OF GODS, EMPIRES, AND KINGS

YEAR OF THE SPIRAL

The hallway behind the curtain stunk of adrenaline, vinyl and iron. Beyond it, the crowd howled—indistinct, ravenous. A monitor near the tunnel mirrored the arena feed: flashes of pyro, faces I no longer remember. A hype package for the next match. My match.

Holly stood next to me. Arms crossed, boot tapping slowly against concrete. It wasn’t nerves. It was anticipation.

Neither of us knew what would happen out in the ring. We were both inexperienced, still learning how to exist between the ropes, still getting used to the spectacle of televised violence.

And neither of us knew how to function as a team.

We didn’t ask to be paired. We were pushed together and thrown at the XWF Tag Team Champions like a ritual offering.

At that point, our relationship was cold. And precise. We were not friends. We were not colleagues. Our connection was Maræth.

I wonder now, if we had been friends, would it have made it more difficult for her to betray me.

Unlikely.

Holly’s hands were on mine, fixing an errant strap of my glove that had freed itself.

This wasn’t kindness.

I represented the Black Rainbow. I was the Advocate. Presentation mattered—almost as much as what followed.

Cooperation. One watching the other’s back. Some would call that trust.

But trust isn’t built on silence. It’s built on ignorance.

If I had known then what she took from me, I would have torn her eyes out and devoured her sin, every drop of it, until she was as shriveled husk. Cameras would have caught me. The Black Rainbow would have been exposed as the threat it was—long before Maræth intended.

I didn’t learn the truth until years later—after Holly died.

Only then did Maræth show me what had been hidden. That what was taken from me was used to create a new god.

Through the glass I watched UNITY nurses tend to Kathryn Blackwood. She lay on an exam table, her legs parted and propped in obsidian stirrups curved like crescent moons.

Her gown was sheer. Ceremonial. It clung to her like breath.

I stood to Maraeth’s left, as always. They watched in silence.

Liræth Va’thurane Velanora Gorgo was conceived not from the union of man and woman, but from machinery and divine intent.

Dr. Chen and Dr. Cambric had fused the DNA structure of the Many Mothers into a single ovum—bridging traits from Angel Hamada, Marisol Vilaro, Kathryn, and what once was Yelena Gorgo.

The Many Mothers.

But Liræth’s conception was not immaculate.

Natural law was not simply being defied—it was being rewritten—and to do so required a seed greater than any mortal could provide.

It required the essence of gods. Plural.

One of decay. One of recalibration.

Two sides of oblivion.

Together, Maraeth and I watched as a nurse read over Kathryn from scripture—one of my earliest works.

“When the Vessel was made flesh, the body obeyed.
When the Voice was divided, the queens heard.
When the Fourth arrived, carrying the grief of light—
The world knew what it had forgotten:
That to create a god, one must first become womb.”

Maraeth placed a hand on the glass.

In the exam room Kathryn spoke.

“Let it begin.”

And so it did.

Dr. Cambric began her presentation to Maraeth. I watched in silence.

“We began with synthetic genome weaving.”

Above her on a display, helixes twisted: YELENA. MARISOL. ANGEL. KATHRYN. Four names—four codes—folding into one recombinant spiral. 

She continued, “Recursive selection over forty-nine generations. No autoimmune flags. No cancer markers. Zero histological drift.”

Dr. Chen cut in, softly. His voice, unlike hers, is shaped for liturgy.

“We made perfection.”

He spoke to Maraeth with eyes warmed with exhausted reverence. The circles beneath them were three rings deep. He hadn’t slept. He wouldn’t until it was done.

“But perfection cannot hold the divine,” he said. “It must be cracked… so that shadow may pour in.”

I was drawn toward the incubator.

It was shrouded in containment fog and wrapped in a gyroscopic armature of blackened steel and pale bone with tubes of nutrient mist and memory suspension spiraling outward like veins carrying life. It hummed like a dreaming god, nestled within anti-reflective glass.

When Maraeth approached I followed. Not close. I was hesitant to see, to behold the creation that would define my existence for not only decades.

For centuries.

Imagine being told you would live forever, but eternity would be spent in service of a child yet to be born.

When I approached I saw the embryo floating. It was suspended in the air, little more than a speck of dust to the eye, but the glass magnified it. Its surface was ovoid—seamless black laced with photoreactive tendrils. It looked so harmless, like flickering starlight.

And yet, for reasons unknown to me at the time, my hands tightened behind my back.

Maraeth stepped forward. Their left arm twisted—bones unwinding, flesh parting without blood. What remained was not a hand. It was a needle: bone-slick, trembling, black.

Their other palm opened. Shadow leaked from within. Not smoke. Not blood. A memory that refused to fade—alive with pinpricks of alien light. The Shadow of Vorazd.

The embryo awaited the offering. The needle met its shell. The darkness entered.

It did not recoil. It opened—not like a flower, but like a mouth welcoming its first drop of milk.

Cambric turned to Them, brushing damp hair from her temple. “The splicing held. The shadow accepted. All we require now is the final fragment.”

The words still chill my spine all these years later.

“Final fragment?” I asked. My tone was dry and thin as paper. “What does she mean, final fragment?”

For a long time, that was the last thing I remembered. One moment I was standing, staring at what would become my entire world. The next, I was seated in a chair, time erased.

In the years that followed, I learned about what Holly did to me. What Maraeth commanded.

They sent my mind into the dreaming, to spare me knowledge of the betrayal and what was to be taken from me. There I remained, lost in visions of happiness with the woman I love.

Halsey Knox.

My feelings for her were at Maraeth’s blessing. Back then I assumed it was a kindness, some kinship leftover from when They were Yelena. Now of course I know the truth. They needed Halsey to create the child. Or, more accurately, They needed a piece of her essence which I had been carrying.

I am a sin eater. I consume what they cannot carry. And when I do, I take a piece of them with it.

Halsey was the daughter of Entropy. Maraeth required a piece of her to stitch together the cosmic threads to seed the embryo. I had fed on her many times when we were alone together, so I had it to spare. Even now, I do not know how I would have reacted if They’d told me the truth then.

Would I have obeyed? Of course.

Would it have fractured my confidence in Them?

Yes. That is why it was kept from me.

The memory I have now is not first person. It plays like a film I’ve been allowed to screen. When I picture it, I am not in the chair.

I am watching from the corner. A silent observer from a different time.

Dr. Chen lowered the crown over my brow. It nested against my skull like a proclamation. A nurse injected something into my neck. My body slackened.

Then I began to glow.

From my chest, a filament rose—thin, trembling, holy—a thread of memory drawn from marrow, like the strand of a star’s first breath. It spiraled into the air, slow and sacred, curling toward the phial Holly held in trembling hands.

It was Halsey. Not her voice. Not her soul. Just the shape she left in me.

Holly sealed it in a black phial. The filament pooled like spun sugar from a dying comet.

She was mesmerized.

“This is it. The fracture. The seed of the sky. With this we can create a child born of the celestial and the abyssal. Of the Many and the Mouth. This is not implantation,” she said, almost laughing.

“This is redefinition.”

She did not betray me out of malice. She did not stop it, either.

It was her honor to deliver the phial—cradled like relic—to the incubator, sliding it into its resting place as my consciousness returned. Her face calm. Composed. Not cruel.

Just… complicit.

Dr. Chen and Maraeth watched as Halsey’s essence was delivered into the embryo—an infusion of stellar light and unbreathable dark. A cosmic convergence rendered in miniature.

Holly was given the honor of implanting the embryo into Kathryn. What followed can only be described as beautiful horror. Her belly began to swell almost immediately, riddled with black veins and stretching in odd directions as her womb distorted to make room for the rapidly developing fetus. The gestation was quick. Nine months reduced to four weeks.

And in that moment, the world turned quietly to face its god.