The sun was setting between the buildings, casting the world in a glaring orange hue punctuated by sharp and sudden shadows. Gloria lay in the middle of the street, her arms splayed to her sides, blood pooling from a massive wound in her chest. I stepped cautiously forward, looking at the headless bodies that littered the roadway, trying to keep my stomach from churning. I expected killers to pop out at any moment, beasts with human hides as clothing and skulls as helmets, but nothing happened. Tera and Justina weren’t among the dead, which was good, but I doubted their lives were in safe hands. Whoever this Night Eyes was, she clearly didn’t fuck around. I knelt over Gloria’s body, closed my eyes, and touched my thumb to her brow. She was technically dead, her heart was an exploded piece of pulp, but the faint vestiges of life still thrummed in her mind. Time to make like a god, and perform a miracle.
Blue light radiated from my palm, and spread into Gloria. It laced through her skin in winding tendrils, flitting this way and that, fracturing randomly like cracks in the ice. The light pooled around her chest wound, seeped into the bloody cavern, and began to move pieces of her back together. The tattered remains of her heart righted themselves and then melded, each chamber forming and taking shape until the entire organ stood perfectly in her chest. A pulse of blue power shot along the arteries that held it in place, and the heart contracted violently before beating with life. Gloria’s eyes flashed open, she gasped in a deep breath, and she screamed. The bones, muscles, sinew and skin stitched back into place, and the pain receded from Gloria’s wail as the last strip of flesh was melded seamlessly back together. She coughed up a splatter of blood through her veil, and I eased her upright as she hacked the remnants of her mortal wound onto the cobblestones. She wiped her lips, her breathing shallow and frantic, her eyes wide. She looked at her hands as if they were foreign to her, touched her face as if it had never been there before, breathed deliberate, deep breaths as if the action was the only thing that mattered in the world. She looked at me with panicked, disbelieving eyes, her mouth working to find words that wouldn’t come. Her lips trembled, and her crimson eyes welled.
“You’re alive,” I said, pulling her close and letting her vent into my chest, “and you have a lot of explaining to do.”
Excerpt from Arbitrus Gen’s Journal, Chapter Eleven, Page One-hundred Fifty
The Creators before us—Gratora, Hektin and Dawnbark—all believed that working in congress was the best way to progress civilization. My contemporaries in Furok and Droktin shared this sentiment, as they would, for they both haled from the great orc empire, as did Hektin and Gratora before them. Ray Dawnbark was both a nymph and a Life Giver, which naturally made him a pacifist’s pacifist, so he did not oppose the accelerated progression of the orc empire. Many celebrated his passiveness, for so many cycles have been marred by cataclysmic destruction between us so-called gods, but those that praised peace did not see where it would lead. Unchecked creation leads inexorably to unchecked destruction. There is a balance that needs to be drawn. No further proof of this needs to be brought forward then when Droktin opened his pass, and cost the lives of millions. Some called me a monster for what I did in response to this attack, and perhaps I am. Only the Holy Mother can judge me, for it was the Holy Mother who gave me these gifts. I took no joy in Hektinar’s destruction, but make no mistake, reader, Hektinar needed to be destroyed. The evils that festered behind those high shining walls were unspeakable, and the atrocities the orc horde committed under Droktin’s unprovoked attack needed to be answered. Call me what you will; murderer, genocidaire. I will not refute you, but if you saw what I saw, you would understand.
But I digress. The Life Giver and Earth Former are natural Creators. The question is then posed, what is the Heat Bringer? What does fire create? The ancients did not call ‘the Heat Bringer’ a Creator. It was not until Hektin tempered the steel city of his namesake that the Heat Bringer was identified with the rest, but I would argue the validity of this label. Hektin simply annealed the iron shaped by Gratora. In a sense, he was a master of transfiguration, but not a Creator. So then, what did the ancients call the Heat Bringer?
They called us ‘The Destroyer.’
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