built in the usual tradition, where audience seating ran tiered laps around the center fighting pit. People filled every bench, some clasping orange and red streamers while others held signs painted with CHAR NIKAU—the fire god’s best gladiator.
Ash noted a new addition with a startled flinch. A few people wore garish masks in Char’s likeness. One showed her sticking out her tongue, her eyes wide and cut with squirming red veins.
Ash wrinkled her nose. People saw the gods as beautiful, but they saw her mother as snarling?
The music swelled. Cymbals crashed, reverberating into silence.
“Here we go,” the dancer playing Biotus cooed.
Ash twitched to right herself, narrowing her mind to the performance.
A harp rippled, and the dance began.
Ash swayed her arms in practiced movements alongside the other dancers. For a moment, she felt a thrum of connection. She had nothing in common with these dancers, couldn’t even choke out a conversation with them for the lies she would have to tell, but in this dance, they were unified.
And Ash wasn’t alone.
The girl representing the goddess of air waved a flurry of streamers to symbolize air energy, or aereia. The Mother Goddess struck her down with a single elegant twirl.
Next went Biotus. He stomped, vicious and growling. The Mother Goddess hurtled into his arms and dispatched him with her limbs twining around his broad body.
Then came Hydra, with flapping cerulean silk to show the hydreia of water, and Florus, with vines for floreia.
When most of the dancers lay sprawled around the Mother Goddess in defeat—not death, but rather their energies merely spent, or so the story went—the second to last stepped forward: Geoxus, the earth god, played by a tall boy covered in dust and sand. He lifted one foot before the Mother Goddess spun on him, blowing him a lethal kiss, and he fell. The crowd roared with laughter.
The only performers left standing were the Mother Goddess and Ash—who played the lead role. She wore a tight bodice with silk pants that hung low on her hips, both in a wine red that made her brown skin gleam. Sheer orange fabric spooled down her shoulders, ending at the tips in bursts of vibrant blue, and her hair hung in thick black ringlets to midback. Kohl rimmed her eyes and blue paint coated her lips, giving a frosty edge to her smile.
She loved this dance for the outfit she wore, for the connection she felt, for the swell of rapture that bubbled up from the core of the earth itself and filled her with power. This dance was a love letter to igneia, fire energy in its most beautiful, enchanting form.
But she hated this dance for the role she played: Ignitus, the god of fire.
Ash had a few more beats before her cue. Her eyes leaped to the arena’s grandest viewing box. On the right were a half dozen centurions from the western country of Deimos; they wore silver breastplates and short pleated skirts, bags at their waists holding stones they could control with geoeia. On the left, Kulan guards wore armor made of dried reeds that, when treated, proved as strong as leather and, better, fireproof.
Divine soldiers like centurions and guards enforced laws among mortals; the immortal, unkillable gods technically didn’t need them for protection, but having them was a display of power.
The Deiman centurions stood behind a plump man who had been chosen as Geoxus’s proxy for this fight, one of his many senators. The Kulan guards stood behind Ignitus.
Ash’s earliest memory of her god was at a feast following Char’s first win. Ignitus gave Ash a candy in the shape of a sunburst, doting on the daughter of his next prodigy.
The candy had been bitter, and Ignitus’s smile had been sickly sweet.
It always struck Ash how normal her god looked in his ageless physical form. At will, Ignitus could become an inferno, or dissolve into a blue-white flare, or appear as a candle flame on a table. Now, he was dressed in baggy silks dyed orange and scarlet, his brown chest bare, his black hair adorned with gold baubles and scarlet garnets that caught the sunlight.
Each of the six gods was the manifestation of their respective energies, the result of the Mother Goddess pushing her own soul energeia into fire, earth, air, water, animals, and plants. All the gods Ash had seen looked like their mortal descendants—save for that expression. The one Ignitus wore as he gripped the edge of the viewing box and ran his tongue over his