In the Land of Dead Gods

	Elsa Ledren settled into the corner of her bathtub with a loud groan.  Her entire body was sore after the day’s extensive training sessions.  The new batch of Paladins was coming along well, but she and her partner Alan were the only ones experienced enough to train them.  The two veterans were now out on the field, sparring against the neophytes for five or six days out of each week, and as much fun as it could be, watching the younger fighters’ eyes light up as they opened them to the will of the Gods, it was tiring.

	Not that she was slowing down with age.  Thirty eight, and as hale as ever, with a suite of combat abilities no person had had since before the Collapse, Elsa Ledren could outfight Well-tapped fighters half again her age with no problems.  The Well had immersed her soul too, so fully that her patroness Asa had told her that she suspected Elsa would live for five hundred years.

	That wasn’t a thought she had particularly enjoyed having, however.  Elsa was a mother and a wife, and she didn’t look forward to outliving her entire family.  She closed her eyes in the hugely oversized bathtub and wrapped her arms around her iron-hard stomach, trying to find peace and solitude in the still water.  The suite of scars on her body spoke volumes about her rough career.  The huge wolf-claw scars over her eye from her first field assignment in the Auxilia, the savage cut across her eyes from the assassin on Don Kotrick’s payroll, the synthetic left arm from Kotrick’s maul, the hairline scars where he broke her nose, and the punctures on her stomach and torso from her battles before and since, they decorated her body.  The scars overlapped and disappeared under her brands.  These weren’t tattoos, but patterns of scored flesh, covering her now from scalp to soles, implanted by the God Gem in her forehead.  They looked like a living mural.

	The scars weren’t all bad, though.  She had a few stretch marks from her three babies, too.  She had a few sun scars from long days in the light, training and riding where she pleased.  The sun had bleached her hair a shade lighter than it had been that winter, as it did every year.

	The door knocked.  “Elsa!  You in there?” her husband Jerome called.

	“Just bathing,” she called back, not opening her eyes.  The door rattled again, as Jerome tested it.  Sometimes she would leave it unlocked, if her exertions had left her a bit amorous and she wanted company in the bath, but not today.  Today, she just wanted privacy.

	Elsa rose from her slump and knelt instead.  She clasped her hands at her waist and raised her head high.  The room went totally silent as she focused into the emptiness.  She wasn’t praying, just meditating.  She meditated often, now.  In the morning, before her exercises, with Jerome and her eldest child, Lars.  Sometimes, she would meditate after clerical instruction, with the Circle in the Steam Chamber outside.  This was just focus, though, with no religious overtones.

	The battle-scarred young elf sat there alone for a few more minutes of total stillness, before rising and letting out the water.  She toweled off slowly, just thinking to herself.


	Asa, the demigoddess of the elves, sat in her throne at the feet of her mother’s.  The thrones to her left were filled by the corporeal forms of her friends and surviving comrades, Haret and Vier.  The demigods of the human race, they were all that was left of the Pantheon of Tarsh.

	Asa’s corporeal form, a cloud of sound, hummed in place as she processed the world.  Souls needed harvesting, though that was routine.  Her power poured through Avatars into the Rifts that polluted much of the surface, and the sea as well.  Of course, most mortals didn’t know or care about the sea rifts, but the world wasn’t only bleeding aboveground.

	The other two were her inferiors in raw power.  The fact that they split all incoming souls between them meant that each only accumulated half of humanity’s dying power.  All elves belonged to Asa.

	She hated that part.  There wasn’t a moment in her life that she didn’t miss gentle, noble Ghalad, her brother.  The pain had numbed by quite a deal of late, of course.  Promoting Elsa and her Paladins had helped, but of course finding Kerin, the long-lost Demon of Discretion, was a far greater triumph.  She politely did not share that with Elsa, naturally.

	Kerin’s voice was a presence in her mind often, now.  She could communicate with him far faster than with the others, whose psionic links were artificial and slap-dash.  Kerin was made to speak to her, just like she was made to speak with Elsa.  It was all connected within her, and she held them together.  She, the last elf representative on the Pantheon, was the glue that held the species to the mortal plane.  If she succumbed, like so many others, then the children of Mother Mai’te would instantly perish forever.

	“Now, the matter of the new Rifts opening to the south pole,” Haret said brusquely.  It had long since stopped bothering her that he was so abrupt and cold.  It was simply how he had been made, and she loved him anyway, as he loved her.

	“Yes, they seem to be unstable,” Vier mused.  “To whom should we give the credit, I wonder?  It was a mortal who found them, correct?”

	“An explorer, a crewman from the ship Horizon Walker,” Haret confirmed.

	“Perhaps a small token of our appreciation, then.  A coin from the wrecks?” Vier asked the others.  Lost treasure from shipwrecks was a popular gift from the Pantheon to the mortals who earned their favor.

	“Certainly.  Historical value gives it… weight…” Asa said.  She trailed off in her lightspeed psionic link with the others, and both took note.

	“Asa?  Are you all right?” Vier asked.

	Asa could not answer.  She had just absorbed a Gift, as she often did.  Gifts were shards of Chaos in the souls of mortals.  They were strange, inscrutable, and inexplicable.  They should not have existed, but they did, and the demigods absorbed the Gifts when the mortals that bore them died.  They tended to be hereditary, but beyond that, they were unpredictable in every way.

	“Some Gifts are useless, some are world-changing,” Asa said quietly.  “I don’t know what this one was.”

	“A new Gift?” Haret asked interestedly.  “What can it let you do?”

	Asa’s sound body twisted around and stared above her.  “I do not… quite know,” she said.  There was a presence of some kind, far above her, in the vast Geode in which they resided now.  They should have numbered 42 and no fewer, since the Gods and their demigods should have had a parent and two children for every race.  Now, the great thrones behind them were empty, and the smaller seats fared little better.

	Above them, though, that was empty.  Everybody knew that.  The Geode was impermeable, far below the archipelago of islands and reefs that denoted the extreme edge of the continent far above.  They were beset by never-ending waterspouts, and for nobody’s safety more than that of the sailors and seamen who traveled the vast ocean.  The weather machines that made life possible on the mainland were in the islands, and even one more failing would have brought about extinction.

	“There’s something in the rock above us,” Asa said, mystified.  “I can sense some item or effect permeating the rock.”

	“A visitor?” Haret demanded.

	“No… it’s not moving,” Asa said.  “I shall investigate.”

	“I’ll come with,” Vier said, and her own cloudy form rose as Asa’s did.  Haret wasted no time in following.

	The three demigods floated up to the top of the chamber of stones and gems, metal ores and heaps of treasure chests.  Indeed, at the top, there were the same thousands of crenellations and crevices that there had always been.

	Now, though, Asa could sense something beyond.  Something shje had never felt.  Distantly., she used her surplus of power to sift through the memories of the people she had absorbed over the years, looking for anything comparable.

	Realization struck.  “Oh!  This is a magic effect!” she said.  “It’s… close!  Very close!”

	“What is it, specifically?” Haret pressed.

	“I have absolutely no idea,” Asa admitted.  “It’s inside the rocks above this spot!”

	Haret’s body scanned the surface, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.  “Are you quite certain?” he asked.  “Nothing has changed.”

	“No, and I suspect nothing will,” Asa said.  “I think I only just now managed to notice.”  She probed the surface of the rock with her form, but found nothing odd.  “There… has this hole…” she said distractedly.  Sure enough, one tiny hole, no greater in size than an inch across, dug back into the rock face.  It was bored through the side of a large geode facet, facing directly down from the center of the room.  “Has this always been here?”

	“I think so,” Vier said.  She was the oldest of their number by a brief period, and had been around when several other Demigods had come into being.  “That… goes deep.  I can’t see the end.”

	Asa paused for a moment, then firmed her resolve.  “Nothing for it.”  She shrank down to miniscule size.  Apprehensively, the others looked on as she passed into the tiny hole.

	“It’s a tunnel,” Asa reported to the others.  “Has this been here the whole time, for four thousand years?” she demanded.  “It goes forty feet straight up!”  She continued on up the passage, still devoting the vast majority of her power to her Avatars and operating the weather machines.  “It opens into a chamber.  It’s fifteen feet tall, I’d say, and completely black.”

	“Is it large enough for all of us?” Vier asked in her mind.

	“Easily.”

	“What do you sense?”

	Asa stretched out with her strange new power, but found nothing specific nearby.  There was a sense of permeation, as if magic had somehow suffused this pocket of rock.  “Nothing I can identify.  I shall risk light.”

	She allowed a dim glow from her hands, and it flooded the room.  The absolute dark of the seabed’s rock faded.  Deep shadows filled the chamber.  Asa’s ever-morphing body turned slowly as she took it all in.  “It’s… a laboratory,” she finally said, as the others arrived.

	“So it is indeed,” Vier said faintly.  She was as stunned as Asa.  Haret said nothing, but stared at the wall of machines and instruments.

	All around them were artifacts of technological, arcade, divine, and psionic creation.  None of them had seen the like.  There were bottles and tubes of strange material, fluted pipes that alternated between opaque, translucent, and transparent.  They saw books in stasis field spells, they saw a box of strange jewelry and metal discs on ancient metal chains.  A chandelier flattened to the width of a bare inch was mounted into the ceiling, and held in place with rivets made of an alloy the three demigods did not recognize.  A skeleton of a strange being, somewhat elf-like in anatomy but more slender and lacking a tailbone, stood erect by a table covered in knives and probes.

	Beyond them, racks of books covered an entire wall, all sealed behind stasis magic.  A pile of chains of varying link size, ominously studded with manacles every so often, draped over low wall segments that jutted out like market stalls.  A few dozen random animal bones in jars dotted desks in an adjacent room with no door.

	Behind a dusty curtain, perfectly preserved by the total lack of air or water in the Geode, they saw a pile of surgical tools.  What looked like a small machine with visible moving parts sat on a table beyond, connected to strange wires that ended in serrated hooks.  A stack of random magic items with labels in no familiar language stood on another table, with bottles of liquid in neat rows on a table against one wall.

	All through the room were marks on the floor.  Regular marks in unknown alphabets, next to colored geometric shapes, denoted patterns the demigods couldn’t understand.

	“Just what have I found, my kin?” Asa asked, dumbfounded.

	Neither knew.


	Elsa snuggled down into the corner of a long couch beside the crackling fire.  She had a book balanced on the armrest, but she was too distracted to read.  Lars was outside somewhere, wandering around the compound, her daughter Belle was curled up by the fire, reading, and her freshest son, Lumiere, was blissed out on her knee.  Elsa’s lips curled up in a smile as she stroked his hair, and he struggled to keep his eyes open.  He was a funny kid.  Somehow, despite barely knowing Cenderian, much less Primordial, he could send her and Jerome into peals of laughter, and she was quite certain he knew what he was doing.

	Lars ambled in, holding a cloak shut.  “Hit the steam room?” Elsa asked.

	“Yeah,” Lars said, his voice cracking.  He grunted in annoyance.  “Shit.”

	“Language,” Elsa said crossly, jerking her head at the other children.

	“Sorry.”  He walked out of the room towards the stairs.  “I need a shower.”

	“Alright.”  Elsa tuned back into her younger children, who hadn’t noticed their older brother’s coarseness.  Belle, named after her mother’s mother, was reading a book of Cenderian and Primordial, trying to wrap her head around both.  Elsa could barely force her sons to learn two languages, but Belle seemed to absorb them with vigor.  The Elf Primordial tongue was a syntactical bastard, but it was more comprehensible than the Human one, which was a total mess.

	“Mommmm,” Lumiere mumbled.  “I’m tired.”

	Elsa half-lifted her young son and nuzzled his cheek.  “Wanna go to bed?” she asked.

	“Yes,” he said faintly.  “‘M sleepy.”

	“Okay.  Belle, I’m going to put your brother to bed, alright?” Elsa said.

	“…Okay,” Belle said distractedly.


	Asa and the others had returned to their thrones in the Geode now, and had their Avatars walking around the place.  It was apparently built for beings of their height.

	“This is unknown to me,” Haret said thoughtfully.  He gestured at a complex grid of strange metal and clamps, holding aloft some delicate glass flutes and pipes.  “I can’t even tell what metal it is, much less what it does.”

	“Were I to wager, I would say this is a heating element,” Vier said.  She poked a thick glass bulb with an ethereal finger.  “Perhaps the liquid is similar to the base reagents for alchemic work?”

	Asa peered into an open chest of seemingly random equipment.  “Has anybody noticed that there seems to be no mana in here?”

	“I think you’re right,” Vier observed.  “This is clearly the product of advanced metallurgy, but there’s no mana anywhere.”  Mana was the physically manifested energy of magic, which was otherwise imperceptible.

	Haret raised a shard of metal from the stone box beside a long, high table of neatly labelled bones.  “This metal is not of this world,” he said flatly.  “I am entirely certain of it.”

	The other two walked over and stared.  “There is no metal in all of Tarsh that holds these characteristics.”  Haret rolled the shard of metal across the back of his Avatar’s hand.  “It is stronger and lighter than steel, it is harder than tungsten, and from what I can sense of it, this is polished more than silver or platinum or even tin can allow.  And here, see?  Where this iron tool has rust, this thing does not.”

	Asa took it up in her hands and held it to the floating ball of light she had conjured so they could see.  “And to think, it was only by the fate of Celisé that I found this at all,” she mused.  That had been the name of the soul that bore the Gift she had used to find the strange laboratory.

	“Who knew this was here?” Vier asked aloud.  As always, they spoke and thought at lightspeed.  While these Avatars explored this laboratory, ten thousand others spoke in courts and libraries, fought the Chaos and Cursed Beasts, sealed Rifts, searched the seabeds, and sucked souls into oblivion.  “This is as old as the Geode itself, it has to be.  There’s no way the Gods added this after we were created.”

	“Perfectly preserved, in a temperature-stable, lightless, water-free vacuum.”  Asa shook her Avatar’s head in wonder.  “This is as old as the first demons, at the very least.  Or… well, I should ask.”

	With her vast, deifacted mind, Asa reached out to her brother, the demon Kerin.  [Brother?  I have encountered a true oddity in the Geode.  The physical space of the Geode, that is.]

	~Beg pardon?~ he said.

	[I have found a secret, hidden laboratory, full of strange machines and otherworldy technology, built into the secret caves above the Geode.  They have skeletons of animals that do not exist, magic we have never seen, and a pervasive magical field fills the room.  We can identify absolutely none of it.]

	~I haven’t even the faintest idea what you’re talking about,~ Kerin said, bewildered.  ~Are there people there?~

	[No, brother, not even corpses.  Well, corpses outside of operating theaters and cages,] Asa said.  [It’s all quite grim.]

	~I fear I have nothing to say, little sister, for I know nothing you don’t in this case,~ her brother’s gentle voice informed her.  ~But if you bring me some of these items, I may use my power to identify them, if it can be done.~

	[Wise.  I’ll be right there.]  “Friends, Kerin says he may be able to identify some of these things if I bring them to him,” she said.  “Shall we risk teleporting it to him?”

	“Why not?  They seem inert,” Vier observed.

	“The pressure differential between the vacuum in which we stand and the outside world may shatter some of the more fragile items,” Haret pointed out.  Even in privacy, his pattern of speech was far more formal than the others’.  “If you take anything, take the metal shards.”

	“Fair enough.”  Asa manifested a new Avatar in her brother’s Shrine, and it smiled as her true self felt the blissful field of deific blessing permeating the whole space.  “Brother,” she said warmly.

	Kerin looked up from the guard with whom he was happily conversing and immediately grinned.  “Hello, little sister,” he said, though of course it was just for the sake of the guard, who had no way of knowing they had already spoken via telepathy.  “Crispin, can we possibly resume this in a moment?”

	“Of course, master,” the guard said, bowing out and walking towards the edge of the shrine.

	“I understand you have something to show me?” Kerin asked.

	Asa silently produced the metal.  The item disappeared from her Avatar’s hands in the laboratory and appeared in the hands of the Avatar in the Shrine.  She watched with a shiver of memory as her brother’s physical form took the object, while his true, deific self stretched high towards the cracked vault of the stars above.  “Fascinating,” he said quietly, while his invisible self wrapped around it, probing the shard.  Asa, the most powerful being in the universe outside of that Shrine, felt very small and safe in the unseen shadow of her brother’s nigh-infinite power.

	“This is… very old,” he said.  Demon minds did not work like those of the demigods.  He could think at lightspeed like the rest of them, but he had no Avatars with which to collect information.  Instead, the shrine was his domain, as much a part of him as his body.  “This is actually ancient.  It may pre-date the heavens.”

	“Is that even possible?” Asa asked.  “Tarsh is older, yes, but it was torn down and rebuilt over and over while the Gods forged their heavens.”

	“This is not of Tarsh, little sister, of that you may be entirely assured,” Kerin said confidently.  “This is of another realm, beyond the Unformed.”

	Incredulity colored her reply.  “How can you be sure?” Asa asked.  “There’s nothing out there.  Even when Sun armored himself in time magic, he saw nothing beyond the Rifts.”

	“Nothing we can reach,” Kerin said.  “Were the Gods so constrained?  We will probably never know.  But I can say, without a doubt, that this scrap of alloy is from another world.”

	Had Asa not spent thousands of years meeting every dead or insane mind in all of the elven race, that revelation would have shocked her into silence.  Had Kerin not spent three thousand years in unbroken sensory deprivation torture, he may have been just as shocked to say it.  As it was, they simply stared at the metal in silence.

	“I suppose it needs a name,” Asa finally said.

	“In the spirit of brevity, may I suggest Enigmium?” Kerin quipped.

	“Brevity?  What’s brief about that?”

	“Nothing, but I felt the need for a joke,” Kerin said drily.

	Asa laughed silently.  She had missed her brother.  “Hmm, alright.  There’s more, though.  Haret tells me that he can’t identify fully nine of the materials in that lab.”

	“Ah.”  Kerin held it aloft, and though the guards outside just saw a flicker of light, Asa saw a torrent of divine power surround the shard, so bright that it nearly interrupted her Avatar’s connection to her true self.

	His solid gold eyes glinted with curiosity.  “Oh, but that is interesting,” he said.  “This metal can react with magic flawlessly.  This is an ideal magic substrate for crafting, at least as good as mana.”  He passed it back to her.  “If you bring me the other materials, I may be able to tell their purpose.  Did you find any books or labels?”

	“Thousands, all in strange languages.”  Asa’s Avatar looked off in the direction of the Geode.  “I am at a loss, brother.  I find it all quite disconcerting to know that this existed so close to our home.”

	Kerin walked forward and gave her a comforting hug.  Asa’s Avatar closed its eyes and enjoyed the feeling, since she would never risk coming to the shrine to receive it in person.  “I promise I’ll help, Asa,” Kerin said.

	“I know you will, Kerin.  Thank you.”  Asa’s Avatar stepped.  “Should we involve Elsa?  She should know of this, at least.”

	Kerin nodded.  “It would be rude to leave her out, though… it is late,” he noted.  “This may trouble her sleep.”

	“Then I’ll just let her know we’ll need some of her time tomorrow,” Asa said.  [Elsa, can I borrow you for a moment?] she spoke into her Herald’s mind.

	There was a lengthy pause.  “She may be asleep,” Kerin observed.  A moment later, they heard her voice.

	{Can it wait about ten minutes?  Kind of in the middle of something.}

	~Certainly, Elsa.  Take your time.~  Kerin glanced over at Asa and shrugged.  “Can you see what else may be in this laboratory in the meantime?”

	“Certainly.  I’ll return when I’ve learned more.  Thanks, Kerin.”



	Elsa finished toweling off her face and hung up the cloth.  She tugged on a sleeping shirt and underclothes and sprawled out over their huge bed, cooling off in the breeze through the bay windows.  Jerome looked up from the chair by the patio door.  “Long day?”

	“Just tough,” she yawned.  “Lars is starting to catch up to some of the younger students.”

	“Yeah?  Good for him.  How long before he has to choose?” Jerome asked.  Lars had been noncommittal at best when asked if he actually intended to follow the path of the Paladin.  He liked the training, but he wasn’t sure the clergy was right for him.

	“Oh… a few years, still,” Elsa said.  She rolled onto her back and stared up at the blank stone ceiling.  “Alan is looking for a new number two, so that should open up a slot in the lower ranks.  Arisa has enough Paladins for now, though.”  Her friend, the leader of the civilian clergy, had a bodyguard of two Paladins.  The King did not like that one bit, but understood the need.

	“Did Asa need something?” Jerome asked.

	Elsa shook her head.  “Not urgently.  I’ll see what’s up later.”  She stood up and walked over to the chair where he sat.

	“Mm.  Kay.”  Jerome held out his arms for his wife as she settled down beside him.  “Hey, there,” he murmured in her ear; she instinctively flicked it to dislodge him.

	“Hee, that tickles,” she giggled.  She rested her hands on his bare chest and shut her eyes.  “So.  Weekend tomorrow.  Got any plans?”

	He didn’t answer right away.  “Uh… not really,” he admitted.  “The bakery always takes up time, but you know, I’ve got people for it now.”  The little kitchen he had opened to provide for the endless queue of petitioners for Kerin had ballooned into the primary source of income for the compound.  “How come?  Asa need you that long?”

	“Oh, I dunno, I just want to spend some time with you and the kids.  Maybe go to the city, or something.”

	“That might be nice.  Wish the trip weren’t so long.”  Even by a fast cart, it was three hours both ways.

	“Yeah, but what can you do?” she said sleepily.  He was so warm.  Belatedly, she remembered her prior contact.  She reached up and tapped her God Gem.  {Sorry, did you need me?}

	[Only to say that we’ll need your help tomorrow with something, but it’s not urgent.  We’ll see you tomorrow.]

	{Okay.  Good night.}  Elsa pulled her hand away and settled in on the thick pillows.  “See you tomorrow,” she murmured.

	“The Triad need something?” Jerome yawned.

	“Don’t think it’s important.  I’ll get to it tomorrow.”  She leaned over and pecked Jerome on the cheek.  “Night.”


	The three Avatars continued their wandering around the laboratory.  It seemed like every time they thought they had found the end, they encountered a new door to a new chamber full of mysteries.  Sometimes, they found horrors instead.

	“Why did they need so many bones?” Vier asked aloud.  A bin before her held over a thousand individual bones, each labelled with the same inscrutable script.  They were clearly not all from the same animals, either, and some were far too large to have come from a Tarsh creature.  The bin stretched out for nearly fifteen meters, and there was a mammal rib that was easily half again as long as her Avatar was tall.

	Asa joined her.  “I know that one,” she said, pointing at the bin.  “That is the radius of the white-tail deer.  That, that looks like an upper vertebrate bone from a small whale.”

	“So wherever these samples came from, they came from a world with wildlife similar to ours,” Vier said.  “Or perhaps they’re not from another world after all.”

	“I doubt it,” Haret said from the door at the far end of the ossuary.

	Both Avatars blinked into being beside him in an instant.  “What are these?” Vier asked.  Asa simply stared, stunned into silence.

	Beyond was a skeleton, larger than that of any non-whale any of them had ever seen.  It had four large limbs like a cross between a dog and a crocodile, it was at least eighty feet long if not longer, and most impressively of all, it had two massive wings, nearly a hundred feet in span, stretching from one side of the room to the other.

	“I suppose that confirms it,” Asa eventually said.  “This came from an alien world, whatever it is.”

	“Even in the minds of the dead within me, I have no knowledge of this,” Haret said darkly.  “Look at those claws!  That monster could level a village from the skies.”

	Vier walked up next to one posed leg and poked the metal frame that held it up.  “The bones are suspended by ordinary steel, but the bones themselves are not made of ordinary calcium,” she reported.  “It’s more like some kind of metal ore, or something like it.”

	“Is it a sculpture?” Asa asked.

	“No… well, I suppose I can’t be entirely sure.  They do seem so real, though,” she mused.

	“Perhaps we should focus on the language first,” Asa said.  “With so many examples of the text, surely we can translate it if we put our heads together.”

	“Let’s see how large this place is, though,” Vier insisted.  “Whatever this laboratory is, it’s clearly larger than the Geode itself.”

	Haret’s Avatar twitched back from a display case beside the massive creature’s carcass.  “This case… there is a very powerful stasis spell on this,” he observed.  “It looks like a rack of maps.  Should I try to pop it open?”

	“I think so,” Vier said.  She prepared a ward, just in case the stasis held more than a bunch of papers.  Slowly, the demigod unwound the magic, until ten minutes of silent work had passed.  Abruptly, the faint purple haze vanished, and the papers sagged in the vacuum.

	Haret grabbed one before it could fall to the ground and deftly withdrew it.  Once he saw that they weren’t going to fall, he gingerly spread his down on the floor.  With the little flicker of divine light he shed across the floor, he could see a cutaway drawing of a great city.  He read the map in silence, while the other two looked over his shoulder.  “This is… unfamiliar,” Haret eventually said.  “There is no structure in all of Tarsh this large.”

	“It’s the size of the Imperial capital, Solium, only folded in on itself,” Vier observed.  “It looks like there are nine huge blocks, subdivided into ten or more sublevels each.  What is this?”

	“I wish Mother were here to help explain,” Asa said quietly in their mental link.  “She had to know this was here.”

	“Garm knew, too, I’m certain.”  Vier’s true body sighed.  “I do not like knowing this thing was up here all this time.”

	“Nor I,” Haret said darkly.  “This map is the same,” he added, “except that markings have been drawn on in wax and ink.”

	Asa tilted one roll of paper towards herself.  “This one is a city.  This one looks like a coastline.  This one is… oh.  What is this?”

	The others looked over at her as she spread one map on the table.  Unlike this one, it seemed to be a carefully hand-drawn colored chart, with a series of concentric circles and discs and spirals, all connected by strange text and hand-drawn arrows.  The center was a dark, hollow circle.  Above it was a strange whorl of spheres, all floating about each other in a sea of fire.  Below and to its left was a flat disk with a vast mountain in the middle, stretching towards – but not touching – the circle in the middle.  Below and to the right, they saw several overlapping, three-dimensional rings of swirling color, all around a blank, white sphere.  Between the three images that stood at triangular points around the black circle, there were more words, in blocky, sharp letters.

	“What in the world?” Vier asked.  “Is this some kind of abstract art?”

	“I doubt it.  These seem to be a series of numbers,” Asa said, pointing at a neat column of symbols in one corner, with an arrow drawn to one of the wavy lines between the bottom left and bottom right corners.  “I think it to be some kind of map, perhaps.”

	“This is entirely too strange,” Haret sighed.  “Does Kerin have anything else to add?”

	“He had nothing,” Asa said.  “Should… in theory, I could ask for a blessing,” she said doubtfully.  “I’ve never bothered, but if he used his full might, perhaps it could work.”

	The other two looked at each other.  “Isn’t that… dangerous?” Vier asked.

	“Very.  The interaction of his divine power with mine could harm me.”  Asa’s true body seemed to shift a bit, in the closest thing it could approximate to a sigh.  “Is there anything in the Dead Realms?”

	“We sealed them off for a very good reason, my friend,” Vier said.  “The afterlives of the dead Gods are filled to the brim with Chaos.  There’s barely anything left.”

	“Well… let’s see,” Asa said thoughtfully.  “The afterlives of the Spirelings, the Dommen, the Crawlers, the Prauns, the Cepros, the Dwarves, the Harpies, and the Felis are gone forever, and we can’t get them back,” she said.  “The afterlives of the Elves and Humans are just shuttered and inaccessible.  The Pukels’ and the Goblins’ are contaminated beyond repair, yes.  But… what about the afterlives of the Dragon-men and the Gnomes?  They’re contaminated, yes, but we sealed them off when we were far weaker.”

	Vier looked uncomfortable.  “We have… roughly doubled in power since then.  You have quadrupled.”

	Haret shook his Avatar’s head.  “My friend, let us at least try to explore the rest of this compound before we attempt such a thing.”

	“Fair enough,” Asa said.  “We should avoid unnecessary risk.”


	The three demigods spread out through the complex on their own.  Every so often, they would find a stair or hidden door that opened up into a new chamber, full of its own mysteries.  After nearly two hours of additional searching, they reconvened around the tiny hole in the floor that had first let them in.

	Vier’s Avatar looked down on the hole.  “Whose seat faced this hole in the floor in the first place?”

	“Fingleiss,” Haret replied at once.  That had been the male demigod of the Gnomes, before his murder.

	“So he must have at least known this was here, even if he never entered,” Vier mused.  “Have any of you found anything that would let us translate these texts?”

	“There are at least two distinct languages here,” Vier said, indicating a small pile of scrolls.  “There are four in the library.”

	“Perhaps Kerin could translate them,” Asa said.  “He does have the ability to read most text.”

	“Indeed.”  Haret gathered up some items he had collected.  “And these, they seem to be keys.  Some mundane, some magic.”

	“Does the facility seem to have a true center?” Asa asked the others.

	“The huge creature,” Vier said.  “All the other rooms branch out from there.”

	Asa looked around the collection of especially interesting items.  “Has anyone found a map of the place?”

	“I have.”  Haret lowered a tube of paper onto the pile.  “What time is it in Kerin’s home?”

	“Just before midnight,” Asa said.  “I’ll speak to him.”  She opened her mind to him.  [Brother, are you busy?]

	~Yes, I am.  Can you give me a few more minutes, Asa?  Elsa’s son is in the middle of a conversation with me.~

	[Very well.  Let me know when he’s done.]


	Kerin rested a hand on the miserable boy’s shoulder and slid his demonic mind into Lars’.  He allowed the young man’s mind to scatter its thoughts through the infinite filter of his own, and found the pained question in the back of his mind.

	His demonic power froze Lars’ perception of time as he spoke to him.  From the young elf’s perspective, it would have sounded like the world itself was speaking, ignoring physics and even the passage of time itself, as he changed the world to accommodate his message.  He would have found it theatrical, had he not known it was the only way to ensure his message could not be ignored.

	THERE WE ARE, MY YOUNG FRIEND.  YOUR QUESTION IS NOT AN UNREASONABLE ONE.  YOUR SENSE OF CONFINEMENT IS SOMETHING YOUR ROLE CREATES, AND YOU CAN ESCAPE IT.  I, DEMON OF DISCRETION, SAY THIS: YOU MAY ALWAYS TURN ASIDE FROM YOUR PATH, BUT DOING SO BEFORE EXPLORING WHERE IT LEADS WILL FILL YOU WITH REGRET.  YOUR FUTURE IS NOT YET ENTIRELY YOUR OWN, BUT WHEN IT IS SO, YOU MUST LOOK FORWARD TO IT WITHOUT WONDERING WHAT YOU HAD LEFT BEHIND.  AS FOR YOUR CONFUSION, IT IS NOT UNIQUE.  THE PAIN OF LONELINESS CAN CUT DEEP, AS I HAVE MYSELF SEEN, BUT IT IS BEST SOOTHED SLOWLY.  YOU ARE SO YOUNG, WITH SO MUCH TIME TO LEARN FROM YOUR SURROUNDINGS, AND THE MISTAKES YOU MAKE ALONG THE WAY.

	SIMPLY ASK.  OVERCOME YOUR HESITATION, FORCE YOURSELF TO ASK.  YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY LOVE, AND NO FURTHER PAIN CAN COME FROM AIRING YOUR CONFUSION.

	Lars slumped.  “Oh.  Duh.”  He rubbed his forehead, and to Kerin’s concern, started tearing up.  “Yeah.  Of course.  I’m… fucking dumb,” he mumbled.

	The outside was utterly dark, and the shrine’s only light came from Kerin’s faint glow.  He opened his arms and embraced the boy, which he would be willing to do to most petitioners, had he no concern for decorum.  “It’s alright, Lars,” he soothed.  “Trust me, not everybody can see their path for all the stones in the roadbed.  Just stop worrying.  Nothing is aided by worrying, not here.”

	“Thanks, Kerin,” Lars said blearily, and his buried his face in Kerin’s shoulder.  “I’m… thank you, so much.”

	Kerin smiled and closed his eyes, resting a hand on the middle of Lars’ shoulders.  “It’s all right, little brother,” he said softly.  “Take your time.”

	Eventually, Lars looked up, stepped away, cinched his bathrobe, and slowly walked back to the temple.  Kerin followed him to the very edge of his shrine, until he had vanished over the bridge.

	~Now you may approach, sister.  Thanks for waiting.~

	Asa appeared behind him with the other demigods, and the two Shieldbearers on duty immediately knelt.  Asa waved them up at once.  “Rise, my children, we’re not here for official duties,” she said.

	Vier smiled and half-shut her eyes, enjoying the sensations of the shrine.  It was so different from the way the human heaven had felt, but so lovely regardless.  “Kerin, if we can, I would like to ask for your help in translating some text,” she said, once the guards were back out of hearing range.  “We have found many, many books and labels, maps and the like.  They are all in one of four unknown languages, apparently penned by several different hands.”

	Kerin willed light, and there was.  The bright, pale beam of light spilled down from nothingness overhead to illuminate a table he had conjured from nothing in the middle of his shrine, beside the nearly-silent fountain.  “Then let us see, my friends,” he said.  He sat at the table – pure affectation, but he didn’t want to seem imposing – and spread out the items brought to him.  “Ah, here… fascinating.  This is no language native to Tarsh,” he said instantly.  “None of them are.  These characters are not Tarsh symbols in any way.”

	“Then what could they be, but from another world?” Asa asked.  “It sounds mad, but what option is there?  A hidden, stasis-preserved magic vault in the ceiling of our own Geode, which is as old as the planet?  Strange languages?  The bones of creatures no Tarsh climate contains?”

	Kerin looked up at her.  “Bones?” he asked.  “What bones?”

	Asa held up one hand, and a tiny model of the creature appeared, cast from wood she had found on the seabed.  “This.  Only, when we saw it, it was well over eight feet wide.”

	“Eighty feet?” Kerin echoed.  He lifted the delicate model and stared.  “I have no idea what this is.”  He set it down and stared at the pile of papers.  “Let us see here.  Some of these items have been targets of powerful magic spells.  They seem to have been dispelled, for the time being.”

	“Some were in stasis cabinets, others were bound by individual stasis fields.”  Haret tapped the edge of one book that faintly glowed.  “This one was protected by one.  It appears to have had a number of authors.”

	Kerin set it on the table and opened it to the title page.  The blank cover’s shimmer faded as it left his light.  The stars overhead were invisible under their cloud cover.  “So it does,” he said.  His solid gold eyes pulsed with a light that only the other holy beings could have seen.  “Were it not for the stasis field, I may have been able to tell how old it is,” he said.  “Is this cavern a vacuum?”

	“Unfortunately,” Haret said.

	“But you say you saw bone?” Kerin asked.

	“I saw some bone in several rooms, including what appeared to be multiple anatomical displays,” Asa confirmed.

	“I see.”  Kerin slowly ran his finger over the page that could only be a table of contents.  “This is structured identically to the primordial human language,” he said in surprise.  “This language, it doesn’t use the same characters, but its sentence structure is the same.  Down… to the punctuation marks…” he said.  He poured more of his divine power into the paper, and the guards outside shivered for no reason they could define.  The demigods looked at each other in surprise in the Geode far away, though they gave no external sign.

	Kerin’s power drove into the ancient paper.  “This is a list, here, of the maps contained within,” he said, and though his voice was quiet, his power seemed to hang in the air.  “And this is a journal of sorts.  There are a few lists of numbers and letters that alternate… perhaps a dating system.”

	“Astonishing,” Haret said in the Geode, where he would not disrupt Kerin’s concentration.

	“Ah, this is a topographic map of a city,” Kerin said, and the paper glowed faintly where he touched it.  “And I need no power to see that this, here with these blocks of ink on a blank page, these are cutaways of a building.  A vast building, actually.”

	He turned the page.  “This is a scalar drawing of a human, and something called… hmm.  I don’t think this word translates into our languages,” he said contemplatively.  “Another animal, similar to a human, but with a different skeleton.  See, it has the ears of an elf, only larger?  And the eyes are wrong.”

	He turned the page again.  “Ah… this is a list of animals.  I see deer, squirrel, whale, falcon… common creatures like mice and pidgeons… how interesting.”

	“So whatever world yielded this mysterious document at least has these familiar creatures,” Haret said.  “Does this document predate our world?”

	“I have no idea, though it would not surprise me,” Kerin said.  “This was in a very powerful stasis spell, more powerful than I’ve seen.  It could be very old indeed.”

	Asa set another one down on the table.  “This one seems to have hand-drawn images in it, mostly anatomical and scientific sketches,” she said.

	“There’s some of that in this book too, though not much,” Kerin said.  He ran a finger over the edge of the book’s spine.  “This is ordinary cow leather, at least.”

	“And this is a seagull feather,” Haret said.  He produced a small scroll, with the feather tucked into the coil.  “Not a quill.”

	Kerin set the materials down on the table.  “Clearly, this world was visited by something similar to our own people, long ago,” he said decisively.  “We must consider that the Gods knew and invited them.  I find it highly unlikely that they arrived without the knowledge of the creators.”

	“That does seem unlikely.”  Asa folded her hands over her Avatar’s belt, a tic she had retained from life.  “This is all quite unsettling.  Are we, ourselves, the product of another world?”

	“And why did the Gods not make this known to us?” Haret rumbled.  “Garm at least knew, I’m sure.  He was too unwilling to forgive a slight to allow this to go on without his sanction.”

	“And even participation,” Kerin pointed out, “if my guess about the origin of this language is true.”

	Asa shook her Avatar’s head.  “We must make more sense of this before we leap to conclusions.  Kerin, can you keep deciphering these documents?”

	“Of course.  The more samples you bring me, the more I can force them to make sense,” he said.  “These maps are especially interesting.  May they be the world from which our interlocutors hail?”

	“More than likely.”  Vier produced another scroll tube.  “This one has a magic spell in it that I have never encountered.  I cannot dispel it, either.”

	Kerin took it.  “A glyph trap seals this,” he observed at once.  “A… shockingly powerful one,” he added quietly as he ran his pale finger over the wood.  “I will have to physically remove the wood itself from the scroll tube in order to open it.  Shall I take the risk?”

	“I grow weary of this mystery,” Haret said.  “Yes, brother, spare nothing.  We have an entire library to raid after this, we haven’t even touched it yet.”

	Kerin tapped the wood and it was no more.  He upended the tube, and to the surprise of the group, caught a few phials of liquid.  Each was barely as wide as the tip of a little finger, and the glass that contained the fluid was paper-thin.  Into each, they saw one word inscribed, in the same four languages as before.

	“Is that blood?” Asa asked.

	“Some of them are.  Some of them appear to be solutions of metals and salts,” Kerin said.  “I suppose they could be blood of a creature unlike humans or elves.”

	He conjured a globe of light above them, and the four of them stared through the little glass tubes.  “This feels like it has a strange magic on it,” Kerin mused, “but I can’t tell its source.  It doesn’t feel like a divine power, as ours are.  It’s not the same, though.”

	“Perhaps divinity works in another way elsewhere?” Asa asked uncomfortably.  Now they were getting into matters of her own existence.

	Kerin set the phials back in their scroll tube and counted them.  “Fourteen, in total.”  He looked up at the others.  “Fourteen, for fourteen Gods?” he asked.

	Silence fell over the shrine.  After a few moments of heavy quiet, Kerin stirred.  He walked over to the Shieldbearer at the edge of his shrine and cleared this throat.  The Shieldbearer spun on his heel and snapped off a salute.  “Alexander, may I ask how many petitioners are expected tomorrow?”

	The Shieldbearer thought for a moment.  “Approximately seven thousand.”

	The demon beckoned the Shieldbearer into the shrine, and the young warrior stepped in with a hidden sigh of relief.  It was always such a lovely feeling.  “My friend, we are contained in business that will consume my full attention for some while,” Kerin said quietly.  “Though I am loathe to turn aside petitioners, that may be necessary for a time.  My full attention is needed elsewhere, and I do not know how long I will be occupied with this.”

	Alexander looked over at the table of artifacts.  “I… understand, sir,” he said unhappily.  “There will be panic if this is done with no notice.”

	“Be that as it may, Alexander, it is to be.”  Kerin set a hand on Alexander’s shoulder and met his eyes.  “If problems arise, do not hesitate to call on the road patrols.”

	Alexander nodded, and Kerin lifted his hand.  “I’m sorry, Alexander, but this is a matter of great urgency.”

	“You don’t need to justify it, sir, it’s your home,” Alexander said, though Kerin could tell he was internally calculating the costs.  “I’ll inform Paladin-Commander Dervich.”


	When Elsa awoke the next morning, she climbed out of bed and vanished into the bath.  The darkness outside was absolute.  As a Herald, her body only needed three hours of rest at most, per night, unless she had been in combat the day before.  After a quick rinse, she took off for the small steam room with the statue of Mai’te in the middle, to begin her private meditations.

	As she disrobed and crouched before the statue, she looked around quizzically.  There would usually be a few Shieldbearers or Paladins present, or a member of Arisa’s clergy, or even a petitioner who had heard of the ancient shrine and wanted to try it.  Today, she was alone.

	Oh well, that just meant she had privacy.  She crouched low and began her mantra, surrounded by the magic water that clung to no surface.

	When she was finished, she went to the Threads, as she called them.  They were a lingering remnant of the one-way portals that the Heavenborn had used.  They had once been the means by which Mai’te’s divine servants had crossed over to Tarsh and begun true life.  Only she and a few of the more powerful Paladins could see them, but they were there.  She walked through them to finish her normal mantras, which she always saved for the privacy of the Glade.

	Back at the house, she and Jerome went through their usual morning processes.  She fed herself and the kids, she, Jerome, and Lars went through their stretch and exercise routines, and she bathed again.  Fresh, fed, and dressed, she and Jerome walked out to get the day started, with her going to the temple to greet visitors, and Jerome to make their food.

	Upon arrival at the temple proper, however, she came to an immediate halt.  The entire structure was packed wall-to-wall.  Arisa and her renamed Circle of the Fervent were just visible at the back of the room, and by the look of them, they were soothing tempers.  Arisa met her eyes across the huge, moss-floored room, and beckoned her over.

	“Sister, hello,” she said.  Her voice was as strained as her smile.  “We have some unexpected guests.”

	“I can see that,” Elsa said, ignoring the rising voices around her.  “What’s happening?”

	“Kerin closed the shrine,” Alan said from behind them.  Both women turned to see Alan Dervich push his way through the throng.  “No warning, no notice, just a hard ‘no’ on today’s services.”

	“What’s the problem?” Elsa demanded.  It was all but un-heard of for him to close his shrine except when he was overwhelmed by the endless press of visitors.  “Actually, let me find out.”  She tapped her Gem.  {Brother, are you alright?}

	~Never better.  I need your help, and Alan’s when you get the chance.  And bring Arisa, if you can.  The Triad and I are solving a mystery that demands my attention.~

	{The whole shrine is closed?}

	[When he says ‘full attention,’ sister, it’s literal.  Get over here as soon as you can,] Asa said.

	{On it,} Elsa said.  She felt a chill in her stomach as she looked at the others.  “Drop what you’re doing.  Al, seal the road if you haven’t already.  We’re needed at the Shrine.”

	The middle-aged Priestess looked worried as she started moving in Elsa’s wake.  “What’s happening?” Arisa asked.

	“No clue,” Elsa grumbled.  “We’ll see.”


	When the three mortals stepped into the shrine, Haret waved them over without a glance.  Elsa and Alan walked right up to where Kerin was standing, but Arisa stopped to stare.  Surrounding the Triad and the demon were over a dozen large wood tables, all bearing scrolls, maps, books, and individual papers.

	“Friends, thank you for coming,” Asa said.  “We have found something.”

	“You’ve found one hell of a lot of things!” Elsa said.  “What in the world is all this stuff?”

	“We’re still not yet entirely sure,” Asa admitted.  “We found a secret tunnel in the roof of the Geode.”

	Alan stared.  “The Geode.  The real Geode, where you live.”

	“Yes.”  Vier tapped her brow in swift salute to her brother’s lieutenant.  “A tunnel that lead to a vacuum-preserved laboratory in the ceiling.  None of us knew about it.  It contained a vast complex of rooms, experiments, and documents.”  She brandished an empty scroll tube.  “It was full of these, too.  Magically-sealed papers and spell scrolls, and vials of blood.”

	Elsa rubbed her head.  It was too early in the morning for this nonsense.  “So the Geode has a building in it?”

	“More or less,” Haret said.  The dour demigod’s Avatar grimaced.  “Accursed Gods never even told us it was there,” he said darkly.  The others looked uncomfortable, but after a night of painful revelations, he was beyond caring.  “They knew, and did nothing.”

	Elsa walked up beside her brother to look down at the item on the table before him.  She stared at the alien text in total incomprehension.  “This… this isn’t any language I’ve ever seen.”

	“Nobody’s seen it,” Vier assured her.  “It’s taken all of Kerin’s power just to translate a bit of it.”

	“Well, not quite all, but close,” Kerin said, and Elsa noticed with a start that he was actually looking a bit tired.  That never happened, not since she had freed him from the prison shard in which he had been trapped for over three thousand years.  “This book is the key to it all, I’m quite sure,” he said.  He closed it and rested a hand on its handsome black leather cover.  “The pages are magic, every one of them,” he said.  “When you look at the table of contents, you tap the page number you want, open the book to a random page before the last one, and that will be the page you pressed.  When you turn the page, a new one appears after the one you saw last, and one near the front disappears.”

	“What’s in it?”

	Kerin opened it to the table of contents again.  “It seems to be an account of the process that a group of researchers undertook on some form of project, when by sheer chance, one of them discovered a completely different secret of magic.  They abandoned their original goal, and pursued the new one, and it led them to something unexpected.”

	Asa beckoned the three over to stand beside her.  Alan felt the human demigods stand behind him, and felt a drop of something cold in his spine.  What was happening?

	Kerin met Elsa’s eyes, and her heart seized when she saw the sadness in his metal ones.  “There were fourteen Gods, little sister, and fourteen researchers.  They discovered a scientific means of attaining true Godhood, and built this world as a test bed for their experiments.”

	Elsa felt faint.  She simply stared into Kerin’s eyes, her mind churning.  The passive feeling of pleasure and comfort from the shrine around her may as well have not been there at all.  Alan staggered as the implications hit him.  Arisa stepped back, shaking her head, and Vier stepped up to lace her fingers with the Priestess’.

	“No,” Arisa whimpered.  “No.”

	“I am afraid it is the truth,” Kerin said heavily.  “We, every one of us, are byproducts of ancient blasphemy, against old Gods none of us have ever heard of.”

	Elsa didn’t risk moving.  She wasn’t sure she could yet.  “I… don’t… know what to say,” she finally admitted.  “I suppose this doesn’t change anything.”

	“Of course it does!” Arisa wept.  “My whole life!  I’ve been… aaaaaugh,” she moaned, burying her face in Vier’s shoulder and sobbing.  “I’ve been preaching a lie,” she whimpered helplessly.  “Every day.  Every day…”

	Vier stroked the older woman’s hair with her hand, and wrapped the other around her back.  “Hush, little sister, hush,” she soothed.  “Let it out.”

	“We’re… vanity projects,” Alan said weakly.  “We’re lab rats.”

	“Yes,” Kerin said.  “Not that that diminishes my love for each of you by a fraction.”  Kerin set the book down again and shut it with its clasp.  “Elsa’s right.  The sun will rise tomorrow.”

	“It was a lie,” Arisa sobbed.

	Vier hugged her Priestess and spoke softly.  “No, it wasn’t,” she said.  “The love they felt for us, it was real.  Harsh, sometimes, but real.  They did love us.  And you know what?  They left us love, too.  We love you.  You love each other, and I think you love us.”

	Elsa jumped as Asa grabbed her hand and squeezed it.  “We do love you,” Asa said.  “You know that, right?”

	“I do,” Elsa confirmed.  She had never doubted.  The Triad scared the living hell out of her sometimes, but she did love them.  “So… this can’t go public, can it?”

	“Why not?” Kerin asked.  “It’s three thousand years too late to matter.”

	“No, but it’s going to cripple society,” Elsa said.  “Not everybody will be as, uh…” she trailed off as she saw the Arisa’s broken state.

	Arisa sniffled and stood back.  “So… I… I can’t,” she said feebly.  “The scripture, it says… the Gods came from nowhere and made us,” she said.  “It’s a lie, isn’t it?”

	“Yes.  They were mortals, from several worlds.  Although, from the text, it seems the majority are from a place called Toril,” Kerin said.  “The rest seemed to meet them in a place called Sigil.  There is a map of each here,” he said, gesturing towards the pile of scrolls.

	“There has to be a reason!” Arisa said.  Her cheeks were swelling.  “Why would they… they made us just…”

	Kerin turned back to her.  “From what I have gleaned, they did this because of their disgust at the inept and hands-off Gods of their own world, but… oh, sister,” he said, as Arisa’s eyes started leaking again.  He stepped forth and embraced her again.  “Arisa, sister, don’t cry,” he said.  “Look at how much you’ve built with us.”

	“But it was a lie!  I swore… I swore to the people that the words of the old faith were true, and they weren’t!” she wailed.  “I’ve been lying my whole life!”

	Kerin stepped back and grabbed her shoulders.  “What harm came from it, sister?” he asked gently.  “Nobody’s life changed because the Gods were dishonest.  Civilizations won’t crumble because the Gods are expatriates instead of independent manifestations.”

	Arisa sniffled.  “You’re a sweetheart, sir, but this still hurts.  A lot.”

	Alan turned and cursed.  Several petitioners were walking over from the temple.  “Ah, shitfire, there are people coming.”

	“I’m on it,” Haret said.  Alan saw several of his Avatars appear through the crowd and begin urging people back.

	“We can’t keep this secret forever,” Vier sighed.

	“Why not?” Alan demanded.  “There’s seven of us, total.  Who else needs to know?”

	“It’s not a question of need, it’s a question of deservedness,” Asa said.  “The people deserve to know that their history is incorrect.”

	“You can’t just dump this in their laps!” Elsa said.  “This won’t topple kingdoms, no, but it will cripple morale!”

	“So what do you propose, Herald?” Vier asked.  Coming from Asa, that would have sounded reproachful, since Asa never used her title, and Haret sounded cold at the best of times, but Vier was a close friend, and Elsa knew she meant it out of respect.  Breaking bad news was something Elsa had to do, sometimes.

	“We reach out!” Elsa said.  “The Gods, they had to come from these other worlds, right?  Why don’t we reach out with our powers and see if we can contact them?”

	“The Unformed Chaos is infinite, in all directions,” Kerin replied.

	Elsa pointed at the map on the table behind him.  “Kerin, you’re standing beside proof positive that it isn’t,” she said.

	He shook his head.  “No, sister, you misunderstand,” he said.  “The Unformed Chaos is infinite, and the world from which the Gods hailed isn’t in the Chaos.  It’s from another plane, like how the heavens and the hells were other planes.  They came from one of those.”

	“Then we unshutter heaven for just long enough for Kerin to leap in, search for something beyond it, then leave again,” Elsa said.  “You can do that, right?”

	Asa hesitated.  “… Technically,” she finally said.  “I have no idea how we’ll manage to keep the weather machines powered up long enough to manage that, though.”

	Arisa rubbed her eyes.  “What do I tell the people here?”

	“That we closed the shrine for an urgent theological matter that is Kerin’s alone to discuss,” Haret said.  “It’s perfectly true.”

	Kerin tilted his head.  “And when they ask me?” he asked drily.

	“Be honest, brother, but let’s not ring a bell we can’t un-ring, all right?” Asa said.  “We don’t even understand the extent of their experimentation.”

	Kerin sighed.  “Yes, yes.  Should I focus on this, or should I open the shrine, do you think?”

	“Kerin, you’re the demon of Discretion, what do you think?” Alan asked.  “This isn’t exactly explored ground!”

	The pale demon looked off into the distance and thought.  “Let’s focus on this,” he finally said.  “It may distract us.  Plus, only I can read this text.”

	“As ordered,” Alan said, and he sounded back to normal.  Finally, he had clear orders and an objective, and that was something he could handle.  He walked off to the temple after a nod from Elsa.

	Asa patted Arisa’s shoulder and helped the Priestess dry her eyes.  “Now.  Kerin, can you examine this book further?”

	“I should be able to read all of it by the end of the day,” Kerin said.  “Keep bringing me reference items, if you can, though we should be careful not to damage anything when you remove it from the vacuum.”

	“Naturally.”  Haret’s Avatar produced a bundle of charts from the lab and set them down on the table.


	Arisa slowly walked back to the Temple after a few more pointless minutes.  When she got within view of the line of Paladins and Shieldbearers Alan had stationed to keep the queue from getting too close to the shrine, she stopped.  The Priestess looked up at the crowd and turned, walking off towards the outer buildings of the complex.

	Her feet took her past the little boathouse, past the steam room, towards the glade that housed the Threads of Heaven.  Before she could even make it there, she stopped.  She looked up at the symbol of Mai’te on the wall of the steam room and felt tears well up again.  She had never felt so destitute.  Even when she had been at her lowest, drinking in uniform in the garden of a library, sobbing her eyes out during a riot, she hadn’t felt so alone.

	Arisa hung her head and stared at the soft moss underfoot.  She felt old, for the first time since the Triad had opened her soul, and left her powers to grow.  She remembered that day, and felt nothing but dread.

	Was that fair?  Asa was kind to her, Haret respected her, and Vier loved her like a sister.  Elsa had become a good friend, Alan was a trusted colleague, and of course Kerin was Kerin, and therefore impossible to dislike.  Even if the Gods had been…

	“What the hell?” she asked bitterly.  “What were you bastards?”

	She heard footsteps behind her, and she didn’t turn.  She saw the telltale silvery light on the wall beside her that told her one of the twins had come to talk.

	She tensed up, and flinched when she heard Haret’s voice.  “Priestess?” he asked.  “Have you a moment?”

	Arisa’s shoulders slumped.  Haret’s wasn’t the voice she had been hoping to hear at that moment.  “Why not?” she said glumly.

	To her surprise, Haret stayed behind her.  “I know you’re technically my sister’s Priestess, Arisa, but I want you to know that I understand,” he said.  “I’m as angry at Garm as you.  For what it’s worth, he did love us.”

	“Did he?” Arisa asked bitterly.  “All the books say he was cold, cruel… I don’t have any difficulty imagining somebody like that would do this.”

	Haret slowly walked around her.  “Neither do I.  No, he was a terrible father,” Haret said, “but he did love us.  That much, I know.  I don’t know if that’s a comfort, but it is the truth.”

	“Why did they even bother with all this?” Arisa demanded.  “Why not just stay on their world?  If they hated their Gods so much, and they could turn themselves into Gods, why not just replace them?”

	“Perhaps they couldn’t,” Haret said.  “Perhaps they were outnumbered.  Perhaps Kerin shall learn, now.  Does it matter?  They’re all gone, they’re not coming back.  We must do better than them.”

	“Shouldn’t be hard,” Arisa said coldly.  She heaved a sigh.  “I feel sick to my stomach, Lord.  This is just… disgusting.”

	“I know exactly how you feel.”  Haret stood beside her and stared off into the Glade with her.  “Let me know if you need to talk.”

	“I will,” Arisa said heavily.  “I just need to… think.”  She started walking towards the Glade again; Haret followed.  “What was it really like?” she asked.  She stopped to stare at the Threads.  “Did you ever visit the elf heaven?”

	“I did not,” Haret said.  “I couldn’t.  My spirit can’t enter that plane.”

	“I bet it was nice,” she said.

	“They all were.  Well, maybe not the Spireling and Goblin ones, but the most human-like races had nice afterlives, by and large.”

	“I suppose… they wouldn’t have bothered creating a place for us after we die if they hated us,” Arisa admitted.

	“They didn’t.  Arisa, I promise they didn’t,” Haret assured her.  “I mean it.  They did love us, just… for reasons we don’t understand yet.”

	Arisa hung her head.  “Thanks, Haret, sir,” she said.


	“White-tailed deer,” Kerin said.

	Elsa blinked.  “Beg pardon?”

	Kerin gestured to the book.  “It says here that the creature called the white-tailed deer was a major part of some kind of medical experiment that Mai’te was undertaking at some point.  I’m not yet sure exactly what it was, but it was important enough to be included in this master log.”

	Elsa walked over, but the text was still inscrutable.  “Weird.”

	“Hey, Elsa?” she heard.  She looked over her shoulder to see Jerome standing awkwardly outside the shrine.  “Uh, what’s going on?”

	She hesitated.  Did she want to break this to Jerome?  Would he care?  Would he even understand?  He was a good, kind man, but he was a little simple sometimes.  “Uh, we had to close the shrine for the day,” she said.  “Kerin is working on a maximum-priority project.”

	Jerome frowned.  “What kind of project?  What is all this stuff?” he asked.

	She winced.  “Well, it looks like the Gods maybe… weren’t so honest with all of their accounting of the history of the Creation.”

	Her husband’s eyes bugged out.  “What?”

	Asa started to say something, but Kerin discreetly gestured for her to stop.  “The Gods may have come from another world,” Elsa finally said.  “And didn’t make this one from scratch.”

	Jerome looked back and forth between the Twins, searching for some sort of clue, but all they did was nod.  “I… okay.”  He looked a little helpless, but he just shrugged.  “Uh, should I stop cooking?”

	“No, and actually, there’s nothing wrong with selling to people in the Temple,” Elsa said.  “You don’t need my permission, either.”

	“Well, yeah, but I’m worried.  People are starting to get angry in there,” he said.  “Al has it under control for now, but it’s bad.”

	Elsa cursed.  “Fine.  I’ll come in and try to help with the crowd.”

	“White-tail deer, and lower primates, and some kind of reptile,” Kerin said.  “I’ve got it.  I know what this all is,” he said.

	Elsa turned back around.  “Huh?”

	“I know what they were doing when they stumbled onto the secret,” Kerin said.  “I’ll search for more details.”  He turned the age.  “It wouldn’t work here,” he added.  “The magic they’re researching simply doesn’t work on Tarsh.  It could only work on another plane, with other, more complex magic.”

	Jerome looked over at him, stunned.  “So… the Gods really were from another world?”

	“Yeah, and they ran from it for some reason,” Elsa said.  “Not sure yet.”  She walked over and lightly hugged her husband.  “Hey, you alright?  I know this is huge.”

	He looked down at her.  “I guess.  I mean… everything else is changing, why not this?” he asked resignedly.

	She smiled and nuzzled his iron barrel of a chest.  “I love you.”  She stepped back and walked towards the Temple with him in her wake.  “Come on, let’s cool some tempers.”


	The day continued at the same pace, until the crowd at the Temple was so large that they had to start turning people away.  After twelve or more years, Elsa was still not used to the size of the crowds that came to pray to Kerin.  After a year or two, she had expected the group to shrink, but no, they still came, thousands per day, and that day was no different.  When the sun started to fall, Elsa and the Paladins and Shieldbearers started to gradually close off rooms of the Temple for the night, and resentment hung thick on the air.

	“This was a terrible day for these people,” one of the Shieldbearers, a young woman named Kalintha, muttered sotto voce to Elsa as they gently turned the last of the visitors out of the art gallery.

	“No shit,” Elsa said.  She had had to use literally all of her speech abilities to keep the crowd from getting rough, though she doubted that anybody would have been willing to openly attack her.  “This… whoa.”

	“Huh?”

	Elsa left Kalintha holding the velvet rope and walked out to the balcony to stare down into the courtyard.  “Is that… oh shitfire.”

	“What?” Kalintha demanded from inside.

	“It’s King Maas,” Elsa groaned.  Of all the days.  “Of course it’s King Maas.”

	“Oh no,” Kalintha sighed.


	Downstairs, the King was projecting a rough circle of space around himself, where the commoners and travelers stood back, partly out of respect, and partly because he had an Infiltrator with him in formal armor.  The Royal assassin was at least dressed for the public, with a very tasteful copper and steel armor suit.  It had dozens of individual miniature plates connected by enchanted leather that turned it all silent, and a ruby-pommeled sword at her side to complete the outfit.  Maas had taken to having Infiltrators follow him around in his retinue instead of – or alongside – the traditional Royal Guard and Legionnaires, or even Shadows.  Elsa had made her distaste for this show of force known to him, which had turned relations between the Crown and the Herald somewhat frosty.  That had been months ago, and Elsa wondered as she descended the stairs if it would color the evening’s dialogue.

	Not at first, it seemed.  As soon as Maas saw her, he broke off his conversation with the awed-looking Paladin beside him and turned to her.  “Herald, hello,” he said, and he certainly sounded civil.  “It’s been a while.”

	“King Maas, welcome back,” Elsa said.  She was still dressed in simple priestly clothes, with green and black pantaloons and a shirt under a stylish black half-cloak, emblazed with the symbol of Asa in embossed silver thread.  He, however, was dressed for travel, with an expensive but durable cloak of black velvet over a thin coat, with a coal-and-purple vest and dress shirt on under that over black military trousers.  “What brings you to our packed house today?”

	“I came for the blessing of our ally Kerin, but it seems the way is shut,” the King said, gesturing minutely to the road to the shrine.  “Is it under remodeling?  I saw much equipment and shelving in there.”

	“Ah, no, just a critical project of ours,” Elsa said, which is what they had been telling everybody else all day.  Most had bought it, some had had questions.  Maas was one of the latter, though wisely held his tongue.  Maas was no fool, Elsa remembered.  He had been one step ahead of her even when they had been working together to stop Don Kotrick’s criminal network at the height of the civil war.  His questions would be voiced in private, away from his citizens.  Away from his guard, too, if Elsa had any say in the matter.

	“Perhaps you could fill me in later?” the King asked.  “I do have a rather important question to ask.”

	More than a few citizens scoffed or snorted, and Elsa herself hid a frown.  That had been a shockingly impolitic thing for the King to say.  Of course what he had to ask was important, and so were the things that the thousands of petitioners had had to say, some of them crossing continents, war zones, and contaminant fields to do it.  “To you, specifically, Lady Ledren,” he quickly corrected.  “Not just to His Holiness.  I had quite a few things to ask you, actually.”

	A slow cover-up of an embarrassing slip of the tongue.  Maas was bent out of shape about something, Elsa surmised.  “Then let’s step aside for a moment, Sire,” she said.  He graciously swept out a hand and she led him back to the rectory, where she, her husband, their children, their dog, and Belle’s fish Violetta lived.  “And leave the thug behind,” she added under her breath as soon as they were out of earshot of the throng.

	“You wound me, Elsa,” the Infiltrator said, and Elsa recognized the voice of Infiltrator Zahn, a comrade from the Kotrick campaign.

	“Fine.  Leave the highly-trained assassin outside my children’s playroom,” she said, and she nearly slammed the door behind her as she and Maas stepped into the rectory.

	“That was rude,” Maas said lightly.

	Elsa whipped around to glare at him.  “Okay, what the hell, King Maas?” she demanded.  “First, you knew Kerin’s shrine was closed, because people have bene turned away since before the sun rose and they’ve had more than enough time to make it to the city, and I’ve had guys patrolling the roads giving out the news all day.  Second, you know damn well that I think the Infiltrators should stick to black ops, while you have perfectly good Royal Guards, and you bring one – one I know personally, at that – into my home?” she asked testily.

	Maas’ levity faded into a carefully neutral expression at once.  “Yes, I did know the shrine was closed,” he said evenly.  “And I may bring my guards wherever I please.”

	“Oh, we are not starting that crap again,” she said curtly.  “If you wanted to know why the shrine was closed, why not just ask?  I would have told you!”  She glared at him again.  “We’re supposed to be on the same side!”

	“Insofar as I am aware, we still are,” he said flatly.

	She ground her hands into her eyes.  “Fine.  Kerin closed the shrine because he’s working on something huge.  A trove of relics from the Creation that the others found sealed away.  Until we’re even entirely sure what it is, that’s all I’m going to say.”

	“From the Creation?” Maas asked.  A flicker of genuine shock worked its way past his mask.  He didn’t allow that often.  “That is incredibly odd.  Were the Heavenborn not created with nothing?”

	“They were,” Elsa sighed.  “Like I said, it’s a mystery.”  She peered over at him.  “Your Highness, I appreciate that you don’t like being in the loop, but in this case, the loop is so small that even I don’t know what’s going on.  None of us do.”

	“I actually did have something to ask,” Maas said drily.  “I didn’t traipse all the way out here because I was curious about your closure.”

	Elsa rolled her eyes and tapped her Gem.  {Kerin, the King is here.  I gave him a song and dance number about why the place is closed, but keep your eyes open for people trying to enter the Shrine.}

	~Are you entirely serious?  You think his men will try to enter without permission?~

	{Well, I meant people slipping past Alan in the chaos, but no, I doubt even an Infiltrator would try to get in without permission.}

	~They had better not.  Atomization is not pleasant.~

	{Right.  Any idea when we should start letting people in?}

	[A day.  More, probably.]

	~That’s my call, Asa.  Elsa, how much of a queue have I got?~

	{Figure six thousand?}

	~Goodness.  I can read the rest of this book in eight hours.  Remember, we can discuss our findings in psi-link, so the post-analysis won’t take long at all.~

	[And how do I inform the others?] Asa pointed out.  [I can’t let them in on our mind-link, even if their communications are as fast as mine.  I’ll have to open a new one with them and repeat everything we’ve decided.]

	~It’s inefficient, but I don’t see an alternative.~

	{Works for me.  How long will it take for you to analyze it all?}

	~Oh… four minutes?~

	{Got it.}  Elsa broke the link.  “Kerin says he’ll need an absolute minimum of eight hours to finish,” she said.

	He shrugged.  “So be it.”  He narrowed his purple eyes and fixed her with them.  “So.  Tell me.  What have you actually found?  More weapons, like Novai Saren’s cache?”

	“No, no, that would be too easy,” Elsa grumbled.  She opened the door and saw Zahn’s back.  “Have a pleasant evening.”


	Lars wandered around the field past the lake.  He was done with his studies, training was cancelled for the day thanks to this whole bother, and he was bored out of his mind.  He wandered north around the pond that took up half the complex until that got boring too, then walked slowly around the barren northern tip of the water until he was approaching the shrine.

	They were clearly busy.  He stopped and stared glumly into the open space.  That sure was a lot of books.  He squinted, but couldn’t make it out.  What were they doing?

	On an impulse, he started walking forward.  He got within fifty feet when Haret looked up and made eye contact.

	Instantly, he heard somebody clear their throat behind him.  He jumped and spun around.  Asa was standing there, and in the shrine too.  That whole Avatar thing creeped him out.

	“Uh… Lady Asa?” he asked.

	She smiled.  “Hi, Lars.  Can I help you?”

	He sighed.  “I just wanted to thank Kerin for his help.  He blessed me yesterday, and I think that helped.”

	Asa nodded.  “Yes, he does that,” she said.  “I’ll tell him.  Please don’t come in, though.  We’re terribly busy right now.”

	Lars looked back into the shrine.  “What are you even doing in there, Lady Asa?”

	“Deciphering some old books,” Asa said.  “Your mom knows.”

	“Is it scary?”

	“Scary?” Asa tilted her head.  “Why would it be scary?”

	Lars jerked a thumb over his shoulder.  “Kerin looks scared.  Or sad.”

	Asa opened her mind.  [Kerin, brother, are you well?]

	~Well?  Yes.  Why?~

	[Lars, here, says you look sad or scared.]

	~Lars is a sweet kid in a tough place.  Tell him I’m fine.  Actually, wait.~

	Inside the shrine, Kerin looked up to the boy and walked over to the very edge of the shrine’s field.  He beckoned Lars closer.  Lars, now aware that every single person in the halted line up by the temple was staring at him, walked closer, blushing bright.  “Uh… yes?” he asked carefully.

	“Sorry if I worried you, little brother, but I’m fine,” Kerin said.  “I just need to work on this.  You can come see me again tonight, if you need to.”

	Lars slumped.  “I just wanted to say thank you, Kerin,” he said sadly.  “I was so confused, but you’re helping.  I know I’m not supposed to come back more than once every few months, but… I don’t have anybody to talk to.”

	“I know,” Kerin said gently.  “For what it’s worth, it happens more often than you think.  Your concern, that is.  Have you raised it with your mother and father?”

	“They won’t get it,” Lars said bitterly.

	“You don’t know that, you’ve just convinced yourself of it,” Kerin said.  “They love you, my young friend.  That won’t change.  Now, I need to get back to work.  Can you let me do that, and come back when you need to?”

	“Yeah.  Thanks, Kerin.”  Lars sighed.  “Thanks.”


	When the night fell in earnest, and the last of the rooms of the temple were closed, Elsa made her way down to the shrine once more.  Arisa was there, and she saw Alan walking over from the direction of the cordon.  Normally, the cordon was just there to make sure nobody got in after dark, and usually consisted of the pilgrims who had been too slow in arriving from the city.  Now, it was a wall of people on both sides of the road, stretching out in the thousands.

	Kerin was waiting with the others, and waved the mortals in.  “Welcome, friends,” he said.  “I’ve learned much.  I should be able to present my final results in the morning, then we can start taking the edge off the queue.”

	Elsa looked over the now-towering stacks of books.  “So… what have you got, brother?”

	Kerin held up the book he had called the key before.  “I have determined that the researchers were trying to find a way to scientifically reverse the effects of a magic spell they called polymorph,” he said, “which allows somebody to turn a person or object into another person or object, and depending on the level of magic used, may last forever.”

	Alan shuddered.  “Sounds like a good thing to learn.”

	Kerin nodded.  “Indeed.  However, at some point, they discovered during a live subject dissection that a creature they had captured was a polymorph victim itself.  They began to research it, when they discovered that it was some kind of divine creature, of a sort I do not understand.  When they freed it from its imprisonment, they were granted a divine boon from the creature.”  Kerin gestured with the book for emphasis.  “They asked for knowledge of the means by which several mortals in their realms had once become Gods, and were granted the knowledge.  They set about working at this point, and began the process of becoming Gods themselves.”

	He set the book down and turned to face the others.  “Some were of races we know, like elves and humans, some of each.  There was a dwarf.  There was something like a Felis, though not a Felis; I don’t quite understand that.  There was a Goblin, and something akin to a Harpy, but different.”

	“So they had all fourteen of their number at this point?” Haret asked.

	Kerin shook his head.  “No, they numbered over a hundred.  Their leader was the being we know as Garm.”

	Arisa looked to the floor in shame.  Kerin continued.  “He led them on the path to Godhood, and it seems he was wedded to Mai’te.”

	“Our father married an elf, eh?” Vier mused.

	“Yes.”  He pointed to a pile of scrolls.  “However, the anatomy of elves in that world was radically different from the anatomy of elves in this world.  Humans also differ, though less so.  Over time, their band of researchers shrank, as they lost people in their quest for Godhood.  Sometimes, they would pick up a particularly mighty wizard from the great inter-planar city of Sigil, and they would use their skills.  Apparently, that was where at least some of the rarer beings in their cadre came from.

	“Eventually, their tests yielded results.  They discovered that the worlds from which they hailed were sometimes, though not always, overseen by mighty Gods, called Overgods,” Kerin said.  “They were not permitted to interfere directly with their respective Prime worlds, and could prevent new Gods from arriving.  The surviving researchers, numbering twenty, traveled to a pocket dimension to finish their work.”

	“Like the Steel Cage?” Alan asked.

	“Something like that.”  The Cage had always been the place where souls went before they were dispatched to the correct afterlife by their deity.  “This was larger, and outside the control of any divine force.  They used it to finish their research, and they designed their new forms.”

	The Triad looked at each other in the Geode.  The bodies the Gods had had in their heavens were not the same as the ones they had in the Geode, which were mere statues of light.  “They had their own physical bodies?” Vier asked.

	“They did.  They were in the great laboratory in the Geode, inside a spell of invisibility,” Kerin said.  He shook his head.  “Clearly, magic was very different in this other world of theirs.  Invisibility, polymorphing, planar travel… who knows what else?”

	Arisa blinked back tears of loneliness.  “This… all hurts to hear,” she said quietly.  “Master Kerin, does it say in there why they did it?  Why they made us?”

	Kerin held up the book.  “The last chapter details things I have not yet reached, though from what I can infer, they stopped updating the book a few years after we were created,” he said.  “Once I finish the book, I’ll be sure to let you all in on my discoveries.”

	Nobody really had anything to say.  After several seconds of silence, he spoke again.  “I will, of course, be available to anybody who needs to talk tonight, no matter what.”

	“I appreciate it,” Elsa said, “but what should I tell Jerome?”

	“Be honest, of course,” Kerin said.  “That will never not be my advice to you.  And let him know that I’m here for him, as I am for all for all of you.”

	Elsa nodded.  One by one, the others blinked away or wandered off into the darkness, alone with their thoughts, until it was only her and Kerin left.

	He looked at her in silence.  “Brother… I dunno,” Else finally said.  “This all feels so strange.”

	“It does,” he admitted.  “But I do think that once it sinks in that we weren’t actually viewed as an experiment, life will go back to normal.  It’s three thousand years after any of this could have made a difference, as I said before.”  He patted her shoulder.  “The lives the world built for itself in my and the Gods’ absence are good ones,” he said gently.  “Don’t let this drag you down.”

	The young Herald looked off at where the vast crowd had stood.  “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

	“I understand.  Perhaps we can distribute my findings academically,” he said.  “To the courts and libraries of the world, instead of announcing it here as if expecting action.”

	“Yeah.”  Elsa looked up at the Temple and saw Jerome in the window of the rectory, puttering about in the kitchen.  “Well.  I’ll leave it to you, brother,” she said.


	The night came quietly.  Arisa joined the Herald and her family for dinner that night, as she often did.  Arisa had always lived alone, by her own choice, but that didn’t mean she didn’t prefer to dine by herself.

	Lars poked his food as the others munched and chatted.  A semblance of normalcy had descended back over the family as they ate, and found comfort in the routine.

	Elsa and Jerome had both noticed Lars’ quiet, but chose to respect it.  Each had a differing idea about his recent foul mood, but neither wanted to broach the topic in front of Arisa, or the younger children.  Elsa’s Gem stayed quiet all the while, to her relief.  It had been a dreadfully exciting day, and she didn’t need interruptions while enjoying a nice moment with her loved ones.

	Kerin worked long after the Ledren family had retired for the evening.  Elsa leaned against the wooden frame of her bedroom bay window, staring off at the shrine on the other side of the tranquil lake.  She could just barely make out the divine glow of her brother with her enhanced aura sight, and watched as he walked back and forth between the book and the large stacks of paper and books on shelves around him.

	Jerome walked up beside her, dressed for bed.  “So… are you ready to talk about what happened down there?” he asked.

	She didn’t answer at once, but after a moment, she looked up at her better half and felt tears well up.  He raised his eyebrows in disquiet, but before he could do anything, she silently wrapped her arms around his torso and buried her face in his chest.  He felt her heave in a silent sob, and his heart sank.

	“Sweetheart, what is it?” he asked softly.  “What’s wrong?”

	Elsa sniffled.  “At least… some of the Gods’ origin story… was a complete lie,” she mumbled.  “They lied to us, Jerome.”

	He wrapped his arms around her too, and held her close.  “Okay… so… what did you see?” he asked.  His mind was racing.  “Did you have another dream?”  Nightmare visions wracked Elsa’s sleep sometimes.

	“No,” she said.  After a moment’s hesitation, she looked up at him and found only concern for her well-being in his face.  Of course.  “Jerome, the Gods may be exiles from another world,” she said simply.  “They attained Godhood somewhere else, and came here.”

	He looked down at her in shock, and then slowly ran his hand over his brow.  “…Alright,” he eventually said.  “So… how much does that matter?”

	“I don’t know yet, big guy,” Elsa said.  “I mean… I just don’t know.  Kerin hasn’t finished analyzing their stuff.”

	“Whose stuff?”

	“The Gods… they were scientists on another world, and they brought their research materials here a long time ago,” Elsa said.  “Asa found it.”

	“Okay… and it says they’re… from other worlds?” Jerome asked.

	“Yeah.”

	“So… I mean, they are dead, right?” he asked.

	“They’re all dead,” Elsa said, “or I’d have questions.”

	“So… I guess, Asa and the Twins are from this world at least, right?” Jerome asked.

	“They are, yes.”

	He half-heartedly shrugged.  “So… what’s the problem?”

	Elsa stared at him before suppressing a giggle.  “Yeah.  I guess there’s no… modern problem.  But it’s killing Arisa.  She thought the words of the Gods were all literal truth, you know?  That they came from nothingness and created us all from scratch.”

	“I guess,” he said.  “Is she gonna be okay?”

	Elsa looked back out the window.  “I don’t know.  I think so.”

	Jerome looked out too.  “So… does Alan know?”

	“Yeah, and right now, it’s just the eight of us,” Elsa replied.  “You, me, him, Arisa, Kerin, the Triad.”

	Jerome let go of her and stepped back.  “So are you going to tell everybody?”

	“I mean, we kind of have to,” Elsa said unhappily.  “We can’t just cover it all up.  Somebody might find out eventually anyway, even if we all stay quiet.”

	“When?”

	Elsa sat down on the bench.  “I dunno.  Soon.  Kerin says we do it through academic papers, that kind of thing.  We can’t put a sign up front that says ‘Scripture is a lie,’” she said.

	Jerome sighed heavily and sat beside his wife.  She rested a head on his shoulder and shut her eyes.  “I’m… sorry I burdened you with that, handsome,” Elsa murmured.  “I promised I would never lie to you.”

	“I’m glad you told me the truth,” he said softly.  “I remember how much we suffered during the Kotrick campaign.  We’re better off sharing the hurt a little.”

	“Yeah.”  She shuddered as she remembered Kotrick taking her arm off.  “Yeah.  You’re right.”  She lifted her head back up and stared off into the distance.  “So… what’s bugging Lars?”

	“I have no idea,” Jerome grumped.  “I think he’s scared of what I think about him being gay.”

	Elsa turned to stare at him, wide-eyed.  “He’s gay?”

	“He’s never shown one second of interest in the female Paladin trainees who run past his window in their underwear,” Jerome pointed out.  “At his age, I couldn’t have kept my eyes off them.”

	Elsa winced.  “I’m… not going to assume anything about that,” she said carefully.  “I think he’s just tired of living so far from the city.”

	“Hmph.  Hope you’re right,” Jerome said.

	“What does that mean?”

	“I mean… I’ll still love him, but I got no idea how to deal with that,” he said.

	“Oh, we’ll see,” she said.


	At that moment, though, Lars was wandering around the compound again in the pitch darkness.  He walked slowly past the north end of the pond and walked towards where Kerin was working, but didn’t bother going farther.  The demon was hard at work, comparing some maps to that book of his.

	He stared at the shrine for a full ten minutes before he had finally gathered his nerve.  “He was just going to tell me what I already heard,” he growled to himself.  He stomped back around the pond towards the temple and rectory, brushing past the startled Shieldbearer keeping watch outside.

	Lars walked up the stone steps, past the level of the rectory devoted to the lesser clergy, past Arisa’s quarters, up to the Herald’s quarters.  He stopped outside the door of his parents’ bedchamber and took a deep breath.


	Elsa and Jerome were finishing changing as they heard the door knock.  “Who is it?” Elsa asked, as if she couldn’t see her son’s aura perfectly through the door.

	“Lars.  You have a second?”

	“Sure.”  The door swung open, and Elsa raised an eyebrow at Lars’ stained feet.  “Did you go for a late-night walk through the compound?” she asked.

	“Yeah.”  Lars blew out a sigh.  “Mom… Dad… I can’t take this any more.”

	“Take what?” Elsa asked.  Jerome tensed up.

	“I just… I’m so tired of it,” Lars said wearily.  He dropped into a chair by the door and cradled his head in his hands.  “I’m so bored.  There’s nobody here!” he exclaimed, waving his arms around.  “The only people for miles are the pilgrims, who I’m not allowed to talk to, and the trainees, and they treat me like some dumb kid!”

	Elsa nodded.  Jerome wilted imperceptibly, but Lars didn’t notice.  “So… I guess you want to go somewhere else, huh?” she asked.  “I kinda figured you’d want to, once you got old enough.”

	He stared at her.  “You knew?”

	“I did just say I guessed, didn’t I?  Not knew,” Elsa said.  “But it seemed likely.  So what did you have in mind?”

	Lars glared at her, feeling hurt for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on.  “I mean… I don’t know,” he said.

	“Well, go think about it,” Elsa said.  “We can talk about it over breakfast, okay?”

	“Yeah.”  Lars looked back and forth between them.  “You’re not mad?”

	“Nah.  I grew up in the city, I get it,” Elsa said.  “It’s pretty far from anywhere out here.”

	“Okay.”  Lars’ head drooped.  “I thought you’d get mad.”

	Elsa shook her head and flicked one ear.  “No, it’s alright.  Right, Jerome?” she asked.

	“You bet,” Jerome said.  “So… is this what you’ve been moping about for the last week?” he asked.

	His son’s half-hearted glare instantly evaporated under his father’s warning look.  “Yes,” he muttered.  “I didn’t know if you’d be offended.”

	“Well, I’m not.”

	“Good.”  Lars sat there awkwardly for a minute longer before climbing to his feet.  “I, uh… I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

	“Sleep tight, Lars.”  Elsa waited until her son was out of earshot before turning to Jerome.  He out his hands up at once.

	“Okay, I was worried for no reason,” he said.

	“No, goofball,” Elsa said, reaching up to peck him on the cheek.  “I’m not saying ‘I told you so.’  I’m saying I’ll see you in the morning.”

	“I’d have loved him if he was gay,” Jerome said.

	Elsa shook her head.  “You’re defending against an attack I’m not sortieing, Jerome.  I know you would.”

	“Okay.”  Jerome shucked his shirt.  “All right.  Good night, Elsa.”


	Before the sun rose, Elsa felt her Gem warm.  ~Sisters, my research is complete.  Please come to the shrine when you’re ready.~

	Elsa groggily tapped her forehead.  {Sure.  Be right there.}


	Kerin set the book down on the table and turned to face the others.  Only Elsa, Kerin, and the Triad were present.  “My friends, thank you for your patience.”

	“What have you learned?” Haret asked, straight to the point as always.

	Kerin set one pale hand down on the table.  “I have learned why and how the Gods fled their world, and what they aimed to do when they made us.”

	He bade them all sit, though it was an affectation for all of them except Elsa.  “In the beginning, the Gods labored in obscurity.  They were powerful mages, and sought to discover the cure for polymorph.  This you knew from last night.  What I have learned here, however, is that when they finally elevated themselves to Godhood, they did so by destroying the remains of several dozen dead Gods from other worlds, which had lingered in a place called the Ordial, which the surviving Gods of the world from which they hailed pretended did not exist.”

	“Why?” Elsa asked.

	“I do not know, and if they learned the answer, they did not care to record it.  What I have learned is that the Gods left their new home at once.  They claim that it was out of disgust, but some few admit that they were actually forced out, for refusing to do anything with the power they had seized.  They travelled so far out into the infinite chaos between worlds, no God of any sort could control them.  They decided to start afresh, overcoming the problems they saw in their homeworlds.”

	Elsa’s shoulders sagged.  This was a lot to take in.  Kerin continued.  “Each decided to create a species of people, similar in appearance to their own race, from their mortal days.  As they all hailed from different worlds, their native species varied hugely in appearance and physical traits.  Elves could live for thousands of years.  Humans could escape specific kinds of predestined fates.  Each had their own facets.”

	“Who built the heavens?  And Tarsh?” Vier asked.

	“The Gods spoke the truth about that part.  The Heavens were their own private realms, to rest after their lengthy journey.  Tarsh was where they cached their physical bodies, and the rock chamber within which they had done their work.  They had long ago decided to keep only a single, large chamber for their work, rather than rely on a network of connected planes.”

	Vier looked down at the ground.  “It’s come to the point where we have to itemize our divine parents’ words for individual truths,” she said sadly.  “Why did they not come clean about all this when they started dying?”

	Haret spoke up.  “Because none thought that they would die until they died,” he said sourly.  “This is entirely in their character, from what I remember.”

	Kerin looked up into the black sky.  “The Gods refused to allow each other to interfere with the process of creating spirits for their own private heavens, to keep them company.  As you can imagine, now that we know they were once mortals before deifaction, they found themselves bored.  Eventually, they used the materials of their labs to create mortal flesh for each of those spirits who wished to move into the world of Tarsh, and co-inhabit.”  He set his other hand down on the back of Asa’s chair.  “I know what you’re thinking.  They did not create us as just another experiment.  To the contrary, the Gods had learned that all they would have if left to their own attention was boredom.  They wanted to create more of their old selves, to live and change freely.”

	He gestured to his own body.  “Our own forms are not identical to their old ones, as I said.  Elves in particular were widely modified.  Mai’te’s original form was similar in looks, but more slender, with slightly longer ears, and vast lifespans.  Mai’te deliberately modified them to be more like humans, and changed our reproductive cycles by adding elements of the White-tailed Deer.”

	“What?  We’re deer?” Elsa demanded.  “Are you kidding?  No, you’re not kidding.  But what the hell?  Mai’te could have given us long life, and she gave us deer parts?”

	Kerin nodded.  “Apparently, the menstruation cycle of old elves was very long, painful, and bloody.  Worse than the human one.”  He looked over at Vier’s disgusted expression.  “Also, she shortened our lives because she had known the pain of outliving a human husband, and wanted to make sure her children never went through such loss.”

	“I suppose I can understand that,” Elsa muttered.

	“It should also be noted that her ancestors were responsible for a gruesome war crime in their past, from which they steadfastly refused to learn a lesson,” Kerin added.  “Mai’te thought that a long life was pointless if nobody learned from it.”  He turned back to the table and walked up to it.  “The other twelve races besides ours are also detailed in here.  The humans were barely modified, though Garm did change a few things about the immune and reproductive systems.  He also gave them far greater resilience to temperatures, which is part of why humans are more durable than elves.”

	“That explains why we look so similar,” Vier said.  “Why can’t we have babies?”

	“The changes made to each annulled their ability to have children together, which was possible with the original races,” Kerin explained.  “They decided not to dilute the original bloodlines of their own creations.”

	He tapped the cover of the book.  “From the creation of the first demon forward, their own records match the official history, though they stop updating the book entirely about six hundred years before the Collapse.”

	Elsa rubbed her face.  “I need coffee,” she grumbled.

	Kerin snapped his fingers, and a mug of coffee appeared at her side.  She started.  “Oh!  Uh, I wasn’t… asking…” she trailed off as she realized he was playing with her.  “Hmph.  Thanks, Kerin.”

	The demon leaned back against the table and crossed his arms.  “So… where do we go from here?”

	Asa stood.  “I suggest we go with the suggestion of last night, and simply release the information gradually through academic journals.”

	Elsa felt her eyes well up a little as she stared into her fragrant drink.  “Damn them all.”

	“Little sister, don’t throw that word around,” Kerin said.  “They were poor parents, it’s true, but I can attest: they were doing their very best.”  He lifted the book and walked over to her chair.  “In fact, I suspect they stopped updating their journal because they fell out over how to best interact to the greater good.”

	The young Herald clenched her teeth.  “Right.  Right.”

	“So are we done here?” Haret asked.  “I’m sorry, but this seems like something we don’t need to discuss further.”

	“What does that mean?” Asa asked sternly.  “We have much to discuss.”

	“Are we going with the academic journal route?” Haret asked.

	“I believe so.”

	“Then I’ll write the papers, distribute them to a local university, and we’ll put this trash behind us,” Haret said bluntly, and his Avatar disappeared.

	Vier sighed.  “I’m sorry, Elsa, Kerin.  He’s handling this poorly.”

	“Yeah.”  Elsa swirled her drink in its mug.  “Yeah.  Handling.”  She grimaced.  “How the fuck do I explain this to my kids?  ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re a single mother’s spite project?  Turns out she was an exiled Goddess who started a war out of passive-aggressiveness.’”

	“No, and you won’t have to,” Kerin said.  “I’m happy to help when the time comes.”

	“Sorry.”  Elsa closed her eyes and felt hot tears stain her cheek.  Her voice cracked.  “I just… I’m so tired.  I’m… shitfire.  I’m not handling this much better.”

	Kerin helped her up out of her chair and gave her a long hug.  “Little sister, don’t hesitate for an instant to come back when you need my help.”

	“I won’t.  Apparently, you were the only one of the old Gods I can actually trust,” Elsa said bitterly.

	“I was never a God.”

	“I wish you had been.  You’d have never made so many mistakes.”

	Kerin looked highly uncomfortable, but said nothing.  They broke the hug and Elsa gave him the drink back.  “Well.  I guess that’s that.”

	“So it is.”  Kerin nodded to her.  “I love you, Elsa.  Never forget that.  I owe you my freedom, and my power.”

	“I… I know.”  She felt the tears splash her cheeks and she rubbed them away.

	“Would you, perhaps, like a blessing?” he asked.

	She sighed explosively.  “Not right now, brother, thanks.  I just need to be alone.”

	“I understand.”

	“Is it alright that I feel betrayed?” she asked.

	“Yes.  We were.  We were lied to, even if it may well have been to protect us.”  Kerin folded his hands.  “Sometimes, that’s what parents do.”

	Elsa looked off at the temple where her children were.  “Yeah.  Not if I can help it, though.”

	“I confess that I do not well understand why the Gods refused to share this knowledge with us,” Kerin admitted.  “In the end, what does it matter?  She did love us, and we love each other.  That’s never not been enough, not since we lost her and had to go our own way.”

	Elsa kicked the ground and stared down at her feet.  “Why deer?” she suddenly asked.  “Of all things, why deer?”

	Kerin chuckled.  “As I suggested, the relatively painless menstruation system of deer was part of it.  She was apparently wracked by horrid pain with each cycle, and wanted her offspring to avoid that.”

	“Oh.”  Elsa snorted.  “Can’t say I mind that decision, at least.”

	“Indeed.”  Kerin hugged his sister again as she started to look up.  “Do return soon, little sister.  I can feel your heart is still troubled.”

	“Honestly…” she said.  She paused to return the hug, then stepped away.  “No.  No, I’ll be all right.”

	Kerin saw the rift in her heart healing.  The young Herald turned to look up at the towering Temple.  “No.  This… hurts.  It hurts a lot.  But you know, I’ll be fine.  I’ve had worse.  I’ve literally died, twice.  I can handle disappointment.”  She turned back to Kerin.  “It’s poor Arisa that concerns me.”

	“I shall do as I can,” Kerin promised.

	“I know.”  Elsa blew out a breath and ran a hand through her short hair.  “I guess that’s it.  I’ll see you later, brother.”

	He nodded with his usual smile back in place.  “Goodbye, Elsa.”