God of Eyes

Loi rolled uncomfortably out of bed. Like many of the Blades in that final battle, Loi had decided--rather, had felt unable to tear herself away from this place. It was more than just the presence of three gods. Rather, it was the confused mess of emotions that she had felt within her that day. If she were to put words to it, it felt like young and awkward lovers making a mess of their first time. She snarled in the dimness; she had tried several times to keep her mind off it, but never quite succeeded.

It was a complicated set of emotions, more complicated by the knowledge that it could have been her wrapped up in some kind of sordid but vibrant spiritual ménage à trois in the sky. She wasn't envious exactly, and she stood by her decision to decline the role of goddess, but... she did feel like they had all not been properly informed about what it all meant.

For now, she like many of the Blades chose to live in the hidden cliff dwellings. There was little need for the enchantments, for now, but she couldn't stand to live among the refugees, not right now. There was a lot of grousing about the failings of the Goddess, and the failings of the Blades, and a lot of mistrust about this God of Eyes and this new Church of the Three--in general, a lot of ungratefulness, considering they all would have been slain in the night. The majority of the refugees already spoke only of escaping this cliffside village and scattering through the nation, which itself might be a terrible idea.

Loi walked out of her small private room and was immediately in the cavern; the place she had chosen was no more than a private quarters, three stories up and built into a wall, although there were a number of lodgings that had connected rooms, for families and craftspeople. This fit her mood, currently, and given the public baths and public cooking, there was no need for her to set aside space for that.

Given the nature of the Chuch of the Three, she had been considering her fate in the future. Marth, Ryan's new ego, had taken to talking about three paths: the wanderer, the scholar, and the warrior, although Loi herself recognized that obviously left out a lot of mundane jobs that would properly fit under Alanna but were not associated with a 'scholar'. Loi was coming to realize, more and more, that her feet wanted to wander, to leave this place behind, but not for war. It wouldn't exactly be the first time she left home... but she had traded home life for the Blades originally, which was another form of structure, one she wasn't sure she agreed with anymore.

Still, she didn't consider herself a devotee of Ryan, either. Whenever she had a chance to meet with him, Marth, or Miana, she still reliably found Miana to be the most agreeable, the most like her. And knowing Alanna was coming to join the others here, Loi still couldn't find herself seriously considering any of the paths that Alanna would offer.

A wandering blade, a mercenary, perhaps. Maybe, if she sorted out her feelings, a missionary spreading word of the Three, but for now, she just needed to get away.

She had more or less made up her mind, but she hesitated. She at least wanted to see the Three meet all together before she headed out, and that should be soon. After that, who knew where the roads would take her.

She wandered off into the caves to bathe and then find something to eat.

Muir had realized with a certain finality that she was going to go blind, and simply stopped counting on her eyes for anything. Ryan, like the doofus he was, kept apologizing, as though her own rejection of him as God of Eyes was his fault.

And she did. Muir had ridden on Xechi's shoulder so often not merely because she liked the big woman, but also because she didn't want to be the one looking at the world and making decisions. She would simply handle whatever life put in her way, with all the ferocity of a very small, very tightly contained storm.

And she liked that.

She felt something big change with her power, but declined to ask too many questions. Apparently her new God was chummy now with Miana and also with Alanna, which sounded sexy enough to her... and that was great, but it wasn't her fate, and more importantly, it wasn't something that was changing her fate. The enemy continued chasing them for another two days, but fell further and further behind, and Muir got better and better at dissuading them with harsh winds and brief rainstorms, whenever she had the power to spare to do so.

And eventually, the Selmonts were met by proper reinforcements, and all pursuit was off. Muir got to sleep and eat properly, and then found and beat senseless the man who took responsibility for leaving behind the wagon with Xechi's corpse on it. He wasn't exactly responsible, per se, and her friend and lover was with her in spirit, literally, but Muir had long since decided it was the principle of the thing.

Once the others had a chance to rest as well, people started questioning her about the new God of Storms. For the most part, she made things up, embellishing things Ryan had told the group back at the Temple to punch up his reputation. She made a few promises about keeping weather out of people's paths, but she didn't care that much whether people believed it. And one warm night, she made a little white lie suggesting that the God of Storms was really, really into threesomes, and that a particularly buxom lady and her strapping cousin or attendant or whatever would receive a blessing if they would just perform a little... ritual with her.

It was a good night.

Xechi seemed to have settled into a comfortable place in her heart or spirit or whatever. The Angel didn't mind when Muir buried her face in another woman's or man's crotch, and didn't really object when Muir spread white lies and mischief in the name of her God, though she got the sense that Ryan himself wasn't all that keen on it--the lies, not the sex. He didn't seem to care about that, unless the two overlapped. He tried to punish her for the thing about threesomes, but nothing he did washed away the afterglow, and she just kept smiling all through the next day and its peculiar weather.

When asked where she was going next, she just shrugged and suggested she would go 'home'. That could have meant a lot of things, but most people didn't ask, and the ones that did, she declared she had to make a pilgrimage to her Temple first and foremost, but she wasn't eager to do that, not least because she expected a spanking from her god, and not the fun kind.

But privately, she knew she needed to go. She needed to learn whatever Ryan could teach her, and then go get revenge. The hell that was infecting this nation would spill over everything if they didn't do something about it, and she didn't intend to sit by idly. The bastards had killed a lot of people, including Xechi, and the god's'd need every helper they had to beat them back.

In the meantime, she just had to resist the mental compulsion to call every problem a "storm". It pissed her off. Yeah yeah, religion of storms, she got that, but it shouldn't be a religion of puns. Ugh.

Raine was constantly nervous around the Temple. She felt like she'd been lied to, even after having everything explained. Mere days ago, she had met her god in a chiseled out cavern that was his best possible effort to have a dry place to sleep. Now the same person was claiming to be a priest of himself, and someone had built a town and temple, and there was something about really powerful illusions to keep things secret.

She smiled tensely and walked on eggshells and tried not to freak out. Which God was hers? Which version of Ryan--of Xethram--was real? Was he a trickster, a liar? If so, had she led a bunch of people here to their doom? Or had she been manipulated--was the cave itself a lie, and the temple had been there the whole time, with the sad-sack act just there to inspire her to be loyal? When she looked back on her time before, she couldn't be certain, but she thought for sure she had never actually walked through any of the places where there were now stone. Had she been guided away from those places so she wouldn't stumble over the truth?

And he was now a God of Storms and part of some trinity and... no part of this made any sense. He was nobody. She had been proud of that, in a way. A person--a God who needed her, who she could help by serving. She was special, incredibly special, as she was his one and only. He had picked her and only her, picked her up out of nothing and nowhere and saved her and empowered her and made her a success.

And now she was surrounded by peasants going about their day, casually worshiping that same deity. And priests of another Goddess recognized him, some like an old friend. Suddenly, Raine was not special. She was not his only; she was barely a face in the crowd.

And yet still, Marth (as he now called himself) sought her out, several times. He didn't seem to really understand, and yet he was kind, and attentive. She meant something to him, but it was clearly not what it used to be--even if it had only been that for a day.

Because for her, it had been love, although she didn't recognize it immediately. A simple man barely able to offer her soup, offering her his own bed to sleep in because she needed it. And now he was...

Raine masked her face a little as a hunter passed her by. Raine had taken to exploring the plateau, in order to keep away from Marth and Ryan and all of the Blades and who knows who else. She had been nothing, and for one shining moment, she was sure she'd found her place. She was sure that she was falling in love with a god, and would become his right hand, his only. If not his wife, then certainly the first among his priests and priestesses, the closest of his confidants, the oldest and dearest of his friends.

Now he held hands with a goddess every day, and word was another would be coming soon to take his other hand. What room was there in that picture for a mere mortal woman? A pathetic lost woman, no more than a Vicar?

And yet over and over, when she had these thoughts, she felt Xethram's hand on her own, his sorrowful and lonely eyes. Was it an illusion? Was it a lie? She felt him now, and she doubted and feared the contact.

She did her best to calm down. It had only been a few days, still, and she was sure she would come to find out the truth. But there were so many questions, and so much regret. She should never have agreed to leave; she should have stayed here and watched the place get built, so that it would feel real to her, and not feel like a betrayal, an illusion, a cruelly crafted lie. She should have been here when the witch Miana appeared, should have seen her at her weakest, should have defended her lord at his weakest. Instead, in those moments, they had only each other.

She wished she had been there, and ground her teeth whenever the thought came to her. She had no idea what to do now to get back in her Lord's good graces, and no idea how to rid herself of this doubt and mistrust.

But she would; she had to. Otherwise, it would be a long life serving a God she had only briefly loved.

Chibal had a great many thoughts about this whole situation, but somehow, her thoughts kept being stuck on a few key issues.

She had been first and loudest in saying that the Gods could not win the battle, and she had been wrong. And yet, no matter how she looked at it, none of her criticism was wrong. A union of gods like the one she had seen--in person--was unprecedented. It was also rare for gods to spend so much power to save people; the Goddess of Blades, even at her strongest, had historically let people fend for themselves and simply given them a few pushes here and there. Alanna, aside from a few incidents that Chibal now privately suspected were linked to a direct avatar of the Goddess filling some selfish need, did very little. Other gods, according to legend, were more wrathful than helpful.

And Ryan, poor foolish Ryan, was now stuck between two very different, very willful women. Miana had been shy in the days since the battle, but it was not in her nature, not as Chibal knew the woman. She was stubborn, even pig-headed sometimes, with a razor-sharp wit that was dangerous to whomever she turned it against. That aspect of her would return once she calmed. And Alanna, when people contacted her specifically about Knowledge, they found her to be cold, calculating, and oftentimes brusque and insincere.

She knew what she ought to do, but she didn't like it. She'd had the impression in her life that she might be a good strategist at the left hand of a general, or perhaps pivot to learning elementalism, to put her intelligence to use, but if the gods could put forth this much power, now she was starting to think that her place was here, guiding them to do the most good they could do for the nation and the world. Because Miana certainly, and Ryan from what little she knew him, both seemed to be short-sighted people, or at least, they had their minds somewhere else.

That would not do. This church of Three would split apart if it was not properly managed. People with power and volatile personalities would never stick together, not a minute longer than they needed to, and quite likely not as long as they needed to. They were for the moment awkward and starstruck like children with their first crush, but it would not last.

She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood and clenched her fists until her uneven nails left marks. She didn't want this to be her life. It felt like managing someone else's children. It was a waste of her intellect. But no matter which direction she cast her thoughts, she could think of nobody else who would even think to handle all the nuances and subtleties that the three of them had between them, much less someone who could successfully navigate that maze.

She saw Miana across the river, with a pretty looking young priestess that had to be Alanna in the flesh. She studied the woman, but didn't look up. There was something off about her, but Chibal had expected as much. An Avatar of a very old goddess would never act quite naturally, she suspected, least of all when faced with the unexpected, and this meeting would have to be that. Chibal tried to drink in a sensation from the woman with her magical senses, but all she got was a sense of a tired and wary woman, if one much larger, much more powerful than she looked. Miana, in contrast, looked very much like she had been looking recently--pained, confused, but slowly healing.

They couldn't handle this alone. There was no way they could. None of them were focused on their future together.

Chibal remained locked as she sat there, until Miana and the priestess came back from their walk and wandered off to get food. A number of others went that way, as well--and soon enough would be Marth's sermon, which of course the other Goddesses would not miss.

She should not, as well, but as she stood up, dreading the thought of the honestly sub-par soup that would be served, a clawed hand landed softly on her shoulder.

"You certainly do seem to be a strange one," whispered a voice in her ear. "Come, sit with me a minute. I'd like to talk to you."

Chibal turned, confused and afraid, her eyes alighting on a metal table and chairs that had not been there before, with a serving carafe, two glasses, and two plates with some kind of pasty sitting atop them, all spread out on the table.

"Come, come." The fox woman walked backwards, her tail swishing mischievously as she stepped nimbly up to one of the chairs, and sat in it without looking. "I promise it's not poisoned. We've much to talk about, I think."

Chibal eyed the strange woman, and hesitantly took a step forward. This place was protected, she was sure. Only another god could have found the place, and only with the Three's permission... right?

As though reading her thoughts, Erika's smile only widened.

Jali paid very little attention to the coating of blood that was starting to accumulate on everything around her. It was profoundly uninteresting, not like her new toy.

The room itself was some kind of white stone, originally polished and pretty; somehow the Goddess of Blades had never actually spilled blood on the room, it seemed, because once she had sacrificed a few people, the red had never come out, not with magic nor dutiful scrubbing by people appointed to clean the room or face death if they were to fail. Indeed, it seemed only to spread, as though the stone itself absorbed the blood like a sponge, or perhaps the power that leaked from the blood itself was what now turned the stone red and black?

She could sense nothing from the stone and the room, or very little, but she could. It was there and it wasn't. It drifted inwards towards the center, passing through something that felt like a sieve, a filter, a cleanser of some sort. Was this the secret of the gods? Was this what granted them immortality and power beyond mortal ken? She had spent a few minutes scouring the details etched into stone, but quickly decided that tests were more useful than study.

Behind her, a man heaved the corpse onto his shoulder, but Jali, now too curious to wait, gestured, and the worker who had been hauling bodies all day became just another sacrifice. If asked, she would deny it, but she was aware; she just was impatient, and didn't care. The last stage of the filtering, if she understood what she didn't sense, was waiting on something. She was sure it was a matter of quantity, not quality. When the last section filled, something would be complete. A spell, perhaps. To do something, but what? Ascend to godhood? Was this where a new goddess was crowned when the old one fell? Her lips peeled back into a grimace. There were too many questions, and she knew nothing.

She felt his shields long before he appeared in the tunnel. She had only elected to keep one of her erstwhile allies in the black arts at her side, and only because he was the most scholarly of them--a pudgy man whose hair had long since turned white and whose lungs protested feebly whenever he was tasked with a good deal of walking.

He had retreated an hour ago for lunch, but Jali only stood and stared. As many hostages as she had sacrificed to this room, she expected results, and she was sure it could come at any time, although she had been sure of that for hours.

"Not yet?" The fat man's voice wasn't disappointed or accusatory, just curious.

"No." Jali appreciated that he was curious and not ambitious. Few of her allies had been ambitious, of course, but she was always nervous. Something about this one set her at ease; he was a scholar, not a killer, and he would be easy to bully into whatever she needed him to do. So far, he hadn't needed much prompting. "But I feel like it's almost there."

He paced in a circle around the room, never approaching the first etch in the floor. She herself had made that mistake, the first time; it burned her, and she felt the darkness leaving her, where she had come too close. And the burn was not inconsequential; she had bled, and scarred badly, all from a moment's touch.

He hadn't dared laugh, even though he'd warned her. He seemed more afraid of the room than anything. Always with him, he searched for the truth above all else.

"Oh, right," the other man coughed lightly, almost a wheeze, as he got back to her side. "I had to brush off another one of those military men, a commander I think. They are buzzing on about bringing in more troops. We should still have plenty of time, I think."

Jali eyed him. He was certainly keen to play the part of a dutiful assistant, no doubt because he knew she would kill him on a whim. Unlike the common people here, he had shields, but they would not last, not with as much blood magic as she could call up.

"Time, yes. I suppose I did make a promise, and I'll keep it, just as soon as I've figured this last bit out." She stuck out her jaw and studied the flow of energy she couldn't quite sense. It seemed to have settled, meaning it was not enough. "We need more."

"You would have it already if you didn't kill the workman," he groused, but turned and marched up the stairs without further complaint, save only the pathetic wheezing noises that followed him everywhere like an attention starved cat.

Jali examined her burned hand, where she had touched the field a day before. It had destroyed her body, but that wasn't what it was for. Whatever this place did, it was to create something. Her heart told her that, and she couldn't help dreaming of what it would be.

And to a certain extent, she was eager to spill more blood along the way to getting her prize. Other people didn't appreciate her hobby, it was true, but it had gotten her this far, and it was one she was good at.