It was in pieces now. It had been since the time she had been cheerfully rooting in the barracks' kitchen-midden, and suddenly a lot of horses came, and some of the buildings around got very bright. Tyr didn't identify as fire the light that sprang up among them, since fire as she understood it was something that stayed in a little stone place in the center of the world, and didn't bother you unless you got too close. So, unconcerned, she had gone on rooting in the midden until the tall thing came rushing to her and snatched her up. This annoyed Tyr; and she became more annoyed yet when her nose told her that there had begun to be meat lying all over. Tyr never got enough meat. But the tall one wouldn't let her at it. He took her to some dark place that wasn't the center of the world, and once there he wouldn't be still, and wouldn't hold her, and wouldn't let her out. This went on for some time. Tyr became distressed. The world was coming undone.
Then the tall one began to smell of fear-more so than usual. He ran out and left her, and the fraying of the world completed itself. Tyr cried out without knowing that she did, and danced and scrabbled at the hard thing that was sometimes a hole in the wall. But no matter what she did, it wouldn't be a hole. Then it occurred to her that there was another hole, up high. The tall one had been by it, and with some frantic thought of getting close to him by being where he had been, Tyr jumped up on things she did not know were tables and chairs, clambered her way onto the windowsill to perch there wobbling, and nosed the shutter aside.
She saw the tall shape lurching across the street, with something slung over its shoulder. Tyr's nose was full of the smell of burning and blood from below her. She added everything swiftly together-the tallness and the scorch and the meat down there-and realized that he was bringing her dinner after all. Wildly excited, she began to yip-Then horses came running at the tall one. Tyr's feelings about this were mixed. Horses kicked. But once one horse had stopped kicking, and the tall one had given her some, and it had been very good. More food? Tyr thought, as much as she ever thought anything. But the horses didn't stop when they got to the tall one and the meat. For a moment she couldn't see where the tall one was. Then the horses separated, and Tyr whimpered and sniffed the air. She caught the tall one's scent. But to her horror, the scent did something she had never smelled it do before: it cooled. It thinned, and vanished, and turned to meat. And the Presence, the something that made the world alive, the Presence went away....
When the universe is destroyed before one's eyes, one may well mourn. Tyr had no idea of what mourning was, but she did it. Standing and shaking there on the window-sill, anguished, she howled and howled. And when the horses got too close and the tall things on them pointed at her, she panicked altogether and fell out of the window, rolled bumping down the roof-gable and off it. The pain meant nothing to her: at the end of the world, who counts bruises? Tyr scrambled to her feet, in a pile of trash, limping, not noticing the limp. She fled down the dirty street, shied past the flaming barricade, ran past even the crushed meat that had been the tall thing. She ran, howling her terror and loss, for a long time. Eventually she found at least one familiar smell-a midden. Desperate for the familiar, she half buried herself in the garbage, but it was no relief. Footsore, too miserable even to nose through the promising bones and rinds she lay in, Tyr cowered and whimpered in restless anguish for hours. Finally weariness forced her, still crying, into a wretched sleep. Soon enough the sun would be up. But it would rise black, as far as Tyr was concerned. Joy was over forever. The tall thing was meat, and the Presence was gone.
As sleep took her, Tyr came her closest ever to having a genuine thought. Moaning, she wished she were meat too.
Sanctuary's gods, like most others, resided by choice in the timelessness which both contains all mortal time and space, and lies within them. That timelessness is impossible to understand-even the patron gods of the sciences shake their heads at its physics-and difficult to describe, especially to mortals, whose descriptions necessarily involve time, in the telling if nowhere else.
Light, overwhelming, is what most mortals remember who pass through those realms in dream or vision. The fortunate dead who come there, having given up time, see things differently. So do the gods. In that place where the absence of time makes space infinitely malleable, they rear their bright dwellings and demesnes with no tool but thought, and alter them at whim-changing, too, their own forms as mortals change clothes, for similar reasons: hygiene, courtesy, boredom, special occasions. Like mortals, too, they have their pet issues and favorite causes. There are collaborations and feuds, amours with mortals or other divinities, arguments between pantheons or within them. Some of the gods find this likeness to mortal behavior distressing. Most profess not to care, just as most profess to ignore the deeper light that often broods beyond and within the Bright Dwellings, watching what gods and mortals do.
Recently the neighborhood had seen the advent of one Dwelling that wasn't always bright. It tended to be either a high, chaste, white-columned temple of the kind aesthetically promising mortals built, or a low thatched hut of stone crouching defiantly in a rammed dirt yard. But either way, it always had a positively mortal look about it that passing deities variously found tasteless, deliciously primitive, or avant-garde. The dwelling's changes sometimes came several to the minute, then several to the second; and after such spasms lightningbolts tended to spray out the windows or doors, and thumps and shouting could be heard from inside. The neighbors soon discovered that the division of this house against itself was symptomatic. The goddess(es) living there were in the middle of a personality crisis.
"Do you ever think about anything but clothes?!"
"At least I do think about them now and then. You're a goddess, you can't go out in those-those rags!"
"I beg your pardon! This shift is just well broken in. It's comfortable. And it covers me ... instead of leaving half of me hanging out, like that old tunic of Ils's that you never take off. Or that raggy goatskin cape with the ugly face on it."
"I'll have you know that when my Father shakes 'that raggy goatskin' over the armies of men, they scatter in terror-"
"The way it smells, no wonder. And that's our Father. Oh, do put the vase down, Siveni! I'll just make another. Besides, when has Ils scattered an army lately? Better give him that thing back: He could probably use it just now."
"Why, you-"
Lightnings whipped the temple's marble, scarring it black. Screeching, a silver raven napped out from between a pair of columns and perched complaining in the topmost branches of a golden-appled tree a safe distance away. The lightning made a lot of noise as it lashed about, but even a casual observer would have noticed that it did little harm. Shortly it sizzled away to nothing, and the stagy thunder that had accompanied it faded to echoes and whispers, and died. The temple convulsed, squatted down, and got brown and gray, a beast of fieldstone and thatch. Then it went away altogether.
Two women were left standing there on the plain, which still nickered uncertainly between radiance and dirt. One of them stood divinely tall in shimmering robes, crested and helmed, holding a spear around which the restrained lightnings sulkily strained and hissed-a form coolly fair and bright, all godhead and maidenhead, seemingly unassailable. Just out of arms' reach of her stood someone not so tall, hardly so fair, dressed in grime and worn plain cloth with patches, crowned with nothing but much dark curly hair, somewhat snarled, and armed only with a kitchen knife. They stared at each other for a moment, Siveni and Mriga, warrior-queen of wisdom and idiot wench. It was the idiot who had the thoughtful, regretful look, and the Lady of Battles who had the black eye.