Chapter 1: Prologue: Tyrannia’s last battle.

 

The light of the moon shimmered as the blade of the massive war scythe danced through the wasteland that was this battlefield. Plants had long since stopped growing in these lands; the greenery replaced by the dirty brown of mud and the dark red of dried blood, the soft chirping of birds drowned out by the harsh caws of the opportunistic ravens. The weapon was swung again, and another life was taken in these fields of death. Just one more of the several thousand souls that had been lost to this war, his blood now clinging to the deadly blade, which had grown dull through the course of the conflict. The woman, its holder, sighed - this would be her last battle.

Both for her and her weapon.

Her macabre ballet continued under the heavy rain, each swing of her sword rewarded either by screams or a mere thud as more and more bodies fell to the ground, puppets whose strings had been cut. But her enemies did not seem to be lowering in numbers. Each soldier was replaced by another one as soon as a gap opened between their files. Rather than grow scared of her power, the newcomers were getting fiercer, wave after wave, the death of their comrades guiding their rage. Hoping one of them got a hit on the woman. Hoping their friends had not given their lives in vain. Hoping her death would bring them back somehow.

She took a step back as she considered whether to tell her troops to fall back. This was their last line of defense, and the woman knew it would be broken sooner of latter. Her men would be massacred. And it wouldn’t stop there. Warriors, civilians, women, children — it was all the same to their foes. Her people, the demonkind, were the enemies of the entire world. Heretics. The followers of a rotten goddess. And they would pay the price for choosing to side with her.

In the end, she held her order. She doubted there were any generals left to relay her command in the first place. And even if they were, she had an inkling her people would disregard her instructions for the first, and probably last time. Such was the loyalty of her servants. They would not let her die alone, even when she had been the one that had brought the war to their lands.

Demons were noble beings; she could not bring herself to rob them of a glorious last stand, as foolish as that feeling was.

A small smile formed on her lips. These were men she was truly proud of. Men and women worth dying for. She resolved to give them one last chance to save themselves.

With that thought, she took to the skies. She flapped her massive wings — three on each side — and instantly felt herself rise several dozen meters above the ground. Her black feathers clashed against the moonlight, threatening to eclipse both of the moons; her wingspan so massive the entire battlefield could see her taking flight. Such was her majesty, such was her divinity, that the entire war zone stopped to stare in awe.

She turned around to her people.

“My soldiers.” She wasn’t screaming, yet her voice carried through the entire battlefield. “This is your general, Tyrannia. You have fought well until now. You are truly the best the demon kind has to offer. Know that I feel proud of each and every single one of you, my brave warriors. But I fear this is the end for us. Our empire dies today. Yet this battlefield does not have to be your grave. You are hereby freed from all your military duties! Go back to your families while you still can. It is my head they want, not yours.”

The battlefield got quiet for a moment. The swishing of arrows, the clank of metal against metal, the screams of the soldiers. All of them stopped. Then, one of her men roared in defiance. Then another. Then a third. The choir of cries slowly rose in volume as it arrived at a crescendo that deafened every combatant in the field.

That was the reply of her soldiers. Not a single one of them broke lines.

“Stubborn till the end...” the woman whispered. She tried her best, but a single tear rolled down her cheek before she could get her emotions back in check.

These people held her in such a high regard, and yet she had failed them as their goddess.

She had lost the war.

The deaths of her kind were on her, and her alone.

Without her protection, they would all die, even if her siblings spared them. In this world, one could not obtain magic without the blessing of a deity. And without magic, they were doomed.

And it was all her fault.

...

No.

She clenched her fist.

She would not let it end this way.

These were her people to defend. It was her divine duty to safeguard them.

“Then so be it!” She had tried to sound dignified, but for the first time in eight thousand years, her voice cracked, failing her. “I promise you, I swear on my own divinity, that I will come back! Even if I fall her, even if DIE here, I will find my way to all of you, no matter how long it takes. You will see me fly once again. And the next time, our armies will march into the heavens themselves.”

Her people roared even louder. Some of them knelt and prayed at that very instant, ignoring their own safety to offer her a solemn departure.  

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The dam that had kept her emotions from spilling out broke, as did the tears, now that she no longer had a reason to contain them. There was so much she wanted to say. So many things she wanted her people to know. Gone was the goddess that had once led the demonkind. In her place stood a woman of immeasurable power and nobility, but a mere woman nonetheless. One filled with regrets.

She wanted to say her goodbyes, not as Tyrannia, Goddess of the demonkind, but as simply Lady Tyra, the name the children in her empire had called her for generations.

“You did not fail me here. This is all my fault. But I will make things right.” She swore there and then choking back her tears as she said her last words. “I shall come back. I promise. Just wait for me.”

It was how she truly felt. She belonged with them. A feeling on a magnitude only a few could truly comprehend.

Deities were supposed to be worshipped by their followers, adored. They were meant to be the ones people looked up to in wonder. The ones to be respected and feared.

And yet, in the end, the roles had been reversed.

It was the mortals who had stolen the heart of the goddess.

---

Darkness. There was only darkness as far as Tyrannia’s eyes could see. This was not just a lack of light or an overabundance of shadows, but simply what an endless void looked like. This was space itself, a dimension where concepts like time lost all meaning.

How long had she been here? She stopped keeping track after the sixteenth century. If she had to take a guess...Five thousand years? Give or take a hundred winters. Long. Far too long for someone to be trapped down here, with one’s own thoughts as the only company.

Lesser men and woman would have lost their minds a great time ago. It was not only the silence, the complete absence of anything at all, or the total sensory deprivation one had to suffer when stuck here. It was the fact that she could, in some ways, watch what was happening in the mortal realm. Her prison had been crafted in such a way for a simple reason; to let her see how her siblings punished her followers in the worst ways imaginable. They didn’t murder them — such a fate was considered kind for many — but rather cursed them, tortured them, chased them to the ends of the world, only to give them a few years to recover before starting all over again. They would not let her people die; they would not let her people live. Only survive. Survive to see another day of torment.

The mind-numbing amount of hate she felt each time one of her own fell was what had kept her from going insane. She recalled the names of every single one of the people her siblings had murdered over the eons. Every. Single. One. Each time a child was robbed of their future, each time a mother had their kid stolen from her, every single time a father wept for the death of his own, she would make sure to burn that image in her memory.

She would not let them get away with this. She would cut them to pieces. Rip their souls out. Torture them for all eternity to come. If only she could get out of this prison.

The woman tried to calm herself as she remembered her last battle. Even the might of her seven siblings combined hadn’t been enough to finish her. Sealing her here had come as too high of a cost for them to consider it a pyrrhic victory. At most, it was a draw.

Xerxes had lost his spear, broken in the fight, and a lot of his power had been drained. Rhepenar was now called the one-armed, thanks to her. Nyphine would never bear offspring again. Thayja had been reduced to a mere recluse, afraid of being seen or heard, for fear of retaliation. She ignored what happened with Ghodos and Phitia after their injuries, but she guessed they had fared no better. Most of the gods were crippled or severely weaken during their last fight. Udoh, the god of War, and the second eldest of the siblings, was probably the only one who had come out slightly less harmed.

She had been so close to victory. But ‘close’ means nothing when the consequences of your actions catch up to you.

And yet, she had not given up on coming back. She promised her people. Tyrannia remembered what her last words had been — words spoken from her heart, a feeling only a few will truly understand — and so did her people. They had forgotten her name, her appearance, her legends, but not her last words.

Even after eons. Even after so much suffering.

Her servants would not give up on her. They would not break, much to the anger of the gods. They would wait for her to save them, as she had promised them thousands of years ago. She would have given her own life if that meant sparing them from all this pain, for her to be able to escape this seal and help them. If only she could break out of here.

That thought gave her pause.

Why did I wake up again?

She had spent most of her time here asleep. Every fifty years or so, she would open her eyes to look at the realm of the mortals for around a decade, only fall to slumber for another half a century. It wasn’t like she wanted to. She needed to conserve energy, otherwise this place would drain her of magic until she died. But this was not the time for her to arise yet. According to her math, she still had another twelve years before the cycle began again.

Soon, she felt her answer. Something was moving. Entering this dimension. She had long since concluded that this was a space somewhere deep inside the Sea of Souls, where pagan souls came to rest and slowly fade into nothing. And, if the theories the other gods had were to be believed, a nexus between alternate worlds and realities. The only reason someone might be opening doors in this place was...

Someone is being brought to this world from another one? No, not someone, she soon noticed. Seven of them. One for each of the gods. She could tell it wasn’t her siblings themselves, but that they carried a bit of their divine energy within them.

Her eyes shot open. This was her chance. If she could sneak a soul into her world now...

This would be a massive gamble. One that could end with her own destruction. She could be detected, or worse yet, she could spend what little power she had left in a fruitless endeavor, and she would die.

But she had to risk it. Even if it did end up killing her. For such was the promise she made to the people she loved.

 

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