Ninon stood on the roof of a long-abandoned apartment building. She was using a pair of binoculars to cautiously survey her surroundings and was fully equipped to survive the chaos that had consumed this world years ago.
The woman was covered from head to toe in protective gear. Her face was covered by a gas mask that she had looted from a store in the early days of her world turning into a strange hellscape. Her body was covered in a mishmash of skin-tight clothing and bandages to help cover up scars and also to prevent any loose spores from landing on her body.
She had a gun in a holster on her hip and carried an array of knives. That had long been suitable enough for her to survive with. She had grown surprisingly adept at using the knife or the gun in self-defense and lately had begun mastering the usage of both at the same time to ward off any sort of human assailant. She was lucky and paranoid and had managed to avoid any real close encounters with the strange monsters that now wandered her world.
The world beneath the rooftop she found herself on was a strange place. Many people had died in the first few days of the divinely caused apocalypse, but those who hadn't perished had changed. Even she had changed. And as Ninon surveyed her surroundings through the binoculars, she was able to witness one example of the ways that the world had changed.
At first, the city streets were empty. Around this time of day, they tended to be empty. It was when they weren't empty that she and other survivors were most at risk. And after a minute or so of visually, and safely, exploring the streets with her binoculars, she saw the first indication that the streets were dangerous.
A lone bat, enormous and covered in fungal growths, stalking the city streets, appeared in Ninon's binocular view of the streets below her current lookout spot. The beast was ugly to look at, and it slowly walked through the streets, pushing cars out of the way and walking towards the city's long ruined downtown cultural center.
The beast was one of many fungal-covered monstrosities that Ninon had seen in the years since the apocalypse. She shuddered as she studied it, making careful mental notes of its speed and the direction it was walking in. As the beast bumped into objects, spores were shaken loose from its fungal-growth-covered fur.
"Damnit. Because of that asshole, I'm gonna have to avoid those streets." Ninon cursed, muttering quietly. She had survived long enough to see other humans and even non-humans touch the spores released by creatures like that bat, and had watched as they were violently transformed into fungi-covered, mindless monsters. And on rare occasions, she had even seen people who made contact with the spores become other sorts of beings, ones who were very distinctly not mindless. And those people were the stuff of nightmares.
Ninon took her binoculars and quickly scanned the street the fungal-bat was walking on. When she found a street sign she quietly made a mental note of it and put away her binoculars. The sun was low in the sky, and as bad as the days were, nights in this post-apocalyptic hellscape were worse.
The young human woman quickly and strode back to the small door that would let her into the apartment building. The door was open, which was how she had left it. As she threw herself into the darkened hallway, she reached into her backpack and pulled out a flashlight. She turned the thing on, and quietly closed the door that led her outside all while shining her light into the stairwell that would take her into the building.
Ninon silently began to step towards the ruined apartment she would sleep in for the night. It took her a few minutes to make her way down the building's stairwell. As she did, every few minutes she'd feel the building she was in tremble and shake slightly, causing her to grip the rails on the sides of the stairwell and steady herself.
"Damn... fungal beasts." She'd mutter, angrily, cursing the monsters that now freely roamed what was left of her home.
In another part of the city, as the sun fell below the horizon and the moon rose into the sky, a pair of twins awoke from a deep sleep. Both of the twins were tall, athletic, and had golden hair. They were also perhaps the only "humans" in the city who looked well-nourished.
The twins silently got up from the soft bed they had spent the last year sleeping on and stretched. Then the pair silently stared at each other for a moment, before greeting each other wordlessly. Their soft purple eyes would suddenly shift whenever they'd use the strange powers granted to them by their master, and as they communicated their eyes lost all color and had the same appearance as crystal clear ocean water.
The twins were clothed, with the male twin, Hans, wearing a pair of surprisingly well-maintained jeans and a short-sleeve shirt, and the female twin, Amalia, wearing a pair of khaki pants and a dark blue polka dot shirt that were also well-maintained, despite the fact that the twins were surviving the apocalypse.
The twins were alone in a large room that they had emptied and transformed into their bedroom. The room itself was spacious and filled with all sorts of furniture. The soft bed that the twins shared was only one of the room's key features. It sat in one corner of the large, underground room.
In another corner of the room stood a shrine centered around a small statuette of a brain. Amalia and Hans went from their bed to this strange shrine and got on their knees before it. This was part of their daily ritual, and it was important to them that they did it daily. They piously prayed to the shrine, devoting their unspoken words and feelings to the strange god they worshiped.
Althos, unsurprisingly, did not reply to their prayers directly. They prayed anyway because sometimes he did reply to them. And from time to time, he intervened directly in their lives. Amalia was especially pious in her prayers, usually praying as many as four times a night.
"May you guide us in such a way that it is as though you are beside, or even inside of us, oh powerful one." She mentally muttered, her hands clasped in prayer before the shrine. She prayed rather intensely, and as she prayed she devoted herself again to her god, the powerful being who had granted her the strange powers she possessed.
"Althos, show us the way to where you desire for us to be so that we may guide more people and creatures towards your strange truths." Hans prayed, his prayer more casual sounding but equally as heartfelt. Althos manifested differently to him than the dark god had manifested to Amalia, which resulted in the two of them having different relationships with the strange deity. Neither had a closer relationship with him than the other did, their relationships were just different.
When they finished their prayers, they got up as one and walked out of the room they were in. Upon leaving the room they found themselves face to face with their guards, a pair of humans who wore a mixture of clothes and armor. Unlike the twins the pair were not related, they were just devoted to Althos and to the twins who had once saved their lives. They were one of many pairs of humans the twins had saved, and as the twins looked at them silently they activated another of their Althos-given powers: the ability to learn the last twenty-four hours of anyone's memories with but a look.
Memories flooded into the twin's minds, and as they learned what the past twenty-four hours had been like for the guards they began to wordlessly smile. It was only when the memories of the guards were fully absorbed by the twins that Hans began to speak.
"I see that we've missed some chaos. Escort us to the injured, we shall heal them." Hans told the guards, a smile on his face as he spoke. Of the two he was the one who spoke, barring either a command by their god being revealed to Amalia or an unusual disaster occurring that caused the technically human woman to feel the need to speak.
The guards absorbed the words spoken by Hans and nodded at him. They began to walk, one of them in front of the twins and the other beside them. Neither guard spoke, as they knew that they didn't need to speak to be heard by the twins, the leader of the strange mind-based cult that the twins were the leaders of. Their minds could be heard by the twins, even if the guards wanted the twins not to read their minds.
Neither twin cared for the privacy of those they rescued from the fungal monstrosities that stalked the world above their hideout, and the cultists who had joined them knew that that was just part of the deal they'd make to survive even if they complained, mentally, about it.
The guards held makeshift spears one of which was constructed the remains of a stop sign and the other of which was a leftover car antenna that had been fused with other items. They also held "shields" which were equally makeshift, both of which being having once been the metal lids of garbage cans.
The group walked quietly for a few minutes. They expertly navigated a strange underground complex without the need for vision and without stumbling. The guards managed this feat as a result of a ritual they performed that rewarded them with sight even when they should have been blindly stumbling through the dark, and the twins managed this through a blessing their god bestowed upon them.
For the twins, the darkness was a friend that had protected them, and the world beneath the surface was a safe haven that they had been given power over thanks to the generosity of their god. Even once they learned that the apocalypse that had consumed their world was due to the will of their god, he had so deeply indoctrinated them that they didn't care. If anything that knowledge intensified their worship of him.
The twins were silent, not even mentally communicating, as they and their guards made their way towards the place all injured members of their cult gathered. It didn't take them particularly long to reach the enormous chamber, and as they approached it the twin's quietly hissed as their empathy allowed them to sense the pain their acolytes were in.
The pair of guards effortlessly opened the doors that stood between them, their leaders, and the injured. When the doors were opened the twins and the guards were greeted by a dim light, coming from seemingly nowhere, that illuminated the vast chamber that was now exposed to the twins.
Inside of the chamber, itself once part of a network of maintenance caverns for a large stadium, were dozens of warriors. Men and women alike were seated on the floor of the chamber and they were all in varying amounts of pain. Hans and Amalia looked out at their warriors and smiled. Hans's smile was gentle and concerned, and his eyes filled with false worry. Amalia's smile was more fanatical and proud, proud of the cult she had built, and of the pain that they had endured in her name and that of her master, the god who had saved her life.
Amalia, despite her offputting smile, was the one whose power began to wash over the assembled warriors. Hans waited until he sensed the power his sibling possessed wash over him before beginning to pose magnanimously and beginning to speak. He stepped confidently into the chamber and smiled as he began to speak.
"Dearest children of Althos, lend me your ears!" He began, a confident, charming smile plastered on his face. The so-called "Children of Althos", the name of this particular cult, looked up at Hans and began to smile and sigh in relief as they felt the power of their true leader, Amalia, wash over them and cure their wounds.
"Althos is watching over us, even now! His power protects us and heals us of our wounds. His power gives us the might needed to clash with the monsters above the stadium. His power suffuses us and gives us what we need to get by. He answers our prayers, and he even brings us back from the dead." Hans told the warriors, his voice and repetition of the astounding works of Althos, through Amalia, combined with the healing effects of Amalia's power, the warriors began to feel excited to face more dangers.
"This world is a frightening world. The monsters we face are terrifying, powerful beasts who endanger us and kill the less fortunate. I wouldn't dream of pretending otherwise. But, my friends, we are truly blessed. Althos has seen us, judged us, and deemed us worthy of not only survival, but companionship, friendship, unity, and the resources we need to survive!" Hans declared, speaking excitedly. Had any warrior been close enough to look into his eyes they'd have seen the fires of fanaticism burn in them.
Distantly, while in another dimension, Althos himself listened to the more charismatic twin give a speech to the warriors he had gathered to the cult. And at the same time, Althos curiously paid attention to Ninon, who had long proven herself to be a talented and cautious survivalist.
The world of Ryths was one that fascinated Althos. He paid attention to every single notification he received from the long decimated planet. He himself had knowingly annihilated the civilization that once dominated the planet, and turned the world into the post-apocalyptic hellscape it had now become, and yet humans had survived.
Humans had survived the deity's successful efforts to wipe out civilization on Ryths, and they had emerged from the ashes of their destroyed world and refused to give up. To the young, curious deity this was deeply fascinating, hence why he gave some of them special advantages and even made his presence known to a handful of the survivors.
Althos had commanded the fungal monsters to not confront Ninon unless it was in self-defense. He had also quietly drawn them away from her, in instances where he predicted that a confrontation between the two would have been inevitable had he not intervened.
Althos had directly protected Hans and Amalia by possessing Amalia and even went as far as directly defeating one of his own fungal monstrosities to keep the twins safe. A year later, he directly manifested, in the flesh, to the twins and they instantly became his worshipers. Hans's sanity was lost in the moment that he saw Althos, as it was the price the god exacted in exchange for the protection he bestowed upon them.
There were other humans he had similarly protected and blessed throughout the world, but Ninon was one of the ones he was the most interested in where he had to yet to make himself known. And the twins were undoubtedly the humans most directly protected by Althos' powers, and their cult was the only one to know of Althos's true name.
To the god, the world of Ryths was a fun playground he had created, where he was willing to use his darkest powers. In dark caverns, he was worshiped not by fungi-covered creatures, but by humans who had fled underground and who were tempted to lose themselves in the dark and to become akin to the monsters they had fled from. They worshiped Althos as the Hungering Void, the aspect of the deity that was a demon lord of darkness and hunger.
In coastal villages, humans who had succumbed to alluring whispers from the oceans themselves lived peaceful lives, so long as they obeyed the commands of powerful, mutated crabs who dwelled in the shallow waters near their villages and usually only asked for tributes of food, though rumors abound of times when they asked for more than food. The crabs themselves were fanatical Althonites who fervently worshiped their god as a nameless Outer God of the shallow depths and evolution.
In mountainous communities, humans who sought to live in peace worshiped Althos' seemingly benevolent alter-ego, the nature goddess Cosecha who only asked for a yearly blood sacrifice as a way to fuel the barriers she erected around their villages. The mountain people, deeming the steep price they paid for peace worth it, obeyed "Cosecha's" commands without question.
Very, very few people on the planet knew even a little bit about the true nature of the monstrous deity responsible for the collapse of their world's civilization. And even fewer knew that the god was still interested in the world. Althos' true agenda was known only to himself, and none knew of the strange schemes he had set in motion that would soon usher in another age of change on the planet. Althos wasn't done with Ryths just yet.
