“The [Solarian Courts] are in chaos,” Eurymedon reported as Melpomene listened. “As predicted, it appears their internal turmoil has boiled over into outright civil war. The Royalists hold the capital for now, but the various revolutionary forces gain ground by the day.”
Eurymedon gestured to a large, detailed map of the [Solarian Courts] and [Despoiled Legion] spread out on a table between the two of them. As they spoke, the [Daemon of Eyes] shifted wooden figures atop the map to represent their updated intelligence. “In the confusion, the keep at Gregory’s Pass has been left without supply or reinforcement for three weeks, whereas Heart’s Pass remains a hotbed of guerilla warfare. I propose we change course and adopt the third route alternative, marching and running supply lines through Gregory’s Pass. The route will be longer, but more defensible.”
Melpomene nodded, studying the map. “Chapter two, advice six, ‘Appear strong where you are weak, and weak where you are strong, but be wary that your enemy does the same,’” she quoted. “Please detail your sources for this report, specifically how they gathered their intelligence.”
“Yes, my [Liege].”
As Eurymedon launched into the requested report, Melpomene listened intently, but allowed her eyes to wander. Situated within a high tower of her palace, she turned to look out the window. She surveyed the staging ground below, where her troops were making their final preparations for the Solarian campaign .
It’d been one month since Aolyn the Deathless — the god Melpomene had spent the last few decades reviving — had returned and promptly abandoned his people all over again. He’d left without even saying goodbye.
Not bothering to show up in person, he’d sent a letter to explain his newest absence as well as the circumstances surrounding it. For others, the revelations contained within the letter might have frightened them into inaction, but Melpomene was never one to let an opportunity pass by.
Far beneath her high vantage point, her army assembled, ready for war.
Six centuriae of [Tier I] [Daemon Shield Legionnaires] for screening maneuvers and holding objectives, each with the coveted [Hardened Veteran] keyword.
Six centuriae of [Tier I] [Daemon Longbows] for ranged support, each outfitted to gain the [Magical Ammunition] keyword for the anti-armor and anti-resistance benefits.
Four scores of [Tier II] [Hex Rangers] for scouting, tracking, and field tactics.
Five [Tier III] [Darksteel Golems] for siege battles.
Five teams of [Tier III] [Darksteel Ballistae] for artillery support.
Three centuriae of [Tier IV] [Daemon Ancients] to serve as the elite core of the ground forces, each equipped to be capable of anti-infantry, anti-cavalry, and anti-large melee. With their bows, they were even capable of ranged support, though it wasn’t their specialty.
Two four-Daemon pods of [Tier IV] [Wyvern Riders] for aerial special operations, now with their newly earned [Mage Hater] keyword to replace one of their old three.
And finally, a single score of [Tier V] [Drake Berserkers], just to fuck shit up. They were technically melee cavalry, and melee cavalry were generally trash when it came to sieges, but the [Drake Berserkers] were the exception that proved the rule. If the Solarian campaign went as expected, there would be plenty of sieges for them to prove their worth.
Along with her best friend and advisor, the [Tier V] [Daemon of Eyes] Eurymedon, the troops mustering below her in the early light of dawn represented the limit of Melpomene’s direct personal power — the maximum number of troops she could tether to her soul. Though her personal fighting style was rather boisterous, her army was practical and balanced — capable of complex maneuvers, but ultimately optimized for the fundamentals of war.
She and her army wouldn’t be embarking on the Solarian campaign alone, but they would be doing the dragon’s share of the fighting. Other minor [Lieges] would be coming along to guard supply lines and hold strategic locations, but Melpomene’s army would be the one to carve a path toward Soleil, the capital of the [Solarian Courts].
It wasn’t an optimal plan in terms of speed, but it more than made up for its relaxed pace with reliability. After all, what was the point of taking land if it couldn’t be held? And besides, Melpomene preferred not to risk troops she couldn’t revive herself.
“…and that was the last of my sources,” Eurymedon said, completing their report.
“Wonderful,” Melpomene concluded, satisfied that their intelligence were reliable. “Any updates on the fallen deities?”
“Of those who ventured north, none have returned. As our deadbeat former god predicted, they have all given up on indirectly claiming the bounty on your head, as it seems none of them are willing to trust their followers with the temptation of a near-limitless wish. Something Aolyn couldn’t predict, however, is how unified the newly mortal gods have thus far acted under the leadership of Luna, the former goddess of mystery, madness, the moon, and recreational drugs.
“According to our most recent intelligence, all but one of the potentially hostile former deities are currently harassing the [Frigid North]. They are attempting to coerce the goddess Treskur into declaring victory over the [Inter-Council Assembly], thus rendering impotent the divine document that is allegedly preventing the ascension of new gods in addition to denying the fallen deities their godhood. To conclude this summary, I should note that we do not yet have reliable reports on whether or not this harassment campaign is succeeding.”
“Alright, and what of the other former deity?”
“Whereabouts still unknown. We’re compiling data on alleged sightings, but no pattern nor hard evidence have yet to emerge.”
Melpomene pursed her lips in thought. “We shouldn’t postpone the campaign due to a single unknown, but we should take extra precautions against his potential interference. We march for Gregory’s Pass in an hour.”
“Yes, my [Liege]!” Eurymedon left the room to relay the order, leaving Melpomene alone.
Still looking out the window, the [Daemon Autarch] raised her gaze to the horizon. Light streamed over the mountaintops, but the sun was nowhere to be seen, hidden somewhere within the brewing clouds of a storm.
Melpomene whispered a single question beneath her breath.
“Where are you, Sol?”
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“Oh fuck! Hot hot hot!”
Sol was being eaten, already swallowed up to the waist by some creature composed of living molten metal that he couldn’t identify. It was vaguely worm-like, but it was as wide as a carriage and so long he couldn’t see its other end. It had teeth and spikes everywhere, so much so that it was difficult to tell where its mouth ended and its thorny exterior began.
Or perhaps there was no difference between the interior teeth and the exterior spikes, Sol realized, because after the creature bit down on his legs, its mouth rolled inward, its whole body furling in on itself to draw Sol further in like a pointy conveyer-tube of molten death.
“Shit! Fuck! Ow ow o—“
His screams were cut off as his head was swallowed along with the rest of his body.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The worm began swimming away, satisfied with its kill. It spiraled its way through the thick, ubiquitous substrate that made up this layer of Terra’s interior. Then it paused, experiencing some indigestion.
Then it exploded.
“Ugh! Ew ew ew! Disgusting!”
Sol, relatively unharmed, erupted like a solar flare from within the unidentified worm creature, severing it in two. The shorter half floated lifelessly within the molten environment, but the longer half quickly knit itself shut and began spiralling at a breakneck pace away from Sol, whom it apparently no longer considered to be food.
“Oh, you aren’t getting away that easily!”
In one fluid motion, he transformed his hand into a barbed javelin of plasma, reared back, and launched it with superhuman force. The javelin cut through the environment as if it were air, and trailing it was a rope of plasma formed of Sol’s rapidly stretching arm.
The weapon sunk deep into the metal flesh of the worm and embedded itself there. Now firmly anchored to the beast, Sol yanked on his rope-arm and flew toward it.
Once he reached the creature’s main body, he transformed his arm back into an arm and kept ahold of the worm by grabbing one of its exterior toothy spikes. He plunged his other fist into the thing’s metal flesh, channelling another solar flare into it, but this time with more finesse.
Rather than have it explode immediately, he directed his power to travel along the length of the beast, ripping the worm apart as it went. Bands and swirls of solar energy flowed through the creature like a waterfall of destruction, Sol guiding the carnage every step of the way.
Sol would have killed the worm if he could, but it was simply too big. Even after having his power travel a few hundred yards through the thing’s body, there was still no end in sight. Since his power became exponentially more difficult to control at a distance, he allowed his attack to dissipate, deciding he’d dealt enough to teach the creature not to bother him again.
Now surrounded by nothing but bits of rapidly dissolving worm-corpse, Sol just had to find a way back to the world’s surface.
For the umpteenth time since he’d fallen toward the center of the world, Sol attempted to just swim up… but he didn’t know how to swim. As a god, he’d never had a reason to learn, and regardless, it’d been difficult to practice when water always boiled away at his touch.
Then he tried to fly, but he didn’t know how to fly without the aid of divinity. Before he became a god, he’d had no talent for any sort of flight skill, and even after his apotheosis into a solar deity, there’d been no need to learn mortal spells whose effects could be replicated with divinity.
Presently floating within the superheated, immensely pressurized, suffocating threshold between the ‘liquid outer core’ and the ‘solid inner core’ of the world — not that Sol knew either of those terms — he wished he’d taken his sister’s advice all those millennia ago and learned some arcane magic just to ‘exercise his brain.’
Now that he thought about it, however, he realized he didn’t technically have a brain anymore, being a sentient mass of plasma and all that.
Next, Sol remembered the vision of ‘rocket ships’ Aolyn had shared, and so he tried launching streams of plasma below him, hoping that attacking downward would send him upward.
The rocket strategy worked for a time, but it took a tremendous amount of energy to push through the dense matter around him. After only a few minutes, Sol was exhausted and in need of a rest, but he noted with some hope that he was indeed further away from Terra’s core than when he’d began, but only barely. Once he finished taking the time to recuperate his strength, however, he could tell from the ambient pressure that he was actually deeper than when he’d started.
Sol let out a scream of rage.
“Aolyn! We’re going to… going to have a stern conversation whenever I get back!”
The rage was there, but for some reason he couldn’t find the proper words to express it. When Sol tried focusing all his negative emotions on Aolyn — the one who was definitely the sole cause of all his current problems — he just couldn’t do it.
He wouldn’t admit it — not even to himself — but he knew the reason why. Sol wasn’t angry at Aolyn, but at himself. More specifically, he was angry that he’d allowed himself to remain ignorant of so much for so long.
All his life, Luna had been the smart sibling while Sol was — ironically enough — the dim one. He wasn’t really an idiot, but after being called one so many times, he’d adapted by wearing the title like armor. Incapable of ever learning enough to outshine his sister, Sol had embraced his role as the ‘powerful idiot,’ the perfect foil for his sister’s genius.
As a mortal, he rose to power not through cunning nor tactics nor trickery, but sheer, insurmountable power. Rather than leverage power to increase its impact, he just increased his power. Why flank when he could charge? Why feint when he could stab? Why negotiate when he could conquer?
He’d spent his entire pre-ascension life ignoring his intellectual shortcomings, which in turn only made them more egregious. It began as a conscious decision of pride, but after many years, it became a habit, and that habit had eventually morphed into a core pillar of his identity. His willful ignorance became a part of him, something he’d never been able to let go of.
And now, after millennia of life stubbornly clinging to his shortcomings, the result was that he was stuck in the center of the world with no idea how to escape.
There was just too much he didn’t know.
Without a way to track time, he didn’t know how long he’d been trapped down there. With no way to communicate, he didn’t know if anyone was coming to his rescue. Without any confidence in the strength of his interpersonal relationships, he didn’t know if anyone cared he was gone.
He didn’t even know why his previous attempt to rocket away had failed. He didn’t know that because so much of Terra’s mass was now above him, gravity didn’t pull on him with the same strength. He didn’t know that this hindered his sense of spatial orientation, making it difficult to feel which way was ‘up’ from within the flows of liquid metal. He didn’t know about convection currents, nor that he was currently stuck in a downward flow.
He also didn’t know about evolutionary pressures, and that external spikes on a creature usually meant that there was a greater predator lurking about. He didn’t know what kind of creature could possibly prey upon a metal worm longer than a league, so he didn’t even consider that it might exist. He also didn’t know that such a creature happened to be attracted by his recent expulsions of power.
Sol felt a wave of pressure pulse through him, shaking the very foundations of the world.
“Huh? What was—?”
Sol looked down just in time to see a clawed hand the size of building shoot out from the center of the world. He had no time to react as the claws wrapped around him and pulled him down, down, down into the deepest depths of the world.
BOOM!
With another explosion of solar destruction, Sol destroyed the hand and freed himself from the mysterious creature’s grasp. “Ugh. Just leave me alone!“
From the fathomless abyss below, twelve more clawed hands shot out at Sol.
“Motherfu—“
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It was night again, and Treskur watched from above as the band of fallen deities tore through her lands. They could not see her, but she could see them, and it took all her restraint not to smite them where they stood.
As for why she held back despite being so openly provoked, it simply wouldn’t be honorable for a goddess to strike at mortals, no matter how divine those mortals had once been.
Besides, it was likely that none of them even knew she had the power necessary to strike them all dead. When they’d all been peers, Treskur never had the chance to awe them with her power, after all.
The knowledge aspect of her portfolio urged her to let the fallen deities know her power so that they might make better informed decisions. Her war aspect kept wanting her to strike them all dead regardless of what honor demanded. Meanwhile, her criminal aspect said to hell with everything else, and told her to do whatever the fuck she wanted.
“One more day,” she growled, unheard be the fallen deities below her. “I give them one last day to see the folly of their ways and turn back. If they persist, I destroy them all.”
It was a weak compromise between the four aspects of her divinity, but it would have to do.
She watched as the fallen deities destroyed another empty village, the residents already having been teleported away to safety by Treskur herself.
The next closest settlement would take some time for even the fallen gods to reach, so Treskur allowed herself to shift her focus away from the selfish bandits below her. She decided to check up on those mortals she’d already evacuated.
She was there instantly, an impromptu camp she’d set up along the southern border of her faction’s territory. It lay within a hidden valley among the mountains, a serendipitous shelter from the winter winds. Rows upon rows of tents and fires were arrayed in ordered ranks all throughout the valley, but there was still room for more refugees should the need arise — a possibility Treskur sadly found more likely to happen than not.
Sensing nothing wrong, Treskur was about to teleport away once more, but then a single conversation among thousands caught her attention.
“Mormor,” called a child to his grandmother, “tell me a story.” The other children — the boy’s brothers, sisters, and cousins — were all asleep, and within the tent, it seemed only he and his grandmother were awake.
“You can not sleep, barnbarn?” asked the grandmother, her voice like a crackling fire. “Very well then. Would you like an old tale, or something new?”
“Old, please,” whispered the child. “The older the better.”
“Haha! Very well, barnbarn. Here is the oldest story your mormor has to tell…”
Treskur should have left right then. She knew what story the grandmother was going to tell, and she knew it was a story she didn’t want to hear.
Still, she stayed.
Perhaps her mental exhaustion was catching up to her. Perhaps it was masochistic curiosity. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Whatever the cause, Treskur continued to listen in as the grandmother spun her tale, a frown already forming on the northern goddess’ face.