The boy had come to the field to find his brother's body and found a goddess instead. She danced where the dead were thickest, black against a sky the colour of an old bruise, her necklace of skulls clacking like a loom, her many hands full of blades and severed things. Where her feet fell, the earth steamed. Where her tongue touched the air, the screaming stopped.
Every story he had ever been told called this evil. Here was the proof of it — a woman drunk on slaughter, dancing on the corpses of the slain, laughing while the world burned down to its embers. He had a stone in his hand before he knew he had picked it up. He had a prayer in his mouth, and it was not a prayer of worship; it was the old human prayer that runs make it stop, make it stop, make her stop.
Then she turned, and looked at him, and he saw that she was weeping even as she laughed — that the blood on her was not all her enemies', that some of it was her own — and the boy understood that he did not understand anything at all. He could throw the stone and run, and tell the world he had seen a demon. Or he could drop it, and stay, and ask the only question that mattered: not what are you, but what are you eating, and what happens if you stop.
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