A Cage for a God

The wards went down one by one.

Gideon walked the length of the ward lines with a knife in one hand and a fistful of charms in the other, slicing through the threads of the veil that had hidden the settlement for two and a half centuries.

Silas followed behind him, plucking Misty’s hush from the walls like a man pulling a blanket off a sleeping child.

The Hunt tribe stopped hiding.

Mana poured out of the underground home like light from an opened lantern.

The thirty warriors standing in the great hall let their own mana flow freely too, unrestrained and unmasked.

Thirty Second Steppers, broadcasting their presence into the black world above like a beacon on a hill.

We’re here. Come and get us.

That was the first half of the plan.

The second half was the cage.

Adam couldn’t guarantee that the thing coming for them would bother with those standing in its way. If it decided to ignore them and chase the defenseless tribe instead, the thirty would die for nothing. So he had made sure it couldn’t.

The shields, the veils and the wards that had protected this place would now become a prison.

When the enemy stepped inside, Adam would crush the master talisman in his fist, and every ward in the settlement would slam shut at once. And everything inside them, the patriarch, his thirty sons and the thing they were waiting for, would be sealed in together.

Six years of the mana core’s endless flow had soaked into every ward stone in the settlement. Even with the core gone, the stones were full to bursting.

They wouldn’t hold an Outer God for long. If it really wanted to leave, it could tear through them like wet paper.

But that was what the thirty were for.

They would harass it. Distract it. Divide its attention. They would make it angry, make it curious, make it busy, for as long as it took the rest of the tribe to vanish down the emergency tunnel and into the black.

The tribe could pass through the wards freely. Every one of them, from the oldest grandmother to the youngest baby, had a permission talisman sewn into their clothing. Ezra had spent the whole afternoon writing them.

And the signal to run was simple.

When the wards rose again, Misty would feel it.

◉◉◉

In the great hall, the men waited too.

The crystals overhead had dimmed to their night glow. The long tables had been pushed against the walls. Every warrior stood in a loose ring around the center of the hall, weapons drawn, armor strapped tight, Iris’s silk beneath it all.

Adam stood at the head of the ring with the master talisman in his left hand and his greatsword resting point-down against the stone in his right. His face was calm.

“Father,” Bram murmured beside him. “How long, do you think?”

“Not long.”

“How do you know?”

Adam didn’t answer; The air in the hall had just gotten heavier.

It was subtle at first, like the pressure before a storm. Then it grew. It pressed against their ears, their chests, their eyes. The crystals overhead flickered.

Somewhere deep in the settlement, a cup fell off a shelf and shattered.

And then a sound reached them.

It came from the main entrance tunnel, far above. It echoed down through the stone, drifting along the corridors, growing louder.

Someone was crying.

Loud, heaving, broken sobs, like a child who had lost his mother in a crowd.

And beneath the sobbing, between every breath, someone was laughing.

“Hehe… hehehe… hic… hehehehe…”

The thirty warriors went cold.

Adam’s grip tightened on the talisman.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, he had stood on a ridge above a burning valley and listened to that laughter for hours.

He had never forgotten it.

It came walking down the main tunnel.

At first, they only saw a silhouette.

Something tall. Far too tall, its head brushing the ceiling of the corridor, its body bent forward to fit. Its arms hung down past its knees. Its legs bent at angles that made the eye slide away.

It walked with an unsteady, swaying gait, like a drunk, or a sleepwalker.

Then it stepped into the light of the great hall, and they saw it clearly.

It was weeping.

Tears poured down its silver cheeks in two heavy, glistening streams, dripping from its jaw onto the stone floor.

And on its head sat a crown.

It was made of broken glass. Hundreds of jagged shards fused into a ring. On every shard was a face. Men, women, children. Every face twisted in the same grotesque grin, mouths stretched wide in a silent, endless laugh, and eyes running with tears that never fell.

One of the younger warriors made a small, choked sound.

The faces on the crown turned to look at him, but the creature didn’t look at him at all. It didn’t look at any of them.

It stood in the middle of the great hall, swaying, its long arms dangling, and turned its head slowly from side to side, sniffing at the air like a dog.

“Where…?” it whispered. “Where is he…?”

Its voice was soft, wet and broken.

“Where’s my fruit…? I’m here… I’m here, I came… I’m so sorry I came early, I’m so sorry, but I’m here, where are you…? ASHEN~?”

It giggled. Then it sobbed.

“Ashen~? Come out~ come out~”

Adam crushed the talisman.

KRAKOOOOM—

Every ward in the settlement slammed shut at once. Barriers rose from the floor and the walls and the ceiling. Veils crashed down over every tunnel and corridor. The whole settlement sealed, then went silent.

The cage was woven.

◉

At the far end of the emergency tunnel, Misty’s eyes snapped open.

“It’s up.”

Nobody needed to be told twice. Two thousand people began to move.

Ashen walked beside the tree’s carriage, pushing his mana into its roots, his feet carrying him forward through the dark. Lapis pulled him along by the hand.

He didn’t look back.

…He had promised.

◉

Inside the cage, Zelrathus didn’t even notice the wards.

He was too busy sniffing.

He sniffed the air of the great hall. He sniffed the floor, bending his long body all the way down until his face was a finger’s width from the stone. He sniffed the walls.

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Then his grin faltered.

“…He’s not here,” he whispered. “Why can’t I smell him? I could always smell him. Even when I was outside, even when he was sleeping, I could always, always…”

He spun around, his crown jangling.

“WHERE IS HE?!”

“Now,” Adam said.

The thirty moved.

{Path Skill Activated: Veil of the Unseen}

Gideon’s veils swept across the hall, swallowing the warriors one by one. Their footsteps faded. Their scent faded. Their silhouettes blurred and vanished into the dim light.

{Path Skill Activated: Watcher’s Eye}

Silas’s floating eye rose to the ceiling, and through it, he saw everything. From the warrior’s positions to even the twitches of the creature’s long limbs. He whispered it all into his brothers' ears through a thread of mana.

“Left side, his weight’s on the left leg. Bram, go now.”

Bram went.

{Path Skill Activated: Limbs of Hunger}

The air around Bram’s fists turned the color of dried blood. He hit the creature square in the back of its left knee with everything he had.

CRACK—

The silver leg buckled.

Zelrathus stumbled. He didn’t even look down. He was still sniffing at the air, his head turning this way and that.

“Chains!”

From the edges of the hall, a dozen warriors hurled lengths of chain.

They weren’t ordinary chains. Adam had forged them himself over the past decade from the Null Stone mithril, links that grew harder the more they were struck, never brittle.

They whipped through the air and wrapped around the creature’s legs, its arms, its waist, its long neck, and the warriors on the other ends threw their weight back against the stone pillars of the hall, pulling them taut.

Zelrathus took one step forward, dragging a dozen men and their chains with him as though they weighed nothing.

“Ashen…?” he called plaintively. “Is that you? Is that you pulling on me? No… no, you don’t smell like him…”

And Adam struck.

{Path Skill Activated: Banked Wrath}

==============================

Banked Wrath

Wrath that is not spent is not wasted.

A grievance you swallow, a moment of fury you choose not to unleash, is banked like coals beneath ash, and it grows hotter with time.

You may draw upon your banked wrath to empower your strikes and your body. The longer it has been banked, the more terrible it burns.

Once spent, it is gone.

==============================

How much wrath could a man bank in a lifetime of injustice? Adam knew the answer. He had dug every one of those graves.

All of it, banked. Packed down into his core, layer upon layer, coal upon coal, until it glowed hotter than any furnace he had ever lit.

And now was the time to open that furnace door.

The greatsword swelled in his hands. It grew until it was as long as the hall was wide, its edge glowing a dull, angry red, and Adam brought it down on the creature’s right shoulder with centuries of fury behind it.

SHHRRRAAAAAAKKKK—

The silver arm came off at the shoulder.

It spun through the air and crashed against the far wall, and the impact cracked the stone from floor to ceiling.

For a heartbeat, the hall was silent.

Zelrathus looked down at the stump of his shoulder. Then he looked at the arm lying against the far wall.

Then he blinked.

“Ah,” he said. “Oh. Hm.”

The stump bubbled. Silver flesh boiled out of it, stretched, shaped itself, and in the space of a breath, a new arm hung from his shoulder, exactly the same as the old one.

He flexed the new fingers curiously.

Then a shudder ran through his whole body, from his crown down to his toes, and his grin stretched wider.

“Ahhh…~” he breathed. “That hurt.”

He looked at Adam for the first time. Tears were still streaming down his face.

“That hurt… thank you… I was so hungry… thank you, thank you, it was so miserable~ that was such a sad little arm, wasn’t it~?”

The thirty stared… the pain hadn’t hurt him. It had fed him.

◉

It went on like that.

They threw everything they had at him. And he barely noticed them.

He wandered around the great hall, dragging chains and men behind him, sniffing at the walls, at the floor, at the ceiling, calling Ashen’s name in a soft, pleading voice.

He left openings everywhere. Guarding and dodging did not seem to be a concept he bothered acknowledging. He simply didn’t care.

So they took every opening.

Tobias tracked the creature’s scent through Gideon’s veil and called out its movements before it made them. Silas’s eye fed every warrior his position.

When Zelrathus reached for the wall, three warriors threw themselves at his arm and pulled it back.

When he bent to sniff the floor, Bram’s red fists slammed into the back of his neck.

When he tried to walk out through the tunnel he’d come in by, eight warriors threw their chains around his legs at once and dug their heels into the stone.

He took a step anyway. The eight men slid across the floor with him.

But he stopped.

“Why,” Zelrathus whimpered. He looked down at the chains around his ankles with an expression of profound, wounded confusion. “Why won’t you let me go? I just want to find my fruit… I’ve been so patient… I’ve been waiting for so long… why are you all being so mean…?”

He sobbed.

“You’re in my waaaaay~”

His tantrum shook the hall.

◉

There was one thing every warrior in that hall understood by now.

On one side stood thirty men fighting for their race. For their children and the wives they had kissed for the last time a few hours ago.

Every one of them knew he wouldn’t see the morning. Each man was spending his life, a piece at a time, to buy his family one more minute of distance.

On the other side stood a god throwing a temper tantrum. Because he couldn’t have his dinner.

It was obvious which side was more desperate.

And the madness of the thirty began to outstrip the madness of the god.

When Zelrathus shook off the chains on his left leg, a warrior dove in and wrapped the chain around his own waist and threw himself at the creature’s knee.

When the silver hand reached for the tunnel wall, Gideon leapt onto the god’s back, wrapped his veil around its eyes and plunged a dagger into the back of its skull over and over.

When the creature tore Gideon off his back and flung him across the room, Adam caught him with one arm, set him on his feet, and went straight back in.

He swung his sword at the creature’s neck.

The blade bit into silver flesh and stopped halfway. Zelrathus laughed and reached for it with both hands.

Adam let go of the hilt and grabbed the creature’s head with both hands.

He pulled it down to his own level, the god’s face, its weeping eyes and stretched grin barely a finger’s width from his, and he slammed his forehead into the bridge of its silver nose.

CRACK—

Again.

CRACK—

Again.

CRACK—

Blood ran from his own forehead. He didn’t care. He kept going. His face was completely expressionless the entire time.

“You,” Adam said.

CRACK—

“Stay.”

CRACK—

“Here.”

For the first time since he entered the hall, Zelrathus’s grin wavered.

“You’re… mad,” he said, sounding genuinely startled. “You’re madder than I am.”

He seemed delighted by the idea.

But that delight made him get a little serious.

It wasn’t much. He just stopped sniffing the floor and calling Ashen’s name.

He straightened up to his full height, his crown scraping the ceiling, and looked around the hall at the thirty warriors with something that might, for him, have been focus.

“Oh, I see,” he murmured. “You’re hiding him from me. You’re all… keeping him from me.”

He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of one long hand.

They kept falling anyway.

“Then I’ll just have to eat all of you first.”

He laughed.

It wasn’t the ‘normal’ giggle he’d been making since he arrived. It was the laugh.

The laugh Adam and Anastasia had heard for hours on that ridge two hundred and fifty years ago.

It poured out of the god’s mouth in a wave, and it had physical pressure.

It hit the warriors like a wall of water. Gideon’s veils tore apart like tissue. The chains wrapped around the god’s legs snapped taut and then shattered link by link. Three warriors were blown off their feet and slammed against the pillars so hard that the stone cracked behind them.

The laugh wasn’t only sound. It carried misery.

It poured into their ears and their minds and dragged up every sorrow they had ever buried. The face of a dead brother. The smell of a burned child. The feeling of standing at a grave. All of it, every grief of their lives, crashing over them at once.

Two of them dropped to their knees, clutching their heads, screaming.

The god reached down with two long fingers, plucked one of them up by the back of the neck, and examined him curiously.

“Ah~” he sighed. “You’re so sad. Sad sad sad sad. Thank you~”

He squeezed. And the young warrior went eternally still.

He was the one who had knelt in the corridor a few hours earlier with his ear pressed against his wife’s belly.

“Bram!” Silas’s voice cracked through the mana thread. “He’s feeding on it! Every time we hurt him, every time we grieve—”

“I know,” Bram growled.

He was standing in front of the god. His fists were red to the elbow.

He looked up at the silver face, and the tears streaming down the creature’s cheeks and already knew what he had to do.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Bram said.

The god tilted its head.

“Me too,” Bram said. “I’m always hungry. My wife says I eat like three men.”

{Path Skill Activated: Feast Of Emotion}

This time, the red didn’t stay in his fists.

It spread, crawling up his arms, over his shoulders, down his chest. When his whole body turned the color of dried blood, Bram opened his mouth wide and inhaled.

The laugh rolling through the hall bent toward him.

The misery in it, the weight of it, the grief it carried, all of it began to pour into Bram’s open mouth like water down a drain.

His Gluttony swallowed it. He swallowed the sorrow that was crushing his brothers to their knees. He swallowed the god’s laugh. He swallowed and swallowed and swallowed.

His brothers staggered to their feet as the pressure lifted from them.

Bram’s body began to swell.

His skin stretched. Veins stood out across his neck, his face, and all down to his feet. Blood ran from every pore, but he kept swallowing.

Zelrathus watched him with wide, wet eyes.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, that’s… you’re eating it? You’re eating my food?”

Bram grinned at him through a mouthful of blood.

“Tastes… like shit,” he managed.

Then his body gave out.

He sank down onto his knees, his huge frame slowly folding forward, until he was kneeling on the floor of the great hall with his chin on his chest.

…Like a man who had finally eaten his fill and sat down to rest.

And he never stood again.

◉

After that, the god seemed to have grown even madder.

Of course, that was from a human’s perspective. From his own, he would probably describe it as a pout over someone stealing food from his plate.

His tears began to fall faster. They dripped from his chin and splashed on the stone, and wherever they landed, the stone hissed and melted like wax.

One of the men stepped in a puddle of them and screamed as his boot dissolved, and his foot with it.

The faces on the crown began to peel away.

They came loose from the glass one by one, like leaves falling from a tree. Grinning, weeping, translucent shapes that drifted through the air on silent wings toward the warriors.

Where they touched someone, they clung.

They wrapped themselves around a man’s shoulders and pressed their grinning faces into his neck, and the man would go pale and start to weep and couldn’t stop.

And then the worst thing happened.

Tobias went down. A silver hand closed around his throat, and his neck snapped. And every warrior in the hall felt it.

They felt his neck break and the air leave his lungs. They felt the terror of his last moment. All of it, crashing through them as though they had died themselves.

Their bond, the thing that made them brothers. The god had found it and turned it into a weapon.

Every time one of them died, all of them died a little.

And he downed it all with the satisfaction of a connoisseur savoring the finest vintage of wine.

“Ah~” Zelrathus wept, his face glowing with ecstasy. “Ah~! You love each other! You love each other so much! So much so much so much! It’s so sad! It’s SO SAD!”

Silas went down next. His eye fell from the ceiling and rolled across the floor like a marble.

Then an uncle.

Then a cousin.

Then Gideon, who had climbed onto the creature’s back one last time to drive his dagger into the base of its crown. The god reached back without looking, plucked him off, and dropped him into a puddle of its own tears.

One by one, they fell.

And every time one of them fell, the rest of them died with him.

And still, they got back up.