I roared out a wordless, mindless scream of rage: fury at Set and his satanic power, at the Creators who had made me to do their bidding, at the goddess who had abandoned me.
Anya had abandoned me. There was a limit to how much a goddess would face for love of a mortal. I had been a fool even to dream it could be otherwise. Pain and death were only for the miserable creatures who served the Creators, not for the self-styled gods and goddesses themselves.
Then a wave of absolute cold swept through me, like the breath of the angel of death, like being plunged into the heart of an ancient glacier or the remotest depths of intergalactic space. Darkness and cold so complete that it seemed every molecule in me was instantly frozen.
I wanted to scream. But I had no body. There was no space, no dimension. I existed, but without form, without life, in a nullity where there was neither light nor warmth nor time itself.
In the nonmaterial essence that was my mind I saw a globe, a planet, a world spinning slowly before me. I knew it was Earth, yet it was an Earth such as I had never known before. It was a sea world, covered with a global ocean, blue and sparkling in the sun. Long parades of purest whitest clouds drifted across the azure sea. The world ocean was unblemished by any islands large enough for me to see, unbroken by any landmass. The poles were free of ice and covered with deep blue water just as the rest of the planet was.
The Earth turned slowly, majestically, and at last I saw land. A single continent, brown and green and immense: Asia and Africa, Europe and the Americas, Australia and Antarctica and Greenland, all linked together in one gigantic landmass. Even so, much of the land was covered with shallow inland seas, lakes the size of India, rivers longer than the eternal Nile, broader than the mighty Amazon.
As I watched, disembodied, floating in emptiness, the vast landmass began to break apart. In my mind I could hear the titanic groaning of continent-sized slabs of basalt and granite, see the shuddering of earthquakes, watch whole chains of mountains thrusting upward out of the tortured ground. A line of volcanoes glowered fiercely red and the land split apart, the ocean came rushing in, steaming, frothing, to fill the chasm created by the separating continents.
I felt myself falling once again, speeding toward that spinning globe even as its continents heaved and buckled and pulled apart from one another. I felt my senses returning, my body becoming substantial, real.
Then utter darkness.
My eyes focused on a flickering glow. A soft radiance that came and went, came and went, in a gentle relaxed rhythm. I was lying on my back, something spongy and yielding beneath me. I was alive and back in the world again.
With an effort I focused on this world around me. The glow was simply sunlight shining through the swaying fronds of gigantic ferns that bowed gracefully in the passing hot breeze. I started to pull myself up to a sitting position and found that I was too weak to accomplish it. Dehydrated, exhausted, even my blood pressure was dangerously low from sapping so much liquid to protect my skin from being roasted.
Above me I saw these immense ferns swaying. Beyond them a sky of pearl gray featureless clouds. The air felt hot and clammy, the ground soft and wet like the spongy moss of a swamp. I could hear insects droning loudly, but no other sounds.
I tried to at least lift my head and look around, but even that was too much for me.
Almost, I laughed. To save myself from the fiery pit of hell only to die of starvation because I no longer had the strength to get off my back—the situation had a certain pathetic irony to it.
Then Anya bent over me, smiling.
“You’re awake,” she said, her voice soft and warm as sunshine after a rain.
A flood of wonder and joy and fathomless inexpressible gratitude hit me so hard that I would have wept if there had been enough moisture in me to form tears. She had not abandoned me! She had not left me to die. Anya was here beside me, in human form, still with me.