“Mahee calls to mahee,” Acela said the words in the ancient language, the one the gods rarely even used anymore. The words themselves were like a spell.

D’Argen had all of his attention focused on her and his mahee thrown wide open. He watched as the world around him faded away into a blank canvas, each stall becoming a blur, each mortal turning into a dirty smudge, and each of the hundreds of gods in the field becoming a dark silhouette.

Instead of opening his mahee to run, he reached for his queen and then for each of the dark silhouettes spread around the blank canvas. As he watched, the silhouettes became lighter and blurry, streams of them dislodging like ink drops dissolving in water. Every single strand, no matter how faint, reached out for one another until they all created a giant net that covered the entire field. A few of those strands streaked away from the field, fading only due to distance, and more appeared out of the distance to reach for Acela, standing in the middle of them all.

D’Argen knew that even if not all of the gods were there, some continents away, in that moment every single god in all of Trace was facing Acela. He had been in distant lands, talking to mortals or running the oceans during previous conferences when the spell touched him and made him stop to face Acela. It was not a comforting feeling at the time. Now, it felt like finally made it home.

For a moment, his mind wandered and he thought of that cheetah running out in the Oltrian fields. He wondered if it too stopped what it was doing and bared is neck and belly this way.

A light smudge near him started swaying and D’Argen closed off his mahee a little. The smudge became a silhouette and then a man’s features slowly appeared in the blank canvas. D’Argen closed off his mahee even more, reducing his scent to keep it from overwhelming the man.

The mortal was clutching at a tent post to keep from falling. Most of the mortals that D’Argen could see were either already on the ground on their knees or had their heads thrown back and facing the sky with ecstasy clear on their features.

He knew that some mortals came here for the euphoric high that they experienced when surrounded by the scents of the gods. He ignored them and faced Acela once more. Her scent was strong enough for him to doubt she was wearing one of Simeal’s charms. It was crisp, clean, a scent that could only be described as sunlight on a warm summer day.

It spread out from the platform like a blanket and covered him in comfort and love, security and peace, and it told him that he would listen. Acela’s mahee was based in the essence aspect of magic, able to connect with that deeper part inside both gods and mortals that made them each unique. As one of the First Five, she could do even more than that. She could make every single person at the conference, god and mortal alike, listen to her every word and obey her orders.

Persuasion, she called it when asked.

D’Argen felt that tug inside him telling him to lift his chin higher.

Control, the rest of the gods knew.

Through their connections with the mahee, Acela guided them all into a silent spell.

The mahee was something only the gods possessed. To their knowledge, there was only that accursed stone and a few metals that affected the mahee in any way, but no mortal had ever been able to interact with it. The mahee was what gave them the scents of magic, what gave them the power to create these lands and their inhabitants, and what made them deities to be worshipped.

While every single one of the gods had the mahee inside them in different aspects and unique scents, the mahee was not many. It was one piece that had split apart to become each of them. It belonged together.

When Acela opened the conference, she was not just saying random words.

Mahee calls to mahee.

This was what it meant to be a god – a Never Born, as they called themselves in their ancient language, learning the words god and deity only after arriving in the mortal realm. They were created from the mahee and belonged to it, never born to a body but kept inside one all the same. They allowed the mahee to live inside them and they were it. Every single one of them was connected to the others.

In that moment, with that spell and the blanket of sunshine over him, D’Argen was no longer himself and he was the mahee, along with every single Never Born in Trace. As he became they and they became one, all of the bodies turned into empty shells waiting for the mahee to return to them.