She kissed the Slaughterer’s sharp face, feeling its many rows of needlesharp teeth, feeling its hunger, feeling its ferocious claws stretching for prey.

She fit it into her bow, pulled taut the golden string, and loosed Plague into the world.

The thing was beautiful, a glowing streak, a glinting, flashing, fiery star making its way across the heavens. A young woman pointed up into the clouds, and she and her mother watched it come. There was no tremor with its fall. It disappeared, and the village did not connect it with the illness that came upon them.

First, an elder of the village fell sick, spiking a high fever that left him trembling in his bed. The old man’s skin blistered, as though he’d been exposed to a blazing desert sun, and then it turned black, charred as if over a cook fire. The old man looked out from his body with bright, horrified eyes, screaming in agony as his wife tried to soothe him. The room filled with smoke and smelled of burning, and at last, the old man was dead.

He would be the first but not the last. Within a few hours, the town, from the tiniest children to the elders, had been taken ill, and within a few days, they were gone.

The neighboring villages packed their belongings and headed into the hills, where it was cooler, but Plague traveled with them, killing rapturously, killing indiscriminately, killing hungrily, and those who were well shut their doors to the sick, and those who were sick ran through the streets in search of comfort, throwing themselves into wells and springs, spreading their disease.

Townspeople became terrified of one another, fighting their neighbors for food and space, fighting their friends, fighting their families, and dying all the while.

The Slaughterer’s mouth stretched into a tight, fanged smile. It fed its mistress, and this was a new and vulnerable country, with no understanding of the goddess and her ways.

There had once been protective spells, but the world knew nothing of such things now.

The Slaughterer traveled, streaking through the blue and shimmering sky, lighting the countryside afire in places both known and unknown.

It visited India and Gaul, Parthia and the iced-over countries of Oceanus. It fell upon an island, where it was worshipped. It was a god for a time, and then it did as gods do and killed every inhabitant. It swept the dead out to sea, where their bodies would tangle in nets and bring disease to fishermen.

Heat smothered the spheres. Lightning crackled in the heavens. A soft cloud of black smoke filled the clouds as the Slaughterer flew, and it inhaled the smoke, expanding the razor-sharp feathers its body was fletched with and spreading them in the air. It did not need the wind. It did not need anything but Sekhmet.

The Slaughterer made its way over the earth, feeding here and there, leaving only Rome, the center of the world, untouched for its mother’s pleasure.