“Are you ready?”

The easy manner of the Healer had transmuted, becoming more serious.

“No.”

“You will do fine. Prepare yourself,”spoke the Golem. Curt of manner he was, and direct too.

They had described the process, the way which they would rejuvenate their mind…how it would require more than the two of them——Healer and Golem, could bring to bear.

Perhaps that had always been the conceit of those trying to heal them in antecedent Eras; trying to do so by themselves.

The Golem slammed his hands together and seven circles of glyphs were stamped into being on the ground of the cloudhome.

Two Humans, three Half-goblins and a Persephoniac stepped out of the portals to the real world - and how they longed for it, and gazed up at the old god.

In those eyes they saw the portents of what they would face should they exit this prison of their own making. When.

One of the Humans was making the closed circle of forbiddance; the half-Goblins eyes were mirrors of awe and terror. A myth, they look at me as if I were a myth.

They wanted to reach out, to tell them that they could recall the lost glory of Goblins, when empires and petty kingdoms had dotted the Homeland Continent; when archons and the manors of mystics were not mere fables. But those words became ash in their mouth. All that had transpired millennia ago when they slept in the dark. It was just stories to these people.

“Begin.”

One of the Humans walked up to them.[Lot:Sword of Remembrance.] A shortsword crafted of burning regret formed before in the hands of one of the Humans.

“1…”

[Lot:The Gardens of Renewal]! Red poppies flowered on the ground of the cloudhome.

[Lot:Face Your Fear]! The air began to shake, jelly before the thunderstorm.

“2…”

They tensed. It would hurt.

[Lot:Repent, Sinner]! A scouring light washed over them.

[Lot:Trance of Terror]! They were descending beneath the sea of consciousness.

“3…”

[Lot:The Hallowed Halls of Hercator]! Goldstone pillars cascaded down in a half circle around the crowd.

The skills all began to affect them. But there were one piece of the puzzle missing. According to the Golem and the Healer there were no archmystics left in the world. The Eras when men and women took to the skies and wrought wonders had passed, for such impossible feats were no longer necessary. What an Era you must live in.

But the Golem was the next best thing. An immortal, made in the image of a archmystic of yore, capable of wielding the sacred truths. Arcane windows swerved around his head, holes to other other worlds, different truths of the same.

[The Retraction of Causality]!

The Golem’s eyes shone an unearthly emerald and the high order mystery overlapped with the [Lots] and then,

they,

were,

falling.

___

“Maceren!”

“Maceren!”

The young Goblin woman rose over the corpse of the sea drake. Her left side ached and her right arm twisted, but the [Hungry Horror of the Veins] had been slain.

The fishers of the village raised their ancient flint spears. Light glinted through the high walls of the canyon; a brush would have been needed to paint the scene.

“Maceren!”

“Maceren!”

This was the first time they had known pride over that small Goblin child that had enticed them out of their henge some odd sixteen years ago. For that girl, they had left the Divine Continent and come to Sardozil.

___

The Humans, the descendants of apes and monkeys were running, swimming through the swamp-rapids of the Origin as Maceren - who by now was the [Defender of Dreams] - unleashed terrible [Lots].

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A horror with teeth for wings and mouths for limbs were devouring slavers, toying with them even as it fed.

The Knotted Fists, the series of mangroves which were home to the Chained Unity burned with foxfire. The Order of the Wake, the followers of the [Defender of Dreams] strode the jungle with torches lit by a fire that seemed to waver in a wisteria-shade.

A terrible thing, bringing death to another continent, traversing the seas not for trade or to exchange knowledge but to bring death. Terrible, yet a worthy purpose still.

Slavery darkened the Globe and so Maceren had cried:”we make no war that is not just, and if we fight, we do so to right great wrongs!”

___

“Death.”

Purple fire enveloped the half-kin man and the scream echoed, rippling away as his body was turned to cinders.

“Next.”

“Perhaps, the next judgement should be one of mercy,” they whispered to the [Black Paladin].

The war against the Chained Unity had hardened their Chosen, and the same vigour that they had used to persecute slavers was now turned towards those…less deserving of the same harshness.

A Persephoniac was made to knelt, the wooden giant glaring up at the paladin.”I have made no wrong, committed no crime. You bring me here on falsely made grounds.” The god felt a strange ache; the titan sounded off like Maceren had, so long ago.

“You have spoken treason,” the [Black Paladin] declared.

“Treason? Great lady, I was among the first to land at the Origin. I carried your banner through the surf; planted it among the corpses of those slavering bastards.”

“Even so, you spoke-“

“Is it treason to say that you’ve lost your way? That the Protector of the Waves, the Blue Paladin herself has left your side?”

A torrent of lily fire, a stream wide as a torso melted the ground where the Persephoniac had stood in defiance; in the negative light a shadow could be made out, screaming silently.

A half circle of melted stone bubbled, so much ash blowing away.

___

The nameless god considered the old covenant sitting as they were in the dark. Power for the opportunity to walk the world. But there were older edicts, things all young gods were told before leaving their the First Henge.

To walk hand in hand with a mortal was to shift their [Affinities], to grant them power otherwise reserved for those who had taken their [Affinities] beyond average shores.

With such power came responsibilities.

The god wept for the young girl, for Maceren the Paladin who had heeded calls from all over the world and fought for innocents. But she wasn’t that person anymore, was she?

And so as hard measures grew strident they reached out for the bond between the two of them and grew a seed there. They were the Steward of Fevered Dreams; dreams could be nightmares, could be a sort of madness.

___

The Order of the Wake had been founded in the aftermath of the Slaying; they had championed Maceren’s causes through the war against the Unity, surviving the months long voyages across the seas but now they were fleeing.

Much could be born, but not the forced chain of slavery. In this, the[Black Paladin] had erred.

Zalin of the Manors called down great burning orbs from the sky, scattering the few followers like gulls before a tiger.

Anoret, whose name had echoed through battles of the Crusade as the Blue Paladin raised a wave over the heavens and the prodigy of fire and water was a battlefield of steam that covered the stronghold.

At its center, Maceren waited.

Clad in glittering white bone, skin red as blood with eyes the shade of a unclouded sky she could have been a vision, but the god thought she looked afraid.

Through the great sheet of steam two approaching figures could be made out; one covered in a glorious fire, the other swathed in cerulean.

“I meet my end alone,” Maceren spat.

The archmystic and the paladin had drawn close now.

“Not alone,” answered the god. Maceren had forgotten the font of her power, the god she carried within her mind and body. But they had not forgotten her, and the seed with which they had planted with cold reason had grown. Ripened.

“Never alone,” the god reiterated.[Lot:The Forgotten Fields of Asphodel].

A scream forced its way out of Maceren’s throat. She bounced on the ground, eyes gone blank like milk. Her [Affinity] began to warp and weave, shattering under the power of a god’s skills. What had been given could be rescinded.

She seized her mace, the head of which was the skull of a sea drake. The blunt instrument rose, ultimately clattering on the ground. Blood seeped out from the corners of her eyes.

“I…”

“Schhh…”

“Whh-Why..?”

“Because I said I would protect you, did I not?”

The two great ones were so close now.

“Ha…liar…”

“I…I wanted to be…”

Maceren, who had been the [Defender of Dreams] and later the [Black Paladin] took a deep breath and died.

Zalin of the Manors strode out through the mist, his smouldering armour cracking like pooling lava; to his left Anoret of the Waves walked, each step leaving water on the ground.

The archmystic surveyed the scene; the fallen paladin, the presence of the god, the sound of weapons clashing in the background.

“It’s over,”the god said.

“You think,” the archmystic denied.

“No,” the Blue Paladin answered.

But it was, atleast for Maceren. For the god, their long confinement began.

_____

The god looked down on the blade that protruded from their stomach. The healers stood around them, with both the Healer and the Golem standing next to them.

They gasped as the sword of starry motes came loose. The pain the god felt was not real, for nothing in this place was real. Yet their eyes stung, great tears inching down their cheeks.

“It was I. Always I.”

The laughter bubbled up from their throat. To the listeners, who knew them only as a myth, a horror from an forgotten Era, it sounded like sobs.

“I safeguarded her at the end.”

Just as I had promised.

This was the great secret. The room within the maze of their mind, the layer within the layer that had never been penetrated. That, at the end of the Crusade, the First Crusade as the Healer called it, they, and not the crusaders had stopped [Black Paladin].

The god who was nameless reached out through their [Lots], finding the one that had started this all those millennia ago.

“I will be seeing you,” they said to nobody in particular.”[Lot: The Bicameral Mind]”

The healers and the Healer; faces worried, the Golem, staring resolutely at them, the cloudhome itself fell away and-

-they woke up.

Soft. Atrophied fingers gripped the warm covers, launching them across the room.

Foxfire erupted in a sheath around their body - and the crush of real sensations after so long was almost enough to drive them mad - incinerating the covers, the bed of a metal unlike bronze and they tumbled down on the floor.

They began to cry. Real pain, real touch after so long…!

Voices, loud and strident erupted from beyond the confines of the sickward they found themselves in.

Throat parched, body shaking, they crawled, still covered by the pale fire. Their hand touched a wall and fire funnelled itself like a cloak in the wind and then there was night.

Beautiful night, a veil of glittering stars above the coast filled with spindly trees reaching for the sky. The Worm Forest.

“Are you aware?”

Who said that? The Healer? It didn’t matter.

“I am here,” the demented god said at last.