‘OK, let's sort this out a little.’

I gather all the letters, profiles, photos, documents, reports, and statements that I just read and lay them out on the floor, starting with a copy of the Hercules project file in the center. From there I add on everything that I know and makes sense. At this point, the web has gotten to the point of being enormous. Next, I carefully went over what was left and either discarded it or added it depending on whether or not I found it relevant. I used blue strips of cloth from my dress to connect the events and documents I thought relevant to each other and white to connect the ones I suspect had something to do with each other. The dress was in tatters anyway from all the running around and such.

‘Pity, I kinda liked that dress. I wonder how it would have looked in red and blue?’

After I finished, I backed up and slowly made my way around the giant web that took up the entire room. I even ended up cannibalizing the table for parts. The result of who knows how long of surveillance and espionage all brought together and organized.

The destruction of churches, kidnappings, questionable deaths, and suspicious sightings. If my shrink from my old life were to see this she would probably recommend me some anti-paranoia drugs or just throw me in a mental institute.

‘OK, where did it all start?’

Based on what I can see, it all started 50 years ago. During a wedding ceremony between the child of the God of Trade and the son of a patron god of a martial order. Both were seeking an alliance The two gods had arranged a marriage between their children at a young age and the proposal upheld. For unknown reasons the daughter had been found to be cheating on her fiance and during the wedding ceremony, it was discovered that the daughter was pregnant with the child of another god. The marriage was broken off.

The God of Trade was furious with his daughter, but more so with the martial god for publicly announcing the divorce in such a disgracing manner. As a god that supported all the life on earth, the God of Trade  had considerable influence and sought to take revenge for shaming him and his family name. The week after the wedding, the son was found dead, supposedly mutilated by Demonic beasts. But nobody was fooled and the martial god sought revenge. This was the seed that started the conflict.

Shrines and martial schools burned and other gods got caught up in the fighting. Many of the gods that did not partake in this combat could only standby and watch as the once small family feud escalated into a full scale war, and despite their warnings the conflict grew. Gods took side and the council was forced to try and quell the chaos by marking the martial god and his supporting gods and goddesses as outlaws and the martial god and his family to be executed. Unfortunately this only further incited rebellion in the hearts of the masses and in response they moved their operations and followers to the demon continent. Thus marked the rise of the rebel alliance, known at the time as the Martial Demon alliance.

Meanwhile, in an innocent little village. Someone important was hiding there, someone that both the rebels and the council had taken an interest in. The profile I found was for one Tierra Kragon, a fallen noble of the Holy kingdom and a Vampire runaway from one of the rebel controlled demon states. Despite being part demon, she was able to use Holy magic on a scale that could rival any pope in the Holy kingdom. In turn she was also able to use curse magic to its full effectiveness even though she wasn’t a demon. Her parents were both liberals that hated the war between gods and thus both retired to the tiny village were they had a halfling daughter. And they loved her like the moon and the stars, but not all saw her for who she was but for what she was.

It is widely known it is fundamentally impossible to be able to worship both Demonic Idols and Holy gods, which are conflicting forces that immediately seek to destroy each other. But somehow this young woman was able to exist in peace with the two conflicting forces. When it was uncovered, both the god council and the new generation forces descended on the tiny village in droves to snatch the young woman. The god council had acquired her in the end but the village had been decimated and both sides suffered huge losses.

The dragons came out of their hibernation in the void realms and intervened, hoping the feud would fade with time and established the mountain barrier. The woman that the council wanted, who had been killed during the conflict, had been well loved by the Dragon God. The Dragon God had sworn a vow of neutrality long ago, but in his rage took the heads of leaders of the demons and humans and decimated the remaining forces in both Heaven and the Demon continent. Even now the dragons patrol the mountains breathing fire at anything that they set their sights on.

The council was content with what they had acquired, though. Being able to recover the body of the woman was incredibly hard with the Dragon god watching, but the woman's body and soul were all worth the risk. The things they could do with a dual power system. Create Holy Demonic weapons, reverse ancient curses that neither Holy nor Demonic power worked on. The possibilities were endless. However, as revenge, before separating the demons and humans the Dragon god hinted that he had given the demons a treasure that would one day slay gods.

The warning that the rebels had been given something else that would empower them to such a level had effectively encouraged the council to prepare and use what they had taken. If such a time came that the Dragons no longer held the rebels back or they themselves came, the end of the Golden age of the Heavens would come to pass. After 10 years of study and research, Doctor reynolds, a fledgling scientist had finally found a way to reproduce the effect of having dual types of power. The Council saw to use it to  form an army that had the potential to crush the rebels  and expand the Heavens even further into other dimensions. Thus the Hercules project was commissioned.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

As time went on it became clear by the increase in size and power that rebels had that whatever treasure they had been given held incredibly value which made the all the gods on the side of the council angry and jealous at the Dragon god. Despite this anger the council could do nothing. The Dragon god held no assets or resident in the Heaven realm and had his own seperate void realm for him and his Draconic kinsmen. The council couldn’t even bar him access to Heaven due to his immense power as an Origin god, but he did receive the anger of every god of the old generation and many refused to do business with the dragons anymore effectively weakening his presence in Heaven.

‘Basically, he helped the enemy as revenge and was treated as an outcast for it. The plot thickens!’

15 years later, Aeonia, goddess of time and space, was commissioned to create a spell that would transport beings with less power than a god through time and space. The goddess of was opposed to transporting entities from one parallel dimension to another in the first place, so the council kidnapped her daughter and forced her to complete the spell. When the spell was complete, Aeonia sends her daughter away somewhere for safekeeping. It wasn’t even recorded where she was sent in all the documents I looked through.

‘Who better to keep something safe from your enemy than their enemy. Right?’

Fast forward 5 years to my death and resurrection into the world of Ryalia, my appearance had thrown the Heavens into an uproar. The goddess was sealed inside her realm and the council was split on what to do. They knew now that the spell worked but the theft of a prototype weapon and summoning spell could not be overlooked. As punishment, Kyanu’s followers were hunted and her assets in Heaven taken away.

Part of the council wanted to pull me back to the Heavens and brainwash me into some super secret black ops soldier while the other wanted to study me under a microscope.

The theft of the weapon in the eyes of the council was a minor issue, after all they could just reclaim it at any time due to tracking systems in place. Reynolds had been keeping track of several different artifacts that he made for testing and monitoring purposes. The knife I picked up in the Asylum was actually one of the lesser weapons he made. However all of them went off the grid a few years ago in some freak accident. Losing the weapons in a strange accident was a wake-up call that something was amiss. But by the time the council realized it, the snakes were already in the grass. Some of Aeonia’s spies had been caught and wiretaps and hidden recording orbs had been found.

The council got nervous and I set them off so to speak by going out of their reach. Losing the only weapon they knew the location of, they decided to risk going against the Dragon god and invade the Fae realm. Aeonia takes this opening and sparks the civil war. Without the elite troops, AKA Heroes, that Reynolds promised and Aeonia shutting down the use of the time-space spell to prevent any attempt to try, Aeonia, who had 25 years of preparations, quickly stormed the Heavens and took over. The council was disbanded and its members broken apart. Reynolds, for helping Aeonia, was treated well, but the other either went to prison or on the run. And here we are now.

‘So this whole situation snowballed out of control because of godly pride and greed. Can’t say I’m surprised but that woman. She just escalated everything.’

So here we are, 50 years of politics later and the Heavens are a war zone, the new generation most likely preparing for an assault, and a good chunk of the population in Heaven dead. The only good news I can see is that most of the functions of Ryalia were not too impaired. None of the report I have skimmed through in all my digging indicated that the mortal realms were deeply affected by this lighting civil war. A number of patron gods and protector gods were killed but not terribly. Pockets of famine have sprung up in Wrolum, the beastman sovereignty, Arcadia, the Human Empire, and Holmond, the Holy kingdom but nothing on a national scale. They can manage.

‘At least Blake and the others will be safe.’

If only I hadn’t jinxed the situation even further by saying that

________________________

“Well someone has been busy”

I turn around and find Aeonia standing next to her throne raising an eyebrow at the web of war and destruction I made. Needless to say after piecing together everything I was not amused.

“Are you serious! You’re joking about the situation you just caused! Even if you didn’t start the fire the least you could have done is not pour oil on the flames. Kyanu stole your spell, didn’t she? And used it to summon me. It was never Reoha cursing me it was you wasn’t it!”

I had been a bit suspicious ever since I found out that Reoha had been sent away for safekeeping. Why would a goddess start cursing someone when they were supposed to be hiding. Simple. It wasn’t her cursing me, it was her mother.

“Still lively as ever. By now you should be asking yourself. Was your goddess ever on your side? Or where you that naive. She made your life a living hell and twisted the story to make it seem like it was my daughter's fault. She deserves her own death!” she snarled.

“You ever thought that maybe the goddess of death has a few methods to avoid death. She can take care of herself.”

“You’re unending faith in your goddess is amusing. But you didn’t answer the question. After all of this, you should know better than anyone that she selfishly took you from your world just to settle her conscience.”

“At least she has a conscience. You just started a civil war that weakened the defenses of Heaven even further. Even if you had every right to, you chose the worst possible moment. Why!”

“Why? Why! You ask why after what those worms did to my daughter! You think I would waste a chance to destroy the council! While my precious daughter was raped and whipped I could do NOTHING! When she was starving and being beaten where was I? I was inside a lab considering spell efficiency and matter break down! While And when I finished the spell for them and they gave her back to me. They said it was compensation for time lost waiting! They hurt my family so we will do everything we can to obstruct the council and their schemes. The corrupt government you call a defense is no defense I want guarding my home and family. And now they won’t.”

She gave off an aura of pure rage and hatred, but there was something else. Grief. She lashed out and lots of people got hurt, me included, so why do I feel sorry.

“So how do me and Kyanu fit into this war of yours. You could have waited.”

“You were never meant to be here. She stole the prototype spell and used it for whatever moral purpose she felt while disregarding the consequences. Do you know how badly she has upset the timestream! More people have suffered by your existence in this dimension than originally should have been possible. You are both mistakes that must be corrected before the situation gets further out of hand and the sooner the better.”

“...”

There was nothing I could say. She was both a dangerous fool and an overprotective mother. She was an enigma, one moment worrying about her daughter and the other worrying about cross dimension mechanics.

“It doesn’t matter. Come, your goddesses execution awaits.”