The Might of God

Sometimes medicine just wasn't enough. Congenital heart defects, deformities, chromosome imbalances, these could not be handled with a proper mixture of herbs. Of every two children Athena 'delivered' one would die within its first seven years of life. Of the ones that remained they required constant attention. Perhaps sensing the looming presence of death which haunted their children, mothers began to starve themselves refusing to leave their supposed children's sides. The tribe was choking and sputtering on their dead children and they begged Athena for reassurance. Asked her to speak to the Goddess, asked the Goddess for mercy, for support.

Athena had no reassurances, no blessings from the Goddess. She had grown bitter. Once again she was receding into herself, pulling away from her tribe. She had conquered the tribe at nineteen years old. They feared her, they revered her, and they were beneath her. They were not her equals. After being a Daughter so long Athena was beginning to find tribal life perverse, even. She saw them born into poverty and ignorance, she saw them die in poverty and ignorance. She had spent a decade with the tribe, she had seen an entire generation grow up, and the generation to proceed them die slowly and tragically.

When she had first come to the Crazy Horns the tribal elders were roughly thirty years of age, the oldest member of the tribe being nearly in her forties. It hadn't been strange to her that these people were relying on her, a teenager. Most of the tribe were teenaged, as most of the Twisted Hairs had been teenaged her whole life. Surviving past your twenties was the exception, not the norm in tribal life. If the elders didn't listen to what teenagers told them they wouldn't hear anything.

Things had changed for the Crazy Horns by Athena's involvement, though. Her medical knowledge had noticeably lengthened the lifespan of the Crazy Horns, even while she was secretly undermining their next generation. The combination had left the average age of the tribe roughly corresponding to her own.

Things hadn't really changed, though. They continued to age but grew no noticeably wiser, no smarter. The tribe was eking out a subsistence living without innovation for years before Athena arrived, and in the ten years she'd led them they'd lived out a subsistence living without innovation for ten years longer.

She was ready to move on. The tribe was not. She wanted bigger and better things but the tribe was stagnating. The elders, now much older than their ancestors had ever been, still deferred to her judgement in all matters, in matter of fact had come to demand it. When she had arrived she accepted and was somewhat pleased to find she was more educated than people twenty years her elders, but now having a band of forty-year-olds simpering and bowing to her left her feeling disgusted and repulsed. She withdrew from the Crazy Horns, made herself much less accessible and much more distant. Her reticence only made the tribe more desperate to rely on her, more fearful of her departure.

Children started dying, dying in ways the Crazy Horns couldn't understand. There had never been a child with trisomy 21 or leukemia before, or certainly not at the rates that were occurring now. They needed Athena's knowledge and reassurance. They needed her most and she was pulling away. The Crazy Horns were desperate.

They turned to the New Canaanites. With nowhere else to go and a cabal of mourning mothers pushing them the elders re-established contact with the New Canaanites, who welcomed them back like nothing had happened. A small group of elders met the Canaanites in secret inside a pre-war church the Canaanites had restored near the tribal village.

The Crazy Horns were terrified. Elder Ramshead trembled. He wouldn't look at the New Canaanites, instead throwing glances all around the room, looking out windows and flinching from the sky, fearing somehow that Athena's power was so immense she would tear the roof off the church herself, and crush them all like bugs under her heel.

Jeremiah Rigdon asked Ramshead what was wrong.

"The Daughters own to much, capital Rigdon. They kentnis none should. The capital Athena won't just mortimus here, she'll nuke the land," Ramshead sobbed.

"You've made a covenant with darkness. You have allied yourselves with the beast, this demon known as the 'goddess.' She has turned you away from the light of God. But the goddess has no power against the Godly, as the beast has no power against the might of God. You are safe here," Jeremiah's booming voice filled the church, his confidence giving his words the weight to calm the elders of the Crazy Horns.

Jeremiah made the elders to pledge loyalty to god and Joseph Smith in order to help them. They baptized them all there in the church according to secret Latter Day Saints Tradition, a ritual so austere and sacred the elders had no choice but to submit themselves body and soul to Jeremiah Rigdon and the Mormon church. As they were submerged underwater in the basin above the brass bulls, the blight of their worries was washed away. They were filled with the cleansing light of god.

"God is mighty, and He will triumph over the seducer," Jeremiah assured them, "We will carry out God's will and cast her out like the whore she is with muscle and steel."

Tribesman Too Much secretly ushered the elders back to the village. He witnessed their transformation, from cowering slaves to defiant elders, people ready to retake their lives. He also couldn't help but note the markings of Canaan they had brought back on their bodies. He wondered if they had not traded one master for another.