The room Brandon introduced me to was an enormous half sphere, like the moon was hollow and we were entering it. The walls should have shown the backward shape of the craters formed in the moon’s mantle, but instead, the white stone walls were decorated with ornate semi-circles. Carved into the stone walls were peacocks resting in the crook of the moon, women leaning against the curve of the moon like it was their lover, a two-headed dragon grooming itself while staring listlessly at a moon in the distance. 

The light in the room was unusual because it came from only one place in the floor, but that point of light moved along the outside curvature of the room. The shadow created unusual shapes and made the carvings on the wall look like one thing when the light shone on them from the left, only to look like something completely different when the light shone on them from the right. It was almost as though the person who designed it had the perspective of someone who had actually been on the moon. The light that shone on the moon was not filtered through an atmosphere. There was only hard light. 

The furniture in the room was a large crescent-shaped sofa where everyone could only look at each other. 

Brandon offered me a seat. Rhuk stopped in front of me bobbing itself up and down. It wanted me to put my feet on it, so I did.

“I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” Brandon said. “I mean, I’ve known immortals who could command the elements, but I’ve never seen a mineral act like a pet or see an immortal chat with one. The elements Pricina commands don’t seem to be able to offer affection—only facts.”

From what I had learned inside Christian’s heart, a mineral having a personality shouldn’t be impossible or even strange. Rhuk was merely able to communicate with me better because I was in control of all elements. That included all the elements that made up Rhuk’s body and all the particles between us. Were the other immortals not trying to learn the language of the hundred and twenty-five elements or were they unable to?

I couldn’t say because the Other Christian had given me everything and I hadn’t had to work for the knowledge in the same way. I had no idea what barriers presented themselves to people who couldn’t learn directly from a greater god.

“Get Pricina,” I ordered softly.

Brandon disappeared from the room. When he bought Pricina back with him, his face was pale and her cheeks were rosy to accompany the telltale smile on her face. If I had to guess why, it was because her method of convincing me had proved so much more effective than his and she was rubbing it in his face.

“Bethany! You’ve arrived.”

I crushed my teeth together and stood up to greet her. “For the record, I dislike being called Bethany.”

She squinted. “It’s a very traditional name. I’d be proud to have a name so steeped in tradition. However, I will call you Annabeth if you prefer.”

“I like being called Beth.”

“It’s too short,” she said disapprovingly. “Beth is fine for everyday use, but we cannot call you the Goddess Beth. It sounds terrible. You need an extension for special occasions and times when people wish to address you formally.”

“Fine. You can call me Bethany when a formal occasion arises, otherwise don’t,” I said. From what I knew about Christian, a name was only a temporary thing. She could call me whatever she wanted. 

“Perfect,” she said with shining eyes before sitting down across from me with Brandon beside her.

As we both sat down, the crescent-shaped sofa rose off the ground and moved slowly around the room, as if to give a perfect view of the art carved into the walls. I snapped my fingers and Rhuk bounded up next to me while I tucked my feet under me. The white light and black shadow had a chilling effect, almost like we were in outer space, flying by the surface of the moon.

“Let’s talk about Christian,” Pricina said in measured tones. “He is the oldest of the gods we have left. He was tasked with correcting our problem with the magnetic field, but he couldn’t fix it on his own. He merely held the north pole in place for five hundred years like those stories of Atlas holding up the sky. Then one day, his mind broke and he couldn’t hold the pole in place for another minute. That was roughly a hundred years ago. Various immortals have tried to hold the poles where they should be. The north pole is going crazy. Half the time it’s in Siberia. Many gods have tried to control it in Christian’s place, but none of them were as good as Christian and the attempts hurt them… irreparably. Christian doesn’t know who he is, what power he used to wield… anything. He’s confused, but he’s in much better shape than the others.”

“What happened to them?”

“They don’t know who they are, where they are, or what they should be doing. The work they did disfigured them. They wander around the village. I have to explain about them in case you see one of them. It’s very likely. There are dozens of them wandering around.”

“Do you have to care for them?” I asked.

“No. They’re immortal… until they’re not… but we don’t know when that happens until one of them turns up dead.”

“They die then?”

Pricina nodded. “Yes. Christian is the only god who could command an Iron Room.”

“An Iron Room?”

“It’s a room designed for giving the best view, for lack of a better word, of the iron river that creates the earth’s polarity. We have other rooms for controlling other aspects of our planet: tsunamis, meteors, earthquakes, and even storms. Our best immortals are busy stopping the earth from destroying itself. One of them is stopping California from detaching. I work in the tsunami room. I don’t need to stay there all the time, but I do need to check up on it most days. I can usually stop disasters from happening, but as you have lived on the surface, you’ll know that I haven’t been able to stop them all. Some of them shouldn’t even be stopped because the consequent rearrangement of the tectonic plates is an improvement in that it provides a more stable structure.” 

“Do you prevent a lot of calamities?” I asked.

“I do.”

“What can you do?” I asked Brandon, leaning forward.

“I can heal myself. Obviously, not as well as you, but I can heal others with their consent. That was how I managed to pull off double heart surgery by myself.”

“I wish you’d stop congratulating yourself for that,” I said with a little sting in my voice. “It wouldn’t have been possible if Christian had not been on such a high level and I am still suspicious of why you were willing to do it in the first place. If I could, I’d unravel your mind to uncover your mysteries. However, I do find it interesting that you are able to heal other people.” I knew that was outside my abilities and I wasn’t sure if King Christian could show me how to heal another person. I guessed it was outside his power too.

“I can heal other people better than I can heal myself,” he admitted with a wry smile. “I want them to be well more than I want to be well myself.”

I sighed and twirled a strand of my hair between my fingers. “How did you become immortal?”

“I took control of my cells. Once someone learns that it’s possible to do so, anyone can do it, but it isn’t a good thing for most people.”

I leaned forward. “Why do you think that?”

Brandon looked like he was trying to stop himself from sneezing, his discomfort obvious, but he still attempted to answer me. “It’s knowing something you shouldn’t know to the hundredth power. You have control over yourself, so why shouldn’t other people have control over themselves? You start to realize that people die because they want to. They’re banking on it. They’re hoping to be spared from the long-term consequences of what they do. They live their lives like it’s the last day of work so it’s okay to flip everyone off. It’s too much for their little minds to handle if they understand that the consequences of their actions can have effects that are everlasting.”

“Do you know what happens if they choose death?” I whispered.

“I don’t,” he explained quickly. “I don’t know where people’s spirits come from or where they go. Just that they are. Your spirit is not your brain, not your heart, not your body. You know that too if you’ve pulled a bullet out of your own brain. How could you make a decision with a bullet in the part of your mind that makes decisions? Something inside you can think without your body. That much I know.”

Slowly, Pricina started talking as the hard light lit up half her face like she was a moon in the first quarter. “It’s not our privilege to know what path lies on the other side of death. That is exemplified by many common threads of life. You only get the experiences won by your own choices. The rest is only in your imagination. So, we can imagine what death is to those who experience it. Something happens to that part of them that is not their body, but we can’t know. We decided to keep our bodies and move forward that way.”

“Go on”

She obliged. “I can only know how far immortals can go from what I’ve seen. We can arrange our cells. We can rearrange matter. We can organize the cells of others. The highest I have ever heard of is a god who can create matter. I’m sure you know that flies in the face of the laws of thermodynamics, which most people think are the cornerstones of God’s laws. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but I know that it can be. I just don’t know how to do it myself.”

I smiled an evil little smile. “Do you need me to chain you up in the castle? I could arrange that. Apparently, that’s the best way for a god to uncover their potential.”

Pricina laughed. “That castle is designed especially for the manipulation of matter and it was designed perfectly… flawlessly.” The evil little grin on her face matched mine. “You’ll never guess who designed it.”

I groaned. “Christian?”

“Bang on, my girl,” she chuckled victoriously. “He made it, though obviously not for you. I put parts of another house inside it in order to give you some modern conveniences, but the guts of that castle have been there for over four hundred years. It’s a brilliant design. When it’s not in use, there are not even windows and it gets swallowed into the mountain. He built it as a training ground for the weak.”

I remembered how weak Christian thought the lesser gods were. 

Pricina smiled a sorrowful smile and regarded Rhuk. “It’s so obvious that you are being personally trained by him. That was another reason he built the castle, so no one would be personally trained by him.”

“Why wouldn’t he be willing to train anyone?” I asked, confused. He had been such a careful teacher when he dealt with me.

“To keep everyone away from him,” she said. “All those years ago, there was something he wanted, beyond fixing our planet, beyond raising gods… he wanted something for himself…” Her eyes met mine. “I wonder how he will react when he is healed and he looks back over everything he has accomplished, lost, forgotten, and retrieved… how he will feel about the strange thing he picked up on the beach when he was meant to be mining.”

Pricina wasn’t being very cryptic. I didn’t think she was trying to be. She was trying to be polite as I did get the feeling that she wasn’t trying to offend me. She was genuinely curious. If he had chosen a lover earlier, perhaps a goddess, and taught her how to hold the south pole, they could have flipped it hundreds of years ago. Yet, he hadn’t. He had waited until he had been on the very edge of death before choosing me… a dying child. Once he returned to his greatness, what would he think of me?

I smiled at her. There was no need for me to be curious. He intended to raise me up to his level. He had said as much. I might not have been what he wanted all his life, but I would be what he wanted in the future. 

So, I took no offense and bobbed my head as I had no other answer to give her.