Zeus, Dagon, Loki, Lugh and countless other deities have come back to this earth and rule over their individual districts with no goal other than satiating their own petty desires.

The sole remaining functional province,
Hellenica
, decides to act. They build the
Academy
and are about to recruit 16 young gods with the hopes of training them to police this world.

The Horsemen

Of these 16 young gods, four have strange powers that the Academy might not be able to control. Kayana Marx, Gunnar Redstone, Tommy Alderon and Saoirse Frost aren’t like normal gods, and their abilities stem from the Monotheistic times.

But if Hellenica has any hope of holding this world together, they will have to teach these four to exercise their powers to their fullest extent, even if it might bring everything to an apocalyptic end.

PART I

RECRUITMENT

DEATH

Kayana Marx woke up to the sound of a high-pitched laugh, the laugh of a dullard. She flipped a switch and twenty bulbs turned on at once, flooding the room with light. This was one of her requests:
complete light or complete darkness, nothing in between.
Kayana caused no trouble, so the doctors were happy to oblige her demands, no matter how strange.

She peeked through her viewing hole to see who was laughing. Her heart sank when she saw a doughy, hairless Celtic boy, perhaps seventeen years of age, perhaps thirteen or twenty-four. It didn’t matter; he could no longer speak. All he could do now was
laugh
.

This was the handiwork of Loki, and it caused Kayana great despair; the boy should have died years ago.

Another one of Kayana’s requests was that under no circumstances should others come within two meters of her. She regretted that request now; if she were free to roam, she could simply lay her hands on the boy and he would die with a bit of dignity. Perhaps others would be hurt, but she could help him. She knew this boy and his dull laugh
should not be
.

/***/

It all started five years ago, when a group of drunken Celts from Éire stumbled into the Apache Courts and beheaded a young man. This was done without Lugh’s permission, of course. Lugh was the Éire district’s leader and didn’t believe in violence without an absolutely noble goal. But the drunken Celts had started a war, and Lugh was bound to end it. The war between Éire and the Apache Courts lasted a year.

The Apaches were humiliated with each skirmish. The Celts’ style of fighting was brutally effective: fast, haphazard, chaotic and unexpected. No plan, no official battle, just cross the line into the Apache Courts and start beheading.

The Apache god, Usen the Creator, did everything he could to fight back. He bestowed his warriors with courage and quickness and even cast a spell to allow them to see in the dark. But it was no use; the Apache Courts were small and peaceful, and they could not mount an effective defense against the overwhelming numbers of the drunken Celts.

So Usen played his last card, the card that most small districts played when they faced annihilation. He went over to Little Asgaard and had a secret meeting with Loki. Loki, of course, agreed to help.

“I will help you defeat the Celts
,”
Loki had said, “but you must fight dirty.”

Usen blanched at the plan but had no other option; it was Loki’s way or have the Apache Courts wiped off the map.

“We’re about to do ignoble things,” the Apache god Usen had said to his people.
”
Depart now and you’ll still be in my
constituency
.”

The next evening, with Loki’s help, only two Apaches launched their raid into Éire. They captured the first son of one of the Celtic leaders and brought him back to a hidden underground cell. The boy’s name was Caratacus.

The Celts were disheartened, but not devastated; Celtic tradition prepared every boy for kidnapping, torture and death. If the Apaches tortured him, the boy would not scream, and the Celts would sing songs about Caratacus in the pubs for centuries to come.

But the Apaches did not torture Caratacus; they
deformed
him, with Loki’s help. They fed him a diet of lard and little else; within three months, Caratacus was a drooling simpleton. The Apaches kidnapped twenty other first-born Celtic children and did the same to them.

At the end of the year, the Apaches kept some of these boys as fools for their noble houses and delivered the rest to the boys’ original doorsteps in Éire.

This move was devastating to the Celtic psyche. The Celts feared neither death nor pain, but having their sons turned into simpletons was more than they could bear. Lugh himself offered unconditional surrender.

“
Kill our sons, or raise them as your own and train them to defeat us
,”
Lugh had said,
“
but do not do this thing
.”

So there was an uneasy peace between the two districts, negotiated by Loki, with the condition that both districts build a temple to him. The kidnappings stopped and the Apaches returned all the kidnapped boys to Éire, but the pain remained. The Celts were not prepared to take these boys in, so they sent some to be killed in foreign wars. Many, like the laughing boy in front of Kayana, ended up wandering the streets of the conurbation until they made their way to the institution.

/***/

Kayana looked at this boy; he was almost two meters tall and a hundred and fifty kilograms in weight. She closed her eyes and thought of what his life
should be
.

His name is Aiden
, she thought.
He was supposed to be a father of four, an engineer, and a poet. He was supposed to die in a boat crash soon after his fifty-fourth birthday.
One hundred and fifty people from twenty different districts would have attended his funeral, which would have been led by Lugh himself.

Kayana’s eyes went into the back of her head and she meditated upon what Aiden’s life would be like now.

He will live sixty more years and will never utter another word; he will only laugh. Ten years from now he will become enraged and kill a nurse. They will give him medication, and he will spend the next half century in bed.

Kayana knew his life would be an abomination, and should not be. She meditated deeply about what she could do to make it right.
I will get out,
she thought.
I will take my gloves off and lay them on him at my first chance, and he will die that night.

But she had requested that the guards keep her isolated, and the institution had made arrangements so that she wouldn’t be allowed amongst the general populace. She was thinking about how to bypass this when a guard came to her door.

“Kayana Marx?”

“Yes.”

“The lead physician would like to see you,” said the guard.

Kayana felt that her plan to help the laughing boy could wait; if nothing else, she had time here.

“I will see the physician, provided he keeps his distance,” replied Kayana. “And make sure his office is completely lit or completely dark. No shadows.”

/***/

Dr. Julius Shaw sat three meters away from Kayana in a brightly illuminated meeting room. He was reading a computerized tablet detailing Kayana’s history. She saw the reflection of her biography in Dr. Shaw’s thick glasses:

Subject’s hair is black and grows thickly but does not grow on the sides of the subject’s head. She has a fine bone structure, small stature, and does not smile. Her skin is devoid of pigment, yet it does not burn in the sun. Her home district and lineage are both unknown. She shows no malevolent intent but should be considered extremely dangerous. She prefers an environment of complete light or complete darkness because she claims that shadows cause her to disappear. Her vision, hearing and sense of smell are all preternaturally acute, placing her in the 99.99
th
percentile of all groups and—

“Orphaned since birth,” said Dr. Shaw. “Your parents are listed as
unknown
. Rare in this day and age, don’t you think?”

Kayana didn’t respond, but averted her focus from her profile and stared at Dr. Shaw through the strands of dark hair that fell over her pale face.

“Fifteen years old, three different foster families before you committed yourself here. You state in your initial interview that you were responsible for deaths in these foster families. Why do you think that?”

“When I touch people,” said Kayana, “they die soon thereafter.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?” asked Dr. Shaw. “Someone of your …
remarkable
intelligence should understand that causation and correlation
—
”

“Would you like me to touch you?” asked Kayana, removing her gloves. “If you survive the night, I’ll admit there’s neither causation nor correlation.”

Dr. Shaw thought for a moment, smiled, and put away his computerized tablet.

“Let’s say you are to blame,” asked Dr. Shaw. “Your touch causes death. Do you feel remorse at your family members’ passing?”

“None,” said Kayana.

“None? Yet you turned yourself in so that you could do no further harm.”

“Their deaths were not supposed to be
now
,” said Kayana. “My presence brought their ends early, and that
should not
be
.”

“Your profile indicates intelligence so high that it can’t be measured,” said Dr. Shaw. “It also suggests that you’re a complete sociopath.”

“I agree with both assessments,” said Kayana.

“I disagree with the sociopath part,” said Dr. Shaw. “I think you have a profound sense of justice, of fairness. I think you have an enormous amount of compassion; it just can’t be measured according to our standards.”

“I am a sociopath,” said Kayana. “We are all sociopaths.”

“Now, that’s not true—” said Dr. Shaw, but Kayana interrupted.

“Sub-Saharan Africa, 873 A.D.,” she said, “there was a battle between the Owambo and the neighboring Himba, the seventeenth of twenty-one battles that century. The Owambo won. They slaughtered ten thousand Himba warriors, took the women as slaves, and slaughtered a thousand infants in cold blood afterwards.”

Kayana looked Dr. Shaw right in the eyes. Her own irises were jet-black and merged with her pupils to form two dark circles, but her eyes flashed completely white for a moment before narrowing and turning black again.

“Dr. Shaw, do you feel sad because of this occurrence?”

Dr. Shaw replied truthfully.

“No.”

“But you recognize the abomination that occurred that day?” said Kayana.

“Yes,” said Dr. Shaw.

“I feel the same pity for my dead parents as you do for the ninth-century African woman who was killed in front of her own child. Though I cannot shed a tear for them, I recognize what
should and should not be
. So I came here so that I would do no further harm.”

Dr. Shaw smiled, then got up and looked out the window.

“I see your point,” he said, “but I still believe in mine; you aren’t a sociopath. In fact, your sense of morality and compassion
far supersedes
what the average human can feel. I feel your sense of right and wrong is more adept than mine or anyone else’s.”

Kayana thought for a moment and then smiled.

“Perhaps,” she said.

“You see the world through a very specific and simple moral lens,” said Dr. Shaw. “What
should be
, and what
should not be
; is that correct?”

“Perhaps,” said Kayana.

“So I ask you this,” said Dr. Julius Shaw. “How do you feel about the world now, specifically the conurbation? How do you feel about this world we live in?”

Kayana thought for a moment. She thought about the laughing boy, her family and the conurbation.

“Is the world as it
should be
?” asked Dr. Shaw.

“No,” said Kayana.

Dr. Shaw smiled, picked up his tablet and pressed some buttons.

“That answer alone is good enough reason to kick you out of the institution,” said Dr. Shaw with a smile. “Above all else, you’re completely
sane
.”

“Sanity is an arbitrary construct,” said Kayana, “a relative standard of brain chemistry that has no bearing on reality and—”

“You’re meant for something more, Kayana,” interrupted Dr. Shaw, “something more than rotting away in a cell, wearing thick gloves and switching lights on and off.”

“Perhaps,” said Kayana, “but if you want to send me back to another foster family …”

“I will do no such thing,” said Dr. Shaw. “Your touch causes death; I admit this. I’m releasing you to another group that has asked for you specifically. It’s a school for your kind.”

“My kind?” asked Kayana.

“You have powers,” said Dr. Shaw.

“A lot of people have powers,” said Kayana. “New gods show up every day.”

“And unlike you, they use their abilities for personal gain,” said Dr. Shaw. “This school asked for you specifically. They want to train you and others like yourself so that the conurbation can be brought under control again, so that society is once again as it
should be
.”

“No school can contain me,” said Kayana.

“This one would like to try,” said Dr. Shaw. “It’s called
the Academy
.”