Side A – Nia
Nia had fought the gods before and she was completely ready to fight them again.
It was a foolish impulse of course.
And she knew that.
At the Calling, she’d been resisting the tiny portion of the god’s might which they’d dared to extend outside the prison sanctuaries. As the walls of the volcano which had formed around them cracked and crumbled however, she felt the full majesty of their beings crushing down upon her.
Unfortunately for the gods, that wasn’t all she felt.
“Render unto the divine their proper due and they shall grant you grace,” Elshira said, her robes transforming into holy raiments as she fully assumed the role of Hierophant.
Nia heard a chuckle from beside her and since no one else reacted to it, she knew it had to be free Yasgrid.
“She’s just a bit premature there, but oh how tempting this must all be. She can just taste the power she thinks she’s going to reap from this,” Yasgrid whispered solely to Nia.
“She doesn’t know yet does she?” Nia asked back, staring defiance at the gods as lava burst from the ground around them.
“None of them do,” Yasgrid said. “They’ve all forgotten.”
“You think we’ll bow without a fight? These are not our gods,” Kayelle said aloud, stepping in front of her sisters. “And you do not speak for us.”
“Last and Least, you have already passed into my domain,” Elshira said. “You have gambled and lost. Your life has fled and you are but a failed copy of the perfection I have become.”
Nia flinched at that and focused her attention away from the cosmic might pressing on her to observe her sister.
Her still living sister.
Her sister who had died.
Her sister who stood on both sides of life and death’s veil and who was welcome in both.
“Uh, what has Kayelle done?” she asked Yasgrid.
A wave of lava crashed before them, hot enough to incinerate flesh and reduce bone to ash. Nia paid it no mind.
“The same thing we have,” Yasgrid said. “We are Endings, at least in this moment.”
“We can still save her though, right?”
“Yes and no.”
“Yes, she can be saved, but no we can’t do it, because we’re in the same boat she’s in and we barely have the power to deal with Endings, with nothing left over to handle those idiots?” Nia wasn’t guessing any of that. She could feel the truth in the words she shared with Yasgrid, but she could also feel the incompleteness.
“It’s not a question of power,” Yasgrid said, and placed her hand on Kayelle’s shoulder to indicate that she had a rebuttal to Elshira’s point to make. “Elshira thinks it is. But then she’s always been blinded by power it seems. As, apparently, have my old gods.”
“You going to enlighten them to that fact?” Nia asked, as the lava rose to submerge them forever.
“And spoil our mother’s fun?” Yasgrid said. “I’m willing to take risks, but that’s definitely a step too far.”
Side B – Yasgrid
What crashed over them wasn’t really lava. In a sense, nothing in the Resonance was real. In another sense though nothing was more real than what existed in the Resonance given that between the timeless moment and the divine power which filled it, reality was being created and recreated anew with every thought there.
With the Stoneling gods in play that was a greater problem than a Shatter Drummer usually faced. Their idea of what should be real carried a colossal amount of weight, and while they expressed their desires through mundane elements such as a prison of eternal molten rock, what the lava most truly was involved absolute control and torment.
“Cut that out,” Yasgrid said, addressing the Stoneling Gods directly.
She could have answered Elshira back, but Elshira wasn’t worth her time at the moment.
Something Elshira could plainly read in Yasgrid’s posture and gaze.
“It is too late for you,” Elshira said. “You could have stood with me, but you have chosen a more wretched fate.”
The lava pressed down on the small bubble of space left to Yasgrid even tighter, drawing a frown from her.
“I said cut that out,” she repeated and reached out not with Endings power but with her own.
A gong the size of the universe sounded as the lava shattered and revealed a crystal spire in place of the caldera the gods had formed.
“What? How?” Elshira blurted out, fear rising in her at last. “What are you?”
It shouldn’t have felt good to see that.
Yasgrid wasn’t the sort to delight in the suffering of others.
Well, not most others.
Elshira had made herself something of a special case.
“What you could have been,” Yasgrid said, each word a knife she twisted in Elshira’s soul.
Where Elshira was lost in confusion however, the Stoneling gods were not.
They understood exactly what Yasgrid had done.
The knew the divinity she had claimed.
Yasgrid wasn’t going to be a god. She clung to her mortal existence and all of the connections and joy and meaning she found there.
But her mortal life lay outside the moment of Resonance and in that one moment, Bearing Endings power, she could acknowledge a truth the gods could not allow to be known.
All souls are divine.
The Stoneling gods hadn’t hidden themselves away because some minor creations were making a lot of noise on some magic drums. They’d fled from the Shatter Drummers because music let the Stonelings touch, if only for the briefest of instants, their own divine nature.
And the gods had forgotten that.
Or been too greedy to grasp a tool capable of eradicating their troublesome creations and dared to bring their true might to bear to win the chance to start over.
DEATH ETERNAL, the gods spoke together and Yasgrid felt the will of her creators reduce her to dust and discorporate ash.
NO, Kayelle said, and Yasgrid was restored.
Yasgrid smiled.
Last and Least? Not hardly.
Kayelle had understood as swiftly as the gods had. Yasgrid’s command had been the gauntlet being thrown down with the stakes named as the existence of the gods themselves.