A Land Without Gods, Part 2

Odilion Redon

 From the journal of Fabius Verr, 3rd of Bittertide, 1249

As I cower beneath the rickety bed in my rickety room in my rickety hostel while frozen clouds smashed into Vlexwood, I can’t help but to wonder how the course of my life could go so wrong. With the lovely sound of splintering wood and my own panicked breaths as a backdrop, I’m coming to the conclusion that, as with most things, it was all my fault. 

I should’ve been a grocer. 

My father was a grocer, as was his father, and his father before him. Before that my great-great grandfather was the Duke of Decester’s court jester, but my father never liked to talk about him much, despite clowning being a respectable and profitable profession in my native city. A grocer might not seem like a very glamorous profession… and it isn’t, but to my father’s credit, he was by far the finest grocer that Decester has ever seen. Perhaps the finest on the entire Umarian Peninsula, though it’s hard to compete with the type of produce the dwarves in Namashem bring to market. It’s the soil, you see, there’s a specific level of acidity you need to find that’s- 

Getting a little off track here. Where was I? Ah, my father and his grocery. If I was a poet, which as you can probably tell from my yammering I am not, I could have written an ode to my father’s tomatoes, and how they blushed like a demure maiden. Perhaps a sonnet, describing the way his eggplants glistened like a fistfull of amaythests beneath the desert sun. Or an epic saga on his potatoes, which… Well, they were pretty ordinary potatoes, there’s only so much you can do with potatoes after all, but you get the picture. My father was a damn good grocer, was plenty proud of it too, and he wanted me, as the eldest son, to inherit his business.

But I was too clever for that, too talented, of course. My father’s success allowed him to send me to the finest school in Decester - the Sliverbrow Academy for Talented Youth. I’m not too sure there was truly all that much talent at the academy, but there sure was a lot of money. Young Fabius rubbed shoulders with the best and brightest (and wealthiest) of the Duchy, and it made his little head swell so much that a wizard could use it as a weather balloon. Add to my growing ego a healthy dose of religious doctrine - the school was run by the clergy of Cornith Silverbrow after all - and you get a recipe for disaster.

I got it into my stupid little brain that I could become a paladin. To be the first one in my family to learn angelic script.  

My father would hear none of it, of course. He wanted me to get a fine education, meet the right people and all of that, but to join the fighting clergy was several steps too far. I’d be throwing away a secure, comfortable future for what was bound to be a life of disappointment - after all, commoners don’t become paladins in Corinth Sliverbrow’s order, they cleaned their water closets, and that’s if they were lucky. I’d be more likely to be put in charge of the immortal souls of a unit of demihuman savages and sent to fight in some pointless war against a rival pantheon somewhere.  

We fought over it. I said some things I regret, he said some things I’m not so sure he did, and by the end of it I was free to join the holy order for only the cheap price of being entirely disowned. I never did inherit my father’s business acumen. For a while I thought I would prove him wrong, becoming the first common-born paladin in half a century, but a combination of the order’s smothering traditions and my own mediocrity soon proved my father right. I was sent to seminar, then to Tridenfield Abbey, and finally, when the Icon appeared and the Myriad Pantheons were convinced to form the Divine League and march on the Abyss once more, to be chaplain of my very own unit of demihuman savages. By that point I have long since buried my ambitions and my desire to serve Corinth, and that was what saved my life at the Fields. 

So thanks Dad, I should’ve listened to you a lot sooner. If this journal ever gets to you… you were right about the tonsure making me look like a nonce. 

4th of Bittertide, 1249

So, by some entirely unlikely series of events I’d loath to call a miracle given the circumstances, I survived yesterday. Not many in Vlexwood can make this claim. Or any other. Because they’re mostly a bunch of multicolored smears under the now defrosting clouds which litter the ruins of the city. 

Also, there’s a titan standing just outside the Gate of Trash. 

Well, I can only assume she’s a titan, of course, since no one has seen one in the last two hundred years, but with her being as tall as a small mountain, her body bursting with the light of the legion of angelic souls and her crown of whirling ice, I think it’s a safe enough bet. 

Said crown of ice, by the by, is the reason half of Vlexwood now consists mostly of splinters and corpses. It’s so cold it froze the surrounding clouds. I’m not sure if the titan intended it to happen, since all she’s been doing since appearing out of nowhere yesterday is just stand there (menacingly), but she sure doesn’t seem too broken up about it. The survivors of Vlexwood have been mostly steering clear of her for obvious reasons, but I found myself leaving the safety of my hideout with a few other fools to get a closer look at her. She’s beautiful, in an utterly terrifying sort of way. And the writing on her… on her everything. She’s covered head to toe, both golden armor and azure body, with the most elaborate, fantastic angelic script I have ever seen… 

If only I could read it. If only I could tell what it meant.

5th of Bittertide, 1249

As I sat at the feet of the titan, my fear eroded by my total fascination with her, it came to me that if we had her at the Fields, things might’ve gone entirely differently. Well, had she and her likes been at the Fields I wouldn’t have had to be there to begin with. 

Time for a history lesson, anonymous reader of the future! If it’s you, dad, I’m sure you’ve gone back to your turnips and stopped reading long ago anyway. Everyone else, here we go: 

The gods never used to employ mortal troops in their wars against the Abyss prior to the last two hundred years. With the titans, they had no reason to. A single titan could destroy an entire mortal army in their sleep, not that they ever slept. The titans were divine masterpieces: on the outside a shell of gilded godsmetal covered in intricate psalms and parables written in angelic script, and on the inside a burning amalgamation of a legion of angels piloted by the most supreme of their kind - a High Seraph. They were the creation of the overgod Marath the Maker, one of those rare and powerful gods born without a pantheon, and thus embodying the entire might of a pantheon in a single divine body. Marath was brilliant even for one of His great kind, and with his leadership  in the War of the Hosts, the last great war before current day, the gods came within a hair’s breadth of finally shattering the Abyssal Core itself. Then everything went to shit. 

See, the abyssals never used to have much in the way of intellect. Overwhelming might, a bevy of horrifying and powerful forms, unstoppable ferocity and an unbreakable will, yeah, but not half a brain to go around between the lot of them. The only reason they gave the gods such trouble was the sheer enormous number of them. With the titans about, these numbers became meaningless, which brought the abyssals to the brink of total destruction. Then just as the assorted might of the Myriad Pantheons were bearing down upon the Abyssal Core and Marath and His Titans were about to deliver the final blow, they appeared. The Devils. 

According to the histories, they didn’t look like much. Just a bunch of barely tangible splashes of color in the vague shape of men. Their presence, however, changed everything. They lifted what people assume were their hands and the mindless abyssals, who were throwing themselves impotently against the impenetrable defenses of the titans suddenly became coordinated, organized… intelligent. Instead of targeting the nigh invincible titans, the abyssals turned against the gods themselves, who, being the vanglorious fools that they were, were not satisfied being situated safely away from the battle but were instead riding astride the titans, assured that they were safe due to the abyssals’ inability to understand that they were vulnerable. 

It was a massacre, rivaled only by the Fields of Slaughter for the number of gods slain that day. Among them was Marath the Maker Himself, who was torn asunder by ten million abyssals who buried his grand titan beneath their weight to get to the overgod. With his death the secret of constructing titans was lost (the gods don’t share knowledge, don’t be silly now) and never again were the gods capable of threatening the Abyssal Core, which vanished after the fight. Not until the Icon and Their wondrous powers, who pointed the gods at the new location of the Core. We all know how that turned out.

So… what in all the hells is a titan doing here? How did she get here, and what does she want, if anything at all? The titans were servitors to the gods, much like the angels which merged to make them, with little in the way of free will of their own. So if the gods are gone… 

This is giving me a headache. I’m going to bed. Now, do you think the titan will greatly take offense if I try to make camp between her toes? I’m not being weird about it, promise! I don’t even like people that way, even if they’re not the size of a mountain. 

6th of Bittertide, 12- TITAN SPEAKS! THE TITAN SPEAKS 

HEAR YOU NOW OH ABSENT GODS, THE TITAN SPEAKS