Leika

Before the world learned to name itself, when stars were still settling into their first dance, there walked the First—the architect-gods who had sung substance from the void and given form to the formless. Leika raised the mountains from her breath, teaching stone to reach skyward. She is vast as continents and patient as geological time, and when she rises "from the celestial foundations like granite given breath and terrible purpose," stone dust falls from her shoulders in glittering cascades and the very floor of the divine realm cracks and reforms beneath her, "unable to contain the weight of one who had lifted mountain ranges from the sea."

Her form is magnificent and terrible—part woman, part living landscape. Crystalline formations jut from her skin like armor forged from the earth's bones. Her hair flows like lava, slow and unstoppable. Her eyes hold the deep green of ancient forests, the patient brown of fertile soil, and the stark white of eternal peaks. Each word she speaks carries the weight of mountains behind it, sending ripples through the divine space; when she shrugs, somewhere far below, a mountain trembles.

Her judgment of her youngest brother's creation is the first spoken in The God Who Wept, and the plainest. She holds up the delicate skeleton of a human child—"bones like bird wings, hollow and light"—and closes her fist, and the bones crumble to dust. "My nymphs and dryads dance with the wind and sleep in the earth—they know their place in the eternal cycle... They are permanent as the mountains they tend, enduring as the stones they guard. But these creatures of yours? They bloom like flowers in a single season." Ages later, in the age after the Great Withdrawal, the nature spirits are still walking the wild places—"Leika's children, if the oldest texts are to be believed"—and scholars still ask what the Mother of Mountains had in mind when she breathed life into stone and stream.

Leika thinks in the long view of stone. She measures worth by endurance and finds the brief, breakable, self-destroying creatures of clay wanting—not from petty malice, the tale is careful to say, but "from the terrible wisdom of those who had shaped existence itself." Thainos's answer to her—"Your mountains were once volcanic ash and settling sediment, sister. Should I have declared them worthless before they found their strength?"—does not move her. Mountains endure because they accept their nature.

Leika's power is the power of the earth's bones: she raised mountain ranges from oceanic depths, and reality itself struggles to bear her weight. Her creations tend the wild places she made, and long after the gods fell silent, those creations remain—one of the few threads of the divine still active in the world, and the subject of a young elf's research journal in Voices of the Wild.

Leika's story runs from the first breath of the world to its silent aftermath. She sits with the First in the Hall of Eternal Judgment, the crystalline amphitheater where the gods sit in judgment. What was argued before that Hall in The Divine War, and how the First Gods answered, is the anthology's final tale.

Leika's bonds are the bonds of the First: siblings who each shaped a portion of creation and judged the others' work, and a youngest brother who chose flesh. Below her, in the world she helped make, her spirits tend the mountains and forests, and mortals of a later age still wonder what she meant by them.