The Island Ch. 18

She shook her head and huffed. "I will make it easy for you. Do you think he is more likely to pray to the God of War when the country is at war or at peace?"

"Oh, At war, I guess."

"Right. He sent soldiers into combat; he has to be seen thinking about their welfare. Basic Leadership 101. So, now imagine that you are the God of War. What would the ideal circumstance for humanity to be in for you?"

I was starting to see where she was going with this. "Okay, yes, I understand what you are saying. If I was the God of War, I would want humanity to be perpetually at war because that would increase the number of prayers sent my way. More prayers equals more power."

"Oh fuck, thank you," she sighed. "You would not believe how hard a concept that is for some people to grasp."

"I'm still not following how that affects us here, though. Or how it justifies murdering Dr. Walker."

"I'm getting there, I promise," she smiled, pulling herself away from the tree and starting to pace back and forth in front of me as she spoke. "The pantheon of Gods is unequal. There are powerful, major gods, and then there are weaker, lesser-known, minor gods. Freja is a Major God. I am a minor one. The major Gods are obsessed with power. Or at least finding ways to influence events on earth that will cause more people to pray to them. But because they need more prayers to maintain the power they are used to - or the power they used to be used to centuries ago - they are willing to royally fuck things up on earth to promote more praying."

"I am following so far," I answered fairly honestly.

"Minor Gods are a little less fussy when it comes to power," she continued, still pacing. "Not only have we never had that much to begin with, but I'm not sure we are even capable of handling the levels of power that Major Gods are used to. We are happy to play the long game. We just do our jobs and feed off the worship that we receive when we get it. But here is the problem. We need a large population to survive. More people means more prayers."

"Surely the Major Gods need the same?" I asked.

"No, that's the problem. We need large populations; they need large events!" She stopped pacing and held my eye. "A series of savage wars, or a massive plague, or a devastating natural disaster is much more likely to give them an enormous influx of power than just 'getting what you are given.' But those events also drastically reduce the population. They are starving the Minor Gods!"

"But that doesn't add up," I frowned again. "They are sacrificing long-term survival for short-term gains."

"And now you see the problem," She huffed. "If it were just one God doing it, it wouldn't be so bad. The population would recover pretty quickly on the cosmic scale. But it's not just one. It's all of them. One after the other, all the time, an endless series of death and destruction. Come on, I know you have noticed it. How many times in your life have you heard something like "the worst storm on record?" How many wars, or conflicts, or periods of civil unrest have you heard about in the last few years compared to only a few decades ago? For fuck sake, the world has literally just come out of a Pandemic, and human scientists are already talking about the next one, while anti-vax morons eat horse paste and scream about Bill Gates manipulating the vaccine to put trackers our blood! In the last ten years, the southern coast of your country has been hit by three hurricanes more deadly and powerful than anything in your history!"

"Yeah, but that's down to global warming," I argued.

She arched an eyebrow at me.

"Or not."

"Oh no, it's definitely down to global warming, but..."

"Global warming is caused by the Major Gods," I sighed. "Okay, let's just say that I believe you. What does this have to do with Freja, the Goddess of lust, and how does that justify murdering Dr. Walker."

"Let me take a stab in the dark here," Mother or Caroline said. "Freja told you that your offspring will be some kind of world leaders that will come together after some bitter conflict to usher humanity into a new golden age. That Tom's descendants will inherit his genius and do something special, and Ray's lineage will be the glue that holds it all together. Or something like that." She had the good manners to wait for me to softly nod before she went on. "But think about that for a second. For any of that to come to pass, there needs to be a conflict. There is no way that she would have expended all that power to get you here without a good cause. That 'conflict' she skipped over? That is World War fucking Three! Billions of lives will be lost. Yes, humanity will survive this time, but barely. Yes, it will usher in a golden age, but not one that wouldn't have happened anyway. Her version just accelerates the timeline by a few generations. In the last world war, whole cities were lost, but in the next one, it will be entire continents!" She was pacing again now. "There doesn't need to be a war at all!"

"I'm sorry, you're losing me," I squinted. "How does the Goddess of LUST have anything to do with war?"

"Bloodlust!" she almost yelled at me. "Revenge! The thirst for power! These are all forms of lust, and all of them feed her! She gets a bump in power from getting you guys to fuck here for a few years, and it pays off in a century or so - 100 years is fucking nothing to a deity."

I was getting a headache. I held my hand up for her to pause for a minute while I massaged the bridge of my nose. "Okay, so if she is the God of lust, what are you?"

"It's not quite as simple as that."

"Try me."

The brunette paused for a moment, considering her words before she spoke. "Freja isn't the Goddess of lust because she creates lust. She is the Goddess of lust because she feeds on it. Lust is no different from any other emotion; it's a product of sentience...just like anger, or love, or even something as simple as homesickness. Gods don't make feelings out of thin air; we feed off them." She held up her hand, silencing me just like I had done to her a few moments earlier. "I feed off lust as well, but only a very specific kind of lust."

"Which is?"

Mother sighed. "I am the Goddess of forbidden desires. Lusting after something you can't have."

I'm fairly certain my face did an exceptional job of scrunching itself up to properly communicate how little that made sense. "How the fuck does that fit in here?"

Caroline laughed. "Seriously? Amy is married, yet she can't wait to fuck your brains out again. Louisa's husband hadn't been dead for a week before she started banging Tom, and Ray is screwing two girls who could pass as sisters and are half his age. You have six... six... girls throwing themselves at you. Girls who, no matter how much you fight it, you want to dominate the shit out of! These are all things that you consider forbidden. Just because you do them doesn't change the way you feel. Lousia, especially, is flooded with the guilt that comes with having something she thinks she shouldn't have, and we both know you have given yourself a hard time for... indulging."

"That is how you managed to control Lousia so quickly," I said, starting to understand. Mother nodded. "And why you can't reach Tom. He doesn't have enough understanding of social norms to consider something forbidden." She nodded again. "But none of this explains why you murdered Dr. Walker and the others."

"Like I said, his death saved millions of lives."

"How?"

"Because one of his descendants would have been the idiot who turned the cold war hot."

"What? That doesn't make any sense," I squinted. "The cold war was over before the first generation of his descendants would have been in a position to do anything. They would have been younger than me when it ended!"

"The cold war ended when it did because I killed him."

"Then why did you offer him the chance to join you before shooting him?"

"Fair question; I will rephrase my previous answer. The cold war ended when it did because I stopped him from leaving the Island...something he was absolutely adamant about doing. He either stayed or died. All other outcomes led to unimaginable bloodshed."

Minutes of silence fell over our conversion, the only sounds were the gentle caresses of the ocean breeze and the waves lapping upon the shore below us, interrupting the stillness of the evening. "Why are you telling me this?" I finally asked.

"Because I can't allow the future that Freja is concocting to happen," she answered dejectedly. "It will mean the end of the Gods. Too many humans will die. I have tried reasoning with the Pantheon, showing the Major Gods like Freja and Ares the results of their actions. But they don't care. They think they can act without consequence. They think humanity will just recover and still be able to give them the power they crave. That war won't be the end, there will always be something else. An earthquake here, a deadly virus there, and when the last of the human race is snuffed out and sacrificed on their altar of greed, all of us will die with you. Most of us will die long before that."

"So you're telling me that you need to kill us for the sake of humanity?"

"No," she said, stepping forward and kneeling down to take my hands. "I don't want to kill anyone."

"What then?"

Mother sighed. "Freja's entire plan revolves around one simple thing. At some point, probably after you have had a few children with a few different women, you will need to leave this island and go back. Your offspring and those future generations can't be part of any greater plan if you are all still stuck here."

I could feel her building to a point.

"So when the time comes, just... stay."

"But you are asking me to condemn a whole generation of my own family to live out their lives here."

"No, not them. You," she said with a sigh. "Those children will only grow into the people that Freja needs them to be if you are there to guide them. If you stay here...." She left the sentence hanging in the air.

"What are you offering in return?"

"...Everything."