Meanwhile, some billion meters
ana, a few hundred yards
kata, in another dimension, another meeting is held.
Someone is hiding something, the goddess Kigok Pokercooks thought to herself, which isn't redundant when all of your peers can hear all the thoughts that aren't specifically private.
She sat at an ornate table in a hunched position, staring at her fellow deities through steepled fingers, as well as the deities who could never, by any leap of imagination, be considered her fellows; they were nemeses, but temporary allies for a common endeavor.
A goddess spoke and interrupted her musings. "The tremors are increasingly unpredictable over time." Kigok eyed the speaker. Limul was a crow-like woman, with long, clawed fingernails and a small, sharply pointed nose. Her hair was tied up in an ornate adamantine clasp, and she carried an angry-looking war hammer made of something that looked like gold.
She went on, saying, "The Seal weakens daily. Lucus-of-the-Hand still lives, but a melancholy has taken him, and the tower remains unfinished. There are new horrors tearing into the mortal planes from the abyssal veil with every passing moment." She paused to pull out a map of the cosmos that looked vaguely like a human child with chicken pox, if an anthill looks vaguely like an asteroid belt.
A human deity of fishing from some backwater dimension interrupted. "None of my constituents have been arriving in Limbo unharmed," she said. "Any who do make it are waylaid or injured by the ones who don't."
"It's intolerable," chirped a bird-like goddess of rebirth from Aluonra. "All the recent stillborns have caused unspeakable misery across the world. Or, most of the world, anyway."
"And Lur?" Sahed asked sheepishly, brushing some rainbow dust of his shoulders. "I hope he isn't lost in transit after he perishes. I wish to have words with him." Sahed licked his lips in a way that implied these words would involve a great deal of pain and begging for mercy.
"Lur is somehow alive," said Kigok, with some resentment in her voice. "But if he can find the sorcerer before it's too late, we might have an easy solution to this mess."
"That's quite an if," said Otik the Blueness of Flickers, as he rubbed his mountainous forehead with fingers like tree trunks.
"Have faith," said Kigok in a strange, faraway voice.
Thoth the godling, who would eventually become Watcher of Aluonra in Lur's stead, now held the All-Seeing Eye that the former god had kept in his All-Seeing Tree. Thoth preferred to house the artifact in a stuffed peacock, which he had dubbed, appropriately enough, the All-Seeing Bird. Peering into the dark passage beyond the bird's yawning mouth, the young god spoke out. "There's a giant blue turtle eating some lizard people."
"Not now, Thoth," said Kigok, shaking her head at him.
Thoth frowned. "But they're in pain. They're asking for our help."
Every god and goddess in the chamber groaned. It was a question every godling would eventually ask: "Why can't we help the sad mortals?" Kigok knew it was time for Thoth to get "the talk" about the Rules, but it would have to wait until later.
"They're bad lizard people," she lied soothingly. "Very bad. Now please, Thoth, no more eyeball until after the meeting."
Thoth looked concerned, but nodded and tucked the bird under his seat. Kigok noticed the discomfort in the minds of her fellow deities and tried to think of something motivational to say.
"Forgive me," said a walrus with a top hat, "but what is the point of continuing this meeting if all we are to do is sit on our flippers? I say to Hell with the Rules. Let's roll into town and make some noise."
Kigok sighed. She decided on saying, "There is a chance Lur will survive long enough to succeed. He knows what he must do now that he is part of the mortal realm." She paused, sighed. "But there is someone else that resembles him an awful lot who is about to cause quite a stir in our world. Claims to have intimate knowledge of recent events. And I can't read him, none of us can. His mind is a..." She searched for the word, "... a whiteness."
She stared hard at the walrus. He looked so silly, so harmless. Dangerous assumptions, she scolded herself. She met eyes with him, and gave him her most urgent smile. "The point is unity before this crisis," she said. "And entering the worlds would mean disaster, especially now. Probability won't withstand that kind of firepower."
"You have enjoyed dominating this meeting," came a voice that chilled even the ichor of the gods. "Yet I have not spoken. Are we not all equals here?"
Kigok knew all about this one. Her name was Ura, and her name was Death. Fleshless and robed, she sat on an obsidian throne that hovered upside down, giving the impression of a torso protruding from the ceiling.
"Do not distract from this topic, Ura," said Kigok in warning. "Or do you have reasons for doing so?"
"The old man is my prophet," Ura said through her ever-grinning teeth.
There was an uproar. Gods simply did not send prophets without securing the proper authorization. It was forbidden, and just plain rude.
"You're too much like your father, Ura!" screamed Harod the God of Sod over a concert of shouting. "The same hubris. And even more impetuous!"
"Not everyone in Mother Kigok's order are meek enough to wait out this catastrophe," was Ura's reply, and her skeletal grin miraculously widened.
I Thirst, said a voice so hideous, so awfully vile, that horror took the entire room in such a way that only gods may feel: a preternaturally villainous voice as vicious as the biting abyss beyond time, a voice that dripped with utter hatred for existence, older than it, greater than it, the fatherless skin of evil itself.
A phantasmal shadow manifested in the chamber, surrounding Ura's skeletal frame, embracing it, adding eyes of etheric slime to empty sockets. It enveloped her limbs which presently throbbed like an exposed and yet beating heart, and a darkness congealed around her as the tiles of the chamber ceiling peeled away into nothingness.
Thoth cried out and fled from the chamber with a flash of light. The worry of the remaining gods echoed in their collective minds, and their thoughts were as One as instantly as they'd thought they should so be.
'The Foul One? Here! How?' I Thirst, said the unfathomable voice that crept around the room like the hungry tendrils of a colossal squid. The unified mind of the gods focused on their most ancient enemy, a golden light filling the room and clashing with the spread of darkness bleeding into their sanctum. Their physical forms flickered and faded as their concentration narrowed in on the battle of wills.
"You will not disturb this Sanctum, Old One," said the gods.
'Ura, what have you done?' Ura said nothing. The voice behind her did not speak, but hissed with the rattling sound of millions dying in pools of their own life. The light in the chamber flared as fire and lightning rained from above. An arc of frenzied energy shot out and struck the wall, and the entire structure around them shimmered and vanished, replaced by an utter, yawning cavern of chaotic proto-reality and pre-shapes, without meaning or any discernible form.
The gods were troubled. This was all very new to most of them.
They had to abandon the Sanctum, they realized. The Foul One had taken them by surprise and they hadn't reacted soon enough to win this battle. The best they could manage was an infinite stalemate. They knew it, and couldn't afford it. Retreat was the only option they could take.
Hells and damnations, they thought.
And then they were gone. Pitch, fetid tendrils of protoplasm crawled into countless realities like the blood of gods dripping down the walls of space itself. Ura grinned, and her grin grew to fill the entirety of the Sanctum.
* * *
Far away on Aluonra, Lur panicked. He was drowning.
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Topic: FailCannon: No Rest for the Wicked (or anyone else) (Succession: Battlefailed 2) (Read 938995 times)