A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (25 page)

Sixty seconds passed before He remembered that He was still in god’s throne room. Angels watched Him, some with horror, some with awe, most with a healthy mix of the two. Thilial had fallen, and was crab-walking across the floor toward god, her eyes locked on Thorn. God himself took a seat on a bench next to the far wall. His arms were folded, his eyes eager, as if he expected some great and terrible entertainment.

Thorn
felt
everything. He felt the vibrations coursing through the air from the three lynxes playing five rooms away. If He focused, He could feel the organelles inside any cell inside any living being on Earth. His mind happened upon a cactus outside of Holbrook, Arizona, and He tried to knock it over. He couldn’t quite manage that, so He tried to tap the shoulder of a woman named Erdenechimeg who was entering a bookstore in Ulan Bator. He couldn’t quite reach her either.

“Amy.” He said it directly to her, lying next to Shelley in the hospital. And Amy
did
look up!

“Thorn?” she asked.

He healed Amy’s knife wounds instantly, and Shelley’s crowbar wound for good measure.

His mind was too giddy to stick around, though. It roamed the planet, tripping fleeing burglars in Marseille, stopping bullets in Gaza, saving a mountain climber from a nasty fall on Annapurna… but more often failing to do such things.
My power is limited. I can do so much, but I can’t do everything.
Still, Thorn had never felt such control over His own life, much less the lives of others.

Why had god done this? Thorn brought His colossal mental faculties to bear on this simple question, but could not reach an answer. What had god said, just before Thorn had been struck with this unthinkable power? Something about the end of the world?

He gazed into the eyes of every spirit in the room—it took Him four eighty-fifths of a second to do so—and most were clearly afraid of Him. The few who weren’t were fools, for who wouldn’t cower at the sight of the fearsome Thorn, of Balthior the Great? He had only to wait for His energy to regenerate, and He could crush this room into a space the size of the head of a pin, from the ornate gate to the sumptuous throne.

Thorn looked at the throne now.

That throne was His.

Thorn could control morality, dictate right and wrong for all humans, all angels, all demons. No longer would god or Wanderer stand in His way. Against all likelihood, Thorn had won! He’d won
it all
. One minute He’d been weak, trembling before god, before that little man in the white suit sitting on a golden bench. One minute Thorn had been a Rat, and the next He’d achieved everything He’d strived for across billions of miserable, backbreaking years.

Thorn had become the greatest demon of all time.

Kill them all
, Thorn said to Himself.
Wipe out the angels, and You wipe out tyranny. Slaughter demonkind, and You slaughter evil itself.

“No,” Thorn argued back inaudibly. “The demons are My brothers. They were betrayed by god and cast down from Heaven with Me. We made war against the enemy together. For millennia upon millennia, they were My company, joking, scheming. I learned from them and taught them. I followed them, and was followed by them.”

But think of their faces. Marcus, who has relentlessly sought Your death based on an age-old grudge. Wanderer, who divided angels and humans into factions, and even betrayed his own faction. The Judge, who washed his hands of Your fate and sent You off to die. Shenzuul, a brute, who tried to end Amy’s life, whose followers hounded You in the Miami Sanctuary.

Vengeful, spiteful, and narrow-minded, the lot of them. Your brothers have stabbed You in the back and left You to die more times than You can even recall. For all those millennia, You’ve lived looking over Your shoulder, fearful of who might oppose You.

Let them die. Let them all die.

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if I kept My power. I could do a lot of good. I could end so much evil, so much suffering… But wouldn’t I cause more suffering in the long run?”

No. You’d be doing the humans a favor. Kill all of the spirits, and reign over humanity Yourself. Perhaps this is the purpose You were meant for all along. You’re finally free from god and Wanderer, but it’s much more than that.

You’re free to remake the world as You see fit. You’re free to wield such power as you’ve only dreamed of. You’ve toiled for so long in order to attain it. You deserve it.

“A world built for Me and Mine…”

Indeed. A world with no demons, no pain, no sin, no—

No. Thorn shut the voice out of His considerable mind. It was a demon’s voice: the voice of His old self. He could not trust a voice that lied.

But then how could He decide what to do? Should He simply hand the power back to god? No, god had proven untrustworthy, and such an action would end in Thorn’s death—at a minimum. Should He use the power to bring about justice? He knew so many evil beings, and ending their lives seemed like such a noble idea, a means to protect the good in the world.

But as Thorn turned these issues over and over again, the impulse to kill His enemies seemed increasingly tribalistic. He’d struggled for months to escape His old in-group morality…
Perhaps I should think rationally about this. It’s good for Me to take control of My own life, but is it moral for Me to do so at the expense of others’ abilities to control
their
lives?
Thorn’s thoughts drifted to the Brandon from the Miami Sanctuary, and his machinations to dominate Cole and Crystal, all in the name of his own freedom.

Perhaps asserting control over some malevolent beings—such as Marcus, or the original Brandon—was necessary to allow for the freedom of everyone else. But Thorn knew that if He tried to control people who tried to control people, He’d end up just like them. Just like god. Perhaps the best that could be done for those like god was to strip them of their power, rather than take their power for one’s own.

Thorn looked inside Himself, at the wicked demon He once was and whom He could easily become again, and He had to admit how unqualified He, or anyone, was to possess such immense power over others.
Simply
having
the power is unethical, no matter how one wields it. The more I use it, the more I will abuse it. No matter how pure My intentions are to begin with, the power
itself
will distort them into something sinister.

The small voice of Thorn’s former self protested—ranting, screaming, throwing a temper tantrum. Thorn wanted fiercely, desperately to keep god’s power. He Himself was more deserving of the power than any spirit He’d ever known.
But every spirit I’ve ever known would think the exact same thing about themselves.
If He kept the power, He could be good to others yet simultaneously great in His own right. Neither He, nor anyone else, would have to live in fear of god or Wanderer ever again.
It would not be so bad if I were God…

But that was a lie. Thorn knew the truth. In some ways, He’d known it ever since the day He’d caused the massacre at Tugaloo. The day He’d caused Flying Owl’s death.

Thorn’s own self was the god He should fear most.

He’d fought so hard for His individual freedom—and now He had it, and it was good. But the good of all peoples across Heaven and Earth was more important than one being’s right to the freedom of ultimate power. And only one option remained to any morally decent being who found himself in possession of such exclusive power: to abandon it, and to ensure that no one else was able to claim the power afterward.

But was such a thing possible?

Thorn dug inside Himself, tapped into the well of knowledge He’d been given. He aimed it back toward itself, and forced Himself to forget the explanation for the origin of life. It worked: a moment later, He couldn’t remember it.

Next He aimed wider. He erased the knowledge that lent Him the ability to create something from nothing. He expunged His capacity to see the world at the microscopic level, His limited teleportation power, and His even more finite ability to manipulate time. Perhaps Thorn could have shared His knowledge with others, for the benefit of all, but His own experiences told Him that the societies of Earth and the spirit realms were just as unready to possess such knowledge as He was as an individual. So He whittled away at His mammoth reservoirs of knowledge and power. And as He did so, He found that focusing His attention on the throne room around Him grew easier.

There was Thilial, her back to a column, breathing fast. There were the angels and the demons, some of them stooped in defensive postures, some of them trying and failing to quell their own fearful trembling. Back in the crowd of demons stood Brandon and Heather, holding hands tightly and watching Thorn bring Himself back to their level. God still sat on his bench against the far wall, his jaw loose and his eyes on the verge of popping out of their sockets.

Perhaps Thorn’s former self clamoring for power got the best of Him, or perhaps Thorn’s new self just wanted to do the right thing, but as Thorn’s power waned, He decided to reach around the universe. In a flurry of action, He allowed Himself to undo some of god’s worst decisions.

The Sanctuary system expanded for hundreds of miles across the Corridors, but a few pulls on the correct dimensional strings unraveled the whole tapestry. Never again would a demon be tested in a Sanctuary, and never again would a human face the potential of such torture. Some demons would still choose wickedness, but as Thorn knew from experience, change takes time.
At least now, the demons have a choice to do good without having to grovel to god. They have a choice to end suffering and promote happiness of their own volition.
Thorn’s brothers would need time to heal. But they
would
heal.

Thorn searched for Hell, and found it in its own spiritual realm separate from the others. Perhaps symbolically, god had placed it in the Earth’s scorching core. Thorn’s power was dwindling, so He had only enough time to make minor changes. He ended the torture and the pain. He freed a few hundred million souls who’d been wrongly sent to burn. The realm of Hell was complex and abstract, difficult for Thorn to scrutinize, but He did His best to change it hastily from a realm of suffering to a realm of mediocrity, a bit more boring than Earth. From now on, the angels themselves would have to sort out who went there and who went to Heaven. Such sorting might prove imperfect at first, but Thorn guessed that it would become more equitable over time, as the angels caught up to humanity’s ongoing moral growth. Perhaps soon they’d even allow the damned prisoners to work their way out of Hell and into Heaven.

Prisoners…
Ah, yes!
Thorn swept His shrinking mind across Heaven’s great golden prisons. He unlocked all of the gates and yanked all of the prison guards up to the surface. He even left a thank-you note in front of Karthis’s cell, which Karthis’s wingbeats almost blew away, but which he did find—

Wings! Thorn reached across the room to the demons at the gate and tried to pry new wings out of the stumps on their backs. The knowledge of wing growth had already left Him, though. His power had grown too dim. Not a single demon’s wings grew back.

Thorn quickly returned Heather’s and Brandon’s memories to them in full, before the power to do so left Him.

Throughout Thorn’s transformation, God had been blathering on about the arrogance of eradicating his power, how Thorn was an unparalleled fool, and so on. But some angels had held him back, and Thorn had easily blocked out his tirade with only a minuscule piece of His mind. But now that Thorn hadn’t the mental faculties to focus away from him anymore, god’s squawking grew clearer.

“You cretin! You’re undoing all my work, and not in the way You were supposed to! Just like a demon. All You know how to do is destroy what greater beings have built! If You were half the god I am—”

Thorn ignored him as best He could. His imploding mind was nearing its original capabilities. He’d forgotten vast libraries of information that no one else would know for centuries to come; He felt them fade like pleasant childhood memories.

Then Thorn gathered all His remaining power and focused it on one last thing.

Xeres, where are you?
Thorn searched through the bowels of Heaven and the crevices of the surrounding mountains. He took a quick peek into Hell, then scoured the Earth’s surface, sweeping from South America up across Canada and over to Europe, Africa, and Asia. When Earth proved fruitless, Thorn even searched the Moon.

I’m sorry you couldn’t live to see the better world that your sacrifice will bring about. Goodbye, My friend. And thank you.

With a final farewell to His old companion, Thorn reduced His mind to its previous level of intellect, forgetting the last of god’s knowledge, and surrendering all of god’s power.

Well, almost all of it.

A carpet of dead leaves protected a village of dead people below the earth. Thorn and Thilial floated above the sun-dappled cairns, letting memories percolate through them. The warm light of dawn cast long shadows through the oak branches, but not so long as the shadows of history, or of guilt.

Thorn looked up into those branches now. Were these the same trees in which he’d once perched with Xeres, gazing dejectedly down upon the Cherokee survivors burying their dead? Or had those old trees long since sunk into the peat below, leaving their offspring to grow toward the sun, as tall and mighty as their ancestors had once been? Thorn took heart upon seeing small yellow flowers poking through the dead plant matter, bright and ready to bloom.

Even more heartening was the thought that Flying Owl could still be alive in Heaven. Only after Thorn had abandoned most of god’s powers had he realized that the boy’s reasonable and charitable tendencies may have earned him a place in Paradise. He’d beseeched the angels to help him search for his long-lost charge, but they’d hear none of it. Thorn had freed them, yes, but he’d collapsed their entire social order. He would not be welcome in Heaven again until his final number was up.

And Thorn could accept that. Just knowing there was a chance of seeing Flying Owl again was enough to satisfy Thorn until the time came. For now, he was through with crusades, with flight from relentless enemies, with panic in the darkness. He’d earned a more peaceful life.