Having completed the transfer of equipment to the Order of the Ancient Ways, the Wise One led Sorin out of the artifact storage room and through a doorway at the back.

Sorin was struck with wave after wave of distorting energies as he passed the door’s warding threshold. Madness, Hope, and Jealousy, were especially prominent in these waves that sought to twist and transform the very fabric of history.

Conspicuously absent from the cocktail were Death and Disease. Such petty games were beyond these Evils. Instead, they were forces of nature that couldn’t care less about sentient thoughts and emotions.

This, Sorin realized, was the true reason for the hierarchy of the Evils. Hope was powerful because it had so many subsidiary evils and stood at the peak of this pyramid. Conversely, Death and Disease were powerful because they didn’t overlap with other evils and therefore didn’t have to share authority. At the same time, they constrained each other and prevented each other from surpassing Hope and its subsidiary Evils.

“I suppose we should start at the very beginning,” said the Wise One, leading Sorin to a warded display case at the entrance.

A large, badly broken tablet stood as a silent sentinel at this checkpoint. The warding could barely contain the remnant’s aura. Instead of suppressing it, the warding redirected and repurposed the aura to destroy most of the distorting forces trying to escape the room.

The tablet itself was a simple thing. It depicted twelve mighty figures whose names had been lost to time.

“These aren’t the twelve Olympians,” said Sorin as he inspected the broken tablet. “They’re older. Stronger.”

“As far as we can tell, these are the twelve original deities of Pandora, who are now known as the twelve original Titans,” explained the Wise One. “Unlike the deities that brought the Evils into the world, the Titans were born directly from Heaven and Earth. In terms of power, they were vastly superior to the twelve Olympians. Which was both a blessing and a curse.”

The next item on display was a painting on a broken clay canvas, pieced together over the course of five painstaking decades. “The twelve titans had a host of children, including other titans. Their most impactful progeny, however, were the Olympian Gods. Under the instigation of #&*%^#$$, they overthrew the titans, banished most of them from this world. Only a few that facilitated some of the world’s vital functions were allowed to remain.

Next, she took Sorin to a large stone tablet that had been cut in half by an unfathomably sharp blade. Not a single bit of stone had chipped away from the cutting line.

It should have been child’s play to reassemble the tablet. Strangely, however, it refused to be made whole. Its halves could only be brought within a few inches of each other thanks to a powerful vice empowered by divine crystals.

The tablet was interesting in that it diverged from the titans and the gods. Instead, it depicted nine beings being sucked into a large box. Sorin instinctively recognized it as Pandora’s Box.

The Largest among them was a many-tailed fox with chains for tails. As the box pulled it in, it pulled in its companions. Concurrently, a cunning serpent used these Eight Evils as a springboard to escape.

“So, there is a ninth evil,” said Sorin, remembering the fading wisp of energy he’d retrieved from the corrupted divine crystal. “And it wasn’t locked away like the other Eight Evils. It therefore wasn’t newly introduced during the Cataclysmic Emergence.”

“Let’s not get too far ahead,” said the Wise One. “Instead, let us consider what exactly these Evils were. As far as we can deduce, there have always been certain Domains on Pandora that require beings of corresponding Authority to exist and manage them. The titans were powerful beings because they fulfilled vital functions.”

“Are you suggesting the Evils appeared to fill the power vacuum left behind after their banishment?” asked Sorin.

“Correct,” said the Wise One. “And since their existence was necessary, they could not be killed, and were therefore sealed using the Realm Treasure Heaven and Earth were born from, Pandora’s Box.”

Sorin frowned as he contemplated the implications. This was diverging from what he’d originally guessed.

“Let’s keep looking before we come to any conclusions, shall we?” said the Wise One, interrupting his thoughts. She took Sorin past vases, paintings, and other historical artifacts that depicted the ‘glorious’ Era of the Gods.

The tales were, quite frankly, horrifying. There were stories of incest, treachery, mating with animals, and punishing people who dared overreach. All things told; the gods were terrible creatures. The only quality they didn’t seem to lack was complete confidence in the righteousness of their actions.

“As you can see, locking away the Eight Evils had all sorts of consequences,” said the Wise One. “And consistent with the nature of the gods, these consequences were a doom of their own making.

“Only a few passing references have been found in the ancient texts we’ve recovered, but we’ve more or less determined that leaders of the gods, #%(*&$(%*& and @!)(!)$^#%, attempted to transcend the realm’s power structure, and in so doing, accidentally tore a whole in reality, opening up Pandora to invasion.

These foreign invaders were joined by the banished titans. The realm’s gods, demigods, and heroes were insufficient to repel them. This brings us to the tablet Astley has been studying.

The Wise One led Sorin to a sealed door where analysis of new artifacts and records was to be conducted. The wards on the door were orders of magnitude more powerful than the preceding runes. The dozens of scars on the potent structure were a testament to its necessity.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

“There’s still time to turn back,” warned the Wise One. “There will be no regretting when you step past this point.”

Without hesitation, Sorin stepped across the threshold to enter a quaint research room. It was a comfortable space, reminiscent of his childhood home.

In a small corner of the room sat Astley drinking a cup of tea. Sorin’s heart ached when he saw that her cultivation base had shattered from the truth he’d discovered, reducing her a level that was barely stronger than a mortal.

Sorin rushed to her side and took her pulse. Physical functions are normal. Trauma is within manageable levels. There are traces… of a Panacea? Impossible. If this is her state after taking a legendary Panacea, her body and soul must have been twisted until they shattered.

“Truth is a powerful thing,” whispered the Wise One from beside Sorin. “I did everything I could, but I could not recover her senses.”

Indeed, Astley was blind and deaf. Her haunted eyes stared blankly into the back wall of the room as she drank tea to appease the only senses that remained to her.

Reluctantly, Sorin retrieved his hand. Nothing could be done for Astley’s current condition. He was a killer, after all. A destroyer. Even with Disease as an ally, complex manipulations of life force were beyond him.

“Perhaps the Kepler Clan will be able to restore her senses,” said Sorin to the Wise One. “But her voice…”

“Is lost,” said the Wise One. “Irreparably so, as is her ability to communicate in other ways. The reason for this is naturally the Truths hidden in the tablet you recovered from the Styx Auction House and the historical fragments recovered from the Ouroboros’s resting place. Those two bits of information answered the most important question our order has been pondering for the better part of four centuries:

“What is corruption. What is divinity? And how do they relate to us humans?

“We therefore turn our attention to Exhibit A, the cause of the Cataclysmic Emergence.

A familiar tablet was once again in front of Sorin. A man clothed in lightning spoke to a chained fox. Now, he understood that the man on the tablet wasn’t an ancestor of Aaron Zeiss. He was Aaron Zeiss many iterations and many lives ago.

The serpent on the next tablet was obviously the ninth evil. It coiled around the lightning clothed man’s eyes, blinding him to the horrors that surrounded him. In this case, it’s not a physical representation of the evil but a metaphorical one. The Ninth Evil’s nature is blinding.

The third tablet depicted a growing darkness and a broken sky. This, Sorin now understood, was a doom of the lightning god’s own making. The familiar energy he’d sensed before was naturally the third, foreign energy found in corrupted divine crystals. The energy of the titans. The energy of this world’s original gods.

This same energy, Sorin now realized, powered the divine weapons the Order of the Ancient Ways had retrieved. The ancient titans hadn’t just been banished. Some of them had been slain, and their bodies repurposed and weaponized.

Next came the story of the two kings and their war against the not-so-mysterious invaders. They were gradually overwhelmed, and in the end, the God of Lightning convinced the God of Death, Ratten Hyde’s former life, to perform a summoning ritual.

The last picture depicted the two deities standing in front of Pandora’s Box. It was clear, now that the distortions on the tablet had been eliminated, that the two deities were opening the box to retrieve its sealed powers into their persons.

Once again, Sorin saw the faintest hint of that corrupted serpent, blinding both these figures to the risks. That single mistake doomed the gods and their unstable dynasty and unleashed the Eight Evils upon the world.

With just this information, Sorin didn’t have a complete picture. It was the reassembled tablet beside it, the one Sorin had recovered from the Tomb of the Ouroboros that made everything click together.

The tablet was a family tree that depicted the likeness of the titans and the gods, and even the Eight Evils that were spawned in their absence.

The gods were many, but their powers all shared a common feature: within each one of them was a hint of the serpent’s aura, a fragment of the Evil they’d inherited from the titans.

“The titans, being born first, had perfectly balanced energies,” explained the Wise One from beside Sorin. “But passing these energies on proved to be difficult. In the end, most children born of them inherited the dominant half of these energies, which, coincidentally, contained most of their power. It was due to this loss of strength to the Gods that the Titans eventually fell.

“This form of energy is what we now call Divinity. It has ever been in conflict with the corruption of the Eight Evils. In the end, however, it is possible to force them into a stable form. After all, they are originally from the same source.

“That’s because Divinity is a form of corruption. It is the most plentiful form of corruption that has existed since the dawn of time. Its nature is power, and that power inevitably corrupts.”

“Also known as the Evil called Hubris,” Sorin whispered. It was a quality that had always plagued his lineage. A quality that had evidently led to the very downfall of the Gods and the Titans before them.

In essence, the Gods were not some pure and holy beings. They weren’t perfect. Such an opinion on their superiority was merely a manifestation of their Hubris.

It was a subtle truth, but its confirmation provoked a transformation of the ‘divinity’ in Sorin’s body. There was a large difference, it seemed, in being blind to your own Hubris and being aware of it.

The potency of the energies in Sorin’s body increased dramatically as his energy adapted to his new mindset. It didn’t quite meld with the other forms of corruption in his body but joined them to form a nine-part balance that didn’t discriminate between purity and corruption.

Sorin’s base poisons transformed, as did the nature of his ‘sanctification’. He wasn’t a perfect and pure entity as he’d previously thought, but a confluence of everything that was wrong with this world.

Pandora wasn’t a corrupted utopia. Instead, it was corrupted from the very beginning. Pandora was corruption. Any creature born in the realm bore this taint.

Sorin embraced the changes to his being, but he was unprepared for the implications of this knowledge. If Divinity was Hubris, there was no such thing as immortality. There was no such thing as perfection. Pandora was essentially in a state of constant decay.

Once everything reached a point where no further decay was possible, everything would be taken back into Pandora’s Box. A new world would form.

This truth tore into what little remained of the so-called perfection Sorin had established. It destabilized his body, causing chunks of ‘sanctified’ flesh to explode. It was only thanks to his demigod-level constitution and his frightening powers of regeneration that he was able to endure.

These uncomfortable explosions continued for a time until finally, Sorin’s body adapted. It gave up on the idea of perfection and instead embraced the path of assimilation that Hope had taught Sorin, likely in preparation for this very moment.

Finally, he looked to the Wise One. “Well? You brought me all the way here and provoked this transformation. I assume you have a follow-up planned?”

The God Seed of Athena laughed as her body melded with the owl on her shoulder. The licked her lips as she shed her peaceful façade and revealed her nature as a conqueror. “I truly am helpless against Zeus, Hades, and that manipulator, Poseidon, Sorin. That’s not even considering the threat the Seven Evils that barged into Mount Olympus to claim Pandora’s Box pose to my person.

“I knew the first time I laid eyes on you that you were something special. I could feel the complexity in your body the constant touch of Hope that manipulated you in this very direction.

“I know my odds of success to don’t exceed a third. But if I succeed… none of those one-dimensional individuals will be a match for me.”

Having said this, the golden owl formed from the Wise One’s divinity, flesh, and spirit plunged into Sorin’s body, filling it with a competing flavor of Hubris.

As Sorin mobilized his own resources to defend himself, Azrakul’s seal unravelled as though it had never been there.

Just like the God Seed of Athena, the Herald of Strife was ready for one final gambit.