37: Light

Light Priest in the Human Capital’s view

Death was coming. The oracle was clear. It was not safe here anymore for us. We already knew it would be dangerous when we saw a new church and people began to change to worship this new tentacled god. 

So many people refuse to listen to the light, and seek the peace of darkness.
So many people reject our responsibilities as humans, and instead embrace hedonism.
So many people… Too many.

This new affront to the Light, is an abomination. Without death, how can our souls be cleansed and reborn? Each new life and rebirth is a new cycle and a new chance to get closer to god. To fear death is natural. To reject death is to reject Light’s love. Yet so many people seek out this new god. They embrace her hedonic teachings and shun the voice of our true god. How can such an undisciplined god lead to a better world?

Sadly, none will listen to me, and insist I’m too young to understand. I’m twelve already! I have the blessing of Light! I’ve been acknowledged and blessed and given the right to lead! At least the members of our church will listen to the oracles I deliver. Our true god’s word, delivered through me… but so many won’t listen. Only our most devoted followers remain. Together, we leave.

Unfortunately, it still took time to gather everyone and get our belongings ready. We thought we had time. No one in town was willing to get violent against us thanks to Murphy putting a stop to fights and hunting down and jailing all arsonists. We did not have time.

When we left, we did not travel long before discovering our fate. An army of the dead, hidden along the path we were taking. We’d chosen a path we thought would be safe. A path seldom taken, where our passage was unlikely to be noticed. It seems we were not the only ones trying to avoid notice.

We were quickly surrounded upon stumbling upon the army. Terrified we dared not make a move when we noticed the enemy wasn’t immediately attacking. It wasn’t long before the sea of the dead parted and a strange woman stepped forth.

“Oh? Looks like you’ve saved us a lot of trouble! I thought we’d have to assault the city proper to get to you! You have two choices, either renounce your god and accept Lae as your new god, or die!”

Death was the obvious choice. Only with Light, can one find the way. In darkness, one can only wander, lost for eternity.

…

Light’s view

When those angry cultists chose to punch a hole to the outer realms with their magic, I was quite annoyed and a little worried. It was an idiotic thing to do, and I didn’t really think they were going to succeed, yet they did. 

Thankfully, what came through wasn’t very dangerous. It seemed to be a rather timid deity that was little more than a barely intelligent mass of tentacles, exploring the world with an avatar it made. Seeing this, I figured I could just focus on eliminating all the monsters first, then worry about this new god. 

This turned out to be a mistake. While they did little at first, they suddenly went from just one avatar to over a dozen overnight. I underestimated the power of their madness. No sane deity can make so many different ordinary humans into avatars. 

Making a human into an avatar requires a great similarity in character and mentality between the deity and human. Otherwise, a human will instinctively fight the possession, in order to remain in control of their body. It is possible to train a human to not resist, but that takes fairly intensive training and usually takes a decade or more.

Yet this deity has made every single “priest” into an avatar. Every “priest” has become a unique extension of this new deity with its own mind and personality. If anything, it’s almost like the human is possessing the deity, and wielding a portion of the deity’s body and power as their own.

Either this deity’s mind is completely fractured, or their mind and personality are so weak, that these humans can easily accept it as a part of themselves. 

Rather than dealing with one god, this feels more like dealing with a loosely organized alliance of gods. Both in the amount of direct influence they bring to the world, and in how poorly coordinated they are. 

This mistake I’ve made has led to the complete destruction of my powerbase in human lands. I must resort to rebuilding a new kingdom with my remaining army. You may have won this round “Lae”, but this is not the end. 

***Author Note***

I’d originally planned to never use the god of light’s viewpoint. It’s just… there were things I wanted to explain that no one else in the story could, and I don’t like doing omniscient narrator stuff. I favor unreliable narrators. All of them have incomplete information.

Visibility of Cultist assault on capital church: 1

I forget the roll now, but I also rolled high on how brutish their plan was. So the cultist assault ended up totally unnoticed by the people in town, because the targets of the cultists accidentally took the wrong route when evacuating.

I feel like this is the end of the first major story arc. It doesn’t really feel like the end of the story though. This isn’t a stable status quo.