Thalgrim, Goddess of Fate, Weaver of Lives, and overall terror of divinities, was injured. It was the worst kind of injury, a conceptual one, one that burned your insides not unlike having swallowed a red-hot iron. There was no true sense of agony in the way mortals would comprehend; it was a pain born out of the unraveling of the constituent components of your existence. The injury had initially formed solely out of the catastrophe that had been Thalgrim’s spell. The backlash of the collapse of her ritual had torn at her like a thresher, but it had been mostly an injury of weakness. It was a heavy price, but not a crippling one, after all, out of all the divinities, the Weaver was the one whose threat did not express itself through brute force.
She had thought the solution simple enough: the entity that called itself “Liam” was, somehow, tied to the origins of all fates. To her, he presented a bounty of succulent power that could give her a hundred times over that which she had lost; it would let her put her project back on track in quick order. Thalgrim should have been more wary, should have paid closer attention to how the fates of the assassin and the Yulvenir patriarch had rapidly unraveled from a single meaningful encounter. At the time she hadn't the luxury, she'd been too cut off from her own senses by the initial blow.
Instead, she thought him a simple mortal. The human (if that was what he truly was) would be simple enough to dazzle and bring into her sanctum. Mortals weren’t exactly the brightest bunch; it wasn’t hard to convince them to do things that would go against their own interests.
That was her first mistake.
And what did she get for her hubris?
The high priestess, a mortal possessing a decent enough number of blessings from the Goddess, was torn from the weave. It had been swift and brutal, one conversation, one simple exchange of words and thoughts, and the tiny hole that had formed within Al-Zahra became a gaping abyss covering the entire city. The fact that Liam had used Thalgrim’s own high priestess as the medium for the destruction had been a masterful stroke. By subverting the fate of one so deeply tied to the Goddess, the city itself had become an unwelcoming space to the Weaver. It wasn't like a barrier, the sanctum erected within the city remained, but peering out of that enclosed space was impossible without taking physical form. It would need her to send either an aspect or an avatar, neither of which was a viable option in her current state (the city was, after all, a place where other deities had sanctums, they would notice her approach).
From a distance, Thalgrim could sense that the fates of those within the city had not been erased, but the careful weave had been unmade. The mortal's fates were without a pattern, loose strands haphazardly wriggling and entangling with each other as they sought to regain stability. A stability that would not come, for there were at least a dozen of their fellows with no fate whatsoever, making their very presence a continuous disruptive force.
Al-Zahra had effectively become a blind spot in the vast network the Weaver had spent countless millennia putting into place. She'd also lost several stitching points linking her weave to her fellow divinities (particularly the Merchant, who'd made Al-Zahra his home base). It had taken considerable effort to keep the tearing fabric from spreading further and creating an ever-growing maw of chaos. The only answer was quarantine until she properly understood the nature of this attack. Thalgrim diverted the fates of tens of thousands of others away from Al-Zahra, every major thread being made to connect elsewhere. The fellow divinities had yet to realize this, but it would become apparent within the next few decades if the quarantine wasn’t lifted.
She had reached out with a poisoned apple, and her adversary had torn her hand off.
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Not once in her vast existence had she been so thoroughly outmaneuvered from a such a tiny mistake. This was no mere mortal but an extremely competent master strategist, he'd twisted the situation so her powers would turn against her.
Thalgrim changed approach. Finding him had been simple enough; the human had placed himself near a mortal whose fate was building momentum. The disruptive presence was like an instrument slowly going out of tune within the orchestra Thalgrim had crafted. It would have been harder not to notice the dissonant tune that made her web of fates violently shake and threaten to collapse.
Yet once she spotted him, she... hesitated.
Everything pointed to a weak divinity having set the “human” up. Their traces were faint enough to make tracking the one responsible impossible, but not so faint that Thalgrim couldn't notice if she looked. And the entity himself was bedridden, unable to meaningfully interact with any other mortals.
It was perfect.
Too perfect.
Thalgrim smelled a trap.
So she set up an experiment. Killing him would obviously be the wrong move; it would entangle his strange unpredictable fate with Thalgrim’s, thus doing exactly what he wanted her to. No, what she needed was to isolate him while she worked to understand the nature of his powers. The tiny conversation they had was a sign of respect. If anything, he'd earned her full attention, something very few had managed over her very long life. She recognized his skill, but when it came to manipulating fate, none could stand up to her.
It would be his turn to lose a tool or three.
With his self-imposed mortality limiting his reach (a strange move, one Thalgrim had yet to unravel), she could get to work creating a little experiment.
The monster responsible for the destruction of the city of Nuremo had, in doing so, entwined its fate with that of tens of thousands of lives. It had built incredible momentum, a thread of fate so thick it would influence the entire region. It was the kind of pressure that would draw in champions-to-be, each one unwittingly placing themselves into a position to attempt slaying the monster, for in doing so their own fate would gain that momentum.
Seeing how a mortal could become fateless, then Thalgrim posited there had to be a way for them to regain it and be reintegrated into the weave. What would happen if a mortal without fate was killed by another? Or failing that, what would happen if a fateless mortal became the focus of such a momentous thing? Whether the “Hero of Cracked Bay” was Noor Dalimor or Hosan Ralo was meaningless to her.
Thalgrim could only laugh; no matter the outcome, she would be one step closer to unveiling the trick “Liam” had used against her and he would lose a pawn.
There was a flicker of excitement within her at the thought of being challenged by what was clearly an unparalleled genius.
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Liam looked down at what looked like two identical brown mushrooms, then his gaze moved towards the little ball of black fluff that sat opposite from him, quietly judging with amber eyes that lacked the fiery touch of divine power. All around them the jungle was quiet, a rare thing at this time of night, but a welcome reprieve. As their gazes remained locked, the mortal trying to pierce through Bunny's mind as she kept the perfect poker face that only a placid-faced blank-eyed animal could.
He reached for the one on the right, hesitating when the rabbit’s ear twitched and rose like one would arch a brow.
Slowly he shifted his hand towards the one on the left.
The ear only rose higher.
“Okay, this one is edible,” he pointed back to the one on the right.
“Poisonous,” Bunny corrected.
“Dammit,” he pointed at the one on the left.
“Also poisonous,” she sang along in amusement.
Liam openly glared, his voice a deadpan. “They’re the same mushroom.”
“It only took you an hour to figure out this time!” The lagomorph broke out into a fit of giggles. "Bunny wins again!"
“God damn it.”