For as long as humans walked the Earth, we had watched over them. We shaped them in what was once our image and they strengthened us with their desperate reliance on a higher power, on beings that could be thanked for their fortunes and blamed for their misgivings. They had brought gifts to my temples and praised me for temperate winters, cursed me for summer droughts. Apollo, they begged, have mercy. Grapes withered on stalks and wine turned sour. Famine ravaged their countrysides, and they pleaded for healing, for forgiveness. They were dependent on us and we enjoyed it. We watched them grow together, grow apart, grow oppressive, and then grow unforgiving. They had to break eventually, as we had. In hindsight, I suppose modeling the human race after us was dooming them to repeat our mistakes. The world as they know it ends gradually, and then all at once.
We’d seen it coming for a while. Elections and protests and wars could only accomplish so much before the human race finally snapped. It started with the United States, with the riots and the looting and the burning of government buildings, only this time the people were angrier than they had ever been. Angrier and more exhausted and armed to the teeth with indignation and nothing left to lose. The tide spread: to Asia, to most of Europe, to South and Central America, and on and on until governments were collapsed at best, utterly demolished at worst. The people turned against each other, as history dictates they do. And so, the Last War began.
Warfare looked different around the world, shaped by whatever was left of the forests or the plains or the mountains. Here in the Anzac battlegrounds of Turkey, where the coasts were once drenched in Greek and Trojan blood and my temples lay buried beneath miles of sand, the humans laid out their automatic weapons and drove tent spokes deep into the earth. They dug trenches, haphazardly and with no regard for the sanctity of the land. The trenches were deep and wide, thousands of feet of stark, violent slashes reaching across the coast. They were meant as tactical bases or mass graves—whichever necessity arose first. This land was no stranger to battle; we’d spent ten long years here before Troy finally fell, my family at odds with each other and the humans even moreso. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that this would have a certain kind of finality on a scale we had never witnessed before.
Humanity had never been kind to itself. First came the conquering and re-conquering of the Mediterranean. Then the crusades. The genocides. The colonization. Slavery. The civil and world wars. Some thought the latter would be the catalyst. I’d heard others place bets on it being the internment camps. Artemis was banking on the gradual loss of autonomy and freedom. By the time humanity had invented nuclear weapons, we’d become morbidly fascinated.
I remembered the silence as my cousins and I stood by and watched the bomb drop on Hiroshima. We had stopped betting by then.
“They’re so much more … resolute than before,” said one, resigned and bitter. “They’ll tear each other apart.”
Another had muttered darkly, “This is cruelty, not resoluteness.”
Even Ares had grimaced at the mushroom cloud as it hovered above the city. A god of war and yet even he had carried a weight in the corner of his eyes for a long while afterward. It was a stark reminder of the brilliant cruelty that could be exhibited by people who seemed so very small.
At the beginning of the end, Artemis had come to my side as I sat watching the Hellenic Parliament burn. “What do you make of all this?”
It had taken me a while to respond. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Athena says it’s the beginning of the end.”
I had a feeling she was right. There was a deep-seated wrongness in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that humankind had passed a critical precipice from which there was no hope of return. “Hm.”
There were a few moments of quiet; the only sounds to be heard were the crackling of the flames licking out the windows of the government building and a far-off alarm ringing tinnily. Uselessly. Then my sister said, “The president of Brazil is dead.”
Good was my first thought. Then—oh. “Athena is right, then.”
Artemis sighed. “She usually is.”
“Does father know?”
“They all do.”
Confused, I look over at her. “All?”
“Everyone. Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas.” My sister possessed the natural stillness of a hunter, yet I could tell how carefully she was holding herself when she said, “They think this is it.”
“And what do you think?”
The flames reflected in her eyes as she watched the fire spread. “I think it’s about time.”
In the Beginning, the first wars were primal battles between chaos and peace. We’d torn each other apart, but we couldn’t die, and in that purgatorial void of the After, we’d created humans as a source of entertainment. We gave them bodies shaped like ours and watched, bemused, as they stumbled around blindly in the dark. Time went on and they figured out fire, then agriculture, and we blessed them and cursed them as we saw fit. We’d enjoyed being needed and felt their dependence on us was both appropriate and necessary. For a long while, we’d been enamored by humanity. They had been philosophical. Adventurous. Inquisitive. They had thirsted for knowledge, and as somewhat omniscient beings, we couldn’t help but admire the lengths to which they had been willing to go to quench that thirst. And then they started getting greedy. They started hoarding wealth and power and the knowledge they’d worked so hard to attain. They made incredible advancements and slaughtered millions on a scale we would never have been able to imagine.
Beneath the searing heat of the sun at the end of the world, I watched them draw their lines in the sand and divide their space into territories. The Turkish flag was bright red. Against the cool blues of the ocean, it was a jarring reminder of what this battleground used to be. The canvas tents did their best to deflect the worst of the sun’s rays, but I knew they didn’t do much. The heat, the low buzz of terror, and the stench of men permeated the air around us. It was not so different from Troy after all.
In reminiscing, I lost focus of my surroundings and suddenly found that I wasn’t alone. Huitzilopochtli stood next to me, hands folded solemnly behind his back as he surveyed the flurry of activity on the beaches before us. The humans continued to set up their camps, their soldiers, and their weapons of mass destruction while we walked amongst them, undetected.
“Is this it, then?” he asked. “Does it end now?”
It struck me that finally, after millennia of human observation, we might get to escape the burdens of divinity and godhood we’d placed upon ourselves. “I suppose so.”
He exhaled, long and slow. “Finally.”
Huitzilopochtli ventured over from Central America from time to time. He said he wanted to keep tabs on how warfare differed across the planet, but I thought that he didn’t want to witness his people destroy themselves. As much as he was their war god, he was also their sun, and I cannot imagine how that paradox tore him apart. I couldn’t fault him for it. As anticipated as this had been, it still caused a deep ache in my chest.
We watched a truck rumble past, filled nearly to bursting with automatic weapons and ammunition. It kicked up sand in its wake, and the humans covered their faces and coughed.
“They’ve fallen far.” Huitzilopochtli shook his head. “War used to be honorable.”
“Did it?”
He turned away from me, gazing out at the miles of flags and tents and bustling movement. “Men used to stare into the eyes of their enemies as they killed them on the battlefield. Watching the spark of life drain from your opponent’s face haunts the soul.” I hummed in acknowledgment. Huitzilopochtli continued, “They don’t get close enough to do that anymore.”
“It must be easier now,” I mused, “to have such a distance between themselves and the destruction they cause.”
“I believe killing a man takes a toll on the mind,” said Huitzilopochtli. “No matter how far away they are when they do it. I imagine their capacity for violence has not necessarily grown at all.”
Interesting. “How so?”
Huitzilopochtli looked at me carefully. “Are you forgetting the first wars? Achilles alone tore apart an army and the Greeks razed your precious Troy in turn. The Mongols held far too much power, as did Napoleon and Alexander and the armies they commanded.”
“I remember Achilles well,” I said dryly. “And all that happened here in Troy. I’m asking if you truly believe the humans to be only as violent as they were millennia ago.”
There was a weighted sadness in his voice when he said, “Seventy million innocent people have been killed in the name of ideology. They have not grown to be more hateful; they are simply able to execute their hatred on a scale we had never thought to imagine. Had they been able to harness poisonous gasses and nuclear warfare in ancient times, I am certain they would have done so.” He sighed. “Now, it will be their undoing.”
Thousands of years ago this sand was soaked with blood, but as I watched the camps it sat warm and golden, shifting steadily beneath their boots. The tide lapped at the shore, the gentle crash of the waves constantly at odds with the clamor of war preparations around me. There was poetry in my presence on the shores of Anatolia where my beloved Troy fell to the Greeks. Thousands of years later, I had returned, primed to watch just one of the many final battles humanity was about to wage.
The days blurred. The war preparations were always the most boring part; when my sister had stalled the Greeks for months at Aulis, I had nearly switched sides just to spite her. My love for planning had not grown in the many wars since. I wandered the tents aimlessly, sometimes venturing to China or Brazil to see how other continents were faring, but for the most part, my feet favored the shores of Anatolia. I could feel the ancient bones of Troy far, far beneath the sand and dirt. I knew these coastlines, their dips and crags as familiar to me as my father’s voice. I remembered the way screams echoed off the rocks and throughout the landscape, how rivers ran red and heat turned deadly, how there was no divinity to be found in the piles of bodies burned on the pyres.
Humans truly were doomed to repeat our mistakes.
Few gods bothered to venture beyond their own domains to witness the early stages of humanity’s destruction. One in particular surprised me—she was the only one of her kind to travel to the shores of Anatolia where I waited. None of the other creation goddesses had wanted to bear witness to the destruction of their children.
“You’re wasting your time,” said Nuwa. “What do you hope to gain from sitting here watching them?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I responded, surprised by her question. “I suppose I feel that I owe it to them.”
Nuwa, who had once dredged mud from the banks of the Yellow River to breathe life into its clay, had turned hard. Bitter. Cracked along the edges like ancient pottery. “I bear responsibility for them. I must see them through this.”
“You don’t—” I stopped myself, realizing my error. Motherhood was not something I could ever hope to understand. How must it feel to watch your children morph so horribly into something you could never fix? Never undo? How could she stand there, watching them destroy everything they had worked so hard to accomplish? “Do you truly believe they’ll make it out on the other side?”
Her whisper was so faint I barely caught it. “I hope for their sake they do not.”
I still didn’t know whether or not I agreed. There had been a quiet sort of resignation among us as we’d watched humankind go on. They seemed to stray away from any sort of unity. The second world war, in particular, had sickened most of the war gods—the sheer scale of destruction and death had not even been conceivable fifty years before. By then, the only gods who had held any faith in humanity to improve itself were the ones who believed wholeheartedly in the power of healing and growth.
It didn’t take long for us to turn, despairingly, to our counterparts across the globe. How were we to fix this? Could we fix this? It felt wrong to abandon humanity, particularly when they seemed to need us the most, but at some point, we realized there was nothing we could do. We’d done this ourselves, after all. In a fit of arrogance, we had created humanity in our image and, in doing so, had doomed ourselves to see our history repeated—an experience humanity would not be fortunate enough to undergo.
“They’ll never have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes as we have,” I said.
“Have we learned from our mistakes?” Nuwa turned to me. “I must have missed that. Are we no longer violent beings? Do we not hunger for the destruction of our enemies? Or have we merely learned to be patient and sit with our anger as we wait for it to ruin us again?”
“I think that we better understand the consequences,” I replied.
“You are young,” Nuwa scoffed. “And naive to think we did not know exactly what our intentions were when we set out to destroy each other.”
She was right. I didn’t remember much of our First Wars. My father and his brothers were generals leading their armies of deities to be punished for the arrogance and cupidity of their superiors. I remember battle but only in flashes—metal clanging, too loud and too close. The panic of my fingers closing over an empty quiver. Grass turned slick with golden blood. A world plunged into dichotomies: darkness and light, fire and ice, chaos and peace.
Battle between gods was complicated. My father slew lightning over his enemies, and they blocked out the sun in turn. Ra battled Apophis for what would be the final time. Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalóatl grappled in the West. Geography around the world was reshaped, forever changed by the elemental chaos of godly warfare. We had utterly destroyed each other. In the process, however, we had brought about an era of peace in which the creation goddesses bore humanity. It was mass destruction on a scale we’d never known, nor would we ever think to know again—until now.
My family appeared occasionally. Ares and Athena spent most of their time in the stuffy heat of the war tents, peering over the shoulders of generals and commanders and reporting back to my father. We were all here in some capacity—gods tended to remain where our roots were strongest, and the Mediterranean had been my family home long before Europeans even thought to colonize the West. Hermes flitted around the planet gathering information, and Dionysus had disappeared to Tuscany after spending the last few days whining about his vineyards. Otherwise, everyone was here watching. Waiting. Those who weren’t would make their way home eventually. My sister, for her part, spent most of her time in the rainforests of South America. She’d found the largest swathes of wild lands and stayed.
The night before the battles were set to commence, she and I met on Delos. The sun was beginning to dip low in the sky, a one-way trip towards the horizon. The temple stones had been bleached white over the years, the detailing on our lion statues worn flat, and yet they sat proudly atop the dust and dirt. The setting sun washed everything in a warm, golden light. It was quiet, the only sound being the waves crashing on the distant shore—far too peaceful of an evening for the end of times.
“How are things on your end?”
Artemis stood still next to me. “They’ve lost control of the fires.”
“I wish it was surprising that they thought they could control fire in the first place.”
“Their continent will burn,” my sister muttered. “As will everything on it.” Including them, she didn’t say, but I heard it.
“Do you think they know?” I asked.
“That they’re going to vanquish each other?” she scoffed at me. “Of course not. They haven’t become self-aware all of a sudden. They never will.”
I nodded. “They were, once.”
“Maybe.”
I knelt to press my fingertips to the sun-warmed stone, worn smooth by thousands of years of worship. We’d begun here, my sister and I. We would watch the End not too far from here too. She would be returning to South America when the sun set—whatever remained of it. “You’ll come back once it gets close?”
Her hand squeezed my shoulder. She smelled very faintly of smoke. “Of course, brother.” Then she was gone.
I returned to the battlefield with my birthplace still dusting my fingertips. The moon was rising in a darkened sky, and the harsh shine of electricity dimmed the glory of the inky heavens above. Huitzilopochtli waited for me at the fringes. He was pacing.
“Updates?” I asked.
With a small shake of his head and a gesture, my gaze was drawn to the airplanes being loaded. Missiles the size of canoes were strapped into place by men with expressionless faces. At that moment, I wished desperately to feel their emotions. To know whether they felt the slightest remorse for their impending actions. Maybe then I could forgive them, just a little.
“It begins tomorrow?” Huitzilopochtli confirmed, and I nodded. Athena and Ares had been in the tents for two months now. From Hermes’ journeys around the globe, we knew the ins and outs of this war; we knew who would win and who would lose and who would think they were winning until they realized no one would be around to win a war again.
He and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the humans throughout the night. There was a breeze blowing off the sea, blessedly cool, that caused the flags to flutter. The darkness had stolen their red coloring and cast their symbols into shadow. One by one, the lights blinked off, allowing the shadows of nightfall to creep closer and closer to their campsite, and there we remained until the sun came up on the beginning of the end of the world.