Once upon a time, there was a Goddess. She wasn’t born a Goddess, but people often don't care or never bother to learn about the life of their deities as if they were ever one of them. No, the deities were so above common folk that they must’ve always been. Even if you count your life in centuries, the Gods existed for thousands of years before you drew your first breath. Without direct evidence, it was safer to dehumanize them and consider them as forces of nature. Incomprehensible.
But this goddess was once just a human, and she lived in a world with only humans. She was a reporter from an eastern news network, sent to cover a war. Far from home, in the fulcrum of the world, the cradle of their civilization. There, she met a soldier from a western country. One that fancied themselves the most powerful ever. The names, they don’t matter. Not for the people who knew the Goddess as just a Goddess. So we won’t mention them. The reporter and soldier fell in love. When the soldier was discharged from duty due to grievous wounds which had made him unfit to fight, they traveled to a western country. There they married and faced the challenge of living as a crippled war veteran and foreign news reporter, hand in hand.
The woman that one day would become a Goddess had it rough. She couldn’t find a job and worked as a freelancer. She even attempted to post her journalism online on a popular video site, but her channel received three strikes by the powers that be. She was too honest in her journalism and the video site wasn’t on the side of the little guy. Nobody was on the side of the little guy.
The couple still loved each other but had trouble making ends meet. Without full use of his left leg, the former soldier couldn’t do the jobs he had the expertise for, and the journalist was struggling to find assignments. That’s when they got news from a friend of theirs, a college professor in a midwestern university.
“Would you like to become Gods?” The professor asked.
They didn’t believe him. If the professor hadn’t had a sterling reputation of being a centered, no-nonsense, pragmatic person, they would’ve probably refused and rudely asked him to vacate the premises. But while the journalist wanted to do exactly that, the former soldier held her back.
“Let’s listen to your proposal,” he told the professor.
The impeccably dressed professor explained. They’d obtain the keys to godhood and travel to another world. One such fantasy world, defenseless and ripe for the picking. It doesn’t matter how if we’re talking about the Goddess. Just the fact that they accepted and succeeded. Maybe at another time, when we talk about the professor. But he is no longer relevant.
They became Gods among several of their friends. The soldier was the God of War and Humans and invested heavily in fortifying his chosen species. The reporter decided she wanted dragons. She was fascinated with the creatures and with a certain pop culture character. She was henceforth known as the Broodmother.
The Gods played in the world like children in a jungle gym. They used their powers, they toyed with the mortals. Over thousands of years, they quite forgot what it was to be mortal, weak, and ephemeral. Corrupted by their divine power, they detached themselves from their duties.
Thousands of years passed. But one day, the God of Humans and War felt something strange. Someone, something had stolen his power. It was like stealing a drop of water from a swimming pool but he felt incensed. How DARED someone steal his power? So he smote the perpetrator before even looking at it. When he looked, he saw a burning straw hovel and a baby. But while he could see the baby with his eyes, he couldn’t see the baby using the System. Oh, right. The world had a game-like system implanted by the professor, but that was irrelevant to this story.
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The God of War decided to destroy the baby. It was clearly an Anomaly. He warned the other deities and attacked. But the baby and the mother were seemingly immune to his power. The other deities arrived and watched with horror at the baby that was a black hole from which no Divinity could escape. A friend of the God of War decided to be smart and summoned a monster. While the monster was created by divine magic, the monster’s powers were mundane. Such a twist of the rules succeeded in killing the woman but not the baby. Instead, the baby killed the monster by just touching it.
The truth about the baby was revealed by the professor. It was a foreign soul, sent here by the trickster god of a famous pantheon. The one from the superhero movie. The Gods argued among themselves on what to do with the baby. Eventually, she was left to fend for herself. But the rivalry between that foreign soul, which the Gods called the Anomaly, and the God of War would run deep.
Eventually, they clashed and the God of War, the once crippled soldier, was killed. On their second altercation, he was eradicated completely. The Goddess that liked dragons, the wife of the soldier, the reporter from an Asian country, wept.
She vowed to destroy the Anomaly. Even if it cost her own life.
The other deities were growing comfortable with the Anomaly. They used her for menial (for a deity) tasks, giving her the deific equivalent of table scraps. But she grew more powerful with each of these scraps. Soon she would be strong enough to obliterate each and every one of them. The Goddess attempted to warn her fellow deities. They dismissed her. They told her to let it go.
How could it?! Her lover was murdered by it!. Devoured! Cannibalized! How could they be so blind? It was a monster, an inhuman creature. Loathing, repugnant, disgusting.
The Goddess, after failing again and again at convincing her fellow deities, called in some favors and enacted a plan. One that would kill and obliterate the Anomaly. She anointed a [Saint], one that could use magic equivalent to divine magic but without being so, to circumvent the Anomaly’s divinity immunity. She gave him the arguably most powerful kind of magic. One that could attack the very Fate of the target. The costs of such magic were immense, usually requiring an equivalent sacrifice. But she knew of a spell that didn’t sacrifice the caster. Instead, she would repay the Anomaly in kind.
It destroyed the Goddess’ lover. Now it was time to repay the favor. Using the soul of the Anomaly’s most treasured past lover, her [Saint] cast the spell that would give her the vengeance she was owed... It should have killed the Anomaly, but it didn’t. The abomination had acquired an ability to avoid death, cheating once again. Three times they cast the magic, three times it failed and was denied her due. Then it was too late, for the Anomaly had acquired resistance to their magic and murdered the dragon [Saint].
Worse, she cried foul play to the other Gods. Her friends, her co-conspirators in the most amazing heist in the history of the multiverse (that they knew of) betrayed her. She was censored and forced to prepare for her last-ditch plan. She had only a thousand years to do so. But maybe there was a way.
The God of War prepared a special vessel for the Anomaly. One that would trap her soul for all eternity, freeing them from the trouble. All she needed to do was to kill the Anomaly and capture her soul before she was claimed by the System.
The Anomaly would die, even if the Goddess had to give up her whole being to see it through.
She sent her agents, [Dragon Archmages] specialized in [Necromancy]. Since dragons were restricted on where they could go, these volunteers underwent a ritual to change their creature type, abandoning their lofty heritage for their Goddess. No sacrifice was too little to eliminate that threat. Clad in their new flesh, they went to the far corners of the world.
On the southwestern edges of the great elven forest, they exhumed the skeleton of a little girl.
On the eastern plains near the same forest, the skeleton of an elf.
A daring attack on an underwater nation where they stole the body of their founder-princess.
Near the current home of the Anomaly, they took two corpses.
In a vast vitrified wasteland, they found a little piece of carbonized bone.
At the great barbarian plains, they found a lock of hair from one of the horse-lords.
Seven great Undead, the likes of never before seen in this world rose from the dead in one auspicious night. The [Dragon Archmages] gladly gave their lives to fulfill the desires of their insane goddess.
The former reporter that once fell in love with a soldier could only laugh at the irony. If nobody could kill the Anomaly, why not make her fight with herself?