Excerpt: Phoenix Falling

Prologue
When time dawned, we were all one. We spoke as one, took our actions as one; we were the council, a single driving force behind the magic of the world and the ways in which it worked. We were all friends, and none of us would act on our thoughts until we all agreed.

Then we created humanity, and it is with the creation of these people, who were divided as Those Who Are asked us to make them be, that we slowly became divided. It is in the way that these people acted that we found our quarrels.

For the Gods and Goddesses of the Appollinian tribes believed that their way was right, that women were equal to men just as Goddesses are equal to Gods, and that all people have a right to make decisions for themselves. That no man or woman should be allowed possession of any other man or woman.

The Gods of the Fidolian tribes, and I, their only Goddess, struggled with these ideas. I was on the side of the Appollinians, but the two Gods, the main rulers, were not. They said that in humanity women were naturally weaker than men because they were built smaller, and that therefore men should be the ones in places of political power, and also because women spent almost a year in pregnancy, which could make them crazy, and their place was to look after those children.

I told them that human women had their own strengths, and that because they birthed the children and fed them in their earliest months, they were just as important as men. We quarreled over this for many months. At one point they conceded that women were equal, but it did not change how their tribes worked.

Together their tribes conquered mine, which led to discord throughout the council. The other Appollinian deities did not like the actions that the Demon in particular took against me. We were the three deities of Fidolius, the Demon, the Shadow, and I, the Phoenix, Gods and Goddesses each with our own tribes until the Demon and the Shadow allied to take mine down. The Shadow begged for forgiveness and he received it. The Demon said nothing of the event.

After that, the Demon was our only real frustration. The Shadow said little, but supported the Demon, knowing that as the Demon had power over him in some ways, the Demon's people had power over his people in many more.

The Demon said that women should not be equal to men in his faith, and so they were not for many years, unable to become members of the Temple organization, unable to fight in wars. But even more frustrating was his view on criminals, that each and every criminal should be enslaved for a period of time suitable to their crime.

We agreed that criminals should be punished-but we said that no man or woman should be able to literally own any other man or woman, and we spoke of the crimes masters committed when they attacked their slaves, and of course the Demon did not listen, and criminals in Fidolius went on being enslaved, and any children they had while in slavery were also enslaved, regardless of which parent was the slave.

We argued against the practices of beating and branding slaves, of putting magical collars on them that would kill them if they tried to escape. We argued against the brand of blood magic that the Demon asked his followers to use to summon them-it did not matter whose blood was used, so long as there was blood and the right words were said.

And thus the council fought. We became divided. The Appollinians on one side, the Demon on the other, and the Shadow and I caught in the middle.

I tried. I pleaded that the Demon see things the way I did, the way the Appollinians did. I begged the Shadow to take a firm stance against him-alll of us together could have appealed to Those Who Are and had the Demon removed, but it needed to be almost unanimous. I tried to keep the council together.

And as I tried I found love, love in the arms of Loki, Appollinia's version of the Shadow, and it made me bitter because I knew that if I offered the Shadow my love he would help us in an instant. Instead I lay with the God that was almost his twin in human mythology, and I asked him to keep the affair hidden, afraid that knowledge of it would make the Shadow truly bitter, that he would have his people turn against mine, perhaps even against Appollinia.

This is the tale of the division that was created, the love that was felt, and the day that I fell...