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nature.
    But enough of the Traitor. She escaped, she helped us, and that is all you will ever know of her. Torture me, if you must. Torture all of us. We can tell you no more because we know no more.
    The play that we produced would have been the crown of any other life. You leaned forward to see better; you watched, rapt, as we strode upon the stage. Our dialogue shaped your reality. Seduced from your sacrosanct paths, you were plunged into our drama.
    Do you know what I hate about the customs of our drama, fellow citizens, judging public? I hate the endings of our plays. We have managed to make life into art, to render our own souls upon the stage, and learn from our flaws and virtues. And then, time after time, we ruin it.
    I have wept at the creations of Euripides. And then, as his plays draw to a close, he deprives us of resolution. He turns away from the humanity that he has created and, instead of finding mortal solutions to mortal problems, invokes the divine.
    It is delusion ; can’t you see that? The gods do not intervene! The gods do not care! The gods merely dissemble .
    Time after time, they appear on stage, force-feed us those damned lies, try to comfort us by their presence, and tie those messy strings of life into a pretty bow with which to adorn their wretched amorality.
    It disgusts me.
    When I descended to the stage, lowered by the Crane, did you think I was one of them? A god as all the other actors had so briefly become?
    I remember little of what followed: of striding forward, hands outstretched; of our Chorus’ suicide, of their sacrifice; of the words spoken as they drove those daggers into their hearts.
    I remember little of it, but the evidence is all around me in the toppled altars, the burned buildings, the slain priests.
    We made a deal with an Entity. It has no name. We do not know what it is.
    We released a hunter among the flock.
    We killed your gods, fellow citizens. That Being that rode my flesh like the driver steers the carriage; that Being that strode to masked Dionysus watching our plays and drove a blade through his neck to see that all-too-mortal blood pour out; that Being was our prayers given physical shape, a god-killer born of invocation and drama on holy ground.
    It is not gone, that Being that we summoned. I woke up, as you all know, memory-less and dying in the midst of the carnage, but it did not go back to sleep. It has been released.
    It will not sleep again until the gods are dead, the world changed forever.
    We have liberated you, even if you are too faith-smitten to see it.
    Mortals – we give you the reigns to your world!
    Do with us what you will.
    Nathaniel Katz blogs about genre fiction at The Hat Rack ( evilhat.blogspot.com ). This is his first published work of fiction.
    The author speaks: In Ancient Greece, the gods were like regular people – just stronger, faster, smarter, braver, more beautiful, and long-lasting. During plays, performed as rituals during the Celebration of Dionysus, the gods were thought to actually walk the stage in the body of the actor. The actors-cum-deities would be mechanically lowered into the scene and resolve the characters’ dilemmas – the literal origins of the term ‘ Deus ex Machina ’. Which, for a Lovecraft-themed anthology, begs the question: what else might be coming down?

IF ONLY TO TASTE HER AGAIN
    E. Catherine Tobler 
    T he winds were blowing low and remained warm when our five boats returned across the wine-dark waters of the Red Sea. It was late in the season – the winds should have begun to cool by then, for it was later than any of us planned, but the Queen of Punt had been exceptionally generous in her welcome of us. The days spent in her kingdom seemed longer than an age, the nights filled with wine, figs and the attention of slim, young boys. The Queen spared us no expense, so that we might return to Djeser-Djeseru with riches none expected; so that she might receive the grand favours of Hatshepsut, the