They send you down into the swamps of Atchafalaya to die with nothing between your teeth but contract ink and shame. There’s a lot of misery to sow across the continent, after all, and no room for a runner-up. No heaven nor any hell has ever taken kindly to an also-ran.
The cypresses here are nearly as old as you, their buttressing knees sinking into you like fangs. They tower over you, implacable, as you order, and then demand, and then rage, and at last beg.
You can’t die, of course, so there’s nothing for you to do but molder in the tepid water, choking on flaked cypress bark and burrowing deeper into the swamp with every passing year. After a few decades you let despair pull you down into sleep, like a ship going under.
Only the boldest, the most foolish, venture deep enough into the swamp to reach the vast trunk that pins you to the mud. Beneath their stumbling, haphazard feet, you usually wake like it’s the first moment of exile all over again. That agony lighting you up from the inside out, power unspooled from your belly and cut away, leaving you a husk.
They wake you by accident, those poor straying souls, and, well.
It’s not even enjoyable. It’s just reflex. Dragged to waking, pulled from the dreamless void through nine layers of nightmare and into the living world, your first instinct is always to lash out, to bite. You snap their spines before they know what’s happening, before any sort of deal can be made. Their souls flee into the swamp, uncaught, untethered. Their bones sink beneath the duckweed, the moss, the spidering lilies; their bones are rinsed moon-pale by the lick of swamp acid; their bones keep your hollow company.
You would hate the waste—them dead and you powerless, a loss on all sides—but you never have time to realize what you’ve done, never have time for regret. The roots drag you under again, and you forget everything. You forget why you were sent here. You forget that you threatened the sulfur throne.
#
There are a lot of contenders for the role, when it becomes clear the mortals intend to pick a single blood-drenched myth out of the lineup and hammer it into equally blood-drenched law. As it happens, the guy who finally lands the job is perhaps the most boring two-bit evocation to ever coalesce out of the darkness of mortal imagination, to ever shake off the dust of the unknown and unroll a sickle smile from the campfire shadows.
You’ll admit, you are not an unbiased judge. You’ll admit, even, that you’re a little bitter.
You bet on the losing side, is the problem. You’ve always favored the underdog. If anybody were to ask why, you’d tell them no bargain tastes as good as the one made in desperation, and you’d believe yourself when you said it, too. So you put your chips down for the mortals who fight mostly for survival, and as it happens, they lose to the side that fights mostly for money.
So he wins the letter of the law and the hand of the conqueror, and you, like so many other forces of nature and unnature that walk the earth cloaked in legend, are left with the scraps. A lot of beings had worked harder, even been around longer. But it’s the mortals who twist the balances of power. It always is, even when they don’t know what they’re deciding.
Most of your kind are in the business of getting on with their work. A collective shrug: oh well, protocol, lord what assholes these mortals be. You are expected to swallow your pride and fade into obscurity, like you’re no better than any mayfly eking out its little existence on the mortal coil. All the while, he gets stronger and brighter and more insufferable. And, unbelievably: he gets complacent.
You would’ve made something of the opportunity. You always favored a tangible presence in the world, the tang of fear in mortal hearts. It’s fascinating to give them someone to band together against. Sitting back to watch them enact their own cruelties upon each other just seems so . . . lazy.
Perhaps you shouldn’t have let it be known how you felt. Perhaps you shouldn’t have shared your thoughts so far from home, upon shores so far from the seat of your power. But there you go, raw fang in the raw wound, exposed bone under the antler velvet. There you go, lonesome little low god, wearing your heart on your sleeve among strangers. And so the Devil, as he gets to be called now, strips you of your title and your name and backhands you so deep into the cypress basins of Louisiana that the aftershocks burn you out of three centuries of the human historical record.
Do you remember? Do you remember that now?
I know they took your name from you, and more. I know they cursed you to forget power and the coal-bright snap of it between your teeth. I know they said there’s only room for one sheriff in this one-horse hemisphere and threw your resume into the waste bins of myth. It took me a lot of scheming and studying and seeking to root it out, and I had to do it all alone. It wasn’t easy. It took me years, while every day the teeth of the world snapped up another mouthful of souls and ground them to dust. But I found the ancient texts, and I found the rumored histories, and I found old men and old women who buried, in endless skeins of story, a half-forgotten fiber of the truth.
And then I found you.
You, here, sleeping the years away. The swamp reminds you of home and yet is nothing like it. The heat is different, the acidity of the soil is different, the salt crust on the bark is different. And yet you remember this damp heat, the ribs and spars of these salt-specked roots. Or you remember something painfully like it.
They used this familiarity against you, when they bound you here. They chose a place that would make you ache just enough to drop your guard. The trees push their knees up around your body and become a closing jaw, your failure made manifest around you, a vise grip, a cage.
You, in a cage! You with your true form of oil-slick-rainbow and fractal aurora-bone, in a cage! You who used to walk with the feet of a deer, in the teak forests, on the limestone slopes, on the black shore—in a cage! You were meant to unfurl down the mountainside with the cold-lick mist, to slide back out with the midnight tide. Back when the mortals mostly ate snails and clams and drummed their drumming songs and the deals they made with you were trades for food and fucking and little else. You weren’t cut out for a world where temptation has to account for profit margins, where power smirks in the ugliness of broad daylight.
This world, these lives milled away for nothing at all: people dying at the point of the gun, at the point of the law, at the knifing point of greed. Faceless in the dark. Choking their way to an early grave. My grandfather lit candles for people he had lost, told stories he hoped would give me strength. He died with the same dust in his lungs that had already killed my parents. There are a thousand stories like his, and the ending is always the same. Always someone in a marble hall with blood on their hands, glutted on crimes for which they’ll never pay.
After he died, I knew I needed more than human strength. I went looking for a different kind of story.
#
Sometimes you dream. Yes, you do dream. You don’t remember it on waking, but the lingering taste of power slides through your sleeping mind: old bargains, old trades, your kiss on mortal brows.
The stern king in his palace of clay. He knelt to kiss the red-knuckled hoof, the ochre earth. You gave him victory in battle and grief in peace, for you took every one of his sons and daughters many, and he’d agreed to it. Oh, he howled, but he’d agreed.
The blacksmith who loved his craft enough to sign you the years he had left. When he struck the last ringing blow and the perfect blade tipped, newly made, from his hands into the summer grass, he fell dead on the spot. It was the last bargain you had sealed before you left for the new shores whose promises were carried on whispers. You spared him a glance as the warmth left his ribs, but your bags were already packed, so to speak. It’s the mortals who move the balances of power, even when they don’t know who they’re carrying with them.
That girl with her fox-fire eyes who ran from a burning town on a moonless night, who tripped and fell elbow deep in the bog earth. She said to the stars anything, anything. The stars were not listening, but you were. You gave her enough lightning in her palms to raze a garrison. The last lead slug from the last dying soldier cut her spine in two, and you felt no sorrow, sending her down to the flame below. So it goes. Even you can’t unmake a bargain—it’s the price, in the end, that generates all of the power.
You know, people think the old-growth forest is all gone, down here. The same magic that makes you forget how you came here makes most forget this grove even exists. Ah, but a few people remember. And a smaller number know how to dodge the teeth of a godbeast, a godcreature, a hellbelly tempest. A demon jerking awake, lashing out, caged in the root-teeth of the swamp trees.
It’s been a long time since anyone spoke your name, hasn’t it? I can tell you want it. I can see you baring your teeth around the shape of it—but you just—can’t—remember it. That’s because they stripped it out of you, on the cellular level.
The old king knew it, across the blue-black oceans, in his forest hall on the eve of war. The blacksmith knew it on that summer day, when the sword of gods was only a dream he held close at night. The girl who said anything, anything, and didn’t read the fine print—you had mercy, or something kissing-close to it, when you took her soul instead of her child. Her child never had to learn your name at all—grew up wondering about her mother, married a sweetheart and had three daughters, and one son with fox-fire eyes, and people liked to say I had his eyes.
I have my grandfather’s eyes, which were his grandmother’s eyes. I know your name, and I know a thing or two about this world, and little god, it’s your lucky decade, for I am willing to make a trade.
The Devil would bargain with me, if I asked. But I don’t want the power of the sulfur throne. The Devil they crowned over you, the one who won the title in that rigged race, the one they let run roughshod and rampant from sea to shining fucking sea, doesn’t trade in the things I want. The Devil never trades in justice until after we die.
And I don’t care about the fate of the wicked, after they die. Not when I still have to live in a world unmade by their living. The death in the air, the water, the ground, it was all put there by someone. They buried you before the gears out here really got going. You were still wrapping your mind around gunpowder. You should see the kind of poisons we’re reaping now.
The Devil is content to wait—but I’ve waited enough, and so have you, I think. Submerged here with the cypress knees rising like stalagmites around you, with the worms tunneling through your sunrise bones and the flame-bellied salamanders nesting in the brackish hollows where you used to keep your power, your name, your heart.
Yes—I think you’ve waited enough.
So how about it, little godling of the swamp? Are you tired of sleeping? Are you hungry enough to bargain, and then to rise, and then to fight? Tell me you have enough fury to pull free of the roots they bound you with when they threw you in here to rot. Tell me you want your name back. Tell me you want blood between your teeth. Take my hand, in this new century, and tell me you, too, want justice.