CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As the pantheon gathered around the statue, accusatory glares were thrown in every possible direction; from Andruil to Elgar'nan himself, there was an intense hatred in the air. Fen'Harel changed back into his elvhen form as he strode back into the temple, his head held high. He did not glance down at Pharen as he passed, nor did he meet the glares of his kin as he settled himself against the very back wall of the temple. Pharen took a deep breath before walking back to the very rear of her temple, wary of what was to come. She had not taken two steps when a loud, angry voice sliced through the already tense atmosphere, shaking some dust from atop the stone pillars.
"You! You knew all along she had been planning a rebellion, did you not pup?" Pharen began to run as fast as she could before Elgar'nan could visit his wrath upon Fen'Harel; it was not his fault. He had wanted to save his people from slavery, Pharen needed followers to ascend to godhood, and everyone's lives would have been better for it. Elgar'nan did not seem to agree with the sentiment. When Pharen burst into the room, slamming the doors behind her, all eyes of the pantheon were upon her. She immediately tensed and froze.
"It's not his fault! I wanted slavery to end and you said I needed followers but you failed to mention how to get them! It's not right to enslave and hunt your own kin!" Pharen threw an angry snarl toward Andruil, gesticulating wildly with her hands to assure her point got across. "I got followers! Willing followers that no longer wanted to work under the poor conditions they were found in! Men and women and children were in these pits doing the work that the self-proclaimed gods were supposed to be doing in their own time. We found pits of fire, lash marks, vallaslin that had been engraved into their-"
"Silence!" Elgar'nan bellowed. He strode toward her, grabbing her chin between two fingers and a thumb and forced her to look up at him. A ferocious snarl could be heard behind her, but at this point, all she wanted to do was get out, and she was desperately looking for a way to do so. "You dare break into each of our temples and take our slaves. You dare to defy what the pantheon itself stands for. You will not take what is not willingly given. Da'len." Elgar'nan spat. He roughly forced her chin from between his fingers and forced her back with a surge of a barrier, throwing her against a back wall.
Her back hit the wall with a sickening crack! and before she could register that she was a full thirty feet away from where she had originally stood, Fen'Harel stood above her, snarling, the Wolf forcing its way to the surface. A lightning-fast surge of magic projected itself toward Elgar'nan, who was knocked back several steps once it connected. Temporarily stunned, the rest of the pantheon looked on as Fen'Harel challenged him.
"How dare you, All-Father, attempt to manipulate into our minds that slavery is accepted. " Fen'Harel snarled, his voice becoming a low and dangerous growl. "Is this what you want? This is the Elvhenan you always wanted? The very people that you claim to defend and protect are demoralized and treated inhumanely under your care and under the careful eye of the remainder of the pantheon. I will not stand idly by and allow this!" His fingernails were turning the charcoal black claws of the Wolf, who was becoming more visible by the second.
"You wish to challenge me, Wolf? Do your worst. You cannot possibly hope to best me! I am the beginning and the end, and you are nowhere in between. You have no place here! You are simply here as a request by Mythal!" Fen'Harel, now fully Wolf, growled and lunged toward Elgar'nan, who had also taken several steps toward the Wolf. "ENOUGH!" Mythal manifested herself and stood between them, and Pharen could only assume that her barrier had not been put up in time, and it was too late for either of them to stop. Fen'Harel's jaw locked around Mythal's throat, and she let out a loud gasp before falling to the floor, unmoving, and blood pooling around the wound the Wolf had made.
Realizing instantly what he had done, Fen'harel changed back into his elvhen form, backing away very slowly. Elgar'nan fell to his knees before Mythal, cradling her head in his lap, rocking back and forth and began to weep. Fen'harel stopped, stunned at the sharp contrast that fate had weaved. Elgar'nan did not look up from Mythal's face as he spoke. "You will pay here for what you have done. Eternal vengeance shall be visited upon you thousandfold. You will be forever cursed. Len'alas lath'din, Dread Wolf. Lathbora viran in uth."
Fen'Harel retreated quickly to the back wall where Pharen still lay, watching the entire scene fold out in front of her. "Vhenan. We must leave. Grab your foci from here, and I will get mine from my own temple. Meet me in the room where we first met." He hauled her to her feet, cast a healing spell and an extra barrier on her, and took off, sprinting toward his temple at full speed. She could only assume she needed to do the same. Surprisingly, she was not stopped by the other members of the pantheon as they gathered around Mythal's lifeless body.
She grabbed her foci, and ran into the woods, away from her temple. She sprinted toward the eluvian she had crafted before, and vaulted through it, landing in the clearing with the summoning font. Charging full speed into his temple, she skidded to a halt in his worship room, and found him there, kneeling in front of his own statue. His body trembled as he knelt on the floor, and Pharen placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder. He tensed and immediately shied away. When he turned to face her, his eyes were heavy with sadness, regret, and fear.
"You cannot possibly still care," he scoffed. "You saw me kill Mythal in my fit of rage at Elgar'nan. The slaves, they-" Pharen shushed him and offered her hand out for him to take. When he did not take it, she decided to let him in on a little secret from the future. "She survives, you know. Mythal. She lives on. But I fear you will be blamed for her 'death', as it were." His features turned from fearful to skeptical in a blink of an eye, and he backed away from her, throwing his hands up in front of him. "She does not yet live. I killed her. The Wolf killed her. I saw her there, dead!"
He was panicking, yet Pharen only shook her head and gave a faint smile. "When have I ever led you wrong? I love you, Dread Wolf, regardless of whatever I've seen you do. Here in the past, or in the future. You are doomed to make mistakes, but aren't we all? Nobody is perfect. We simply learn from mistakes, and become better for having made them. That's what living is, Fen. The slaves are no longer slaves, Mythal lives, and granted, yes, we probably have the entire pantheon after us now-" As she spoke, the walls shook, and a bellowing roar of rage was heard over the war drums pounding in the distance.
Sighing and furrowing his brows, he touched his foci and began to charge it with his magic, glowing bright green the more he poured into it. Pharen dug into the robes she still wore and drew out her own foci, also casting into it. Both magics began to swirl together, faster and faster and glowing brighter and brighter until the light was so blindingly bright, both had to stop casting, and threw a hand in front of their faces. When they did, a loud, resounding boom! echoed through the silent chambers, casting out several pulses of energy. Then all was silent.
The swirling magic within both orbs slowed, and finally stilled. They looked to each other for mere seconds, questions in both their eyes, before Fen summoned the Wolf to trod outside to investigate the silence. His padded paws made no sound at all as he stalked the darkness surrounding his temple. There were no war drums, no screaming, nobody running, and no animal sounds through the thicket. He carefully re-traced Pharen's steps from the eluvian and with a huff, stepped through to the other side.
Once there, all remained as quiet as it had been on their side, chillingly so. Needing to sate his curiosity, he snuck into Pharen's temple that was now devoid of life. He padded to the back room where Elgar'nan's wrath had broken free, and was shocked at what he saw-or rather, what he did not see. There were no bloodstains, no corpses, nothing. Then he saw it. A movement out of the corner of his eye. Keeping to the shadows, he snuck to the back where Pharen had lain, and waited.
He had a feeling the movement he saw had something to do with the giant statue in the center, with all of the pantheon linked together. He focused on Andruil's face in the stone, and as he watched, the pool beneath it began to pulse green, bright red, and fade, then began pulsing again. This repeated for several heartbeats before he padded over, confident she was not hiding in the shadows like he was. Changing back into his elvhen form, he peered over the edge of the statue, into the pool of water, and was both shocked and in awe of what he saw staring back at him. Andruil, the goddess of sacrifice, was staring back at him in the reflection of the pool.
He features were contorted in anger and agony, her nails scraping against the surface of the mirror in an attempt to become free once more. As he walked the edge, he saw all the pantheon safely locked away under the pools that had solidified, all attempting to crawl their way out. He chuckled to himself at the irony that the mistake he had been burdened with by Elgar'nan now locked away the entirety of the gods and goddesses, save for himself. And Mythal, he thought.
Changing back into the Wolf he knew so well, he trotted back to the eluvian in which he came from, and made his way back to Pharen. He was not surprised to see her outside, looking for him. "What did you see?" She asked, cautiously. Fen'Harel smiled, and he laid both his hands on her shoulders and drew her close to his chest. "I can safely assume that our focis were both channeling the same thing, and due to their proximity, began to feed off one another. The resulting pulses caused the pantheon to be summoned back to their respective temples, and sealed the way back." Pharen sank against him, and she looked up at him with hopeful eyes. "Does this mean we are not going to be hunted?"
Fen'Harel shook his head. "No, we will be hunted. Though I am uncertain how long this sealing will last." Pharen nodded her head, slowly digesting what he had told her. "I intended to use the foci as a means to channel enough magic into the atmosphere so that it tore, effectively cutting off their means of magic. This…this is much better." Pharen cocked her head to the side, and tried to cast a small fire in her palm. It took her a few moments, but she eventually summoned a small ball of light. "You made the Veil, then." She whispered, more to herself than to him.
He was slightly confused but did not press her. "Come, vhenan, we must prepare for uthenera, and hope when we wake up the world will be different than this." He began walking back into the temple, and held her hand tightly within his own. As she walked behind him, Pharen realized she could now never doubt the fact that she was a goddess. She was about to spend the next couple thousand years sleeping next to the Dread Wolf.