The gods and their names are masterclasses in corporate branding. Temples to synergy, board meetings around the altar. Each a horrific thing of hunger and power, kept barely sated by the recursive demand. A volcanic eruption designed by committee.
They didn't all start that way.
The Petropater was, at one time, a bucolic figure, raising fountains of black gold and ploughing fields of glistening anthracite.
The Slag King was made when Glottage broke ground, long before cars and street lights and steel in buildings. Mouths formed in the liquid concrete to whisper and bellow and demand. His crown is rebar.
Pit Head was an open mine that stretched deeper and hungrier than any other, and the more workers it swallowed up the more ore was belched to the surface. It ate the other mining gods with way a hagfish does a tide-washed corpse.
But the Saint Electric is different. Saints are beautiful, wonderous things- the stretching of a human to the world of a god, elongating their mind and unspinning the simple molecules of their body until something goes twang.
When the secret to electricity was cracked, and the first generators began to spin in their cradles, a meeting was held. Nervous corporate types shuffled papers with engineers and priests.
The industry needed a god, of course it needed a god.
But which? The Thunderer? He Who Stands Behind The Thunder Cloud? What about Wheelturner, for the generators? Or Many Hands Make Light Work, for the lightbulbs?
It was too fractious, too granular. The system couldn't handle pooling together all these tiny gods, and it would take a very long time to cannibalise all of the others. And, they said, unknowable. The Slag King and Pit Head and the Petropater- these had been known values. Sure, power and corporate pantheonhood had altered them a smidge, but they'd grown organically.
They had brand recognition.
No-one knows who's suggestion it was. Blasphemy, of course, of the highest order, but experimental blasphemy.
If to make a saint is to take a human and lift them forcibly into the divine, perhaps, just once, it could be done in reverse.
To take a god, some thing of light and sound and crackling energy, and tether it, stretch it downwards until it snapped.
Maybe she was a god of lightning or something else.
They trapped her and bound her in copper and dynamos and forced a face and a name on her and brought her down rather than up. They made a body from insulating clay and they placed her in a faraday cage and even when she screams along the frequencies in power lines she cannot be heard. They scooped out her back and stabbed cables into the sores to make her wings.
Electricity flows along the wires like blood in vessels, and she is the heart that beats, circulating it. Making it flow.
Keeping the world alive.