Whoever had designed the defensive protocols for this event had had to invent an entirely new kind of warfare. Modern battlefield doctrine was irrelevant without wands, staves, shielding charms and cannons. Ancient battle tactics mostly boiled down to "poke the enemy with something pointy", which worked very well against most enemies but not these. The traditional fallback for when one's usual tactics were useless was "do magic at it", but that was also off the table.
And so, the doctrine that had been developed seemed to be as follows: set them on fire; slow them down with barricades; poke things through and over the barricade and wave them around. The undead didn't feel fear or pain, but apparently the hope was that this would do enough large-scale damage to their bodies that the animating effect would lose hold.
And on the whole, as Sharidan watched, it seemed to be working.
He pulled level with the Major Avelea behind the inner barricade, as the citizens locked ranks behind him. They weren't sure what they were supposed to be doing, but by all the gods, they were going to do it.
'Good use of the killing ground,' he commented. 'Really, stellar work on the tactics and logistics here. Was all this your idea, or just the execution?'
The Major smiled. 'Your Ma—'
A bolt of lightning struck the barricade.
The shockwave knocked Sharidan flat on his back, jarring his head—and indeed, his entire body. For a moment he just lay there, completely disoriented, seeing stars and with an ungodly ringing in his ears. Staring straight up, he saw the Hands of the Emperor moving at the edges of his vision to take up positions around his body.
Some presence of mind returned, although his hearing was still shot. Moving only his eyes, he glanced left and right, between the legs of his bodyguards.
The undead were all around them. As far as the Emperor could tell, the Hands were keeping successfully protecting him—but then, they had mithril. He couldn't tell how the soldiers or civilians were doing.
A Hand of the Emperor knelt next to him, held up a black-gloved finger, and said something. Sharidan couldn't hear what it was, but he followed the finger with his eyes and then waited patiently as the Hand gently checked his head, followed by his limbs.
The Hand said something again. The Emperor tapped his ear, and then reached to be helped up.
Only once he was in his feet, surrounded by four of the best-trained personal guards in the world, armed with mithril, did he turn to look how his civilians were doing.
The tight mass of bodies on the highest tier of the amphitheater were mostly unarmed. A lucky few were carrying sticks. The attackers were immune to fear, pain, and most kinds of injury, and at least partially on fire.
The living were therefore losing, but they were losing slowly. Even as Sharidan watched, a young man who couldn't have been older than twenty kicked a skeleton's shin so hard that the crumbling bone broke, and then stomped on its skull when it hit the ground.
Had it just been the undead, the Emperor would have been hopeful. Most of them were burning, and if they could be held off for a couple of minutes maybe that would be enough to destroy them.
But the lightning strike on the barricade hadn't been a coincidence. Wands and staves had been rendered unusable, but Sharidan's encounter with the headhunter had made it clear that a skilled enough caster could get magic to work some of the time even under prevailing conditions.
He addressed the Hand in front of him, between the Emperor and the populace, who was not fighting off any of the undead right at that moment. 'We have a problem!' Shouted Sharidan, trying to enunciate as clearly as possible even though he could no longer hear himself properly. 'Someone cast that lightning bolt! There's a living mage here somewhere trying to get us all killed!'
Hands of the Emperor were not emotional as a rule, so the man's expression remained calm and professional for a second before a shadowbolt hit him the side of the head.
Under usual circumstances, this would have been nothing more than an inconvenience. Aside from their extensive training, Hands of the Emperor had powerful though mostly passive magical ability. Much of that magic was fae in nature, which—by laws of magic so basic that even the Emperor knew them—implied that the Hands were highly resistant to direct infernal attack. A warlock might as well have tried attacking a dryad.
Under these very unusual circumstances, none of that was relevant. Not for the first time, Sharidan saw one of his most loyal servants die while standing less than a foot from him.
The other Hands were on him immediately, two of them shielding him from the direction the attack had come from and the third trying to open a path through the people bravely standing their ground in front of him.
Quite suddenly, a person appeared in the crowd in front of them, with some kind of aggressive teleportation effect that shoved those already there out of the way to make room. A young, female plains elf.
No, thought Sharidan.
She turned her face towards the Emperor, and indeed she was a different young, female plains elf to the one he'd encountered in Antonio Darling's house. The expression on her face, however, was identical: unfathomable hatred.
At this point the Universe is just running out of ideas.
The earth between her and Sharidan heaved upwards, tossing the civilians and Hand between them aside. A moment later, the headhunter crested the peak of the mound and dropped towards him.
A moment before she got to him, Yophiel the Black sprang from the shadow Sharidan cast by the torchlight and knocked him aside.
The elf and the dragon went rolling into the crowd—who, miraculously, managed to find room to back away from them. Sharidan risked averting his eyes from them for a second to find that someone had opened up the amphitheater on the opposite side to the one the attack was coming from and was leading the civilians in a reasonably-ordered retreat.
The surviving Hands of the Emperor began hustling him away as well. Sharidan went with them, saying nothing; they would grieve together later, if there was a "later".
The Emperor's eyes flicked back to his attacker and would-be defender. Yophiel had the upper hand, of course; they were both on the ground, but he was on top. The dragon raised a sword and brought it down on the headhunter.
Just as it made impact, something strange happened to Sharidan's vision. For a moment, the elf was replaced with a mountain. A mountain the size of an elf, but somehow very much a mountain. Yophiel's sword slammed point-first into several million tons of rock, and snapped.
The dragon dropped his remaining half a weapon.
'Haven't seen that one in a while,' he remarked, and the Emperor noticed for the first time that he could hear again. 'Gloves off, then?'
Suddenly the amphitheater was full of dragon.
The greater form of Yophiel the Black was the size of a building, but slimmer than most dragons—more snakelike than lizardlike. The transformation had not released the headhunter; now he held her down with a single massive foreclaw.
His huge, flat head, easily larger than Sharidan's entire body, bent down to regard his opponent. She had stopped struggling, and the Emperor wondered whether the dragon had simply crushed her under his massive weight.
Yophiel breathed fire. It was blood-red, like the hellfire that came from his sword.
The headhunter opened her mouth and inhaled, and the fire was drawn down into her like water down a drain. She exhaled a blast of air that knocked the entire front half of the dragon's body straight upwards, and rolled free and to her feet before his claw came down again.
'I—' said Yophiel, and coughed.
The headhunter was watching him intently. Had Sharidan's exits not been blocked by crowds, undead hordes and a huge dragon, it would have been an excellent time to run.
Yophiel opened his mouth to speak again, and a single rose grew up out of his throat towards the open air.
'I—' he said again, and collapsed.
Sharidan watched in horror as more roses grew out of his mouth, nostrils and eyes. Neither breathing nor heartbeat were visible in the dragon's enormous flank. He was, without a doubt, dead.
Only then did the headhunter turn to face Sharidan again.
'Step aside,' said the Emperor to his bodyguards. When they did, he knelt down.
It was obvious enough having seen that fight. The other headhunter's magic had been too unreliable to use; this one had done just fine. Even with all her magic, a headhunter might not have been able to beat an ascended dragon, but this one had.
Only gods could suppress Chaos. Only gods were more powerful than ascended dragons. But headhunters weren't gods; they were elves, possessed by the spirits of dead orcs. Or, to be more precise: possessed by the spirits of those killed in Athan'Khar by the Enchanter's Bane.
And so the nature of the enemy revealed itself.
'Khar,' said Sharidan. 'O murdered god.'
The headhunter's expression was unreadable. Could she understand him? Could her possessors?
'I'm sorry,' said the Emperor, feeling foolish but not knowing what else to say. 'I know it's not enough.'
The elf said something in Orcish and raised her hand.
Light.
Heat.
Pain.
Darkness.
Sharidan came to his senses slowly. His eyes were shut, and the first thing he noticed was the feeling of soft earth underneath him, unlike the hard stone of the amphitheater. The second was the sound of his wife's breathing, right by his ear.
He opened his eyes. Eleanora gasped.
'It worked!' she exclaimed.
'What worked?' asked Sharidan.
'I believe the traditional phrase is "It's alive!", Your Majesty,' said a sardonic voice on Sharidan's other side.
The Emperor recognized the voice, although right now it brought mixed feelings. He sat up, but stopped short when he realized that Antonio Darling was lounging against a headstone.
They had carried him to a graveyard.
He turned towards his wife.
'Am I dead?' he asked.
'Not any more!' announced the Bishop cheerfully, even though the question clearly hadn't been addressed to him. 'Her Majesty is a genius, she really is.'
'This is one of the sites the dead have been rising from,' explained the Empress. 'I thought it was worth a shot. Thank me later. And as for you,' she glared at Darling, 'Don't think you can flatter your way out of this one. Your secret headhunter apprentice murdered the Emperor. Unless you make yourself very useful in the immediate future, you're on the block.'
Antonio Darling had the good grace to look abashed, an emotion the Emperor was honestly surprised to see he was capable of.
'Your Grace, did you know your apprentice was a headhunter?'
'Yes, Your Majesty,' the Bishop sighed. 'Both of them.'
'I thought so,' said Eleanora triumphantly.
'Well, he's not wrong,' said Sharidan. 'You are a genius.'
She kicked him. It wasn't the standard of behavior they usually maintained in public, but then the world was ending, and Darling wasn't going to be doing any gossiping in his current situation.
'Unfortunately,' he continued, addressing himself to the Bishop, 'I don't have to time to hear what I can only imagine is a fascinating story. First things first: are there any more headhunters I should be aware of?'
'No!' Protested the Bishop. 'I swear. That would be over the top, even for me.' He paused. 'Fauna is still at large, though.'
'That's the one who… killed me?'
Darling coughed. 'Yes, Your Majesty.'
'What happened after that?'
'She vanished,' said Eleanora. 'Literally teleported away. She could be anywhere.'
'Phenomenal,' said the Emperor. 'I'd better keep a low profile, then. Second question, Sweet, and please do consider your position before you try to mess me about or pretend you don't know what I'm getting at: what was Justinian's plan?'
Darling opened his mouth, then closed it again when he saw Sharidan's warning expression, then opened it again. 'Apotheosis,' he said at last.
Not another god after all, except kind of. The Emperor awarded himself partial marks for that one.
'Oh,' said Sharidan. 'Really, godhood? I was expecting something more original.'
'You don't understand,' explained the Bishop. 'Not for him. For everyone.'
That was a first, as far as Sharidan knew. 'I see. Do you know how close the plan was to fruition? In terms of… what the hell does a person need for something like that? Resources, power?'
'We like to say a god is a combination of person, power and concept, but that's more of a philosophical statement than a useful technical one. I happen to know the Archpope has been covertly collecting artifacts of the Elder Gods for years; perhaps they play into it somehow.'
As it happened, the Emperor had already been aware of that. Quentin Vex was far from incompetent.
'The Pantheon's ascension involved killing most of the Elder Gods and pooling their power,' continued Darling. 'I don't care to speculate whether the Archpope intended to try something similar or whether he thought he had a different power source.' He paused, and Sharidan got the impression the smarmy little bastard was enjoying lecturing him. 'I can tell you that the timing wasn't right.'
'The timing? There's a schedule for apotheosis?'
'Sort of. There were external factors that he was waiting on. An alignment of some kind.'
Interesting, but did it help him? If he looked at recent events and assumed that everything had been deliberate on Justinian's part, at least in the broad strokes, did they make any more sense?
No.
He thought some more.
Yes. A little bit.
'I spoke to Justinian earlier,' said Sharidan. 'He'd been reading the Book of Chaos.'
It said a lot about the Archpope that neither Empress nor Bishop looked entirely surprised by this revelation.
'He claimed he was reading it with an eye to counteracting Chaos rather than using it,' continued the Emperor, 'but as our current predicament attests, the man is both completely untrustworthy and possessed of more intelligence than good sense. So let's assume he figured out some Chaos magic.'
'The stars,' said Eleanora. 'Right before you ran off to speak with him.'
'Right,' said Sharidan. 'A Chaos effect, obviously. But perhaps not a random one.'
Bishop Darling cleared his throat. 'We can't be sure of any of this, Your Majesty.'
'No,' said the Emperor. 'But when this debacle started, the situation was desperate enough that the Pantheon allowed Scyllith to send an emissary. That emissary is now dead, so it's only a matter of time before the Pantheon start losing again. For all we know, they're dying as we speak. So that means the Archpope's hypothetical master plan is all we've got, unless anyone has a better suggestion.'
An uncomfortable silence made it clear no-one did. Eleanora turned and waved towards the shadows near the graveyard's high walls, and a Hand of the Emperor whom Sharidan hadn't even noticed standing there came forward.
'You overheard all of that?' she asked him.
'Yes, Your Majesty.'
'Good. Grab a squad of soldiers from somewhere, go the Grand Cathedral, and ransack the place—including the catacombs—until you find these artifacts of the Archpope's. Figure out how to activate them and be ready to do so.'
The Hand bowed and left.
'At risk of stating the obvious, what if the artifacts aren't in the Grand Cathedral?' Asked Darling. 'Or your man can't find them or figure out how to "activate" them? Or—'
'Then we're screwed,' said Sharidan bluntly. 'But don't underestimate the Hands of the Emperor, and don't underestimate the Archpope's capacity for incredibly complicated plots. But since you ask, you can go with him.'
Darling clearly thought better of arguing about that, and left. He'd probably be fine, anyway—the Cathedral's active defenses would be disabled just like everyone else's.
'That leaves one other piece for us to deal with,' said Eleanora in a low voice once he was out of earshot.
'We might not have to,' replied Sharidan. 'Here's how I see it: the Pantheon are up there fighting Chaos right now. There are two ways that can go. If they win, great. If they lose, well… presumably that will involve at least one of them dying. That's our trigger.'
'You're missing a possibility,' said Eleanora. 'If it comes down to it, they could abandon us. The Empire is everything to us, but not to them. They have worshipers all over the world. If they have to choose between losing a god and losing Tiraas…'
'If it looks like that's how they'll swing,' said Sharidan, 'then we'll make sure they don't.'
Eleanora inclined her head. Both of them contemplated deicide for a second.
'If Chaos does kill one of them, my money's on Avei.'
'We're not starting a deadpool on the Pantheon, Nora,' sighed Sharidan. 'Change of subject: let's go see whether our capital has fallen yet.'
They walked, two royals and two Hands of the Emperor, in the direction of Army HQ. The undead were thick in the streets, and they had to keep doubling back to avoid them. Sharidan saw soldiers and civilians alike fighting them with antique and improvised weaponry, sometimes beating a fighting retreat through a street, sometimes standing on a front porch with a sword and shield.
The Emperor felt genuinely proud to rule such a people, and deeply ashamed at having failed them so completely. He didn't bother expressing this to the Empress; she'd be feeling the same way already.
As they passed through one of the more high-end districts, one of the now-dark streetlamps caught Sharidan's eye. 'Do me a favor and get one of those down for me, would you?' he asked a Hand, who did so without question.
Eleanora, not bound by the same kind of loyalty, raised an eyebrow.
'The fairy lamps turned black before the dust hit,' said the Emperor, holding it up to his eye. 'I'm hoping it will let us know if Chaos is about to intrude on our plane.'
'What if it explodes, as about half of arcane devices seem to be doing?'
Sharidan shrugged. 'Then I'll be down an eye and part of a hand. I'm dead already, remember?'
They had almost made it to army HQ when the lamp in his hand flickered black.
'Told you,' said Sharidan, and Chaos was upon them.
The Outsider crashed through the walls of the world like a meteor strike. It was everywhere at once, tentacles and eyes and teeth and other organs for which there was no analog among material beings.
The Pantheon followed, manifesting in the sky above them like… well, gods. The soldier and the lover, the scholar and the hunter, the bard and the banker. Death, time, the sea and the sky.
The thief, something about him uncannily reminiscent of his former High Priest even though physically they were nothing alike.
'All present?' asked the warrior.
'Omnu and Salyrene are just finishing with Calomnar,' said the trickster.
She grunted. 'Probably wise, I'll grant. The last thing we need is for him to pull—'
It attacked.
Sharidan doubted any mortal could have followed the events of the next few minutes, but perhaps undeath had improved his faculties. The Outsider's appendages lashed out, fast as lightning, and the gods moved to defend themselves and to counterattack, each in their own way.
He remembered the strategist telling him that the Pantheon wanted to keep the Chaos beings from manifesting on the mortal plane, and in a vague sort of way he could see why. On the abstract level, "sustain the world and protect its denizens" was to one degree or another part of every god's domain, and therefore something they could turn their power towards. In a more concrete sense, though, it was difficult to see how fighting off horrors from beyond the veil of time and space fit into the oeuvre of, say, the companion. No doubt her presence was somehow helpful, but there was the definite impression that the gods were at a disadvantage in a physical fight.
Remarkably, Sharidan did not find himself panicking at that last thought. Could he even panic? He definitely still had emotions, but they were... muted, like they were coming from a long way off. Probably for the best.
The battle raged on as he watched, stranger and more vicious than any he'd seen or participated in himself. Neither side seemed to tire, but wounds were visible – particularly the avenger's, who was bleeding profusely again after only a few moments. The invader lost some limbs, but Sharidan couldn't tell how much good that was doing.
The collateral damage was immense. People were the least of it; in the distance, the Emperor could see an entire wing of the Imperial Palace had been demolished by a flailing tentacle. At one point he thought he saw a star plucked from the sky and cast downwards towards the Outsider.
Eventually—it couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes, but the terrible helplessness of just watching made it seem like longer—the warrior drew back, and the ranger replaced her at the point of the Pantheon's formation. He raised a long hunting knife.
Dawn broke, and the voice that came from the east sent Sharidan to his knees.
No.
The avatars of the other gods were all essentially humanlike, even striding across the vault of heaven. But the sun came as what it was—vast, powerful, life-giving but on a scale beyond the grasp of mortals. The lord of life shone with a light that made it impossible to look at directly; Sharidan tried closing his eyes, but that was useless. He had to turn away.
'If you start again with that pacifism stuff—' declared the wildman.
If our sister cannot win a battle, then that battle cannot be won, said the greatest of the gods. A change in perspective is required. What if Chaos is not an enemy to be defeated, but…
There was a gut-wrenching sense of vertigo, and the Emperor had a sudden impression—no, an understanding of the world as the cultivator saw it: a single, ancient, living organism, wherein whole creatures—whole species of creatures—were like cells of a body, living and dying in a brief instant but still a fundamental part of the whole.
… a sickness to be healed, finished the healer. Izara, with me. This will take some time.
Sharidan cracked his eyes open. The alien being that had filled the city was gone; in its place was a mass of rotting and broken flesh, oozing and pulsating, at once nauseating and somehow arousing sympathy.
It's in pain, thought Sharidan. Or perhaps the world is in pain because it's here.
Or perhaps they both meant the same thing. The layer on which the gods operated was incomprehensible to the Emperor.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he almost jumped out of his skin.
'A penny for your thoughts?' inquired the con man. He wore a winning smile that was somehow all the more endearing for how obviously untrustworthy it was.
Sharidan knew better than to ask him for an explanation of the metaphysics. There was only one question he really needed to know the answer to.
'Are you going to win?' he asked. 'With Omnu here…'
'In a sense,' said the rogue.
With some difficulty, the Emperor bit back his first response to that. 'May I ask in what sense, Lord Eserion?'
'Ooh, "Lord" Eserion, am I, now?' the rebel winked. 'You must know what my real followers call me.'
Sharidan sighed. 'Could you please let me know what will become of my Empire… Big Guy?'
The robber smiled. 'Dust. And I don't mean that in the philosophical, all-things-have-their-time sense. I mean the Tiraan Empire is officially over, as of last night. You'll never recover from this.'
A tiny part of Sharidan thought: Well, at least that means I outplayed Embras Mogul.
A much larger part of him thought: Crap.
He considered a question, reconsidered it, and then reconsidered his reconsideration. What the hell did he have to lose?
'So when you said "in a sense", you actually meant "absolutely not"?'
'Nope. Doing this the slow way we can probably beat this thing in well under a century. Or heal it, as Omnu would have it. You can imagine what will happen to Tiraas in that period, but we will be fine. Heck, we have followers on the other side of the planet.'
Sharidan stared at him, speechless. He flicked a glance at Eleanora out of the corner of his eye, to see what her response to this casual admission was, and found she was frozen in time. It was just him and the crook.
'Feels bad, doesn't it?' asked the gangster. 'You thought the people in power were working for you, but actually it turns out they had other priorities this whole time.'
A terrible thought struck the Emperor. 'Did you do this?' he asked. 'As some kind of lesson? Or punishment?'
The scofflaw laughed. 'I know I'm a cranky, tired, eight-thousand-year-old man—devilish good looks notwithstanding—but no, this isn't my style. I just believe in taking opportunities where they come, and we have here what might be called a "teachable moment".'
'The lesson being…?' prompted Sharidan. He was straying into smiting territory, but he had run out of reasons to care.
'All systems are corrupt,' said the anarchist.
If gods were anything like their priests, the catechisms came out when they nothing useful left to say. Sharidan shifted his grip on the impossible black fairy lamp in his hand.
'Put that thing down,' said the rebel conversationally, 'before you embarrass both of us. What was the idea here? Omnu is the god of light, and Chaos-tinged magical light sources become sources of darkness, so maybe it will hurt him or something? Listen to me. All systems are corrupt.'
Sharidan froze. In fact he had been thinking that maybe the lamp would distract the farmer at a crucial moment and allow Chaos to finish him off, but the Emperor didn't say that.
'All systems are corrupt,' repeated Sharidan, more to buy time than anything else. He paused.
Power, person and concept.
He didn't know any of the gods personally, and it went without saying that their power dwarfed his own.
There's no such thing as a god of something that doesn't exist, because such a god would themselves not exist. It follows that you can, in theory, kill a god by destroying whatever they are a god of.
But what if a god is the god of a philosophy? Of an attitude? You can't kill an idea.
Of course you can. I do it every day. I'm a demagogue.
'All systems are corrupt,' repeated the Emperor again. 'Including yours.'
The larcenist nodded encouragingly.
'You're supposed to be the god of rebellion and humbling the powerful,' Sharidan continued. 'But you made yourself immortal and ruled over your fellow humans for millennia. Your own worshippers pay you lip service but regularly abuse those weaker than them, and you don't stop them because you don't care enough.'
He didn't know if this would work. But there was something in the eyes of the god he spoke to.
'Eserion, self-styled god of thieves, you are a hypocrite. You haven't lived up to the purpose you adopted when you left your mortality behind. I call you as you are: a broken god, an empty god. A god of nothing.'
The joker grinned. 'There's no such thing as a god of nothing,' he said, and it sounded like a catechism, like a response simultaneously rehearsed and sincere. It sounded like a prayer.
'No,' agreed the Emperor, and drew his mithril dagger and stabbed him in the heart.
Eserion died smiling.
Sharidan stepped away from him, shaking. It was too much, he'd killed a god, and any moment now—
Eleanora leaned down and yanked out the dagger. 'Well done.'
The gods of the Pantheon—those not focused entirely on the Chaos in front of them—turned to the two mortals, looking almost as shocked as the Emperor felt.
Eleanora took his hand. 'Sharidan.'
He turned locked eyes with her, knowing that the Pantheon would annihilate both of them at any moment, and saw her eyes glistening with tears.
'It was the right thing to do,' said the Empress. 'He knew it too.'
The glistening in her eyes became more pronounced. There were no tears there, he realized, only light.
'I know,' said Sharidan. 'Now go do your job.'
The goddess of Tiraas turned towards the mass of pain and wrongness lying across her city.
'Begone,' she ordered.
Across the city, the Emperor saw dots of light. Not torches or fairy lamps, but people, shining like the stars above. A shout rose from them, and though Sharidan couldn't hear the words the sentiment was clearly the same.
The collective thought of the Tiraan gods echoed across the city: Go away.
The Outsider vanished.
The dust, the finely ground skull of Belosiphon the Black, vanished.
The gods of the Pantheon, whose wrath had somehow been stayed for a moment, took a step towards the Sharidan and Eleanora, but death said something in a language that Sharidan didn't speak, and as one they vanished too.
The Empress's expression changed. 'Something's happening,' she said.
'I can—' began Sharidan, and then she was gone.
Suddenly, he was alone.
The Emperor—if he could still describe himself as such—wandered through Tiraas for a bit. He spotted some animals, and the now-inanimate dead bodies that had caused so much trouble until recently, but of the people none remained.
"Something's happening", she said.
On a hunch, Sharidan made his way towards the Elysium. The Archpope Justinian—though probably not anymore—was standing in the street outside, taking in the morning air. He still looked terrible, having apparently not shaved or showered in a couple of years.
'Justinian,' called Sharidan.
'Sharidan,' he responded, and Sharidan did not correct him. 'Thank you.'
'Well,' demurred Sharidan as he drew closer, 'the work was mostly yours, of course.'
Justinian waved a hand dismissively. 'Technicalities. You provided the soul of the thing.'
'Really? How?' he assumed the ex-Archpope was being sincere, since there didn't seem to be much point left in lying.
'Consider: the power for this third apotheosis came from the death of Eserion. But Eserion was already involved in the fight against Chaos. So how could killing him and redistributing his power among many other people increase our overall odds of success?'
Sharidan noted the nonchalant tone with which Justinian discussed the assisted suicide of the god he had served until a few minutes prior. The man was frightening.
'Honestly? I'm sure that point would be incredibly obvious to a magical theorist, but it never occurred to me.'
'Well,' said Justinian, smiling like a kindly elderly priest and not someone who'd just orchestrated deicide. 'Gods are, as they say, a combination of power, person and concept. These things interact in complex ways. The initial power can grow if provided with more people and strong driving concepts. It's less like a big bucket of power of fixed volume, and more like… fire.'
Sharidan felt vaguely contemptuous of the fake pause-while-I-look-for-the-right-word there. There was absolutely no way Justinian hadn't planned out this entire speech years ago.
'I don't see how I come into it,' he objected, mostly to keep Justinian talking. Something was off.
'You gave them a choice, Sharidan. I've spoke to some of the new gods. Some were fleeing, some were fighting, but all of them were in the middle of actively trying to protect the things they cared about most at the moment of apotheosis. They had agency. That's what a real god looks like.' His smile widened. 'You saved the world, at mortal cost to yourself. Be very proud.'
'Thanks,' said Sharidan. 'What about you?'
'Excuse me?'
'Why didn't you ascend with them? You're not dead.'
Justinian's smile dropped. 'I have been tainted with Chaos. A Chaos-tainted god is a terrible thing. You know about Calomnar.'
That did not check out.
Justinian had known that apotheosis was his master plan all along. He'd read the Book of Chaos anyway. That had been necessary to bring about the alignment, but they could always have just waited. Justinian himself probably would have survived two years, important person that he was.
No, the Archpope would not have allowed himself to be deprived of his shot at godhood by a blunder like that. It had been the plan all along.
'Say,' said Sharidan, 'isn't there a theory that the gods are affected by mortals' beliefs about them?'
And if you're the only mortal left on the continent… doesn't that make you, in a sense, more powerful than the empire's worth of gods? Especially since no-one else knows they exist, so they can't even have beliefs about them?
Clearly two years in solitary confinement had done something to Justinian's social skills, because that question got the tiniest flicker of a reaction.
Sharidan punched him in the face. His fist collided with a divine shield that might as well have been made of steel. There was a crunching sound that made him think he'd broken his hand, although being undead it was hard to be sure.
'It really is better this way,' said Justinian. He didn't seem particularly angry that Sharidan had just tried to assault him. 'A million gods would just be a million people, only worse. But a million gods with one believer are gods who will never go to war with each other, never—'
He looked down to find that Sharidan had buried the mithril dagger in his chest with his other hand.
'Oh,' said the ex-Archpope Justinian, and crumpled to the ground.
Somehow this was worse than killing Eserion. He'd known Justinian, if mostly as an opponent. The man had had other people's best interests at heart, in his own way, and he hadn't wanted to die.
The Empress appeared beside him, looking just as she had as a mortal. She looked down at the former Archpope's body, and without a word she gave Sharidan a hug.
'Thank you,' she said. 'Nobody likes to kill people, but thank you. That was… scary.'
'You're welcome,' said Sharidan. He didn't inquire as to the subjective experience of being a god whose only believer was Justinian. 'What happens now?'
'I don't know,' said the goddess of Tiraas. 'This has never happened before.'
She broke off the hug for long enough to give him a small smile.
'Let's find out.'