Mo pulled a fresh cigarette from his pack, the tip glowing a violent orange in the shadows of the crate. He blew a steady stream of smoke toward the harbor, his eyes narrowing as he watched a distant patrol boat move through the black water.
"Grandma talked about the Devil's Tree," Mo said, his voice flat. "Deep in the center of the first rift, a white tree grew upside down. Its roots went into the sky, sucking the light out of the sun. The Queen found it when she was a mortal woman, dying of a lung rot that turned her insides into black mush."
He leaned closer, the smoke stinging my eyes.
"She crawled to that tree on her hands and knees. She offered a deal. She'd give the tree a billion souls over a thousand years if it gave her a heart that wouldn't stop beating. The tree agreed. It dropped a single, heavy fruit—a jagged, pulsing thing made of white wood and thorns. She ripped her own chest open with a rusted dagger."
Mo mimicked the motion, his fingers clawing at his own vest.
"She reached into her own ribs and tore out her dying heart. She threw the bloody lump of muscle into the rift and shoved that thorned fruit into the hole. The thorns hooked into her arteries, digging deep until they fused with her spine. She screamed for three days while her blood turned from red to a thick, silver liquid. Her skin healed; it became like marble, cold and impossible to mark."
He shook his head, flicking the ash off his cigarette.
"That's how she became a god. She stopped being a person and became a conduit for that tree. Every time a Ranker dies, every time a civilian gets slaughtered by a Stormbeast, that tree gets stronger. She gets another year of youth. She made us into cattle for a thing that lives in the dark."
I looked at my own hands, scarred and shaking. "So we're just feeding her?"
"Always have been," Mo said, his grin returning, jagged and ugly. "Every kill you've ever made was a deposit in her bank account. But hey, at least the pay was good until they tried to chop your head off, right?"
Mo took one last drag, crushing the butt of the cigarette under his boot as the sound of heavy footsteps approached our hiding spot.
"The Queen was already a freak before she became a god," Mo said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "Even in the old magic era, she pulled the strings. She wanted more. She wanted the kind of power that didn't just bend the world—she wanted to own it. That's why she stitched the Stormbeasts together. They were her hunting dogs, and the rest of us were the foxes."
He leaned his head back against the crate, his eyes tracking a patrol light sweeping the water.
"There was this one guy, William. He was the first 'Crowned' Ranker, back when the spirits still gave a damn. The guy was a walking mountain of mana. He had a blessing from the Moon Goddess—the Gleipnir spirit. A silver wolf the size of a house lived inside his shadow. He was the only one who touched the Soul-Breaker without his skin melting off."
Mo made a sharp, ripping sound with his mouth.
"I saw an old scroll once. It described William wading into a swarm of the first Stormbeasts. He erased them. He swung that Primal Gear, and the moon itself fell on their heads. He ripped a Storm-Alpha's jaw off and used the bone to spike its own eyes out. He was a god in a man's skin. But the Queen hated competition."
He looked at me, his face twisting into a bitter scowl.
"The Golden Era ended because she poisoned it. She realized spirits like Gleipnir were too hard to control. They had 'morals.' She shifted the world to technology. She traded the spirits for Gears. She traded magic for oil and steel. Now, the gods have tucked tail and run. Only a few freaks like Mabeth with her Dragon spirit, or that psycho Tora from the South, carry those blessings. The rest of us? We're pulling triggers on machines that slowly eat our brains."
Mo spat into the oily water below the pier.
"William disappeared. Rumor is, the Queen lured him into the center of the first rift. She waited until he was exhausted from killing her pets, then used the Witch of Time's power to freeze him in a single second. He's still there, somewhere in the void, holding a Gear that could end this nightmare, while we're stuck playing tag with Mabeth's veterans."