“Empty again,” complained a man with four metallic arms.
He casually punched one of the modest buildings beside him. With but a touch of his strength, he destroyed a wall and collapsed the roof, demolishing what must have once been a family’s home.
Snow and splinters were kicked up into the air, but the man just waved the airborne debris out of his face, annoyed. “Fourth village today, and not a soul around to fight me.”
Luna turned to regard the man, and he in turn regarded her. It took all her willpower not to wrinkle her nose in disgust — not at the way he looked at her, but at the way he saw her.
Even bundled in furs, she felt exposed. After millennia spent as an unknowable enigma, to be comprehended by mere eyes was beyond unnerving.
Aolyn had torn down the wall between her and the world, and now she was vulnerable. To be seen felt like sin.
Luna felt no cold, but she instinctually pulled her layers of fur tighter around herself to ward off the unwanted gaze. Inwardly, she cursed herself for the action, viewing it as a subconscious admission of weakness. Outwardly, she stared down the other fallen deity, icy and unshaken.
“Believe it or not, Treskur calls this village a city. Rhyshagen, she’s named it,” Luna said. She addressed only the lone man before her, but made sure her words carried to reach the other five hundred former deities prowling the streets, searching for prey. “Regardless, I ask that you keep your patience, Brelumn. My plan is working.
“Minutes before we arrived, this place was teeming with those barbaric northerners. For it to be deserted now means that Treskur expended some level of divinity to whisk all her followers away, just as she did with the other towns. She can’t keep this up forever. Sooner rather than later, she will tire and be forced to capitulate.
“Once we force her to declare victory over the [Inter-Council Assembly], that accursed addendum will be nullified and we’ll regain our divinity. Believe me, things will return to normal soon, so long as you continue to follow my lead.”
Luna’s words had a placative effect on her audience, but she could tell many still wanted to grumble. They’d only been campaigning for a little over a month, yet many were already frustrated with their lack of total victory — or rather total defeat, in this case.
For a group of once-timeless beings, they sure were impatient. Having spent time as deities must have accustomed them to instant gratification, Luna supposed.
Sensing the need for further assurances, Luna spoke again, this time addressing the entire group directly. “We number five hundred!” she yelled. “Each and every one of us has tasted what lies beyond the apex of mortal power, and we shall taste it again! Naught but a single goddess stands between us and our rightful place above all creation, and who is she to stop us?
“Before us, she shall fall!”
A cheer passed through the crowd, loudest among them being the more… instinctually driven minds. Luna’s passionate but ultimately meaningless words had achieved their desired effect, and now she just needed to—
“Bold words for a mortal.”
Every eye and ocular equivalent locked onto the one that had just spoken.
She appeared from nowhere, or perhaps she’d been there the whole time, and only now deigned to become visible. Standing upon the air above the temple at the city’s center, shrouded in the violent whirls of her personal rimestorm, she glowered down at them all. Her muddy-green eyes were filled with disgust.
Treskur, sole god of the [Frigid North], now sole god of the world.
Many of the fallen deities flinched, but Luna was steady as stone. “Hello, Treskur. Have you come to accept our conditional surrender?”
“Shameless,” Treskur growled. “Were not half of you at one time called gods of honor? Gods of compassion? Gods of wisdom? Why do you now—“
“Treskur, that’s enough of your—“
“YOU WILL BE SILENT WHILE I AM SPEAKING!” thundered the goddess. Divinity laced her words, and Luna was struck dumb. The moonstone spellcaster touched a hand to her lips, and found them sealed shut.
“If it were not so foolish, I would find your arrogance impressive,” Treskur went on. “To spit at a goddess within her own domain? Such an act ventures past hubris and into the realm of madness. Before I destroy you all, I offer you one last opportunity to reflect on your actions and turn back.”
Once Treskur finished speaking, Luna felt the divinity sealing her lips disappear, but she wasn’t the first among her group to speak.
“If I may be so bold,” interjected a sentient mass of moss wearing glasses, “allow me to say that we are the wronged party, not you. We were deceived and had our divinity stolen away by none other than you and Aolyn the Mad. It was you, Treskur, who colluded with an explicitly evil god to bring about what many are now calling the [Divine Apocalypse]. The world is in chaos because of your actions.”
“Well said, Musgo, but I don’t care,” Treskur said.
All around her, Luna heard the scandalized cries of her fellow fallen reacting to the brusque statement, but once again she herself remained silent, awaiting the perfect opportunity to strike with her words.
“I am a goddess of honor, not of law,” Treskur went on. “I care not what you deem right or wrong. My only regret is that I did not betray this pantheon earlier, when I first recognized its corrupted roots.”
“With one breath you claim honor, but with another you praise betrayal?” accused the glasses-wearing moss. “Are you a goddess of hypocrisy?”
“I owe none of you an explanation, but I’ll provide it nonetheless. Law concerns itself neither with what is right, nor what is good, nor even what ought to be. Law is nothing more than the codified will of the powerful.
“Honor, however, resists definition. It is known, or it is not. The words and wills of lawyers and lords may neither bestow nor besmirch the honor of another. Even I, a god, have only the power to recognize what is already there, but even that perception is not unique to me, nor is my sense infallible.
“Riddle me this, Musgo. Was it honorable of me to sit by all those millennia as mortals all around the world suffered under the negligence of their gods? Was it honorable of me to attempt to fix a broken system from within? Was it honorable of me to trade away expedience for the mere potential of nonviolent resolution?
“And though I never lied, was it honorable of me to deceive? You all who never treated me half as well as the dirt beneath your feet, was it honorable of me to betray you with naught but the truth? Was it honorable of me to venture down the shortest route to a better world, no matter how fetid the path had proven to be?
“For all these questions, I have not the answers. Perhaps in a few days’ or decades’ time, I’ll come to recognize the nature of my actions, but even then, at least I’ll know I acted as best I could in the moment.
“But enough vague philosophizing. This is your last chance. Turn back, or die.”
Luna sensed many of her fellow fallen wavering at the pronouncement, and now was her time to strike. She needed to reassure them quickly, or else her hopes or reattaining godhood would be dashed forever. In order to pressure a goddess — even a godess like Treskur — into complying with their demands, they would need to stand united.
“The fact that she is giving us the option to flee is proof that she can not handle us all!” Luna declared. “If she could kill us all, she would have done so from the start! For her to show up now means she’s desperate! Stick to the plan, and we’ll succeed!”
Bolstered by her words, those who were wavering managed to stand their ground, but with differing levels of fervor. Luna took note of the most cowardly among them — when this was all over, she’d make an example of them — but ultimately, they all held firm.
“Very well then,” Treskur said when it was clear no one was buying her bluff. “Prepare to die.”
She raised her arms and her eyes glowed icy-blue. A pillar of light shot out from beneath her, slamming into the earth and destroying the temple below.
Before Luna nor any of the other fallen could question what the barbarian was doing, lines of destruction spread across the ground, emanating from the shattered temple. The goddess’ power froze and sundered the earth wherever it spread, jagged cracks propagating outward at the speed of sound.
Before the attack could reach them, Luna and every other fallen with the ability to fly launched themselves into the air. From her heightened vantage point, Luna observed that the ostensibly wanton destruction had actually been deliberately guided. When viewed from above, the seemingly random lines broken into the ground actually formed the immaculate lattice of a snowflake. The lattice was massive, four times the diameter of Rhyshagen in length, spreading both inland and into the now-frozen ocean of ice.
More notable was the fact that the attack hadn’t harmed a single member or Luna’s impromptu warband. Even those fallen deities incapable of escaping into the air or otherwise too surprised to dodge were also left untouched. It was as if Treskur had intentionally sculpted her attack to avoid striking them, which made no sense.
Why would Treskur destroy her own city with such an inefficient, bloodless attack? It was almost as if…
Luna wasted no time in finishing the thought. She snapped her head around to more closely analyze the lattice of broken earth, its shape and distribution of lines, the arrangement and densities of fallen deities within those lines…
For the first time in untold millennia, the moonstone sorcerer’s heart was filled was fear.
Treskur hadn’t been bluffing.
“RUN!” Luna screamed, voice tearing from the strain. “EVERYONE RUN A—!”
Too puzzled to react immediately, none of her fellow fallen got away in time. Even Luna herself — the first to react and already flying away at top speed — was too slow.
Light erupted from every crack in the ocean and earth, and with it rose crystalline walls of ice. They grew with violent speed, shooting up from the ground with all the might of a thousand volcanic eruptions.
Luna did her best to maneuver around the rapidly growing walls, but they were too fast. New walls splintered off from those that had already formed, jutting out in front of her no matter where she flew. Within moments, she was trapped in a divinely reinforced labyrinth of sheer cold. Even her enhanced perception couldn’t penetrate the walls.
She’d failed.
She was trapped.
She was alone.
Her only company were the thousand reflections coming off of every facet of the crystalline walls, each showing her an image of herself.
She locked eyes with with one such reflection in the wall before her, and the sight was disgusting.
Just weeks ago, no mere light would dare contain her image, but now…
Luna took in a breath through clenched teeth, forcing herself to look into the image before her.
She saw a coward, bundled in furs to hide from the world.
She saw a fool, a leader who’d led her entire pantheon first into mortality, and now into a trap.
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She saw a failure, a goddess of the unknowable whose form was now utterly comprehendible.
CRACK!
Luna smashed the reflection before her. Cracks spread through the ice as if it were glass, but it did not fall apart. The single facet became dozens, and within each new shard of ice was born a fresh image of the fallen goddess.
“AAAAAAAAAH!”
She smashed the wall again and again, pummeling it with a flurry of blows until each facet was barely as large as a fingernail, but still, the wall held firm.
With one last strike, she planted her fist against the wall and kept it there. She stared into her reflections, each showing naught but one of her opalescent grey eyes staring back.
“You shouldn’t have been able to do this. You were never this strong, Treskur.”
“Not exactly a question, but I suppose I could still enlighten you.”
Luna swiveled her gaze and locked onto the source of the voice, a reflection of an eye shining muddy-green. She smashed it, but the voice came again, this time from behind her.
“I’ve never seen you so overtaken by passion, Luna. Perhaps a month of mortality has done you well.”
Upon a facet of the wall behind her was an image of that traitorous bastard. Luna kicked out, and the single image became sixteen.
“How?” Luna demanded. “The Treskur I knew couldn’t pull off a miracle this large, this fast. You couldn’t have refined this much divinity in a single month. Unless…”
“Unless I’d always been this powerful, and just never revealed it?” the sixteen reflections asked, finishing the fallen goddess’ unspoken thought.
Luna grit her teeth. “Why not just kill us all then? You had us. You spent all that time hiding your strength. Why waste the effort to trap us when you could’ve had our heads?”
“There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between us,” Treskur said, stepping out of the wall and into the labyrinth.
Luna clenched her fists, but otherwise didn’t react to the goddess appearing before her.
“First of all, I never hid my strength. I just never revealed it.” Treskur went on. “Once I gained a seat on the [Century Council], there was no reason beyond vanity to do so. None of you listened to me anyway. What would going from the fiftieth to the fortieth strongest god have done for me?”
Luna wanted to rebuke the goddess, but knew she was right. Though the difference between Treskur’s expected level of power and the power she now displayed was large, it wasn’t so large that it would’ve caused a splash had they all still been gods.
“As to why I didn’t just kill you all, there are few things more dishonorable than for a god to strike down a gaggle of mortals, no matter how ill-behaved those mortals may be. You all had so many opportunities to turn back, but none of you did. I could’ve commended your unity and resolution, if only those admirable qualities hadn’t been turned to such ignoble ends.”
“Enough of your damned preaching!” Luna yelled. “The only way you can get people to listen to your insufferable babbling is to trap them in a labyrinth! You’ve never been anything but a pretentious, unoriginal asshole. Having power doesn’t change that. With every ounce of sincerity that I can possibly muster, believe me when I say fuck you, Treskur. I would tell you to go take your honor and shove it up your ass, but it seems there’s already a giant stick in the way.”
Luna had no illusions that’d she’d get out of this alive. The only way she could see herself potentially surviving against a goddess would be to submit, but there was no way she was submitting to Treskur.
“Maybe you’re right,” Treskur replied, her tone suddenly casual.
Luna blinked. “What?”
“I’ve never much enjoyed being a deity, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Figures that you wouldn’t understand. For the rest of you, godhood was one big vacation. Most of the time, it felt like I was the only one who took it seriously. The rest of the time, I knew I was.”
“I thought we agreed you would stop with the moral superiority complex?”
“Fair enough. We’ll never agree about what the point of being a deity even is, so what’s the point of arguing about it? Besides, there’s something else I want to show you.”
Treskur rapped her knuckles against an unbroken wall beside her, and each of its hundreds of facets transformed to reflect a different scene. Every scene contained a different fallen deity, showing them as they wandered about the icy labyrinth, aimless and lost.
“Why show me this?” Luna demanded. “How do I know this is real?”
“Finally, some questions I can answer.”
Treskur snapped her fingers, and the chaos was immediate.
The reflected images exploded into violence. Spears and limbs of ice struck out at each of the fallen, catching many of the [Tier S] entities by surprise.
Each strike originated from the point-of-view Luna observed through the reflections, and much to her horror, she realized that the reflections weren’t gleaned from some arbitrarily placed scrying spells. If what she saw could be believed, each of the hundreds of facets of crystalline ice actually allowed her to gaze through the eyes of a creature capable of singlehandedly attacking a fallen deity.
“This is impossible,” Luna whispered. Due to the nature of peering through their eyes, Luna couldn’t tell what the creatures themselves looked like, and neither did they leave reflections in the ice around them. From her brief glimpses of striking limbs, her best guess was that they were humanoids weilding spears of ice, but such a simple description wouldn’t do them justice.
Whatever they were, they were ruthless.
Luna could only watch as her fellow fallen were slaughtered. Taken by surprise, each member of the former pantheon mounted a futile resistance. Their blood stained the air and the walls around them, turning the crystal halls into a malefic kaleidoscope of scarlet. Their screams and howls echoed throughout the labyrinth, and from the sound, Luna knew what she saw to be real.
Then came the first death.
Brelumn — the four-metal-armed idiot with a skull thicker than his muscles — grappled his assailant mid-strike, halting the spear’s momentum and lifting his opponent into the air. His lips started moving, and though Luna couldn’t hear what he said, she knew from the curve of his smirk that he was taunting his helpless attacker.
He never saw the second one coming.
It came from the wall behind him, invisible until the moment it emerged, spear already extended in a strike. The weapon pierced through the base of Brelumn’s skull, then exploded out his eye.
Brelumn’s form crumpled to the ground, but his hold upon the first creature remained. The second released its implanted spear to aid the first in prying itself free of the metallic vice, and as their gazes each landed on the other, Luna got her first real look at one of the creatures. They looked exactly like Treskur’s mortals — tusked humanoids with wide frames and hard, impassive eyes — except they were naked, shaved, and made completely from ice.
As the second aided the first in pulling apart the fallen god’s fingers, the fallen god’s body sprung back to life. He screamed silently through the reflection, a cry of war Luna could not hear, but nevertheless understood.
You think that was enough to kill ME?
A spear still protruding from either end of his head, Brelumn tightened his grip on the first creature, shattering it into a thousand shards that exploded in every direction. Some of the shards struck Brelumn directly, but none did much damage.
Even as its ally died, the remaining creature did not hesitate. In one fluid movement, it fell into the floor to dodge a punch while grabbing its shattered companion’s spear. Before the half-blind Brelumn could collect himself, the creature again erupted from the ice, this time emerging from above and to the side of the fallen god’s punctured eye.
Unfortunately for the creature, Brelumn did not need his eyes to see.
Having twice now been taken by surprise, Brelumn was ready. He swung around, meeting the plunging strike with a double-backhand that shattered both the creature’s arm and its borrowed spear, leaving it with nothing but a jagged stump beneath one shoulder. With his other two arms, he carried the momentum of his half-spin into a pair of brutal haymakers.
The blows connected, and everything below the creature’s chest disappeared in another explosion of ineffective icy shrapnel.
Having recently learned a lesson about not taunting his foes, Brelumn took no chances. He threw another pair of punches in an attempt to destroy the creature entirely… but somehow, he was too slow.
The creature slapped an incoming fist. The slap did nothing to alter the fist’s trajectory, but instead allowed the airborne creature to throw itself to the ground, out of harm’s way.
Luna and Brelumn were both dumbfounded. Brelumn was indeed injured, but there was no way a creature reduced to nothing but a head, chest, and one and a half arms should be able to outspeed a [Tier S] [Pugilist].
Still watching through the ice creature’ eyes, Luna realized what was happening. The innocuous shards of ice that had exploded out with every one of the creatures’ injuries weren’t so harmless. Many had embedded themselves all over Brelumn’s skin, and they were growing.
Worse yet, there was still a spear of ice embedded in his skull, and the frost was spreading from his eye. There was no telling how deep within him the chill had already reached.
Probably realizing the same thing as Luna, Brelumn yanked the spear from his eye, and from his lips let loose another silent scream. He threw the spear away, but the ice continued to spread. Brelumn then tried ripping the shards of ice off of his flesh, but there were simply too many, and they were spreading their chill too fast. Besides, the ice was already within him, inside his skull, freezing him from the inside-out.
What was left of the creature had already taken the opportunity to hobble away and sink back into the floor, leaving Brelumn alone to his futile efforts. From within the walls, it watched as the fallen deity slowly succumbed… slowing… slowing as his first the joints of his legs became bound by the cold… and then his arms… and then his remaining eye.
Unable to maintain his balance, Brelumn fell onto his back. Struggling until the very end, he screamed in defiance of the inevitable, and in the shape of one final howl, his face was frozen forever.
Only once its quarry had stilled completely did the creature emerge from the wall. It dragged itself to the frozen face of the once-great god and reared back with the jagged stump that had once been an arm.
Without flourish, without ceremony, without grace, it stabbed. It stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, plunging its sharpened limb through the eyes of the fallen god over and over again until at last he was dead.
A pulse of soul spread throughout the labyrinth, heralding the death of the powerful [Liege]. Despite the crystalline wall’s perception dampening attributes, Luna could feel it from where she stood, and judging from the shocked faces she observed through the eyes of every other creature of ice, so could the rest of her fellow fallen.
Treskur again tapped the wall, and the conjured reflections disappeared, only to be replaced by the image of Luna’s own stunned visage reflected from hundreds of different angles.
“You know, Luna,” Treskur began, her tone lighthearted but weary, “up until this moment, I never took seriously the possibility that I might kill you all. I told myself over and over again that today is the day, the day that you all die if you don’t turn back, but still, I never thought it would come to this.”
A second pulse of soul spread throughout the halls, heralding a second death. Then came a third and a fourth. The screams came from every direction.
“Last night, I spent hours agonizing over… over nothing, I suppose,” Treskur went on, heedless of the death echoing around her. “All my problems could have been solved just by murdering all of you, but I never actually considered doing it. How stupid is that? How stupid am I?”
A fifth, sixth, and seventh pulse washed over Luna. Then came the tenth, the fifteenth, and the twentieth.
“I’m a goddess of war who swore that I might kill you all, but the thought never crossed my mind that I’d really do it. How much of an idiot does that make me? How much of a fool can I be?”
Soon, the pulses of death came so quickly that they overlapped into waves, and it became difficult to determine just how many of her comrades were dying by the second.
Luna’s face twisted in rage.
“You call this honor?!?”
“I call it war.”
“Stop with the fucking riddles! For once in your miserable life, just say what you mean! Speak plainly, you ice-brained wad of hypocrisy!”
Luna stepped toward the goddess, heedless of the danger. “You think you’re better than the rest of us just because you hang around your mortals? I’ll let you in on a little secret. Only hanging around people vastly less powerful than you doesn’t make you a benevolent overseer. It makes you a fucking creep. You’re fucking creepy, Treskur. You’re a goddess with a mortal fetish, and nothing more.
“You don’t even deserve to be a god! You don’t even want it! Declare your victory this instant, and I promise I’ll wipe all your angsty bullshit from the face of existence! That’s what you want, isn’t it? If being a deity is so hard, just be a fucking mortal and let the rest of us deal with it! Get over yourself and fucking give up.”
“You want me to speak plainly?” Treskur asked, the quiet gravel of anger seeping into her voice. “Fine. I’ll speak plainly.
“I helped Aolyn get rid of all the gods because I do think I’m better than you. I hated the way of the world, and I wanted to change it. I declared war so that I could stay in power while the rest of you fell, but only so that I could help save the souls of your followers from annihilation when all your heavens and hells simultaneously disappeared — not that any of you were worried enough about your followers’ souls to even ask about them in the first place.
“And were my actions honorable? I don’t fucking know! But as a goddess of honor, my honor should be impeccable. The fact we can even be arguing about it proves my shame, but what else was I supposed to do? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to simultaneously be a goddess of honor and war?
“Honor is tearing me apart from within because I used my godly powers to imprison you. War is chastising me for not smiting you where you stand. War demanded that my soldiers of ice ambush you all one by one, bringing their full force to bear on each of you individually for a complete defeat in detail. Honor demanded that I not ambush you at all!
“I compromised, and now neither aspect is happy, and the pain is unimaginable.
“You say I don’t want to be a goddess? You say I don’t deserve it? Maybe you’re right! Fuck it! I never asked for this in the first place, so why don’t I just give it up?”
Treskur closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and when she next spoke, her voice thrummed with divinity. “I hereby relinquish my divine authority over both honor and war.”
Luna felt Treskur’s words take hold over reality, and knew the deed to be done. As a goddess, Treskur was forever diminished.
“So we’re agreed, then. Now, declare your victory so that the rest of us may regain our rightful powers.”
“I’m not finished yet,” Treskur said. “I am still a goddess of knowledge and criminals, but what sort of buffoon willingly gives up power? Perhaps I'm not so fit to claim knowledge after all. In fact, I relinquish it.”
Luna felt the words again take hold of reality, and once more, Treskur was diminished.
Luna’s heart stopped in her chest as she realized what the northern goddess was doing. In spite of both the cold and her stone anatomy, sweat formed on her brow.
“Treskur, stop. Declare your victory right now. If you become mortal, we’re all stuck like this forever! There might never be another deity in all of Terra ever again!”
“Hadraniel, I know you’re watching,” Treskur said, ignoring Luna’s pleas. “Take care of all the souls, won’t you?”
“Treskur, no. Don’t do it.”
“I’ve already given up three-quarters of my portfolio because I felt like I didn’t deserve them. I claim to be a criminal, but what sort of criminal returns what they don’t deserve?”
“No, Treskur, don’t! Please! Please don’t do it! I’m begging you!”
“Did I ever tell you how I became a goddess, Luna?”
“Stop!” Luna commanded. “Stop right now!”
Treskur didn’t stop. Wordlessly, she raised a hand. Three of her fingers were pinched together, the way one would hold a grain of salt. She looked straight into Luna’s eyes, and released her grip.
One last pulse of divinity escaped Treskur’s form, and she was a goddess no more.
There were no more gods on Terra, and there might never be another ever again.
A spear of ice formed in Treskur’s hand.
“Time to finish my dance.”