One of the few good things in Mark's life had always been sleep. He’d never had a nightmare in his life, even during the most stressful times of his life he would at most wake up feeling like he forgot something horrible, but never quite able to grasp it.
Feeling grass across his back, and the feeling of wind blowing across his body almost caused him to think he’d somehow woken up outside, but even before opening his eyes the distinct lack of sound dissuaded him from the idea. No matter where you were in the city you’d always be able to hear some form of traffic, engines, or even people going about their day, regardless of the time.
Opening his eyes only proved this, when he was faced with a clear sky and the tops of trees above him.
Am I dreaming?
Raising his body slowly, while looking around proved fruitless as he’d seemingly been transported into a garden of some form. Oak trees on all sides, with beds of roses scattered around almost seemingly at random, if they didn’t all match a certain rainbow rhythm to the place. The trees to the plants seem to shift color without rhyme or reason, with a clear path forward from where his body rested.
Am I naked?
Looking down at his obviously uncovered body would normally horrify him, with him being out in public completely naked, but for some reason he couldn’t feel any emotions besides need.
A need to follow the path ahead.
Rising to his feet he slowly began traveling the dirt path ahead of him, almost perfectly cut. Everything, in fact, seemed perfect. Even with the trees around him packed so closely that he couldn’t see further than a few dozen feet past the tree line, there weren’t any leaves on the ground.
Seeing no reason to resist the urge, he walked forward.
Step after step down the path only proved how beautiful the garden was, the flowers further down the path becoming more and more intricate in their designs. Where there were once simply roses became entire fields of lavender, with odd shaped sunflowers lining the fields around them. The flowers seemed almost alive as they swayed, even against the breeze that should have been moving them in the first place.
The sky above the garden was almost entirely clear, no clouds, or a sun for that matter in the sky at all.
The odd movements of the flowers and missing sun had no chance of ever making it into Mark’s notice however, as he’d laid eyes upon something - someone, far more beautiful.
To say she had been the most beautiful person he’d ever seen would be a lie, because comparing her to any other human would almost be a sin. An angel, sent from God himself, sat in a small clearing in front of him.
She was smaller than any angel had the right to be, standing around five feet tall. Sitting in the grass looking towards the gardens ahead her black hair almost completely blended in with her dress, like someone had dyed a sundress so completely you’d mistake it for mourning wear.
He’d completely forgotten his compulsion to follow the path, looking forward in amazement at the being before him. He’d almost regained his sense when she turned towards him, and he was lost all over again.
Her eyes are like gateways to the universe.
Inside her eyes were no pupils, but voids, glittering with small lights that moved and shifted nearly constantly. Differing colors and varying degrees of radiance to each of them.
If she hadn’t been actively restraining herself to a more base form there would have been almost no chance for his survival from gazing into her true form so ignorantly.
If Mark was capable of good sense at this time, or was free of the natural compulsion that Virasuta exhibited as an Immortal, he would have run right then. He would have turned away screaming for anyone, Beater, nearby Altered’s, even god to save him from what he saw inside her eyes.
Instead he walked towards the Immortal, until he was directly in front of her. Kneeling down on both knees before her he couldn’t resist what even in his muddled state he knew was a mistake.
He reached out and cupped the side of her face in the palm of his hand.
Even the Angel seemed shocked at his action, before a small smile spread across her face.
“You’ve Arrived, My Champion.”
-
Mind Delving was always a unique experience, for both mortals and immortals. While the danger was there for most beings, for her it had always been somewhat relaxing. You could learn almost everything about a person during a delve, from their current emotional state to their truest urgest and wants. It usually required rejection of some form for the delving to stall, or for the delver to begin to have problems with reading whatever was inside.
For most magical beings most of them had at least a beginner understanding of mind magic, and as such had developed basic protections. As a man from a world of savages, her Champion had never even thought to acquire any forms of protection, whether in the form of techniques or tools.
For her Champion, his mind seemed almost entirely peaceful, if only temporarily. Time would tell whether or not this tranquility would last another day, let alone a year.
She gazed out onto the field as she felt her Champion begin to enter the deepest parts of his rest. The effect it had on the world was immediate as more of the decorations she had laid out became more alive. The wind started lightly blowing, the flowers began their dancing, and the sky cleared to show a near perfect day.
As close to perfection as he can withstand.
Unlike what many of her ‘Colleagues’ would think about the way she had planned their meeting, she was not planning on openly dominating him like most would assume. While most had taken her more… violent tendencies to mean she was rash and unintelligent this was far from the truth. The simple fact is that no one, Angel or Forgotten could have gotten to the stage she was without at least the bare minimum of intelligence and cunning.
And she meant every word previously, you truly can not force someone to believe in you. You could force them to fight, yes. but to pray to you with enough belief that you gained power from it, and gained the ability to grant them power in return was something that had to be earned.
By both sides.
Worship was a road then went both ways, you could not gain worship from someone who didn’t believe in you, while you also couldn’t empower someone who didn’t have faith in you. The only true way to create a champion is by using fractions of your divinity on a true believer.
This is something Immortals like the Lords never had problems with, being creatures of light. It was easy to convince savages that you were their Gods made flesh when you shined like a star, but when your true form was horrifying beyond equal it required practically every trick in the book to gain believers.
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What a Lord could do in a day it took a Forgotten a millennia.
She played with a small flower in her hand as she reminisced on her first world. It had been a gift from her father, the first world he demanded she conquer on her own. But not only did she need to conquer it, she needed the savages to worship her completely on it.
Many people may get ‘True Believers’, ‘’Believers’, or ‘Faithful’ confused with each other, not knowing the real difference. However the differences between the three are greater than simply their titles, the difference is within the Faith generated by each.
Someone who is Faithful might have been raised as a believer without ever truly devoting themselves, or simply fallen out of practice with their religion. They may attend sermons or festivals but they may rarely pray. Whether or not they even truly believe is another matter when it comes to Faithful as they generate such little Faith that the difference between them and a nonbeliever is almost negligible.
A Believer is someone who not only believes in their God, but prays frequently, they act as their religion demands and rarely break tenets or vows related to it. A Believer is relatively common for established religions in the universe, with them rarely betraying their divine hosts. They are also the bare minimum standard for what a Champion can be selected from, or the stock required for the creation of minor Ascendants.
True Believers were another stage entirely, True Believers generated several times more faith than their fellow sect or church members, almost to the point where a single True Believer being created can almost raise the status of a church several times over. During the long history of the universe True Believers had taken many forms such as Saints, Prophets, and Avatars.
The appearance of a Saint or Prophet was almost always a great boon for the churches they belonged to, Saints regularly created miracles while Prophets were well known for being able to lead their flocks to prosperity. Avatars were the rarest of the trio however, with the capability of using portions of their lord’s power personally in whatever form their lord specialized in.
With the dozens of worlds under her banner she still only had a handful of Avatars under her command, and each one was a treasure.
As she had begun building her churches she had quickly learned how difficult gathering faith was.
She had used every method she could think of, invading dreams and demanding servitude, personally attacking their lands and forcing people to serve her, making deals with kings and other monarchs for preaching rights. But over the course of decades she hadn’t managed to gain a single true believer.
Sure, she had plenty of believers and faithful, and plenty more who just pretended to serve, but no one who truly believed! It was infuriating for her younger self.
Until her thirtieth anniversary of descending on the world, when a small child entered her temple.
From what she learned from the child later, she had grown up in poverty most of her life. Traveling from one part of the city to the next begging for food since before she could remember, except one day while begging outside of a market district, one of the priests had given her some food after he’d caught her stealing bread from a stall.
After catching her in the act he bought her the bread, and brought her to the church for one of his morning sermons.
Years of effort, training soldiers, preaching her ideals, starting and ending crusades, and the first True Believer she ever received was a child that believed in her because she was given three days old bread.
She would have been mortified if she wasn’t so ecstatic over finally accomplishing her goal. After that she made small changes to her churches, once where she preached strength and the capability to conquer all enemies she promised to take care of the families of soldiers as well. She had figured at the time that if such a small kindness could cause someone so young to believe in her so completely, then something greater would convince her soldiers to believe in her as well.
It took years for her to research the best ways to gather followers, and even longer to safely garner True Believers. Promising people gold was no better than just hiring mercenaries, since only the greedy or ambitious would follow her for something so worthless. While working with the sick and poor would create plenty of believers, it really only created the worst kind. The ones reliant on her simply for survival. Over the years she had nearly mastered how to garner believers on new worlds using her teachings, how to change them almost instantly just enough in language or tone that they emphasized different parts based on the world's present ethics or society.
More warlike societies would latch onto her figure as a Goddess of War, taking blessings to dominate their enemies and conquer new lands. These societies were the simplest because they believed in her while also actively spreading her religion as far as they could in return for her gifts. All it took was a single Saint or Prophet being born in one of these worlds and she could practically leave the entire world on its own until their inevitable death. They’d practically take care of themselves at that point.
She’d only ever returned to those worlds during mass ceremonies that required her presence or during Forgotten invasions that required her defense.
More peaceful societies were more difficult, so she fashioned a more pacifistic version of her original tenets, focusing more on defending themselves and preventing enemies from gaining the upper hand against them. All these worlds really took was convincing them that certain outer elements such as other Forgotten or the Lords desired their enslavement. While not entirely true it also wasn’t entirely false, since many on both sides would gladly enslave a world for their resources, even before converting the people there to followers.
And like that she kept spreading her name to new worlds, each world with just a slightly different religion to make capturing their hearts and minds as easy as possible. The largest issue with her plan was making sure each differing sect or planet didn’t have anything in their texts that contradicted another. This had been mostly avoided by making sure that each world's texts and faiths came from her main Church, in her home world. While the texts that she spread to individual worlds were changed just enough to be more suitable to the world in general, without being changed enough to have her accused of manipulating things for her own benefit.
The simplest example would be the difference between a pacifistic world and a militaristic one, for the pacifists she could focus on self defense, and the protection of their children. While the militaristic one could have texts that focus on removing enemies early on before they become too large of a threat, while also taking resources to improve their own lives.
The easiest explanation for these differences if confronted by two leaders of differing worlds is that she was merely teaching them to play by their strengths, which she honestly was in many cases.
It was rather sloppy, in her Fathers words, but it hadn’t failed her yet. The few times people had taken issues with it she had managed to calm them and their followers rather easily and hadn’t suffered any Faith fractures even after all these millennia.
This world, and this Champion would hopefully be no different, at least she hoped.
As she sat in the garden, sensing her Champion awakening for his final test she waited back turned for him to travel to her. She had planned most of their meeting out, from start to finish.
He would wake up, confused but muddled by the magic and her presence, then he would follow the compulsion placed on the path and follow it. Once he followed it and became more enamored with the land he would eventually find her.
After that, she’d have the final confirmation on what kind of man he was.
Many people underestimate how truthful they are in their dreams. Some people just need to be prompted and they’d act out their deepest, darkest, most disgusting desires because after all, it’s a dream. There are no repercussions.
If he appeared before her, and acted egregiously then she would have to revert to her… backup plans, of simply taking the world.
I have wasted far too much time, and I have had too many disappointments as of late. At that point it would be Gerards fault for siring a beast of a son.
She sat there waiting patiently as the man made the slow trek to her location, and as time passed she regretted how much effort she placed into the presentation.
I should have made the path shorter.
She had almost gotten irritable when he finally made it to her, and she almost felt the emotions of awe wafting off of his body. Virasuta had to suppress a smirk as her pride was stoked.
He is just a mortal, this isn’t something to be proud of. She reminded herself.
The first of the many tests that she had planned for him had been passed, as he hadn’t immediately desired to force himself on someone he found beautiful, even in a dream. Nor had he immediately expressed a desire to harm her for one reason or the other.
I still regret the form I took when I tested that disgusting creature with the glasses, I’ll never wash those emotions from my psyche.
The thought of the ‘Great and Intelligent Master Burro’ still filled her with disgust, and she promised herself that she would have her Champion slaughter the man at the first available moment. She cleared her mind of the anger and disgust before returning to the present, where the man began to slowly walk towards her.
She turned around to face him, every movement and facial expression practiced so many times over the years they had practically become second nature.
As she locked eyes with him his body seized up, and she realized she had made a mistake. I forgot to cloud my eyes. In her disgust she had actually forgotten to shelter the poor man from viewing into her shell.
Luckily for her, or for him, he seemed almost unbothered by it. The small amounts of terror drifting off under the weight of the compulsion dissipated before he kneeled in front of her.
Has he already decided to serve me? If only they were all so simple.
Before the mortal did something she really didn’t expect, he reached out with his right hand, and held her face almost lovingly.
As an immortal, her perspective of time was vastly different, or it was more fair to say her reaction speed was vastly different. She had been waiting for something, maybe an attempt at seduction - that was fairly common under the compulsion, possibly even a more lustful response to her form, this was almost always the case for mortals. It was almost disappointing how common it was to resort to lust over everything else.
She wasn’t expecting the pure Love that radiated from his form though.
The genuine affection that seemed to be transferred from his soul to her own.
This isn’t the compulsion, did I leave too much of my divinity inside my shell? Have I broken him?
In less than a second she had discounted a thousand other reasons, until she was left with an embarrassing obvious one.
He’s infatuated with me because of the compulsion and my shell's Immortal Beauty.
Immortals had very many benefits compared to mortals. Stronger bodies, almost endless lifespans, more powerful magic, almost improved in every way.
This included appearances. Even shells or clones, fakes or disguises will always appear more beautiful or appealing due to the Immortal aura around them. Disguises only really lost that effect if the Immortal themselves were talented in the art, and even then it was difficult.
I need to break the connection and try again, but I can still do what I originally came here for.
As she realized the answer to her problems had become increasingly simple and obvious, she smiled at him. She swore she could see his brain melt in front of her.
“You’ve Arrived, My Champion”