Well, that was horrifying. That was the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me, I thought. Which only meant I was still in shock about the reality of the situation. Even in my shocked, cloudy state, there was something in that meeting with Marus that gave me an idea. Marus had mentioned the world. Yaiya. There was a god globe in the hall of the gods.

You might be a mortal, so you might not know. A god globe lets you look down on the world and see what's happening from above. You can even zoom in down to individual people if you know how. I always felt that was a little creepy. I just figured if it was bad to look in someone's window when they thought they were private, then it didn't make it any better if you do it with god magic or remote viewing or anything. It's all the same thing. Anyway, it usually didn't come up much because I didn't own a god globe anyway. They were actually super expensive. Mostly only the highest ranking gods or gods that needed them for their area of influence had them. Which is why I didn't think of it in the first place.

In ordinary circumstances, I would never be able to use the god globe in The Hall, but there was literally nobody around anymore, so I figured it would be fine. I went back into the hall of the gods. Trying not to think about what the mess inside might imply, I made my way to the globe room. It was a special version of the god globe made for public display instead of private plotting and brooding and spying. When you stand in the dias and activate the globe, you can then manoeuvre and spin and rotate the Yaiya and even other worlds with just gestures from your hands.

I suspended Yaiya, spinning her slowly between my hands. Rather than her usual beautiful glow, she looked sick, dark and maybe a bit…rotten. Okay, that's bad. You might not think Yaiya would mean that much to me, being a god and spending a lot of time in various heavenly realms and so forth. But the truth is I played a lot on her as a child. Even if I didn't visit that much recently, she always seemed like a place I could visit any time. A place I would go a lot once I had some kind of area of influence to look after. Now, it looked like that inevitability was an impossibility.

There was something else wrong with the Yaiya as well. No, not wrong with Yaiya itself I didn't think, just with the god globe itself. Whole portions of the world were fogged out. A close inspection revealed that large parts of the image of Yaiya were actually just broken. The broken patches were filled with a blurry, unmoving placeholder image of what ought to be there. The god globe must have been damaged. Only about 40% of the glove was showing a real image of the world, but that was enough to get a good idea of the extent of whatever was going on.

Stolen novel; please report.

The parts of the globe that were functioning were…dark. Dark in a way that frustrated the eye and made you anxious. Like, have you ever had a dream where you can't see well? Maybe it's dark, and you turn on a light in your dream, but you still can't see well? As if maybe the problem is not that the figure you are trying to look at is hidden in shadows, but maybe it is made out of shadows? That was what the accurate parts of the globe looked like.

I zoomed in to try to figure out what was happening. Down through the world level, the cloud level, the continent level, the country level, the city level, down to the level of the buildings.

What I saw was too much to even characterize. In one place, mortals doing horrible things to other mortals, then a monster I had never heard of before manipulating the beheaded bodies of a hundred people like puppets. There were things on fire and areas of death, ruin and destruction, and those were, in a way, the most normal. The most comforting. Because such things have always happened in wars and in the abuses that mortals, and if I'm honest, gods too, sometimes, inflict on one another.

But those at least make sense. At least there is a personal motive behind those wars. Someone imagines that they need to start a war for the sake of survival, or for a moral cause or, again, let's be honest, for a god.

Now, I saw strong marble pillars that would come away in handfuls like sand or crumble at a mere push. Everything that was built or made became worthless and worse than worthless because it would fail those who relied upon it.

I saw reasonless actions by the mortals, whole communities gleefully brawling with each other. I saw a mother… I saw too much horrible stuff. I don't need to talk about it here. I don't want to think about it even.

I don't know how long I scanned the globe, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Knowing what I know now, it was way too long. I should have been running like Marus said, but instead I zoomed out a bit to examine a different region, hoping that what I was seeing was just in one group of people, or one country or… and as I did so, a little area of light caught my eye. A small place. Nothing more than an island and a bit of surrounding water connected to the shore by a long bridge.

V0.2.1 10/31/23