Knocking on the door, Thera wasn’t surprised to see Fontesh come out, it was her house after all, and she was specifically dropping Delair off, but what did catch her off guard was seeing Dewdrop in the other woman’s arms, looking like the scrungle had found all of the comfort in the world as it rested, the laziest member of their household not having changed at all in the past few days.
“Ah, welcome back,” Fontesh greeted, her eyes lighting up upon having her daughter return. “Did everything go well?”
“Largely,” Thera nodded, not feeling the need to dive too deeply into Ben’s failure to awaken or his failure to see an alternative to making a machine body when ultimately, they’d at least succeeded in saving Inux. “And I hope Dewdrop didn’t cause you any troubles?”
A part of her was expecting some; she could see the outsider had raised its space and time magic since she’d seen it last, but Fontesh just laughed, petting the creature as she did.
“Oh no, it’s been a little sweetheart, either resting or staying with me while I tended to the garden. Actually, you all made good time. I just finished a bit of baking if you and Mora want to come in and share some?”
With the offer, interest shone in Mora’s eyes that the boy couldn’t hide and Thera wouldn’t deny. She knew he liked Fontesh, the two of them spent more than enough time together with how often she and Ben asked her to babysit, and as things were, it would be nice for herself as well. The trip hadn’t exactly been a stressful one compared to so many others she’d go on, but she couldn’t help but want a break, and with that, happily accepted the offer, enjoying the snacks while the two kids woke and played with Dewdrop, letting her chat with the other woman while they were occupied.
“Everyone’s been adapting pretty well,” Fontesh went on as an hour passed, the kids not looking done with each other yet as Delair pulled out more games for the two of them to play, giving Thera no rush to leave when she had nothing else that day to take up her time. “The demis have been an endless help with getting settled, having neighbours that are so friendly has really eased the transition here.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Thera smiled. “They’re good people, and their lives… well, they had a few issues of their own before moving here; they know what it’s like to have to pick up and leave everything behind.”
“I suppose it’s something a lot of people can understand by now,” she sighed before forcing herself to lighten up. “But still, we’re all doing our best, and the kids are really enjoying the chance to make more friends. It’s an adjustment, but I think it’s a positive one.”
“Well, if you ever need anything, me and Ben are here for you too. Speaking of, you and Delair should come over for dinner again sometime soon. We’d love to have you.”
“If you have a date, then we’d love to. My daughter certainly enjoys the company,” Fontesh said, both of them looking over to see Delair lifting Dewdrop over her head in a victory pose at whatever game she’d just won.
“Well, we shouldn’t have anything else coming up soon, so how about-”
Her words cut off as suddenly a feeling of wrongness overcame her, one she couldn’t ignore and took a moment to figure out the source, her eyes going wide the second she did and left Fontesh to see that something had happened.
“Thera? Is everything alright?”
“Um, I don’t know. Sorry, there might be a bit of an issue I have to deal with. I hate to ask so last minute, but could you watch Mora and Dewdrop for another night while I try to figure out what happened?”
“Alright, but are you sure you’re okay? You don’t look well.”
“Just a little caught off guard, it’s fine,” she said, standing up from her seat to turn to Mora and Dewdrop, doing her best to erase whatever worry on her face that was so obvious to Fontesh. “Sorry you two, you both might be staying here tonight, but I’ll come get you in the morning, alright?”
“Why, what happened?” Mora asked, able to tell there was something too that drove Thera to come up with a quick lie.
“Anailia reached out to me; she just needs a little help,” Thera explained, hoping her goddess would understand. “I have to deal with this, but I’ll be back as soon as I can so both of you be on your best behaviour for Fontesh, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good, thank you.”
She pulled them both into a hug before leaving, allowing every bit of calmness she’d been trying to force to drop the second she was out of sight to rush to her uncle's shop and the gates that it held, needing answers as to why the bind that linked her to Ben had been cut off.
“Anailia, I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re busy but I’m panicking and need help,” Thera desperately prayed in the main church of her goddess, seeking whatever answers she could get and not intending to stop until she got them. “Please, whatever’s happening, just make a little time for me. Please.”
“I’ll always make time for you, child,” her goddess said, now by her side as the two of them stood in her realm. “But I’m sorry to say, I know what you’re looking for.”
“Something happened to Ben?”
Anailia hesitated for a moment, knowing how much the answer was going to hurt. “You know he’s always had his issues with some of the gods among us, and it seems that in their extreme ignorance, they decided to act on it.”
“Ben’s not dead,” she said, almost reflexively. “He’d be up here with you if he was.”
“... He’s survived a lot before, perhaps he’ll survive this too,” her goddess hesitantly agreed, not wanting to give one of her children false hope, yet wanted to believe it herself just as much. “But he’s been dealt with in a way that would be hard for anyone to come back from.”
“Meaning?”
“... He was dropped into the infinite hells,” Anailia explained, seeing the shock it left in Thera’s eyes. “Not just his soul, they were all too cowardly to try and fail at that, but all of him and the church he was in. They opened a hole to it on the world and he fell through. The odds… I’m sorry, but you have to be prepared for the worst.”
Thera said nothing at first, not knowing how to respond. She’d joked enough that one day some god or other was going to send him to hell for everything he would do, but she never actually believed it would happen, and there was nothing she could do to change that. She couldn’t open a gate there, and while she knew Ben had devised all sorts of methods of doing such a thing himself, she’d never bothered to learn any of them herself for what had seemed like obvious ethical reasons at the time. Now, though, regret at avoiding doing so was eating her up.
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“Who?”
“Thera-”
“Anailia, I’m going to be a god of this world. Anyone who would do this to someone I love is going to spend the rest of my mortal life fucking regretting it until I can get up there to murder them myself. Who were the gods that did this?”
“I’m not stopping you,” Anailia told her. “I can’t stand the thought of letting anyone who’d do this to a man who’d benefited my children so much. With your power and your position, make sure you make them aware of the depths of their mistake.”
As always, a swarm of spirits followed Thera wherever she went, and usually, she was happy enough to just let them be, chatting occasionally if she needed to but otherwise just let them enjoy her mana and her company, but not then. After Anailia had given her a list of names, the moment she’d left her goddess’s realm, her mana erupted with requests to them as the world felt what it meant to enrage the spirit princess.
All of them had travelled the world and, while they didn’t typically take much interest, they did occasionally learn things, and with the volume of them that currently existed, there was always one that either had or could find an answer to any simple questions asked. Questions such as the location of every individual church that the gods behind Ben’s banishment held, with a request for the destruction of each not far behind it.
And when the spirits felt no faith in any power higher than their great ones and Thera herself, such destruction meant nothing to them. They could see Thera’s anger and feel her sorrow, and anyone who made the one they loved so dearly go through that were enemies not worthy of a second thought as they rushed to do as she willed as, in cities, towns, and villages across the world, every church and every monument to those gods was systematically destroyed, replaced with pillars rising from the ground naming them for their crimes for any who came to find them.
But, letting the spirits do it all themselves would do nothing to help her own anger, her own desire to act out and destroy, so with the request, she asked them to save specific sites for her as well, getting the space spirits help to make her own trips quick as, one by one, she was taken to each gods’ greatest church.
The first they’d build and the grandest, acting as pilgrimage points for their believers to raise even more faith, they were spots that had been strengthened by endless centuries and millennia of devotion and they were hers for the taking as she flew above the first, her soul sight and other senses working together to tell her there were people inside and got the spirits to remove them as she worked.
So what if the buildings were strengthened by faith? So what if they’d been empowered by thousands or tens of thousands of years of belief? She was the daughter of the great earth spirit, she wouldn’t have let millions of years of such strengthening stop her and, feeling every bit of stone and metal that had gone into that first location, grasped it with her mana like she was holding it in her hand and crushed it with all the force she could muster, leaving nothing but sand to fall where she left it.
The spirits constructed the pillar explaining the crimes of the god whose church had once stood there, while the city around her panicked at the presence of the mad mage in their midst; she had other concerns. Destroying it wasn’t enough, she wanted to be sure they never rebuilt again and, with a though, solidified the rubble and ground, merging the wreckage together into one greater whole that would be impossible to clean up without the use of magic before flooding it with her power again, yet in a different way, using one of the spells Ben himself had once spent lengths teaching her, one she never expected she’d use again.
While he himself lamented that there was no convenient way to become a bestower, as someone who was a non-affinitied mage, she had no issues with such things after learning the mechanisms behind it and put that power into practice, using it in tandem with her soul magic to flood the location the church had once sat, so deep that no one would ever bother excavating it away, with a spell that would cause weakness and sickness to whoever stood on the land.
She wanted to do more. She wanted blood, but she forced herself to hold back. She wasn’t in a position to kill the gods responsible, at least not then, but that didn’t mean she could slaughter their believers. They weren’t responsible for what their gods had done, so with nothing else there, she could only move to the next place, hoping that by the time she was finished, she might feel calm enough to decide what she should do next.
Here again, she told herself, feeling empty when she got to one of her last destinations, ending up at the church of Eneth once more.
With the building she found there being something humble. After Ben had destroyed the old church and with the way he’d been devastating their finances, they hadn’t had the money to rebuild anything as grand as what had once stood there, but, with many of them being earth mages and Eneth having worshipers who were architects, craftsmen, and construction workers, even if their jobs didn’t align to their god’s nature, they’d managed to at least build something to give his people a place to pray in.
She could tell that there were priests in it too, but unlike the previous stops, she didn’t bother taking them out first, instead collapsed the building around them, taking care not to give anyone more than a few bruises and to leave the statue of Myriad within completely unharmed before she cursed the land like all others, as those around finally spotted the one destroying what little they’d been able to rebuild.
“What are you doing!” Eneth’s apostle and Ather’s mortal father, Felth yelled, letting her finally see a decent target for her rage as the man and the priests beneath him came out to try to appease her, even as their reptilian faces filled with fear. “Please, haven’t we been through enough?”
The wrong words at the wrong time. Of everyone who worshiped a god responsible for sending Ben to hell, those were the ones she wasn’t willing to assume innocence for. She was well aware that they’d tried to murder Ben in the past, and with that being the case, they were less than dirt in her eyes as she landed to meet them, taking a few steps towards Felth and, once he was close enough, pulled her arm back and punched through him, leaving blood up to her elbow and a hole in his chest.
Though not used much given she was a mage, she was also strong physically, both from having her soul modified, as well as all of her own awakenings, and none of the other priests had been prepared for her, least of all Felth, who only looked confused before he fell to the ground, being the sign for the rest to move.
For ages, they’d expected that Ben would come back to kill them one day, his grudge seemingly endless, and while they hadn’t expected it would be his partner instead, that didn’t mean they hadn't been prepared to fight to the end, with all of their efforts worthless.
Most of them didn’t have their spears, and the ones that did felt them turn to dust in their hands. Following their god, most of them were earth mages, yet her power eclipsed them to a point that it was impossible to use such spells against her, and all other magics failed when put against her might as well.
But it wasn’t her magic she fought them with. Leaving each of them powerless and preventing any one of them from running, she did the same thing she had done to their leader. One by one, she went and she struck them, feeling them break under her hands as organs collapsed and ribcages shattered, all of them lying in a puddle of blood, desperately clinging to life in the few seconds it took her to finish.
She looked at them, only a few managing to stare back at her with fear, hate, or a maddening panic, and felt nothing, but, with a flicker of will, healed them once she was done. As grave as those wounds were, she was a soul mage who’d grown from the life affinity, tempered on endless hospital work, and had even regrown a body’s head before it could die. Saving them was nothing to Thera, and they looked at her in a mixture of hope and confusion, desperately praying that she’d be satisfied with that and leave until, with another small act of will, she petrified them, turning them all into statues to store into the spatial ring Ben had given her, with new ideas filling her messy thoughts.
“Alright, new plan,” she told the spirits around her, speaking with both voice and mana as the mental strain of the day took its toll. “Gather all of the apostles, oracles, and high priests of the churches we’ve destroyed and bring them to me.”
She wasn’t going to give them the same treatment she’d just given the believers of Eneth, at least not completely, but she couldn’t deny she wanted the option, and as people were summoned before her, too quickly for them to understand that they’d been whisked away, she petrified them all and stored them in her ring, left to stare at it in the end as she wondered just how far she would be willing to go if Ben really didn’t come back, while, in the background of it all, notifications continued to go off in her head.
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