Thar Shaddin

Hunkered in the corner of a lonely alleyway, forgotten and lost, lay the dead god.

In her reality, she wasn't much. Petite wasn't accurate; she was a waif, barely there, often forgetting to eat and more often forgetting to sleep. She was no mortal, and so she was beyond mortal needs such as rest and sustenance, but a body could go only so far without so much as a care before it would begin to hate its owner. Eating and sleeping were ways to show her body respect, and she had not done this for a long while now.

She'd been mortal, wholly mortal, once upon a time. She still remembered how hunger felt, the gnawing sensation that she'd learned to ignore. She used to be plump and sprightly; now she was wasted. She felt broken inside, but she wasn't mortal enough to name this particular pain. It was a bone-deep ache that scattered her across the foyer of her immortal emotions, but she'd been out of touch with humanity for so long that she no longer had a word for the sensation.

If she'd been around humans, they could've named it for her. It was loss. She felt quite sure that anyone she'd ever met, befriended, even known a little, was dead. Every single one, buried and turned to insect-bitten bones, and years ago, from what she could tell. Her grasp of mortal time was ephemeral at best; she had no gauge to know just how long it had been since she'd last seen any of them, but she'd decided, beyond all doubt, that they were all gone anyway, therefore it was useless to hope that one day she would turn a corner, bat an eyelash, and there they'd be. Someone, anyone she would recognized.

It was raining. As usual, she turned her face up toward the wetness splashing from the sky. She remembered the sky, remembered how it had felt to soar among the clouds, beat her wings against the wind currents and scorch the earth. She'd lost the ability to shift when the certainty of her friends and comrades being dead had taken hold of her. A god needed worship to retain power; and though she'd lost her true worshippers millennia ago, there was a form of worship in friendship itself, a type of bond that strengthened a god's power. One friend could equal one thousand worshippers, if only they were true in the emotion, honest in their love and loyalty.

All dead, though. Not one left to bear witness. This was why she felt certain that they were all dead; as each died, a sense of herself, of her immortality and godliness, drained away into the earth. The god wouldn't die without worship, but slowly their body would turn to ash, morph into an echo, or a howl in the wind. A breeze through leaves, or perhaps a sun's rays for a fleeting moment. A shadow. A very lucky few became grass, or a flower, or even a tree.

She didn't think she would be lucky.

She shifted beneath the clothes which draped over her form. She was skeletal, thin enough that even a professional tailor could not have created a proper garment for her for fear of crushing her fragile form. She was very near wasted away, and even now, she felt the drag of her skin and bones toward the earth, the constant tug of gravity which urged her to join with the forces of nature surrounding her. This tug enticed her with offers of natural immunity. Become a sprinkle, they whispered, or a cool Spring shower. Wouldn't you like that? Wouldn't you like to live as a raindrop?

She didn't understand why she fought to remain alive, and she never would. She was an immortal who had spent enough time around mortals to take on their stubborn survival traits, their will to fight and fight until their last breath, but she didn't recognize this as a mortal trait. She considered it just another of her quirks. And she had many.

Immortality was a gift until all you wanted was death.

Now she began to doze. It wasn't true sleeping, it never was, but during her dozing she dreamt nonetheless, a waking dream which she could control and manipulate to her heart's desire. Sometimes she was among the clouds; others she was in the vast ocean, trailing a claw along the bottom, where it was coldest and darkest.

Sometimes in her dreams, she was the god in her prime. She'd forgotten so many of the recent decades and centuries, their curious ways and social developments, that when she dreamt she was back within one of her oldest origins. An ancient society, a stacked pyramid temple, worshippers and sacrifices. And oh yes - a priest.

She spoke with this priest, in her haze of dreams, and she liked to tell herself that he listened, that he was real rather than a deluded portion of her imagination. She told him stories of her own feats of death and decay, of her triumphs over both darkness and light. But today she wanted to tell him of something that once made her ashamed, and now brought forth no emotion at all. It was just a story, like all the others. She didn't even see it from a first person perspective.

The image formed in her mind of his location, and it was always different, in small or large ways. One day he would be on the road; another, by a fire; and on others, like today, in a tavern. Sitting quiet and alone, and surveying what she strongly suspected he thought of as his kingdom. She never dwelled on what he could be thinking. She was terrible at understanding mortal thoughts.

I have a grand vision for you today, priest. I hope you enjoy my story.

She ran her phantom hands through his drink, loving how the minute bubbles popped against her hands. She was shadowy and none-existent, and yet could feel some things to a degree. The chair beneath her, the table she rested her elbows on - impressions on her psyche that translated into rough versions of what they would feel like to a physical body. This was how she did not fall through the solid objects. She'd fallen into the earth in one of these visions before; it had taken weeks to come back out.

She turned away from those days. They were past and irrelevant. She looked at the priest, and in her mind he looked back at her. The only one who could see her. Her own private audience.

She loved these dreams.

Let's begin.

She always began this way. She imagined that he appreciated her flare for drama. Not that it mattered; he was no more real than she.

There was a civilization, even before the oldest I've told you about before. They were advanced in their savage way, though they still thought fire was a living being. They worshipped my siblings and myself, as was proper. But this was an early society, as I mentioned, one of the first we'd created - and the first tries always fail at some level, don't they?

She plunged the visions into his head. She narrated for her own benefit, but she liked to show him what she was speaking of, also. She wanted him to see for himself that she wasn't lying.

We instructed this early effort to sacrifice once every moon cycle someone dear to them. One child, every cycle. Never to be older than five rotations of the earth around the sun. A child found dear to the tribe, born and bred to be our soldier in the afterlife.

But the cycles passed and passed, and as they did, the society grew, and with that growth came thoughts and knowledge. Depression. They felt... Here she paused, trying to find the correct human word...They felt that it was unfair, giving a child twelve times a year. They felt they had a right to grow and expand further. They felt twelve was too high.

Again, she ran her transparent hands through the mug sitting on the table. She often wondered if the other patrons she made up in these dreams could see her. If they could, they never indicated as much, and efforts on her part to control their actions had proven useless. She focused on the priest again, gnawing her lower lip for the sole purpose of faking the sensation. She so loved these dreams.

They had become smarter, though. They knew that outright rebellion would be fatal. And so, they became conquerors, spreading their empire farther and farther past the hills of their original homeland. They pillaged and torched and burned - and captured prisoners. Women and children at first, but then, as time went on, only women. These they raped and seeded, and forced to bear children. And these children, they sacrificed. They thought we wouldn't notice, and I must admit, we didn't at first. They were clever. They didn't just start sacrificing these half-breeds outright; they were slow, methodical. First one every cycle; then two, and on and on, until their own children were wholly spared, and the children of their slaves was the only blood we knew.

Here her eyes darkened. She'd forgotten recent ways, and this past injustice had never truly healed. It was a deception by the very beings she'd had a hand in creating. It was a deep wound.

We only realized when the slaves themselves converted, and began to offer their own prayers. Prayers for us to spare their children. Their rotten, degraded half-breed bastards. This was how the game was spoiled.

And now, the satisfaction. She couldn't repress a smirk. It was too easy, in the end. They'd deserved worse, for what they'd done.

We discussed for cycles, for gods do not share time with mortals. We fought and plagued each other over the proper punishment. And as time passed, more of the tainted blood was sacrificed. If we waited much longer, our sacrifices would begin to tear us apart, to leech our strengths. It was I who came to the final conclusion, I who started the process, and I who ended it. For I was, after all, the great god of the slaughter.

I spoke with my sister, the god who could turn the ring of nature around her very fist, and we hatched the plan. We used water before; a flood hurt the earth more than we thought. And these creatures we'd created were merely flesh and gristle.

She unleashed the natural forces, but not the forces of nature, oh no. Instead she removed the blinders from her own animal creations - the birds, the lizards, the snakes and beasts of prey and biting insects. These creatures had been blind to the meat that was man before; now, it was their only craving.

They crept into the houses and temples, swam through the rivers and climbed down from the trees. They ripped and slashed, bit and tore. They gouged eyes and bore lungs from the breasts of the nursemaid, still hitching her final screams. And I was pleased, so pleased. I hadn't seen such a slaughter in many, many cycles.

She raised her dark and limitless eyes to the priest. They were always natural, in these dreams; neither orbs nor slits, but black holes where eyes may have once resided, literal caverns with the tiniest spark of light in the back of her hollow sockets. She wondered if he saw anything in her eyes, this figment. He never did maintain eye contact for very long, and she remembered that the power in her wings also resided within her eyes. If one were to stare long enough, their past deeds would well within and spill over, overwhelming the viewer with buried or ignored emotions. She never kept eye contact for long herself; she hated to watch someone sink into their depths.

And then we started over again. The next effort we made not from earth, but from maize. Dirt, it's gristly and sifts through your hands; you can't control dirt. But maize is a plant, and feels kinship with the earth, but is not the earth itself; it recognizes its need for other forces beyond its own sustenance. It is dependent.

Now she cocked her head and stared at the maize-based beverage before the priest. She'd never ventured to ask questions of her figment before; she wondered what result such an experiment would produce.

So tell me, priest. What would you do if you could start over with the world?

((Please read in conjunction with Silent Awareness))

Perhaps it was a game she played with herself. It must be. She'd never asked a question of her dreams before; she'd let the be, let them play and drift wherever they pleased, no matter how comical or weird. She didn't mind. It was a distraction from the perpetual weight of her corporeal form. She wished she could remember how to become as mist, just once. To feel the weight vanish in a literal puff, to waft about the world in a cloud of herself, float among the grass blades and molecules surrounding her body. She'd forgotten how it felt to be everywhere at once. The loss of this memory had hurt once; now it was fleeting and vague. She barely remembered herself most days.

And so, as a test, she'd asked a question, to see what her addled and dying brain might produce. She had expected nothing at all; a garbled message at best, or the vision collapsing under the strain of trying to find a suitable reply at worst. But a response...

Her priest met her eyes, and met her eyes, and refused to look away. She felt bile rise within her mortal's throat, and swallowed it down again, staring at her favorite vision.

No vision. No vision at all.

His statement and later question were nonsensical, for they made sense. He didn't spout gibberish, or string a random sequence of words together to form an amusing slogan which would leave her chuckling quietly to herself. His words made perfect sense. Now the clues came tumbling through her, shredding what little grasp she had to her insanity - her safest net.

He was always in a different place, yes. But the place was always solid, always contained elements of the real. The background...this she hadn't taken note of before, but now, with the evidence piling against her, she could no longer ignore...the backdrops remained the same during these visions. If in a bar, the patrons came and went, filling and abandoning the tables surrounding him; if in a clearing, before a fire, the fire itself would spit and crackle, die and then live once more as he fed it. But the backdrops...the trees, the wall, the tables and sticks and sky above...these all remained the same. None of her visions managed such a thing. She could no more retain a stable image inside her head than she could grasp a handful of sand. But this priest...

Naked pain filled her to bursting, though no tears spilled from her eyes. She was staring in open horror at the priest - no longer hers, no longer her favorite, near-sentient vision, but a real man sitting in a real bar brimming with true patrons and whiskey and, perhaps, a quart of milk. For months, she'd visited this man, told him stories, and always she had never thought he was real. Now that he was real...now that he was a flesh and blood corpse which surveyed her with something like adoration...

Her mind swayed under the strain of her own realization, and the vision of the priest and the bar dimmed. She was ready to destroy the connection now; she didn't want to see this man any longer, never wanted to tell him a story again. It was too painful, to know he was real. She'd been so very successful at severing all connections with mortals, all attachments to their temporary emotions and temporary corpses, and now she found herself betrayed by her own insanity, the strongest safety net she'd ever found. The most comfortable mode of being; never a need for questions, never a need for answers. Just a state of being, of drifting through life with nothing but the constant tick of one's own sentience to pass the time.

That, and dreams.

She closed her eyes and refocused her energies. She was ready to severe the tie to the man, she was certain. When she opened her eyes, he would be gone, lost in time and space, forever forgotten. She would not care if he died, for he would die regardless of if she cared or not. She would never come to terms with his death, for he would be dead already.

In the moment her eyes shut, her form shifted to the wasted creature she'd become. Ragged, greasy and stringy, no awe-inspiring woman of blood and power, but a wasted female. A moment of honesty, between old friends, perhaps.

The moment passed.

When she opened her eyes, he sat before her just as before, though perhaps a bit closer, a bit more solid. She blinked - he remained. Again, her mind betrayed her. She wanted to destroy this connection and lose him forever; her mind did not. For she had done such a desperately good job of murdering her own desire for companionship, that now the only thing she craved in the entire world was a companion.

She'd never hated so completely as she hated herself in this moment.

She remembered his question, but she couldn't imagine how to proceed. What could she say that he would understand? Was it even possible to communicate what she'd just experienced, and how only now had she realized that he was a true flesh and blood man, who worshipped her for the sake of worship? No, it wasn't possible. But perhaps...perhaps he could...

She mustered her courage and spirit. She was compelled and driven, now. Another test. One more, before she believed, before she came to terms with just how thoroughly her own mind had betrayed her.

Tell me a story, priest.

No, this wasn't sufficient. Her mind was capable of stories. It didn't even have to make sense. Something more - something personal. Something which involved far more structure than she was capable of.

Tell me your story.

Here is where he would falter, and the vision would collapse. She waited in silence, confident now that she'd fooled herself beyond question.

Bring you back fully...

She fidgeted in her seat, uncertain of her position within the world anymore. It had been so long, she wasn't even sure there was a way to bring her back fully. She wasn't even sure what that would mean. Had there once been a ritual? Had she ever known the details? Or had she left it all to the priests to handle, something for them to debate and perfect over centuries of time and patience. They'd kept records, she remembered, but it had been long enough for those records to disintegrate into the dirt and breeze, forgotten and lost. Much like herself.

But not completely forgotten. This man - this priest, this Mavarion - he'd clung to her memory, kept her alive. She felt saddened now, diminished in some way. For so long, she'd believed that friendship kept her alive. Had a fanciful notion that a true friend was what kept her relevant and present, even sane...but the true reason now sat before her in flesh and blood, his memories sifting and blending through her own mind so that she could line up the timeframe.

Here was where she became a god, where she remembered herself and shifted from mere mortal to godlike form - when he discovered her and began his worship. Here was where she'd been beheaded, and survived - at the height of his worship and sacrifice, when she'd been at her most powerful and godlike.

And then the decline, the loss of worshippers and giving up the sacrifice ritual itself, unsure and uncertain about how to proceed. Here was where she'd become mortal again - she'd thought unrelated, done by her pantheon brethren, but now she could see it was when he was alone again.

Memories of friends and adopted family drifted through as well, but now she could see they were irrelevant to her power. Instead, they'd served as her mortal link, the chain which kept the civilized veneer in place, kept her from craving the blood sacrifice, from needing it as she had before.

They'd been her curtain, the cushiony blanket over her past desires. But they'd never made any difference in her own strength and existence. That had all been this priest - Mavarion.

She felt the sorrow flood through her as keenly as a virus invading her cells, one by one, until she was overrun with the strength of it. She'd thought she'd changed herself, changed her very nature. Thought she was beyond the bloodletting and carnage that she'd so favored those many cycles ago. But now she knew the truth of it - and now, though she'd suppressed it for so long she hardly recognized it, she realized that what she thought of as mortal hunger was in fact the craving for these sacrifices and worshippers, the cravings of a god for a temple and priests to serve.

She leaned back, staring at his drink, and felt old, tired, and defeated. She'd been wrong, so very wrong about herself. And for a moment, she wondered what her friends and adopted family would think of her now, should they discover this truth. A few of them had been murderers, but they'd murdered for food. She'd induced others to murder on her behalf because it delighted her.

And she still wanted to. She was just better at pretending she didn't anymore.

She ran a hand over her face and hair, feeling the bones, the old protrusions and the sharp incisors of her godform. This was how he'd always seen her, but she only now realized. She knew she was naked, but this taboo had never bothered her. She knew her shoulders and back were covered in blood, the blood dripping from the shattered bones in her hair. Human bones. Children's bones.

Even among her own family pantheon, she'd been regarded as brutal.

She looked at her priest, and felt the duty and bond between him and herself rise like bile. She recognized and honored his purpose, understood that he had a mission to fulfill...but she could not yet help him. Her memory was just too scattered. Her more recent mortal memories pervaded all else; it would take time and effort to remember what he needed her to.

"I don't remember the ritual."

She looked at the table, reached out to run her hand through the glass.

"It was so long ago...you'll have to be patient. Give me the time to remember."

His corporeal form meant little to her. He might die before her god's memory served. But it was his job to try and make sure this didn't happen, not hers.

Her arm looked more solid now, stronger, even a bit darker. She could make out veins. When her hand came in contact with the glass, it stopped against the solid form. She tapped the globe, then cocked her head.

"But now that I am aware...I shall try."

She listened to his words now, in the detached way of a god, with a small portion of herself dedicated to him and the rest dedicated to...everything else. His request did not fall on deaf ears, but the god's first response was filled with malice, an urge to deny his request, deny him, and leave him to his mortal's life to die and be left without the dreams which had sustained him for all this time. But the god's duty reawakened along with her realization and acceptance of his priesthood in devotion to her. Through acknowledging his actions, the bond between priest and god stirred within her belly - the only attachment that a true god could form with mortal man. Her past experiences separated her from this god's life and sensibilities, but she remembered.

Bits and pieces, like assembling a shattered puzzle made of glass that she'd abandoned only halfway through completion. It would take time; she needed to search out all of the pieces, remember what image the puzzle was to form, and develop the urge to maintain that puzzle once completed again. For a mortal, it was exhausting, a life's worth of work to mold the image within the pieces and find out who they were meant to be. For a god, it was a diversion.

She could still refuse his request, and without the bond, she would have. This is what the bond granted the priest: her inability to refuse him without cause. She needed a reason, and answer; she could not just say no for the sake of doing it.

Or rather, she could. But it would weaken the bond. Now that she knew him, and had seen his works in her honor and devotion, refusing him simply for the sake of being able to would be cruel. And although she was a god now, and had been before, she had also lived as a mortal among mortals, and among them had learned the sense of duty and obligation. She could not turn away from him; she felt that it would be...unfair.

But idly, she wondered why she'd never known of him before. She was a god, even with her mortal's corpse those many cycles ago; why had she not heard his prayers, felt his rituals within her bones? The answer was obvious, and the solution came to her unbidden and powerful in her own conviction of its truth. Her pantheon brethren had turned her mortal, told her it was for one reason...but they'd lied. They'd separated her from this man, cut the link that would have begun developing by simply murmuring her name, and when they'd grown weary of catching all of his prayers and wisking them away to be ignored and forgotten, they'd cut her off from godhood entirely and left her with a human husk.

To prevent this very moment. This bond of trust, of kinship between devoted servant and impartial master. To prevent this man, her priest, from calling her forth and reintroducing her to the modern world.

Why was answered easily. She was no lover's god; she was brutal and cruel, and thrilled in slaughter and chaos. And the modern world, with its newer weapons and further isolationist countries and cultures, was ripe for chaos. Her brethren had done it for fear; fear of her glee and delight...in destroying the world.

Few minutes passed while she digested and came to her personal conclusions, and as she considered, her form solidified further until only the faintest outlines of the background could be seen through her dark body. She neither knew nor cared if she could be seen by others, though if they viewed her, it would be just as she appeared to her own priest - her god's form beginning to morph itself into the truest version of herself. She would remain unclothed, as clothes were something so modern and foreign to her that she hardly realized she didn't wear them.

While the rest of her skin remained human and smooth, the skin around her left eye began to shift and bubble and twitch as it slowly withered into more solid form, darkened scales which would change color in different lights which wove down from her left eye in a giant "S" shape, curving toward her ear, and continuing its swerve downward to engulf her right breast before sinking below the line of the table. The skin itself shifted and hardened into this new form, and it was a gradual process, similar to one's flesh being burned by fire, though her own skin did not crack and peel.

She remained human-themed, with supple hands and feet, bipedal, though her sheer presence ranked of inhuman qualities. And on her hands, her human nails has changed to sharp daggers, though not quite claws. They were capable of rending flesh, but still thin, only harder than a human's nail consistency would normally allow.

She felt two pinpricks in her back, where wings might spring forth and carry her aloft. The mindless savagery of the natural dragon awoke as well...but still, it was a memory, and she did not want to give in to this instinct. Not yet. Her priest had called upon her.

She reached forward to clasp his cup, filled with the maize liquid, and turned the glass to its side to allow the liquid the freedom to spill upon the table. It was not a large spill, and as water itself would do, it curved its edges into a rough simulation of a circle. But it did not matter how the liquid looked, so long as it was large enough to see. And now she raised her eyes to her priest and held out one delicately clawed-but-not-clawed hand.

"Give me your hand."

The goddess took his hand with a gentle, loving grip, still too far from the violence of her younger days to do anything more. The priest trusted her implicitly, she knew, and the sensibilities she'd gained so recently pumped the desire to fortify that trust through her.

She did not want to disappoint him.

She tilted his hand palm down, then turned the hand itself up and positioned her wrist above the spill on the table. Here she hesitated - her taste for pain had died many years ago, and she wasn't fond of hurting the man who had kept her alive for all these years...but there was nothing for it. Her own blood would not suffice; it had to be a mortal's to function. Her grip tightened for a moment as the blood rites rushed back, the power they provided and the slaughter they entailed. The rush made her light-headed, dizzy, but still she hesitated. She moved her thumb, with its razor's nail, above the vein in his wrist, and finally, with a small hiss, plunged the tip into his flesh and dug through the layers to puncture the vein.

As the blood flowed, she tilted his hand farther back, holding it still above the whiskey and watching with something like hunger while the liquid sifted through, creating a cloud of red just underneath the surface of the whiskey before reaching the edges and beginning to fill the puddle in an expanding mass.

Once the liquid was saturated enough that the table beneath was invisible, she removed her nail from his flesh and released his hand. She had no healing arts within her while performing such a ritual, and expected the priest to tend his own wound. Her attention was focused instead upon the red puddle that gleamed in the tavern's light. Several long moments passed as she remained hypnotized by the bloody pool. It had been so long...

Now her hand, thumb still bright with the priest's blood, drifted down to settle against the top of the puddle, making the water shift and ripple under the contact and pressure. Her eyes, black and cold, raised to fix on the priest's own - but she was unfocussed, staring with another eye that he could not see. She had no need of his true eye's contact; instead, she shifted her focus like a dagger, and plunged images into his head without discretion or any of her previous caution. It had been millennia since she'd participated in this ritual, and her clumsiness came through in her lack of finesse. She only hoped he had the fortitude to focus his own energies and not be overwhelmed by what she was feeding his mind.

The image formed instantly in his mind, but it was not what he needed to see - yet. The god was unfamiliar with this area, this territory, and needed to seek the image out. And so instead of the crypt itself, the ultimate goal, the heavens opened before him, a top-down view of the entire city from high up within the clouds.

Beneath her hand, in the tavern, the blood spilled into the small puddle had begun to shrivel and shrink back from the edges of the whiskey as she absorbed it into herself to feed the projections.

She sensed this was incorrect from his own mind, and the image rushed forward, to and fro, until the village instead was in view. It happened quickly, and could be disorienting - but again, the god did not care, her entire energies focused on making the rusty spell work. As one image, they hovered miles above the earth, gliding lazily about the town until the images the priest had fed her before became familiar - there, the cemetery. And now they dove, in an instant were within the tombstones and structures of the cemetery itself. Here was a small pool of blood, and the god, within her element, sucked up the blood she found to further feed the spell. The blood within the puddle was spared a moment; with this contribution, here within the graveyard, she would be able to sustain the enchantment for several minutes longer than with just the pool of blood she'd created in the tavern.

Now they hovered through the cemetery, searching, ever searching. She tooks cues offered from his mind, if any were offered; unfamiliar and unsure of the area, she relied on his own images to guide them. And then, there, a crypt which had broken - and the hole to enter.

Another flash as they sped forward, diving into the hole and following the path of the previous adventurers in a mere flick of the time they'd taken to enter the crypt. Up, down, left and right, until finally the basin opened before them, with the epic worm itself as the center of their view, and the soldier and vampire both struggling to defeat the worm. The worm's blood covered the floor, the walls as it thrashed and spewed along the cavern, but the god did not touch this blood. It was no mortal's.

If the priest were oriented, he would feel the whisper along his mind, like a lover's gentle caress, barely there murmurings, as the goddess spoke to him.

"See what you need to see. The spell will last as long as the blood you offered."

The god's hand wavered across the puddle as the blood drained further and further. The blood within the graveyard had granted her moments more for the spell, before the blood already in the whiskey vanished into her skin, but her own weakness caused the blood to drain far faster than it would at her strength's peak.

She watched the worm's thrashings with something akin to pity. Her agonizing years as a mortal had inflicted upon her a most unhealthy view of all things being of equal value, and she was kind to a fault when physically manifested. Seeing this creature in such pain made her ache - and, sensing her priest's delight at the sight, she knew she shouldn't pity the creature. It was a struggle, to maintain her focus on the spell, while the creature slammed its body into the earth, again and again. She was gritting her teeth against the impulse to try and help it, save it from its attackers - but there was nothing she could do, regardless. She was a spectre projecting images into a man - a man who was pleased with what he saw.

Although...

When the link was broken with her priest, the god took a mere moment to fixate herself instead upon the men within the room. One was a different sort of creature, not mortal - the god could do nothing there. But the other, a mortal man who was shackled in armour, was speaking outside of himself now, addressing something within, or floating about in the air - and at this exact moment, there happened to be something there.

The god did not inject images into his mind, as she had with her own priest. She was much too weak for such things at this distance. But words, words were a different matter. They were a whisper, a hint upon the subconscious. And in the moment he asked, he sent out an open invitation for something to reply.

And so she did.

He is pleased.

She held for a moment to try and see his reaction, her hand shivering on top of the whiskey, until finally the last sliver of blood was absorbed into her skin, and she pulled both her hand and her focus back to the table before her. The priest wiped the spill up with his uninjured hand, though it took her a moment to realize this must be why he seemed to favor the other. She'd been unable to aid the worm as it writhed in agony; she felt the urge to at least serve a purpose here.

Again she held out one hand for his. The other she raised to her mouth, and pressed it against her sharpest tooth, to prick through the skin. She wasn't sure her attempt would work, but it couldn't hurt to try.

"Give me your hand. The injured one."

Anga gently handled the palm her priest offered, examining his small injury. An inkling of a memory pricked at her, and she thought that perhaps...

While her priest spoke with the owner for a room, she closed her eyes and remembered with all of her strength. The memory was fleeting, dropping hints and pieces for her to assemble, one by one. It was a spell of sorts. A healing spell. But she couldn't place all of the specifics.

She'd always had the ability to heal, but the blood arts from millennia before had faded from her memory and been replaced with a more direct and self-mutilating type of healing. It required an exchange, always - and in the blood arts, the blood itself was the exchange. But she had lost this knowledge over the past few centuries, or perhaps willingly chosen to put it from her mind. Knowing mortals had granted her patience, compassion, and the desire not to injure others. She'd taken on even their worst habits, which included self-loathing and masochism. And so, as time progressed, her healing skills had evolved from blood craft into exchanging her own well-being for the benefit of the healed.

It was just as effective as blood craft, but far more draining and dangerous. She was left vulnerable from feeding off of her own energies. Now, she remembered how it had been done before.

She raised a hand to her mouth and took her thumb between two incisors, pressing her fanged tooth into the flesh until she'd punctured her skin and her own blood began to flow. Now she held this thumb above the priest's wrist, directly above the hole she herself had created, and allowed the ichor to drip straight into his vein.

It was impossible, and sizzled as it contacted his skin in the miracle that her very presence had created. She could not be here, touching him and filling his wound with her blood. But here she sat. And if she concentrated hard enough, she could even feel his wrist within her palm.

The ichor had created new flesh, a small patch of blackened skin which would remain upon his wrist unless he should cut it out. The physical mark of her craft, as well as his bond to her. She hoped he didn't mind the scar.

"As you have bound yourself to me, I now bind myself to you."

Now the dripping stopped, and she released his palm. She had accepted him completely and was at peace with his role in her changed world. She reached out now, gently took one side of his face into her hand - and she could just barely feel his skin in contact with her own.

"You've done so well, without guidance."

She felt a parent's pride for the achievements of their child toward this man. She could not help but be amazed by how well he'd done and how far he'd come with only smoke and mirrors to guide his pace. He was more than determined, more than a mere priest; he was a true worshipper. Even in the days of old, when she and her brethren had conversed with their mortal creations, the heart-bound worshipper was hard to come by.

She honored this man for that.

The god pulled her hand back, curling the fingers inward as though withdrawing all touch from her priest. But it wasn't him she was pulling away from; it was the innkeeper who had approached during such a moment. She watched this other, this intruder, as he walked away and busied himself elsewhere. She'd felt such intense hatred before, but eons ago, and the taste made her queasy and unsure of how to filter the emotions. As it was, her hatred blazed forth from every inch of her shadowy form. She felt confused and distant, unsure of how to channel such fiery wrath; she looked to her priest for some guidance, and drank of his pleasure and vindication. It served to soothe her savage reflex, though it didn't calm her frazzled nerves.

She hadn't felt the emotions of a god in too long. She'd forgotten that a god's emotions were far stronger and more all-encompassing than any mortal's, for the god had to be the physical embodiment of whatever emotion might override their reason. Before, as a mortal and then mere steps away from mortality, a feeling was a feeling, a thought was a thought. They could no more dictate her emotions than she could control them. But now, rising in her self-awareness and embracing the godliness which had spawned her in the beginning, an emotion became her, and she it. Thus annoyance became loathing, and anger wrath. Hatred fused with her mind and made her mindless save for the satisfaction of vengeance; and vengeance itself became blood lust.

She needed his mortality to ground the surging emotions as they threatened to overcome her. Some part of her struggled for it knew that she was not yet powerful enough for such works; and another part, a sighing wisp which even now lay dying within, whispered that it was wrong to hurt, wrong to kill and inflict pain. The last of her mortality, winking out even as she struggled.

And the final part of her clung to that mortality, for without it, she would never recognize a tree for a tree or a flower for a flower again. It was her mortal's eye which gave her the ability to respect each living being, every pebble and grain of sand. Without this view, she would become as the night sky - an oblivious dark force which regarded no one thing with any more respect than another, which looked at the world as a whole and only saw pieces to destroy, build up, and create.

She wasn't ready for that yet. And so she fought. As her priest struggled to contain his own emotions and exhaustion, she fought her own internal struggle.

She needed to act. She could not let the innkeeper be; every step, ever motion of his which displaced the air nearby, made her tense and agitated. She could not kill him, certainly not - but perhaps...yes. She could harm him. Just a little.

She fixed her hater's gaze upon the poor oblivious man as he went about the tavern business. Her blackened hollow eyes held a bright gleam in the back of the sockets, and this gleam sparkled as she felt the rush of committing some cruelty upon an innocent bystander swell.

A simple spike in the brain, a trigger to press and molecules to manipulate to her will. Such a small thing to do - and slowly, ever so slowly, a trickle of blood emerged from his nose, ever increasing in flow and thickness. Within seconds his nosebleed was noticeable and dripping.

The god was satisfied, and no longer felt the headlong craving for the kill. She turned her gaze to her priest and smiled with all the affection she felt for this worshipper. Deep within a monstrosity stirred. The outside indications were her own gleaming eye specks, and the lazy smile she graced her priest with.

"Rest well. You have much work ahead of you."

Far and away, in a small darkened alleyway, her lungs fluttered and began to collapse. The god convulsed and clutched her chest, eyes wide and disbelieving. Surely her mortal's body wouldn't give in now? After all she'd done to it, now?

The wrath morphed to desperation, and she realized how very little she wanted to die. She looked at her priest - damn her memory, what was his name? - fixed his eyes with her own and communicated with a blast from both mouth and mind, assaulting his head from inside and out.

"Time grows short...priest! You must...hurry. This mortal's body...will not suffice for longer."

She knew that she must return now or give up the ghost. One last fleeting glance, a silent promise to return with neither voice nor thought to back up the intention, and she was gone.