Chains of Divinity

The bone-white sands of the desert parted before Kael as he approached Vael'thar's central temple. Three centuries of fighting through flesh-stripping storms had left him intimately familiar with death's many forms, but something was different here. The air thrummed with power that was both divine and alien.

"Someone's home," he muttered, noting the fresh footprints in sand that should have been undisturbed for millennia. They led to the temple's entrance—a maw of impossible geometry that seemed to exist in multiple places at once.

Golden light erupted from the doorway, temporarily blinding him. A figure emerged, wreathed in divine energy that was somehow... different from what he remembered. Wings of pure light spread across the bone-white sky, but they weren't the perfect geometric patterns of normal divine warriors. These wings bore scars, showed wear—told a story of countless battles and endless vigilance.

"That's far enough, Exile." The Valkyrie's voice carried the weight of divine authority, yet underneath lay something else—weariness, perhaps, or understanding. She stood between him and the temple entrance, her spear crackling with contained lightning. "Vael'thar is forbidden to you."

Kael studied her. His eyes had adapted to this realms...uncertainty and allowed him to see layers of reality others missed, and what he saw in her made him pause. The power radiating from her made his accumulated strength feel like a candle before the sun, but it wasn't pure divine energy anymore. It had changed, evolved through isolation just as his own power had transformed through exile.

"Interesting. The gods sent one of their own to guard these ruins. Must be something valuable inside." He kept his tone casual, testing her reactions. The way her wings shifted at the mention of the gods told him volumes.

"I am Selene, Last of the Valkyrie." Her armor shifted like liquid moonlight, and he noticed that parts of it had grown dull, as if worn by countless years. There was pride in her voice, but also something that sounded almost like defiance. "And you are not the first exile to seek the temple's power."

"But I'm the first to make it this far, aren't I?" He took a step forward, his power coiling around his transformed flesh. The marks across his skin responded to her divine presence, not with rejection but with curious resonance. "Tell me, Selene, in all your years guarding this place, have you never wondered what secrets it holds?"

"I know exactly what lies within." Her wings flared brighter, but there was something in her voice—a note of weariness that hadn't been there before. Static crackled between them as divine and Kaels energies interacted. "I've watched a hundred exiles try to claim its power. None survived the price it demands."

"Ah, but I'm already quite good at dying." The energy around him pulsed with absorbed pain, each mark a testament to lessons learned through death and resurrection. "It's the living part I've yet to master."

Their first exchange was like watching lightning strike in reverse. Selene's spear, burning with divine light, carved a path through reality itself—not just moving through air, but parting the very fabric of space. Kael tried to catch the blade between his palms, his marks flaring with countering power. The clash sent ripples through multiple dimensions of reality.

He barely managed to dissolve his form before the spear would have ended him, reforming several feet away. His hands smoked where divine light had touched them, the corruption in his flesh struggling to heal against power that denied its very existence. But even as pain coursed through him, he felt his marks adapting, learning from the contact.

"Interesting," Selene murmured, but there was no real surprise in her voice. "You've learned to adapt. But adaptation isn't enough against divine power." Her wings spread wider, casting shadows that seemed almost solid.

Kael launched himself forward, drawing on every technique he'd learned in his centuries of exile. His body became living shadow, his movements distorted space, black lightning crackled through his transformed flesh. But each attack simply washed against her divine aura like waves against a cliff.

Selene didn't even need to dodge. Her wings pulsed once, and reality reasserted itself around her. Kael's shadows became mere darkness, his spatial distortions smoothed themselves out, his corrupted lightning grounded itself in the sand. With a casual gesture, she sent him flying backward, his body crashing through several dunes before coming to rest.

"Impressive," she said as he pulled himself up, his form struggling to maintain cohesion. "Most don't last this long against divine authority."

"You haven't aged a day in centuries, have you?" Kael asked, noticing how the tarnish on her armor didn't match her eternal appearance. "How long have you been here, Selene? How long since you've heard from the gods?"

Her wings dimmed slightly, betraying more than words could have. "Time... moves strangely here."

"They abandoned you, didn't they?" He took a step forward, not to attack but to see her reaction. The way her spear lowered a fraction told him everything. "Left you to guard their secrets in a realm they feared, and never looked back."

"The gods don't abandon their servants," she said, but there was an emptiness to the words, as if she'd repeated them so many times they'd lost all meaning. "They test us. Shape us."

"Like they tested me?" Kael gestured at his transformed body, marks pulsing with energy. "Look what their 'shaping' has done. Look what it's doing to this entire realm."

"You know nothing of divine purpose," she said, but her spear lowered slightly further. The lightning crackling along its length seemed dimmer now.

"Maybe not," he admitted. "But I know about being left behind. About being used as a tool and discarded. The difference is, I've stopped pretending it's for some greater purpose."

The divine light around her flickered, just for a moment. "You speak of blasphemy."

"I speak of truth. And you've been here long enough to know the difference." He met her gaze steadily, his marks resonating with something almost like sympathy. "How many centuries has it been since you felt their presence? How many millennia have you waited for a sign that isn't coming?"

"They ordered me to guard this place," she said, but he could hear the doubt creeping in. Her wings had lost their brilliant glow, taking on a more muted, earthly light. "To prevent any exile from claiming its power."

"And you have," Kael said softly. "Faithfully. Perfectly. And what has that loyalty earned you? An eternity of solitude in a realm they fear too much to even watch?"

Selene was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice carried the weight of ages. "The temple will destroy you, you know. The power it offers comes at a price no being should pay."

"Then why not simply kill me? End the threat?" He gestured at the battlefield, where her casual displays of power had rewritten reality itself. "We both know you could."

"Because you need to choose." She lowered her spear completely, and for the first time, he saw her fully—not as a divine guardian, but as another exile, abandoned by the same gods who had cast him out. "And because I'm tired of being the only one who remembers what choice means."

"The gods won't forgive this," Kael warned, though they both knew it didn't matter.

"The gods," Selene said with a bitter smile that contained eons of abandoned faith, "have forgotten this realm exists. Perhaps it's time we forgot them in return." She stepped aside, her wings now streaked with the same bone-white as the desert around them. "Go. Enter the temple. Face its trial. But remember this moment—remember that you were given a choice."

As Kael passed her, he caught a glimpse of what she truly was—a being as transformed by abandonment as he had been by exile. The gods had left her here to guard secrets they no longer cared about, and in doing so, they had created another kind of rebel.

The temple's entrance yawned before him, a mouth of impossible geometry ready to swallow him whole. Behind him, the Last Valkyrie stood watch, her divine light dimmed by centuries of unanswered prayers. The gods had abandoned this realm long ago, but in doing so, they had sewn the seeds of their own undoing.

Two exiles, shaped by divine neglect into something new. Something that even the gods might learn to fear.