A Clockwork God Preview
- Paul Kupperberg
- Apr 19
- 9 min read
A CLOCKLWORK GOD
A Novella of the ReDeus Event
by Paul Kupperberg
Cover by Jay Francis
Published by Crazy 8 Press, April 2026
150 pages
$14 (shipped/U.S. only)
July 27, 2012
London.
Close to a hundred thousand people gather in the London Olympic Stadium. Billions more watch on televisions around the world. There is a commotion near the main gates. The crowd begins to cheer as a single figure appears. A young woman, her head held high, her right hand higher as it bears a shining rod aloft. The top of the rod glows and flickers with a bright flame. The Olympic torch. She runs across the stadium’s field, the cheers rising all about her as she approaches the platform set there in its center, and the wide, shallow brazier it holds. She stops short, ten feet away, and, with a practiced overhand toss, flips the burning torch toward the brazier. It lands squarely in the center, and the oil there ignites at once, a rich blaze springing up—
—and then the blaze bursts into a blinding light. Those in the crowd shield their eyes, blinking, and squinting and staring as the light pours forth—
—and gleaming, golden figures leap from the flames.
At first the crowd thinks these are holograms, laser displays, some form of special effect, and they roar their approval as the powerful, handsome figures turn and survey the scene. They wear togas and robes cinched with heavy brooches, laurel, and olive wreaths atop their oiled and curled hair, sturdy sandals upon their feet. They are beautiful, commanding, and their skin glitters like gold.
Then the central figure steps forward. He is taller than the others, broader-shouldered, his beard full and his deep eyes wise and arresting. He raises a hand and the cheers stop as if a shroud had fallen, cutting off all sound. And into that silence he speaks.
“I am Zeus,” he declares, his deep voice rolling out across the stadium, across the country, across the world. “The father of the gods, the ruler of the sky and the land. I am he who slew his father Chronos, shattered the Titans’ might, and laid claim to the world. You know me, for you have worshipped me since your earliest days.”
“I have returned.” He raises his arms wide to encompass his companions and his audience. “We have returned. And now we will accept your worship once more.”
Welcome to ReDeus. The year is 2032. It is twenty years since the gods returned. Twenty years since they carved up the world between them, pantheon battling pantheon. Twenty years since every man, woman, and child was forced to pay obeisance to their ancestral gods—or be forever branded a heretic and hunted mercilessly.
“I’m sorry, you wanna give that to me again,” FBI Special Agent Irwin Benjamin said, looking up from his notepad with an expression that said the misunderstanding was his own and not the fault of the young woman who had just delivered the news.
“I said,” NYPD pathologist Rita Conti repeated, “The vic’s not human. She’s a god.”
Benjamin looked back down at the prone figure of the blond woman sprawled on the pavement in the alley behind the Temple of Lofn. The narrow space between the two Upper East Side New York buildings was blocked from the street by yellow police tape behind which curious onlookers gathered and gawked, and the alley itself swarmed with plainclothes and uniformed police and support crew. Shattered glass from the second floor window through which the woman had crashed before plummeting to the ground was scattered around the body, which was clad in a diaphanous gown that didn’t seem to even qualify as clothing. She had landed face down, her left arm beneath her body, her legs splayed in a most unladylike fashion, and her head twisted at an angle that told the investigating officer she was dead even before he looked into her wide, unseeing pale blue eyes. Her facial expression was frozen in surprise, but then, the middle-aged federal agent thought, so were the faces of every victim of sudden, violent death he had ever seen. Nobody ever expected it would happen to them.
Certainly not a god.
“They can die?” he said, trying to digest the crime scene investigator’s news. He knew it was a stupid question to ask while standing over the corpse that made the answer obvious, but he felt the need to say something.
“Apparently,” Rita said. “I was pretty shocked myself the first time it happened, but we got a positive ID from half a dozen of her followers. Name’s Lofn, spelled L-O-F-N. Norse goddess of relationships…or orgies, from the looks of this place, which is her temple.”
“I thought they were supposed to be…y’know, immortal.” Benjamin shook his head, running his hand over what remained of his dark hair. “It doesn’t seem that something as trivial as a twenty foot fall should be enough to kill a god.”
Rita shook her head, her full red lips pressed tightly together in a straight, grim line. “It isn’t. And there doesn’t seem to be a mark on her from the broken glass or the fall. As far as I can tell, they’re pretty much impervious to ordinary bodily harm.”
“Then what’s the C.O.D.?”
Her green eyes stared at the body as though trying to look through it to the secrets beneath its flesh. Though New York wasn’t the FBI agent’s regular beat, he had met Rita at a conference in Washington a couple of years and was as acutely aware of her reputation as he was of her beauty.
“I’ve got my suspicions,” she said, “but I can’t say until we do the autopsy…if we’re allowed to do one.”
“Why wouldn’t you…?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. The tall pathologist turned to the member of the CSI team who had been taking photographs of the body. “You got enough shots, Warren? I want to turn the body.”
Warren nodded. “Yeah, I think we’ve got everything we need for now, Rita,” the young African American said. He glanced up at the broken second floor window. “The temple’s keeper gave us permission to do a work-up on the room upstairs, but with the volume of worshippers in and out of there, I’m giving it long odds we’ll find anything useful.”
“Thanks, Warren,” Rita said. She inclined her head towards the FBI investigator. “CSI Warren Vinson, meet Special Agent Irwin Benjamin. He’s going to be working the case with the NYPD.”
The two men nodded in acknowledgement of the introduction and shook hands while Rita knelt beside the corpse. She gestured for Benjamin to join her and, together, they started to gently roll Lofn onto her back.
There were more shards of broken glass under the body, bits of which clung to the robe and glittered in the light as they moved her. Her pale white flesh was unmarked but as cold to the touch as any human corpse Benjamin had ever handled. Her left hand was clenched into a fist that pressed firmly against her left breast, frozen there as if in rigor mortis.
“Okay, that’s weird,” Benjamin muttered. He pushed his thick, horn-rimmed glasses back on his nose. “The beat cop who called this in heard the breaking glass about forty-five minutes ago, right? That’s not near enough time for rigor to start to set in, even in this weather. And there’s no sign of postmortem lividity.”
Benjamin knew that after death blood quickly begins to settle in the lowest portion of the body, causing a purplish discoloration of a victim’s skin.
But Rita Conti was shaking her head.
“You’re thinking human physiology, Agent Benjamin. The gods may have human forms, but they don’t work quite the same way we do.”
“How the hell do you know how they…” Benjamin started to say, then caught himself. “Wow, I must be getting all kinds of stupid in my old age. It just hit me…when I got here, you said you were shocked the first time it happened. ‘It’ meaning…another dead god?”
Rita looked, checking to see if anyone else was close enough to overhear them. “Caught that, did you? No wonder Washington put you on this case.”
Benjamin stared at her, waiting.
“Look, word came down from on high. It’s supposed to be hush-hush, a strictly need to know basis.”
“Considering I’m squatting over the corpse of a Norse god, I think I qualify as needing to know, don’t you? I’m sure the chief or the commissioner or whatever level of brass and braid the word came from would agree.”
“No,” Rita said in a fierce whisper. “When I say on high…”
Whatever she’d been about to say was interrupted by a booming voice from the mouth of the alley.
“Stand aside, mortals,” the voice commanded. “I am Odin and I will see what has become of one of my own!”
Rita looked at Agent Benjamin with a raised eyebrow and said, “I mean very high.”
Father Rowe could count on a handful, at most, of devotees stopping in at Saint Joseph’s Church for the midday Communion Service. The old church, on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue near Waverly Place had survived fires and age to serve the Greenwich Village community since 1834 and was now just two years away from celebrating its bicentennial. But on days such as today, when she conducted services to empty pews, the priest wondered if the old Greek Revival building would still be a house of worship when that time came.
Everything had changed that day the gods came. July 27, 2012.
Gloria Rowe was a 26 year old nun at the time of the Return, just two months after taking her Temporary Vows. She had known with a certainty from the age of eleven that her life would be spent in the church and the service of the Lord. The appearance of cascades of false gods in London’s Olympic Stadium that day had served only to strengthen her devotion to Jesus and the tenets of Catholicism. She remembered in the days and weeks immediately following the Return how the churches and cathedrals of New York had been filled to the rafters with similar believers, countless worshippers whose faith wasn’t to be shaken by the appearance of beings making fraudulent claims to divinity. Once, perhaps millennia ago, primitive man could believe that their gods were merely superior reflections of humanity, but surely now, in the two thousand years following Christ, they had to recognize that the opposite was true. That we were inferior reflections of the one God.
But in short time, the believers began to dwindle in number. The false gods established their domains on Earth and congregants began to leave the church to worship them instead.
“Why?” the young nun asked them.
“Because they are here and they are real,” the people said.
“But what of faith?” she cried.
“We have faith in what we can see and touch,” they replied.
“You can see and touch this wall, that statue, those cars,” she said. “You might just as well believe in those things.”
“We do,” they said. “We believe this is a wall, that is a statue, those are cars. We believe these are our gods.”
And Gloria, now Sister Constance, finally understood: Faith in the unseen and the unknowable was difficult. Belief in the tangible was easy. But while she soon lost all faith in mankind, while all around her, her sisters abandoned their vows and priests left their holy orders, she never stopped believing in her God. Yes, she could see Zeus and Ukko, could touch Anansi and Horus, but she couldn’t feel them in her heart, where true devotion lived.
And when the priesthood had become all but depleted by devotional defections and the Holy Seer opened its ranks to women, Sister Constance had traded her habit for the Clerical collar. She gave up her life of quiet contemplation and the study and preservation of church history to make her own history in the church. The time for debate over whether women should be priests had passed. All that mattered was the continuation and survival of the clergy.
But now, after almost a decade in the pulpit, doubt ate away at Father Rowe’s certainty. Not doubt in the existence of God; she knew as sure as she stood at the head of her church, devoid of worshippers though it were, that God, who created the world and man in six days, who gave us the Bible as his living Word to the faithful, was real.
No, her doubt was worse, a sin far greater than non-belief.
Hers was the doubt that God any longer cared what fate befell the world he had created.
The idea had slowly crept into her thoughts that he had sent the false gods to test mankind’s faith and that mankind had, in the end, been found wanting. If it was possible for man to stop believing in God, surely it was possible for God to lose faith in mankind.
As she turned from the altar and started to remove her vestments, Father Rowe froze in surprise.
A lone man sat in the last row.
He was not a member of her congregation; she had few enough of those that she could recognize them all by sight. He sat tall and straight on the long wood bench, a slender figure with close cropped white hair, and the gaunt, sunken cheeks and hollow eyed look of an aesthetic. He was dressed in a black t-shirt and windbreaker, his head slightly bowed, as if in prayer.
She hadn’t seen or heard him enter the church. She wouldn’t have thought she was so preoccupied with her memories or solitary devotions that she wouldn’t have noticed.
“Hello,” she said, her voice echoing faintly in the empty space. “I’m Father Rowe. May I help you? Have you come to take Communion?”
The man rose and stepped into the aisle.
“I cannot, father,” he said in a slightly accented voice that was surprisingly strong for his thin frame.
“Oh? Is it against your religion?” she said, smiling quickly to show she was joking.
The man did not smile in return and when he spoke, his tone was without any humor.
“No. I will not receive communion until I have fulfilled my vow.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand. What vow would that be?”
“To slay all the false gods,” he said. “And make way for the return of the one, true Lord.”
# # #
Read all the epis tales of the returned gods and goddesses in the ReDeus Trilogy
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