Before Ahura clashed his hands against Azerath, he could reasonably dismiss what the demon preached as nothing more than wanton farce. Ahura condemned its King as a mere pretender to the throne of a long list of tyrants; his friends shared his conviction.
When Ahura found himself buckling under Azerath’s demonic celerity, and so too his friends, he came to realize that there was indeed substance behind the being of the demon’s worship. Indeed a being, the monster of monsters, who lent Azerath such palpable power bordering on the alien.
And in this moment, with the Eye of the King gazing upon their heads, Ahura could no longer dismiss Azerath’s worship as fantasy. Or even to think that this King was a mere monster of monsters, for that matter: because for the first time in his life, he felt what his ancestor Maitreya did in the presence of the ancient invader Mahazduhum – the world-serpent that shattered the domain of his Emperor in a fortnight, released by the desperate Aesynir in their last defense against Yanasura himself.
And this feeling that now gripped Ahura’s heart was the incalculable dread of a mortal being in the presence of an absolute divine. A being of existence that could lay claim to all mortal domain, an entity radiating power that even the bravest could not dare to graze the image of the being in their peripheral sight.
Ahura and Mithra, and to some extent Kaniya, recognized the FOUNDERS of the Mahamastra and their divine statuses attested in the myth of humanity. Although the FOUNDERS did not gift a Maht to Kaniya – who shared her blood with the Aeteriite Tyrians – they did for Ahura and Mithra, over air and fire, respectively. The FOUNDERS, they learnt from the memories of their ancestors and their mother, uplifted humankind by creating the arts over those four fundamental domains of fire, water, earth, and air. They marveled at the legends of the FOUNDERS performing their feats bordering on the planetary and astronomical. From Manasura carving the canyons across the continents, Tera and Sera adjoining the very continents themselves, Artaia impressing the power of speech into reality, and Sunna rising to ignite the dying Sun, each of them added to elevate the status of humankind to dominate and become masters of nature. All of humankind were children of divinities, and to feel that all the powers the people from ten thousand years yonder to now derived from the Five FOUNDERS gave the two brothers an unassailable faith in their power, and also as a result, a fearful reverence of such a level of power.
And now, they were facing such a class of power.
They saw the Eye of the King in the tenebris sky, not through their actual visions, but in their minds. They hoped to be wrong. That when they turned, they would not see the eye but the rubble of the city which they left behind. How they would welcome even a sight so bleak right now! But they could not dare turn.
Ahura and Mithra and Kaniya were frozen in their stances of battle, locked in that final position where they dealt the finishing strike to Azerath. But Azerath called the King; and its heart was still beating. In their peripheries they saw Kiriel, Cantor, Chatterbox.
Beads of sweat condensed around each of their battered and bruised figures.
Chatterbox was struggling to hold his lithic form together, for the entirety of his mind was being assaulted by signals bordering on the strength of rays that originated from star-deaths. He struggled to send a word of warning, a message, or rallying cry to his dear companions. But he found those messages, sailing like boats, splintering against an inundating torrent of force that the Eye cleaved in between their heads. Chatterbox, ever since he had found independence from his fellow beings deep under the earth, had wanted to learn and know what it was to have a ‘soul’ – to be a being of organic flesh, to feel. Through years of logical introspection, he had developed a way to extend and adapt the mind-to-mind communication of his peoples to his friends, so he could commiserate with them, and learn from how they thought, and figure out this perplexing mystery that was organic emotion, a prerequisite for a soul or so he believed. And he was very good – ‘pleased’ as an organic would express it – with his improving ability to bring people together. It made himself feel whole in a way entirely separate from being chained to a greater Mind under the earth.
Over the years, Chatterbox had grown this ability from a mere trickle to a sizable stream, where words and thoughts could freely flow from his friends to him, and from him to his friends. But now, assaulted by this alien presence even beyond the comprehension of his mind, Chatterbox realized that this stream that he found satisfaction with was nothing compared to the ocean of water that this being overhead could conjure and shunt into their minds. With its ability, Chatterbox computed with effort, the divine figure above could conceivably communicate with billions of beings on a planetary scale.
Pinpricks of Cantor’s emotions made through the torrent and into his mind, drawing his attention. Chatterbox could not turn even an inch to assure his salamander friend.
Cantor was gripping his staff so tight that his knuckles were white. The blood-red scales that he had sported in rage were gone: only his plain beige and flaccid green of his back remained, a coloring which invited many of his own people, the Atarsk, to shun him long ago. That, and his lack of scales, had made him defenseless in combat, made him useless also in the art of the claw and the tradition of arcanism which they practiced, deriving their power from faith in their vanished divinity of yore. Unwelcomed by his own people and fated to live a life of misery, Cantor abandoned them and searched for his own path forward. He rejected the divinity of the Aesynir, rather searching and developing methods of power which he himself could wield, that only he was privy to. And he did develop that power, making his magic compatible with even the Mahamastra of humankind, the former enemies of his kin. Creating spells only dreamed of by the myopic arcanists of his own people, Cantor reveled that he could achieve what others could not, and with continued cultivation of his faculties, could eventually reach for the throne of divinity himself. Not to rule, for he had no desire to rule, but to witness for himself where his thirst for knowledge could carry him, to feel the ice-cold ecstasy of achievement and conquest over what others could only gaze. For Cantor, every Atarsk that ever shunned him, even the greatest among them, were mere nines and tens in a number scale that stretched to the thousands. He considered himself hundreds of thousands.
But in the face of this King of All Ends, Cantor was struck with the fear that he would never be able to attain such a divinity: for here, he realized that the number scale did not halt at his own making, but instead stretched to infinity. And at the ends of infinity, was this being to which the Eye belonged.
He began to tremble, his tongue paralyzed with fear.
Yes. No matter how great of a number he was, he was precisely as far away from infinity as the number called one.
He flicked his eye to Kiriel next to him, her face contorted in an expression of pain. She felt phantom lashes land upon her bare back, sundering her fair skin from memory of centuries ago.
She had felt the power of a divine being before, better than any of her friends: their cruelty, their malice, their will to dominate anything that would not bend to their whips. She had felt it when she was with her peoples, the Nineveth, who the humans called Vakarian. The Divinity that ruled over all the Nineveth was her King, Amunzaramat; the first among the Aesynir and their most powerful. Amunzaramat was violent in every sense of the word, but with violence comes power, and power had afforded her peoples hegemony over much of the world. Kiriel herself was a priestess of blood in Amunzaramat’s noble ranks, a rareborn who could control blood for the art of healing and war. But she was foremost a healer, not a murderer. In her early years, she made very few mistakes, unlike the others who in their minor transgressions, had their throats cut in the blink of an eye at the hands of her King, and if lucky, would have their wings stripped forever, depriving them of their arts.
But in a punishment campaign against a small human state – for failing to pay tribute to the Nineveth – where Amunzaramat slaughtered nearly all humans above the height of a shortsword and made every child below a slave, Kiriel took pity on a dying human child, and healed her secretly with her art of blood.
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But her secret had been seen. For when the news of Kiriel’s pity reached the ears of Amunzaramat, the unforgivable treason of his most trusted priestess, Amunzaramat laid upon Kiriel an eternal punishment: the gift of endless regeneration. Kiriel could not fathom how this alone could be punishment until the King stripped her of her wings and sentenced her to an eternity of lashes, delivered once every minute stretching into years, decades, and centuries, chained to the Aposcalite Temple atop the capital. The whips conjured by her cruel divine King were arcane, everlasting, and merciless, administered not by the irregularity of biological hands but by the clockwork of magic: Each lash of each minute would sunder her skin, tear it open like a carving knife, and blood would flow forth, making her hoarse with screams and her eyes flood with tears. But her skin would close and stitch, and her nerves regrow, to ensure by design that she would feel every next lash and its mordant pain as if it was the very first until the sands of time ran out. She implored out to passerby, to her former friends, to anyone that would listen – to beseech the King that a moment of pity for another life needing help – even human – is not a crime, to be freed from her torment. But they were afraid of invoking the wrath of their divinity, Amunzaramat. No heel came to save her. The only way out was for Amunzaramat to die, for her torment came from him.
Day after day, she watched the world turn and change a little by little, and heard hushed voices in the palatial steps between her punctuated cries. And one day, war descended upon their Empire. Their warriors took up arms – not only the fresh gentry that had learned to use their wings and to fire their arcane bolts, but the elite of the elite who once accompanied Amunzaramat and Kiriel in campaigns of bygone centuries against the other Aesynir. And Kiriel watched as the days of war turned to weeks, months, and years, and amidst her tears enduring the pain of each lash saw the faces of warriors heading to the front becoming younger and younger. Until at last, on a fateful day when the sky was dyed crimson with the weeping Sun, a radiant blue comet streaked across the skies and tore through Amunzaramat’s stratospheric abode. The battle around that abode turned the firmament into blood; drowned Nineveth fell from high heaven, burning with fires from broken wings. From the distance of a hundred miles, Kiriel witnessed Amunzaramat battling against a human that declared his name as Yanasura for the heaven and earth to hear, their blows sundering space with sparks of divinity.
To her horror, it was Amunzaramat’s divinity that Kiriel felt most acutely, because it was the one that chained her; but also to her hope, she felt a greater divine power surge and roil from Yanasura, a divine power not from his body but from the arts that he wielded. Later, she would learn that this Yanasura – Emperor Yanasura – performed the Dance of the Sun and the Rhythm of the Moon, the pinnacle arts created by ancient humans called the FOUNDERS, who ascended to become divine beings in their own right.
Kiriel could still remember when the lashes stopped, and her broken skin melded no longer.
She was free. Yanasura and his Knights had slain Amunzaramat.
And with the loss of divinity, she remembered that her people fell to chaos. She herself had felt her head grow weary and dim, and felt the roiling sparks of immortality given to all Nineveth sap from her heart. She watched as the advancing army of humanity inundated their lands like relentless tides, using the Elemental powers to exterminate her people just as they’d tried doing to humankind when they arrived thousands of years ago. She herself was captured and taken by Emperor Yanasura’s soldiers as a subject of study until the world-serpent Mahazduhum was unleashed to the mortal world, and annihilated the capital of Yanasura.
Kiriel found her way out, and when she did, she ran to the ends of the earth, wanting nothing to do with the humans nor her people nor the rest of the Aeterii.
It had taken her three hundred years to escape from the phantom pain of the lashes she received, and a hundred more to muffle the sounds of her own screams awaking in nightmares at the vision of her tyrant King. She found a way to suspend herself in amberwood sap so that she could, in a far far future, awake in a world where divinities did not exist and the world would be free from pain. And when she was awoken on that fateful day seventeen years ago by Ahura, Mithra, Cantor, and Kaniya, she found her dream to be true. She promised herself to carry them in their campaigns so that no tyrant would ever rise again, the resolve in her heart reigniting her power over blood that had been stripped with her wings long ago. She had convinced herself that no obstacle and no force could hold her back from her quest to realize a world without cruel divinities.
But now, she felt that resolve waver like a lone candle, her power growing thin. Kiriel was feeling the lashes again, as fresh as the sting of the first stroke, the trauma of nearly a millennium ago resurfacing as if it was mere yesterday. But the force exuded by this eye in the heavens surpassed the blistering aura of Amunzaramat, and even the pinnacles of might from Yanasura that had once shaken the axis of the world.
There was a far worse divinity that she hadn’t known about, and the world was its playground. She had to warn Ahura, Mithra, and everyone else: that assailing against such a divinity would result not only in death, but an eternity of pain.
But her throat could not issue a syllable.
She flinched as the giant Eye delivered its next words.
“YOU HAVE SHOWN YOUR CONVICTION. RISE AGAIN, MY ORDO OF TRUTH.”
Kiriel found herself and her friends being stripped away from their positions and forced into the endless dark sky, invisible nails piercing their limbs to the firmament. They watched, unable to move, suspended in a circle above the skeletal remains of Azerath.
Each felt a blinding flash of light in their minds as Azerath’s skeleton began to clacker and regrow. Pristine white bone emerged once again from their broken-off stumps, restoring themselves whole. There came next the vine-like wrappage of muscle fibers, pink and red coiling around the bones to complete its flesh, larger, more defined, and more sickeningly beautiful compared to before.
Another flash of light skewered their minds as Azerath’s skin began to materialize – no, not its old skin of tarnished and matted umber fur, but a lustrous and silky pelt of black that seemed to shine even in the absence of light. It wrapped around its midsection, tight against the abdomen that it showed the individual definitions of its muscles; down its legs; and on its head, reformed into the shape of a titan jackal, its ears pointing upright and eyes of radiant red skewering the night. Its limbs were no longer unnaturally long, but forced to a proportion without flaw. Threads of gold materialized around its neck, and wrapped themselves into a broad half-collar from its bottom neck to its upper chest; gleaming bracelets and boots shaped from the threads fixed into place as Azerath issued its first breath reborn and flexed its newfound form, every part of its body superior to its original. It now stood 100 feet in height.
Azerath knelt with one knee and bowed deeply, the darkness seeming to thud with his kneel.
“MY KING…”
As Azerath whispered its solemn gratitude, a broad-tipped greatsword five yards across and twenty yards long materialized into its open palms. Its surface was inky black, deeper than obsidian, swirling with specks of faraway stars. Its lucent end, slanted into a line rather than a tip, appeared so sharp that it hurt for Ahura and the others to gaze at it.
“I GIFT YOU THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS. CARRY MY WILL TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH WITHOUT FAIL.”
“IT SHALL BE DONE, YOUR HIGHNESS.”
“NOW…”
The Eye swiveled towards Kiriel, Ahura, and the others.
“AZERATH, WHAT SAY YOU OF THESE WARRIORS, HAVING BESTED YOUR PROWESS?”
Azerath lowered its head.
“I HAVE BEEN HUMBLED, YOUR HIGHNESS. THEY ARE NO ORDINARY WARRIORS. THEIR RESOLVE KNOWS NO BOUNDS. THEIR ARTS STING GREATER THAN THE PRETENDER KINGS.”
“AS THE ORDO OF TRUTH SHOULD PRONOUNCE. IT IS DECIDED. THEY SHALL JOIN OUR VISION.”
“AS YOU WISH, MY KING.”
Ahura’s mind and that of the others were forcibly opened against their will. It was as if a force punched them square in the head and chest and belly. They coughed blood.
“SCION OF MAITREYA, I KNOW THY NAME.”
Ahura did not speak.
“YOU HAVE PROVEN YOUR CHARACTER AGAINST MY ORDO OF TRUTH. NOW, I GIVE YOU THE CHANCE AT YOUR SALVATION AND THAT OF YOUR ALLIES.”
Ahura had to do all in his power not to pass out from the force of the Eye’s delivery, feeling his own eyes in indescribable pain, like being skewered by a thousand spikes.
“KNEEL TO ME, THE KING OF KINGS. AND BECOME MY ORDOS, HERALDS TO THE NEW WORLD.”
“If…” Ahura forced his tongue to speak against the divine demand, “If we shall not?”
Kiriel shut her eyes in terror as the Eye delivered its reply.
“REGRET.”