Chapter SEX: The Uterine Reckoning

The temples lay in ruins, their shattered stones scattered beneath the indifferent sky. The statues of the Sky Fathers, once towering above the cities, had fallen - their beards crumbled, their eyes hollowed. Yet the earth did not mourn them. It sighed, as though relieved of an ancient weight.

But the reckoning had only just begun.

Without the gods of men, there was no longer a story to hold the world in place. The priests’ parchments curled into ash. The names of First Men and father-gods faded from the tongues that had once repeated them. And in their absence, the silence was vast.

But it was not empty.

For even as the echoes of the old stories dissolved, a deeper voice stirred. It came not from the heavens, but from the soil - the pulse of the earth itself. It was the voice of blood and birth, the knowledge of the uterus that had never ceased, though the world had tried to forget it.

The reckoning was not a war. It was a remembering.

Midwives emerged from the shadows, their hands stained not with sin but with the crimson truth of the most laborious labour, with all the hidden stories whispered by the labia - the dishonest name the First Man gave to the lips of the mouth of the womb. The mothers who had been silenced for generations now spoke without fear. Their words did not proclaim dominion. They did not seek thrones. Instead, they spoke of cycles - the endless rhythm of creation that no king had ever touched.

Althea stood among them, though she did not lead. She had never sought to rule, nor to raise her own name above others. She had only torn away the veil, and now the world saw.

The reckoning began with the body.

Women traced the lines of their bellies, no longer ashamed of the marks left by birth. Daughters placed their hands on the pulses of their mothers, feeling the echo of the life that had passed through them. The blood that had once been called unclean was now honored - not as a curse, but as a covenant with existence itself.

And the men, stripped of the stories that crowned them as first, stood in awe. For they, too, had been born. They, too, had been carried in the dark warmth of the womb. There were no more myths to separate them from their beginnings. Only the undeniable truth of their mothers.

But the reckoning was not only for the living.

Across the lands, the burial mounds of forgotten women rose like small hills. Once nameless, their resting places were now marked with reverence. Althea knelt before one such mound, her fingers sifting through the damp soil. There was no monument of stone, no scripture to bind this death in words. Only the earth, bearing the weight of the body it had reclaimed.

“You were the beginning,” she whispered. “And through us, you remain.”

No one called it worship. There were no prayers, no cries to absent gods. Only remembrance. The people gathered, not to seek salvation, but to honor the truth that pulsed within their veins. Every birth was now seen as a holy act - not because of divine will, but because it was the body itself that parted the veil between nothingness and existence.

And with every cry of a newborn, the reckoning deepened.

The mothers did not claim the world as their own. They did not carve their names into stone. They did not need to. The knowledge of the uterus could not be possessed; it could only be lived.

The rivers remembered. The trees remembered. The stars, though falsely named, blinked once more in recognition. Even God, though absent, might have turned - not in judgment, but in quiet acknowledgment. For if the divine had ever gazed upon the world with wonder, it was surely when the first mother bore life from her body.

And perhaps now, with the Sky Fathers gone, God could gaze once more.

The reckoning was not an end.

It was a return.