Baethen clawed his way out from the carcass of Behemoth, disgusted at the bestial skin he’d willingly clad himself under and assumed the role thereof. Would that he could, he would cast the wretched cocoon into the abyss where it belonged.

  Though he put near all the blame upon his own shoulders, there was a tenth of that blood-price that belonged to the Tenth Hand and he would see it paid in full. He would rip out Her wings and ground the bug into the ground where it belonged.

  So great was his fury then that he did not even realise the futility of a mortal fighting a god nor even divinity that descended upon him and made it so that he was no longer merely a man.

  [You are Watched.]

  Absolute, divine terror descended upon Fate when the mortal below looked upwards toward Her, staring at Her with a half-mask of fool’s gold. Corruscating bismuth and pyrite growths boiled from his skin, crawling over to hide away all but that eye that She’d thought She’d given him, its sight boring into Her very soul and laying every secret bare.

  [You are Seen.]

  It had been a mistake—that eye was already his and always had been; She’d merely scoured the flesh from it to bear the thing beneath. It was the same nameless, faceless darkness of Loken the Unborn that stared back; a sentient hallucination. Baleful with the all-nothing, the unfathoms not of this world, that eye was what all the Arcana feared of and ran from, siring others farther and farther away from that prim?val nought that existed before Mirror-Broke and all things were destined to return to when the Worldshards dissolved into the nothing-waters.

  [You are Judged.]

  Each and every Number born after the First was done in the task of escape, a great chain stretching away from the Place-Below-Hel-Itself. A fruitless, inexorable and ultimately self-fulfilling prophecy of fear—Fate, She knew this intimately, having done far worse to far better throughout the ?ons.

  [You are Found Wanting.]

  In a single blink of that eye, Fata-Morgana went from an all-encompassing presence to a mere avatar atop a mirror of blackest-alabaster in the ether. Though this was not the entirety of Her being, merely that fragment of ego trapped within the akashic tower, it was no mean feat to do this to the manifest persona of a Major Arcana even if the executor were a persona of the same rank Himself. She’d been dragged to a Crossroads, a liminal realm in the sea-of-night where godspawn cavorted and made parley. There was no sensation of the translocation, faster even than the ratiocination and reckoning of a god.

  Steps echoed out in the black and She turned, ill at ease being bottled within such a limiting form like lightning within a phylactery. Her skin and hair were spun of the finest winesilk such that Her pellucid nakedness transitioned smoothly into an porphyric dress of amaranth gossamer, equal parts alluring godliness and uncanny majesty. A crown of black thorns settled upon Her temples, always in writhing peristalsis, going from right to left. There, upon the middle of Her skull, was a wheel both rotating counter and set perpendicular to the crown and wrought of the very same chthonic substance: antimonic was a difficult metal to work with let alone procure.

  Afterall, it was the bones of Broken Babylon, blackened to char in the lowest bowels of Gehenna and gestated within the accursed womb of Scaduphomet Herself so that it might incubate the nightmares of the Dead-God. Just as damascene was called sorrow-steel, antimonic was known as infernal-iron.

  “[Truly, Sister Ours, We expected nothing better from the likes of Thee; petty that Thou art.]”

  The avatar that approached took the same corporeal schema as the mortal Baethen Locke, though it was the right side of His face that bore the Erudition of Tentratmon rather than the incarnate’s left. The Mask was festooned with halfborn divine sigils that spoke of madness and revelation in the same breath. Rather than the armour that the mortal wore, the Lokenic was fashioned in the likeness of a ebon-marble statue, entirely naked except for the likewise-golden leaf that hid His manhood.

  Gods, at Their most base essence, were not conscious entities—They required avatars to scheme and think in the manner of mortals. Elsewise, They could not comprehend the limited perspective for They were so far removed from it, conceptual beings that They were. Like slumbering, half-awake near-real dreams that required the lucidity of Their dreamers to self-realise and actualise into physical existence.

  Person? functioned as the mediators between divine ego and the physicalised splinters that most called ‘avatars’ or, in the case of prime manifestations, incarnates. Here, in the Crossroads, Fata-Morgana—the persona of the Tenth Hand—was trapped within Her own avatar. She could die a mortal death, sundering this fragment of the oversoul such that it might drift away into Hypnagogia and be reborn as an archfey or even a lesser elemental of Fate.

  And a fickle and self-serving goddess such as Herself would not let such a thing be. Fata-Morgana, Tenth of the Twenty-One Gods, suffered no fools.

  “[My, my, my—finally show Yourself, dear? Why all the shyness—it’s only Sister Dearest.]”

  The Emissary’s human face froze over like a lake in the dead of winter; an undercurrent that swept away cities dwelt just beneath that placid surface. The Fool did not care beyond Its prime designation but the aspect of Folly had lived a thousand-thousand-thousand tragedies just like this and would live many more.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Rather than numb the anger, each and every lesson only stoked the cinders of resentment through the ?ons, building up a funeral pyre that would see the Gods unseated and brought to heel to answer for Their countless, heinous crimes. It was not a black rage that would quickly burn itself out after its purpose was concluded.

  It was an ashen hatred that would see to it that other things flourished in its shadow out of spite for even itself.

  “[Thine father misses Thee, Sister Ours. He is troubled that Thou left His House before supper concluded.]”

  Fear once again showed on that detestable face of Hers, a crinkling at the corner of Her mouth. The Emissary forwent inhuman perfection in His avatars unlike Morgana, knowing that anything but utter humbleness was poison to the mind of a god. It strangled the scruples like parasitic roots around those of a tree and would see it hollowed out from within. The gold He wore was false pyrite laid over worthless lead and the stone that wrought his body was taken from an old crumbled temple whose deity was forgotten. His face was full of mortal defects and his physique wiry muscle that was all sinew and no fat, that of an ascetic devoted to the God-of-Famine.

  Morgana recomposed Herself, unfolding great insectile wings from Her back, five to each side. It was a gesture of moot effectiveness—a god that needs to be called such was nothing more than a child with too much power. To expect respect of that ilk from a stranger was tantamount to self-absorption that bordered on the incestuous.

  This avatar and persona, afterall, She had never met but the opposite, unfortunately, could not be said. The Emissary had Dreamt but the Feyry Godmother had always been asleep in ignorance. Those that lived solely in the future-yet-to-be oh so very easily forgot of the past-that-never-was.

  “[He is no father of mine—not after what He showed me in His cellar.]”

  Those pretty adornments of Hers were each made of a thousandfold, translucid insects which were in turn made of tinier creatures. They crawled to show great disgust and old terror and horror great enough to unnerve a goddess that took child sacrifices and the holocaust of cities burnt in Her name with the glib abandon of a woman far removed from the humanity that bore Her. These tells were imperceptible to a mortal but not to a persona having millenia of experience with another of its kind, especially one as immature as this ancient hag.

  “[The Nought can be’eth distressing, aye. But child Thou art not, no matter how childish Thine acts haveth been.]”

  The false anger She bore turned real then—righteousness borne of the self, that. Get petty Morgana any bit riled-up and She loses access to reason like a bairn not nine Turns old. Her wings spun furiously around the axis of Her sacrum and from the darkness came a host of fallen angels, each one a grotesque parody that could only fit within the disturbed imagination of a precocious child.

  She should have known better—the darkness, though the prime dominion of Alunariat the Veiled Lamp, was a near second for Loken. The Ignorant, He was called, and His was the Stave-of-Ignosis. With nought more than a flick of His wrist, a long and utterly uniform stave—wrought of worthless lead and entirely unembellished—descended into the liminal existence of the Crossroads as if it always had been there and so it was.

  The first of the three staves of the Unnumbered-One—the Mallets—Gōph dealt in all things there were not. It blinded the universe to the existence of all its shadow struck, erasing it from the face of Eot as if never was and so it wasn’t.

  The feyries harassed Him from all sides, the odds utterly against the Emissary for even a godling could not contend against a host of angels that numbered in the uncountable thousands of thousands of thousands. But odds were tricky things and no better trickster there was or ever would be than Loken; for every divine spirit touched by Gōph, a stillborn, cannibal reflection arose from its shadow to drag them in and devour them in the darkness.

  The Emissary had formed the Crossroads with only a singular addendum Divine Law: that all things must cast a shadow below them. Gōph’s power did not dictate that it must stay within its own cast-shadow and could instead form a chain thereof—so long as the first stave’s cast-shadow touched another of its kind, that second one was subject to it, considered an extension as all things became one in the dark.

  Once Morgana figured out His strategy, She began to tip the scales. Coincidences and fortuitous outcomes spontaneously increased to an absurd degree—rather than long and uncontested chains of devastation, Gōph’s reach was decimated angel by angel. Whenever it seemed that He could reach the Godmother with the stave’s power, a feyry would collide with another and terminate the chain early.

  The Emissary spun about Gōph, transmutating worthless and heavy lead into rich and comparatively light gold. Where the last stave was a long and featureless rod, this one was inscribed with Babylonic scrollwork depicting the Twenty-Two gods of Byzantium and crowned with an inverted spear-head on both ends.

  The second of the three staves of the Unnumbered-One—the Mallets—Zefon dealt in all things there were yet to be. It elucidated the universe to the existence of all its light struck, creating something from nothing as if always was and so it was. The Stave-of-Gnosis, the All-Knowing Crook; many took it to be a relic of Balphas the Magus but, really, it was a borrowed power.

  Zefon cast no shadows and banished the darkness with the light of Sol Himself. The Sun-God, the Beautiful One, had gifted the spear-heads to Loken for every candle must cast a shadow and thus every shadow must be born of a womb of fire.

  The angels of Fate that accosted Him were beings of chicanery and illusions but before the Revelation, all falsehood was cast to the earth and beaten into the dust, carried into the ether by the five winds of Stribog. All it took for a lie to become truth was for another to believe it so and the Emissary did not believe a single thing His eyes told Him.

  A quarter of the host of feyries were made into smoke before the mirror of blackest-alabaster and then scattered by His breath into the nothingness. Truth to a god was malleable, reality His clay—if a god tells a stone that it breathes it gains a spirit through which it might draw-in air. The titans had been born in this manner as Eot was the first among the Twenty-One to figure out how to sire further arcana beyond the maximum Number allotted to this world.

  Revelation and Madness, Gōph and Zefon, danced in His hands. Light and darkness bent to His fickle whims and iron will, destroying lives and creating deaths. Lead became gold and gold decayed to lead as the Emissary spun about the mirror in the martial forms of the whirling-dervishes of Rephatamon the Chariot. Each step flowed into the next with the casual mastery achievable only by someone having practised for millenia.

  Seeing the futility of sending Her minions to do Her bidding, Lady Luck charged forth to do battle with the Emissary Herself, flying on the wings of ten-thousand cicadas. A mistake that—you do not entertain fools without becoming one yourself.

  Arcana Interlogia

  Map of the Kolithil Worldshard

  Cruciata the Curse-Fire

  Arcanum of Hypnagogia

  Arcanum of Fire

  Ta-ta.