Leon felt himself float upwards and watched the bloodied remains of his body grow smaller as he slowly ascended skywards. He saw the round oval of the arena and the many spectators which turned to ants as he continued to float. He became the sky; the clouds were his children. He could see the ocean, blue and shining beneath him as he became free. He became incorporeal filling the entire sky with his essence. He explored the extent of his mind, flexing and reaching out his tendrils of power, forming little clouds that were his eyes, or else commanded the birds which became his eyes.
As he filled the heavens with his self, he became aware of little sparks of energy which swirled up into his sky body, clinging to him, adding whispers of their past lives. Their weight became heavy and the sky was soon crowded with souls. He heard the whisper of the sky itself, a voice that was weak and feeble spoke to him. It showed him a vision of what once was, a vision that was both great and terrible at once.
In the beginning the souls of man had been bound to the wheel, a wheel driven by the father of the sky. Here in the heavens, the souls of the dead resided. Some were calm, gently sleeping amidst his billowing clouds, winking into the stars as their dreams and memories lit up the night sky every night. Others were scorching hot needle points. Their angry malevolence sweltered against the sky, raking out in violent, unbridled fury at the ground below. All these forces welled up inside the sky, impregnating it with their intermixing consciousness.
Yet in reality, the land and the sky were really one, a fragmented unit filled with opposing forces; life and death; land, sea, and sky; good and evil. These forces muddled together, blending in messy marbled layers. Yet all were driven by the wheel. It turned, forcing the balance to continue to churn in time causing the seasons to come and pass in a great cycle.
The Sky Father had turned the wheel and occasionally vent the oppression of souls that filled up and saturated his clouds. In those moments he let them vent, sending the souls of heaven back to the earth in torrents of rain, releasing them back into the grip of life to be born once again. As they filled the ground, their essence was returned to the planet, filling slowly back into all the living things until the time came for them to once again return to the blissful slumber among the sky. Only those whose lives had reached fulfillment were free from the cycle, imprinting themselves as stars which eternally winked as they slept and dreamed of paradise.
Leon watched as the lives of men shifted and swayed living, dying, and reuniting in a cycle of harmony as he breathed balance back to the cycle. He felt cooling airs of passivity blow, cooling the flames of war. The cities of men crumbled to dust as men shed the machinations of power and lust for control, returning to small communities to live out their lives in communion with the earth itself.
Yet Leon felt a stirring from within the earth. A dark and unyielding force that tug at him, stealing away the hearts of the men who lived above. It was a writhing slithering mass of rage and jealousy. The souls of vengeance and dishonor he expelled from his sky fueled it with their hate, filling it, with increasing power until it rose from the crags and caves taking a form that was all too familiar to Leon.
Raek, the god of the earth, he whom his grandmother had taught him to respect and to pray to. Raek was an entity that fed on war, petulance, and turmoil. The truth dawned on Leon even as he felt the plague of Raek once again spread, infecting and awakening once again the blackest reaches of the hearts of men.
From out of the depths of his mountain halls, came Raek’s brothers, taking on physical but shadowy forms clad in black armor that seeped the very color in the aura that emanated from them. On their heads were great wickedly shaped antler-horns which protruded in impossible jagged spikes. They were filled with the souls of the dead, those unfulfilled souls filled to the brim with rage, greed, and the lust for vengeance. Aberrations that had escaped the ways of the wheel and had become twisted and corrupted by it.
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They rained down from the sky in explosions of lightning. Leon saw as the Sky Father lost control of the careful balance of the wheel. The darkness from the halls of Raek assaulted the Sky Father’s heaven. In that moment Leon knew it was this force, this darkness that spewed forth from the halls of Raek and the old gods who had fed off the suffering of men that had tugged at him in those nightmares back when he had been a young farmer turned child soldier on the isle of Dalm.
They had wanted the sky for themselves, to overturn the realm of the sky and corrupt the hearts of men who lived beneath it. They lusted for his power in order to trap the souls of the dead within their halls and feed their sway over man and beast. Their malice was without bounds, their anger undying in their immortality. And so, they sent forth their legions of vengeance and wrath assaulting heaven and the wheel in their desire for liberation and lust for power.
For eons the forces of the heavens and the legions of Raek battled, scouring and scorching the earth with tempests and fire from below. The stars were awakened, recruited in the effort to restore balance to the wheel.
In the last days of battle, each force faced off in battle. The forces of heaven gathered in resplendent glory gilded in shining ethereal armor they glowed with determination and the power of light itself.
However, their foes were terrible. They were dark masses that had long since twisted into unrecognizable shapes. Their teeth gnashed with great maws filled with needle like teeth. Their exteriors were hardened and scaly, great caprices that oozed from the joints slick and corrosive slime. Their eyes were red and pupil-less, nearly blind from ages spent in submersion in the great halls of Raek. Countless legs carried them on long spindly spider-like legs. Their mass of legs danced in a constant squirm as they struggled to contain the weight of hatred bore by the minions of Raek.
The battle was fierce, the forces of both tearing and rending each other, sending countless souls into the dissipating nothingness of the dark abyss. By the time the battle had reached its zenith, the earth and the sky had been rent asunder. Great wounds gashed the earth splitting it into deep ravines that snaked outwardly in sneaking tendrils that mimicked the pattern of the lightning weapons that had caused it. The sky bled crimson as its moon lie in tatters leaving nightfall in near darkness. The stars two had lost half their host as the attrition of the cosmic battle left it all but barren.
In the end a tumultuous peace was reached, When the spear of the Sky Father pierced the dark heart of the god Raek. The wheel too had been shattered, its splinters carpeting the earth, covering it in thick and dark forests and jungles. Leon two had suffered burns from the dark tendrils of Raek.
Thus, the age of gods and fate had come to an end. The world was left unbalanced fate-less. Each of the hosts of both heaven and the earth were left unbound, left to inhabit what was left of the world. Here both were corrupted, losing all sentience and in time reducing to the basest elements of the world itself.
In the aftermath, men too were nearly eradicated from the earth. Yet they proved to be more resilient than both god and beast. Despite the harshness of the broken planet, they emerged from their hiding holes and rebuilt. The corruptions of Reak and the loss of hope from the death of the gods left mankind lost. So instead, they adapted, building great cities and reveling in lust, worshipping the minerals of the earth which had been the realm of Reak. But with the wheel broken, the souls of the dead could not recycle, and so they came to inhabit the earth instead.
The world of men was all but lost, yet Leon saw now in this vision a glimmer of hope, a remnant of power left behind by the aftermath of the great cosmic war. Within the halls of Raek, deep within the mountains was the weapon that had been used to strike down Raek, that great and terrible weapon which had scorched the earth itself. There it remained trapped, infusing, over the ages with measures of both Raeks and the Sky Fathers power. There Leon knew was the last bastion of hope for the return of balance. Only this weapon could restore the wheel. Only then could the hosts of the dead return to the cycle of rebirth.