When I woke up the next day, Joanna was already hard at work at her unfathomable tasks, carrying on an animated conversation with her attendant spirit. As usual, she was speaking far too quickly in her unfamiliar tongue for me to understand what she was saying, so I busied myself with rolling up my tent and repacking my gear, while I snacked on some dried dukkar jerky. Soon enough, the god noticed my preparations and stomped over, her strange, magickal armor giving off little insect buzzing sounds as she moved. “You are leaving?” She asked, in the tongue of the Erin-Vulur.

“I am,” I responded, checking my bowstring to ensure it was still strong despite the many days of disuse. I hadn’t had much time for practice. Satisfied, I slipped the string back out of its notch in the bow’s upper stave, leaving it attached and half strung, but slack. “My elder calls for me. He wants to know about you. He wants to know why you are here.” I was careful to speak my words clearly- there were still sounds I made that she could not quite differentiate.

Joanna made a forward rolling motion with her shoulders that it had taken days for me to recognize as some kind of shoulder-shrugging gesture that equated to my people's own "I don't care gesture" of twisting our hands from side to side. "I understand," she continued. "I hope you will come back. There is still much I wish to learn from you about your world." She halfway showed me her teeth, caught herself, and instead narrowed her eyes to mimic the way my people smiled. "Maybe your elders will let me come and see your village?"

"I hope so." In truth, I had no idea how the elders would respond. They had already tried to kill her once, and it hadn't worked. Finding out that she planned to change the face of Ravanur so completely might scare them, and I knew that Vassa, in particular, would be quick to leap upon the fact that Joanna denied her godhood. If my tribe reacted in fear, things might go very badly, both for the Erin-Vulur and for the reluctant god. Joanna had shown me a weapon attached to her tower that she called a "goss reyfel". Though the words meant nothing to me, I had seen the terrible power it commanded. One day, she had detected a burug moving under the ice toward her encampment, drawn perhaps by the storm, or the tower it protected. After briefly speaking to her unseen spirit, the god had dismissed the storm surrounding her tower, sending away the howling walls as if they had never been there. Then, before I could ask what was happening, the “goss reyfel” had made a loud barking sound, and nearby an entire mound of ice had shattered into powder. I heard the burug’s roar a moment later, and when I went with her to examine it, I was shocked to see that her weapon had ripped a hole large enough for me to crawl through yawning wide in the creature's back, exposing its steaming organs to Ravanur's ravenous cold. I imagined that weapon firing its deadly shot at one of my people and shuddered. Would there be anything left?

But my people were not an insignificant threat to the god, regardless of her weapon’s power. The Erin-Vulur were not so numerous as we once were, but we were still many, and our warriors were all the most formidable hunters on Ravanur. We had survived where so many other tribes had dwindled and died. We hunted and ate even the mighty burug, and we had laid low rival peoples of all kinds. We had even brought low false gods that had come down from the firmament, beings of unspeakable power that had sought the extermination of our entire tribe. We had strong blessings wrought by our Deepseeker and many Stormcallers who could shape the very winds of the world. If my tribe leveled its wrath at the god, many would die, but they would bring her down. I didn't want to imagine Joanna's armor shattered and that beautiful face crushed beneath a hammer any more than I wanted to imagine Nissikul split in half by a single shot of the god's divine weapon. It was my job to keep that horrible future from happening.

I reached out and placed a hand against her armored arm, aware even through the blessing that kept me warm enough to live, that the metal that protected the god was incredibly cold to the touch. It left my skin tingling where I had touched her and left steam hissing up in a handprint where I had made contact. "We… meet… again," I said, haltingly, in her language. "I… happy that… you… friend… mine." Then I shaped my mouth into one of her smiles, trying to ignore how strange and aggressive it felt on my face.

She smiled back, the expression much more natural to her. "Good luck, Volistad," she said in my language as I shouldered my pack and walked slowly towards the storm wall. A mere spear's length before the winds would have started pushing around me, the seething wall tore itself apart in a random gale, spewing fragmented ice in all directions. With the storm wall down, I could see that its passage had worn a wide, circular track into the ice all around the encampment, a trench at least two spears deep, and three wide. Such power, at the command of someone who claimed she wasn't a god. There was no way that could be right. Not even a Stormcaller was quite that strong, and they were somewhere between mortal and divine themselves. I set off at an easy, loping run over the ice, gathering my strength and leaping over the trench in a single long leap. I took the landing smoothly and fell back into the rhythm, one leg stretching out after another and carrying me away from the home of Ravanur's newest god. Before long, I heard a telltale whine and felt the winds shift around me. I turned back to see that the storm had whirled back to life from nowhere, Joanna's campsite obscured in a column of roiling, angry clouds and seething, crackling lightning. I shook my head in amazement and turned back to the path ahead of me. Just a day to the border of my people's territory, and then the moment of truth.

I couldn’t believe this had all happened to me. I was just like a prophet from the old stories, announcing a new savior to his people, only to be scorned and thrown in prison. But just like those apocryphal prophets, I would be vindicated when the god showed her true power and saved my people.