Yule First Warrior of the Eternal Hall, God of War over Men, is reawakened by the Supreme Goddess and made to answer for his betrayal of his brother and sister deities.
Mother had sent him back among the mortals in their guise, to harvest them, to feed her need. He had failed her, had been so seduced by the base cravings of his mortal form that he betrayed her on behalf of their prophet. She had been merciful, as mothers often are with obstinate children. Mother had graciously given up her own ermine bed for him to recline upon while he mended. She tended his wounds herself, and, thanks to her magic healings he was whole within two moons. Brother had been kind as well, had visited him often. Others had come also, including two tender sacrificial victims—soft tasty mortals they were.
The flesh and blood of the ambitious and the tears of the innocent were the food and wine of the gods—and he had feasted, even while prone upon his own altar.
He woke from the rejuvenating, dreamless sleep that is the secret to a god’s youth. While mortals are tortured by dreams—and he recalled well being a half-mortal pawn in the games of men, tortured by countless sorrows in the night—the gods alone simply rest, waking as if reborn without an ache or a worldly care. He rose naked from Mother’s bed and smelled her fetid breath before he tilted his head back far enough to see her bright yellow-blue eyes.
My, Mother, how rank your breath is, how like a great bellows it blows warm between the jagged crags of your teeth.
He stood there, tiny and repentant, beneath her great dripping snout. He went to one knee and bowed his head. She was such a huge, fearsome beast she might have bitten him in half, or even swallowed him whole. But, though she might yet be angry over his betrayal, she loved him still, and nuzzled him with her coarse, blood-crusted snout.
You have fed recently, Mother.
I hope they twitched and whimpered like you prefer.
Now that she had accepted his submission in her true form she used her changeling powers to take on her human form, so that they might better communicate. Mother was dressed in translucent white silk through which her tall shapely body shown perfectly, for she was the color of steel, and her curly hair was crimson, so long that it swept the floor. She bent her head slightly so that he might rise on tiptoe and kiss her cheek. Her breath was now the scent of cherries, her voice the song of the deep.
“Yule, I am so glad that we stand as a family again. Your brother and I have missed you terribly. Here, sit on my knee. You are grown, but you are yet my son, my beautiful, Baby Boy.”
As intelligent children do, he admitted his crimes against parent-kind and made apologies, hoping to lessen the severity of his punishment.
“Mother, I am sorry for the war I waged against you and my siblings. I had become as one of them and shared their petty beliefs. How could I have been so weak?”
She used a handful of her blood-colored hair to polish his bald head aimlessly as she spoke with a voice like liquid fire, “Yule, it was not your fault. You were raised by mortals while in disguise and you took on their petty nature, even adopted their trivial concerns. Nothing vexes me so much as mortal politics and their vein attempts to interpret Our Will. I nearly slew you myself, Yule. But then when I looked into your handsome face as you fought on hopelessly, I knew that their punishment lay untapped within your pounding chest. Do you realize, Yule, how it angered me when you took your own hand, the hand that I had so thoughtfully crafted to raise the heads of slain giants above the shattered ramparts of their strongholds?”
She has you. Repent.
“Mother, what is it that I must do to restore your faith in me, before I shall be permitted to return and lead my brothers against Father’s giant bastard spawn?”
Her voice hissed like molten ore, “Now there is the warrior I bore!”
She rose and cast him against the walls of the Eternal Hall. The timbers creaked as did his bones and sinew. But he landed on his feet defiantly to face Mother in her true form, hunched like a wolf carved out of a mountain of corpses, dripping acidic drool to the floor. Her voice was a gurgling hiss as she spoke through the massive, inhuman mouth, “Voool, veturn to vhe vortles ven vlay veir vrovet! Vring ve visss ‘ead!”
With that she seized him in her slathering jaws and bounded out of the Hall and up the tale of the great serpent that girded the World of Men. She ran through the everlasting forest of spikes that sprouted from the spine of the Worldgird Serpent. Day gave way to night as they circled the spherical World of Men, and then gave way to night again as she finally ran between the mountains that were the horns of her mighty pet. They now stood above the shimmering, night-shrouded Earth, sparkling with the ever present, yet pathetic, attempts of men to light their darkened world. He dangled there above a vast world of puny creatures made in his mighty image. Then, with a turn of her acre-long snout she cast him down through the clouds, and he fell…
