Side A – Yasgrid
Yasgrid had expected the scream that tore through her. She knew the hatred that powered the Wail of Death, and knew how it could corrode her life away in an instant.
Unfortunately for Elshira, she also knew how to counter it.
With the greatest song that Stoneling hands had ever called forth surging around her, Yasgrid met Elshira’s assault letting the death Elshira brought only bring her halfway across the veil to what lay beyond her mortality.
“That wasn’t terribly wise,” she said, slashing at Elshira and cutting through the Hierophant robes with the reforged crystal blade she bore.
“Wasn’t it?” Elshira taunted her as the robes fell away and dissolved into a swirl of dead leaves. “You have stepped into my realm and become oh so very like me. Whatever sins you would punish me for, whatever taboos I have broken, those will weigh a thousand times heavier on you.”
“Will they?” Yasgrid asked, her heart light and beating strong for all that she was literally half dead in the moment. “Do you still not understand who I am? Is all that you can see a mirror of your own flaws?”
“I am without flaw,” Elshira said. “I have beaten death and claimed the divine as my own. The power you wield is nothing compared to what I have become.”
“Then why not dance a little closer?” Yasgrid asked. She shifted one pace beyond the veil, entering a realm from which no one returned. Except for Elshira. And except for Yasgrid. Where Elshira was an interloper though, a blemish on the cycle of the world, Yasgrid had been invited to the unknowable lands, and had not left behind the living world to reach them, not with the a song of life and change and creation filling her to bursting.
She knew she couldn’t stay long. The veil needed to drop once more, and Elshira needed to dealt with for that to happen.
There was only one little problem.
“You cannot beat me,” Elshira said from inches behind Yasgrid.
Yasgrid who had been ready for Elshira’s by then predictable appearance and slammed the crystal blade through herself and through Elshira as well.
Like with Endings, Yasgrid’s crystal blade made no contact with her, passing through her body as though she was made of smoke.
Against Elshira it had a great effect though, plunging through Elshira’s heart and nearly cutting her in two as Yasgrid spun around to face her.
That was were the problem lay.
Elshira merely laughed at the wound.
“I am still a Bearer,” Elshira said. “You broke Endings constraints, but the prohibition against harming the Bearer is a fundamental part of the power. It’s what keeps the power from ending itself.”
Yasgrid backpedaled a trio of paces as Elshira loomed above her.
“You cannot slay me,” Elshira said, wreathed in ghostly fire. “You cannot hurt me in the slightest.”
A spasm shot through Elshira the moment she proclaimed her invincibility.
Pain wracked her features and, gasping for breath, she turned to face the woman who had appeared behind her.
A woman who held a single strand of silver light which led to Elshira’s deathly form.
“Found it,” Kyra said and began to tie off the final strand of Elshira’s life.
Side B – Nia
It wasn’t the end of the Stoneling gods.
At least not all of them.
Some, admittedly, did not take kindly to their progeny and their progeny’s newfound friends assaulting them. Some even fought back in with creativity and imagination.
And to be fair, they had spent a rather long time cooped up in their hideaways without much else to think about or plan for.
The ones who went all in on chaos and destruction, who strove to use ever means at their disposal to end the threat before them were the ones who didn’t see the dawn which followed the twilight of the gods.
While Endings power was only a sliver of the divine might any one of them held, it was a sliver capable of rousing the souls of all it touched, and thanks to the song which Margrada and the other drummers created, it touched more or less every soul in the Darkwood and the Stoneling mountains.
Because it wasn’t just the drummers who gathered in Gray Rift who beat the song into existence. At Naosha’s suggestion, part of the song was given to volume and range.
No purely physical notes could resound over so large an area, but the song the Gray Rift drummers played was founded on the same technique which Nia had recklessly pioneered to bring together those separated by even the greatest of distance.
To say that the mountains and the woods rang with the beats was in no sense metaphorical. Osdora and Gossma made sure of that, carrying the song to the melody of the Darkwood and letting the melody flow back to the mountains, complete in a manner no song either realm had ever been before.
And against that even the gods could not stand.
Divine might met mortal will and only one of those held claim to the world as it had become.
The gods who saw how their creations had grown, and who understood how very equal they were to the people who lived within their creation, made several different choices.
Some, at long last, let go, turning away from the world to pursue their own divine ends. There were always other worlds to craft after all.
Others retreated back into their volcano hideaways which cooled and quieted. They were no longer quite so hidden, and no longer quite so unwelcome, choosing to observe their legacies as an audience might a grand play with innumerable players strutting across the stage.
And, of the remaining ones, those who did not find their ends at the hands of the mortals who defied them, there were those who chose to accept the gift of Endings power, dying as the divine beings they were to be reborn as mortals within their world, so that they could could share in its griefs and wonders.