Chapter 118: Chapter 118 – When the Almighty Shatters (Sara’s Tale)

It is written in the annals of the Temple Lands that the Nineteen warred with one another. Among them were all of the Gods who are greatest among the patrons of Iavshet’s lands: Khasaf who fuels Hytherian avarice, Kazir of Ionderai growth, Shamaya of the clear Heharani skies, and Mikha, Safaran, and Nahaseh, of the Temple Lands and their long-held vengeance, knowledge, and striving. Among them too were others no less powerful at the time; Aiah of the sudden storm and the Shieldstorm itself, Teiwa of Arcadian fame, Noar and Briya and Mez and four more who are Gods of Iavshet still.

The last, it is often written, was neither the greatest nor the least among the Nineteen, nor the canniest. But the God who would come to be known as the Goddess was gracious and kind and loyal in fair measure, and perhaps lucky or perhaps unlucky.

When the centuries of war sweeping across Iavshet ended, they ended at the hand of the Goddess, and She cast down and cast out the undigested fragments of those divinities and spirits which She had consumed into the void. It is possible that She thought them annihilated by doing so, but it was not so; they had enough connection to Cador and to reality to create something akin to a shadow realm, and there they plotted their return and their vengeance.

The span of time between the Breathing and the triumph of the Goddess is known as the Tumult, the Storm, or the Goddess War. It was catastrophic on a local level in a way that belied its general lack of impact on the broader populace. This is largely considered, in modern scholarship, not to be due to some ethical position or a cultural imperative but rather because the contemporaneous mortals’ connection to the System was generally very weak. This allowed for targeted intervention by the few remaining Ironfolk and those others, such as the remaining elder sed, who had survived since before the creation of the System and the introduction of its convenient path to what was then only middling power.

By these interventions, what would have been a series of genocides resulting in the extinction of kith and kin alike on Iavshet’s surface was tamed into something more formal and performative, but no less lethal to those involved, deities included. Deep strikes destroyed holy sites and training grounds, armies of tens of thousands fought on the battlefield, and the Gods took the field time and again, taking wounds and harvesting energy to heal once more.

When a God took the field, an army could fight ten times its number without flinching. They would never tire, would never yield; their weapons would never break, and their bows would always strike their mark. But when two Gods took the field, or when on two occasions the size, training, and equipment discrepancy of an army was simply too vast for divine intervention to overcome, a God would die.

Three Gods took the field, once. The records of their more distant enemies suggest that two were in an alliance of convenience against the third; now, even their names are lost to us.

Natash, who once bore a different name, was the ultimate victor. When her mortal armies burned the holy fields of Kazir, she broke the stalemate between herself and the other God. The stalemate had taken the form of a battle waged on a conceptual level, an abstract, yet literal, conception of a shapeshifter’s challenge—a godwit would consume a worm, but the worm could become a parasite, and the bird in response could become a carrion-crow, whose stomach is so inhospitable as to render that irrelevant; and in this manner, the two Gods waged battle, Natash slowly losing ground to Kazir until her mortal allies destroyed his foundations underneath him.

The Goddess cast off the name She had borne until that time, and transcended that which Natash had ever been. For the duration of the Long Peace, She reigned unchallenged. It was, if not a time of unalloyed goodness, considered to be as close as our history holds, when examined through the lens of the masses. There was less strife between kith and kin in the Breathing, but the detritus and hazards of the war left scars that had not yet begun to heal; and the Later Stillness is kind to the most powerful, as are the heights the System now permits them to rise, but by a number of measures—literacy, the probability of an unfettered life without the interruption of violence, lifespan for the lower quartile, diversity of foodstuffs for the same—the Long Peace was a benison and balm.

That is not to say that all was peaceful. The days of the Early Stillness were marked by short, vicious wars between small companies of what were effectively professional soldiers, and the rate of death among the nobility was the highest on record, not excluding the rate of death—periodic massacres notwithstanding—during the worst excesses of the Firstborn’s rule. So-called “Guilds”, broadly equivalent—though very much not identical, for reasons not particularly relevant—to today’s professional craft organizations, were not exempt from having a similarly elevated rate of death; the relatively low ceiling that the System afforded at the time without transcendent breakthroughs into fundamental magics meant that now-standard methods of culling beast populations and other hazards were inapplicable, and even crafting bore substantial risk of various adverse events.

These, along with the proscriptions of the Goddess with regards to the conscription, killing, or taking more than the regional surplus from civilians, are considered by modern scholarship to be the major reasons for the inability of the nations of Iavshet to meaningfully muster in time when the Goddess spoke the warnings of the coming Great War.

Modern scholarship agrees with contemporaneous scholarship and the scholarship of much of the Stillness that the two polities in a position of reasonable preparedness for the War were Arcadia and the Heharani Townships. The former was at the time the foremost magical researchers of Iavshet and had a divinely-blessed connection with the natural forces, as the islands in question both possessed the last remaining sed of Iavshet and had had the Teiwashti influence incorporated into the Goddess; the latter remained sparsely settled, and much ink has been spilled over their supposed ways and structure. Largely, this scholarship is empirically false; the Heharai were not barbarians, nor were they authoritarian clanholds, and they were overwhelmingly human and tazi; that is, they were kindred. What they had that others lacked was a connection to certain unstructured—that is, pre-System—magics, ones related to flight, lightning, and certain notions of daring and independence. (It is worth noting that only the Pillars of the Sky retained, at the time, a coming-of-age ritual that had substantial risk of lethality, though rates of death or unhealable maiming from even a first solo skiff ride in a natural storm, the most dangerous scenario, were well below first-cull death rates in Hyther or Ion.)

The beginning of the Great War is generally agreed to be the opening of the Twin Rifts, and the outpouring from those of the initial armies of fiends, voidspawn, shadows, and twisted reflections. New scholarship, credited in large part to the first-hand knowledge of Taveda Zidanya Medah, suggests otherwise; instead of the Vanishing of the Blues being due to treachery or a long-range teleportation ritual, the deaths of the Arcadian delegation and certain factions—commonly referred to as “the Blues”—of Hyther, Ion, and the Coalition of Free States resulted from an ambush by at least one Paragon-tier demon and its coterie, which included a minimum of two Grandmaster-tier devils. Descriptions of that demon and its domain and skills bear a striking resemblance to the godling Seter, who was, as with all other godlings, thought to be cast into the Void by the Goddess; the presence of a now-Transcendent tier Architect and mover-and-shaker of the same name in the Temple of the Godsforsaken Wanderers, where Taveda Medah is confirmed to have resided since the time of her death, confirms that this was a deliberate attempt to prevent any coherent effort at collaboration and to weaken the power of Arcadia by removing one of its rising powers.

The opening of the Twin Rifts, then, was at minimum the second strike, rather than the first. The Pillars of the Sky were initially subject to the brunt of the attack, but when they were able to not only successfully contend with the initial, lower-tier offensive but also destroy a Transcendent-tier Demon Lord (name unknown; while the story in question is well-attested, the reconnaissance information was not widely shared, since its details were considered irrelevant), the demonic forces made substantial adaptations to their strategy. (A discussion of the contemporaneous scholarship of the nature of the Great Adversary is of course out of scope, but it is worthwhile to note that there was a great deal of what can only be described as wishful thinking with regards to this shift and the implications thereof with regards to the Adversary’s intelligence and capacity for improvement.)

The destruction of the outlying forests and associated villages and waystations in the Arcadian demesne was accomplished with relative ease, though with a substantial amount of attrition at effectively no cost to the Arcadian defenders other than the strategic depth they lost as a result. Their attempts to extend their offensive into the floating islands of Arcadia themselves were no more successful than their initial attempts at destroying the township of Sturmstadt; what were once the Teiwashti Forests and had then become the Goddesswoods had been fashioned into a fleet of ships, rough and inelegant and abounding with flaws but armed with powerful magics. Hurricane winds surrounded them, and elemental powers flowed around and between them, and if they had the logistics in place to make the effort they might have won through on their counterattack to the Eastern Rift; but they withdrew in good order, and their foes took as their consolation prize the seaside lands and islands of the Coalition of Free States, an effort which took them critical months but which served to isolate Arcadia from any other polity.

Most histories of the Great War would at this point discuss the Bilateral Alliance and their disastrously unsuccessful efforts to relieve Arcadia, and the Demon Lord Kirku’s successful efforts to bait out and then bypass the Arcadian fleets when they sallied in support of the Bilateral efforts. It is worth noting, however, that during the time when the forces under the Demon Lords Aldrnari and Vandreina were methodically besieging and razing Hytherian and Ionderai cities, the demon who would become Nakh stilled the clouds and storm entirely over the city of Sturmstadt and destroyed it; but the unnamed partner of Segi Prymja, showing a superior understanding of the mechanisms of lightning, inflicted a tremendous countervailing charge on the two Demon Lords present at that siege. While doing so appears to have consumed or otherwise destroyed his Self to the point where no records of his name remain, the results were highly efficacious. The survivors of Sturmstadt professed a willingness to repeat his deed, and the Pillars of the Sky were left largely to themselves for the remaining duration of the war, albeit blockaded so as to prevent from reinforcing the rest of the continent.

If the Hytherian and Ionderai efforts had been as successful, the Twelve Shrines would never have been desecrated, Lake Kadash would have remained the great shining jewel of the high southern plains, and the Arcadia Fleet would not have had to choose to pursue the slim thread of victory at ruinous cost.

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