The Mare Gods
The Sword of Nubium
By
J.M. Thomas
~~~
Copyright 2014 The Cosmic Empire Publishing
The Mare Gods
The Sword of Nubium
The supernatural prey on the power of the human imagination.
The unseen boogie man in the closet of a girl of eight is far more terrifying than he would be if she ever woke to see him standing over her bed. Even with the grotesque, disfigured, rancid complexion, with the stench of centuries spent prowling the crevices between this world and the next, with the souls of the haunted swirling in his eyes, the boogie man could never strike the fear in the heart of that little girl by appearing before her to match the terror she felt every night looking at the door in the shadows of the corner of the room.
The Mare Gods knew when to use this to their advantage and when the display of their power, the manifestation of their ability, the demonstration of just what it means to be a god could render human imagination feeble.
When the moon stays full for thirty days, every person on Earth pays attention.
Summus, whom no one, god nor man, thought beneath any entity in the known universe, had the keen ability to know when an illustration of his might was necessary. Lightning storms set New York City ablaze and leveled it to the ground. The Bread Basket went fallow for a decade. The Iberian Peninsula sank into the sea. These provided reminders to adhere to the life demanded by the gods were counterbalanced by acts of kindness from Summus, but periods of total peace, the reigning in of natural disasters, and the obliteration of cancer's presence in whole paled in comparison to the very real fact there would never again be one person whose nationality would be Spanish.
Every man, woman, and child would think of Summus every evening when they saw the Moon in any of its stages that made it visible. They all thought of Summus during the new moon and darkest nights of the month. Night was the domain of Summus, inescapable in its totality, a possession the mightiest god would never relinquish.
No person had seen Summus for more than a millennium, and no person needed to see him in the flesh to know his power.
Interaction with mortals was left in whole to the Five of the Mare. In the hierarchy of the divine, these five gods occupied the space below Summus and were wise to remember their place. Frigoris, the youngest son of Summus and known throughout as his father's favorite, had no desire to wait for the all-powerful to leave his realm to his children and had no intention of being sixth in line to the throne.
The god Frigoris paid for his attempt at patricide by being banished to the dark side of the Moon forever.
The remaining siblings found ways to simultaneously support one another but leave no room to question which would destroy the other to rule in their father's stead. Whether Summus would ever cease to be never was the question at hand. Only to whom power would transfer when it would come to pass occupied the thoughts, actions, and deeds of the Five and their devotees on Earth.
It was wrong to say humans worshipped any of the Five as little could be gained by seeking preemptive favor. When one of the Five had cause to visit someone, or send one of their emissaries, the reason to do so was set in stone and nothing could prevent it. Many would accept their fate and the influence, judgment, correction, and sometimes praise or bounty. Those who had the ability to see whatever happened as what was decreed to happen saw their place in the world as contingent upon the gods and they deserved what came to them. Some would attempt to fight back against the influence, and those who did were destroyed. Obliterated. Made to be an example to prevent any resistance to the gods. The foolish of those fools would plead with one god to intervene against another, but such misguided action rarely worked and caused extreme collateral damage.
The vast majority fell into those two camps, but a small minority, people who cut their own path through life who spent most of their lives alone, gave themselves to the gods. They curried their favor. They pledged the whole of their existence, their bodies, their lives, their fortune, to count themselves among a god's cult. While fewer in number, these humans held power far greater than they would otherwise possess. To the individual member of the Five was left the question what kind of benefit, or lack thereof, the devotion would provide. A god, on a whim, could choose torment over pleasure, and no measure of morality within the deity provided a permanent compass. There were times when a god just wanted to be amused, and humans surrendering themselves had to know no method of knowing when the mood might strike one went with the territory of surrender.
Pleasure. Earthly gain. The easing of suffering. Vengeance. Power. The loners among the species sought these things and in seeking they hoped that all might lead to their ascension into the hallowed grounds of Luna to the sea of their particular god and eternal existence. It was even given from time to time.
But no matter how a person would react, they all knew one of the Five never darkened the doorstep of someone who did not need it.
The whole of the species felt their only comfort knowing nothing was arbitrary.
Each of the Five employed the services of a herald. When every form of creature that crawls upon his belly on Earth started to invade a space through the door, the vents, the pipes, the windows, they fell from the light fixtures and writhed in the furniture, dirty laundry piles, and refrigerators, then Anguis was at hand, and regardless of how one thought of himself before meeting Anguis, he never felt the same and could do nothing again to return any type of belief in himself there was before. Anguis sent her serpents only to those who needed a new world view, and while her work most often involved the pulling back of those delusions the person held about themselves there were times when a man or a woman welcomed her and the impending change. Those people who were freed from the prisons they constructed for themselves remained true to Anguis for the rest of their lives.
The rest? They were the ones who found life after Anguis to be difficult, at best, and suicides were the rule, rather than the exception, among those visited. That they knew, Anguis took greater pleasure in torment and rarely prevented one from surrendering their life.
Nubium, the god of justice, came forth from billowing clouds. When his herald arrived, when a person wandered into the room, alley, or an open field, the crime for which sentence was to be carried out was always known. The person would watch Nubium form within the vapor, they would see Nubium's sword ablaze in white flame and prepare themselves to lose something of value to set right the scales. No one doubted the extremes to which his satisfaction of Nubium ran when he had a wrong to set right. He was frightening in his adherence to claim compensation.
Stanley Jenkins, a snide little man who enjoyed watching people he burglarized come home to see their lives in ruin, tried to run when the fog rolled into his backyard. If he had understood what the glint in his wife's eye meant, he would have shook off her hand that prevented his flight.
It was not as though he would be able to understand those sparks as they danced across the dull blue circles just beneath her high hairline.
She had never shown it to him.
She was Pearl Jenkins, so named because her mother thought of something precious growing within her womb and her father tended to shrug his shoulders, ignore his wife's pursuit to find meaning in everything, and hoped to remain conflict free in everything he did. Her thought patterns followed her mother's, and rather than think of herself as the result of a mollusk's hyperactive immune system she went by the name Monarch when she was younger, before she met Stanley Phillip Jenkins, but already on the road to surrendering her life to a little man. There was nothing of note between the two save the union made at the Te
mple of Fecunditatus, accessible via the Jersey Turnpike, and desire to one day receive the blessed gift they sought by their marriage. The twilight of her fourth decade neared, there would never again be a time when she would say she had her only child in her thirties, and without the intervention of something, Pearl was destined to waste her life away with a man she thought of as a twerp.
When Nubium entered the room she and Stanley had shared for fifteen years, she accessed the part of her brain that fired the electrons of sex all through her body. The god stood a solid six feet tall, golden hair, his square jaw and deep-set features carved from the very lunar surface by Summus thousands of years earlier.
Pearl felt him where she needed to feel him, she felt her flower