When a story starts in one of the usual ways—“once there was, once there wasn’t,” in the English—it’s trying to let you know its nature. “There was,” as in these are the people you are about to meet, limned into shape by the text, and these are the events those word-shadows will take up; and also “there wasn’t,” because at the end, all the letters slip amorphously into their puddle, and the ripple of consequences meets a solid barrier. 

A story exists—“there was.” 

But it’s only a story—“there wasn’t.” 

So: there was, and there wasn’t. 

But this usual opening, here, is not a notice about its nature in the usual way. It could be said that it’s closer to a warning, because Winona Robins has just killed a god.   

Lythensel, the god in question, is also the god in every answer. He created the stars, she created the planets, ze dug hir thumbs into the fabric stretched through it all to pierce the black holes, and when they paused to collect themself, they had the idea for time, pinching the center of the universe and twisting it into motion. Thus: a flurry of activity all at once, bright and loud, all her busyness bursting into existence. Ze beckoned the other gods forth to examine hir creation, and they all agreed that it was much better than any of their previous attempts. His siblings complimented the arrangement of stars, the variety of constellations they’d inspire on different planets; the color schemes of the nebulae, the precise shade of black for the far-off backdrop. But time, that was the winner. That was what had been missing before—“before”! The sense this could bring to their own existences alone was immeasurable. 

Time was Lythensel’s baby, her first-born, and though ze would never admit it aloud, hir favorite. He birthed other concepts and philosophies, but none so precious as time.

Time is, at the moment, bleeding out of Lysenthel’s holy veins. 

Winona Robins has wrapped her body around the shaft of the massive spear with her boots in the air and blood rushing to her head. Through the curtain of hair in her eyes, through the angle cricking her neck, she gets her first look at where her blow has landed.

Two heads knocked together, one ethereal and one a gleaming silver glory. The spearhead’s point met Lythensel’s left eye and kept going. 

It’s easier not to wretch than she anticipated, knowing what sort of thing happens when spearpoints meet bodies. The viscera glimmers and warps around the broken socket, anything but red, even almost beautiful, and the reflection of those godly colors in the wide end of the spearhead is a better eddy for her mind to circle than how she’s supposed to get down. She hasn’t thought that far ahead. The other gods, caginess wrinkling their auras, hadn’t said outright her chances amounted to a certain doom, but she’s assumed so from the start. 

So she’s chewing at the puffy, raw edge on her bottom lip and considering the hues straddled across the unreal line through teal, orange, and purest brightest night when Lythensel’s broken face shocks into grayscale. First the face, then seeping out across the glass floor, and dripping in thick honey-globs through the cracks drawn from the battle. 

The spear holds the gray down with a firm hand, and instinct floods Winona’s tired body with relief.

Creation is a tricky business. Visranthel’s planets melted, matter dripping into the infinite abyss. They’d been distracted while calibrating gravity, and the nothingness of space had selected a definitive down. Wolaenivel, blind, never knew to light the stars, and the life they’d lovingly crafted froze at first breath. None of their siblings had thought to tell them. Stuzel tripped on their last black hole, ripping it wide open, them and their universe gone in a blip. 

So much could go wrong, until it didn’t. 

Lythensel was a good executive god, too, until ze wasn’t. 

First there was the drought, the disease, and then the planet’s prayers were batted away with bolts of lightning the width of a small town, and then the flowers. So many flowers, fields of rosebushes and sunflowers and poppies springing up through the ashes. Forgive me, they begged for her, until the people picked one too many. Hir moods balanced on the head of an atom-splitting pin.

And his siblings discussed among themselves, and then with the coterie assembled from the dominant species of Lysenthel’s favorite planet—he had to die. The summits failed, as had the prayers and supplications of the humans’ tiny voices. Stuzel had passed without any scars on the greater metaphysics, so this history could continue without its maker with nary a bump. This was the theory, and Winona and her comrades had nodded along, squashing doubts, for who would dare question the gods?

Lysenthel, though, is not just a creator. She is a sire of thought. None of the pantheon invented the ideas of planets or suns or people: it was innate in their plans, just the way universes flowed. Identical building blocks for every iteration, until ze added one more, then another and onward. No one could have known—unless they’d asked Lysenthel, and he’d become so unapproachable—about the umbilical cords still tying those concepts to his being. 

The same umbilical cords, it should be said, have withered away to dust at the end of Winona’s spear. 

The gray leaks farther.

What is a world without time when the two were braided together from the start? 

Blasted dead. 

At least upon first inspection from above. 

Winona’s heart thuds in her ear, head full and heavy, and she chooses to believe the black smudges flickering in the corner of her vision is simple gravity and a bad angle. She wipes one palm on her jeans, then another, before gingerly righting herself. 

A shriek, a short drop. Freshly dried hands keep her airborne, dangling over the divine corpse and the planet farther below—yes, still a wasteland. 

Her heart thuds harder—in her chest, where it’s supposed to be—and a sore chill squeezes and squeezes until her breath comes in wheezy gasps. Her people were still down there, Molly and Yara and Rhys. Her bearded lizard. The threadbare tiger plush from her grandfather. Everything she’s ever loved or hated, or never thought to notice. 

But she blinks, and something distorts. Not in the lens of her eye through the quickly-bulbing tears, but lower. She blinks again and there, miles and miles below the surface, lies the alley where Winona rode up to the heavens on Hranapel’s literal coattails. Molly and Yara still stare up, arms wrapped around each other; Rhys stands on the closed lid of the dumpster, braced by the rusted scaffolding of the fire escape. Winona blinks again, and she can almost trace how it falls, the stack of moments—Yara spinning back toward the street, Rhys’s imperfect landing in a puddle. Another blink and the rest of it rushes back, resealed and dead. 

“Hranapel?” Her voice echoes in the glass hall. The surrounding stars gleam with taunts in a tittering rhythm. “Weren’t you supposed to take me home after? I mean—it’s the right thing to do, even if we didn’t discuss it.”

On the third try, she hooks a leg around the spear shaft, easing the strain on her arms. 

She nearly slips off entirely when something below gurgles. Lysenthel: gray and broken and newly twitching, air wisping out of his godly esophagus, fingers on hir blood-clean hands stretching then collapsing into their palm like dead spider legs. 

“No one escapes a death rattle, huh. Sad.” 

For half a moment, she thinks she spots the corner of their mouth spasm into a smirk; and though there’s no one else in the room, her first instinct is to deny it, out loud so the echoes play back as reassurance. 

“No one else but you could pull it off.”—Yara, sitting beside Winona at the top of the hill just that morning.

Dawn didn’t break so much as leak, smoke from the fires scraping pearlescent color in rivers across the starscape. Lysenthel had lit them during his latest crest of spite masquerading as holy righteousness, and when emergency services across dozens of countries turned their industrial hoses on the flames, great hellmouths gaped and swallowed them whole. 

They learned to let them burn. Everyone else learned how to read the winds. 

Winona focused on her breathing as a breeze rushed in from the west—over the gorge, she reminded herself. The fires can’t hop the gap. 

“I mean it,” Yara said. She leaned forward to try to catch Winona’s eye. 

A solitary little ant hiked up a blade of grass at her toe. 

Her chest burned. 

“Rhys freezes up under pressure,” she continued. “Molly’s the only one who can make sense of that comms system. And I could never lift the spear.”

“And I can? Be serious.”

“I’ve seen you!”

“Yeah, before the estrogen.”

Yara sighed. 

The ant had reached the top of the grass, its front legs and antennae twitching in the open air. 

Warmth at her shoulder, and a stray handful of curls under her nose. Even in the end times, Yara’s hair still carried the scent of rosehips under the smoke. 

“You’ll see,” said Yara. 

But that was the future, so it didn’t exist yet, and in the now there was only the spreading dawn, the glow of the flames a mirror in the west, and the ant missing from its summit, and the tentative crawl of Yara’s hand, first to Winona’s knee, then her thumb, where she traced the shiny pink line of a scar. And here, she could take Yara’s hopeful hand, but that would require breaking the now, leaping toward the nonexistence of the future and being so sure that it would be there when she landed—and she quite liked the now, as it was. 

The now was that much farther away from her confrontation with Lysenthel, and no matter what Yara believed, only one ending waited for her there. 

Hranapel isn’t coming. None of the godly family is. 

The wisps of their bodies as they glided through the sky, the hazy border between the atmosphere and the void—they’d become a common sight after the first cataclysm, soaring above the cloudline and refracting light with all the care of a clumsily cut crystal. They’d orbited in a ghostly whirl around Lysenthel’s lair as Winona squinted one eye shut to aim at the center of his forehead. 

Nothing but the stars surround her now, stars and a green burst of aurora far-flung on the horizon until it, too, touches the gray and fizzles away. 

Below, the spread of the gray pool has slowed. 

“Can’t hang here forever,” she mutters. 

She repositions herself, hanging again by her arms near the spear’s pommel, and uses her body weight to spring the tip free from Lysenthel’s head. Ten yanks—backward pull-ups, Molly might call them—and a long fall that hurts, but only enough to kick the breath from her lungs. 

She spares no glance behind her at Lysenthel’s body. He’s dead, or ze’s not, or both or neither or it’s not her business anymore, is it? She heeded the gods and that was that. Consequences bloomed, and they’re not here anymore and it’s still, still, up to her. 

And if it’s still up to her, she’ll need the spear.

Her head buzzes as she drags it to the lair’s hatch. The metal spits up sparks where it grinds against the glass, and Winona ignores it all; or, not ignores it, but doesn’t notice it. Nothing registers but the static between her ears and the dead earth below.

With the hatch propped open, the earth speaks back in a whistle and once more Winona takes aim. But what is left for a divine spear to slay in a wasteland? Nothing, she knows this, yet a spear this size has other uses, and an earth wrapped in so many layers of moments is much thicker, much closer to Lysenthel’s little satellite. As she shoves the spear down, jumping after it, she’s thinking about fire station poles and praying to no one for one last sprig of luck. 

That’s not true. 

She’s praying to someone. Three someones, in fact. 

They’re just not gods. 

The spear tip cracks the earth and for a moment, if it can be called that anymore, shards of clay and bits of rock zip past Winona’s face in silence. A crater chasms itself just beyond the tip of her scuffed-up boots, and then it crashes into her—grit and sound, a screeching thing with under- and overtones, sidetones, nothing her ears can unravel. The dust cakes her sweaty hands, stutters her slide down the spear pole, but she keeps hold of it, still shunting down and down and down, down farther than she should be able to, given the length. 

She looks up—

A smear of herself towers over her. A snapshot of milliseconds laid on top of each other, blooming from nowhere as she rushes toward the tip. Against the stars, beside the pommel, her legs still kick wide from the jump; she traces the arc of their wrangling. Closer, she studies the back of her head, the face she made before glancing overhead. 

“I might’ve fucked up,” she says to the shrieking air.

She’s squinting at flecks of black trailing beside her newest freezeframes, teasing out the shape of a backwards f, when she hits the ground. 

Winona Robins was and was not. 

She also is and is not, but this far down, the layers strictly deal in the simple past. 

A misnomer of a name, certainly, but Lysenthel was not without her jokes, no matter how rarely any of their siblings laughed. 

A boy, on a lawn long turned to hay from drought, summer sun scalding—was Winona, wasn’t Winona, became Winona, isn’t Winona yet, is still Winona because there’s still a heartbeat pulsing up through all the moments in between to where she lies on the cracks breaking through a different year. That pulse is at her cheek, one hairline fracture knocking against another. 

She peels open an eye.

Shadowy blots sharpen to more grass, healthier. A hill. Two figures sitting close, facing each other, grins pinched to keep their teeth from outshining the sunrise. 

Winona remembers. This morning, after Yara lifted her head from her shoulder. 

The earth punches up against her face with a pointed throb. She doesn’t remember that particular dead lawn or sunburned nape of the neck, no matter its insistence. It’s not even her, she wants to say, as if there wouldn’t be another motion-blurred trail tying that boy to both of her, here.

Lysenthel, for hir part, despite everything, is still a god. 

The twitches and spasms Winona spotted were written off as the final discharges of a divine engine of a heart, if that’s indeed what ticks in their chests. They’re incurious about their own anatomy, as they never grow ill and, aside from poor Stuzel, never fall injured. 

And Lysenthel, being a god and the progenitor of time, can rewrite rules however he wills. 

So let us try again—

Winona Robins has killed a god.

Maybe.

And in the maybe, a lumbering body folds itself to its knees, shambles across the muck-stained glass to the hatch still flung open to the earth below. It traces the trail of Winona’s descent, disappearing into the hole drilled into time bestratified, and a hot flash hisses under its skin. Only when the steam starts to leak from its wounds does it remember the word for the emotion. 

Fury.

Then it remembers its own name—Lysenthel—and hir dominion—all—and she grabs Winona’s closest hand. He yanks, slamming onto its back, and the line of Winonas follows, collapsing into herselves like a folding accordion, a faint shriek growing louder and higher on a chromatic scale, fingers scaling up the accordion keys until she crashes, united, in a splash of blood and mud and holy ichor. 

The spear clatters beside her, and she doesn’t reach for it as she rights herself to sitting. Bruises have already burst on her calves, where her cheekbone’s cracked, across her knuckles, all muddy lavender. “Yeah, okay,” she sighs. “Why bother? That’s the lesson of this whole thing, right?” 

Lysenthel, on their feet, hunches at just the right angle to loom.

“Because you’re always going to win out?”

Ze huffs and seethes and glances with his whole hulking self at the spear, and Winona’s attention can only follow. 

A scramble, a pounce, and a roll—holding the spear again, her hands burn. Bones and tendons beg her for mercy. Not just yet, she tells them, her, whoever is listening. Perhaps it’s just Lysenthel, mere inches from the spear tip, closer than ever. 

“Don’t you ever get bored?”

This time, she aims for their throat. 

She strikes true.

Winona assumed doom was her due for a long, long time, so when the pantheon handed her the spear, she could spot the strings attached. She’d been looking for them, after all. And she wasn’t quite honest with herself before, when the boy that she was-wasn’t tugged on her sleeve, because she does remember, can’t not remember. After the accident, when her father, held at gunpoint by his grief, hired the movers to take out every last trace of her mother. They even found the stash under Winona’s bed, jewelry and blouses buried in a giant box of loose LEGOs. 

The boy she was-wasn’t sat in the backyard and waited for her mother to fall past wasn’t into never. 

Her father stared at the boy she was-wasn’t through the screen door, and perhaps he didn’t mean to drape the doom around her shoulders then, but the weight of his eyes couldn’t help it. He saw a shadow of a woman clinging to the child he thought of as his son and knew he would chase that out, too. 

Except—

Something in the god’s body snaps. 

Lysenthel withers.

The spear hangs in the air, angled up, as his deflated mass droops to the ground—most of it, at least. The spear tip remains lodged in a gleaming silver sphere from the center of hir throat. 

“Huh…” Winona says to herself, backing away from the end of the spear. “Is it still a voice box if it’s not shaped like a—”

The gleam roars sunshine-bright and bursts. 

The afterimage hovers in Winona’s eyes in a wall of blinking white and blue and gold, and even as its mist clears, the colors stay—on the walls of the room, dripping from the ceiling, dripping from her. That same oozing substance that grayed whatever it touched. 

“Gross.” She spreads her hand wide and waits for the gray to peel down from the sticky web between her fingers, but the oil-slick shine stays fresh and twisting. 

Through the open hatch, the only clean view to the outside, she spots the crater and every layer she broke in her meteoric descent. 

“You’re dead, and the world’s still—everyone’s…” 

For good measure, she kicks Lysenthel’s body, or tries. It wraps around her boot toe like a waterlogged towel, tugging her off balance until she falls into the muck with a splat. 

“And no Hranapel, of course.”

She claws at her face, screams into her palms. Slayed the god, survived the god, and now the last human unshackled in the flow of time—might as well have died. Doom by any other name is just as lonely, and she can’t even soothe herself with the hypothetical future of Yara, Molly, and Rhys marching on into the sunny perfect future if there’s no such thing. No such future. No future. All of human history laid in phyllo dough, everything present tense and static. 

Winona sits in the ooze with the doom on her shoulders and she sits in her old backyard with the doom on her shoulders and she never figured out how to let anyone else share the weight, even when they had the room. 

Absently she chews at her fingernail. Her tongue touches the ichor.

It tastes of—

Everything. 

And she’s in Lysenthel’s lair and her backyard but also on the hill with Yara and beside Rhys in the go-carts before the end times and singing a duet with Molly out-of-tune to the fires. Not in the eye of her memory but around her, all was, no wasn’t—all is. She swims through Rhys laughing on his birthday with Yara’s burnt cake and her father’s loaded glance over the newspaper. 

She kneels, scoops more of the substance in her palms, and drinks. 

Darkness. 

Her eyes roll from the back of her head, and there is a boy sitting on the nowhere-ground at her feet.

She knows that face. She still wears it. 

She offers a hand.

The boy she was-wasn’t, doesn’t hesitate.

Winona Robins killed a god.

Winona Robins has become a god, something beyond herself entirely. 

When she returns to her body, her hands glow with white fire and pluck time from its frozen snarl. They return life to the earth. 

She waits for any of the other gods to finally crawl from their hidey-holes, wincing from embarrassment and gratitude, and she can only assume they latched onto the tail of a passing comet instead. They’ll take a detour around the sun, see what they wrought through her hands with the cushion of a couple centuries. 

Cowards. 

But she’s still here. She waits and waits for everything to settle, for the punctuation to come. She killed the god, made things right, can watch Yara and Rhys and Molly run through the city and its rebuilding unhampered by the constant omnipotent threat from above. She can join them, surely. Soon. When the happily ever after drifts across the sky, and the god that is-isn’t Winona leaves the isn’t behind.