The Many Lives of Cadence Lee

*Kingdom of Frakus, The Grand Temple, Eighteen Years Ago*

Chaurl Kent’s POV:

  In the beginning, there was Nothing. Then, there was The First One.

  From Beyond, The First One created a space in the Great Emptiness and stepped into it, thus The First One created the Void and the Void consumed the Emptiness insatiably. As the Void grew, The First One drew from it its blood and from that blood created Substance.

  And the Void howled in pain, distracted from its feast. It turned upon Substance and tried to return it to itself - to render all into Void - but The First One held the Void back and it could do nothing against The First One’s might.

  “Who is ‘The First One?’” I asked my mom as I sat on her lap. I wanted to read, but I hated the Wisdoms who taught in the Temple’s classrooms. I’d try to hide and avoid them, but they always caught me somehow - and then they always gave me even more work to do! “Where did they come from?”

  “No one knows,” mom said with a smile. “Perhaps only Lady Alet herself knows for certain, but she has never answered anyone who has asked.”

  “I thought I had memorized all the Gods,” I had been proud of that. There were a lot of Gods and Goddesses, so it had been hard work! “But no one told me about The First One!”

  “That is because we don’t worship them - no one does.”

  “They sound mean anyway,” I announced. Void was scary, but stealing its blood was wrong.

  Mom just laughed and started reading again.

  The First One subdued the Void and created a cage from Substance to separate the Void from the Great Emptiness. Then, The First One created another cage and separated what would become the World from the Void. The Void would claw at the walls between itself and the Great Emptiness, but its claws could not leave a mark so it turned upon the cage within itself and found that it could scar it.

  However, it could not break it. While the Void had raged at the loss of its food and its blood, The First One had shaped a being within and named that being Order. The First One touched Order’s brow and granted Order the Spark of Life. While the Void was a creature of instinct - a Monster whose intelligence was born of its feasting on the Great Emptiness - Order was Sapient and was free to choose.

  And so The First One asked Order, “Will you uphold Creation?”

  And Order answered with the determination they were born with, “I will, and always.”

  This pleased The First One, who connected Order to the cage that separated the World from the Void. Order, dutiful to his task, spake thusly:

  “I am all that is, and I bend to nothing but my creator and my own will. Order I am, and Order there will be, for I was granted the power to make it so and as I make it, it is.”

  And so, Order created all of the Laws of the World and they were immutable and inviolable. That Substance would call to Substance; that Substance could never be destroyed, nor created again; and that Substance would obey the forces upon it by those who would be born upon the World that would be.

  Order was proud of his Laws, yet in their youth they fell to hubris.

  Thus Order had spake, “The Void shall never be able to break the bonds that separate it from this World.”

  And thus it was, but while the Void could not break the cage, it could rend it. And so Order always had to watch the border between the World and the Void lest the Void whisper through the tears it made and convince a Sapient to let it in.

  “Order was kind of dumb,” I wouldn’t have messed up like that! “Why didn’t he just change it so that the Void couldn’t damage the cage?”

  “Order cannot change,” mom answered. “They too, are bound by their Laws.”

  “But couldn’t they just make a new Law that makes them not bound?” I was quite smug that I had managed to think of a better way than a God! Maybe Order would take my advice and I would become a [High Priest] - or a God myself!

  Mom just laughed and started reading again. The Wisdoms had been furious that I didn’t know this story already, but their voices made me fall asleep! I could never listen when they talked - mom was different though.

  Order pleaded with The First One, but The First One would not help Order anymore than they would help the Void. Instead, The First One took another piece of Substance and held it out to the Void. The Void was cunning, but a slave to its desires. It knew that something was wrong, but it could not ignore its hunger and bit into the Substance.

  But as its fangs bit into its meal, it found that it couldn’t retract them! The First One pulled the Substance back and tore the fangs from the Void’s mouth, leaving it screaming behind them as it returned to the World.

  To this mass of Substance, laced with Void, The First One granted the Spark of Life - but The First One had not shaped it. Chaos was born fighting the echoes of the Void’s hunger and the ghost of Order’s bonds that lay upon its Substance. Chaos was the first Demihuman and wielded the Void’s power with Order’s strength, yet was never able to reach its full potential.

  Chaos turned to its creator and asked The First One, “You chained and abused my elders, what will you force on me, oh great one?”

  The First One merely laughed while shaping Substance into the planet and the stars and all that was in the World. The First One was still laughing when they finished and returned to the Beyond.

  The Three fought among themselves, with Order and Void always at odds with each other. Chaos, as was its nature, would help or hinder either Order or Void according to its whims, always assuring that neither could ever truly win. Yet, it was bitter, because it knew why The First One had laughed at it.

  The First One had not needed to bind it in any way, because Chaos would do as The First One wanted without being bound.

  “But Chaos was doing what it wanted, right?” I didn’t get it. If Chaos did what it wanted, why was it unhappy? If mom wanted me to eat cookies, I wouldn’t be unhappy to eat cookies.

  “Chaos isn’t Chaos if it is following a plan,” mom turned the page. “Just as Order cannot go against its own rules, Chaos can't go with any for long - it is against its nature to be bound by its own nature.”

  I didn’t get it… Chaos couldn’t be Chaos? But how would Chaos not be Chaos because it was Chaos!? It was confusing, so I ignored it.

  Chaos approached Order, and seduced it. From their coupling, the first Gods were born.

  Order gave birth to a woman - for she was born fully grown - and the Goddess spoke to her mother saying:

  “Mother, I will be - I am - Alet,” and thus was Truth born. While her mother was blind to the movements and desires of the Void and those born with the Void’s touch, Alet was as much a daughter of Chaosas she was of Order, and she knew her father as she knew her mother - and so nothing in the World was hidden from her sight.

  Chaos gave birth to a man - born fully grown - and the God whispered to his mother saying:

  “Mother, I won’t tell you who I am, but you know me well enough, for what I am is Secrets, and I will hold yours in confidence,” and thus was Secrets born. While his mother was unable to fully restrain and escape her nature, he knew all that was kept hidden because he was the Secrets themselves. He followed behind his mother, and lent her his subtlety. What else he does, perhaps only his sister knows.

  “Wait, how can they both be mothers?” A [Priestess] of Love had told me where babies came from, and while it seemed kind of weird and icky, I did know that there was supposed to be a mom and a dad to make a baby!

  “Order, Chaos, and Void are neither and both male and female,” mom explained, making even less sense than when she talked about Chaos before. Why did all of this have to be so confusing… She noticed that I had stopped paying attention to her explanation and ruffled my hair, which I hated!

  “To simplify it, Order is Truth’s mother and Secret’s father; while Chaos is Secret’s mother and Truth’s father.”

  That didn’t seem simple at all…

  The fighting continued, but now Order and Chaos were accompanied by their children. The brother and sister met on the battlefield and while their parent’s both hated and loved each other, the siblings held no compassion for each other. Their power nearly rivaled their parents, and their fighting shook the ground and split the sky and all that lived on the young World hid in terror and pleaded with the Three to stop the siblings before they tore apart the World itself.

  Chaos refused, unwilling to hurt its children even though Alet fought for Order, but Order’s nature moved him to action. The World was their duty and purpose, and they could no more let their children break it than they could let Void do so. Yet when they tried to stop Alet from fighting her brother, they found himself powerless before her.

  Order was, by their very nature, bound to their actions. Everything they attempted, Alet knew ahead of time and was ready for. Order, for all of their power, could bring none of it against their daughter and the fighting continued and the world suffered.

  Alet saw the young mortal beings - mostly ignored by the others - and saw their potential. She spoke the Truth to them, granting them knowledge and power just below her own. Even with her mother no longer fighting with her, Truth was unstoppable with her army of mortals armed with the knowledge of the Gods.

  The mortals were bound by nothing, and used their power to conquer and dominate all beneath the Gods. The evil they perpetrated is unspeakable, hidden from history by the God of Secrets lest horror overwhelm any who learn of it.

  Order, in desperation, turned to their eternal enemy and made a deal with the Void itself. They coupled, and Order gave birth to Scalus, God of Justice. Scalus saw his sister’s actions and saw that it was wrong. He met with his sister and demanded she stop, but Alet saw that he was weaker than her and ignored him.

  Alet had inherited her mother’s hubris and while she could have looked deeper and seen the future, she did not. She thought that nothing could challenge her and that she deserved to rule the World and the Void, and believed that Void would be even easier to defeat than her mother. Both Order and Void were easy for Truth to discern - it was her father and brothers that she had even the smallest difficulty reading.

  She could have known that she had a sister as well. She could have known that her two brothers and her sister would ambush her and her army. She could have defeated them if she had looked sooner, but she did not and her hubris ended her ambition.

  Moria, the daughter of Order and Void, and the Goddess of Death joined Scalus and Secrets in fighting Alet. The Mortal Gods, confident that their numbers would overwhelm even a true Goddess, attacked her.

  Moira spake to the charging mortals, “to be mortal is to die. No matter what you do, no matter what life you lead, you will meet me at the end of your days. Today, you have met me and so your days must be ended.”

  And they died, for Death walked among them and no mortal could conquer her.

  Meanwhile, Alet fought Scalus and Secrets and was winning. She was Truth, and Truth always was. A mystery might obscure the Truth, but no secret could change it; the Truth could be Judged, but no Judgement could change it either, for the Truth was.

  But Justice was not his mother, nor was he his sister. Beyond Truth was the Laws set down by Order, and The First One had not aided the young Order in making them. Order made mistakes, and the World was cruel and unfair as a result, yet Order could do nothing to change it; Order was even unable to ask Chaos for aid.

  Justice was not his mother, and he invited his father to help because even Law could be unjust. The God of Secrets obscured the plan from Alet’s cursory examination and she was struck low by Void.

  And yet, she could not be taken by Death. Moira held no power over Alet, for the Truth was. Void struck out again, yet Void could not halt Alet either and soon Order arrived to push Void back from the World. Scalus could strike Alet, but he was not powerful enough to stop her. It took Scalus and the God of Secrets working together to defeat her.

  It was then that Alet was able to see past her hubris again and spake these words, “what will be, will be; what is inevitable, is inevitable; you know not what will come from this moment, but you could have never done anything different. Let it be known that even I could not avert the Truth, although I did try.”

  Those were the last words she would ever speak aloud because before Justice could be rendered, the God of Secrets moved and cut out Alet’s tongue.

  “Ewww,” that was icky.

  “Ewww?” Mom sounded amused, “Of all your reactions, you choose ‘ewww’ Char?”

  “The God of Secrets had to grab Alet’s tongue,” he would have had to stick his hand in her mouth! “It is gross!”

  And he cursed her in her weakness, that she might only speak the Truth to Justice and never again to mortals or Gods again. And yet, Justice floundered, because he then knew that his elder sister had moved out of a belief of necessity. Alet, her mouth bloody, smiled and laughed and whispered the Truth through the blood.

  No one save Justice himself and Truth herself knew what she whispered, nor what Judgement was rendered unto her. Thus was the First War of the Gods ended and the Gods turned towards the world ruined in their wrath. The Gods were powerful, and yet the World cried out for more than they could give, and so the Gods had children themselves.

  Justice fathered Jakkus, the God of Ambition, with Chaos and the people of the World were filled with the desire to improve it. Chaos also was the father to Mercy, who was the daughter of Chaos and Death.

  It would be Mercy that would blind Justice, that Justice may only act on what Truth was told to him.

  “But that is a story for another time,” Mom said to me. “For now, it is time for bed Char.”

  “Wait, who is Jakkus?” That wasn’t a name I remembered, and I had been so proud that I had remembered them all!

  “Not all the Gods are good to worship,” Mom replied, but that wasn’t an answer! “You will understand more when you are older.”

  “Ok…” I try to keep myself calm and pretend I took that for an answer as mom tucks me into bed, but I know where I can go to check! I just have to keep myself awake for another couple of hours until my mother is asleep and then I can sneak into the library myself! No one has ever caught me before, well, aside from the [Priests] of Alet - they always knew what I was doing!

  They never told anyone though, so it didn’t really matter to me. I hated waiting for my mom to fall asleep though - it was hard not to fall asleep myself and it was boring just sitting in bed and waiting for her to go to sleep!

  Hours later, I snuck through the halls of the temple and into the library. I wasn’t seen by anyone that mattered - just a [Priestess] of Secrets and a [Priest] of Alet, and they either wouldn’t or couldn’t tell anybody else - so I was free to check the Book of the Gods.

  I had never directly read it before, the Wisdoms had given me a list of Gods to memorize that was taken from this book, but I had never looked at it myself. It was on a shelf above my head and just barely in my reach. When I pulled it down I found that it was very heavy too!

  I started to scan through it, looking for Jakkus and found that there were a lot of Gods that the Wisdoms had left out! Decay, Destruction, Evolution… They did not seem like nice Gods, but wasn’t the purpose of the Gods to uphold the World?

  Eventually, I found Jakkus, the God of Ambition, but his entry was empty save for a single sentence:

  “If you could have any one thing, what would it be?”

  I wasn’t sure, there were a lot of things I wanted. Infinite cookies, to escape from the Wisdoms, to know who my father   was… How would someone ever decide what one thing to take when offered everything? Oh…

  “I would take everything,” I whispered confidently. “‘Everything’ is one ‘thing,’ right? Just like a cookie is made up of parts of a cookie!”

  “An excellent answer, child.” A voice whispered behind me, and I dropped the book in surprise and whipped around to see… Nothing…

  “Where are you?” I was really afraid. There was no one nearby, yet I had heard someone speak to me! “Who are you?”

  “An interesting question,” the voice answered - it sounded like it was smiling. “Considering what I am, asking where I am might be a singularly pointless question.”

  The voice was… Inside my head? I didn’t understand what it was saying though…

  “Yes, I imagine you are a bit too young to understand the metaphysical implications of an entity actually being a concept. In fairness to you Chaurl, everyone else in your temple is too young as well; humans are like mayflies…” I kept looking around, but the voice really was coming from inside me and I was getting really, really scared!

  I was going to call out, even if it got me in trouble, but I couldn’t. My mouth wouldn’t open!

  “I never was good with children… So many of them give up their dreams as they become adults.” The voice seemed to mumble that before announcing, “Listen well child, for I am Jakkus, the God of Ambition.”

  I didn’t notice that I had fallen to the floor for a while. I found my forehead against the ground, bleeding from a cut and shakily pushed myself up. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t! I didn’t think meeting a god would be like this and I didn’t like it!

  “Truly, the dreams of children are more fragile than their lives,” Ambition noted as he spoke to me. “Yet I am not so easily swayed. You may have just barely met the requirements set forth by Order to allow my interference, but you did meet them. You will serve my plan, and be rewarded for it - and perhaps it will fan the flames of your own ambition…”

  “[You have met the requirements for the Class: [Initiate]!]

  [You have 9 open Class Slots.]

  [You have Classes available, would you like to see them now?]

  [Jakkus, God of Ambition, has assigned you the Class: [Initiate]!]

  [You are now an [Initiate].]

  [You have gained the Skill: [Prayer]!]

  [You have gained the Skill: [Ambition is Life]!]

  [You have 8 Class Slots remaining.]”

  Suddenly, I was alone in the temple library and I started to cry and kept crying until the Wisdoms returned me to mom.

*Kingdom of Frakus, The Grand Temple, Nine Years Ago*

  It is easy, I suppose, to envy the Gods. Easy to see their servants wield powers beyond mortal comprehension with seeming ease and want it for yourself. The few friends I had outside the Temple thought as much and could never understand why I felt pity for them. But in the nine years since I had been chosen by Jakkus, I had gained a better understanding of what it really meant for them to be a concept as much as a being.

  As an [Initiate] I had been moved into classes meant for older children and I had struggled, but I did learn. I learned things that terrified me as a child - what child wouldn’t get nightmares when they learned that the Gods of their stories were very nearly mad? The very reason that they weren’t insane was what was also driving them to it, and it was that their nature was absolute.

  We interchanged their names and domains because effectively there were no differences between the two; Jakkus was Ambition and Ambition was Jakkus.

  These were the thoughts that went through my head as I wrote my essay, taking the test to receive an [Acolyte’s] training. It was the subject I had chosen to write on: the inherent contradiction of my God, that even two ambitions that were mutually exclusive were both equally part of him - and that there could be as many ambitions as there were thinking beings.

  While I had originally been scared, and then angry, that Jakkus had forced me to take him as my patron, I now knew that he could never have done otherwise. Order was given a choice at the very beginning, but no God ever had a real choice in their actions since. The most powerful could somewhat choose how they would arrive at a future point, but that they would arrive at that event was a foregone conclusion and even in that choice they were severely limited.

  Ambition already knows that he will fail to break free of those shackles, and yet he must try. He already knows that I will not be able to further his plans, and yet he could do nothing but choose me as a pawn in a game he already lost.

  And so I pity him.

  Personally, I doubt I am any more free to choose than Jakkus is - but there is a difference between that doubt and certain knowledge. Moreover, I am not bound to any absolute. If my life is already chosen for me, then that is something I could learn to live with.

  And most importantly, the way the human mind works I am granted the illusion of choice even if there are none. I make my own decisions, or so I feel, but I don’t need it to be true. It is that mere feeling - the emergent illusion of time and choice - that preserves me from the madness that nips at the heels of the Gods themselves.

  Of course, I don’t write down that I have come to share my God’s ambition, although that is what the Wisdoms assumed I would do anyway. Almost every true worshipper of Jakkus agrees with their God’s ultimate desire, because what Ambition truly desires is choice itself. The pinnacle of Ambition is met when they are granted the choice to choose everything, anything, or nothing and are not bound to choose any one of them.

  In short, Jakkus wants freedom.

  After I hand my essay in to the Wisdom, I go to see my mother. It had only been a few years ago that I had learned the truth: short of asking Truth herself, I would never know who my father was. Mom was a [Priestess] of Life, and one of the requirements to become a [Priestess] of Life was to have a child. She had known nothing of my father, save what she learned of him as they spoke over a drink at a bar and he probably did not know that I even existed.

  Yet this knowledge did not stop me from hugging her now, nor did it make me feel any less loved by her. That she had such a reason to have a child did not stop her from being a caring and loving mother and I had come to appreciate the ambition she showed. Some of that appreciation was bleed over from Jakkus himself and it was one of the things I was most thankful to him for.

  To worship the Gods was to be changed by them, affected by them. Each one influenced their [Priests] in different ways and the [Priests] of Jakkus were known for enjoying the vision of an action equal to or more than the substance of it. Without Jakkus’s influence, I think I would have been more hurt when I learned that to a certain extent I was something to check off a list.

  It had hurt though, even though she did love me. I had spent less time at the Temple after that, preferring to explore the city itself when I had the time. Being able to feel the ambitions of people around me made it a fascinating experience. Inside the Temple the ambitions of [Priests] tended to be cold and quiet, but at the same time hard and unwavering. They knew their goals and pursued them with the patience of inevitability, for they had been granted surety by the Gods themselves.

  But in the city, ambitions flared and faded, blazed and shifted! I could watch as the spark of an idea passed through the mind of a man and they burned with desire and possibility, only for the flames to sputter out as reality reasserted itself over them. People were quick to have grand ambitions, and just as quick to give them up.

  It was last year that I, watching the ambitions of people around me rather than the people themselves, had wandered into a seedier part of the city. Thankfully, the robes of an [Initiate] had kept me safe - mostly because anyone who saw them recognized that I would have nothing on me anyway.

  I had, unknowingly, tailed the lieutenant of a powerful gang into one of the underground bars they owned. Underground in this case because of their illegal fighting ring, drug sales, and prostitution. I had been confronted there, because my robes only kept me so safe and they had no desire for the servants of Justice to come down on them.

  I was still in somewhat of a trance however, and didn’t reply to them. I watched the people around me until one of their [Thugs] hauled me up by the collar.

  “And what,” the lieutenant snarled at me. “Is so interesting that you would ignore a knife to your throat?”

  “That woman,” I said, pointing at one of the whores who worked here. “Probably is wasted doing just that. You should offer her an opportunity to do something more.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you see how much she wants something more?” I asked, hardly noticing the confused [Thug] and [Gang Underboss]. “Can’t you feel the strength of her desire? Given a chance - any chance - she would pour her soul into it.”

  “Only one kind of [Priest] talks like that,” an older voice came from the back. “It has been a while since I have seen a worshipper of Ambition, and a Chosen one to boot.”

  “Being Chosen really isn’t very impressive,” I automatically replied. It sounded impressive, sure, but realistically anyone with a religious Class had been Chosen. The Gods weren’t often obvious about it, because their Chosen usually found their way to the Temple without much intervention. But the public was only interested in the flashy kinds of Choosing and rarely paid attention to the usual ones.

  I had very nearly gotten a punch to the gut for saying that - if the [Crime Lord] hadn’t stopped the [Thug] he would have given me a “lesson in respect.”

  “Now, now,” the criminal lord had said. “Leave the kid alone, he probably doesn’t even know where he is and he might be useful to us.”

  That had been last year, and I had agreed to help the criminals. Of course, I hardly saw it that way, I saw it as giving people who wanted something more the chance to do so. Was it wrong? A [Priest] of Justice might say so, but I didn’t think the problem was me.

  As I had become more used to the chaos outside the Temple, I realized that I had been distracted by the number of ambitions and how quickly they could change. As I spent more time around the citizens of the city of all classes, I realized that very few really had great ambition.

  In fact, most barely cared or thought about what they could be or do.

  The [Lords] and [Ladys] that I saw visiting the Temples had ambition within their political games, but that was a petty thing. How many actually wanted to improve the land they governed or improve the lives of those under them? No - how many thought it was even possible?

  And I could see why they doubted, because the majority of the populace was perhaps not content, but definitely resigned to their fate. Few sought to Level seriously, fewer still sought rare or special Classes. They merely… Existed.

  And existed miserably.

  Hunger and disease were common in the slums, and the only source of Levels and money to be found was in crime. How could Justice blame them for wanting more? One Level or one coin might be the difference between life and death when the next winter sweeps the weak from the world. Where was the justice in that?

  I started taking lessons at the underground bar, eventually earning the [Brawler] Class. My time in the city had made me come to believe that my God was right, the World needed a change. The World needed something more.

*Kingdom of Frakus, Royal Palace, Two Years Ago*

  I had come with the [Priestesses] of Truth and Justice to the Royal Palace on a whim. I wished to see what the ambition of royalty looked like, but now I suspected that a [Priest] or [Priestess] of Love had interfered somewhere because I can only say that it was love at first sight.

  I had only thought that I had seen ambition burn before, but before this inferno I knew I had only seen the barest of sparks.

  “I did say I would reward you, child.” Jakkus whispered into my mind, “This meeting was your purpose - whether you make something more of it is up to you. You are to approach Ylma and work with her.”

  Well obviously I was going to approach her, although I could already see that I wasn’t like her. I might be a servant of Ambition itself, but she burned brighter than me. Perhaps she would have the courage to have spoken up, but I didn’t and I told myself it wasn’t the right time.

  Instead I approached her after she returned to the Temple with us and said, “Hello there Ylma, my God asked that I find you.” As I held my hand out to her, before realizing I had forgotten to even introduce myself. “Ah, how rude of me, I forgot to introduce myself. I am Chaurl Kent, do you have a moment to hear about Lord Jakkus, God of Ambition?”