Tsel:
The Shadow of Death
(Part 1)
By
Pouya Sattari
If you like my work and would like to hurry it up, please consider supporting me on:
https://www.patreon.com/sattarip
paypal.me/SattaRIP
You can buy the full book on Amazon in Ebook and paperback.
Preface
I’ve been trying to become an author and finish my first book for thirteen years now, and finally I have succeeded. I’m deeply interested in the sciences, mythology, and fantasy, so I wanted to create a story that encapsulated all three. I did copious amounts of research into various mythologies in order to write this novel, something I often did in my spare time anyway. The myths I researched largely pertained to Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Canaanite, and Hindu stories, but I do plan to include other mythologies in future instalments.
Funnily enough, this story started out as a Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction, but because I refused to give up on it for all those years, it evolved into something else entirely. I did so because I wanted to create what I saw as the perfect story. True, there is no such thing and I make no claim that there are no issues with this first instalment that could not be ironed out without making drastic changes, but I hope to remedy the few problems that I am aware of with the release of the sequels.
There’s more I wish I could talk about in my journey of research and writing, but because they are sensitive topics, I’ll leave them out.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
In memory of the unnamed and forgotten...
Another Message to Humanity
Dear Homo sapiens sapiens,
As a fellow being born from the primordial chaos, I welcome you to my tales of the greater multiverse.
All beliefs are true. If you travel far enough in space-time and can somehow manage to survive such a journey, you can find a place where your perception of reality lines up perfectly with reality itself. But every single one of those perceptions of belief is also inevitably inaccurate by some margin, whether it’s the world you live in, or the imaginary one that happens to coincide with realities on other planes.
Remove all preconceptions of what you think is normal in the world. If only for the purpose of learning a lesson from the memories we, the Riders of the Apocalypse, bring from throughout infinity. But know that these were never the only version of events across space-time. Your Earth is, after all, only one out of 2.423*10^42 Earths that did not manage to set itself upon the correct path to eventually competing with interdimensional invaders several billion years from now. But that may still be corrected.
As one would expect, creatures born into three-and-a-half dimensions such as yourselves would have difficulty imagining the nature of extra-dimensional beings such as myself. I’m aware many of you humans are not the curious types of people, and understanding the intentions of higher beings may be above some of you, but that’s no excuse to hide that information from those of you with the desire to learn.
Who am I to be lecturing you? To get straight to the point, I am Death itself, though only one of many incarnations that happened to record my adventures in these books. I wish to share these stories with you humans, if for no other reason than someone might recognize my efforts.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Chapter 0: Death’s Chasm
‘Do not go near the God of Death, for his yawning mouth is a chasm leading to an Endless Abyss,’ her brother had warned. But now, he was dead, consumed by that same abyss. And now, the Earth — this particular Earth — was without its Lord. Baal Hadad, God of Storms, Anat’s dear brother, was gone from this life.
Anat had wings of bronze, but she was not an angel. No, an angel is something else entirely. She was a goddess, the Goddess of War, and she was armed to the teeth. She left behind her collection of severed heads as they would be literal dead weight in the fight to come. Her bow strung, her swords sharpened, her focus on killing Mot, the God of Death. Whether in her mind it was justice or simply vengeance, I do not know.
She had buried her brother, Hadad, the previous day at the summit of Mount Zephon where his grand palace was located. The sun had blotted out as the Goddess of the Sun, Shapash, had descended from the heavens to assist with the funeral. Astarte, Hadad’s consort and the Canaanite Goddess of the Hunt, had attended as well.
Hadad’s body had been found at the gate to the underworld, which is why Shapash believed Mot to be responsible for his death. In addition, only a week ago Mot had threatened to consume the Baal as revenge for Hadad offering him to feed him simple food instead of what he craved: souls and flesh.
‘My appetite is like that of lions in the wilderness, like the longing of dolphins for the sea,’ Mot had said to Hadad before threatening to devour him. He could, for his mouth was vast enough to consume a god.
But then, why had a body been left behind? Anat did not question it. She searched the depths of the Nether-world looking for Hadad’s shade, but had found nothing after many years. Finally she had lost her patience with the death god.
Anat flew till she was high above the clouds and surveyed her brother’s lands, searching for the God of Death. First she turned her eyes towards the gate to the underworld at the base of the mountain where her brother’s corpse had been found. Mot was gone, but trails of destruction led away from the gate. One appeared fresher than the others; it led to a faraway desert, and so she followed it.
The desert was vast, like unto a dry ocean. There, Anat found Mot feasting upon the remains of a still-living sand dragon, his gaping mouth wide enough to encompass both earth and heaven, reaching to the very stars. She pressed her steel-bound feet together and dropped like a meteorite towards the earth, landing with a crash and demolishing Mot’s meal. The serpent-like god had sensed her presence at the last moment and ducked out of the way, but grew furious at the sight of the torrent of sands consuming his meal.
‘Who dares to intrude upon my feast?!’ Mot’s voice boomed ‘Niece Anat? I shall make bread of your bones for this!’ His body, which had been humanoid until that point, took a more serpentine shape similar to the dragon he was feasting upon.
In a flash, the two raced towards each other. Mot’s maw opened to the extreme and Anat’s many swords were drawn forth from her divine aura. She slashed at him. Then, with her free hands dug her fingernails along with the tips of her bronze wings into his flesh and slammed him head first into the pit she had made with her landing. He let the momentum carry him down into the sands and swam about like a fish in water. Just before his mouth closed around her from below, she leapt to the sky. He followed ever upward, forming shadowy wings on his back as he did, a black chasm rising from the bowels of the earth.
Anat zig-zagged out of the way, but Mot was relentless. She spun a sword rapidly in place and sent it flying into the death god’s cavernous throat. Though it dug into his flesh, he regenerated faster than it could hurt him. The sword passed into the abyss that was his mouth harmlessly. He burst past her and nearly took her leg. Circling back, he swiped at her with his tail, knocking her to the ground. The earth shook as she crashed, then shook even more as Mot’s massive body landed beside hers.
On and on the battle went. Again and again Mot would attempt to devour Anat, while Anat would make pirouettes and skillful dodges she had long since forgotten she had learned. His mouth drooled with deathly saliva, and his fangs blared to encompass her, but she dodged again. The hardest battle of her life was before her; no monster nor giant would compare to the God of Death. She called upon all the faith of her followers to help defeat Mot, and when he was weakening, he did the same. However, Mot’s followers only revered him out of fear for the afterlife, and so the prayers of his worshipers gave out before hers did.
Finally, after days of fighting, she caught him in a weakened state, thin and frail. With both hands on the hilt of her sword, she split his head open and didn’t stop until his whole body was cut in half. With her divine aura, she created a thousand swords, each sharper than the last, and minced Mot’s body into many tiny fragments. She gathered up the pieces with her aura, took them to a nearby village that had narrowly avoided their path of destruction and used the village pyre to burn him to ash, then took the ash to the millstone to grind Mot’s remains to dust. She spread that dust across the desert and left for the heavens, battered and bruised but victorious. Mot’s ashes would make that particular desert even more infertile towards life, and the one village of people had to move away in the coming years as Mot’s inescapable darkness spread to all corners of the plain.
Within seven years, both Hadad and Mot would be reborn and attempt revenge upon each other. El, God of Eternity, would prevent further escalation of the conflict, and peace would return amongst the Canaanite gods. All this would happen in most of the branchings of the timelines. However, in one version of reality out of the infinite more, Mot’s destruction at the hands of the war goddess was absolute, and where the Death god’s story ended, mine began.