The god of truth grew grim. His brother-sister god, the moon, whose great eye saw the dealings of the mortals’ nights, shrank to a narrow crescent smile. The moon knew the sweet and salt of mortal flesh. This god had tasted mortal savor, and the incandescence of human love. Though sister-brother moon saw no reason to tell tales on fellow gods—at least, not when it was to no apparent advantage, and not when the moon sinned as other gods sinned—the moon knew that the god of foresight’s words rang with truth.

Once tempted to taste a mortal kiss, many gods could not resist. Soon the bellies of mortals and gods alike swelled with hybrid fruit. Half-godlings slipped into the world.

They had gifts of their own—weaker but unpredictable, spectacular, subtle. The gods fought among themselves to protect the half-gods, or make them pawns in games against their god-kin. Most consternating, however, was that the little half-gods looked no different from humans. Sometimes divinity did not shine from them as with the gods’ first half-child, but rather sank deep, undetected, like underground water.

Nor did all half-gods bear allegiance to the gods, or even fellowship toward humans. Mortals who suffered the devious machinations of half-gods begged for protection from them. Some half-gods, resentful of being chits in immortal games, bucked the authority of their undying parents. They stole secrets. They played games of their own. They thwarted the will of the gods and wrought unhappiness.

They will kill one of us, said the god of foresight.

Impossible, said the pantheon. But the god of death, their monarch, craved the god of discovery’s aid.

Identify them, Death commanded.

Discovery ferreted out all the half-godlings and marked them with a sign on their brows that mortals and gods alike could see. For a time, there was calm, and the power of surprise was no longer a half-god’s domain. For a time, all was well.

But a god took pity upon the half-ones. A god who had enjoyed the chaos they caused, who had chuckled with the god of games and wrought his own mischief in the chaos.

And it was this god who undid them all.

“Do you enjoy what you read?”

The voice startled me out of my reverie, out of the world the book painted in my mind: the birth of Ethin with its sequined waters; the extravagant beauty of the gods, some of whom looked vaguely human, and others alien, with rose-colored skin or a snakelike form. Misty Death, who could coalesce into a solid weight greater than stone. The shifting Moon: sometimes a male, sometimes a female, sometimes invisible to all.

I glanced up from the unfinished book, my pulse high because I had been startled, but I wasn’t truly afraid, not even when I saw who had spoken. I would twist his memory easily enough.

It was the Lord Protector.