From Welland to Wye River - Ch.3 - The Goddess (Patreon)

My conversation with the elusive catgirl was interrupted when the front door opened, and that young brunette girl came in and sat down on the sofa next to Zoe.

The catgirl glanced at the child then commented "I suppose we'd better do some introductions? Aeron, that is Tam Stevens, a reporter from Canada doing a story about Cindy. And Tam, this is Aeron. She's originally from Wales, but stays here with us now. She's friends with Ciara and Sid."

When I heard the girl speak earlier she didn't have a Welsh accent, if anything I thought she sounded like another Canadian. 

I was about to ask about that when Zoe spoke up again. She asked the young girl, "Are you going to stay with me while I'm talking with Tam? Or do you want to get Kat? Or your big sister?"

Aeron shook her head, "Kat and Aeronwy said I could stay with you for now."

Zoe looked back to me again, from her expression I could tell she was awaiting my next question.

I hesitated slightly, "Is it ok to talk in front of her? I don't want to risk upsetting her with some of my questions."

"She'll be fine," the catgirl replied. "She's tougher than she looks."

I wasn't sure what to make of that comment but I let it go. "May I ask who Aeron is? How did she come to be living with you? Did you adopt her?"

Zoe smiled as if there was another inside joke in something I said. "I suppose you could say we adopted her. I'm sure you know this already, but I got married last month. Aeron stays with my wife and I."

"Yes, I heard. Congratulations. Your wife's name is Katrina, correct? I take it that's the Kat you and Aeron just mentioned?"

The catgirl wore a smirk on her face as she nodded, "Right. She prefers to be called Kat, which as I'm sure you can imagine is a source of constant confusion when we meet new people. The one with the cat ears is Zoe, the other one's Kat."

I smiled as well, "Cute. Was Kat ever involved with Cindy and her plans?"

Zoe's smile faded and she shook her head. "I didn't meet Kat till after Cindy was gone, but I'd rather not go into that at the moment. Perhaps if my wife turns up while you're still here, then we can discuss it later."

"Ok Zoe," I nodded. "What about this sister Aeron mentioned? Aeronwy? I take it that's a Welsh name?"

"Right," she nodded. "That's something else we should probably leave for now. If she shows up you'll definitely find out about her, but otherwise I'd rather not drag her into this."

I was frustrated at having some new lines of inquiry shut down before I could even get started, but I accepted it for what it was. The last thing I wanted was to cross some line and have Zoe kick me out. Odds were I'd never get a chance like this again.

"Ok, let's return to the reason I'm here. So Cindy started out on the streets in St. Catharines in twenty-twenty. You met her in twenty-twenty-two. In spring of twenty-twenty-four she kicked off her Change The World campaign. And in November twenty-twenty-five she was gone. What can you tell me about those first two years you knew her? You've said she was perhaps a little immature, and a bit reckless and took some risks learning magic. What changed, what led to her shift focus from an avid student of magic to a world-changing visionary?"

Zoe was quiet for a few moments, and wore a sad but thoughtful look on her face. Aeron had been sitting quietly through all this as well, just watching and listening.

Eventually the catgirl took a deep breath then gave me her answer.

"As I said, Cindy and I became friends after we met in twenty-two. Close friends even, but not intimately close. I got a job near where she was living, and the two of us hung out together. By the summer of twenty-three we'd become a lot closer. I felt like I'd outgrown the job I was doing, and Cindy decided she'd learned as much as she could where she was. She wanted to travel the world, and she invited me to accompany her. We started off in the UK. We went to London, and just started wandering around, exploring and stuff."

I nodded quietly. I'd already documented some of that in my research, I even spoke to some people they'd met or witnesses who'd seen them in London, in Shropshire, and in Wales.

"So we spent a while in and around London, then we travelled west. We ended up in Wales, and that's where things went wrong."

The catgirl sighed deeply. "I'm not going to go into a lot of details on this, because it involved several other people and I've sworn not to expose them. Suffice to say, Cindy and I were attacked by a couple guys who knew magic. It was unprovoked, but that led to us discovering there was a group of people who were looking to keep magic to themselves. Basically they'd kill anyone else they suspected of having access or knowledge of magic. They were vicious, ruthless, plus they had money and resources. And there were a lot of them. That attack on the two of us kicked off about six weeks of hell for me and Cindy and a bunch of other friends of ours."

I thought back to the fall of twenty-three and immediately made the connection. It had to have something to do with that mysterious terrorist attack on a St. Catharines area high-school, and the three dead terrorists. There was never any real explanation what the terrorists wanted or why they were there. Or what happened to them. There were rumours of magic at the time, but they were quickly debunked. Then six months later Cindy's spell was shared with the world and magic became a household word.

"So what happened?" I asked. "If these guys were so formidable, how'd you and Cindy escape? And how did you deal with the threat to your friends?"

Zoe grimaced, "They were bad, but Cindy was stronger. She saved both of us during that initial attack. That caused those guys to try other tactics, and they got even more vicious. They went after our friends' families. They murdered a friend of ours and tried to kill another. They tried to kidnap or kill some teens, and ended up kidnapping me instead. And that pushed Cindy over the edge. They were bad, she was worse."

The catgirl sighed again. "Up until October twenty-three, she was content to be a curious eccentric sorceress. She didn't have much ambition, all she wanted to do was travel and learn about magic and see the world. By the end of November that year, she'd grown up. She'd used magic to kill. She'd risked her life to save me and our other friends. And she'd seen how some of us suffered, how people used the fact that some of us are trans as a weapon against us. She saw how greedy small-minded bigots behaved when they had money and power, and she decided the world needed to change. And by that point she had enough power of her own to make it happen, and to basically give zero fucks about anyone who might try and stop her."

"How much power did she have?" I asked. "Is there even a way to quantify that?"

That brought another thoughtful frown to the catgirl's face, as if she was either trying to decide how to answer my question or perhaps whether nor not she should.

While she was still thinking it over, the brunette child spoke up instead. 

Aeron's voice was quiet and sombre as she told me, "Cindy held the power of two Gods. She defeated them both at the end of November, and had an uneasy truce with three more. She really didn't like to use the title herself, but she was effectively a Goddess. The only functional difference between her and a true Goddess was Cindy was not immortal."

It would have been easy to dismiss her words as the imaginative ramblings of a child, but the worried look I saw on Zoe's face wasn't the look you gave a kid who was talking nonsense. It was the look you gave a child who just blurted out a sensitive secret you'd patiently explained she must never ever say in front of guests.

The look on the catgirl's face didn't go unnoticed by Aeron either. She looked at Zoe and shrugged slightly as she explained, "The others said it was ok to say that."

"How do you know all this Aeron?" I asked the child in what I hoped was a kind friendly voice.

The young brunette looked back at me again and replied, "My big sister was one of the Gods that Cindy beat."

Her tone was calm and casual, she may as well have been discussing yesterday's weather the way she almost sounded bored while making this unbelievable statement.

I found myself staring at her as I asked, "If your big sister's a Goddess, then what does that make you?"

It was Zoe who replied this time. The catgirl sounded serious as she responded, "Aeron is a Goddess of War. But don't worry, she's mostly harmless."

I glanced at the catgirl then looked back at the child sitting next to her. I recalled the girl playing that violent game earlier, the look on her face as she happily gunned down helpless injured enemy soldiers on the TV screen. 

She looked back at me with a grin, and in a cheerful voice she announced "I haven't killed anyone for real in almost three years!"

That had to be one of the least-reassuring statements I'd ever heard. Except it was almost impossible to believe either her or Zoe. I came here to talk about a mysterious blonde teen named Cindy, and now I was allegedly meeting a Goddess. 

I wasn't religious, I didn't believe in God. And the God I didn't believe in was the pop-culture ideal of an old white guy with a beard and robes sitting on clouds. It never even crossed my mind that a Goddess could be a small ten-year-old girl who played video games.

The idea that there were multiple Gods around, that Cindy defeated two of them and seized their power for herself, and that the little sister of one of them would be sitting here in front of me... It was preposterous. Impossible.

Except for the last two years I lived in a world where magic was known to be real. I was sitting across from a real live catgirl. And I'd spent the last three months of my life researching that small blonde teen who gave magic to the world, who created and shared a simple spell almost anyone could use, to completely change their body into almost anything they wanted.

Maybe the idea that Cindy was a Goddess wasn't that farfetched after all.

I was still staring at that small brunette. I gulped and asked, "If you're a Goddess of War, then what's your big sister?"

She grinned, "Aeronwy is a Warrior Goddess."

Zoe added, "It's probably apparent by their names, but Aeron and Aeronwy are very closely related. The distinction is mostly that while Aeron is a Goddess of War, she doesn't go out and do any fighting or killing herself. Not anymore, that is. Aeronwy on the other hand... Let's just say you don't want to get on her bad side."

After a heartbeat the catgirl added with a grin, "Not that you want to get on Aeron's bad side. Or Kat's or mine either, for that matter."

I just nodded slowly as I stared at both of them. I wasn't sure if I should feel anxious or not. Neither of them had actually revealed anything magical, though I felt fairly confident that Zoe wasn't your average catgirl. It took me another half minute to get my mind back onto my job, the reason I was here in the first place. 

"So um, you said Cindy had the power of two Gods? Who was the other one?"

Zoe sighed, "He called himself Alexander. I'm not sure anyone knows his true name. He was originally a local God of a Germanic tribe that was masacred by the Romans as they conquored Europe. Roman scholars equated him with their Goddess Minerva, they even suggested his name may have been Menerwal but that was a serious mistranslation."

Aeron added, "He was mean and nasty, and Cindy outsmarted him like she outsmarted my big sister."

I looked at the girl again as I asked, "You don't sound upset about that? If someone beat my big sister I don't think I'd be very happy with them."

The kid actually blushed and looked down at the floor, like she was embarrassed or sheepish. She shrugged, "We were unhappy at first? But Cindy was really nice to us. She beat Aeronwy but in the end she helped us. She..."

The girl's voice trailed off for a moment and she got a sort of distant look on her face for a few seconds. Then she nodded and looked up at me and said, "Cindy sacrificed herself for us. For Aeronwy and me, I mean."

I noticed Zoe had that uneasy worried look on her face, that suggested maybe the kid said too much, or said something she shouldn't have. I decided to go after that thread this time.

"Zoe?" I asked the catgirl. "You look a little troubled by what Aeron just told me. Do you have anything to comment on that? Did Cindy sacrifice herself for a couple Goddesses that she formerly defeated?"

The young woman took a deep breath then let out a deep sigh. She finally nodded, "Yes. There's a lot more to it than that. She told me, towards the end... She said she knew her fate was sealed back at the end of twenty-three. After she defeated the two Gods, when she got the idea in her head to change the world. She said she didn't know how or when it would happen, but she knew her days were numbered and she decided to do as much as she could, to help as many people as she could, for as long as she could."

I could hear the sadness in the catgirl's voice and see it in her eyes as she continued, "I think she expected it would be either another God who'd get to her, or perhaps she'd let her guard down or slip up and some human would get lucky. I... Thanks to Cindy's magic, she and I, and our friends, we're fairly well protected. Very hard to kill, in fact. But none of us are invulnerable, or immortal. And as strong as she was, she couldn't defeat a God or Goddess in a direct one-on-one fight. The two she beat both lost because they underestimated her while she outsmarted them."

After a soft sigh she finished, "What actually got her in the end was her own hubris, in a way. Like I said, she over-extended herself. She used her magic to try helping the Goddess she defeated, and she ended up overdoing it. She burned herself out."

"What was it she was trying to do?" I asked softly, as I looked between Zoe and Aeron. "What was so important that she'd give her life for a defeated enemy?"

It was Aeron who answered. Her voice was soft and sombre again as she explained, "We were dangerous, violent. If we'd gotten free we would have brought the world to its knees, then we'd probably have brought it to its end. We thrived in war, in combat. And you humans have invented so many amazing ways to kill each other over the last two thousand years. We wanted to see them all, we wanted to use them all. Bombs and missiles and chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons. So many toys, we wanted to play with them all. Cindy kept the world safe from us by locking us away, but she didn't want to leave us entombed in stone for eternity. She wanted to reform us. She wanted us to feel love and friendship and kindness, so we wouldn't want to go around killing everyone. And she did it. She saved us, and she saved the world from us. But it cost her life to do it."