They plotted to shatter her soul. It was a momentous decision for Orikka to make, one more radical than any decision they had ever put forward ever before. To capture her, Orikka set up a snare, one baited with a cache of rabbit ghosts, looping their deaths over and over, caught in an electromagnetic field, an intensity of energy Yanus would be sure not to miss, she would then become trapped in it herself and her soul ripped apart, bonded to the ghosts, who would then themselves scatter.

‘Wouldn’t this be an effective method to diffuse the souls trapped in other gods?’ Iseult wondered. Orikka looked pained, presumably at the thought of effectively murdering their children. ‘The souls are still corrupted, just spread out, damaging more ghosts, preventing them from purifying either. We are only compounding the problem, but for the moment this is a more attractive solution to the en masse build up of energy Yanus was garnering before.’ Iseult tapped her fingers, frustrated. Of course this would only increase the problem. The solution wouldn’t be so easy. They need the gods to find peace, after all, to choose it. What if they had someone to show them how? To lead them, she mused. Well, they would have to come up with a method to do so, first. But it was an idea worth noting.

Attracting Yanus was easier than Iseult expected, the god’s appetites an insatiable thing, always greedy for more. What was harder was listening to her death as her soul was ripped apart.

Iseult had lived in the city for all her life. Her interactions with animals were limited to the occasional zoo trip. She hadn’t even encountered many animal ghosts, the city was so ancient that not many lingered. So she had no way of knowing the death cry of a rabbit would be so excruciatingly eerie. It was at a decimal she hadn’t known any animal could reach, going on and on and on as the trap pulled her body and soul apart at the seams. She could see the other living rabbits rushing about, terrified at the death of their god. Bits of souls flaked off, caught in rabbit ghosts surrounding, the corruption a visible, corrosive damage to the apparitions as they scampered away, freed from the field. The entire thing was traumatizing to Iseult, who was just a bystander, she couldn’t imagine what it was like for Yanus. Didn’t want to imagine what it was like. Eventually there was nothing left, Yanus’s soul fractured, abandoning the charred remains of her corpse, which fell apart before them, crumbling to dust, leaving behind only her opal eye, the last sliver of her soul attached. Orikka picked it up, cradling it to their chest. The last memento of their daughter. How horrible the decision must have been for them, Iseult thought, her heart aching for the ancient god. They felt so deeply for each of their children, to condemn one of them to such a brutal death must have been a difficult decision. Had it been a hard decision for her father as well, she wondered. She shied away from the thought, unwilling to compare her adopted parent to Gual. This was different, she assured herself.

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They left soon after that, after the dissolution of the field, preventing any other being from becoming trapped and doomed to the same fate. She wondered if she would always feel guilty for what happened to Yanus, if that last scream would haunt her. Perhaps it was what she deserved. Yanus, no matter how mad, how greedy, no matter all of her vices, deserved better than what had happened to her.

Returning to the cloud castle had Iseult burying herself in her research. The idea of having a being, a god for the other gods to follow wouldn’t leave her mind. A god-messiah, to lead them to a paradise of peace, to purify them. What would Orikka think of birthing a god born to die? When put that way it was a sobering thought.

But back to the soul gate. It all hinged on making a gate. Their research into the moribund as a gate hadn’t produced any leads into creating one for gods. Perhaps it was finally time to move on. The churning of the rabbits during the ritual seemed to have pulled in both the worldly ghosts and the purified souls. They had seemed to meld with the soul dimension, to bend spacetime with their actions, if only for a brief time. Perhaps saturating a small locality for a longer time with faster moving, more pure souls would be enough to condense spacetime and puncture through? But how would she test this hypothesis? They had hoped that the moribund was key simply because it was Orikka’s expertise, but if that were the case they might need another speciality. A messiah. A soul-god. Another god that had not killed their kin.

They could start with a demi-god, one directly from immediate Orikka’s line. But how to have a sufficient sacrifice to become a god without kin killing? Presumably their kin would be Orikka, or another god. Unless they could do a ritualistic sacrifice, give Orikka another body to die in, so that they could rise again after the god-hood was initialized, purifying the soul of the newly formed god. Orikka had said that the stillbirth of Gual’s godhood had them questioning the entirety of what they knew about the process, that the process had more intricacies than they anticipated. It would be a risk for Orikka’s soul, they would have to make sure it wasn’t consumed in the process, so that it could be recondensed, reconstructed itself afterwards. And there was no assurance that it wouldn’t negate the godhood, return this hypothetical god to demi-god status. Or even that the newly formed god would retain the soul mark, considering they had technically committed a kin killing, even if it were reconstituted.

But if they remained a god, purified their soul through the sacrament of Orikka’s resurrection, after they had achieved godhood they would be the only other god to have access to the realm of the souls, would be able to open a gate via a congregation of pure souls and bend spacetime to puncture through between the living world and the higher dimensional realm of souls. After which they would be able to lead the other gods through the gate and to purification. It was a stretch, but it was a hypothesis they hadn’t explored before, and that was more promising than spending time with one that hadn’t manifested any results. This way the moribund would be entirely circumvented, they wouldn’t have to try and force a corrupted godsoul through it. A god-messiah. She would have to discuss it with Orikka.