farthest reaches of the bone mountains that pierced the great sea of molten rock. If they summoned every village and tribe, they might completely consume Water's corpse before it putrefied.

 

Little did any of them know it would be the last time they'd ever see flowing water.