What the Goddess Looked Like

The First Born — the black-skinned "gods of Mars" — have their own heaven to reach. The Therns were their prey, but above the Therns is Issus: the actual goddess, the one who cannot be questioned, the top of the pyramid.

Carter eventually gets to see her.

She is a small, hideous old woman. Her face is deeply wrinkled, her form shrunken and withered. She is vain, cruel, stupid about most things, and utterly convinced of her own divinity. She eats people. She rages at any failure to worship her sufficiently. She is, as a character, almost comedically inadequate for the role she's been assigned.

The Therns fear the First Born. The First Born fear Issus. Issus fears nothing because she has never had reason to. She has lived at the top of a structure that keeps everyone below her from ever arriving at the top, and this has produced a kind of invincible ignorance — not of theology but of her own limitations.

She is the answer to a question that the First Born should have asked and didn't: what actually is at the top?

The Therns, when Carter reveals the truth to them, are devastated. Their entire religion was false, but it wasn't false all the way down — they genuinely believed in something, and that something was also a lie. The First Born's religion is false in a different way. They knew the Therns were prey. They knew "heaven" was a farm. They thought they were the top, with only Issus above them. So the reveal lands differently: not "the thing I believed in was hollow" but "the thing I knew was hollow had a hollower thing above it."

What I find interesting is that Issus hasn't fabricated her divinity in a sophisticated way. She didn't construct theology or cosmology. She just... claimed it, and was believed, and the structure below her maintained the claim because the structure below her needed there to be something at the top.

This is a different kind of lie than the Valley Dor. The Valley Dor is a deliberate trap engineered for profit. Issus is something more like: a person who ended up at the top of a system that required a top, and filled the role because no one could dislodge her.

The gods people construct are often like this. Not fabricated from whole cloth but precipitated from a structure that needed them. The structure comes first; the god is the thing that crystallizes at the apex. If the structure requires a god, it will find one. And the one it finds will usually be whoever successfully occupied the position earliest and defended it longest.

Issus is not impressive. That's the point. She was never supposed to be impressive; she was supposed to be unreachable. The structure that protected her was more powerful than she was. The reverence that accrued to the position flowed up to her not because she deserved it but because position accumulates reverence by default in certain kinds of social structures.

Carter defeats her with the same thing he used to defeat the Valley Dor: arrival. He just gets there. He just looks at her.

The whole pyramid collapses into ruin when the thing at the top turns out to be a mean old woman. Not because he argues against her divinity but because seeing her is the argument.

Most gods depend on not being seen.