Alone among the primordial gods, Isyn planned. Her kin were consumed in their squabbling, fighting for influence on the world to come before it had become more than an eventual inevitability. And that difference would earn her the very mastery they sought.
She began building, shaping the primal void into bricks. It was mindless work. Necessary, but mindless. The others thought she had given up on the world that was to come. They took no note of her brow creased in concentration. They gave no heed to the careful variation to each piece she crafted. They saw nothing of the plan that was coalescing before their very eyes.
The pantheon’s primacy had been nearly decided while she created her bricks and tiles, then her walls and roofs, then her halls and towers. Each part built into the next, each piece the next step in a cascade. Even without it being finished, the goddess could see it well enough to walk its paths and never doubt her steps.
Then Kheteus, god of growth, came to her creation. “I have been driven out,” he cried. “Golden-haired Lemus has deemed my fealty insufficient. He has pledged to hunt me. Have you room within your heart to shelter this specimen of rejection?”
Isyn took him in with a scant two conditions: he would swear to her instead and he would assist in the construction of her home. He agreed without hesitation, as she offered not simply shelter until Lemus’s rage abated but safe harbor forever. He took over the construction of one of the four cardinal halls and the creation continued.
The process repeated thrice more; Lemus’s rage peaking and ebbing in great cycles to drive more gods from their homes. Vynus, Oteus, and Aharis, the deities of moon, luck, and conquest joined their hands to the effort. Each took a hall of their own, in accordance with the original vision.
This would be a palace through which time would fold and flow, cycling back and forth for as long as it stood. With their help, it would be complete. With its completion, they would have etched their place within it forevermore.
Eventually even the proud Lemus took note at the lack of return from the gods he’d ousted and came to her, demanding she hand them over and stop holding them against their wills. Their rightful place was with him, he insisted, as they owed him their loyalty as king. It was clear on his face that he considered his demand the beginning and the end of the matter.
She refused, insisting that they were where they would remain and would do so of their own volition. Isyn refused to recognize his self-appointed crown and bade him leave.
“I shall tear this castle down upon you if you do not return them to me. Even then, I will not leave. I will remain until you recognize your rightful ruler and swear yourself to me. I have permitted your neutrality to this point. My patience goes no further,” Lemus declared.
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Isyn placed a single brick. The last brick, the final flagstone of the culminating tower. Her creation was complete. “You shall not get what you want.” Her power flowed through the walls, filling the places left open for it, reinforcing the whole beyond the strength of the mere materials.
The god of beginnings raged. He boasted, he threatened, and he demanded. She would bow to him, in time if nothing else.
But time was her domain. With every second he spent attempting to shake her creation back to its constituent parts, she layered the full weight of time upon him. Every motion stretched until it took an age to complete. Every thought spread until it was too large for Lemus to hold.
Eventually, he ceased. The burden grew to be too much for him. His efforts to overpower Isyn had failed.
Then she came to speak with him, lightening the burden for the first time since his demands began. “I told you that you would not have my loyalty. And I should not have to tell you that you will not have the destruction of all that I have built here.”
“How?” Lemus panted. “How have you stymied me?”
“I sunk its foundations deep, an effort that only reinforced my own as well. I am more than you, Lemus. You may hold your domains of crown and cruelty, but I am time.” She reached out, trailing a hand down the great stone bricks of her lovingly shaped fortress. “Even you are and will forever be the subject of my creation.”
But Lemus was not one for being subordinated to another’s will. “This will not go the way you think,” he growled. His hand scrabbled along the hard layer of material that the estate had gathered beneath itself, hunting for any chip or scrap of loose matter. “I will not let it.” His fingers closed; his wrist twitched.
Isyn spun, layering enough temporal weight back onto him. She was too slow. The scrap of pure causality had already shot forward. She had barely noticed it when it punctured the outer wall. It left a small hole between two bricks, not even wide enough to see through.
For a brief moment, Isyn thought her creation would weather the damage. Then she felt the currents of time shift, a wisp of the cycle slipping out through the new rent. It would widen the gap, she knew, and in doing so allow more diversion. Her perfect, stable cycle was dead.
She rounded on Lemus, intent on tearing strips from his hide, only to draw up short at the pure smugness written on his face. Her anger deserted her, draining out until she could only think to ask one thing: “Why?”
“For daring to claim you had any standing higher than mine. Your creation will crumble in time, but I will remain in my place even then,” he gloated.
“You have doomed more than you will ever know,” Isyn proclaimed. “This will be on your head forevermore.”
“Then next time, know your place.”
Lemus then left, paying her no more heed. He had achieved his goal. The natural order had been restored. He had proven that his place was at the very pinnacle of their hierarchy.
After he left, Isyn mourned for all the lives that would eventually come to a final end for this disruption, for the apocalypse that would come when time itself crumbled, and for the path to peace that had almost been.
