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When Bellamy is angered, deafening bouts of thunder shake the heavens. Heavy storm clouds darken the sky above Arcadia, and the four neon lightning bolts at the top of Blake Tower flash in crazed, erratic patterns of blue and green and gold.
What has caused his ire today? A lovers’ quarrel?
The windows of the penthouse suite have turned black.
Mayor Marcus Kane is standing in the penthouse, his shoes sinking into the plush, purple rug, and then he is in the boardroom three floors down. He claps his hands across his chest, his arms, looks down at his body with wide, terrified eyes—but it's all there. All human and all in one piece. So he was lucky today. The last time he got into an argument with the God of Thunder, he spent the next two days as a pig.
Wild rains lash against the windows, mixed with heavy jolts of thunder strong enough to shake the ground. From this height, he can see the whole city through the floor-to-ceiling windows, muted and distorted by the watery waves that shine along the glass. Even the second-tallest buildings seem as small as child's toys. The boats in the harbor at the horizon, floating on storm-wracked waves, appear as little more than playthings.
Clarke is sitting at the head of the table, twirling a letter opener around and around by the point, which is lightly embedded in the dark, gleaming wood. "You should be careful," she says, in the lightest of tones. A sing-song voice. Parent to child. God speaking to mortal.
"If he doesn't understand what an embargo by Polis will do to this city—" Kane starts, striding across the room to her, but she puts up one hand, and he stops in his tracks. Another round of thunder sounds and a gust of wind rises up, throwing the rain against the glass, where it clatters like hail.
"Monty's still sleeping," Clarke warns again, just as soft. "Bellamy's storm clouds could bring snow. We don't want that."
Kane takes a deep breath but it huffs out hard through his nostrils. They're the same, both of them, all of them, these bastard gods; he talks to them in any tone and his words are only tiny fists thrown about uselessly against impenetrable stone walls.
"I'm still in charge of this city—" he tries again.
Clarke twirls the letter opener around and around. Staring at it, fascinated.
"Polis has five times the population of Arcadia,” she says. “A war with them would crush you. You ignore the threats. Form alliances with the City of Light, Mecha, Hydra. Then you're ready, even if tensions with Polis escalate. And—" She looks up, ice-crystal eyes sharp in a ghost-pale face. The loose blonde waves of her hair do little to soften an expression as hard as the edge of broken glass. "Worry about yourself a little more. Bellamy doesn't like Mayors who forget their place."
She picks up the letter opener and points the end right at his heart.
Fighting with his umbrella right outside the carousel door of Blake Tower, as sharp, cold raindrops, splotches of light snow, and hard pellets of hail hit and scatter across the sidewalk and the air turns an ever more bitter cold, Kane looks up, and thinks, she talks about the war as if it were not here.
But if it isn't, what are those?
Shining black drones, flashing like onyx crystals even beneath the mountainous gray clouds, zip, turn, fall and rise again to an unknown choreography. He counts a half-dozen. A small swarm. Their round camera eyes are unblinking. Their tiny propellers whir unceasingly without heed of snow or rain.
Kane watches them turn a figure eight in perfect harmony, then rise higher again, and depart in a single straight line for the south.
The storm ceases abruptly forty-eight minutes after it began.
Six days later, the people or Arcadia wake to the chirping of birds in the trees, soft rays of sunlight they can hold in their hands, patterns of watercolor rainbows on their kitchen walls.
Signs of spring.
They pack picnic baskets with homemade foods wrapped in white linen and fill large glass jars with lemon-tinged iced tea. Then they put on their summer sandals, dust off their bikes, and ride or walk down the narrowest streets to the squat, dusty-sage building in the green part of town. The center of the Arcadian Park. All around it now is a wasteland of dead grass and trampled, muddy footpaths: the decay of the cold season still waiting to be swept away. Dark and quiet all winter. Sleeping all winter.
The people assemble; Monty awakens again. They watch him step out of the front door, yawning and stretching. He places his hand on the side of the house and vines sprout from his palms and climb their way up along the uneven wall, curling around an invisible trellis, trembling, about to bloom. He walks barefoot on the ground and new-green spikes of grass sprout up from the upturned dirt. Where he places his hands, tentative new flowers rise, unfurl kaleidoscope petals, reach, still trembling, toward the sun.
March, April: Monty is Arcadia's favorite god. The people perform rituals. He visits every house.
He visits the rooftop of Blake Tower too, and leaves behind low planters of fuzzy, wide-leaved ferns, a trellis of curling vines sprouting royal purple morning-glories, lilacs, columbines, sage. Clarke lounges on the velvet couch in front of the trellis, watching, unblinking and unconcerned, as Bellamy swats away an errant bee.
"Damned things," he mutters, surly and low.
"You're in a bad mood."
He walks to the rooftop's edge, kicking one of the planters as he goes, leans against the wall, and looks down at the city. A few lights are turning on already, a few more, a few more, as dusk deepens slowly into night.
"You're talking to the mortals again," he says.
"Yes," Clarke answers, unashamed. "You talk to the mortals all the time. You know sometimes they need advice."
"And they love to come to you for it."
"Jealous?"
She watches the hard line of his shoulders, traces the tension down his back. Oh, if she still loved him like she used to love him, she'd let everybody know. No use hiding an attraction as explosive as theirs had been.
"You can't be both beloved and feared," she adds, when he doesn't answer.
Heavy gray clouds float across the moon, and the lightning bolts flash and flicker again. Seen this close, the lights are both unearthly-giant and nearly obscene, the jagged tails of them grasping up to slice across the heavens. The nearest one glints in waves of gold.
"Such a ruthless god," Clarke murmurs, as she gets up and crosses the roof to him. She stands next to him, and he straightens up, shoulder to shoulder with her. At their full height, anyone looking up from the street could pick them out, dark imposing shadows edged in neon glow.
Early dawn, he answers her: "Haven't you been feared?"
Down below them, uncanny winds are picking up, dragging new-sprouted leaves from the trees, swirling bits of trash along the roadside, rattling the windows of the houses of every district.
Wise and level-headed Clarke, who wears clothes that she's woven and sewn herself, visiting the artists in their homes. Brutal in war. Cool and steady and uncompromising Clarke, in hand-wrought armor, who would stand at the head of armies—should they need their armies. She would rather be loved. Behind her, trading ships sail out, then sail back in, with a steady rhythm like the seasons, like the thread in her hands.
The latest threat from Polis is a blockade.
"We have the same concerns," she says. And then: "I see Octavia is angry."
The winds turn bitter and harsh, whipping Clarke's hair around her face in golden tangles. Down on the street, a man loses his grip on his umbrella. He ducks against the tower for shelter. The umbrella turns inside out and briefly tangles with one of the drones, then flies free.
"Like brother, like sister," Bellamy says, and even allows himself a fond smile.
Sometimes if you're lucky, you'll catch a glimpse of the goddess of the hunt before dawn, deep in the Arcadian woods. She might be at target practice with her bow and arrow, or bathing in the stream.
If you are unlucky, Octavia will see you, too.
She's wild as the earth itself, changeable as the weather, beautiful and terrifying, arbitrary and capricious, sharp around the eyes and yet every movement precisely and perfectly controlled. The target in her sites. The fierce, keen glint in her brown eyes. The tension of her bowstring, the careful angle of her arm.
Stone-still at the center of her storm.
Heavy rains, wild winds, and the early, soft-earth days of spring: in the aftermath of the whirlwind, the children on Griffin Street draw hopscotch squares in chalk on the sidewalk, splash in the puddles, stumble and color their clothes with grass stains while playing tag.
Bree watches a group of them from her lawn chair, splayed out beneath the first full sun of the season, letting it sizzle against her skin. She lets her arms fall back behind her head. Stretches all the way down to her toes, then flicks her sunglasses down over her eyes.
Roma, sitting on the porch steps and worrying at a hole in the knee of her jeans, asks, "Beloved, feared, misunderstood: Bellamy, Clarke, Murphy?"
"Oh, too easy. Beloved: Clarke. Feared: Bellamy. Murphy is misunderstood." She taps her fingers against the rough plastic of the chair, the underside shaded from the sun. "Beloved, feared, misunderstood: Raven, Murphy, Monty?"
"Beloved, Monty. Obviously. Misunderstood, Raven."
"And Murphy, feared?" Bree raises her eyebrows, the thin lines of them appearing above the border of her glasses.
"I dunno." Roma shrugs. "He seems pretty sketchy to me. Beloved, feared, misunderstood. Clarke, Jasper, Wells."
"Beloved: Wells. Feared..." A scratch of her toe, painted in chipped red, against the lawn chair mesh. "Clarke." She tilts her head back. The children have paused in their games, standing in groups on the lawn and in the street, watching the slow progress of a low-flying drone.
Sparks of sunlight glint off the sharpest of its edges and flash from its beetle-clear eyes.
"Jasper," Bree finishes. "Misunderstood."
"Come innnnnnnnnnnnnn, come in come in come in," Jasper insists, as he ushers both people and gods through the door. He can barely be heard above the pounding bass beat. But they feel his words.
Tall neon cones of light twirls like searchlights at either side of the entrance gate. They blink in purple, yellow, pink, bright green.
The floor jumps; the walls jump; the music is a rhythm, or a sensation in the gut. The same searchlight strobes are the only illumination in the endless black room at the end of the hall. Walking down the hall: an invited guest of honor, aware of the mirrors that illuminate every new arrival in shifting, wafting royal-golds; of the low trellises of purple grape vines, fully ripe, indulgent, thick upon the ground; of the unceasing and rabid growth—grapes falling at your feet, squashed grapes staining the ground with purple blood beneath your feet.
In the room at the end of the hall, anonymous and damned.
Who is a mortal and who is a god, one cannot always tell. Everyone feels powerful and almighty-strong in the depthless black, feels sprinkled in gold; everyone feels debased and lowly, slick with other strangers' sweat.
Clarke unfurls herself on a couch in the back, behind the red-velvet rope, while Octavia illuminates the fairy lights. She's pretending to watch Murphy, who has just returned from the dance floor: he's shining with gold leaves of sweat and pretending to be out of breath, and he keeps sliding back and forth across the floor on his sneakers, leaning back on his heels so his silly little wings keep him afloat.
All the way from the left to the right. All the way back.
But really, Clarke is watching Raven's knee, right next to her, where Raven is straddling the arm of the couch. Dim like this, beneath the twinkling firefly lights—no one will see Clarke's finger gently turning figure-eights along the side of Raven's thigh.
How she'd like to feel Raven's fingers tangling lazily in her hair.
Oh, none of the gods would care. But mortals see more than you want them to, in the dark.
"Those shoes are ridiculous," Raven says, spitting out the words with a sour taste. She always gets tense like this when Clarke teases her into coming out. Scowled all the way down the mirror hallway, limping, not even picking at the grapes as she went, while Clarke, three mortals behind her, idly imagined walking in on her arm. How the tabloids and the newspapers would talk!
Raven thinks no one would care because she is a hidden goddess, trailing sulfur fumes, burns trailing tattoo marks on her arms.
But the mortals, they care about everything small, and everything too big to comprehend.
"I'll have you know they're very popular," Murphy answers, twisting on his heel in mid-air. The wings work tirelessly. He looks much too smug as he floats. "I'm selling imitation flyers for eighty-nine-ninety-nine on my site."
"What do you need money for?" Octavia asks, with a skeptical quirk of her brow.
"Because," Murphy retorts, "I'm a godly entrepreneur."
Clarke swallows a laugh behind a lazy, light smile. She ducks her head against the couch cushions. For a moment, her nose grazes against Raven's thigh.
Out in the haze of people, she can see Jasper and Monty dancing, and laughing, and arguing. Jasper laughs so hard his head tilts back. She picks up bits of conversation—"You may know about GRAPES Monty but I know about WINE"—and she envies them. The sweet surprise of reunion. The madness of abandon. How between them everything grows, and grows, and grows.
"Why are there so many mortals here?" Octavia complains. "Why is Jasper like this? Why is he always like this?"
Murphy does a pirouette on his winged heels and shrugs.
"Because he's insane," Raven answers.
Around two in the morning, the lights come up and the strobes flare out, and the full decimation of the room can be seen: the broken furniture, the shining spills, the feral overgrowth of grapes clambering up the walls and across the bar and over every bit of furniture, in thick clusters spilling wine into the mouths of drunken, dizzy guests. Even Clarke's velvet couch has been obscured by vines. She sits there still, prim and proper now, popping them into her own mouth one by one. She catches Raven's eye as discretely as she can and shares the first smile of the night as the show begins.
Guests take the stage, take on other lives, throw themselves into other lives. Most of them, later, won't remember a thing. Trailing stray bruises and cuts along their arms and legs and knees, smashed glass shards on the floor, hoarse voices and muddied aftershocks of dreams.
"Brilliant," Jasper declares, spilling juice down his t-shirt as he gobbles down grapes, his face flushed. Monty stands next to him, holding him around the waist, leaning into him.
Above the cries and hysterical laughter, Monty asks, lightly, "Octavia—what about Wells, Bellamy, and... me—beloved, feared, misunderstood?"
Headline in the Arcadian Times, last week of April: Clarke Griffin Seen Exiting Blake Tower, Evening—Strategizing Over Polis Problem?
Beneath, a picture of Clarke ducking away from a camera's flash.
No comment, the goddess said.
Bree flips to the gossip page at the far back of the paper: a blurry shot of two gods on the Blake Tower roof, monumental, edged in surreal flares of light. Griffin Spotted at Blake Tower: An Old Flame Rekindled?
Across the breakfast table, her little brother is staring, yet again, at a picture of Murphy's Magical Winged Sneakers on his sister’s iPad. Only $89.99 + tax and shipping. He wonders how long it would take their parents to notice if he borrowed their credit card just one time.
"It's a shame Raven doesn't want to market these," Murphy says, as he jumps up on his coffee table to slay a dragon, his eyes large and unseeing behind a pair of round, black-rimmed, VR glasses.
"I know," Jasper agrees, crouching down in defense behind the armchair. "Brings me right back to medieval times—super authentic. The mortals would have no idea."
"She would make a fortune," Monty agrees. Then, after a beat: "For whatever that's worth."
On the first day of May, Jasper hands over the keys to the temple where the Oracle of Arcadia is housed, and all of the city floods the streets in celebration.
"It's like they don't trust me with it at all," Jasper says, pretending to be hurt, and Wells laughs and throws open the gates.
Beyond the gates and up the rise of marble steps, past the row of Doric columns, which stripe the inner hollow of the temple with ever-darkening shadows, the Oracle of Arcadia sits: a glowing blue orb in a hollow, stone pond. "Alie," Jasper calls to it, sliding his fingertips along the side. "Alie..." Almost teasing, almost coy. "Will you miss me, Alie? Will you tell me what my night has in store?"
The sun has almost set, now, flooding an orange glow over the marble floor. The shadow lines are low and dark. The light increasingly dim.
Wells unfolds his phone into three rectangular screens, then throws it in the air so that it hovers just level with his face. "Livestream on," he commands, and his own face is reflected back at him. Jasper remains visible in the background, lit by an eerie, misty blue sheen.
"Hello, Arcadia!" Wells calls. "I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful opening day at the Oracle. All of your questions have been heard. I understand that the situation with Polis weighs heavily upon you, but the new trading opportunities opening up with the city-states to our west are promising signs of a bright future. In addition, I urge you not to worry about the presence of the drones. They are harmless. I'm about to go inside now for an evening of entertainment with the other Arcadian gods. But expect further updates from me shortly."
He ends the stream with a wave of his hand, and the phone clams up again and falls neatly into his palm.
Jasper rolls his eyes. "You sound like a politician," he says, leaning so heavily on the edge of the basin that his sandals leave the ground. "Too smooth. You're a god, Jaha. Not the fucking Mayor—wait." His eyes light up and he drops back down to his feet. Flash-bang, a clap of his hands. "You should run for Mayor!"
Wells sighs, taking Jasper's arm as he walks toward the entrance of the temple proper. "Bellamy would throw me from the roof," he says.
Jasper shrugs. "So? You'd survive."
Inside, a string quartet of Muses is playing a gentle waltz, and pairs of gods and minor gods are dancing. From their vantage point at the entrance, at the top of the grand staircase, Jasper and Wells can look down upon the scene in the round bowl of a room below: the shining gold gleam of the floor, and the people, the sparkling white stone of the walls. A soft glow blurs every edge.
Jasper pulls his arm away, out of Wells’s grasp. "Not exactly my kind of scene," he says. He looks down at himself and frowns. "And I hate wearing a suit."
At the edge of the room, Raven twists and turns uncomfortably in her blood red dress. It falls down from one shoulder in soft, flowing waves, hides the brace on her leg and her soot-smudged shoes, shows off the subtle chain of tiny iron links that she wears around her neck. She picks at the sides of it, fidgeting like a child.
It's cute, Clarke thinks, and lets Murphy twirl her around and around. She almost grows dizzy. But then, he was always her most enthusiastic partner. Bellamy is here tonight, too, surly and grumbling as always; she’ll pass a few songs with him later, glad that Wells would never livestream from inside the temple, and they can have their privacy this time. She's fueled more than enough rumors for the season as it is. And later still she'll turn a few rounds with Wells himself. Oh, he's active all year round, true, but he always glows brightest at the beginning of spring.
He dances so lightly that he always sweeps her off her feet.
After midnight, the arc of the heavens across the ceiling scatters over with many-pointed stars, and Wells recites poetry for them. He’s draped himself across the plush, red velvet throne at the head of the room, while the others laze bonelessly over the pillows on the floor. Clarke stretches out, sleepy and soft. In her late-night daydreams, infused with Wells's deep voice and gentle art, she imagines that she and Raven tire of the game, and become careless: Clarke's head in Raven's lap, fingers tracing patterns on her hip. All the soft planes of her and the sharp and unexpected angles, too.
"What have the mortals been asking, Wells?" Monty asks, into a silent beat.
"Oh. About the war. They're worried about the possibility of war."
Clarke trails her fingertips along the marble tile beneath her. Fine lines of gold, like veins of ore through ancient rock, shimmer in the starlight.
Bellamy is sitting up against the far wall, thin-lipped and grim. "They should be," he says. "They should be."
A trio of drones zips in and out among the trees in Arcadia Park. Their propellers buzz louder than the early morning birdsong. Mist still lies in low, dense clouds above the ground.
"Damned things," Octavia mutters, pulls her bowstring taut, and takes one down.
The other two continue, threading between the trees, rising higher as they reach the open land at the center of the park, twirling around the squat green building covered in vines. They skid low over the residential neighborhoods—all of the people in their houses still asleep—rise and rise over the business district, and sprint past the windows of Blake Tower at full speed.
Sometimes one outpaces the other, then falls back. Sometimes they hurry along side by side, following steps of a dance no mortal nor god would understand. Together, they trace an inevitable path into the lowland of the city, the oldest sector, the manufacturing district at the far southern edge of Arcadia. No one goes down that way anymore, not since most of the original factories closed shop and business moved to the shiny high rises around Blake Tower, and money moved to the gleaming outline of the coast.
The Arcadians still build. But they don't build here.
Most of the factories have heavy locks and chains over their doors. Old, shattered glass from their windows litters the streets, along with scattered oil spills and other rotten debris. The whole zone is owned by a shell company now, Sinclair Optics, and its distinctive logo watches ominously from all sides, stamped onto the brick walls of the buildings and plastered on the sides of dented metal drums. One sign has even been affixed to the door of a rusted-out shell of a car. The thick, black-rimmed glasses stare out from behind a smudge of graffiti.
Clarke lets the glass crunch with a neat, crisp sound under the heels of her boots, the hood of her jacket lifted to obscure her face. The district is abandoned but, perhaps, still haunted: she never feels herself alone when she walks these streets. Eerie gold- and silver-plated androids loom from alleyways like ghosts; discarded armor is stacked by the dumpsters, waiting to be retrieved; and the ominous spare parts of unknown weapons and machinery pile up in heaps behind the smudged factory windows. Low clouds of acrid, sulfurous smoke roll along the streets.
A buzzing sound catches Clarke's attention, and she looks up, momentarily startled—but it was no more than a pair of drones. She smiles and reaches out to one. It settles gracefully on her arm, and she kisses its nose, and lets it fly away again.
The drones lead her to the oldest of the factories, where, underneath the Sinclair Optics sign, faded lettering on the metal door reads V U L C A N in all caps. Clarke pulls open the door with a loud, low creak, and gives the heavens one more glance before she steps inside. Cloudy today, she thinks, no hint of the sun to burn through the morning mist. Threats of clean, spring rain.
Inside, the abrupt slam of the door echoes and echoes, reverberating up to the high ceiling and filling the wide and empty space. The air is frigid, tinted with metallic undertones; goosebumps form up and down Clarke’s skin. She finds the staircase tucked away into the corner and follows it down.
Down.
Down.
Her boots thumping with loud, hollow clangs at each step.
The sulfur smell is stronger down below, and the cool air of the main factory floor has heated to a fiery pitch: manic, jumping flames like hellfire at every corner; grotesque, god-sized shadows climbing up every wall.
Her love is hard at work today.
"Getting an early start?" Clarke asks, throwing back her hood—as if time mattered to them at all, or ever had.
Raven, holding the end of a spear into the fire, doesn't answer until she's pulled it out glowing purple and gold, sparking sharp at its point, set it aside to cool, and pulled her goggles from her face and her heavy gloves from her hands. But she leaves the apron until after she's kissed Clarke, a single, insistent, fire-strong kiss against her mouth.
When she pulls back, Clarke is smiling, so softly and so sweetly that the mortals would faint to see. She holds up the wicker basket in her hand. "I brought us breakfast. Leftovers from Monty's feast."
Raven's eyebrow lifts in a sly, thin line. "More leftovers? Could he be more beloved than Wells?"
"After this winter, possibly."
Raven finishes taking off her apron and putting her protective gear away, while Clarke climbs the steps to the raised platform that functions as Raven's home: her bed, her table, her chairs, her narrow window that lets in a hazy morning light.
Clarke sets the table, lays out the food, then place a final item on top of Raven's plate: something rectangular and soft, simply wrapped in brown paper packaging and tied with twine. "Happy anniversary," she says, when Raven sits down across from her, biting back a smile when Raven pretends to be surprised.
"For me?"
"For you."
Raven reaches into her pocket, and takes out a much smaller package, wrapped in a thin, nearly-transparent cloth, as light and insubstantial as a lilting breeze, tied with a ruby-red string. She places it on Clarke's plate.
"Happy anniversary," Raven says, "to you, too."
The two drones hover eagerly at either side of the table as the two goddesses unwrap their gifts.
Raven's is a dark brown scarf, with shimmers of silver-metallic thread sewn in, which she promptly wraps around her neck despite the warmth of the room.
"I wove it myself," Clarke says, as she pulls from the cloud-like wrapping a finely wrought silver owl pendant, suspended on a light silver chain.
"I crafted it myself," Raven says, and helps to fasten it around Clarke’s neck.
As they eat, they hold hands, meeting each other's eyes at times and giggling, like mortal children, while the drones bob and dance and sway around them, and the fires in the room crack and spit high sparks of flame.
"Mortals are so funny," Clarke says after a time. "Aren't they? They concern themselves with such small things."
"This war with Polis," Raven agrees. "Oh, I know it could be dangerous," she adds, quickly, at the sharp, warning expression on Clarke's face. "But Bellamy won't let it come to that. He just likes worrying. He likes when all the people look to him."
"And you like preparing for battle," Clarke reminds her. "We all have our weaknesses."
"Battle is everyone's weakness. But you didn't mean Polis, did you?" She spears a strawberry on the tines of her fork and pops it into her mouth whole. "You meant us. We could be the story of the century, because they think we're so interesting."
"Story of the millennium," Clarke says. "But then a part of us would always belong to them."
That's it, she realizes, only when the words have left her mouth. With Raven, she is selfish. She doesn't want to share with man or god. Impulsively, she pulls Raven's hand up to her lips and kisses her knuckles, possessively, with bite.
Raven is silent for a long moment. She's watching Clarke's lips where they've settled against the grazed burn marks on her skin.
"Hey, Clarke?" she says finally, her voice distant and dull.
"Mmm?"
There: a hint of a smile, a betrayal of her thoughts, curling at the corner of her lips. "Beloved, feared, misunderstood. All the Arcadian gods."
Clarke grins. She sets Raven's hand down again and leans in across the table, until they are nose to nose. Her hand braces itself against the scarred, heavy-beaten metal surface of the table: a sturdy, solid thing that will not waver beneath her weight.
"Oh, that's easy," she breathes. "Beloved: Raven Reyes."
She does not pretend to answer the other two, and Raven does not let her, but instead launches herself across the remaining space between them. She curls her hand into Clarke's hair, presses a breathless kiss against her lips. Clarke lets her eyes close. Her breath stutters, then evens out. Her heart pounds with an excitement and a fire, nearly a passionate fear, that no deity has ever known, and she understands for the first time what it feels like to live below the gods.