Descent of the Goddess

Being the Final Part in This Chronicler’s Accounting of Matters of The Goddess of Many Names, Her Lord Husband, and Their Son, Bringing Us Up-To-Date With the Current State of Affairs

This is the third and final part of my Kali trilogy, which I end in less seriousness than I had originally planned . Parts one and two can be found here and here . I may have some crunchy bits left, but I didn't want to break the story flow throwing feats, spells, and whatnot into these three articles.

----------------------------------------------------------

Behold, mortal seeker, the Goddess of Many Names, the Giver and Taker, the Child of Three, the Mad Scion, the Iron Mother, Parvati, Durga, Tara Maa, Kali, Kamakhya, Shakti. Notice how she carelessly let her tongue loll to one side, almost down to her perfect belly button. Notice the angry wringing of her lower set of hands. Notice the panther's gait in which she's pacing the garden.

Can you guess, seeker, what troubles the Goddess?

That's right.

She is bored to tears.

~I saw her,
~I saw her with her black tongue tied
~Round the roses
~Fist pounding on a vending machine
~Toy diamond ring stuck on her finger

At that time, it had been almost four millennia since the Goddess agreed to accompany her husband, Lord Shiva of Entropy, to his secluded realm in order to learn of the order of things and of her role within it. She could hardly refuse, after what had transpired on Ocanthus. She new that She needed to discover Her purpose and find out how it may fit in the grand scheme of things (assuming there was one) before She could decide what to make of Her immortal life. So She would stay, listen, and learn - for a time.

Her Lord husband had many things to say, starting from the basic principles that every god-fearing child knew, and working His way up to the true mysteries. He spoke of atman and brahman, the singular being and the whole being. He spoke of the Great Wheel of Time, the eternal cycle of existence. He spoke of the Trimurti, the tenders of the Wheel who create it, maintain it, and then destroy it only to be recreated. He also spoke of the chaos factor, the "infallible variable", and the terrible risks contained therein, but would not go into details on that.

The Goddess absorbed the information, assembling it within her mind into patterns that neither Lord Shiva nor his two brothers could understand. The Goddess was an amalgam of sorts, a being created from the essence of all three Trimurti powers - Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva - in their time of need, and was alien to each one. Her conclusions and ensuing questions troubled Lord Shiva greatly, for He could not find a satisfying answer to some of them, and was repeatedly forced to bluff His way out of tight spots using His far greater experience at such matters of the spirit.

At times, other beings, both mortal and immortal, were present at Shiva's domain, the Vortex, humbly seeking divine lore of the Lord Destroyer, not unlike what the Goddess was doing. Public discussions were uncommon but not terribly rare, and the Goddess made a habit of verbally challenging her husband and mentor whenever She found the opportunity. She would question every axiom, and ask for proof on any of His statements, no matter how insignificant or with how much authority He made it. Nothing was sacred to Her, and Shiva was not enjoying it.

Ultimately, both the Goddess and the God grew tired of their games, and when the terribly bored Goddess suggested that They could take some time off and go some place nice, the Lord Destroyer did not hesitate to agree.

So They went on vacation. They toured the planes for centuries, usually incognito, and few locals suspected that the apparently inexplicable events that took place had anything to do with a pair of wealthy and well spoken travelers from afar. The divine pair paid no heed to the surrounding violence and chaos that They spontaneously generated, and They were enjoying Themselves in a surprisingly relaxed fashion.

Eventually They came to the Beastlands, and decided to call kip in the verdant layer of Karasuthra. The unsurpassed tranquility soothed the destructive nature of the pair, and they knew peace. When Shiva took His wife's hand and proclaimed Himself happy - an unprecedented event for the Lord Destroyer - Their divine essences came together in a unique act of creation, forming a spark of a future power. The Goddess was pregnant.

Soon enough, duty called Shiva back to the Vortex, but He agreed to the Goddess' request that She stayed in Karasuthra until the baby was born. The Lord Destroyer left, unsuspecting of the fact that His wife's agents had been placed in His escort. For a time Lord Shiva conducted His business on the planes, with carefully grown and trained proxy spies tracking His every step, and sending their findings back to the Beastlands.

Finally, the Lord Destroyer was informed that His son had been born. Shiva put on His least fearsome avatar and traveled immediately to His wife and child, only to find a short, fat boy with a blissfully radiant face sitting at the feet of an angry, cold Goddess, all iron spikes and blades. She welcomed Him, and after the customary two-hour greeting formalities went straight to business.

She knew everything, She said. She knew of the Trimurti scheme, building and dismantling the Great Wheel every few billennia while selling positions of divine power in the future cycle to the highest-bidding pantheons. She knew of the stagnation of existence that the Trimurti had forced upon the multiverse in order to keep themselves in charge. More importantly, She knew of Her potential role. She knew that what happened on that fateful day when Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva made Her out of a mixture of their divine essences had never been done before, in any version of the multiverse. She knew that She was the chaos factor, the variable, the one being that had the potential to stop them from turning the Wheel their way. She also knew of the regular reports that Her Lord husband sent to Brahma, and the cold, manipulative manner in which He spoke of Her, as if She was no more than a weapon, a dangerous tool, a barely tamed animal that required careful handling.

The Goddess would expose the Trimurti, She said. They couldn't possibly hold every divine power in their hands, no matter how affluent or devious they were. The Anubis, the Auditors, the Center-of-All, there were beings out there that would listen to Her claims, and take action. Hearing this, the Lord Destroyer smiled, and shook His head. There were none such powers, He said. A great rewind needed to be done, and who better to perform this than the Trimurti who have been doing it for countless cycles? Every pantheon agreed that it was the best viable option, and those who could buy, steal or otherwise worm their way into the next run would survive.

Shiva spoke eloquently and passionately, advising caution and cool-headedness when discussing matters of ultimate importance, suggesting that wisdom would come to the Goddess in time and She would see that this was the best, the only course. He spoke again of the need for all things to be pre-ordained, designed, without major and disruptive changes, stable, safe. He claimed that without the efficient rebuilding of the Cycle, there would be nothing left, or at least nothing that a divine mind could comprehend or utilize. He said it was not stagnancy, but careful, deliberate re-evolution.

As He spoke, He advanced toward the Goddess, and She gazed into His eyes. In one She could see what had always been there - the Vortex, the ultimate void that would eventually consume All. In the other, she saw the faces of Brahma and Vishnu, peeking in and adding support to the words and actions of their brother. The united gaze of the Trimurti held Her helpless, unable to move or act, as the Lord Destroyer came closer, still pleading His case in soothing words, now speaking of His personal love and devotion, promising true eternity.

Suddenly, someone was in Shiva's way. The child, the squat little godling stood between Him and the Goddess, instinctively sensing danger and directing feeble, undeveloped powers in a threatening way against the advancing the Lord Destroyer. Shiva was too concentrated and high-strung to laugh, so he swung a light backhand that ripped the head of the newborn god's shoulders, annihilating its life force instantly. The reaction, however, was not one that He had expected.

The Goddess broke from the Trimurti gaze and let out a single, terrible cry of sorrow. The awful sound grew in intensity and changed, becoming a living, howling thing of rage. It sent the Lord Destroyer flying, shriveled the surrounding trees, and darkened the glow of Karasuthra itself. Shiva was on his back, staring in disbelief at the creature that had once been His wife-child. He could not understand where all the power was coming from, since all of Her being supposedly stemmed from the Trimurti, and the Trimurti were feeling quite helpless at the moment. The black-skinned Goddess grew, Her tongue turning red as if She could already taste the blood of Her enemies. Winds still howled, and the ground beneath Her feet trembled. As Her gaze fell on the murderer of Her child, She focused the rampaging energies to consume and devour Him, but at the last moment, the dazed deity was whisked away from the plane by his brothers.

~With a noose she can hang from the sun
~Put it out with her cheap sunglasses
~Walking crooked down the beach
~She spits on the sand where their bones are bleaching

The Goddess' blind rage went on strong for some time, and than gave way to sorrow, as She looked for the head of Her dead son. She found the ugly, half-disintegrated thing, and stood over it for a while. Then She crushed it under Her heel, swearing on Her son's blood an oath so terrible that the words escaping Her perfect lips came alive, cried in fear, and fled to hide deep within the bowels of the plane.

The Goddess swore to end Her creators, the Trimurti, and all their doings. She swore to conquer Mount Meru and slay every being there, mortal or immortal, living or undead. She swore to purge from life every Prime world that provided her enemies with belief and petitioners. She swore to stop the Wheel of Time in its tracks and break it beyond all chance of repair, reducing the multiverse to a chaotic mass of half-looped and disconnected time streams, letting all places and times float away into their own separate fates, ending existence as anyone ever knew it.

Swearing that, she left the tortured plane, moving Chaos-wise toward the deep place where she would establish a new realm and make her first steps toward ultimate retribution.

~I saw her,
~I saw her with her hands tied back
~And her rags were burning
~Crawling out from a land-filled life
~Scrawling her name upon the ceiling

Three figures crowded around the divining pool.

"What's she doing now?"

"Building, I guess. I don't know where she got the strength from, after the stunt she pulled on the Happy Hunting Grounds. But we already know that her powers are ... foreign to us."

"It's a whole domain, it is. And it looks like she's building it around something. That would explain how she can manage to pull it off so soon."

"What's that? It looks like a ... skull, or something."

"It is a skull. My sources say she found the skull of the dead tanar'ri lord Maheshasura, remember him? Yeah, I thought you would. Now she's growing this huge monstrosity of a palace-realm around it, and by the looks of it, she's building it skull-shaped too."

"So, anyone care to make an early estimate of her odds of success? I'd have to go with 'not that great'. But they're not negligible, either."

"My thoughts exactly. Time will tell. We should be ready when it starts."

"It's already started. You wouldn't believe the things that her people on some Primes are doing. It's so gruesome that the mortals are buying into it, and we've already begun to lose a small percentage of the total income."

"At the moment, this can wait. One thing remains uncertain, though..."

The other two Trimurti looked at Brahma as he spoke, then turning slowly to the small humanoid with an elephant head attached, playing happily in its cubicle.

"Does she know that her son is still alive?"