The gods are rotting.

A white film of light once enveloped the divine epidermis of each and every one of them. Satin ranging in tone from pale white to umber stitched up their vessels; their faces moving, talking, perfect porcelain.

But that was then. This is now.

Pus spurted out of Ordeina’s cheeks, followed by blackish red ichor. Volcanoes pulsated all around her flesh. An amalgamation of disease and necrosis disfigured the empyrean women like carrion crows preemptively picking at prey resigned to its fate. Her knees thumped onto the ornately embroidered velvet carpet below her, embroidered by the late Sewso.

Ordeina clawed herself to the door. Sloshing from an indeterminable source could be heard as her soon-to-be cadaver became acquainted with the ground.

Ordeina’s once bouncy and playful brown curls were replaced with the rough wool of a slaughtered sheep left out for the wolves. The locks were ceasing to regrow now, but they didn’t stop tumbling to the ground.

She shivered and shrieked. The divine rarely experience discomfort and pain. How could they be prepared to decay alive?

Who was to blame for this? Was it the third realm’s mystics finally acting on their disdain for the gods? Was it the voidwalkers? Was it the work of one of their own?

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What the gods would have never guessed was the actual culprit. So unassuming and primitive. So lowly and incapable of marvels and acts of reality-altering magnificence that crowned the gods. So… mundane. The real culprit for their destruction was their own subjects. It was humans.

Maybe that’s an oversimplification. Human corruption was the cause to be precise. It had become a trend among the gods to disguise themselves as mortals and foray into the world of man. During those excursions, one of the gods, who was known for his trips, developed an affliction, a disease, one with no cure.

Lagren concealed it. He found the blemish after a trip to a busy city whose redlight district he’d grown fond of. He was told that his trips had grown worrisome as of late and that he’d have to take a reprieve from them. This trip was meant to keep him tame for the next few centuries. Never did he expect to come back with a bump on his stomach and bad breath from the consumption of human delicacies of flesh and food.

From there, it silently spread across the first realm. The hubris of each of the gods prevented a conversation from happening surrounding each of their tiny, unseen ailments.

Until they were too much to ignore.

Ordeina’s eyes rolled back. Her vessel went limp. Black bile oozed from her mouth. Her scabbed, peeled, sienna skin had visible lines, cracks, and stretches all over where there was once perfection.

Within the halls of Zhulong’s temple, splashes of red decorated the walls. Someone had slashed the throats of all of the deities that attended his party.

Jupiter bisected on his throne.

Yahweh succumbed to the infection.

Freyja’s stomach blasted open from the inside.

All that remained of the gods were ten. Ten deities whose minds became addled by the revocation of their godhood by something not even alive. Ten of them left to look after all of humanity with their maggot-filled brains. Ten that needed to be slain.

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