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She was only a goddess part-time but, she lover her job, and she was good at it. she went to and fro upon the earth and walked up and down it, and where she strode bloomed flowers and sprouted grain; when she spread her hand, the winter was mild and the harvest bountiful, a summer storm brought showers warm and sweet as a sunlit pond, and the spring sang of things green and growing.
The First Folk called her Eyyallarann, the Flowmind; the stonebenders called her Thukulg'n, The Drowner; to the Treetoppers she was Ketinnasi, The Riverman; to mankind she was Chambaraya, The Water Father; but her name was Pallas Ril.
It was said she had a human lover, in some far-off place; that for half the year she took the form of mortal woman and lived in peace with her lover and her human child. Others said her lover was he, himself a god, her shadow-self, a dark angel of slaughter and destruction, and that half of each year she spent at his side was the world's ransom; that she paid with her body to keep him beyond the walls of time, and preserve the peace of the good land.
As is common with such tales , both were true ; and false to the same degree.
The part-time goddess had no church, no religion, no followers; she could not be propitiaied by sacrifice or sommoned by invocation. She walked wither she willed, and followed the course of her heart as though its turns were the twists of her river bed; she loved the land and all things in it, and all prospered under her hand. the only prayer that might sway her was the sob of a mother over her ill or injured child--be that mother human or primal, goshawl or bobcat, elk or rabbit--and this only because the human part of her remembered what it is to be a mother.
This was probally, in the end, the real reason why she and her lover both had to die.
For the scent of her green and growing land troubled the slumber of another god a blind and nameless god, a god of dust and ashes, whose merest dream can kill.