Side A – Nia
A struggle between divinities did not play out like a mortal conflict. The Stoneling gods were closer to concepts than they were to tangible beings.
It felt indescribably good therefor to punch one of them right in the face.
Doing so required Nia to instantiate one of them into a physical form, something they quite clearly hadn’t been expecting. She then turned the godly might which surged within her into pure physical force.
How strong was the blow? That was really possible to calculate. If it had been a back alley brawl it would have left her target smashed and broken with weeks of healing in Dr. Pash’s clinic ahead of them.
They were not in a back alley though. Yasgrid had conjured them to a future vision of stone and crystal peaks.
Nia’s punch therefor only sent the god she’d hit hurtling away with enough force to shatter a mountain and reduce the entire thing to glitter and dust.
Had they still been against the starry background, it would have blasted a planet or a solar system to dust, so the gods could perhaps be forgiven for not expecting that particular mode of attack.
Similarly, Nia had not expected them to respond in kind.
“Oww,” she said, picking herself up from the remnants of what had been a quite beautiful mountain.
“Your pain is just beginning,” Elshira said. “There will be no forgiveness for your sins this day.”
A sword-sharp flash of rainbow light speared through the location where Elshira had stood, but as fast as Kayelle’s attack lanced out, Elshira shifted herself away.
“My ending is not yours to write,” Elshira taunted Kayelle from inches behind her.
“No,” Yasgrid said. “It’s mine.”
She’d performed the same trick Elshira had and appeared inches behind Elshira, her left hand locked around Elshira’s throat.
Nia shielded her eyes from the blast that followed.
More of the gods had joined the fray and were, apparently, none to happy with Yasgrid’s disrespect of the Hierophant.
“Forget about someone?” Nia asked as she called them into a manifestation through the laughter she remembered from them.
The gods were giants, but limited ones. One’s small enough to squeeze down into the caldera of a volcano.
That was good news.
Nia was an elf, fighting things bigger than herself was something she’d been doing for months in once sense and her whole life in another.
The bad news was how many of them there were.
“Okay, so you didn’t exactly come alone,” Nia said, gazing out at a sea of divine wrath.
“In trying to save you, your foolish drummers broke the sanctuaries all of the gods were resting in,” Elshira said. “Now do you understand the futility before you? The architects of this creation will not be denied.”
“Is this truly all of them?” Kayelle asked. “They all stand assembled before us?”
“In their unity is writ your doom,” Elshira said. “I think I shall ask that you be carried into the new world though. I want you to hear the screams of this one dying. As those you love are torn apart, their strength ground down and their hopes drowned in their own blood, I want you to know that every moment of agony is one you are ultimately responsible for.”
“But it is all of them?” Yasgrid asked.
“There are no gods who will stand beside you now,” Elshira said. “None who will shield you from the wrath your foolishness has earned.”
Yasgrid grinned.
And then she started laughing.
Nia knew what that meant, and couldn’t stop herself from laughing too.
Side B – Yasgrid
The moment of Resonance ended and the real world came crashing back in.
The divine might which had coursed through Yasgrid flowed out from her and into the world.
Which at one point would have meant the end of all things.
Endings power had no will guiding it and was poised to fall into the hands of an army of deities with a millenias old grudge against their own creation. As apocalypses went it had the virtue of being so certain and overwhelming that fear was an unnecessary response.
That was made the taste of the god’s defeat so very sweet.
In racing out into the world, Endings’ power found something it wasn’t able to fathom the extent of – a song wrapped around it carrying it into thousands of different Resonance moments, a song which swelled to meet the power, crescendoed at their union and tumbled down to its last note which was also the first note of its next chorus.
The song was beaten out on drums of stone and hearts of magic. It was sung in the melody of the winds through leaves and the harmony of mountain and forest joined together.
There was no center to the song. No one point of failure for Endings to slip through and undo everything.
Margrada played. Osdora played. Pelegar, Belhelen, Gossma, on and on, so many drummers were joined with the voices of the Kayelle, Marianne, Kyra and so many more in the Darkwood.
Where one drummer faltered in their beat, or one singer warbled in their notes a dozen others carried on, and soon the drummer and the singer rejoined them, their failures the crucial element in showing Endings the path forward.
Endings power unbound was the force of termination, the nullification of one stage of existence. By its very nature though it left room open for the next stage of existence to begin.
Yasgrid’s laughter was equal parts joy and vindication.
In her hands a blade of rainbow crystal formed again.
She couldn’t carry the entire might of Endings power, but she could still bear her share of its power and carry the responsibility she had sworn herself too.
Across the Stoneling’s mountains and the Elve’s dark woods, those who choose to take up that responsibility found blades of light filling their hands as well.
The Stoneling gods had once fled before the unfurled might of their children.
This time their children of stone were joined by the children of the wood who were much faster and quite eager to end what they saw as the biggest Troubles ever to exist.