Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods by Michael R. Underwood Page A

returned to her companions and they headed off down the side street, avoiding the chaotic scene.
    I took one look around with the jadeite in hand, just to be sure, then proceeded home, wishing I had brought my schoolwork with me to read on the trains.

CHAPTER
    EIGHT
    I was up until one finishing the next week’s schoolwork, but as I did not have class until 3 PM on Friday, and that being only a discussion session, which I’d never missed, I trusted that the next day’s schedule would be unduly complicated by schoolwork. I had a shift at the library for my work-study, and then another shift on Saturday, but again, priorities.
    Unfortunately, the resurrection of anxieties I’d hoped to put aside made that night’s nightmares particularly vivid.

    The entire night played over. Thomas and the prom. The evening of laughter and worry.
    But this time, when my father burst into the room with the knife, it was Esther instead. After she plunged the knife into Thomas’s chest, the scene froze, and she turned back to me.
    “Jacob. I know you’re there.”
    I froze.
    The dreamscape faded away, until it was just Esther, the bloody knife, and me.
    “Speak up, little brother. It’s been too long.” She reached out for me, hands draped in the blood of the only outsider I’d ever cared for.
    I stepped back. There was nothing but the two of us and a field of shadow and blackness around us. There was no light, but I could see Esther clear as day.
    “Why are you here?” I asked.
    Esther took another step forward, her eyes unfocused with the zeal I’d learned was peculiar to my family, not a universality of self-confidence among all people. It had saddened me when I learned that most people lacked that certainty of purpose, but since I’d become one of them, it was also mildly comforting. “It’s time, little brother. The unborn will rise, and we will inherit our place in the new world.”
    I brushed her hand away and stepped back. It couldn’t be. The prophecy had yet to be fulfilled. “It can’t be. The longest branch . . .”
    Esther laughed, then she spoke the words of the prophecy by rote.
    “When the Green tree has grown, its roots spread across the land, the longest branch shall break off and seek new root.”
    Another step. “The scion will replant the branch, and when the rains come, the sea will boil, and the first of the unborn will rise. The Last Age will begin, and the longest branch will bear fruit.”
    We’d all been raised on the prophecy, the far-off promise that the Younger Gods will be born, and they will come to love their aunts and uncles, the Bold, and wipe away the folly of the Timid, their siblings. But I had never expected that I would live to see it.
    She reached her hand out again, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t push her away. She caressed my cheek like she’d done countless times before, pushing hair back and away from my eyes. Her touch was warm, reassuring, terrifying.
    Esther smiled the knowing smile that came so easily when she explained something to one of us. “It’s you, baby brother. The tallest branch. And I am the scion. Don’t you see? We’re doing it right now. The Last Age begins with us. The Younger Gods will wash away humanity, and we will reign among the Bold when they remake the world.” Her voice was excited, nearly ecstatic, full of the wild energy of the spring rite, when Greenes from across the country would gather to preserve the seed.
    I stood to my full height and looked down at Esther. “Even if that is the case, you would have to bring me back. And I’m not going back. The family isn’t right, Esther. We’ve never been right. The world doesn’t want the seas to boil, people don’t want to be wrapped in the embrace of the unborn, don’t want to be their slaves. It’s an eschatological inbred cult. I don’t know how long we’ve been deluding ourselves into thinking we’re important, but the Greenes are just a cluster of sociopaths with delusions of