“Aarde… please… my only sibling… grant them your wrath.”
Aine was weak, her life nearly gone. Her soul could barely connect with her relative.
“Aine, I shall take no action against them, as your suffering is a lesson to be learned. Just as I have seen the death of my minor gods without my action, and taken the lesson of the one of darkness. The one who the others called a coward. When the faintest traces are all you have, I shall stop them. A lesson will be learned, and I shall protect you as you grow your new people. There is nothing these things could do which I cannot stop. And to stop them now would be to avoid pain and learning.”
Aarde had never felt fear, he was a powerful world, bursting with life and power. Unlike his weak sister Aine, who took many more millenia to create a world full of life.
But as that portal opened, as those things came out.
He felt it.
Aarde created his Titan in that moment.
Finding a deformed dragon, born maligned, thrown into the trash by the subjugators.
Full of emotion it could not even understand enough to call rage, it fed on the rats who would wander near it.
Sometimes it saw the dragons in the castle breathe fire, fly, and during an attack it witnessed them deflect large magics with only their scales.
It envied them, it hated them.
It could barely see its own reflection in the sewer water, its wings small and useless, its scales white and brittle, its throat would burn when it tried to light the fire inside itself.
It hated the way it was born, that it was born with the intelligence to understand its malformation.
A voice called to it, asked it if it wanted to fly, to breathe fire, to be unchallenged among its peers, to be a lesser god, a Titan.
It felt a part of its soul quake under the offer, the information of what that all meant was pushed into its mind.
“Yes.
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“I grant you a name, you will be Wyrmwood, you will be my wrath. You will find and destroy the humans of my world, and you will hunt those things which are not of my world, a human may be left, but the interlopers MUST be removed entirely. Is there anything you would ask as payment beyond power?”
“I want to be the only dragon. I want them to know what I have been… to look at others and see what they could’ve been…”
“I shall grant this, they shall be your lessers, seeing only fragments of what they once were in every other species of them.”
A great pillar of magic consumed the deformed dragon, reducing it to nothing but mana which Aarde would shape into its new form.
His scales became as Godtouched, white and gold veined, its wings blotted out the sky.
He was a living mountain, he was the fury of Aarde.
For the first time in his life, Wyrmwood felt the air blow past him as he took flight; he had never known what a body without pain felt like, and it was glorious.
His breath was a white flame which dug deep holes into the ground. He trapped nations in walls reaching the edges of the sky before filling them with his flaming hate.
A tree as tall as him smacked him out of the sky, and even through his scales he felt the strong impact.
But the tree could do little as he let his flames burn around him from the gaps in his scales, he became a living meteor and simply dove through the tree as it tried to stop him once again.
As he stood in its center he let out a roar infused with the power of his soul, turning it to splinters.
It took him 6 days to destroy all life on the continent, another 3 days to find and remove the peoples of other continents.
But he never found a single of the interlopers.
He could see traces of them in places, but they were beyond his sight, and the sight of Aarde.
“Where are those other things you wanted me to destroy?”
“They hide outside of my vision… pockets of space and time… I cannot see them in such places. Your flames will not burn them there… I shall set in place long term plans for them, but for now I will make my new lesser gods, and seed new life on this world. I shall anchor my new gods through you.
Two shall be anchored in the deep below, where my darkness hides, so shall my stone.
Two shall be anchored in the skies above, the mist which shall surround one land, and the storm which swirls such a veil.
Of the last, one will be within his own pocket of space, a forest which befits him.
The other, breathe your fire into a valley, shall it be ever burning.
Go now, Wyrmwood.”
And so began the second age, 8 thousand years had passed before intelligent life arose to Aarde’s liking. Many seals were placed on their souls to stop them from becoming as powerful as those of the first age. But seals were chiseled away, one by one by those things which came through the portal those millenia prior.
They now called themselves gods, dozens of them covering every topic they took a liking to.
Aarde simply watched, waiting for their chance to find a way into the pocket dimensions which they would cloak themselves with.
Their test subject was a place the empire had made, a failed throne for a man who thought himself a god, now stolen by a Fae which took no side but his own.