It was the middle of the night in Communion, the soaring skylines of the metropolis dimmed and subdued out of respect for the events occurring above. High in the sky, between certainty and infinity, the void burned and the fate of worlds was being decided. Netta pointedly did not look up as another flare of power splashed across the formation barrier that protected them, wasted energy from a sloppy cataclysmic spell washing the world below in multicolored horror as raw destruction was transmuted into harmless light.
The Divines were fighting. The one she served was losing.
Her Godseal burned against her flesh as the Tyrant of Elikos, God-King Eternal of the Alinean peoples and of all Realms under His Dominion, fought desperately with everything He could muster. The pain was like the caress of knives, transmuted into her blood as her limited power was harnessed for the benefit of a being infinitely beyond her. Netta was lucky she had not been called upon to serve in His battle-retinue; the pull would be much stronger in proximity, the draw of energy almost certainly incapacitating. She doubted any of her seniors would survive the fight.
If they were even still alive.
The priestess took a deep, laboring breath. Inhale. Exhale. Banish fear. Expunge doubt. Begin the mantra. Thought begets Will, the Will for-
Another surge, this one forcing Netta to her knees and knocking her out of the meditative state. A wail escaped her lips, torn from an unwilling throat. Time was running out. The Tyrant would be dead soon, if she did nothing.
“Nothing” was an option she refused to entertain. Once more, she forced herself into movement, the Flow overtaking her as she channeled her own personal power from a small ankle bracelet given to her for precisely such a purpose. Suffering dulled into negligence. Duty withered and turned to dust. There was now only the Flow, the trance of bliss and clarity that she had spent years scheming to acquire.
Now it came so easily to her. A predatory grin spread upon her face, distinct enough that Netta could feel it, even in her enhanced mental state. She exalted in this feeling for a few heartbeats before resuming her path down halls of living wood and breathing stone, deeper into the structure her people called the Palace of Stars.
Netta cast her gaze around the large open hall that her passage disgorged itself in, searching for oblivious scribes or shirking guards. There were no signs of life within the Palace, which was exactly what Netta expected; she had written up the duty rosters for tonight with exquisite care, making sure that those she had chosen for this posting would be absent or otherwise preoccupied. Rigging that to happen had been a feat worthy of legend, in her opinion - so many contacts and connections made, all for this single night. Success or oblivion. Victory or death.
The stakes alone made her shiver with pleasure within the Flow.
The priestess walked calmly and smoothly across the night-black stone floors, passing statues of her seniors’ likenesses. She would recycle them for their memorials. No need to spend money on expensive gravestones when these edifices would do just as well, without the expenditure.
Netta’s steps took her across a threshold of inlaid silver conduit at the end of the hall, letting the enchantment wash over her with its alien, benign intent.
The guardian spirit here wasn’t even a roadblock in Netta’s plans. She’d long ago figured out how this fussy little soul ticked.
“Good evening, Axios. I am invoking the Emergency Wartime Powers Decree, effective as of Realmrise today. My authorization should already be logged under ‘Broken Glass Protocol’.” Technically, this wasn’t a lie. She had her seniors convince their Tyrant that no amount of preparation was excessive, and they had given her access to many secrets that normally one as fresh-faced as she was would never be aware of for decades. Including the built-in failsafes for all the magical entities that protected sensitive locations around the entire continent.
A task of centuries, achieved with a breezy comment and a casual agreement.
<...I see it now. Your authorization is granted. Moving to secure facility access behind you. Warning: observation and monitoring systems were disabled at the last shift change. Sabotage is suspected. Alert status has been raised to level 5. For your safety, please do not attempt to leave the wards until All-Clear is broadcast.> Axios hummed with concern as light and space rippled in front of her to reveal a pair of metal bulkheads at the end of the hall, already opening in acceptance.
Netta moved beyond them with little concern, fully aware that these doors - as wide as 4 soldiers abreast with a depth of two more - could and very likely would become the entrance to her own mausoleum, if things didn’t go exactly as planned.
Now past the doors, (which were already sealing behind her as soon as she was clear of them) Netta inhaled the charged air within the sanctum chamber at the heart of the palace. The Sanctum of Stars Beyond was well-named, to Netta’s eyes; the facility soared in open rings above her into what seemed infinity, all black stone sparkling with motes of starlight that burned with distant apathy. Netta had heard her seniors calling them “liminal spaces” or something. The minutiae of space-time manipulation didn’t hold her immediate interest.
Insulated from both mundane and magical destruction, sanctum facilities like this were intended to be the ultimate security system for a Divine’s temporal interests. Netta moved towards a cluster of crystal pillars extending from the stone beneath that formed the thronelike shape of the command console, her Godseal acting as both key and interface as her senses extended into the magical locus at the demiplane’s heart.
Netta sat upon the oversized chair and wondered at the scale of the place and the ease with which she seized it. How simple it was to subvert the slumbering mind within to her own purposes with a brush of her fingers and a small exertion of the Flow. The channels of complex, enchanted materials carried her Will throughout the entire structure, ownership changing hands so easily because those who had designed it had never imagined a trusted identity to be something unworthy of trust.
Once more she allowed herself a fleeting sensation of triumph. Even if every other plan she had put in motion tonight fell apart, this one success was enough to ensure her survival. Once roused, the entity that formed the core of the sanctum would do everything in its power to keep Netta safe - or, if safety was impossible, alive. If that meant releasing a swarm of hexplagues into the skies or scorching the very earth until it became glass, it would be done. It was not a power brought to bear lightly. Sanctums had a very…extreme logic process.
A murmuration of sleepy questioning touched her mind from the endless vault above.
[AWAKE? ACTION?] Thought became intent, filtered through Netta’s Godseal, and the little-god embraced Netta’s own consciousness with childlike affection, the cloudy white crystal throne illuminating as two Wills entwined to greater purpose.
Netta’s Will was a small, wispy thing compared to the massive complexity of the being she was connected to, and it reminded her, rather unpleasantly, of being too close to the Tyrant’s attentions. She had seen the expressions of her seniors when it was turned upon them, and often had to treat the aftermath with healing once their God-King retreated back to his own realm.
Fear threatened her again. She would be consumed. The Sanctum was too powerful for her - even with her mark of ownership it could devour her and fill her husk with its own avatar, driving her flesh remotely. She almost foundered under the crashing waves of raw power.
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Think. THINK. MANTRA.
Netta’s mouth opened, air filled her lungs, and words began to define space.
Thought begets Will
Will forms Architecture
Architecture guides Thought
Perfection through Iteration
I am more than my Thoughts
My Will is the foundation of all reality
The Architecture is the product of Will and Time
The Cosmos is Perfection through the lens of Uncertainty
Power obeys Will
Will obeys Thought
Architecture obeys Power
I am Power. I am. I AM.
The Flow fled from her at the completion of the affirmation, the Sanctum replacing the power in her veins just as fast as it left. For a moment, she lost herself amidst an endless swell of the Sanctum’s awareness.
She was Power. She reverberated through the pocket dimension, compounding upon herself as a statement of mathematical expression rather than biology. She was Logic. She was Imagination. She was so close to divinity it burned her Godseal in resentment. But the Mantra repeated itself, now a memetic weapon against mental solvency.
Power obeys Will.
She was Netta again, only more so this time. Time reasserted itself on her awareness. Sixteen heartbeats had pulsed within her chest between now and the exact moment she had opened herself to the Sanctum.
Beyond the confines of her own bound infinitude, she remembered her purpose. Her ticket to freedom.
[Activate remote viewing function. Target is the Tyrant of Elikos.] Her Will pulsed and the celestial rings began to spin, alternating their rotational speed and direction in a bizarre pattern that warped the light in the central atrium, overriding a vision of what is to one of what was. Fortunately, the Tyrant was an easily-found target. No other being was quite so visible to divination as a Divine, least of all the God-King Eternal. Normally, Divines would be immune to any sort of scrying. It took almost nothing of their attention to make themselves invisible and unreachable to magical and mundane messengers.
This situation could safely be placed in the “Not-Normal” column. Netta’s gaze lifted itself up from her flesh and into the Void, a space between worlds where Divines spent most of their time. A golden skyline spanned for dozens of kilometers across her view, an immortal city of gods held up by the perfection of its design alone. Instead of a normal sight of the heavens, the stars were distant and dim, their sun being the only recognizable celestial body visible.
Wait. That was wrong. There was something else visible out there. The Sanctum briefly paused in its divination, a new query forcing itself to the surface. Focus changed. Vision blurred. A new shape became visible. A perfect orb of blue and green, with glittering silver rings around its axial tilt, and a glowing spider web of what was obviously a massive city taking up a good chunk of a very familiar continent.
It was Communion, as seen from above, like in maps. She was seeing her own world from the perspective of the gods. It was almost humbling. Netta devoted the sight to memory. It would make for a good story.
An explosion rocked her perspective and once again her attention turned back towards her God-King. Across the radiant city her vision flew as swift as a falcon’s dive, until she found a large, open city square.
She immediately realized that she could tell absolutely nobody about what she saw here.
The Tyrant was a radiant giant 4 meters tall in his war-form. Normally, he was clad in immaculate armor, but now it was bloodied and sundered. He was missing both of his legs below the knee, and the flesh around his eyes was a blackened, burned mass of scars. A gaping hole was cleanly shot through his torso, most likely from an immensely powerful spell. Yet still he lived. Netta allowed her vision to expand beyond his immediate form, and what she saw didn’t get any better.
Surrounding him were the bodies of the thirty six elves, all marked as Netta was with a Godseal visible on their foreheads. But their flesh was withered and emaciated, and Netta knew with a tragic certainty that they had not fallen in battle.
The Tyrant had drained them dry, even exhausting their immortal life force until naught was left but ash. Each elf, on their own, was as powerful as any independent archmage, but their specialty lay in group tactics and coordinated squads. Such wasted potential.
Idly, Netta calculated how long they had been dead and reasoned that, if she had been even a few minutes behind schedule, she would have been beyond the impenetrable buffer that the Sanctum provided and she would be dead, just like her seniors.
She widened her vision again, and the results of the entire battle came into focus. The belligerents were round-ears - Humans, they called themselves. Their self-proclaimed “Pantheon” lay in pieces around the plaza. Many of them wore strange armor or clothing, and the ruined remains of their unfamiliar weapons lay haphazardly around the battlefield. Though few in number, what remained of the intact items glowed with obvious power.
Netta could count about a dozen recognizably intact bodies, each about two and a half meters in height but built solidly, not that their obvious personal prowess meant much against an ageless master like the Tyrant.
It wasn’t until she made closer examination of the alien Divines that she realized her mistake.
She was looking at Humans. The Sanctum detected the presence of Divines but further examination revealed that only their weapons held the energy of the gods - not the fighters.
Netta didn’t understand how alien magic worked, so she couldn’t comprehend how these short-lived creatures could manage to survive in a god’s realm. But now she understood how this battle had been an actual conflict.
The Humans had somehow figured out how to harm the gods. Their artifice was not a subject she was familiar with, but in the future she would be making a serious effort to understand it. It was now the most valuable secret she knew.
[Teleport all intact Divine energy readings into this Sanctum under quarantine.] Netta’s Will exerted itself.
Distance became meaningless as there became here. The energy required was immense, but the Sanctum could provide. Her isolation bubble popped into existence around the Tyrant easily enough - he was not currently strong enough to resist Netta’s Will combined with the raw output of a Sanctum - but the Divine weapons resisted her pull with great force.
A tug-of-war between the Will of the weapons and Netta’s own ensued for a few more minutes before she managed to shackle them in powerful bindings, reflecting their own strength back upon them, that they finally acquiesced and 4 new bubbles popped into existence next to the Tyrant’s comatose form. The Sanctum had done most of the heavy lifting, creating the spell-form needed to bind the powerful artifacts independently of Netta’s own efforts.
Even if the priestess could not figure out how these Divine weapons worked, it was better that they be denied to the enemy as a resource, should they send a second wave.
Her task now complete, Netta allowed her power to retreat and her vision to become limited to her physical form once more, feeling the power of the Sanctum recede from her with an ache that sorely tempted her into indulgence. Her Will refused it, and the Sanctum reluctantly subsided until it was barely-active again, slumbering but eager to answer Netta’s call.
The elf girl rose and disconnected herself from the Sanctum completely, approaching the floating sphere of translucent energy containing the one being that could command her life and death.
“I have always wanted to say this, Your Radiance,” Netta began in an exuberant, cheerful tone, not caring if her audience was conscious or not, “Fuck you, and your fucking shitty Godseal.”
The blasphemy left her lips with perhaps a bit more force than was intended, for the Godking’s awareness suddenly flickered to life with a visible aura of light and his body began to mend itself before her eyes.
“...Netta. Beloved servant.” The Tyrant finally spoke with an echoing voice hoarse from disuse.
Oh shit. Netta thought, quite reasonably.