Maybe if one were a mortal, they would see Iniri’s change as a gradual decline, but when looked at from the perspective of an ageless Divine, Iniri’s change was so sudden that it instilled a fear into all of us. We noticed it near the end of the Great War as once dreaded Mother Nature, one of the strongest beings to ever exist, started to lose power. Everyone has their own theories: Helenna is especially poetic with hers, talking of the waxing and waning of the seasons and how Iniri is merely staying true to her demesne by going through some spiritual winter. Maisara is the complete opposite, she directly references changes in the world and claims it is only natural that the Goddess of Nature would lose power when there was so much less of her remaining. I hope that Maisara is wrong, because if change like this can be proven to affect Iniri, then it means the rest of us are just as vulnerable to it.

I and Fortia both hold that it is the sealing of the World-Core. Elassa also finds it harder to use magics since the Sealing. The timing roughly lines up, although Maisara scoffs and calls us cowards who only hold to this theory because it makes weakening exclusive to Iniri. The worst part is that I can’t even argue against her because she is correct, I do truly wish that it is the World-Core’s Sealing that did this to Iniri because then what happened to her cannot spread to us. No one knows why the Goddess of Nature has lost so much strength.

– Excerpt from Goddess Allasaria’s, of Light’s, private diary. Entry dated to two decades after the defeat of Arascus and the Fall of Rhomaion.

In the depths of Arda, in its deepest and darkest veins of the dwarven highway network, which light had abandoned and forgotten more than a millennium ago, raged a swarm. It bit and clawed with tiny pincers, it sliced through flesh mortal and divine, it snapped at bark and metal, it scratched into armour both mechanized and personal. Vehicles carefully safeguarded men within them and two spheres of wood joined by a tunnel protected a trio of Goddesses. One in black and green, her dress and cloak covered in living wood that wrapped protective shells around herself. One in black armour and a pool of her own blood. And one looking like a traveller, in a black coat lined with silver. With a heavy pack and a rifle on her back and a sword on her belt. With hair pale like a dirty grey, and terrible eyes of the same colour.

Kavaa, tears in her eyes, ripped Kassandora’s helmet off her head and came across a horrific sight. A face more exposed flesh than skin looked up at Kavaa, blood leaked out of Kassandora’s mouth, from her nose and from under her closed eyelids. That red hair, normally a bright crimson, was now almost black and matted with blood. A single finger touching Kassandora’s forehead revealed the damage. The woman was holding on through sheer willpower and nothing else, her heart had been riddled with holes, there were still insects in her lungs too. Her brain had the most meagre of neural activity, her throat was filled with blood. Kavaa paused her inspection, she had learned enough. There was no thought, there was no planning, no inspection, she moved with the same confidence and speed as when she came across ruptured hearts.

For the second time today, lips met lips. Twice now, it had been ruined. Twice now, fate had forced them to be hasty. Twice now, Kavaa cursed this world for not letting them savour and enjoy the moment. That was all the thought Kavaa gave to it as she poured enough life into Kassie to make even Fer cry. Anyone else, and Kavaa would not trust that their mind would withstand it. But this was Kassandora, who had burned in the fires of a star once already. This was the Goddess of War, who Kavaa knew was different from the moment she had seen the woman split her hand into two in Olympiada’s Closed Prison. And this was Kassie, who had given Kavaa something no one else could. If her mind was to go, then Kavaa would re-stitch it piece by piece.

Better her mind than her soul.

Kassandora’s body gave one spasm as Kavaa’s energy set the woman’s body alight. They didn’t have time for a careful rebuilding of a heal, nor for Kavaa to carefully restitch the woman’s wounds. Kavaa’s life burned and devoured Kassandora’s body. It broke down every fibre, it dried up every drop of blood, it pulverized bone and it swallowed everything and anything save for Kassandora’s immaterial soul. And behind it, instead of leaving ash, it left a body untouched and unhurt, clear and pale, with the skin still delicate and pink and the hair cleaner than if it had been washed.

Kavaa pulled her lips away and looked down at Kassandora’s face.

And for the second time today, a moment dragged on into eternity. Time seemed to slow down. The buzzing of flies and the crashing of wood became silent as Kavaa’s world crashed down around her. It became difficult to see. Kavaa’s vision lost the world around it. The stony ground, covered in blood and muck and torn shreds of flesh, faded away. Kassandora’s black armour, shining with blood, became irrelevant. Kavaa’s own body and strands of grey hair did not matter. All that was important was that face framed by red hair in Kavaa’s hands. It was a moment that stretched on for eternity and ended in an instant.

Crimson eyes, not the colour of blood but the deep, warm tone of a roaring fireplace, looked up at Kavaa. Kassandora smiled, Kavaa finally took a breath as Kassandora’s eyes suddenly bulged and the Goddess of War coughed up a cascade of blood and muck. Kavaa scanned the woman’s body, she was sure that she hadn’t made even the tiniest mistake.

There was no error, but the woman’s lungs had a scratch. Another one. A poke. Kavaa realised what happened after the fourth flare of damage. A fly or two had still survived inside Kassandora’s lungs. They bit and tore and followed the command of Be’elzebub still. No doubt they had alerted the swarm outside what happened in here. Kavaa wished she was slightly smarter, so that she could figure out a way to kill them without injuring Kassandora further. But there wasn’t: Kavaa held tight onto Kassandora’s shoulders as she warned this lovely creature in her care. “This will hurt Kassie!”

Kassandora gave one nod, although Kavaa knew that she didn’t know what she was preparing for. Kavaa sent raw energy into Kassandora’s chest. She was no puppeteer, but she knew how to work the muscles artificially. She took a moment to prepare, she found every strand she wanted to activate, and she smiled at Kassandora. Kassandora smiled up at her. And then Kassandora crushed her own lungs. Her diaphragm roared with such strength it exploded, her chest tightened, her heart made a single beat with the sort of strength that Fer or Arascus would have, her veins tightened, her lungs tightened and her eyes bulged. That last one, Kavaa was not responsible for.

Immediately, Kavaa forced Kassandora’s lungs to restitch themselves as the Goddess of War coughed up a ball of grey-brown-green slime. Shells and carapace and filthy blood and jaw. Kassandora breathed heavily, then immediately curled up into a ball as the pain overwhelmed her. She made a horrible, soundless scream, as her lungs tried to expel air they simply did not have. “Calm.” Kavaa said as she brushed the woman’s red locks from her face and finally stood up. That was the most important part done. She felt a tiny wood chipping fall on her head and remembered she was in the very centre of Be’elzebub’s terrible swarm.

Kavaa looked up at the buckling wood. Pillar of the Pantheon. As much as people talked about how the White Pantheon was lovely and accepted all, that was not true. Sceo had wanted to get in, and no matter how much Zerus vouched for his wife, it had been a unanimous vote that the Goddess of the Sky was too weak and too ineffectual. She could summon hurricanes to engulf cities, she could tear through fortresses with tornadoes, and she was too weak. The Goddess of the damn Sky had been laughed at, and Kavaa was part of the group that did the laughing.

Kavaa saw the wood crack and her panic faded away as all thoughts of Kassandora left her mind. Instincts kicked in and battles replayed in her mind. She saw the mighty Sassara as monsters under Arascus stalked the sand, she saw the sand that ripped and tore and scoured flesh from bone. She saw Anassa, high and mighty in the air above her, the sky turning red as Kavaa’s Clerics raised shields. She saw the untamed forests of Erdely, which Maisara and Fortia and Allasaria had given up on after Fer claimed them. She remembered how those Goddesses had approached her, because there was only one Goddess who could even imagine fighting in such treacherous terrain.

Not a Goddess of some grand ideal or abstract, not some pretentious chit who talked of better worlds as she brought nothing save ruin, but a Goddess whose demesne was to the White Pantheon, what the demesnes of the White Pantheon were to minor inventions. Not the Divine of Healing or of Curing. Not the Divine of Healthiness. Not the Divine of Youth or of Vigour or of Energy. But the Divine of it all. A Divine that rejected her own title on her first day, because she knew instinctively that such a thing should not exist on Arda. Others would kill her for it.

Kavaa, Goddess of Life.

One of Be’elzebub’s flies crawled through the hole and dove down at Kavaa. Its jaw sliced through her shirt and bit into her arm. Kavaa gave the fly life in the same way she would when she made hearts beat through sheer force or kickstarted the body to produce blood. Her energy found the fly and gave it a life it had never seen or tasted. Its tiny heart, smaller than a drop of water, beat as strongly as the heart of a man. And its tiny heart exploded under its own power as its own force ripped it apart. The fly dropped to the ground as Kavaa let out a deep breath.

“Kassie.” Kavaa said. “Let me play your tune.”

“Nnnhhh.” Kassandora gurgled. The Goddess of War forced her hand to grab Kavaa’s wrist, and Kavaa heard the magnificent orchestra she never wanted to part with again. There had been a time that it scared Kavaa, she heard the song and she knew she was being pulled in by War’s audacity and energy and violence. She heard the quiet piano, barely managing to hold onto its panic. She heard the mighty organ in the background, now stuck with its low notes as Kassandora’s army lost morale. Even with the blessing and knowledge that their Goddess was watching, they were on the verge of breaking.

It made sense though. Kavaa saw through their eyes as they saw through hers. She saw the crowded insides of APCs and tanks. Men pushed themselves deeper into the holds of their vehicles and away from the doors. Men grit their teeth and held onto the window shutters until their own hands started to bleed. Men held the barrel locks closed as their vehicles were shaken by the swarm like a mighty galleon in a storm. There was not a pair of ears that did not hear the terrible buzzing of Be’elzebub outside, and there was not a soul that did not have some note of despair in its tune.

But if it was only the swarm outside, then the Orchestra would have the striking drums and trumpets which signalled final hurrahs. Kavaa saw men pull the pins of grenades in their own hands, she saw through the eyes of men who were holding their lighters to the gasoline that engulfed them. She saw entire squads exchange silent nods and salutes. She saw the inside of gun barrels. She heard the terrible ringing of a pistol going off right next to a man’s ear. She felt the spiking pain.

And then, Kavaa saw the rest of the army. The men in the vehicles that had been overwhelmed. She saw insects crawl through tank barrels, she saw armoured doors fall off their hinges and she saw flies crawl through tiny cracks they had managed to pinch through the steel. But then, the Goddess of Life saw men looking down at their stomachs ripped apart. She saw men still alive, unable to see anything but instead hearing buzzing in their ears. She saw men look at their own hands, reduced by the swarm to nothing but bone. She saw men look down at their chests. She felt dead men, whose bones had already been picked clean but whose souls refused to leave War’s Orchestra.

And then Kavaa heard her own overpowering and hopeful, overbearing and calming violin come in. It played a series of brilliant notes that ignited a spark within the men. The tune of War’s Orchestra became slightly higher-pitched, the organs in the background tried to follow Kavaa’s song. The drums gave themselves a slightly faster beat. The trumpets followed along for one note of Kavaa’s tune. War’s Orchestra gave a hopeful flourish, and then returned back into its hopeless and dire song.

That did not matter in the slightest. There would not be one more loss. Not Kassandora. Not Iniri. Not the men. Not Kavaa herself. Anyone whose body had died better leave now, because if there was even a shred of bone still linked to a soul, Kavaa was about to drag it through a torture that only a person returning to this dreaded life could feel. “Soldiers!” Kavaa shouted and the violin carried her voice through the swarm. The men heard it, Kavaa was sure of it. She had never been good at speeches but down in these tunnels, with men who were facing the same horror she was, the words simply started to flow.

There was no bargaining. There was no morale building. There was no telling of better futures. Kavaa simply knew what to say. “You will stay on this world whether you want to or not! You will take my blessing and you will bear it until I let you go! Your mind may give out and your soul may give up but I will not let you move on! Soldiers!” Kavaa shouted it out loud, and she shouted it through War’s Orchestra. “Today, we stand as one! We die together or we live together! I will leave not one soul behind! Accept my blessing! Not out of generosity or faith but as an order!”

And with Kavaa’s words, her blessing started to flow. She felt life seep through War’s Orchestra. In a single moment, that terrible, sorrowful tune it had been playing was replaced. The piano tried a few high notes, as if unsure of what was happening. The organ paused. The drums gave up their beat. The trumpets stopped blowing. Kavaa’s violin came crashing down with a thunderous series of notes, each one carried her blessing and the purest energy that there was on Arda: life. “There is no demon nor bug, no Divine nor power that will kill any of you! Whether that swarm has millions or billions, I do not care! I grant you infinite life! Die a thousand times for each bug you kill, and you will still have more than enough life within you!”

Kavaa heard the Orchestra come back as men’s breaths caught. A series of trumpets sounded and a man whose head was bleeding as he held onto the window shutter suddenly stopped shaking and the blood stopped flowing. He roared with renewed strength. Another was staring at his compatriot’s quivering mess of a body, looked on in awe as he saw fingers flex and an arm smash against the cabin, squashing a flesh-eating fly. A man looked down at his wrists, mere stumps of bone, and saw his hands reform and regrow. Another man touched his stomach, expecting to feel the hole that had been there just moments ago.

A man on fire stopped burning even though the fire did not go out. A man hidden entirely by bugs started to madly thrash about and squash as many of them as he could. A soldier got off the ground and detonated a grenade in his hand. The explosion knocked a thousand of the flies out of the air, eviscerated his hand and ruptured his organs. In the next moment, his hand regrew, his organs once again started to work.

War’s Orchestra shunned sorrow, deserted doubt and forgot fear. The drums and the percussion, the woodwinds and the strings, all started to play in a furious unison of rage and revenge and pain. As bugs buried into bodies and bodies crushed the insects through the power of their healing. And above it all, still audible, Kavaa’s violin played.   

“Today, I steal your mortality and I make you immortal! Today, I revoke your divine right to die!”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep