Bisi stood in one circle, in a group of circles, surrounded by several other clerics. She wore the traditional ceremonial robes of a priest or priestess sworn to the circles, or domains, of Akamal. Her feathered headdress marked her as one of his Vodou practitioners, in her case, due to her gender, a mambo.
Bisi heard chanting all around her and even though she was chanting too she managed to smile. Had anyone locked eyes with the mambo they'd have seen an unhealthy amount of pride in her cold, iron-colored eyes.
The priestess stepped out of her celebrated, envy-inducing position in the middle of the middle circle and she stepped forward. She continued her chanting, and she took powerful strides to lay her eyes on the nightmarish creature who stood in the heart of the ritual.
Bisi, the head of the ritualists who worshiped Akamal as a Vodou deity, had seen the god she worshiped in an array of forms but his propensity for shapeshifting never failed to surprise her. The fierce monster-god she worshiped was in his final guise.
Akamal was wrapped in a massive red cloak, one larger than entire humans, and the vague outline of his body suggested that he was in a more or less human form at the moment. Which, for him, was quite odd. The red cloak covered his body and hid his face from view.
Bisi didn't dare approach him, as he could destroy her with but a thought if she made even the slightest mistake in how she moved closer to him. Between her and him there was a small circle of initiates, junior priests, and priestesses who as part of their training placed their bodies and souls on the frontlines of dealing with their temperamental deity. They were all shorter than she was, but only by a little.
She was only a few years older than they were, and though she'd never admit it she related to the fear she felt them radiate. She had felt it too, not that long ago. And sometimes it snuck back into her heart.
Akamal was, for mortals, a frightening deity to try and approach. He preferred monstrous forms over humanoid ones, and his temper matched that of the most volatile, hot-headed Vodou deities known as the Petro Loa. Any priest or priestess of his knew that to physically approach him any closer than where the initiates were was to court death.
As a greater deity, Akamal had an array of vicious powers with which to strike them down directly or to corrupt them so thoroughly they were effectively transformed into other people and thus died a different, indirect sort of death.
Akamal's covered form began to shudder and twisted in the direction of Bisi. The young human priestess shuddered as she felt the power of her god, her frightening patron, fall on her.
I studied and absorbed the memories of the corpse, and as I did I began to laugh. Bisi, the name of the woman I had slain, had been slain over and over and experienced death and rebirth time and time again.
Bisi was a victim of Akamal, but not in the usual sense of the word. Akamal had not slain her. But he hadn't let her rest, let her leave this place of horror and death. Even now his power kept her tethered here. In her currently dead body resided memories of tens of thousands of people, victims of Akamal's eternal hunger and insatiability. And each time they met defeat at the hands of Akamal, or fled his fierce power, he began to slowly recharge his own temporal powers.
When the dread-god of the Temporal Temple had regained enough power he'd use it to reach out through time and pull his servants out of the past and into the present. The memories of Bisi confirmed this, and they confirmed that each time she was pulled into the present she suddenly remembered both the victims of this place that in her original time hadn't appeared yet and also her own inevitable fate of either killing invaders or being slain by them.
Bisi, originally an arrogant and powerful priestess, had been worn down by the passing of hundreds of eons and countless deaths at the hands of angered adventurers, avengers, or future victims of this dreadful gravesite. The Bisi of the present, who I had slain, was a shell of the woman she had been when she was just a clergywoman and not a victim of this place.
"So... The domain of time is truly that powerful." I uttered, as I studied Bisi's memories and the thousands of times that she remembered a powerful blue portal appeared in front of her and beckoning her to the future. She never resisted it and each time she stepped through the portal she died, at best of starvation and at worst at the hands of those she had been called to kill. But what matted was that with Akamal's power she wasn't resurrected, she was pulled from the past and brought forward into the present. Which meant that with that power, perhaps no death was inevitable.
"The domain of time... Yes, it truly is a powerful being." Death uttered, his voice sounding distant for a moment. I could hear a touch of awe in his voice and chuckled at it. Even Death itself was in awe of the power of time, and for not the first time in my life, I wondered which of the domains was the strongest one. Logic dictated that it would be the domain of reality, or perhaps fate, but the domain of time and the eldritch domain were immensely powerful as well.
Knowledge of the inner workings of the temple and Bisi's memories confirmed that with the power of time under my control I'd be able to create portals to the past, and apparently drag things and people from the past into the future. Which confirmed at least one way that I could resurrect Ava, and filled me with even more of a desire to bring Akamal's vestige to its knees.
Death turned his back to me and began to gaze at the runes again. He was once more reading through them. There was a smile on his face as he read the history of this place. He only knew of the deaths tied to this macabre temple, he didn't know the history of it from the perspective of the living. At least not like I did.
He was expanding his understanding of this place. I wasn't and I couldn't if I had done what he was doing. I had absorbed the memories of the hundreds of warriors we defeated. Warriors who had lived in this place, had protected it, died for and in it, millennia ago.
I knew their thoughts. Their memories were etched on my soul. My mind was a sponge for memories, capable of absorbing all of them nearly instantaneously and incorporating them into the rest of my mind just as rapidly. My mind was a parasitic, hungry thing that clamored for more creatures to absorb.
Eventually I tore my gaze away from Bisi's corpse. As I did, I heard a familiar and unsettling sound. The sound of portals opening up behind me. In the rooms that Death and I had already been through. Enemies were coming. Or rather, enemies were being brought back. And as the first of them stepped through the portals, a monstrous voice wormed its way into my mind and like a roaring lion demanded to be heard.
"So... A god has finally appeared and entered my prison. How curious. I tremble at the thought of meeting you, little one. Come, seek me out if you wish to escape this place. If not... Well, my warriors will be entertained. Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha!" Rumbled the voice, the eerie and inhuman voice of Akamal.
I turned around and saw the first of the new wave of enemies beginning to step through the door and towards Death and I. They had dark, savage grins on their faces and clutched their spears tightly. I sighed and rose a hand in their direction, aiming a clever attack at them that was meant to disrupt and distract them.
I filled the air around my hand with my monstrous spores and then used my control over wind and air to hurl the disastrous spores at my enemies. They sped down the hallway and when they touched my foes I watched as the newly infected creatures fell to their knees and began to vibrate. They shook for a few seconds as spores sunk into their skin and began to race towards their brains, to change them from the inside out and make them my loyal, fanatical servants.
I wasn't done either. I wasn't so weak an elemental overlord that my powers over air were limited to places I could see. I closed my eyes and began to activate a flurry of abilities. As I did that, another portal appeared behind me, in the direction Death was facing. I could my gaunt friend begin to chuckle as another Bisi, and her allies stepped through the portal.
"I'll handle the ones behind us. You take the ones in front of us." I muttered. I felt Death's head bob up and down in his mockery of a nod and I began to laugh, menacingly.
The large central chamber that Althos and Death had made of a mess of was now filled with life again. A number of large blue portals were visible throughout the chamber, and rows of human warriors stepped through each every second. Akamal was assembling a veritable army of servants and worshipers while making the mistake of not knowing his enemy.
Althos was unlike a great number of gods in that he preferred to have others do the fighting for him. He was by no means weak on an individual level, but he was also not particularly fond of enacting violence. That said, he had quickly gained tremendous power over domains that specialized in converting others to one's own followers and had an immense number of abilities that specialized in making friends out of one's foes. And he was unleashing the most potent of those abilities on his foes.
The center of the enormous chamber was suddenly wracked by an array of localized tornados. The pillars of wind were powerful, each creating winds that were around fifty meters per second in speed. That said the real danger of the deadly breeze wasn't its speed.
The powerful tornados were each filled with tens of thousands of exceptionally dangerous spores, spores which could utterly transform and dominate even demons and devils and would instantly overwhelm even the greatest mortal minds, those of dragons, instantaneously.
Spores swirled around in the winds of the tornadoes and were spat out all over the chamber when each tornado began to speed up. Human warriors were touched by and then transformed by the spores, their minds becoming infected by the captivating powers of both the fungal subdomain and the mind of the god who created and lorded over the spores.
The spores that infected their allies were far more powerful than the spores Althos had once commanded, and in the case of the particular spores Althos created here and now were also infinitely more aggressive than even the most belligerent of the spores he had created in the past. These spores had sensory abilities, thanks to the impossible powers of Althos and were driven to infect as many creatures as they possibly could.
The spores themselves were eager to alter the minds and bodies of the foes of their creator. They were filled with a fairly basic but determined intelligence, one that urged them to infect every creature in the chamber.
Human warriors who had the misfortune of not being hit by the spores watched in confusion as their former allies, humans who had been hit by the spores, fell to their knees and began to change. They watched, their eyes filling with fear, as fungal growths began to dominate the bodies and minds of their friends and fellow Akamalians. And those monsters were swiftly joined by other Althonians in the form of the wave of Akamalians Althos had dealt with using the first of his spores.
"For... ALTHOS!" Some of the human warriors would roar, speaking in guttural Atlani, as their throats were clogged with disgusting fungal masses. These spores didn't leave their victims looking human. These were transformative spores that reshaped their victims.
Althos' potent nature as a terrifying deity of change and fungi was on full display, even in a chamber where he himself wasn't present.
The fungal-infected humans began to attack as one, their motions eerily and impossibly coordinated given their disgusting appearances as fungi overran their bodies and corrupted them into strange mockeries of their past appearances.
Althos himself appeared at the doorway he had entered the hallway he found himself in and chuckled. He stepped through it and used his powers over metal to create a metal wall that was the color of milk where the door he had previously destroyed had once been while his newest spore servants began to go berserk.
He silently watched as they unleashed some of their first attacks on their former friends. There was a smile on his face as he watched his minions clash with the servants and worshipers of Akamal. That said he wasn't here just to watch.
The deity placed his hand on the wall he had just created. When he did something odd happened. Colors began to spill out of his hand and onto the wall, flowing from his open appendage and onto the solid, harder-than-iron, wall he had just made.
No humans noticed this, as they were busy fighting for their lives. The fungally dominated humans who were now their fierce enemies had gone berserk and were either trying to knock them unconscious to infect their former friends or outright kill them. They swung their limbs with wild abandon and cackled as they did so, the fungi that infected them were happy to convert their foes into their friends, at the behest of their master and creator.
Althos' hand remained on the wall, and as it did the colors that spilled out onto the milk-white metal wall began to move about, seemingly of their accord. Althos continued to smile, as what he was doing was a special usage of several abilities at once.
The colors that were pasted onto the wall began to make shapes, and when they made the special shapes Althos sought for them to make more colors appeared on the wall. After a few moments the special, mysterious painting Althos was making became clearer.
The image on the wall was of a mighty, enormous troll. The creature was beautifully painted, in intricate detail and looked powerful even for a member of its hulking, intimidating kind. Althos chuckled and spoke gently.
"I have no intention of being bothered by the inhabitants of this room again." He said, his eyes locked on the warriors who filled the room. Althos brought the painting to life, and the troll's eyes began to glitter and gleam as the beast roared, and pulled itself out of the wall it was painted onto.
The creature was a powerful, three-dimensional, fungal infected, painted troll. It stood at three and a half meters tall and had fierce claws that were caked with parasitic spores. It turned its gaze towards the nearest uninfected human, and began to walk over to him even as he tried to fight off one of his former friends, who merely muttered "Join... Ussss...."
Althos smirked at the battle and stepped through the wall, so that he could rejoin Death and they could continue to head towards Akamal.
