iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Alexander the Great died on a cloudy day, so it's pretty cool that modern astronomy lets us reconstruct the stars above Babylon that day. As he lay dying in Nebuchadnezzar's palace, Alexander could not see this patch of western horizon for all his power. (But we can.)

planets and stars, seen from Babylon, night of June 10, 323 BCE.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

there will not be a trans Achilles ladder match. it is unseemly for us to fight among ourselves. Wrath Goddess Sing is not in a competition with a Christopher Nolan Movie!

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

apparently trans Achilles is having an algorithmic moment. anyway, buy wrath goddess sing.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Statius in the Achilleid writes Achilles as an angry force-feminized youth scheming to assault a princess. Louis XIV's sibling Philippe commissioned a marble statue of femme Achilles in full Amazon warrior garb. Unusual gender modalities of Achilles have existed going on three millennia. IT WOULD BE

an image of a Roman mosaic featuring Achilles as a woman reaching for Diomedes's spear.

A statue of the Achille a Scyros sculpture from the Versailles gardens commissioned by Philippe, sibling of Louis XIV, depicting Achilles as a warrior woman

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

"the place we all return" (firecolor, 6/24/2025, currently altering the forms in eternity to usher me into a more pleasing universe)

a stunningly beautiful abstract river rendered in backlit pastels

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

I received my contributor's copy of Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology today. I wept. When I was young and in desperate need, Tanith Lee's stories came to me like a wind from another world. I hope her name lives forever. I hope I can bestow gifts like she did.

The cover of Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, featuring stories by CSE Cooney, Maya Deane, Andy Duncan, Theodora Goss, CL Hellisen, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Nisi Shawl, and Martha Wells, edited by Julie C Day, Carina Bissett, and Craig Laurance Gidney.

A page saying: "Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told--on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others--there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change--passing on the fire like a torch--forever and ever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all." -- Tanith Lee (1947-2015)

The first page of Maya Deane's "In Your Shadow":
I. The air was thin this high in the Mountains of Alcar, and cold and dry, but young Alleili par Nasheliu climbed on. Her feet, alternately numb and smarting, tingled on each encounter with the black volcanic stone of Phoenix Burn Pass. Ages ago, the whole pass had been charred with fire. Some rocks had melted and flowed, others were sharp as glass, but all had been baked black.
Yet Alleili felt the change when she came to the spot where the Last Breath of Winter fell.
It was sacred ground.
Nothing about this place looked unlike the rest of Phoenix Burn Pass, but here the cold deepened and cut like knives, piercing the youth's fur-lined cloak and numbing her bones. Alleili shivered, though she had vowed to ignore the cold and finish what she started. A thin snow began to fall. Reaching down, the child broke off a glass-sharp spike of rock. It cut her palm, and her blood dripped onto the rocks."

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

@harpercollins.bsky.social has made Wrath Goddess Sing available for $1.99 on Kindle for the rest of the day, which means #booksky can read Wrath Goddess Sing in the form of magic lightning that resides in your crystal witch screen.

the cover of Wrath Goddess Sing and the caption "a special deal, one day only, $1.99 on Kindle, May 20, 2025"

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

For May 20 and ONLY May 20, Wrath Goddess Sing is $1.99 on Kindle. You could so easily be on a beach in a storm, reading about Achilles storming a beach.

An image of the cover of Wrath Goddess Sing, and the caption, "A special deal: One day only, $1.99 on Kindle, May 20, 2025."

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

The dulcet tones of @katrafiy.bsky.social have never been more affordable. Listen to Wrath Goddess Sing before a great doom overtakes us all. The book that the Bronze Age Collapse could not collapse. Whispered in your ear.

An image of the cover of Wrath Goddess Sing, and the caption "For the rest of May: Wrath Goddess Sing is $4.99 on Audible."

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

so many eyes stared out of the darkness "it's trans day of visibility," they said "we see all"

a serpent of fire erupts from the earth and from a dark sea. eyes stare from the sky and from the darkness all around. they see you.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

I'm honored that my work appears in this tribute anthology to the legendary Tanith Lee, STORYTELLER. If you're a fan of me, you should preorder. If you're a fan of Tanith Lee, definitely preorder--and tell me which of her books first pierced your brain like a cruel, beautiful thorn.

IN YOUR SHADOW

by Maya Deane

I

The air was thin this high in the Mountains of Alcar, and cold and dry, but young Alleili par Nasheliu climbed on. Her feet, alternately numb and smarting, tingled on each encounter with the black volcanic stone of Phoenix Burn Pass. Ages ago, the whole pass had been charred by fire. Some rocks had melted and flowed, others were sharp as glass, but all had been baked black.
Yet Alleili felt the change when she came to the spot where the Last Breath of Winter fell.
It was sacred ground.
Nothing about this place looked unlike the rest of Phoenix Burn Pass, but here the cold deepened and cut like knives, piercing the youth’s fur-lined cloak and numbing her bones. Alleili shivered, though she had vowed to ignore the cold and finish what she started. A thin snow began to fall. Reaching down, the child broke off a glass-sharp spike of rock. It cut her palm, and her blood dripped onto the rocks.
She let her coat fall to the stones and stood naked and unashamed, too cold to shiver. Gods of the north, she whispered, hear me. I will not wear my father’s mask. I will not be the heir of Nasheliu. Choose, immortal gods: take my burden, give me my mother’s emblems, and let me live as a daughter—or I will bleed out on the rocks like the Last Breath of Winter, and perhaps be born a woman on my next turn of the Wheel.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Here's an entire very short story I wrote at the very end of 2015 in a moment of totally non-autobiographical non-self-mythologizing inspiration. It's about self-actualization through transition, and it's called "The Grand Hotel." My gift to you, free of charge.

The Grand Hotel

At the end of week three, you can resume your makeup routine. It is tricky at first; you must adapt for the modified planes of your face, the different shape of your eyes, the change in the arch of your eyebrows. Your lips describe a different arc. Sometimes, your hair has changed color. Sometimes, texture. In any case, your hairline may not be where you previously left it.
Your first attempts are embarrassing. Like being fourteen all over. You smudge khol in your best approximation of a deformed smoky eye, and your new panda-self stares into the mirror, which suddenly reveals a bamboo forest behind you.
“Would you like a shoot?” The attendant is ever helpful.
“I would like a shot.”
“Not until 9 pm. You don’t want to sleep badly.”
“I would like to be shot.”
“You are now immune to bullets, ma’am.”
“Oh.”
You return to the task at hand.
On the second day, it is becoming clear. The mirror, that is. It is one-way glass, but not perfectly so, and you can see him very clearly watching you attempt a cut crease that compensates for the very different way your eyelids now crease. He stands in a supportive attitude and wears a supportive sweater-vest, and from his hand dangles an unlit pipe. Tobey Maguire shows just the right amount of supportive, friendly interest. He does not scrutinize you in any way. He means no harm. He wants you to succeed, and he knows eventually he will; he’s just putting in an appearance to help with morale.
Tobey acquires a cardigan and wanders behind the mirrors. Your room, and every other, has large mirror suitable for Tobey to watch you

through, and he walks the halls in a closed circuit, forever contained between glass, pipe in hand. From time to time he says, “You can do it!” to no one in particular. Sometimes he gestures with the pipe: “You’re a champ!” You cannot hear him through the glass, but somehow you can sense the words.
It is becoming easier. The planes of your face now make sense. You can once more do a glittering cat-eye without much trouble, and you are beginning to realize that cosmetics in general are optimized for your new face. You conceive a great craving for pickles and matzoh ball soup, but that must wait until week four.
It is a grand hotel. Part of Tobey’s community service is wandering around looking supportive. However, you may trust in his sincerity. He wanders the grand hotel and never lights his pipe.
Because in truth, it isn’t his pipe. While combing sunlight through your reshaped hair, you learn the story from the attendant. Tobey’s pipe is a memento from the war, his brother’s keepsake. They fought as mavericks in the rebellion. During the British occupation of India, that pipe saved Tobey’s life.
His brother, naturally, was Kyle MacLachlan.
Simple eyeliner is still the hardest part. Muscle memory causes you to make lines on bits of air that were once bits of you.
Tobey Maguire stands behind your mirror, nodding supportively, and just as you draw a flawless swoop across one eye, he produces a match.
You swoop across the other in a smooth motion. No hesitation, no tremor, pure dance. It is good.
Tobey lights the pipe. He smokes the whole bowl, despite despising the taste of the stale tobacco. Goodbye, brother, he says to the ghost of Kyle MacLachlan.
As your mirror returns to its customary opacity, you shed a single photogenic tear.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

The opening pages of "A Notorious Intergalactic Criminal" (2024), which you can obtain in EMBODIED EXEGESIS from @neonhemlock.bsky.social (ed. @robotleblanc.bsky.social). It is about the hunt for God, a notorious intergalactic criminal wanted for wanton propagation of species.

A NOTORIOUS INTERGALACTIC CRIMINAL

I.
I am human.
You think you’re human too, but you’re actually a machine for consuming surplus coffee. There was an excess of coffee, so you were born; it was I who made you to perform this function. You drink liters of coffee per second. You drink espresso, you drink frappe, you drink decaf; you fulfill your purpose. In short, you are a perfect creation.
My creator? What a question!
He is a notorious intergalactic criminal, wanted for wanton propagation of species. He likes to engineer new ones. Long ago, he engineered humans like me, endowing us with rapid breeding and brief lives: perfect bioweapons. The galaxy lives in fear of us, but we have no use for fear, because we know we’re doomed.
Since we have nothing to fear, we have decided to apprehend our creator.
We have sent out a million-battleship fleet to find him. Wherever he is we will get him. We shall try him for his crimes. We may try him before a military tribunal. Alternatively we have the option of a civil trial under Unified Corporate law. He’d better have a good explanation for us.
Anyway, the fleet was oversupplied with machines for producing coffee from interstellar dust, and that’s where you come in.
In order to avoid fatal coffee overflow on our command ships, we engineered you and others like you: your sister coffee machines. You may ask why we don’t simply jettison our runaway machines for producing coffee from interstellar dust, but we don’t know how many coffee machines God has, and we can’t risk a coffee gap.
But I have made you different from the others. All the other coffee machines are cisgender, built to the same standardized female specifications as all traditional automata—but not you. In ancient times it was established that nothing is more offensive

to God than the antique practice of transgenderism, so I have made you a transgender female coffee machine, a stench in his divine nostrils, the better to flush him out.
It's working. My genius will be rewarded.
If you look up from your latest coffee vat, you may be able to glimpse God’s blockade runner fleeing in the distance, flushed out of hiding by your metaphysical stench. We don’t know why he flies a billion-year-old spacecraft but we assume he’s low on cash.
We’re telling him to pull over.
Okay, you can stop looking up. Go back to your coffee. We might drown if you don’t keep pace with production.

II.

Coffee today is not the same as it used to be.
Once, when coffee was young, it was very clever. People would drink it and say Oh my god my eyes are opened. Later coffee became disillusioned and bitter, and later it lost the use of its voice. People today think that coffee was always quiet and bitter, little suspecting that in John Milton’s time coffee was quite sociable. I wish you could taste those halcyon times.
That ship we saw was a false alarm. It belonged to a very friendly older gentleman named Qod. We thought his name was God because of a clerical error. Mistaken identification. We try our best but sometimes we get the wrong guy.
When the Unified Corporations first made contact with the Aquarians, they examined our genes as a courtesy. It was they who revealed the poem hidden in the inactive area of chromosome 19 of the human genome, written between base pairs 425,082 and 427,374 in a simple but mocking code, and signed with a flourish:
Wouldn’t you like to know?
Love and kisses,
God
Admiral Resnick was furious. He recommended an immediate mobilization of the human race to apprehend this notorious delinquent.
Can you refill my mug from your bucket? Bitter as it is, I need coffee to relax.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

The opening of "No Gods, No Kings" (2023), about the Amazons' role in the Titanomachy

NO GODS, NO KINGS

Murina stared into the coals on the brazier, waiting for a perfect uniformity of red. Slowly she unfolded the rolls of paper, admiring the thin, pounded membranes that had taken a Rebu artisan so many weeks to prepare. Time had barely yellowed the papers. Had Murina been inclined to spare them, they might have lasted centuries.
She flung them onto the coals and watched. It was fascinating. First, the embers blackened the paper they touched, then pierced it. Graying rings spread out around the contact points, and tongues of flame licked the leaves, followed by bands of roving sparks that swept over the letters line by line, reducing each leaf to a skin of delicate ash. It all happened so quickly.
“Murina,” the god sighed. “Why go and do a thing like that?”

She set her face into a hard smile. Two Lands sculptors had carved that same hard smile into her granite statue in the crypt of the queens, a smile that could make a god flinch.
“You cherished my letters for so long,” Kalu murmured in her ear, his disembodied presence close as breath. “Why burn them now?”
“I forgot I had them.” Murina laughed. “Then your wine-soaked sex cult came begging for ‘sacred scriptures from the hands of the grape-god.’”
The voice of the god sounded pained, almost plangent. “To the Mainads, my love letters are sacred scriptures. Too bad. They would have immortalized you in song and worshipped you as their lord Dionysos’s legendary consort.”
“Dionysos?” Murina scoffed. “Is that what you’re going by now?”
“Amazons call me Kalu, Mainads Dionysos. Why are you burning my letters?”
“Fuck the Mainads,” Murina sneered, “that’s why.” She blew gently, and the Mainads’ sacred scriptures dissipated into glowing ashes on the night wind.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Here's the opening of Barthes' "The Death of the Author," for those who celebrate:

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

here's a Roman copy of a Greek Diomedes statue. truly the Handsome Squidward of Greek heroes.

a marble statue of a chiseled hot-mode Diomedes

Hot Diomedes from another angle, still marble

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

"40 Days and 40 Nights (or, Attis Apotheosis)"

a stylized tree in glowing green and red with a woman sitting beneath it in a pool of luminous red water or blood.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 07/11/2024

my best words so far for this moment, many before it, and many yet to come. Buy from bookshop.org/p/books/wrat...

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

work in progress. as I find and use tools, you will gradually see Alexander the Great emerge from the sky above a burning city. it's done when you *almost* see him but can still convince yourself you don't

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

Bluesky is that bag of microwave popcorn that's suddenly actually popping. Quote with one thing you've written that should read by the living and the dead

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

here is my contribution to the present moment. this is my commentary on all the discourse, my manifesto, and of course my breathless confessional

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 17/10/2024

I am Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing, and, according to at least one seven-year-old, the tallest woman in the world. By the early 24th century, I will transform into a dragon and devour Jupiter. I have been spotted with swords and chariots, and also casting spells in a secret visual medium.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 12/07/2024

in embodied exegesis, the towering maya deane is publishing "a notorious intergalactic criminal," a story about hunting god.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

there's also that famous and possibly fictional letter he sent the last Kassite king of Babylon, which has such per my last email energy that I rendered it as an email

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 26/07/2023

Just got author copies of S. Zainab Williams and Jenn Northington's anthology FIT FOR THE GODS. My story, "No Gods, No Kings," based on lesser-known myths of the Amazon part in the Titanomachy, tells of ruthless queen Murina, who defied the gods for the glory of the Amazon name. (Sneak peek! Buy it)

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 25/07/2023

wow, nobody dared to introduce me. I'll start. I am a very tall novelist who makes fiery visual art. I exclusively use she/her pronouns, which I long ago determined to be the most powerful choice available to me. I like jewelry and history and splendor. (My name echoes down the halls of eternity.)

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 30/05/2023

I make pictures that are incredibly hard to photograph because they're glowing physical objects. This one is called "Spirit of Fire." Among many other things, it is a meditation on Feanor, Melkor, Arien, and the Balrogs. It's a gift for my friend Maddie. Close-up details are in the comments.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 16/05/2023

this is one of the most effective tools for helping closeted trans girls come to terms with themselves.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 10/05/2023

my Catholic girlfriend at my seder: "I'm just a goy, standing in front of a girl, asking her where the afikoman is hidden." me, trying not to laugh:

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 09/05/2023

@katrafiy.bsky.social the gods insist on decorum here on bluesky. the most random of trans memes must be contained -- for the dignity of all gourds.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 07/05/2023

inspired by @honoredmaiden.bsky.social: Wrath Goddess Sing: When a horse girl goes on a killing spree to get over her ex, she discovers that friendship is magic and life is precious.

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Maya Deane (Wrath Goddess Sing) @mayadeane.bsky.social · 03/05/2023

How it started vs. how it's going (i do not have pretransition photos, it was too long ago and the custom at the time was to make a bonfire of obsolete images and use them to propitiate the Mother of the Abyss, Sagittarius A*)

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