Chapter 22: The Gloomy Forest Was the Legendary God-Forsaken Land

A legend that lived only in the lilting songs of wandering bards, a tale of a dense forest ancient beyond memory, its origins beyond anyone’s finding.

But the great churches all knew it was no forest at all, but a small continent unto itself. After the divine authority splintered apart, this once-richly blessed continent shrouded itself completely, and no one could find it. Stranger still, the continent seemed able to drift; every few decades, word would surface of someone wandering in by mistake.

But none of this was what truly concerned the churches…

They shared the bards’ songs with the Gloomy Forest, and yet the Divine Descents of the orthodox gods had grown rarer and rarer; in the last few centuries there had not been a single response!

So when the Temple of the Earth Mother showed unusual movement, however tightly the news was sealed, the other churches learned of it at once.

A god’s aura cannot be hidden.

Nor is there anything that would be worth a deity’s trouble to hide it.

Temple of the Lord of Dawn.

Archbishop Trovsky stood in attendance upon the border between light and dark. The glory of dawn had yet to pour down, the sun had yet to rise; dim sky wove through with stars as he gazed out at the night beyond the temple.

“Archbishop, ten minutes ago there seemed to be unusual movement among the believers of the Church of the Earth Mother. In just a few parishes of Rosa alone, hundreds of worshippers knelt down in the open streets, claiming to have sensed the aura of the Earth Mother Goddess. The other kingdoms are much the same. Could the Church of the Earth Mother be planning something?” said a man dressed as a priest, his voice kept low.

Trovsky was an old man with a grizzled beard, his expression warm and kindly, bearing not a trace of the blazing, sun-scorched visage of the Lord of Dawn’s followers. “The will of gods is not for mortals to fathom.”

Even when it concerned other gods, it was the same.

That serene, unruffled reply left the reporting priest uneasy. “But…”

The archbishop’s face twitched twice, and he produced a benevolent smile. “The Earth Mother has awakened. That is indeed cause for concern. But…”

In the unseen shadows, the archbishop’s smile split wider and wider, nearly dreadful in its strangeness. “I sensed my Lord’s aura.”

The priest faltered, then was overjoyed.

There were many songs in praise of the Lord of Dawn. In them, It held the authority of the sun, master of holy daylight, Its blazing radiance not to be gazed upon directly. Compared with the Earth Mother, who scattered Its light on a whim and left without a care whether Its believers lived or died, the Lord of Dawn was more domineering, and Its followers more impulsive and quick to anger, little different from the God of War’s faithful.

The priest did not doubt the archbishop’s word in the slightest, and at once stopped dwelling on the matter.

Once the great hall stood empty, Trovsky looked upon the sacred, soaring sanctuary, then turned and mounted the steps one at a time. Stopping before the seat that belonged to him alone, the archbishop murmured, “My Lord…”

He could feel the violent change and tearing within his body, forces wholly incompatible warping his decades of ascetic training. Yet Trovsky did not waver; instead his body slowly began to tremble, as if in agony too great to bear, and yet all the more like the rapture of thorns. Beneath his holy vestments his belly swelled in several places and swiftly contracted; his arm went soft for a heartbeat, sticky as a tentacle. Each and every one of these mutations…

…was just like those of the Fallen.

This was a trial granted by my Lord.

Trovsky fell silent, his aged face brimming with forbearance and mercy.

Yet that eerie smile still clung to the corners of his mouth.

The nearer one drew to a god, the easier it was to come unhinged.

It only made one feel ever more minuscule, like a fleck of gravel beneath the starry sky.

Gods were supreme, the terminus of all things, the end of light, infinite knowledge… A god’s every passing word was sacred sound to mortal ears.

Ancient.

And evil.

Ah, these deities…

Who could truly say that these great orthodox gods weren’t merely… the least wicked of their number?

Just as the Lord of Dawn quietly fell into aberrance, across unknowable stretches of starfield, a yellow, twisted figure sought to descend upon the Gloomy Forest.

Gods could not appear upon the continent; this seemed to be a nameless law.

Through divine descent, They could linger briefly, but divine power of too high an order would afterward grind the vessel it lodged in to dust. It amounted, in a way, to a kind of… projection.

There were also more direct projections, illusory phantoms.

Yet no matter how vast a projection’s power, from beginning to end They could never possess a physical form in the present world.

Perhaps this was the check against gods unmaking the continent?

After all, even a human could go raving mad from gazing directly upon a projection for a single instant, or be burst apart by the reality flooding into their skull.

But the great churches refused to acknowledge that reason.

How could gods be bound?

A body too vast seemed to cram this entire star region; through the crevice between realms, an enormous tawny eyeball peeped through.

It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw It saw…

Frenzy!

It had seen the Unnamed One.

A rush of ecstasy burst from deep within and swept through.

The crevice was abnormally hard, yet from within the starfield came a soundless, violent battering, as if something were mad to squeeze its way through!

Closer.

Closer still!

Cuddling the Big Ball, Wusu mumbled, “Don’t look at Wusu.”

Sitting atop the stone pillar, tiny Wusu watched the monsters fling themselves wave after wave against the low wall. As that imminent gaze above the void drew near, the monsters seemed to shudder and writhe, swelling a size larger.

The words seemed an invisible rebuke, and they lashed the Big Ball onward; the black sphere that had been quietly content in Wusu’s arms suddenly strained and bucked twice.

Wusu kneaded the soft Big Ball. “What’s wrong?”

Silently, silently, the Big Ball burrowed itself deeper into Wusu’s arms, smearing a handful of lovely soft squish all over his palm.

Above the Gloomy Forest, a vortex appeared.

It was like a black gash, as if a clean, ruthless blade had sliced the void open. Through the gash one could see only dense blackness, that extreme black flecked here and there with patches of green and warm flares of light, and the hum leaking from the gash was piercingly shrill.

(As the anomaly unfolded, the light of the Fallen Corridor grew ever clearer, as if the black gash were siphoning away its nourishment.)

The blackness seemed to churn into tentacles ugly beyond words.

A pause.

Gloomily, it rolled up the tentacle monster of utmost horror, kneaded it and bundled it, and, wronged as could be, compressed it into one big round ball.

In an instant, its horror rating plunged from peak terror to peak adorable.

And whose fault was it that That One liked them? It thought in misery.

The Fallen Corridor’s light burned brighter, every stone pillar flickering with radiance.

Strangely, it seemed to carry a scorching warmth.

Utterly at odds with its name.

At that twisted, pale-yellow mass trying to force its way down, It flashed flares of near-searing heat.

“The Unnamed One is Mine!”