“Before you ask stupid questions,” the demigod cut the Fiends off without even giving them a chance to speak. “Your precious pet will be fine. I will sever the connection to his body soon so that there is no lasting damage. This was just the quick and easiest way to deliver a message.”
“I will keep it brief. I know what you’re plotting, all the plans you have in mind to alter the state of the world, my world. To think my dear children would be so ungrateful of the environment I have lovingly crafted for them, that you would spit on the gifts I have wounded myself to provide. You want to change it, to change me, all without my permission. But I won’t allow it!”
“Yet… I am not unreasonable. Come then, come to me. Bow your heads and ask for forgiveness. Explain yourselves, why you believe your course of action is superior to mine. Just maybe, if you can convince me, I’ll allow you to go through with it. But if you dare move forward without my consent, you will feel my wrath!”
“Don’t keep me waiting.”
Pox’s glowing eyes dulled back to normal, and then his body collapsed onto the living room table. He seemed to be breathing well, and was just unconscious, but they still called on the doctors to check on him. They ultimately found nothing wrong, but took custody of him for the night for observation.
“So after all that…” Kada found herself slumped back in her original spot on the couch, throwing up her hands in aggravation. “She still didn’t tell us where she was!”
“It’s the worst possible timing too,” Phon joined the woman in her aggravation. “We can be certain she was referring to Project Fiendless, which should be ready for launch very soon, but now it might be postponed indefinitely as long as her threat is still looming over us.”
“If she even gives us that much time,” Jaid reminded them. “By the sound of it, she wants us to see her as soon as possible, but it’s not like we can just turn up on her doorstep tomorrow if we don’t have a set location.”
“Even if we do find her,” Xard jumped in. “It’d be reckless of us to just show up without making as many preparations as possible. If she does actually have divine power, which is safe to assume at this point, our own Curses might not be enough to take her down if it comes to it.”
“Well ideally it won’t,” Drim could only anguish at the thought. “Since she hasn’t stopped us from doing anything before, we can hope she’s more reasonable than how she presented herself. Not to mention that she made all of us in this room into Greater Fiends. Let’s pray she still holds us in her favor and will hear us out.”
“For tonight, though, there’s nothing more we can do,” Phon wrapped things up. “We’ll start our search for her in earnest in the morning.”
The group departed, all heading to their own rooms, ready for bed after the crazy night, though it would certainly be difficult for any of them to fall asleep. But it would be a while before Drim even had the chance, because he knew that he still had another supernatural entity to deal with.
His room was calmer than the king had anticipated, but as expected, he did find his mother, or rather her floating spectral form. The ghost was hovering next to the window, staring out at the bright moonlight. One of her hands was idly stroking the floral hair of Drimini who had already fallen asleep in the nearby vacant plant pot.
“Rathe,” the woman said calmly as soon as her son entered the room.
“Rathe,” she repeated with more intensity.
“Rathe!” Eleen was practically yelling now, her anger building.
“I can finally say her name! Rathe! Rathe! Rathe! Rathe! Rathe! Rathe! RATHE!!!” With every repetition, the woman’s words got louder. And by the last one, she could have shattered a window with how loud she’d screamed. Fortunately, her son was the only one who could hear her, or she would have woken the entire compound.
But with her explosive outburst, her rage became physical, causing a gust of energy to burst in every direction, ruffling the leaves of the little plant girl, making her stir. The woman’s mad chanting stopped there, and she was quiet for a moment, but then she turned around, bearing a face that her son never expected.
Eleen Drazah could only be called distraught. She looked absolutely devastated with faux tears streaming down her face. “You have to do it, Drim! You have to kill her! That woman, that monster who calls herself a god, she can’t be reasoned with. For us, for your family, for your friends, for the entire world. Rathe has to die!”
“Why though?” Drim was sincere with his question, desperately wanting to understand. “What did she do to cause your obsession? I understand that she gave you your power, and in turn cursed you so that you couldn’t talk about her. But now that you can, maybe you can tell me what actually happened.”
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The looming revenant suddenly thrust forward, speeding over to her son in the blink of an eye. Her visage practically distorted with all of her anger, haunting him like the vengeful spirit that she was. She then let out a piercing screech, all of her raw emotion, years of repressed regret and misery, it all vented out in just a few words. “Rathe killed her!”
Elleen’s ghastly tears continued to trickle, vanishing as they hit the floor. She looked ready to go berserk, but when she saw her son’s calm and patient face, it made her realize what she was doing. So her rage began to waver, but she continued with her grief. “She… she killed my first love.”
The woman floated away for a moment, trying to recompose herself and get a hold of her feelings. After a minute of drifting aimlessly, she finally turned back around to face Drim with a more pleasant face. “I’ll tell you what happened. But have a seat, it will take a while.”
Drim did as asked, sitting down in one of his reading chairs. He didn’t want to risk his bed, or else he might fall asleep the one time that he actually wanted to hear his mother speak and miss something important. Though with all of the insanity and adrenaline of the evening, it’d likely be quite a while before his mind would properly allow him to rest.
Eleen took the other chair, having become a natural at pretending like she was somewhere she actually belonged. For a moment, it almost felt like they were a proper family, a mother and son having a heartfelt talk, but the reality was far too strange for it to ever be considered normal.
“Your uncle has briefly mentioned it in the past,” the mother started, “but I first heard her voice when I was still young, not quite yet a teenager. She was asking if anyone could hear her. I thought I was going crazy at first, and no one believed me except for Harth, but they couldn’t ignore the changes to my mental state. That event was what triggered my own Premature Cognition, a trait which I guess somehow affected our bloodline.”
“From then on, I had the mentality and consciousness of an adult, as you both have experienced. Yet unlike the intelligence I watched the two of you gain, it was like my own devolved over time. As the years passed, I heard her more and more. At some point she must have realized I could hear her, and she began talking frequently, almost daily by the end of my late teens. Though she never actually did directly respond to any of my questions. It felt like my sanity was slowly slipping away.”
“Then shortly after I became an adult, she called out to me one final time, and beckoned me to come and find her. And in that moment, it was like I was in a trance and could think of nothing else. I left home without a second’s hesitation and crossed the world to… somewhere. And the next thing I knew, she was standing there before me.”
“Wait, so you’ve actually met her then?” Drim jutted forward in his chair in disbelief. “I always thought she’d just communicated with you mentally like she’s done with us. So do you know where she is then?”
“No,” his mothers face dropped in utter disappointment with herself. “Believe me, I would tell you immediately if I could. But it’s all a blur. Don’t go thinking I haven’t been wracking my brain ever since to try and remember. It’s been eating away at me for decades.”
“But… I do remember a few specifics that may assist you in your search. At some point I was on a boat. I’m certain about that. Though, I can’t remember if it was a proper ship, or a speedboat, or just a little dinky thing I rowed by myself. However, I’m pretty sure it capsized at one point, and I think I may have drowned, or believed I was going to. That’s when I woke up and saw her.”
“I thought I was dead, though in purgatory because it didn’t feel like heaven or hell. Her lair, I guess is the best thing to call it, is still vivid in my mind. It was like a cave system that she’d carved out into her home—very obvious that it wasn’t natural, but rather formed that way on purpose.”
“The moment she said her first words, I knew it was her, the woman I’d been hearing in my head all that time. Rathe told me that because I could hear her, that I was someone special, someone destined to usher in a new era. And she wanted to give me a mission: to unite the world.”
“All the details are still a bit hazy, but she did try to explain to me why. Apparently a long time ago, she used to live alongside humanity, openly as their ruler and deity. But whenever she showed any particular group special favor, the others would get envious. They ended up fighting over her, a world war that essentially collapsed society.”
“Rathe never did tell me how that war ended, at least not that I can remember. Thinking about it, though, there’s only one obvious answer. The ancient ruins and relics, why the geography of our world has so many inexplicable mysteries, your thrall, Asset, and the many souls they contain, it all points to one thing. She must have destroyed that world and rebuilt it into the one we know.”
“Even now, I feel as if I understand her intent. She didn’t want the same thing to happen twice. So instead of ruling openly, she decided to exist in seclusion, waiting for a time when humanity was united as one all inclusive society before revealing herself. But Rathe is an impatient being, so she got tired of letting it happen naturally.”
“That’s why she wanted me to do it, and why she gave me a power that would allow me to move society along with a heavy hand if necessary. It’s also why she made it impossible for me to speak of her, so that I couldn’t reveal her existence before it was time, fearing that the cycle of war would start again, with opposing factions wanting to win her favor and claim her power.”
“So then she sent me on my way with my mission. I couldn’t tell you how since I no longer had a boat. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on a beach on the eastern coast of the continent, nowhere that I had ever been to before. I had tattered clothes, no money, and a muddled memory to the point that I barely even knew my own name.”
“But that’s when they found me—Relyk, the man who would become your father, and his sister, your aunt and my first love, Writ Drazah.”